“When we realize the everlasting truth of ‘everything changes’ and find our composure in it, we find ourselves in Nirvana.” – Suzuki Roshi

There are big and small cycles in spiritual life. We can’t stop the cycles, but we can learn to navigate them with grace, ease, and nobility. Here is how the decades have unfolded for me. The first major period of spiritual training that I devoted myself to was in Thailand, Burma, and Laos in the 1960s. After being in robes for several years and studying in monasteries, I found myself becoming quite calm, spacious, concentrated. I was cultivating a deep and pure consciousness.

When I finally returned back home from my spiritual trainings, I sat with my father who was in the hospital having almost died from an overdose of anesthesia. I sat there meditating, doing metta for him. He asked me afterward how it was for me. I said, “Well, I was very calm and doing some loving kindness meditation for you.” He got really upset. He said, “Don’t you care for me?!” His reaction was affirming that I was no longer caught up in the typical reactions to the drama of human life. I was very calm, I had no fear, my mind was open and spacious. I loved him, but was also at peace with everything.

“You can make your mind like the sky—without boundaries, vast, open. You can become the space of loving awareness, of mindful loving awareness.”

But then I dove back in to Western life. I went to graduate school studying psychology, started going to therapy, got a job driving a taxi in Boston to pay for school, and began a romantic relationship with a woman that I’d known before… And by the end of that year, it was almost as if I had never gone to those years in the monastery. That’s the truth. There was, however, one big difference. It was very clear that I was doing many of the same old neurotic things, but I would find myself in the middle of doing them and say, “Far out, I thought I’d never do that one again and here I am doing it!” It was really clear to me. I also remembered, sensed, or knew from my spiritual practice that there was another way.

So, that began the process not of just seeing something different, but actually of becoming different. And for me, it was a process with many cycles to it—inner cycles and outer cycles. There are times when you’re in silence, there are times when you relate to the world of the business, times when you are focused on family, or politics and the economic environment.

When I look at my own practice over the past decades, I see that in an odd way I’ve kind of worked my way down the chakras.

In the beginning of practice, I studied Buddhism and got very excited by the ideas of the Dharma. When I went to monasteries my focus was on my mind, getting insight, vision, understanding. I wanted to know; there’s a certain kind of power in knowing. I wanted to be someone who knew, who understood. So, I spent years both learning and training my mind. I would sit and do whatever the teacher said for weeks and months, and I would be met with lights, visions, understanding, and insight. It was very far out and I felt like I knew a lot. Which was a problem, of course.

At some point in returning home and practicing, what I began to see was although I had a lot of mental clarity and understanding, I was out of touch with myself emotionally. I’d had, like many people in America, a pretty painful childhood. The strategy to deal with that was not to feel too much, to go into my mind. In relationship I realized that I didn’t love very well, I didn’t even know how to be intimate in a deep way with people or things, and I was quite frightened.

“To live a life of awareness asks a lot of us—it asks that we know ourselves, know our feelings, and know our hearts.”

I went through a few difficult relationships, replaying the old patterns again. For help, I got into therapy, continued to meditate, and I worked with loving kindness and compassion meditation, all while I was beginning my teaching and doing graduate work. For ten years the main work that I focused on was simply learning how to love better and how reclaim the feelings—the whole range of feelings, from joy to sorrow to anger—and with that, to have a deeper capacity for empathy and feeling and love.

Then it dawned on me, it wasn’t just that I was not living in my feelings, but I was not living in my body either. I had the gift of a healthy and good body, and I used it so I could meditate all night, and climb mountains, and live adventurously… but I was using my body rather than truly inhabiting it. Seeing this, there was a sense that I needed to connect love and feelings to my body, to integrate it cellularly, to embody what I had learned. To embody meant to inhabit my body more fully, to practice including my body more fully.  In a way, this brings a deeper degree of intimacy.

“Enlightenment is intimacy with all things.” – Dōgen Zenji

In the decades that followed, I had a family, became a leader, worked in service and community. And in each cycle I needed to open and be present in new ways. The cycles of practice have gradually led me to touch and love more and more dimensions of my own experience. Sometime this was easy, sometimes painful, opening to the fullness of the life around me.  I’ve had cycles of retreat, and cycles of service, of teaching, or working in refugee camps, cycles of parenting and family, and cycles of time much more quietly alone.

There are different cycles. Those are natural for us. We breathe in and out, our heart opens and closes. Your heart isn’t supposed to stay open all the time. Even flowers close at night. It’s true. So don’t get some idea you’re supposed to be a certain state or a certain way. It’s more about flexibility and listening, and honoring what cycle you are in your life.

A question I might pose to you in your spiritual practice is: What cycle are you in? Is it time for more inward silence? Is it time to go and serve in some way? Is it time for more attention to intimate relationship? Is it time to care for the world in some important way? If you ask, you’ll get a sense, your heart will answer.

Navigating the cycles of spiritual life is really about listening and honoring your body, your feelings, your wisdom and your intuitive heart. With Mindful Loving Awareness, you can open to your own cycles with grace, and find your compassionate composure amidst it all.

With Metta,
Jack

*This article is an excerpt from my newest podcast, Heart Wisdom Ep. 247 – Living the Dharma. Listen to the episode on Spotify, Apple, Youtube, or JackKornfield.com