Intimacy

This week’s words are from an article in Buddhadharma magazine by Lama Willa Miller, founder of Natural Dharma Fellowship.

To disentangle a great tree from an invasive vine, you must become intimate with both. We meditators often make a grave mistake in this regard. We want to become intimate with our states of ease and leave our states of dis-ease behind. We want to embrace states of concentration and leave agitation behind. We want to cut down our trees.

We can be forgiven for this. The initial trainings in meditation ask us to return our minds again and again to the breath, or some other nonconceptual focus. On a quest to strengthen mindfulness, we label almost everything but attention as “distraction.” This works for a while, but not forever. Eventually the labeling of experience becomes an “othering” that is yet another form of aversion.

Thoughts and feelings are not aberrations of the human condition, they are natural to us. They are the inner abhasa [appearance, phenomena]. To befriend them, we need to develop a non-adversarial relationship to appearances. As long as we feel threatened by thoughts, or seduced by them, we are entangled.

True “cutting” is to become intimate with whatever is arising. This intimacy is affectionate and loving, but is not indulgent. Can you love your thoughts? Can you love your anger? Can you love your fear? To mature as a practitioner is to embrace a path of intimacy.

Our mindful attention will help us separate the loving and caring qualities of the tree, from the invasive vines of habitual patterning. We need the intimate connection with the mind to understand what we need to cut and what we need to save and allow to grow.