Julia Cameron on the Path of Creativity

Interview led by Samuel Bercholz

The author of The Artist's Way and The Vein of Gold in conversation with Samuel Bercholz, founder and president of Shambhala Publications. 


http://www.shambhalasun.com/Archives/Features/1998/May98/JCameron.htm

Samuel Bercholz: Your work is nominally about creativity, but it seems to be as much about tools for spiritual growth. What is the connection?

Julia Cameron: People often say to me, "Your book is a Buddhist book," or "This is a book about mysticism, really, or this is a Sufi book." That is probably because creativity is a spiritual path, and at the core of the various spiritual paths are the same lessons. For instance, I recently read Thich Nhat Hanh for the first time, and I found myself thinking that he sees the world with an artist's eye. I think that's because he is very heart-centered. Even though we think of creativity as an intellectual pursuit, in my experience creativity is a heart-centered pursuit. We actually create from the heart. I think it's interesting that the word "heart" has the word "art" embedded in it. It also has the word "ear" embedded in it.

So both Buddhism and creativity involve the art of listening to the heart. That's where the creative impulse arises from. That's why I cannot distinguish between creativity and spirituality. When you're practicing creativity you become a grounded individual, and that communicates the universal.

I've been a writer for more than thirty years, and the issues that arise in the creative practice are the same kinds of issues that arise in a spiritual practice. You get to look at your insecurity. You get to look at your inquisitiveness. You get to look at your fantasy that a satisfied desire will lead to satisfaction. As near as I can tell, this is what happens with a grounded meditation technique: you go through all of the shenanigans of the restless nature of the mind and what you are left with is, just be. Out of being, things are made. So creativity is the act of being.

Samuel Bercholz: Your creativity exercises could also be viewed as a form of therapy.

Julia Cameron: Again, I don't make those definitions. My books are taught by myriad therapists. What they have found is that if they can heal their clients' creativity, neurosis disappears. This is why they all love this approach, and why therapists facilitate artists' circles all the time.

My feeling is that an enormous amount of what we think of as neurosis is actually blocked creativity. When people begin living in their creativity, the "neurosis" disappears. I am not certain that we are a neurotic culture; I think we are more a stifled culture, needing to express the self, and you can spell that either small "s" or large "S."

My feeling is that we are exhausted with talk therapy. Because The Artist's Way is experiential, it brings people back into their bodies and their hearts. Therapists are using it to bring people into an embodied practice, and that's why everyone's calming down.

It's one of the world's best kept secrets that art makes people sane and happy. If you think creativity makes you crazy and broke, let's not do it. On the other hand, if it makes you expanded and connected and joyous and vibrant and beautiful, it may make us a little nervous, but maybe we should try it.

The only time I get in trouble is if I'm not making something myself. If I'm too busy teaching to do my own art I get very sad. It's a matter of balance for me. I must keep my artist first and my teacher second. I must be making things and then sharing out of that process. If I am only teaching what I have already learned without doing my practice in order to be learning more, I'm very desperately unhappy. It's dangerous for me.

When we are creative we become happier, more stable, more user-friendly. We have this image of writers as grumpy curmudgeons. Well, when they're blocked they are, but a writer who's writing is usually a very festive, even if it's secretly festive, person. A lot of what I teach is playing. I think that as we become more light, we take our ideas more seriously.

Samuel Bercholz: Do you mean "light" like "more brilliant" or like "light-hearted?"

Julia Cameron: Light-hearted. As we become more light-hearted, we paradoxically take our ideas more seriously. If we're trying to take our ideas seriously without a light heart we do not have the passion to execute them. This is why I say creativity is a matter of the heart: it takes heart to execute. If you can get people back in their heart, you get them into executing their creativity. If you keep them in their head, the heart becomes hobbled and the capacity to make things that connect becomes hobbled.

Samuel Bercholz: A big part of The Artist's Way and Vein of Gold is how passion and creativity relate.

Julia Cameron: I think passion is a marvelous thing. I was recently bawled out by a shaman because he took my use of the word passion to mean emotion and turbulence. I use passion to mean an act of will and commitment. I believe that we are intended to be utterly present, present with a passionate commitment. Then when we are, we create. Conversely, when we create, we become present with passionate commitment.

One of the aspects of certain forms of Buddhism that I have difficulty with is that occasionally I get the feeling that people are using their meditation to avoid experiencing the incarnation we all share. They become detached, they hold the larger view, and it becomes: leaf falls from tree, child dies, same value. I think we can hold that view some of the time, but we are intended as humans to resonate far more deeply than that. I believe that creativity as a spiritual path is very much a felt path.

Samuel Bercholz: "Felt" in the sense of passion, or heartfelt?

Julia Cameron: I don't see those as two different things. Do you?

Samuel Bercholz: No, but...sometimes feeling is just a swirl. Is there a difference between the swirl of emotion and heartfelt feeling?

Julia Cameron: When we're in a swirl of emotion, in a funny way it's intellectual. Confusing and conflicting ideas are wrapped up with the emotions, much the way smoke has particles in it. When we are in our heart, there is a clarity to the feeling, a purity to the feeling. It's less like smoke and more like water. Creativity allows you to purify swirling emotions.

Samuel Bercholz: By grounding them? By liberating them? What happens?

Julia Cameron: You see, for me it's difficult to talk so theoretically. For instance, this morning I was very frustrated. I sat down and wrote four short poems, and then I was fine. The poems both grounded and liberated what I was feeling.

Then I think we should talk just about the practice, because the intellectual part of this doesn't make any sense. You can read everything about creativity, everything about meditation, everything about spirituality, and what difference does it make?

Okay, let's look at the nuts and bolts of The Artist's Way. Get up in the morning and write three pages of long hand writing about anything.

Samuel Bercholz: What inspired you to do that? This is something you created, and people are doing it all over the world.

Julia Cameron: It didn't begin with an idea. One day I got up and started doing it, and I found that it worked.

Samuel Bercholz: What do you mean by "worked"?

Julia Cameron: It made me prioritized for my day; it rendered me present to my life; it gave me a seed bed of ideas that later became creative work; it rendered me profoundly present. So I did it more. (laughs)

Samuel Bercholz: Then you wrote the prescription for everybody else. How did you know that this wasn't just for you?

Julia Cameron: People would call me up who were confused, and I'd say, "Try this," and it would work for them. That's how it became larger: I simply shared the tool. It's a tool that arose out of the fact that I am a writer with a habit of writing; therefore, it was the most natural thing in the world for me to get up one morning and start writing, and then to notice what it did for me.

I also do believe in reincarnation. I think that I'm a teacher, and I suspect I've been a teacher for a very long time. A lot of what I know comes from my thirty years of work as a writer, but I suspect that a lot of what I know is remembered. I think this is true for all of us, that we are often doing in this life a work that we began a long time ago. That's what I think The Artist's Way is; it's a work that I probably began a long time ago. Or that artists began a long time ago.

Samuel Bercholz: So do you think there's an ancestry of artists as well as a family ancestry?

Julia Cameron: Absolutely. When people talk about a spiritual practice, they talk about the lineage of the practice. I think I'm squarely within the lineage of creativity, from the caves forward.

Samuel Bercholz: Is this a natural gift, or something you had to develop?

Julia Cameron: I think we have natural gifts and then we develop them. I think my work is helping people to wake up to their gifts and develop them.

Samuel Bercholz: Do you think everybody has natural gifts?

Julia Cameron: Absolutely!

Samuel Bercholz: So what's with all these frustrated people?

Julia Cameron: I think we've forgotten who we are. I think we've forgotten we're gifted. We've been made to feel we aren't gifted: we have an enormous mythology that creativity belongs to an elite few. They've known it since birth, they suffer no fear, they always wear black...

So what The Artist's Way tools do is reconnect people to their own creative impulses, at which point people become far stronger and begin to move in the direction of those impulses. It's essentially a spiritual process, a listening process: with morning pages you are listening to what's going on within you. You're putting it on the page and communicating it to yourself and, in a sense, to the world.

The second basic tool is something called an "artist's date," which is a once-a-week festive period of solitude. This is like turning on the radio to receive. So with morning pages you're listening to yourself and communicating out, and then you go into solitude, a festive engaged form of solitude - you are out in the world, you are interacting, you begin to feel and hear other impulses. You begin to receive.

Samuel Bercholz: In The Vein of Gold you talk about walking as more than just a physical thing. It's about visual images that come by and all kinds of things.

Julia Cameron: We are ecosystems. Creativity is an ecosystem. If we want to be creative, we fish from the well of the ecosystem. It's as though you have an inner trout run and when you strive for creativity you're fishing out of it. Then you need to replenish it, restock it.

When you walk, a couple of things happen. One is that you have an image-flow moving at you. You see and notice things. You see a tiny little bird skittering under a pine branch. You see a homeless person if you're in the city. You note the image, and the image goes into the well. The well is part of the heart, and that's where your art comes from.

Walking also moves you across the bridge into a larger realm of ideas. It allows you to listen to a different frequency. I experience it as a sort of click in the back of my head. I begin to have insights and inspirations which seem to be of a simpler and higher order. There is something enormously powerful about visualizing and moving at the same time. It may just be because we have more energy to deal with, but it really helps things to clarify, and once something clarifies it begins to be able to manifest.

I call it crossing into the imagination. When we make things they begin as thought forms, as spiritual blueprints, and when we are walking and we visualize something, we're actually drawing it into form. As a writer, if I have a tangled plot line, I go for a walk. I'm not thinking particularly about my plot; I'm thinking about the little wren that I saw, I'm thinking about the mallards, if I'm in New York maybe I'm thinking about the antique velvet rope that I saw in the shop window. And as I'm thinking about these things, "Oh! That's what I can do with my plot" emerges. Creativity is sort of Zen: as you focus north, solutions emerge south. It's not linear.

Samuel Bercholz: Well, that's magic. That's the way spiritual practice is: it works because it works. I mean, you could do whole scientific studies and they don't help anything. You can make up excuses why it works, but they're just excuses.

Julia Cameron: You know, if smart were the solution, very few of us would be screwed up. Smart isn't the solution. The heart is the solution. That's why I don't like the term "mindfulness." I like the term "heartfulness." I think it's more accurate.

Samuel Bercholz: Actually, the term is translated from the Sanskrit, and whoever translated it chose the word "mind" rather than "heart." But mindfulness refers to the Sanskrit citta, which is in fact "heart." So "heartfulness" is more accurate; it's not about our head at all.

Julia Cameron: Well, this is good. I always thought, what a dreadful word, they can't mean it.

So we're really talking about what arises from the heart.

Samuel Bercholz: You don't mean the little flesh thing, right? What do you mean by "heart?

Julia Cameron: The essence. The center. The place that is simultaneously individual and universal that each of us carries. That point of truth. I think heart is a pretty good word for that.

Samuel Bercholz: What's the relationship between time and creativity? You're struggling with a deadline now, working on a book, and all of us who are involved with the world of creativity know there are always deadlines and the panic that comes with them. Do you think it's positive that there are time restrictions or would it be better if things were eased up?

Julia Cameron: It's a central question. We yearn for more time with the illusion that if we had open time we would be creating all the time. The trick is to actually learn to use the time which we have.

What I try to teach is how to be creative within the life you've got. We are a workaholic society. We are addicted to work and often to work for work's sake. But when you are happy, rested and in touch with yourself, you can often work very quickly. That's because when you have some clarity it's easy to do something quickly. The trick is really clarity. People say, I don't have time to do the morning pages, but if they do the morning pages it gives them clarity, and that makes them do all the rest of their life more quickly and more easily.

Now, the whole issue of how to be creative within a business environment is an issue of people being connected and clear, which is contagious. I use the term "creative contagion." Very often if one person in a workplace starts working with creative emergence tools somebody else will say, "What are you doing? You seem really different." Then they'll start doing them and you have this sort of grassroots beneath the hierarchy; out of sight of the superiors you have these people who are becoming more and more grounded while also becoming more visionary, innovative and individual.

These tools render us able to see our choices in any given situation. In the middle of a demanding business day you can close the office door for ten minutes and listen to a piece of music. You can go off and write a half a page just to clear your thinking. The tools are very portable. These little tiny timeouts during a day keep you connected, and just an instant of connection creates space for what I call grace, or what other people might call inspiration or intuition. If we make the smallest opening, there is the possibility of creativity. This is why it is so much like a spiritual practice.

Samuel Bercholz: Do you want to say something about the various kinds of addictions and their relationship to creativity?

Julia Cameron: Our mythology tells us that artists are addicted people - that they are promiscuous, drug addicted, alcoholic. We've come to think that somehow those addictions are part of the creative process.

My experience is exactly the opposite. My experience is that creativity is freedom from addiction. We are frightened when we feel the force of our own creative energy, because we don't know how to ground it. This is why my tools tend to be grounding tools, and when creativity is safely grounded and used, addictions fall to one side. Conversely, if you see someone addicted, what you're seeing is a profoundly creative soul reaching for a substitute to self-expression.

When people get sober they can be profoundly creative. When people get emotionally sober off of a process addiction like workaholism or sex addiction or relationship addiction, they have freed for their use a beautiful amount of new usable energy with which they can make wonderful things. That doesn't just mean writing a poem or making a ceramic vase. It can be a new system for the office. It can be revamping the way they do parent/teacher meetings.

But often what happens is that when we experience our creative energy we don't recognize it as creative energy; we just think it's anxiety. So rather than saying, "How can I direct this energy and what should I make?" we try to block it. We block it by thinking of some titillating sexual adventure. We block it by picking up a drink. We block it with a pint of Hagen Daas. We block it by picking up workaholic work. But it doesn't go away; it's still there. Creativity is always there, because it is as innate to humanity as blood and bone. It is the animating force.

Samuel Bercholz: Although a lot of people talk about creativity and sexuality as not different energies. Do you see them as different?

Julia Cameron: No. I would tend to say that energy itself is pure, and that we can abuse it. You can feel the difference between an

addictive, deadening sexual encounter and a sexual encounter where you stay present and the other person stays present.

Samuel Bercholz: Being in the present is the issue?

Julia Cameron: I think so.

Samuel Bercholz: Is it the same with creativity?

Julia Cameron: Creativity is living in the connected moment.

Samuel Bercholz: What do you mean by connected?

Julia Cameron: Heartful, present, alert, attentive, engaged.

Samuel Bercholz: Thank you.

To order a trial subscription to Shambhala Sun, click here.

 
"According to Buddhist Tradition": Gays, Lesbians and the Definition of Sexual Misconduct

By Steve Peskind
 
Leaving the Fairmount Hotel in San Francisco, having just met with the Dalai Lama, the words, "according to Buddhist tradition" reverberated in my head. Stepping out into the June sunlight, I felt tired, calm, enormously grateful-and disappointed. 

I was grateful for the Dalai Lama's willingness to meet with gays and lesbians to discuss their concerns about Buddhist teachings on sexual misconduct, and for the press release from the Office of Tibet supporting human rights regardless of sexual orientation. But I was disappointed that he chose not to speak personally and directly, beyond Buddhist tradition, to the real harm of some of these misconduct teachings, and their irrelevance for modern Buddhists and others. I wondered, does the Dalai Lama, whom many consider the embodiment of Avalokiteshvara, who "hears the cries of all sentient beings and responds skillfully," really hear the cries of sexual minority Buddhists?

The story of our meeting with the Dalai Lama begins with an article in the February/March, 1994 issue of OUT magazine, which quoted the Dalai Lama as saying: "If someone comes to me and asks whether it is okay or not, I will first ask if you have some religious vows to uphold. Then my next question is, What is your companion's opinion? If you both agree, then I think I would say, if two males or two females voluntarily agree to have mutual satisfaction without further implication of harming others, then it is okay."

Gay men, lesbians, and others reveled in reading the OUT article. We copied the article, sent it home, sent it...everywhere! We reprinted it in community newsletters that made their way around the world. A major spiritual leader, "the favorite lama of the world" as a friend referred to him, had finally told it like it is. We thought.

But in 1996, North Atlantic Books published Beyond Dogma: Dialogues and Discourses, a collection of talks and discussions from the Dalai Lama's 1993 visit to France. On page 46 he responds to the questions, "What are proper sexual attitudes? What do you think of homosexuality, for example?" The Dalai Lama replies: "A sexual act is deemed proper when the couples use the organs intended for sexual intercourse and nothing else....Homosexuality, whether it is between men or between women, is not improper in itself. What is improper is the use of organs already defined as inappropriate for sexual contact. Is this clear?"

My immediate reaction on reading this was: "No. This is not clear!" Was the natural behavior of my sexual orientation a violation of the moral precepts of Tibetan Buddhism and consequently negative karma in itself? As a sexually active gay man, a longtime Buddhist practitioner, and an AIDS services provider for the last 16 years, I asked myself, "What happens when `new' Buddhists, often refugees from harshly judgmental Divine Revelatory religions, read this? What about men and women around the world living and dying with AIDS? How will they feel?"

Although the proscriptions were not discriminatory against "homosexuality" per se, they were clearly discriminatory in their impact on homosexual men and women (and even prohibited most of the AIDS safe sex guidelines). Stating that homosexual orientation is okay, but that homosexual behavior is not, creates a terrible double bind for any gay Buddhist who believes the Dalai Lama's teachings.

On the basis of the discrepancy between the OUT article and Beyond Dogma, I wrote an open, public letter to the Dalai Lama in January of 1997, noting that many of us who so admired him were confused and distressed by the inconsistency of his statements and their worldwide ramifications. I respectfully requested that he "in whatever manner and venue he chooses, speak to the Buddhadharma, the truth of homosexuality and homosexual behavior." That letter resulted, through the agency of the Office of Tibet, in the June 11 private meeting between the Dalai Lama and seven gay and lesbian leaders in San Francisco.

At the meeting I asked the Dalai Lama about a statement he had made at a press conference the day before. A reporter had asked him to comment on the morality of homosexual behavior, and he replied: "We have to make a distinction between believers and unbelievers. From a Buddhist point of view, men-to-men and women-to-women is generally considered sexual misconduct. From society's point of view, mutually agreeable homosexual relations can be of mutual benefit, enjoyable and harmless."

The Dalai Lama went on to say that the same Buddhist scripture that advises against gay and lesbian sex urges the same for heterosexuals. "Even with your wife, using one's mouth or the other hole is sexual misconduct. Using one's hand, that is sexual misconduct." He added, "The Buddha is our Teacher," the historical reference for all Buddhists.

The next morning in his diplomatic suite in the Fairmount, I asked him, "If the Buddha is our teacher, where and when did he teach that homosexual partners are inappropriate, that homosexual behavior is sexual misconduct?" The Dalai Lama candidly responded, "I don't know."
During the meeting the Dalai Lama confirmed for us another sexual proscription according to Buddhist tradition: heterosexuals are prohibited from having sex more than five consecutive times with a partner. Jose Cabezon, a gay Buddhist scholar, promptly asked him, "If the purpose of the proscriptions is to reduce sexual activity, how does it make sense to allow a man to have sex with his wife up to five times a night, while saying that it is sexual misconduct for a man to have sex with another man even once in his life?"

The Dalai Lama roared with laughter, saying,"You have a point there!" Earlier he had asked all of us, "Sex is for procreation, right?" Our collective silence was our response. When I asked, "Which of the proscribed behaviors regarding partner, organ, or excessive frequency do you personally consider most important?" he responded with a thoughtful look, not saying anything.

In preparation for the meeting the Dalai Lama had traced the sexual misconduct teachings back to the Indian Buddhist scholar Ashvaghosha, and said they may reflect the moral codes of India at the time, "which stress moral purity." He was open to the possibility of Buddhist tradition changing eventually in response to science, modern social history, and discussion within the various Buddhist sanghas. He urged all of us to go forth and advocate our interests, basing our action on Buddhist principles of "rigorous investigation and non-violence." He noted that he is not unilaterally empowered to change tradition: "Change can only come on the collective level," he said.

Religious teachings on sex-make that "wrong sex"-are well known to be a principal cause of violence and discrimination against sexual minorities and a primary cause of self-destructive behavior among them. This is true in the West and it is true in the East. Clearly, some of the traditional Buddhist teachings are violent to the truth and lives of Buddhist sexual minorities. It's still questionable whether the Dalai Lama, whose words carry much weight in the court of world opinion, really "gets" the impact of Buddhist tradition labeling the way we make love as "sexual misconduct." My partner of twenty-one years and I don't appreciate it. And the Buddha didn't say it at all, according to the evidence.

According to the oldest Buddhist teachings, the Buddha cautioned against "misconduct of sensual desire." He warned of mental stains from "drowning in sensual pleasure-harmful and disturbing intentions and actions arising from wrong perception and the dualistic fixation on self and other. He did not mention sex, inappropriate organs and partners. During the June 11 meeting the Dalai Lama clearly stated that "the goal for all Buddhists is Nirvana"-complete freedom of mind free of wrong perception, dualistic fixation, defilements and hindrances. He did not clarify, however, how sex as an expression of emotional intimacy, or moderate and respectful recreational sex, or gay tantric sex for that matter, in any way impedes full awakening, freedom and peace of heart.
The meeting was warm, serious and much too hurried. The 45 minutes was a 15 minute extension to the 30 minutes which the Office of Tibet originally allotted for "this historic meeting." The Dalai Lama encouraged the seven of us and others to hold conferences on Buddhism and sexuality and other pressing concerns, including Tibetan Buddhist full-ordination of women as nuns. Although the Dalai Lama opposed violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation, he did not commit himself to helping correct harmful Buddhist teachings still on the books-including the conduct codes which can fuel homophobic behavior among Buddhist teachers and students. Famous for saying, "When science points to or proves a truth contrary to Buddhist teaching, then Buddhist teaching must change," he said as we were leaving his suite, "Changing Buddhist traditions will be much harder than advocating for your human rights."

So it's up to us to affect change, with lots of help from Buddhist teachers who are quite awake on the subject of sexual right action, teachers such as Khandro Rinpoche, Drukchen Rinpoche, the late Dudjom Rinpoche, Lama Tarchin Rinpoche, Robert Aitken Roshi and others. We must continue to insist that the tradition change. Three years ago I asked Khandro Rinpoche, the gifted young Tibetan teacher, about her views on homosexual behavior and the dharma. This eldest daughter of Mindroling Rinpoche, and Kagyu and Nyingma lineage holder, offered the following response as part of her public teaching in San Francisco on "AIDS: Compassion and Skillful Means":

"One can grow spiritually by being a monk, through getting married, through homosexual relations. If you really love another man as a man, no problem. Within the Buddha's doctrine itself homosexuality is nothing special, nothing new. Such a thing as realization means being free from attachment to whomever it may be-a man to a man, a man to a woman, a woman to a woman, or whomever it may be. Each person is responsible for his or her own mind, own thoughts, emotions, understanding, awakening, realization. It's possible for a homosexual person. It's possible for all sentient beings."

We cannot control tradition and politics. We cannot control psychological and physical violence born of delusion. But Buddha's way is not about the "control" of suffering; it's about responding with open awareness to the whole display of our experience, including suffering. The Dalai Lama accurately observed that he is not unilaterally empowered to change Buddhist tradition. But he is empowered to speak for himself. His speaking to the irrelevant, false aspects of sexual misconduct teachings will certainly help the cause.

A Buddhist's responsibility is to insist that Buddhist oppression of sexual minorities, women and others, including heterosexual couples, end. The San Francisco-based Buddhist AIDS Project is formulating "A Respectful Request to the Dalai Lama," in the form of a petition asking him to speak directly to the irrelevance and harm of some traditional misconduct codes found in all lineages of Tibetan Buddhism.

Steve Peskind is coordinator of the Buddhist AIDS Project in San Francisco. He is the editor of the anthology, Heart Lessons From an Epidemic: Buddhist Practice and Living with HIV, to be published by Parallax Press. He can be contacted at
 

"According to Buddhist Tradition", Steve Peskind, Shambhala Sun, March 1998.

To order this copy of the Shambhala Sun, click here.

To order a trial subscription to Shambhala Sun, click here.

/catchusers3/2010620/shambhalaback/Archives/Features/1998/Mar98/Peskind.htm

Queer Spirit: On Sexual Identity as Help and Hindrance

Peter Sweasey

Homosexuality and spirituality do not seem, at first sight, particularly compatible. Gay people are still routinely condemned by prominent religious figures. Many Jewish and Christian organizations see homophobia as proof of orthodoxy, while fundamentalists generally believe that the more you love Jesus, the more you should hate faggots.
Some religious groups have gradually adopted more liberal views-but their acceptance of queers is often hedged with qualifications, such as refusing to acknowledge gay marriages. The majority of western Buddhist groups take a more positive line, although, as the Dalai Lama controversially pointed out recently, they are going against some Buddhist cultural traditions in doing so.
Just as religion rejects queers, so queers reject religion. Angry people, wanting to fight back after suffering years of oppression, find an obvious enemy in religion, which so brazenly proclaims its prejudice. For many queers, religion is seen as "a straight thing"-you may have had it when you were younger, but after coming out it should be left behind. Now you're out and proud, and the only pilgrimage you should make is to Ikea.
To come out is to join people with well-established beliefs and traditions, spaces and rituals, culture and community. Being lesbian, gay or bisexual becomes a way of life in itself, fulfilling many of the roles traditionally played by religion. Who needs "spirituality" when you've got lifestyle, fashionable celebrity icons, the best nightclubs, and lots of beautiful people to have sex with? Or, for the more earnestly inclined, when there's equality to win, a health crisis to survive, and homoculture to consume?
And yet, in spite of this mutual hostility, and in spite of the virtual taboo around spirituality in most queer contexts, there are many lesbian, gay and bisexual people for whom both spirituality and sexuality are sources of strength and joy. There are queer Buddhists, Jews, Quakers, Episcopalians, Catholics, Neo-Pagans, Sikhs, Hindus, Taoists, and New-Agers of every complexion. Some of these people practice in predominantly heterosexual organizations; others join lesbian and gay synagogues and churches, or groups dedicated to gay spirituality, like the Radical Faeries.
There are people who draw on a number of these and other spiritual traditions without fully belonging to any of them; and there are still more who identify themselves as "spiritual" but would have reservations about anything resembling organized religion. Some turn elsewhere for their spiritual sustenance, perhaps to nature, art, drugs or sex.
How do these people manage to integrate their sexual and spiritual identities when there is so much pressure from both sides to choose one over the other? Why do they bother to do so? How does their sexuality affect their understanding of spirituality -and vice versa?
I put these questions to a large number of lesbian, gay and bisexual people, from a variety of different spiritual traditions, while I was researching my book From Queer to Eternity (Cassell, 1997). In their answers, there was a lot of agreement about some key ways in which being queer can affect your spiritual journey. Some people told me that their sexuality, far from disqualifying them from spiritual involvement or causing them to reject it, was actually what caused them to set out on their journey, and that it has been helpful for their spiritual growth.
Queerness may be a spiritual advantage even if it is a religious handicap, even though some religious groups will close their doors to you. Queer people are very quick to make a distinction between spirituality and religion.
Elizabeth Sarah, a lesbian rabbi, explains that "when people think of religion they think of institutions, hierarchies, things that are fixed and try to control them. The word spirituality seems more autonomous, about where people are coming from in their own lives. It's about what it is to be human, what it is to be alive, what it is to be part of creation." Chris Ferguson, a gay man and Buddhist, makes a similar distinction: "Religion is trying to make you what you're not. Spirituality is trying to make you who you are."
Chris, Elizabeth and many other gay people emphasize the inner life over external dogma. This is partly a distinction that queers are forced to make, because the public aspects of religion have so often been hostile to us. Turning inwards is more than a defensive response, however; it is an inevitable part of realizing you are lesbian, gay or bisexual.
Spirituality arises from the ultimate questions: why am I here, how do I live? To realize that you are other-than-heterosexual in this society is to initiate a process of self-analysis that can include, or eventually lead to, those same Big Questions. To be queer is an existential condition; at least for that time when people are in the closet and thus locked inside themselves, they are forced to ask: if I am not like others that I see around me, what am I about? What do I want out of life? Who am I?
"Because we're told that we're not meant to be here," says Jason Oliver, a Pagan, "gay people go out of their way to find out what they are really here for." Once you've started asking those big questions, it's difficult to stop. As a result of this process, we fall out of innocence; queers come across the big existential questions much sooner than many other people may have to.
As Diana, a Christian priest, said to me, "When you're confronting your own sexuality, you're confronting yourself at the very deepest level of your being-and it's in that deepest level of your being that your spirituality dwells as well. A lot of straight people think they're `normal'; they never actually look at who they are because they don't think they need to, they just get on with life. So because they don't go through that process of delving deep inside themselves, they may never get to that level of looking at their spirituality either, or even realize that they have a spirituality."
The catalyst for this crucial process of questioning and turning within is the feeling of not being able to identify fully with the surrounding world, the experience of not fitting in: "queerness." David Philbedge, now a Buddhist, told me of how, from an early age, he'd felt like an outsider. "If you have a sense that you're different from what's around you, you're not going to get sucked in without thinking, you're not going to accept received wisdom. All worthwhile spiritual paths involve asking questions: it's that sense of being an outsider that begins that process."
Another Buddhist, Fernando Guasch, agrees: "This radical form of dislocation is fundamentally the core of the gay experience. Jung says consciousness comes out of friction: where you clash with the rest of things. It makes you very aware. Being gay allows you to `read the world differently,' as the native American say. Gay people can see through many of the `god-given truths' that so many straight people seem to believe are moral/ethical facts about the world-they're good myth busters. Gay people have always been able to point at the emperor and say he has no clothes."
When people realize that they are not heterosexual, they may also realize the illusory nature of so much of what they are told life is about. They begin to awaken. Most humans get a wake-up call sooner or later-when someone they love dies, perhaps, or when achieving material goals fails to bring the happiness they expected-but queer people, if they are to have the chance of living honest and fulfilling lives, are forced to act on this call earlier in life than most.
Coming out involves rejecting social programming and expectations, and asserting that they will live by the truth of their experience instead. And in refusing to keep up any sort of pretense (about this aspect of their lives, at least), they are laying the groundwork for a healthy, open spirituality. They are learning something about who they really are instead of who they are told they should be, and as a consequence, the act of coming out can be a source of spiritual insight.
"When I allowed in the `truth' that I am gay," says Philip Joyce, a father of three, "it was an overwhelming insight, enabling me to make sense of so many of my previous feelings and experiences. It released an enormous amount of energy. I experienced a powerful sense of self, and a human warmth towards other people, which were new to me. I was illuminated and exhilarated, and it changed the course of my life. It was a new truth by which I had to live. It was so inspirational that I would say this was a major stage in my spiritual growth."
A lesbian called Kate told me that when she came out, "I felt `born again,' or rather that I had finally found who I really was. From being monochrome, life had become glorious Technicolor."
Kate is not the only person to use religious terminology in describing coming out. Realizing you are gay can cause a kind of death-of the former, ill-fitting heterosexual identity and expectations-but it leads to the experience of new life. Spiritual growth similarly involves a shedding of old assumptions and illusions, ideas about who you are and what your life will be like, in order to make space for a greater truth or liberation. Perhaps it is no coincidence that when Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead, he uses the words "come out" (John 11:43).
Lazarus is often depicted as being reluctant to come out, since the tomb, like the closet, has the apparent comfort of a certain security. It's a risk that has to be taken, however; in the words of Harvey Fierstein's anthem to gay pride, "Life's not worth a damn till you can say, I am what I am."
That song provides another interesting cross-over with religious terminology. "I am what I am" is a classic statement of spiritual truth as well as gay identity. In the Old Testament, these words are how God is identified: when Moses asks the voice in the burning bush to name itself, it replies "I am what I am." To be oneself, to be aware, to be conscious, to be; awareness, consciousness, being: these things have been the concerns of spiritual traditions throughout history, and they are signified by "I am what I am."
Having admitted and asserted this much truth, queer people are unlikely to surrender their hard-won insight into the way things are. If the existential questions provoked by being queer cause them to look to religion for answers, they have a yardstick with which to judge what they are told. If they're told that they should not exist, or that their sexuality is wrong, they have reason to doubt the veracity of anything else that religion may say.
Queer people are skeptical of anything that will not acknowledge or allow the truth of their experience. They have a built-in-some might say God-given-bullshit detector. This is valuable, since there's a lot of bullshit in religion, as well as a lot of good. Any spirituality worth its salt survives skepticism; a lot of conventional religion does not. Being queer may force them to throw out the bathwater, but that doesn't mean they can't keep hold of the baby.
This confidence in the authority of personal experience is a marked trait of spiritual queers, and is important whether the individual concerned is following an orthodox tradition or a looser, more individualistic path. To people with a paternalistic concept of religion (God commands, we obey), it may sound heretical to value personal experience over the supposed authority of religious institutions and scriptures. I would argue that, as well as being the only rational course, it is crucial for psychological survival and spiritual maturity. Spiritual maturity requires growing from childish dependence to adult independence (or interdependence), from external religion (with all the fear, conformism and habit that may involve) to the freedom of internal spirituality.
As part of this process of spiritual growth, queer people who had some sort of faith before they came out often find themselves renegotiating their relationship with religious authority. Rabbi Mark Solomon told me of how, when he was Orthodox and in the closet, he saw religion as a matter of "fitting in to patterns that had already been established." When he came out, he realized that "there are no answers that are identically suitable for everybody...each person has a personal relationship with God which is different, because no two people are precisely the same. God is beyond all the narrow concepts and systems to which we confine God and confine religion."
Another gay man, Peter Ashby-Saracen, was formerly involved with fundamentalist Christians. "Christianity was something I wanted to protect me from the hurts of life and to take away certain things I couldn't handle at the time, like my sexuality." After coming out, he began to practice the Buddhism of Nichiren Daishonin.
"Nowadays I look on life as a voyage of discovery. I've always thought of Buddhism as a tool-rather than a prop, which is something one leans on for support, something I see as static. I like the emphasis on the practice serving the individual, rather than the individual serving the religion. It is a liberating experience to know that there is a non-restrictive practice aimed primarily at encouraging you to be what you are. Being able to become the real me is of immense importance. If I ever felt that Buddhism wasn't serving my purposes any longer I would reject it without hesitation."
He believes because he chooses to; because it is beneficial for him to do so. He is not disempowered by his faith. In this, he is typical of queer believers.
One of the more common objections to any notion of spirituality or religion is that it's a crutch, a sign of weakness, something for feeble people who can't accept life as it really is. The lesbian, gay and bisexual people I spoke with would reject this claim. Since queers are not encouraged to acknowledge their spirituality, those who nonetheless persist, and overcome all the hurdles put in their way (by their own community as well as certain religions), must do so out of genuine desire.
Queer people who follow spiritual traditions are not doing so because of social convention; nor do they surrender their intelligence. They are well aware of the routine and obvious objections; their spirituality has been fiercely tested-by themselves as well as others-and survived. As Rabbi Lionel Blue has said, spirituality in the lives of lesbian and gay people tends to be "honest, not rhetoric. It does not avoid or evade. In a packaged society, such plain and simple truth is rare and valuable."
Religion is frequently guilty of sentimentality and escapism, but I saw very little of either quality among the queer people I came into contact with. Jonathon Andrew, a Christian who has lived with HIV for over a decade, said to me: "I don't think by having a spiritual practice you can exclude yourself from the hard reality. If your spirituality doesn't work on the ward at the AIDS hospice, it's not worth it. What the spiritual practice is about is coming to terms with the reality. And transforming it, somehow." Another gay man, Steve Hope, is a Quaker; he finds "the freedom lies in being as open as possible to ever more realities and experiences, and to share and be enriched by other people's experience. Being open to God is being open to more and more reality."If your spirituality doesn't work on the ward at the AIDS hospice, it's not worth it. What the spiritual practice is about is coming to terms with the reality. And transforming it, somehow." Another gay man, Steve Hope, is a Quaker; he finds "the freedom lies in being as open as possible to ever more realities and experiences, and to share and be enriched by other people's experience. Being open to God is being open to more and more reality."
Being truly open to reality means letting go of certain ideas about ourselves and the world. So far I've suggested that the potential advantage of being queer is that it can encourage people to do precisely this-to feel less restricted by what society decrees to be "normal," and to be freed to follow their own truth instead of obeying social or religious orthodoxies.
However, there is always a strong temptation to substitute the discarded orthodoxies with new illusions of your own invention-more appealing and subtle than the ones they replace, perhaps, but illusions nonetheless. Queers, for all the potential spiritual insight of their experience, are as susceptible to this temptation as anybody else.
One way in which gay people have responded to so many years of being marginalized by mainstream society is to create a very strong cultural identity of their own. If you read any of the lesbian or gay magazines or books now available, or watch some of the numerous lesbian and gay movies that have been released in the last few years, or go to the pride marches and festivals which take place in most major Western cities, you'll quickly pick up how gay men and lesbians dress, what music they listen to, what they do with their leisure time, and much else besides. This process is strongly consumerist-there are few items which you can't buy emblazoned with the colors of the rainbow "freedom flag," symbol of lesbian and gay pride.
These are just the superficial trappings of two very deep-rooted beliefs: that sexual orientation is centrally important to your life, and that there are defining characteristics of gay men and of lesbians beyond their sexual preferences. It's not just what they do and how they look, it's what they're like inside. Gay men, for instance, are assumed to be sensitive, witty, creative, caring, have good taste (in clothes, interior design, etc.), and get on famously with straight women. Crucial to their definition is that they are the opposite of straight men-who are emotionally inarticulate, obsessed with sport, money and cars, and intrinsically violent. Similar logic can be found underlying a lot of lesbian discourse (although there it is tempered by the feminist imperative to identify with all women).
I am over-simplifying and generalizing here, but one way queer people have reacted to being told for so long that they are worse than everyone else, is to end up thinking that they are fundamentally, innately different-and sometimes, even, that they are better. The world can be divided into two camps of people, Us and Them, and the gulf between these groups is caused by sexual orientation. Modern lesbian and gay people are happy to divide themselves off like this because they understand their differences from heterosexuals as being positively to their advantage-and because queers are the ones making this distinction, not the victims of it.
Some queer explorations of spirituality reflect this us-and-them division. Mark Thompson, author of Gay Spirit and Gay Soul, sees the role of queer people as "carriers of soul to a world that prefers to dwell on surfaces." Along with gay anthropologists like Will Roscoe and Randy P. Conner, he argues that queers have played this role throughout history.
The "Gay Spirituality" movement that they are involved in takes as its role models people from earlier cultures who deviated from the dominant gender and sexual norms, and undertook spiritual work and leadership-most famously, shamans and Native American berdache. Modern queer people, like the berdache, can provide a bridge between men and women because they have characteristics of both. They can also, as shamans did, bridge the profane and sacred. Queer people are inheritors of spiritual skills (healing and divination, for instance) and, although scattered across the world, are all part of one special tribe-if only they would realize it.
As a gay man, I have in the past found these ideas deeply appealing. Of course I would love to believe that I am spiritually gifted and have a crucial role to play in saving the souls of the world-and that this comes to me without effort, simply because I was born queer. However, ultimately I must reject this Gay Spirituality for the same reason that I reject homophobic religion-because it does not acknowledge the vastness of reality, nor does it correspond to my experience.
You only need to listen to the conversation going on in your average gay bar to realize that queers don't, automatically, represent a higher order of consciousness. Gay men, for instance, can be just-if not more-macho, objectifying, emotionally inarticulate and misogynist as the next (straight) man (and I know many straight men who display none of those characteristics). True, there have been some remarkable homosexual visionaries and artists throughout history, but there have been some remarkable heterosexual visionaries and artists too. If we believe it is up to the queer tribe to save the world, we write off the majority of humanity.
If queers are destined to play this spiritual role, what's left for straight men and women to do? The idea that only queer people can have easy access to both "masculine" and "feminine"characteristics traps the majority of human beings in the restrictive gender roles that, following the lead of feminism, we have finally begun to deconstruct.
The spiritual gift of queerness is a certain freedom from social and religious norms. But the notion of queers as intrinsically enlightened-or, more basically, the notion that we're fundamentally different-could easily become another "norm" that disguises the full complexity of who any of us is; or another distraction from reality. The dualistic division it creates between queer and straight limits our ability to identify with all others as human creatures like ourselves, and so could hinder that most basic of spiritual virtues, compassion. Of course queer people want and deserve equal rights, but do we have no concern with the world beyond the way it treats us? Will we not act on the (noble) truth that all people are suffering?
"You've got to keep away from elitist attitudes," warns Rabbi Lionel Blue, who is much-loved in Britain for his regular radio and television appearances, and came out in his sixties. Although homosexuality was illegal for much of his life, and caused him a great deal of personal conflict, he says "Everything that gays go through a straight person goes through too. The scenery is somewhat different, but the same dramas are played out. It is easy to escape from a ghetto imposed on you, and then to build one of your own because it seems safe and cozy. The aim of gay liberation is to make people whole, not to increase their divisions."
Being queer does not automatically make you "special," any more than it automatically makes you evil or sick. It has no inherent, objective meaning. There is nothing about feeling sexually attracted to people of the same gender that predetermines your spirituality; spirituality grows out of our experience. There is some experience that most queer people at this time have in common-some of which I outlined earlier in this article-and that experience can be very valuable to work with. That experience is not innate, however. In a future society that freely acknowledges the whole spectrum of human sexuality, homosexual people will no longer be "queer" outsiders and coming out will no longer be the same catalyst for self-realization that it is currently.
Such a society is still some way off. But even here and now, some queer people-in the light of their spiritual beliefs-argue that sexual identity is given undue emphasis. "You limit yourself by over-identification first of all with your own sexuality, and secondly with the group of people that you belong to," says Maitreyabandhu, a Buddhist. "Your sexuality is only a part of you. It doesn't have to be that big a part of your life even. It's not a problem, but neither is it a status-or a career."
Someone once told Maitreyabandhu that their sexuality was the foundation of their life, like a chair that they sit on. "I said, well it will break. It's not big enough to contain what life is about. To try to understand life from the basis of being gay drastically restricts human potential."
Peter Ashby-Saracen agrees, while clearly valuing the experience his sexual orientation has brought him: "Being gay is one manifestation of being human, and being human is, among other things, to be aware of our place in the wider `scheme of things.' Being gay doesn't satisfy everything in my life, though it's probably the thing that affects it most. I need some expression for my feeling of the infinite and where I fit into it, and my spirituality does this for me."
However big a part sexuality may play in our lives, infinity is, obviously, bigger. Spiritual traditions aspire to encompass the whole of reality-the breadth of human experience, the mystery of existence, the immensity and variety of the cosmos-which is not something lesbian and gay identity, however proud, can do. Coming to this realization can be a continuation of the process that starts with coming out.
"You've got to bring more than your sexuality out of the closet," advises Nagaraja, a gay Buddhist. Spiritual growth, like coming out, requires you to "know thyself," to keep asking that central question, who am I? "A queer person" is a good answer, because it is honest and shows some self-knowledge-but it is still only part of the answer. There's a temptation to think that "a lesbian" or "a gay man" is "who I really am." But we are mistaken if we think what we have found on coming out is our ultimate identity. Instead it is a signpost that points to the greater truth: the fact that, in many further ways, we are more than the culture around us would have us believe. Coming out is not the final destination; it is just the beginning of the spiritual journey. By starting with what we know -that we are lesbian, gay or bisexual-we may be led to universal human issues of mortality and meaning, of justice and suffering, of our place in the universe.
"If we are not careful," warns Maitreyabandhu, "our gay liberation will become gay limitation. We need to rediscover our radical roots and reconnect with the urge to change ourselves and the world."
For me, that means queer people should not be putting so much energy into building a permanent, fixed identity, and instead should be questioning why we are categorizing ourselves by our sexuality anyway. We will not change ourselves or the world if we remain content with roles based on who we have sex with, whether we feel good about playing those roles or not. As Maitreyabandhu suggests, being queer in itself is no longer the radical challenge it once was. "Lesbian and gay" has gone mainstream; spiritual traditions, however, remain revolutionary. The Buddha and Jesus invite us to look beyond how the world seems to be organized at the moment, and the place we are assigned within it.
In arguing that sexual orientation should not be our ultimate concern, I am not for a moment suggesting that it is not important, or that we should deny who we are. Being open about our sexuality, while seeing it as just one facet of our complex humanity, is very different from staying silent about our sexuality because other people force us to. For political reasons, it is still crucial in many situations to identify publicly as queer. And for queer individuals, without the crucial act of honesty and self-realization that coming out represents, any sort of spiritual growth (or fulfilling life, for that matter) is impossible.
Our journey can only start when we know where we are coming from. We can only understand other people when we begin to understand ourselves; we cannot comprehend universals until we acknowledge our own particulars. There will be many things that make us different from other people-sexual identity is one, but national identity is also important, and so are gender, race, class, education, age and many other characteristics. All of these are significant; they are the material we have to work with, the fuel for our spiritual journey, the grist for our mill. And yet we must avoid clinging too tightly to any of them, in case our ideas about who we are get in the way of our spiritual task-which is simply being who we are.
The final irony is that this sexual identity some of us have fought so hard for becomes, in the silence of meditation or prayer, just another part of the psychological baggage that we need to leave behind. In the words of Lev, a man I spoke to who belongs to the Jewish havur'a movement and Radical Faeries, as well as drawing on Eastern traditions, "When I've felt most spiritually connected is when I've had the strongest and clearest sense of my core being, rather than being a Jew, being a gay man, being a professional, being white, whatever. It's what's underneath all that."
 

Queer Spirit: On Sexual Identity as Help and Hindrance, Peter Sweasey, Shambhala Sun, March 1998.



To order this copy of the Shambhala Sun, click here.

To order a trial subscription to Shambhala Sun, click here.

/catchusers3/2010620/shambhalaback/Archives/Features/1998/Mar98/sweasey.htm

Resting in the River

By Thich Nhat Hanh

My dear friends, suppose someone is holding a pebble and throws it in the air and the pebble begins to fall down into a river. After the pebble touches the surface of the water, it allows itself to sink slowly into the river.

It will reach the bed of the river without any effort. Once the pebble is at the bottom of the river, it continues to rest. It allows the water to pass by.

I think the pebble reaches the bed of the river by the shortest path because it allows itself to fall without making any effort. During our sitting meditation we can allow ourselves to rest like a pebble. We can allow ourselves to sink naturally without effort to the position of sitting, the position of resting.

Resting is a very important practice; we have to learn the art of resting. Resting is the first part of Buddhist meditation. You should allow your body and your mind to rest. Our mind as well as our body needs to rest.

The problem is that not many of us know how to allow our body and mind to rest. We are always struggling; struggling has become a kind of habit. We cannot resist being active, struggling all the time. We struggle even during our sleep.

It is very important to realize that we have the habit energy of struggling. We have to be able to recognize a habit when it manifests itself because if we know how to recognize our habit, it will lose its energy and will not be able to push us anymore.

Ten years ago I was in India visiting the ex-untouchable community of Buddhists. A friend who belonged to the caste organized the trip for me. I was sitting on the bus, enjoying the landscape outside, contemplating the palm trees and the vegetation. Suddenly I turned and I saw him looking very tense. There was no reason why he had to be tense like that. I thought that he was trying to make my visit pleasant and maybe that was the reason he was so tense. I told him, "Dear friend, I know that you want to make my trip pleasant, but I am already very happy. I've already enjoyed the trip. So why don't you sit back, smile, and relax?" He said, "Okay," and he sat back and he tried to relax.

I was pleased and I turned my face toward the window again and I enjoyed the palm trees and other things. But just a few minutes after when I looked back at him he was as tense as before. He was not able to relax, to allow himself to relax. I knew that he belonged to that section of the population that had been struggling for many thousand years. He was discriminated against. He had suffered so much, his ancestors and himself and his children. So the tendency to struggle has been there for many thousand years. That is why it was very difficult for him to allow himself to rest.

We have to practice in order to be able to transform this habit in us. The habit of struggle has become a powerful source of energy that is shaping our behavior, our actions and our reactions.

When an animal in the jungle is wounded, it knows how to find a quiet place, lie down and do nothing. The animal knows that is the only way to get healed—to lay down and just rest, not thinking of anything, including hunting and eating. Not eating is a very wonderful way of allowing your body to rest. We are so concerned about how to get nutrition that we are afraid of resting, of allowing our body to rest and to fast. The animal knows that it does not need to eat. What it needs is to rest, to do nothing, and that is why its health is restored.

In our consciousness there are wounds also, lots of pains. Our consciousness also needs to rest in order to restore itself. Our consciousness is just like our body. Our body knows how to heal itself if we allow it the chance to do so. When we get a cut on our finger we don't have to do anything except to clean it and to allow it the time to heal, because our body knows how to heal itself. The same thing is true with our consciousness; our consciousness knows how to heal itself if we know how to allow it to do so. But we don't allow it. We always try to do something. We worry so much about healing, which is why we do not get the healing we need. Only if we know how to allow them to rest can our body and our soul heal themselves.

But there is in us what we call the energy of restlessness. We cannot be at peace with ourselves. We cannot be peaceful. We cannot sit; we cannot lie down. There is some energy in us to do this, to do that, to think of this, to think of that, and that kind of restlessness makes us unhappy. That is why it is so important for us to learn first of all to allow our body to rest. We have to learn how to deal with all our energy of restlessness. That is why we have to learn these techniques of allowing our body and our consciousness to rest.

I would like to offer you some instructions about walking meditation. The first thing we shall do early tomorrow morning is to practice walking together, which we call walking meditation. Walking meditation means to enjoy walking without any intention to arrive. We don't need to arrive anywhere. We just walk. We enjoy walking. That means walking is already stopping, and that needs some training.

Usually in our daily life we walk because we want to go somewhere. Walking is only a means to an end, and that is why we do not enjoy every step we take. Walking meditation is different. Walking is only for walking. You enjoy every step you take. So this is a kind of revolution in walking. You allow yourself to enjoy every step you take.

The Zen master Ling Chi said that the miracle is not to walk on burning charcoal or in the thin air or on the water; the miracle is just to walk on earth. You breathe in. You become aware of the fact that you are alive. You are still alive and you are walking on this beautiful planet. That is already performing a miracle. The greatest of all miracles is to be alive. We have to awaken ourselves to the truth that we are here, alive. We are here making steps on this beautiful planet. This is already performing a miracle.

But we have to be here in order for the miracle to be possible. We have to bring ourselves back to the here and the now. Therefore each step we take becomes a miracle. If you are able to walk like that, each step will be very nourishing and healing. You walk as if you kiss the earth with your feet, as if you massage the earth with your feet. There is a lot of love in that practice of walking meditation.

The Buddha said that the past is gone and the future is not yet here. Let us not regret the past. Let us not worry about the future. Go back to the present moment and live deeply the present moment. Because the present moment is the only moment where you can touch life. Life is available only in the present moment. That is why walking meditation is to go back to the present moment, in order to be alive again and to touch life deeply in that moment. In order to be able to touch the earth with our feet and enjoy walking, we have to establish ourselves firmly in the present moment, in the here and the now.

In walking meditation, we walk like a free person. This is not political freedom. This is freedom from afflictions, from sorrow, from fear. Unless you are free you cannot enjoy walking. I would like to propose to you a short poem that you might like to use for walking meditation:

I have arrived. I am home.
In the here. In the now.
I am solid. I am free.
In the ultimate I dwell.

You might like to take two steps and breathe in and say, I have arrived, I have arrived. And when you breathe out, you take another two steps and say silently, I am home, I am home. Our true home is really in the here and in the now. Because only in the here and the now can we touch life. As the Buddha said, life is available only in the here and the now, so going back to the present moment is going home. That is why you take one step or two steps and you awaken to the fact that you have arrived. You have arrived in the present moment.

If you are able to arrive, then you will stop running—running within and running without. There is a belief in us that happiness cannot be possible in the here and the now. We have to go somewhere. We have to go to the future in order to be able to really be happy.

That kind of thinking has been there for a long time. Maybe that feeling has been transmitted to us from our ancestors and our parents. That is why we have to wake up to the presence of that habit energy in us and to do the reverse. The Buddha said that it is possible for us to be peaceful and happy in the present moment. That is the teaching of trista dharma sadha vihara. It means living happily right in the present moment. When you are there, body and mind united, you have an opportunity to touch the conditions of your happiness. If you are able to touch these conditions of happiness that are already available in the here and the now, you can be happy right away. You don't have to run anywhere, especially into the future.

When we practice walking, we might be aware that we have strong feet. Our feet are strong enough for us to enjoy running and walking. That is one condition for happiness that is available. When I breathe in and I become aware of my eyes, I encounter another condition for my happiness. Breathing in, I am aware of my eyes. Breathing out, I smile to my eyes. This is an exercise, a very simple exercise to help you realize that you have eyes which are still in good condition. You need only to open your eyes to see the blue sky, the white cloud, the luxurious vegetation. You can see all kinds of forms and colors just because you have eyes still in good condition. Your eyes are another condition for your happiness. We have so many conditions like that for our happiness and yet we are still unhappy. We still want to run away from the present moment, hoping we'll find some happiness in the future.

Breathing in, I'm aware of my heart. Breathing out, I smile to my heart. That is another exercise. When you practice like that you touch your heart with your mindfulness. If you continue a minute, you realize that you still have a heart that functions normally. It is wonderful to have a heart that still functions normally. There are people who don't have a heart like that and their deepest desire is to have a heart like you. So conditions for happiness may be more than enough for us to be happy, but we are not able to be happy because of that tendency to run away from the present moment.

To take an in-breath, to smile, and to touch the conditions of happiness that are available, is something that all of us can do. Because of that we can stop and establish ourselves in the present moment. That is the teaching of living happily in the present moment. Please train yourself to make the present moment, the here and the now, into your true home. That is the only home that we have. That is the only place where we can touch life. Everything we are looking for must be found in the here and the now. In that way walking meditation can be a great pleasure and can be very healing.

Do you have to make any effort to practice walking meditation? I don't think so. It is like when you drink a glass of orange juice. Do you think that you have to make an effort in order to enjoy the orange juice? No. Walking is like that. To really enjoy a glass of orange juice, you have to be there one hundred per cent mind and body together. If you are there, mind and body firmly established in the present moment, then a glass of orange juice will become a real thing for you. You are real; therefore, the juice is real. And there life is real. Life exists. Life is deep during the time you drink your orange juice.

When you contemplate a beautiful sunset, do you have to make any effort? I don't think so. You don't have to make any effort in order to enjoy a beautiful sunset. You need only to be there, to be there mind and body together. But if your body is there and your mind is in the past or in the future, then the beautiful sunset will not be there for you.

There is a kind of energy that helps you to be there body and mind together. That energy is called mindfulness. Mindfulness is the capacity of being there body and mind united. When you drink your orange juice, drink mindfully and you will enjoy your juice because you are really there one hundred per cent. If your body and mind are united when you contemplate the beautiful sunset, it means that you are mindful. Mindfulness helps you to be there in order for the beautiful sunset to be there too. While you walk, if you allow yourself to be there mind and body together, then walking will become mindful walking; it will be healing, refreshing and nourishing.

To meditate means first of all to be there, to be on your cushion, to be on your walking meditation path. Eating also is a meditation if you are really there, present one hundred per cent with your food. The essential is to be there. So please when you practice walking meditation, don't make any effort. Allow yourself to be like that pebble at rest. The pebble is resting at the bottom of the river and the pebble does not have to do anything. While you are walking, you are resting. While you are sitting, you are resting.

If you struggle during your sitting meditation or walking meditation, you are not doing it right. The Buddha said, "My practice is the practice of non-practice." That means a lot. Give up all struggle. Allow yourself to be, to rest.

I sit on my meditation cushion. I consider it to be something very pleasant. I don't struggle at all on my cushion. I allow myself to be, to rest. I don't make any effort and that is why I do not get any trouble while sitting. While sitting I do not struggle and that is why all my muscles are relaxed. If you struggle during your sitting meditation, you will very soon have pain in your shoulders and back and things like that. But if you allow yourself to be rested on your cushion you can sit very long, and each minute is light, refreshing, nourishing and healing.

It is not sitting in order to struggle to get enlightenment. No. Sitting first of all is for the pleasure of sitting. Walking first of all is for the pleasure of walking. And eating is for the pleasure of eating. And the art is to be there one hundred per cent.

When I was a novice I learned how to light a stick of incense in mindfulness. You see, when you light incense you think that the purpose of lighting incense is to have the incense pervading the Buddha's home. But lighting the incense is just for lighting the incense. You pick up a stick of incense mindfully and you enjoy that, because it is by itself an act of meditation. During the time you pick up the stick of incense you are mindful, you are concentrated, you are real, because your body and your mind are together. And the stick of incense is real. When you strike a match, you do the same thing. During the time you strike a match, you only strike a match. You don't do anything else. You don't think of other things. You are perfectly mindful of striking a match. You are concentrated on it, and you enjoy the act of lighting the incense.

When you hold a stick of incense, it is the same. When I stick it into the incense burner, I put my left hand on my right hand. That is the tradition. Everyone in the Buddhist tradition lights incense in that way. The stick of incense is very light; one hand is enough in order to hold it. Why do you have to put your left hand on your right hand? Because it means that you are doing it with one hundred per cent of your body and your mind.

Be there truly. Be there one hundred per cent of yourself. In every moment of your daily life. That is the essence of true Buddhist meditation. Each of us knows that we can do that, so let us train to live each moment of our daily life deeply. That is why I like to define mindfulness as the energy that helps us to be there one hundred per cent. The energy of your true presence.

Breathing in—in the here, in the here. Breathing out—in the now, in the now. Although these are different words they mean exactly the same thing. I have arrived in the here. I have arrived in the now. I am home in the here. I am home in the now.

When you practice like that, you practice stopping. Stopping is the basic Buddhist practice of meditation. You stop running. You stop struggling. You allow yourself to rest, to heal, to calm.

And after a few minutes of practice you might switch into doing the third line—I am solid, I am free. This is not auto-suggestion. Why? Because if you have succeeded in arriving in the here and in the now you are much freer. You are free from the past, from the future, from your worries, from your fear. And you become much more solid; your steps become more solid and you become more solid in your body and in your mind. Solidity becomes a reality after a few minutes of arriving, of being home.

Solidity and freedom are two characteristics of nirvana. Nirvana is not something abstract. The Buddha said we can touch nirvana with our own body. So while you practice walking meditation you can begin to touch nirvana already with your body and your spirit.

When you feel you are a little bit more solid, a little bit more free, then you begin to touch nirvana with your body and spirit. Solidity and freedom are the true base for your happiness and well being. No happiness, no well being, is possible without solidity and freedom.

The last line of the poem is wonderful. In the ultimate I dwell. In the ultimate. In the ultimate. I dwell. I dwell. The ultimate here is the true foundation of your being.

Let us visualize the waves on the ocean, several waves appearing on the surface of the ocean. Some waves are big, there are those that are small, and each wave seems to have its own life. A wave may have ideas like, "I am a wave. I am only a wave among many waves. I am smaller than the other wave. I am less beautiful. I last less than the other wave." Ideas like that. A wave can be caught in jealousy, in fear, in discrimination.

But if the wave is able to bend down and touch the water within herself, it will realize that while it is a wave, it is at the same time water. Water is the foundation of the wave. While waves can be high and low, more and less beautiful, the water is free from all these notions. That is why if we are able to touch the foundation of our being, we can release our fear and our suffering.

Touching the foundation of our being means touching nirvana. Our foundation is not subjected to birth and death, being and non-being. A wave can live the life of a wave, but a wave can do much better than that. While living the life of a wave, a wave can live a life of the water. The more our solidity and our freedom grows, the deeper we touch the ground of our own being. That is the door for emancipation, for the greatest relief.

Throughout his tour, Thich Nhat Hanh addressed the specific issues of Americans in a series of question and answer periods. Here is a selection of his responses to questions on leading a spiritual life in the modern world.

Stress and Work

How do you maintain mindfulness in a busy work environment? At times it seems there is not even enough time to breathe mindfully.

This is not a personal problem only; this is a problem of the whole civilization. That is why we have to practice not only as individuals; we have to practice as a society. We have to make a revolution in the way we organize our society and our daily life, so we will be able to enjoy the work we do every day.

Meanwhile, we can incorporate a number of things that we have learned in this retreat in order to lessen our stress. When you drive around the city and come to a red light or a stop sign, you can just sit back and make use of these twenty or thirty seconds to relax-to breathe in, breathe out, and enjoy arriving in the present moment. There are many things like that we can do. Years ago I was in Montreal on the way to a retreat, and I noticed that the license plates said Je me souviens—"I remember." I did not know what they wanted to remember, but to me it means that I remember to breathe and to smile (laughter). So I told a friend who was driving the car that I had a gift for the sangha in Montreal: every time you see Je me souviens, you remember to breathe and smile and go back to the present moment. Many of our friends in the Montreal sangha have been practicing that for more than ten years.

I think we can enjoy the red light; we can also enjoy the stop sign. Every time we see it we profit: instead of being angry at the red light, of being burned by impatience, we just practice breathing in, breathing out, smiling. That helps a lot. And when you hear the telephone ringing you can consider it to be the sound of the mindfulness bell. You practice telephone meditation. Every time you hear the telephone ringing you stay exactly where you are (laughter). You breathe in and breathe out and enjoy your breathing. Listen, listen—this wonderful sound brings you back to your true home. Then when you hear the second ring you stand up and you go to the telephone with dignity (laughter). That means in the style of walking meditation (laughter). You know that you can afford to do that, because if the other person has something really important to tell you, she will not hang up before the third ring. That is what we call telephone meditation. We use the sound as the bell of mindfulness.

And waiting at the bus stop you might like to try mindful breathing, and waiting in line to go into a bank, you can always practice mindful breathing. Walking from one building to another building, why don't you use walking meditation, because that improves the quality of our life. That brings more peace and serenity, and the quality of the work we do will be improved just by that kind of practice. So it is possible to integrate the practice into our daily life. We just need a little bit of creative imagination to do so.


The Benefits of Silence

Could tell us about the benefits of silence and how we could bring that home with us from this retreat?

Many of us have realized in the last few days that silence can be enjoyable. We realize that there are many things that we do not have to say, and that then we can reserve the time and energy to do other things that can help us to look more deeply into ourselves and things around us.

If you are pushed by your habit energy to say something, don't say it. Instead, take a notebook and write it down. A day or two later, read what you wrote, and you might find out that it would have been an awful thing to say. So slowly you become master of yourself, and you know what to say and what not to say.

I remember one time I proposed to a sister that she practice silence. She was an elder nun and she had a few negative seeds in her that prevented her from being happy. She was just a little bit too hard on the other sisters. I proposed to her that she was a very talented person, very skillful in many things, and she could make many people happy if only she knew how to be silent and to say only things that needed to be said.

I proposed to her that she use only three sentences for three months. She could repeat these three sentences as many times as she wanted (laughter) and I told her that if she practiced that for a week, she would feel happiness right away. The first sentence was, "Dear sister, is there anything I can do to help you?" (laughter) The second sentence was, "Did you like what I did to help you?" The third was, "Would you have any suggestion that I can do it better?" (laughter) If she could say that, she would make many people happy and the happiness would go back to herself very quickly.

In the family we can practice silence. We can ask the other members of the family to agree that we will practice silence for three days or for a week. It is very beneficial. There will be a transformation after the period of practicing silence.


Letting Go of Suffering

Why do we cling to our suffering?

Many of us are not capable of releasing the past, of releasing the suffering of the past. We want to cling to our own suffering. But the Buddha said very clearly, do not cling to the past, the past is already gone. Do not wait for future, the future is not yet there. The wise people establish themselves in the present moment and they practice living deeply in the present moment. That is our practice. By living deeply in the present moment we can understand the past better and we can prepare for a better future.

Today I attended a Vietnam war veterans' discussion, and my heart is still heavy. The condition of the war veterans—their heart, their mind, their body—do you think that they will ever be emotionally healed in this lifetime? I think if they practice with all their heart and they are determined to relieve the past, they will be healed.

We cling too much to the past; we have to face the future. We have to stand on the ground of the present moment. The war in Vietnam was just a war. There are many wars still going on and we continue to create victims of war and war veterans. The number of American soldiers who died in Vietnam was something like 55,000. Every year the number of people who die in car accidents in America is exactly that number, 55,000. So there is the equivalent number of dead people caused by alcoholism and unmindful driving. This is another war. The toll is as huge as the damage inflicted by war, and every time a person dies because of a car accident, it creates many war veterans in the children who lose their mother, the mothers who lose their son.

If we stick to our suffering we can never stand up for healing and prepare the future for our children and their children. I would say to the Vietnam war veteran, okay, you did kill five children. We know that. But here you are, alive in the present moment. Do you know that you have the power to save five children today? You don't have to go to Vietnam or southeast Asia. There are American children who are dying every day; they may need only one pill to be saved from their illness.

If you know how, every day you can save five children from dying. Why do you let yourself get caught in guilt and become paralyzed year after year? Why don't you make a bodhisattva vow to use your life to work for the safety of many children? Did you know that 40,000 children die in the world every day just because of the lack of food and nutrition? You are here; you can do something. Why do you let yourself get caught in the past? You can save children in the here and now. You can use your life in a very useful and intelligent way. You can very well transform that negative energy into a positive energy that empowers you and makes life meaningful.


Relationships

When I go home, I return to my husband who is a hunter. He goes into our beautiful woods to shoot birds. He brings them home to show our seven-year-old twins, who want to be like daddy. What can I do to stop him from this habit of killing?

If you do not know how to be patient, how to care, how to use loving speech, you cannot help other people to change. But if we have the energy of compassion and loving kindness in us, the people around us will be influenced by our way of being and living. Reproaching them, shouting at them, blaming them, can never help them. Only our love, our patience and our loving speech can help. And if we are in a situation where our own skillfulness, our own compassion, is not strong enough, we could need the support of our dharma brothers and sisters in order to do the job.


Abortion

What are your views on abortion?

I am inclined to devote more of my time and energy to preventing the situation from happening than to what happens when you have to decide whether you have to do it or not to do it. If we prepare ourselves in such a way, then the problem will not present itself to us, and we don't have to make a decision between abortion or not abortion. In the last 2,500 years we monks and nuns have helped a lot in limiting the population of the planet (laughter). And if you'd like to join us (laughter), it's never too late.


Media Saturation

In regard to television news and newspapers, how can we balance not taking in toxins with not closing our eyes to suffering?

Myself, I want to be informed about what is going on in the world. I want to be informed, but that does not mean that I have to listen to the news three times a day. I think there is some kind of vacuum in us we want to fill up; that is why we buy so many newspapers and magazines and why we view so much television. We do not need that much information. I think maybe five minutes daily is enough. Sometime we can survive several months without any news bulletins. And you have friends who can tell you what is important that has happened.


Space and Freedom

Can you please elaborate on what is space inside of us? Why is this good? I feel lonely sometimes. This feels like emptiness or space inside, but it does not feel good.

Space here does not mean loneliness. Space here means freedom because you are not busy inside—you don't have a lot of worries, fears, projects, things to think about. That is space. Space here is the basic condition for you to enjoy life. If you are preoccupied with so many things, you don't have that condition.

One day the Buddha was sitting in the wood with thirty or forty monks. They had an excellent lunch and they were enjoying the company of each other. There was a farmer passing by and the farmer was very unhappy. He asked the Buddha and the monks whether they had seen his cows passing by. The Buddha said they had not seen any cows passing by.

The farmer said, "Monks, I'm so unhappy. I have twelve cows and I don't know why they all ran away. I have also a few acres of a sesame seed plantation and the insects have eaten up everything. I suffer so much I think I am going to kill myself.

The Buddha said, "My friend, we have not seen any cows passing by here. You might like to look for them in the other direction."

So the farmer thanked him and ran away, and the Buddha turned to his monks and said, "My dear friends, you are the happiest people in the world. You don't have any cows to lose. If you have too many cows to take care of, you will be very busy.

"That is why, in order to be happy, you have to learn the art of cow releasing (laughter). You release the cows one by one. In the beginning you thought that those cows were essential to your happiness, and you tried to get more and more cows. But now you realize that cows are not really conditions for your happiness; they constitute an obstacle for your happiness. That is why you are determined to release your cows."

We have to ask what is really essential to our happiness. We believe that things are essential to our happiness, but we have to look again. Many of us have cows, many cows that prevent us from being happy. That is why we have to learn to release our cows. Also there are many cows inside, so many preoccupations! Many things to worry about, to be angry about, and there's no space at all inside.

How can you be happy in such a state of being? That is why to release the cows around us and to let go of these preoccupations inside is a very essential condition for happiness. That is the space we are talking about when we practice. I am space; within and out. I feel free. Freedom is the real foundation of happiness. Sometimes if you don't know how to love, love will deprive you of your freedom and deprive the person you love of her freedom. That is why space is so essential in relationship.

There is a beautiful poem praising the Buddha: "The Buddha is like the full moon/traveling in the vast sky of emptiness." Because of that freedom, the happiness of the Buddha cannot be measured by our mind.

 
Resting in the River, Thich Nhat Hanh, Shambhala Sun, March 1998.

Click here for more articles by Thich Nhat Hanh


To order this copy of the Shambhala Sun, click here.

To order a trial subscription to Shambhala Sun, click here.

/catchusers3/2010620/shambhalaback/Archives/Features/1998/Mar98/ThichNhatHanh.htm