Evolving Dharma by Jay Michaelson

Author:Jay Michaelson [Michaelson, Jay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-58394-715-9
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
Published: 2013-10-15T04:00:00+00:00

Doubt as Dharma: How I Learned from Shadow

Well, easier said than done. There’s no getting around the reality that extended retreat brings up all kinds of difficult and painful experiences. In shamanic traditions, it’s understood that in this kind of intensive work, you get what you need, not what you want (or what you think you want). This has been my experience on retreat as well. There’s no way out but through; there’s no path to liberation that doesn’t pass through the shadow.

To speak about this more directly, I want to share the story of a “dark night” through which I passed on a forty-day retreat I sat in 2004. As you’ll see, I am not offering this up as a story of how you should practice, or what will happen to you, or as anything other than one yogi’s personal narrative that can hopefully be useful to fellow travelers. I didn’t do everything right; indeed, a lot of the point is what I did wrong. Possibly you’ll make similar mistakes. Then again, who knows.

When this difficult episode occurred, I had been sitting for about a month, and had long since acclimatized to the rhythms of a long meditation retreat. The first few days had come and gone—it was right after the 2004 presidential election, and I had volunteered for the Kerry campaign, convinced that we were going to win. The resultant loss had thrown me for a loop, and I spent much of that first week getting over the grief—as well as the physical exhaustion—not to mention letting go of a whole lot of anger, thinking, and distracting nonsense that was entirely useless for the work I was on retreat to do.

Fairly soon, however, I’d found my groove. At this point in my practice, I was still overly interested in samadhi, in cultivating states of bliss that were conducive both to dharma insights and to content insights—as I describe in Chapter Four. Sometimes, I’d spend these altered states noticing the three characteristics and doing other good dharma things, and other times I’d wander off the dharma path, indulging in the beauty of the retreat center’s natural surroundings—there’s really nothing like a snowfall on samadhi—or even sneaking off to enjoy some highly ecstatic iPod time. Bad Buddhist, I know.

Several weeks into the retreat, I’d had a powerful “peak experience”—later (much later; two years later) interpreted as the Knowledge of Arising and Passing Away, as I described in the previous chapter. There was a moment, during walking meditation, in which everything seemed to stop. It was incredibly profound, as if the universe were looking at me with the gaze of a close friend, in one crystalline instant that seemed to crack like thunder through the ordinary passage of time. All kinds of enthusiastic thoughts started popping: insights about this and that, inflated egoic thoughts about how awake I now was, plans to evangelize about the dharma because it is so great and awesome, plus a deep sense of having figured something out.

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