A question I've heard people ask over and over again is: "How do I bring my meditation practice into my life?" Ken McLeod's response is usually something like: That's the wrong question. Bringing practice into life doesn't work. Instead, bring your life into your practice. He makes this point very powerfully in this passage from the Heart Sutra Workshop, session 4:
Ken: Generally people seek how to apply these practices to their lives. I think this is very problematic. In some traditions of Buddhism anyway, there’s a very, very deep bias regarding life, and it’s entrenched in vocabulary—at least in the Tibetan tradition. You know, you have your word for meditation sessions, which is thun (pron. tun), and then you have the word for the rest of your life, which is thun mtshams (pron. tun sang), which means between meditation sessions. In other words, from this point of view, you’re only truly living when you’re meditating. And this kind of attitude has come up a lot in various groups in the West, and it creates a real tension between people’s spiritual practice and their lives. They feel, “Oh, my spiritual practice—I can’t put as much energy into it as I want because it’s going to take away time from my life.” And so it ends up with a total no-win situation. And it’s very, very destructive. So I don’t like that way of thinking at all. I prefer to think of practice in this way.
Practice is the cultivation of attention. Cultivation of attention, exercise of awareness, whatever you want. During your formal meditation periods you’re cultivating attention unmixed with other activities. During the rest of your life you’re cultivating attention mixed with activities. So when you’re walking, you walk in attention. When you speak, you speak in attention. And so forth.
Which doesn’t mean to watch every word that you say; it just means to listen to yourself speak so you hear the sound of your own voice while you are speaking. Very few people do that. They start speaking, and they stop listening to themselves. They just go on, and on, and on, and say things that they really wish they hadn’t said. If you’re listening to the sound of your own voice as if you were listening to another person, you will very rarely say something you regret. Because as soon as you start down that road, you’ll hear the difference in your voice and something will go, “Oh, I don’t think this is such a good place to go.”
So rather than think of bringing practice to life, think of bringing life into your practice. So that—how do I bring walking into my practice? How do I bring washing the dishes into my practice? How do I bring taking care of my children into my practice? And this is very important because when we think of applying practice to life we think of finding this nice calm clarity, and then we’re going to take that nice calm and clarity and bring it to life. How well does this work? As I said, the best military plans last until first contact with the enemy. If you bring your life into practice, then two things shift. One is, you have no choice but to find that calmness and clarity within the experience of life itself. You’re not gonna bring it to life, you have to find it in your experience. Which is exactly what we have to do anyway.
And the second thing is, it’s a practice. How many times have you failed to practice meditation perfectly? [Laughter]
Student: Six or seven.
Ken: Thousand? Million? [Laughter] That’s why we call it a practice because we don’t expect to succeed—we just keep trying. That’s what you do in your life: you bring your life into a practice. “Okay, I didn’t do that so hot, let me try it again.” So one tends to take a much less punishing attitude to one’s self. Which in turn creates the willingness to make further efforts. Because you don’t—how many have that harsh critic flying around in them? Yeah. So that’s the last piece I think. Take your life into your practice. And work with these tools. You will fail thousands of times. So, you’ve already failed that way in your meditation. It hasn’t stopped you from practicing meditation. You know, so you haven’t walked mindfully down the street. Well, maybe next time; maybe next time.
A passage from one of Ken's sutra sessions describes what has proved to be one of the most powerful ways of bringing life into practice for me.
As a child, I learned that interrupting adults was an effective way to get attention, and I invested a lot energy in mental rehearsals of what to say. This habit persisted into adulthood, and I learned the hard way that both habits were highly problematic! Learning to let go of thinking, in favour of listening rather than constantly preparing to say something and interrupting people to say it, has made a huge difference to my life.
Once you learn to drop into what is actually happening, you also start noticing much more about what is going on in conversations—the moments when attention drifts from listening towards rehearsing a response, and the impulse to fill every silence. You start to become very comfortable not saying anything, because the need to be someone diminishes. It’s so relaxing.
From Sutra Session 10, June 13, 2010. Unpublished.
NOTE: In the Buddhist tradition, a sutra refers to the meeting of the teacher’s mind and the student’s mind. In these sutra sessions Ken converses informally with students about life and practice.
Ken: The big thing is, what do we do in meditation? Here we sit, and a thought comes up, and we recognize it, and go back to the breath. Right? And we do that again, and again, and again. What we're doing is practicing letting go of the thinking process. That's what we're doing.
Now, when you're having a conversation with someone, if you're like most of us, you start thinking immediately what you're going to say to them even before they finished, right? And that's what prevents people from hearing each other. They've got 20 percent of the attention going to what the other person is saying, 80 percent of it is going to: "How am I going to respond? How am I going to look good? How am I not going to offend them?" etc., etc.
That's all internal stuff, all our internal thinking. So as we meditate more and more, we just keep letting go of that, and we don't even notice that we're letting go of it. And we keep coming back, and just listening to the person. And lo and behold, we may hear what they have to say. And now it's a very different kind of dynamic. So what a lot of people find is that as they practice meditation, after about a month or two—and I get this all the time with people—I say, "How's your meditation going?"
They say, "I don't know. I don't think it's going anywhere. I don't seem to be getting anything out of it. It's just thoughts, and thoughts, and thoughts. And if there aren't thoughts, then there are feelings. It's just a big mess. I don't think I'm getting anywhere."
And I say, "Well, how's your life going?"
And they say, "Funny you should ask. Things just seem to be going more smoothly. I seem to be getting along better with everybody." And they just don't put the two things together, because it's not an obvious cause and effect kind of thing. So as you practice letting go of thinking, thinking, thinking, you may find yourself just being a bit more responsive and a bit more attuned to how things are in your life.