Live Session Summary, Sunday, January 8, 2023: It was good to be back with you today for our first Live session of 2023. Here is a summary of today’s theme, ‘The Paths of Wellness and Awakening’
I argued that while there are many different ways practitioners describe the goals and intentions of their practice, it’s possible to identify two broadly distinct goals of practicing mindfulness, meditation and related skills. The first is a goal of greater peace and ease in our life, a reduction in stress and worry, a better quality of life—what could be termed a path of wellness. The second goal, identified with the Buddha’s teachings on suffering and the end of suffering, can be called a path of awakening—pointing to the potential of realizing freedom from suffering through ending clinging.
We can see psychotherapy as within the first goal: Freud said, “… much has been gained if we succeed in turning your hysterical misery into common unhappiness.” The practices of secular mindfulness—exemplified in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT,) and other secular mindfulness programs—while having their roots in Buddhist teachings, are also focused on reducing stress and anxiety and improving quality of life rather than seeking the goal of awakening. Other approaches to wellness or well-being that we will discuss also focus on greater ease and peace but don’t have as their goal ‘awakening’ or ‘the end of suffering.’
The Buddha’s path, on the other hand, grounded in teachings of the Four Noble Truths, the Noble Eightfold Path, and the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, has as its goal the complete ending of suffering that results from letting go of clinging to anything as ‘I’ or ‘mine.’
We can see these goals and the paths that are connected with these goals as distinct—the first goal is focused on everyday well-being; the second on ending suffering completely. But we can also see them as on a continuum where the second path points to a loftier and more distant goal. We may see this sense of progression in the well-known statement of Thai forest meditation teacher Ajahn Chah, who said: “If you let go a little you will have a little peace; if you let go a lot you will have a lot of peace; if you let go completely you will have complete peace. Your struggle with the world will be at an end.”
We can see cultivating wellness as essential to moving towards the goal of awakening: if we are caught up in stress, worry, and burnout we will not be in a position to go more deeply into the practices of letting go. Reflecting on the relationship between therapy and other wellness practices, on one hand—of developing a more balanced, peaceful, and less-stressed version of our ‘self’—and, on the other, the loftier goal of enlightenment through letting go of any identification with a separate ‘self,’ spiritual teacher Ram Dass said, “Once you have become somebody, then you are ready to start the journey to becoming nobody.”
The Buddha himself spoke of his teachings—whether directed towards laypeople with many day-to-day worldly responsibilities, or monastics, who have chosen to focus their lives on awakening—as having ‘one taste,” the taste of freedom: “Just as the great ocean has one taste—the taste of salt—so also this teaching and discipline has one taste—the taste of liberation.”
Another helpful way we can look at these two paths is through the metaphor of a spiral—where the same patterns keep coming round again and revisiting us. For example, where we keep playing out the same patterns in relationships and having the same negative outcomes. Without awareness, we keep facing the same problems and repeating behaviors. But if we bring awareness to what’s arising, bringing what is unconscious into awareness, our life can become more of a virtuous spiral—where we don’t need to keep repeating mistakes over and over, like ‘Groundhog Day.’
As Jung said, “What is not brought into consciousness, comes to us as fate.”
I finished by touching on an approach that includes eight elements of wellness: Emotional, Physical, Social, Occupational, Financial, Environmental, Spiritual and Intellectual. We’ll explore these and their relationship with the path of awakening in more depth next week.
I shared Martha Postlethwaite’s poem ‘Clearing,’ a part of Rumi’s ‘The Guest House,’ and Lynn Ungar’s poem ‘The Way It Is’, and recommended the documentary film ‘My Year of Living Mindfully’ (available on Amazon Prime and other platforms.)
I hope this summary is helpful, if you missed the session or parts of it. Have a good week and see you next Sunday at 9am Eastern. Warmly, Hugh 🌻 💜 🙏🏻
