Motivating your practice

Ken: As you know from the schedule, this is our last teaching. If you can call what we’ve been doing teaching. That’s a discussion for another day.

Main reason is that over the years we gradually came to realize that giving people more information on Sunday morning didn’t really allow much absorption, just like overloading the wagon. So tomorrow morning we’ll follow our usual schedule with some changes, which I’ll discuss at the end.

Gail and I have a certain amount of material, some of it is quite important, but we’re going to allow plenty of opportunity for questions and anything you’d like to comment or follow up on.

We’ve been using this metaphor of looking for a treasure. We haven’t been completely clear about what the treasure is. Part of that’s on purpose. Part of that’s probably carelessness on our part. What I found working with people in my own practice is that at various points, we lose energy in our practice, or the energy in our practice seems to go flat. And what I’ve observed is that it usually indicates, and I would say this is usually the case, that an intention has been completed.

It is not always easy to recognize that. There was a person I was seeing a few years ago who came in one day and said a number of things, but none of them seemed to have any juice. And she seemed to be a little confused about what she wanted to ask.

I recalled our first meeting and I said to her, “You might consider that our work is over.” And she went, “What?” I said, “You originally came to see me to bury the ghost of your mother. Where’s the ghost of your mother now?” “Buried.” “So, what I suggest you do now is consider why would you see me? Why would you continue to see me? Because that intention has been completed. “She’d done meditation, she’d done a lot of work, and a whole bunch of issues had been resolved in her. And she called me up a couple of weeks later and she said, “You’re right, done.”

But that’s not the way it is for everybody. For other people, whenever intention is completed, you have to reach further inside to find the new intention. Not everybody wants to do that. But if you don’t reach further inside, you don’t find a new intention, and you cannot practice on the basis of the old one because there isn’t any energy left in it. That’s why we’ve been encouraging you to look—what are the questions which motivate your practice? And by and large, that’s what your treasure is.

We’ve reduced that down to—what are you doing here? Why am I here? Whichever way you want to approach that. And in addition, we’ve also been trying to give you a sense of how you can find in yourself ways to work with your spiritual questions. So that you can actually find your way. I think Gail’s going to talk a little bit about what you do when you find your questions or you find your way. What happens then?

Finding your way

Gail: That’s a good lead. So, I had this client. I see clients as part of what I do during the normal lifetime. And I had this client who came to me who had had three flip-over her car accidents in a year’s time, and she was in extreme pain. And I was the last of a line of several people who she’d been working with.

The first thing that struck me with her was that in her time of seeing practitioners over the year, no one had ever asked her, “Why do you think you had three car accidents in a year?” This had never occurred to her before. And I think it was actually that question that made her decide to try to work with me because I was doing something that was very unknown to her.

We had had several sessions, and she was making pretty steady progress, learning how to really be with whatever’s coming up, experience it and really making good effort. It was clearly making some effect in her life. I probably had seen her, I don’t know, maybe a month, a few times a week. It’s really wonderful when you see a client start to know when they come in and really have this kind of faith in what they’re doing.

We had done a session, and she came in for her next session, absolutely furious, completely angry. She had been going on this track, her pain had been lessening, she was feeling really good, and all of a sudden it was back worse than ever. It was obviously something that we had done in the session and I was quite surprised. But I thought, “Okay, there’s something we did in the session that brought up all of her pain.”

I was looking over the session notes, trying to figure out what that might be. And then it occurred to me, well maybe … so I asked her, “What did you do in the three days between this session and the other session? Did you do anything unusual?” “No.” And this was a woman who after this year of accidents, could not walk more than maybe three city blocks, before she would get very exhausted.

She said, “I was feeling so good. I was just feeling great that I went out and rented a rototiller and I rototilled three eight-by-ten garden plots in my backyard. And then I went out, got soil, mixed it in, and planted a vegetable garden and a flower garden. And I said, “Do you think that might have anything to do with what’s up?” She was able to entertain that idea a bit. She’s a lovely client. This is one way to bring the treasure into your life. Use that rototiller.

Student: Why did she have three accidents?

Gail: It’s a mystery. It won’t go on tape. [Unclear] I’m going to tell you about another client I saw. He was about 28 and he had been in a severe bicycle car accident. I saw him about a year and a half after that accident. And at that time, he was in constant pain, he was seeing a chiropractor three times a week, a TMJ specialist who would literally crack his jaw once a week and some other practitioner once a week.

He came for a session, he was so crinkled, he looked like he might be 95, very crunched forward, could not sit straight, could hardly sit. He was a scientist and he had to sit for work. Before the accident he had been very active—snowboarding and doing all kinds of things. If you looked at him now, you would think, “Oh boy, I dunno if there’s anything that’s going to happen here.” He looked about as bad as I’ve seen a client come in my door and he had been told by a series of doctors that he would never be active again. That he should stop even thinking about biking, rollerblading, or even long hikes. That the best he could do would be a short walk and maybe he would be able to sit for longer than a few minutes at a time.

He came to me because he refused to accept that diagnosis. He was not somebody who had ever done any kind of movement work. And he had a lot of fear about it because he knew from his experience of a year and a half, any movement he would do might cause another level of pain in his body. But the one thing he had going for him was that he was completely willing to try whatever was presented. He was completely willing to go there. And I learned a lot about that willingness from him because just to sit or lay down was excruciatingly painful for him.

As he worked this willingness that he had to just go right into his experience and tell me about it as best as he could, built his own confidence. So he was then able to go into even deeper experience because he knew he could do it. Through all of that, his awareness kept getting wider and wider. I think it was in about eight months he stopped seeing all the practitioners. In fact, they came to one of his sessions because they couldn’t understand why he was getting better. And even as they watched the session, they still couldn’t understand why he was getting better.

In a course of time, I saw him over about three years and I actually still have contact with him. He became different than he was before. He could go back to all of his activities, but with this new awareness.

These are two examples of possibilities of how you can bring that treasure into your life, not to change yourself but to use it somehow. They both point to the willingness to experience, which is faith, and the confidence that you can do that, the trust in that ability. I think these things go hand in hand and they’re also talking about the same thing.

I know for myself, confidence arises as I meet something. Faith is the experience that comes out of diving into that thing. So over the course of this retreat and in the times that I’ve actually met with people, I have a sense that you all have a little bit of this arising. Coming for an interview, you’re not really asking for an answer because you know the answer.

Ken: What do you have confidence in?

Gail: Nothing whatsoever!

Ken: I think you’re going to have to explain that one.

Gail: So what is the experience of trusting nothing whatsoever? You did it the other day when we worked with the four questions. You knew which question to ask. How did you know?

Student questions

Ken: Let’s hear from a few people. Somebody from my side of the room.

Student: I’m not sure why, but it reminds me of when I quit smoking. Besides the fact that I wasn’t smoking, and that felt good, and my lungs started feeling better, my metabolism and things started evening out, what I really remember was the relief. For some reason, not having to have the cigarettes and having to go to the store, if I was out hiking or something, keeping the cigarettes dry and then I had to have matches.

There was something about not having to have it, it was like the lack that actually gave me the confidence not to have something with me all the time. So it wasn’t the feeling good so much, it was the fact that there was one less thing to worry about and take care of and have to have all the time.

For me, that sense of confidence comes from the simplicity of the instruction that you can always observe what’s arising and it’s right there and it’s just immediate and right there. So that provides a sense of confidence.

Peggy: I think that there are many things. For one, we’re here so there’s something that we are believing in or believing will happen, as well as our own confidence in ourselves. And also there’s the teacher and the relationship with the teacher.

I had the experience last night of going into my interview with Ken and having him ask the question, “What are you doing here?” in a way that completely opened my practice, even though I had been asking myself that question for two days and just hitting walls. When I went in, at some point yesterday feeling really frustrated at not getting anywhere with the question, I said to myself, “Ken’s here. I mean that’s part of why I’m here.”

And I just said, “I’m going to tell him how much I’m struggling even though I hate telling the teacher that. I want to tell him that I’m doing great, but the fact is that I’m not.” And so having that kind of confidence, there was confidence in that that I could just let go of my fear of not doing a great job or not being able to get away from the walls that I was hitting and just let the teacher give me some instruction. It wasn’t even instruction, it was just the way in which you asked the question.

Ken: I’d like to point out something about that because I think it’s very important. You imply, in a way, that confidence was in me, but I’d like you to take a closer look at that. You’d gone through two days of struggle, frustration, and banging into walls, and as far as you could tell, getting nowhere. You also said you hate telling the teacher that you are getting nowhere. You want to say, “I’m doing great”, right? Prior to coming in for the interview, something had happened. Can you talk about that?

Peggy: What happened was I kind of said, “Enough, this is as far as I want to go with this” or “I see that I’m not getting anywhere by continuing to ask the question.” I didn’t know why, but I wanted to say actually something else about it because what happened after you asked the question and I had my opening is that I went back and examined how come he gets to ask the question and I get it and I can’t do it myself.

I went back and thought about the question and what was different about your way of asking me. And I realized that everything that I was doing about asking the question was punitive and frustrating. There was nothing compassionate about the way that I was asking myself the question.

But your asking of the question was free of judgment, free of assessment. At least that was my experience of it. What I experienced when you were asking me what I was feeling as I was sobbing in the interview and I couldn’t answer at the time, what I experienced once I kept coming back to it and could sit in the experience, was loving-kindness and the experience of no judgment.

Ken: I’ll come back to that part of your experience, but what I’m particularly interested in is the transition from banging into walls to deciding to say, “I’m not getting anywhere.” That transition in you. I’m going to put words in your mouth, but you can tell me whether they are correct. Something in you gave up and something in you trusted something you couldn’t put into words.

Peggy: Yeah, that’s right.

Ken: What was the something you couldn’t put into words? What I want to suggest here, and I’d like you to take a look at it is that it was nothing whatsoever. There’s an opening and in that opening there is nothing whatsoever. Does that fit? Okay? This is what Gail’s referring to when she says nothing whatsoever.

What Peggy’s describing here very well, and I’d like to thank you for that, is what the actual role of a teacher is. It can be summed up in just a few words. The teacher can provide something—I’d like to call it a catalyst—which you aren’t able to provide for yourself at that time. It doesn’t mean you’re always not being able to provide it, but at that moment you aren’t able to.

And by having it provided, it plants the seed for being able to provide it to yourself. Is that fair? However, if we can project that ability onto the teacher and never take ownership of it ourselves, that becomes extremely problematic. And it’s exactly what Gail and I are trying to point you away from over this weekend.

A sufi story

Ken: I am going to tell you a story about faith.

Mullah Nasrudin was out in his garden and feeling very pious. He decided to pray to Allah. He was very poor and he prayed to Allah to make him rich. He was praying in a very loud voice. He was desperate.

His neighbor who happened to be an extremely wealthy man, heard the sound of Nasrudin’s prayers coming over the wall, which separated the gardens, and he thought, “Let’s have a little joke.” So he took his bag of gold coins and threw it up in the air. It went over the wall and Nasrudin said, “Oh, praise be to Allah. Thank you. I prayed, I have my coins, I’m okay now.”

Then the rich man poked his head over the wall and said, “Nasrudin, that was just a joke. Give me my coins back.”

And Nasrudin said, “What, your coins? I was praying to Allah, you probably heard me. And he answered my prayers, these are mine.” And they got into a big argument.

The rich man insisted that they go down to the magistrate and sort this out. So off they went. And as they went along, Nasrudin said to the rich man, “You know this really isn’t very fair. Here you are, you have these beautiful clothes on, and I am just clothed in these rags. Who do you think the magistrate is going to believe? If you really feel your cause is just, make it a little more equitable.”

The rich man thought about that said, “Yeah, you’re right.” So they changed clothes.

Then Nasrudin said, “I don’t think this is going to make much difference. Look at the beautiful white horse you’re riding. Here I’m on this broken lame donkey.”

The rich man thought about that, “You’re right.” So they switched their seats.

By this time they had arrived at the magistrate. The magistrate said, “What’s the dispute?” And the rich man explained, “I heard Nasrudin praying to Allah. I thought I’d play a little joke on him. I threw bag of coins over the wall and now he won’t give them back. He claims they were from Allah.”

The magistrate turned to Nasrudin dressed in finery, big white horse, and said, “What do you say?”

He said, “I don’t know who this person is. He just sort of tagged along, I never heard of him before.”

So the magistrate decided in favor of Nasrudin, threw the other guy in jail, and as Nasrudin rode off, he said, “Praise be to Allah!”

Gail: I sure had a minute, didn’t I? Yeah, let me give it a shot.

Ken: Good. Okay.

Stories about faith

Gail: For several years I worked for an incredible choreographer who was known to do crazy things. And one of the crazy things that he was known to do was to run during the show backstage from the sound booth all the way down to the stage and grab someone right before they were supposed to enter and not let them go.

And this, of course, would cause a little imbalance on stage because whoever was not coming on at their allotted time suddenly wasn’t there—do you continue? What do you do? You can’t just stand there and be shocked.

You could respond to this experience of someone grabbing you in the wing right before you’re supposed to go on by just getting pissed off or struggling with it. But the fact was you could also meet it by going, “Okay, I can do this, I come on late, I can see what happens.” And that’s confidence. It’s oriented to how you meet what arises. Then, of course, you would go on stage, and there you are in this experience that’s not at all like what you’d rehearsed for about a year and a half.

Ken: Nobody here has been rehearsing their life for the last year and a half.

Gail: And really all you could do—I mean there was no way to catch up necessarily—was just open to the mess that you were in and just do what needed to be done. And that is the experience of faith. It’s oriented to the arising of experience.

Ken: Is that clear to everybody? If not, ask questions, this is very important.

Student: You used the word “improvising,” and that’s exactly what I was thinking. You rely on your faith or your foundation to get you back into the rhythm of whatever it is. That was such a mess. But to get there, you’re improvising because it’s not happened before.

A question I have though is what is the legitimacy of the improvisation to the audience? Are you lying? Are you presenting them something that’s not true? Because their only perception is what they see at that moment.

Before you answer, let me give you one story of my own. So I was a university student in music and had two very good friends. We were all composition majors. Thursday afternoons were the days that the students got to exhibit their wares. One of the students wasn’t able to get their piece done in time. So the three of us were asked to do this piece.

We didn’t really have a piece either, but we went up on stage with our scores, placed them on the things in front of us and actually put them upside down. It was a piano, a saxophone and accordion. And we proceeded to improvise for about five or ten minutes. Because we were composers, we kind of pulled it off. At the end of the performance, the dean of the school came up and asked us, “Did you write all that down?” And, of course, we proceeded to tell him we did. So that’s where the nature of my question comes from.

Ken: Wonderful question.

Student: So was it legitimate?

Ken: Well, wrong question.

Student: Was the performance legitimate? Yeah, because I think actually we walked away from it, and probably each of us stole ideas from one another for our own pieces.

Ken: What I like about this question, how many of you go through your life performing? Why do you do that?

Student: Why do we do that? Because of several things. One is fear of being authentically myself, wanting to be loved, etc., etc. Having so many personas or so many patterns that can’t get to the real self takes having to come here over and over for starters.

Ken: So can you connect what Gail was talking about with respect to faith and confidence and what kind of life that might lead you to?

Student: I hate the word faith, I can’t stand it. I’ve been in a practice for 20 years, and that’s what was asked of me all the time—have faith. I never understood what it meant really. I’m Italian and I’m Catholic, so that was another thing. So really I would just love to change the word. I mean, I don’t know it’s possible to call it different.

Ken: Did you hear Gail’s definition of faith?

Student: Yeah, but still it just gets in my stomach because they have given to me millions of definitions, and they are not really quite right. Confidence, how do you find confidence? I mean I never had confidence. It just started coming when I decided to stumble down and not care, stand up no matter what.

Ken: When you started to have confidence in nothing whatsoever.

Student: Exactly.

Ken: Okay.

Student: When you’re asking the question, how many go through life performing and why do we do that? I thought of the exercise we did at the fire circle where everyone was being very genuine. That seemed very refreshing. What was going on with them came out. It wasn’t a performance. That’s why I think we were able to connect. That’s why I think we were able to get into whatever we needed to get into and bring out a genuine quality where other people felt it. And I think we also felt it. So I think that was a good correlation.

Ken: Any other comments?

Lynea: This is about performing as well. I think a lot of the time I find myself performing because relating to people or relating to the world or to experience in a different way is so foreign both to myself and to other people. So for me it really goes to some degree of separation, which is another level of internal faith or internal confidence, being willing to separate in order to step out of the performance.

Peggy: I perform because it’s the scariest thing I can think of. And so when I go out on stage to physically perform a piece of music, even when I’m talking right now in front of a bunch of people, it’s the scariest thing ever. So I’ve made it a part of my life because there’s something I have to overcome there. So it’s maybe my place, my treasure, something’s there.

Be willing to open to whatever arises

Ken: On the one hand, being willing to open to whatever arises in experience. And you can say that our meditation practice is one of the ways that we develop the ability to do that. And then trusting in nothing whatsoever.

When that space opens, we actually meet it rather than run away from it. Those are basically two sides of the same coin. Because by being in touch with one or both of those is how you will find a way to be in your life, being stable but not rigid.

The stability actually comes out of nothing whatsoever. Anything we reach for to be stable actually attaches us to something and produces rigidities because we hold onto it. Equally, these two qualities enable you to move from dispersing things, dispersing energy that arises in your experience to being clear in the arising. The clarity arises when you stop dispersing and stand in the experience.

Student: Stop dispersing and stand in the experience as it is.

Ken: As it is, exactly. And in the same way, you move from consuming experience to knowing it. We’re in a consumer society. It means that we know nothing of what we experience. It’s all about feeding, not about experiencing.

My favorite one on this was a commercial that Ford put out in the late nineties, brilliant advertising. It showed young man in his mid to late twenties. Behind them and around them were scuba gear, tennis rackets, golf clubs, stereo sets, clothes, computers, and all the paraphernalia that goes on. And behind this was a Ford pickup truck. Big truck.

He was sitting in a sort of half-assed cross-legged position, a fake meditation posture. The caption: “John knows that to be one with everything, you have to have one of everything.” [Laughter] You got to admire the guy who thought that up!

Also, through trusting nothing whatsoever, you’ll find how to move from busyness to effective action. And from fragmentation to presence. So here you enter a new world. Finding your way, there are a few things that we’ve tried to point out. One, learn how to listen to yourself, or rather the totality of your experience, inside and outside very deeply. Two, understand that a way is indicated by the direction of balance. And three, to move in this way, one needs to have faith, the willingness to open to whatever arises in experience, confidence, and the ability to trust nothing whatsoever.

A final sufi story to end the retreat

Ken:

Once upon a time, there was a merchant named Abdul Malik. He was known as the good man of Khorasan, because from his immense fortune he used to give to charity and hold feasts for the poor. But one day it occurred to him that he was simply giving away some of what he had and that the pleasure which he obtained through his generosity was far in excess of what it really cost him to sacrifice what was after all such a small proportion of his wealth. As soon as this thought entered his mind, he decided to give away every penny for the good of mankind. And he did so.

No sooner had he divested himself of all his possessions, resigned to face whatever events life might have in store for him, Abdul Malik saw during his meditation hour, a strange figure seemed to rise from the floor of his room. A man was taking shape before his very eyes dressed in the patchwork robe of the mysterious dervish.

“Oh, Abdul Malik, generous man!” intoned the apparition. “I am your real self, which has now become almost real to you because you have done something really charitable measured against which your previous record of goodness is this nothing. Because of this and because you were able to part with your fortune without feeling personal satisfaction, I’m rewarding you from the real source of reward. In future I’ll appear before you in this way. Every day you’ll strike me and I’ll turn into gold. You’ll be able to take from this golden image as much as you may wish. Do not fear that you’ll harm me because whatever you take will be replaced from the source of all endowments.” So saying, he disappeared.

The very next morning a friend named Bay-Akal was sitting with Abdul Malik when the dervish spectra began to manifest itself. Abdul Malik struck it with a stick, and the figure fell to the ground transformed into gold. He took part of it for himself and gave some of the gold to his guest. Bay-Akal not knowing what had gone before, started to think how he could perform a similar wonder. He knew that dervishes had strange powers and concluded that it was necessary only to beat them to obtain gold. So he arranged for a feast to be held to which every dervish who heard of it could come and use his food. When they had all eaten well, Bay-Akal took up an iron bar and thrashed every dervish within reach until they laid battered and broken on the ground.

Those dervishes who were unharmed seized Bay-Akal and took him to the judge. They stated their case and produced the wounded dervishes as evidence. Bay-Akal related what had happened at Abdul Malik’s house and explained his reasons for trying to reproduce the trick. Abdul Malik was called and on the way to court his golden self whispered to him what to say.

“This man seems to me to be insane or to be trying to cover up some tension for assaulting people without cause. I do know him, but his story does not correspond with my own experiences in my house,” said Abdul Malik.

Bay-Akal was therefore placed for a time in the lunatic asylum until he became more calm. Dervishes recovered almost at once through some science known to themselves. And nobody believed that such an astonishing thing as a man who becomes a golden statue daily could ever take place.

For many another year, until he was gathered to his forefathers, Abdul Malik continued to break the image which was himself and distribute its treasure which was himself to those who he could not help in any other way materially.

The Good Fortune, Tales of the Dervishes, Idries Shah