The Beloved Withdrawn

There was a period of my life when I meditated seriously and ran seriously, and both practices carried me. The meditation quieted the mind. The running quieted the body. The two together did something the traditions have always claimed the practices would do, which was to open a space in the ordinary hours where something larger could be present. I got high, in the sense Ram Dass used the word. The equanimity was real. The insight was real. The connection to whatever it is the practices connect a practitioner to was, for years, available.

Then my third child was born.

For a while I managed. Meditation before the house woke up. Runs in whatever hour would take them. But the demands of a household with three children accumulate, and the work I was doing accumulated with them, and the hours that had once been mine became hours belonging to other people who needed them more than I did. The practices thinned. The equanimity that had come easily began to require effort I didn't have to give. Then the practices stopped, not because I chose to stop them but because there was no room left in the days for them to occur.

What followed was long. It's still ongoing. The traditions have names for what I found myself in but I didn't have the names then, and the not having them made it worse. I only had the felt experience, which was that I had been separated from what had brought me into connection, and that I did not know how to get back.

I. Separation

The Sufis call it fira'q. Separation. It's the state named in Rumi's opening line, the reed cut from the reed bed, crying because it remembers where it came from. The Sufi tradition takes separation seriously in a way most Western spiritual writing does not. They do not treat it as a lapse or a failure. They treat it as one of the defining conditions of a certain kind of practitioner's life. The person who has known the beloved and is now separated from the beloved is different from the person who has never known the beloved at all. What they carry is not absence. It is the shape of what should be there, held daily against the fact that it is not.

For a while I mistook what was happening for a straightforward loss. The practices had brought me the connection, the practices had gone, therefore the connection had gone. The obvious response was to try to get the practices back. When I could, I tried. Twenty minutes stolen here, a run when a run was possible, a return to the cushion when the youngest was finally sleeping through. But something had changed. The practices when I could do them did not carry me the way they had. The state I remembered was there in memory but it was no longer available in the same way through the same door. It was as if the door had been closed while I was away and I had misplaced the key.

I understood eventually, or partly understood, that this was not simply about time. It was about a change in the person doing the practice. The self that had sat every morning for years was a self that had certain conditions available to it, the quiet, the space, the hours, the ability to withdraw from the world enough to allow the practice to do its work. That self had been dissolved by a life that no longer permitted those conditions. What I was trying to bring back to the cushion was somebody who no longer existed. The practice couldn't work the same way because the practitioner wasn't the same.

II. What the traditions say

The traditions are unanimous about what to do in this position. When the conditions of formal practice are taken from you, the practice becomes the conditions of your life. This is karma yoga in the Hindu tradition, called by other names in others but recognized everywhere. The Bhagavad Gita is essentially a text about this circumstance, Arjuna is a warrior in the middle of a battlefield, told by Krishna that his practice is not to leave the battle and go meditate but to fight without attachment to the fruits of the fighting. The Christian mystics called it the sanctification of daily labor. The Zen teachers used the story of the wood-chopper and water-carrier who continues wood-chopping and water-carrying after enlightenment. Ram Dass talked about it as the yoga of your karma, using what has been given to you to do, and to be, as the vehicle for the work.

The traditions verify that this works. The Gita is not wrong. The mystics are not wrong. The wood-chopper who has become his own practice is not wrong. There are lineages of practitioners who have arrived at the same recognitions the seated practices point at, entirely through the transformation of ordinary life, without ever having sat a formal retreat.

But there is a thing the traditions know and only sometimes name plainly, which is that karma yoga is different in character from the seated practices. It is not simply meditation applied to daily life. It asks something else of the practitioner. In seated practice, the conditions do the scaffolding. The zafu, the timer, the room, the silence, these are the exterior architecture that holds the practitioner in the shape of the practice while the practice does its work. Karma yoga has none of this scaffolding. The practitioner is the scaffolding. Every moment of every day, they have to recognize what is happening as practice, or the moment simply becomes another moment of a busy life. The recognition itself is what the practice consists of. There is no timer that will remind you. There is no room set aside for it. There is only the moment, and whether or not you are awake enough to receive it as what it is.

This is harder than the seated practices in my experience. Not harder as a claim about the tradition. Harder as the report of a person who has done both and who is currently attempting the second. Seated practice asked a lot of me but it asked it inside a container the practice itself provided. Karma yoga asks something different, which is a kind of continuous vigilance that has no container at all, done in the middle of exactly the conditions that make continuous vigilance most difficult. Small children, tired days, work that has to be done, the ordinary friction of a shared household. The practice is available in all of it, which is the promise and also the problem. Available and unnoticed are only a moment apart, and most of my moments are the unnoticed kind.

The tradition offers something else beyond the prescription, which is a recognition about why the difficulty of the practice matters. An earlier dispatch on this site held a letter Ram Dass wrote to two parents whose young daughter had been murdered, in which he told them their pain was her legacy and that it must burn its purifying way to completion. He put the mechanism another way in his broader teaching. The stuff of life is the crucible in which we are forged. The heat is what does the forging. There is no version of the transformation the traditions point at that does not pass through the fire.

That letter treated the maximum instance of what a human life can be subjected to. This dispatch treats something much smaller. But the recognition Ram Dass offered Steve and Anita is not a special case that applies only to the maximum. It is a description of a mechanism that operates in every practitioner's life, at whatever intensity that life is currently producing. The mother in Bangladesh struggling to feed her children and the person in a comfortable Western life struggling with the ordinary friction of raising a family and holding a demanding job are not having comparable experiences of suffering. They are having different experiences of suffering, from different positions, with different resources available to meet them. Neither is more real than the other. Neither should be measured against the other and found wanting. The Bhagavad Gita is a text spoken to a warrior on a battlefield and also a text useful to a person doing laundry, because the recognition it points at is scale-invariant. The scale of the fire changes with the position. The fact that a fire is present does not.

This is why karma yoga is hard at any scale. The difficulty is not incidental to the practice. The difficulty is the material the practice is being made from. The friction of the specific conditions, the small children, the demands of work, the ordinary heat of shared days, is not the obstacle to the practice. It is what the practice is being applied to. Without the heat, there is nothing to tune to.

III. What it feels like when it works

When it does work, it works. There are moments in the middle of a completely ordinary day, a hand on a small back that is falling asleep, a specific quality of light coming through a window while I am doing something I have done a thousand times before, a piece of a difficult conversation that turns unexpectedly toward honesty, where the recognition arrives without being sought. The practice is being done, not by an effort I am making, but by the moment itself and my willingness to receive it as practice rather than as background. In those moments the separation is not separation. The beloved has not withdrawn. The beloved was here the whole time and my seated practice had been one of the ways of getting quiet enough to notice, and there are others.

These moments are what the traditions promise. They are what the wood-chopper knows. They are why the Gita is a text about a battlefield rather than a text about a monastery. The tradition is not wrong that ordinary life can become the practice. When it does become the practice, it is not a lesser version of what the cushion offered. It is its own kind of arrival, and the specific texture of it, that this thing you would have missed a hundred times before is suddenly the whole point, has a quality of tenderness the seated practices did not.

But I don't want to be dishonest about the ratio, even acknowledging that ratios across different lives are not directly comparable. The retreatant in the hut and the parent in the busy household are not measured against each other, and neither should be. Inside the life I have, the moments when it works are still a small percentage of the moments. Most of the moments pass unrecognized. Most of the days I finish thinking not that I did karma yoga but that I got through. The gap between the practice-in-principle being available and the practice-in-fact being enacted is wide, and it is on the practitioner to close it, and the closing of it is the work, and the closing of it is what I have found difficult.

IV. What I do not know

I do not know whether what I have found in the years since the meditation stopped is progress or accommodation. The traditions would tell me it can be progress if I let it. Karma yoga is not a downgrade from formal practice. It is a lineage of its own, capable of taking the practitioner all the way. But whether it is doing that in my case, or whether I am using its availability as a way of accepting the loss of the practices I had, is a question I cannot answer from inside my own life. I would be the worst judge of it. Every person who is telling themselves a comforting story about their spiritual condition believes they are simply reporting the truth.

Ram Dass named the same uncertainty in one of his talks. Lurking in the back of your mind is, is this a gross rationalization to allow me to go back into play some more? And you don't really know. You just have to trust some intuitive sense that says it's okay. He didn't resolve the question. He acknowledged that the practitioner cannot fully resolve it from inside the practice. What he offered was that the honest response is to keep tuning, and to trust the tuning to make itself clearer over time, even if it never resolves into certainty.

V. The listening

The tuning is what the whole talk of his I have been thinking about was actually pointing at. He said it plainly. You can't grab. You can only listen and tune and listen and tune and listen and tune. He said the tuning was the whole of what a spiritual life consists of. Not the methods. Not the practices. Not the identity of being a certain kind of practitioner. The tuning to what is actually happening, what the moment is actually offering, what the correct next action is inside the specific conditions of the specific life the practitioner has been given.

The methods, on this reading, are all forms of the tuning. Seated meditation is a form of tuning. Running is a form of tuning. Karma yoga is a form of tuning. The practices differ but the practice underneath is the same. When one form is taken from you, the underlying practice is not taken from you. What is taken is one of the forms it was showing up in.

I have not lost the practice. I have lost one of the forms of it, and I have been slowly, imperfectly, unevenly, learning how the practice shows up in the form that is available to me now. Some days the tuning is present. Most days it is not. The percentage does not resolve into a satisfying trajectory. I could not tell you honestly whether I am closer to the connection than I was ten years ago or further from it. What I can tell you is that the tuning is still available, and that when I remember to listen, the listening still works, and that this is more than nothing, and that the traditions have been holding practitioners in exactly this position for a very long time, and that they say it is enough.

I am not qualified to say whether it is enough. I can only say that it is what I have, and that it is what I am doing with what I have, and that the doing continues.

The beloved withdrawn is still the beloved. The separation is not the end of the relationship. The reed cut from the reed bed still remembers the reed bed, and the remembering is what the cry is made of, and the cry, according to the tradition that has been paying attention to this longest, is a form of the relationship continuing. Not the form the practitioner would have chosen. But not nothing. Not by a long way not nothing.

This dispatch shares its central image with Dispatch 12: The Crucible, where the stuff of life is the crucible in which we are forged, there at the maximum instance a human life can be subjected to, here at the ordinary scale of a busy household. It follows Dispatch 13: The Third Man in chronological order.