What worked for me

For the March 2023 edition of the Upadesha Magazine: The Variety of Insight Practice in Triratna

Background

I didn’t have a particularly religious upbringing but I became a Christian from my own conviction and reading (ok, a little help from Billy Graham and a love of British medieval churches that continues to this day) at the age of 16. By the time I was 20, thanks to the influence of two of my closest friends, I looked into getting ordination in the Anglican church. I was effectively told by the bishop to go and grow up a bit. I should have taken his advice! At the same time, I was developing an interest in the more mystical side of Christian teachings, which in some ways, eventually, bridged the gap into Buddhism.

Between school and college, I spent a year working in London, attending a ‘high’ Anglican church and spending the weekends at my parents’ home, sometimes serving at the local parish church. One weekend I was out for a walk on a misty morning with our dog in a scrubby woodland area. I remember I was pushing though a thicket when I looked up and saw a single drop of water on the end of a twig and everything vanished – me, dog, the world, time, space, everything. Yet it was known – not a blackout or unconsciousness – and there was a sense (as I would have put it at the time) of ‘numinosity’. Then it was all back again. I don’t know how much time had passed in the everyday world – not more than a second or two probably.

I knew this as a deeply spiritual experience (if ‘experience’ applies), presumably a gift from God, but didn’t really know what to make of it until, many years later, I read Daniel Ingram’s descriptions of cessation and ‘path moments’. It left me with an assurance that this ‘reality’ is not all that it seems to be, or in Buddhist terms that I didn’t have available then, that this is a fabrication, a construct.

I ended up studying  to be a teacher and took religious studies as my main subject. This was in 1971. It’s where I first encountered Buddhism (and also Sangharakshita, very briefly - but that’s another story). The religious studies course knocked out my remaining Christian beliefs, but I found study of the various expressions of the main world religions fascinating and developed an increasing interest in Buddhism. This went beyond academic study and reached its fruition in 1975 when I realised one morning that I was a Buddhist, and forthwith started meditating, from a book by Christmas Humphreys and practising yoga as “that’s what Buddhists do”.

One morning, I stopped doing whatever practice I’d been doing and happened upon a sense of spacious awareness. This was new, and I knew it was significant. However, the books on meditation I had access to didn’t go into this, nor did I come across any pointers to the significance of awareness or ‘non-meditation’ during my first 15 or so years in the FWBO, and when I did, it was from another source.

In the FWBO  

I continued practising without any significant contact with other Buddhists for a couple of years, discovered the existence of the FWBO in the little bookshop they were running in Brighton and, after a longish period of evaluation, finally went along to a meditation class at Aryatara. There, Nagabodhi offered more helpful meditation instruction than I’d come across so far and I soon became a mitra, moved into Aryatara, asked Sangharakshita for ordination, and was ordained in 1980.

I don’t recall when exactly but after around 15 or so years in the Order, I came to a sense of defeat and the conclusion that “insight is not for me in this lifetime”. How did it come to this?

Having taken up the Manjughosha Stuti Sadhana at ordination, I was certainly interested in the wisdom teachings: prajñāpāramitā, the Heart Sutra, Madhyamaka. It didn’t go beyond conceptual interest and rather uncomprehendingly trying to read the various long Tibetan tomes on emptiness that were then being published – I had no idea of how to bring it into the area of experience.

For a good 15 years, I’d been reading and studying a very large proportion of Sangharakshita’s available works and had attended quite a number of seminars with him. On the personal level, he’d never seemed inclined to get into much discussion of my practice, beyond agreeing to the various sadhanas I asked him about practising, and seemed much more interested in talking about my work for the movement. My meditation practice continued to be solid, maybe rather stolid. My main regular practice was sadhana and I did the ‘whole system’ including the six-element practice, but only I was on retreat. I largely enjoyed it, but no real insight seemed to be forthcoming. In fact I didn’t have any sense of what it would ‘look like’ if it did.

Still not getting it

In the early 90s Aryadakini and I began what would become a close personal and dharma friendship. She went off, before she was ordained, to do a 6 month solitary at a Tibetan centre on the Coromandel Peninsula in her native NZ and came back with some new ‘tantric’ enthusiasms, including the not strictly tantric “Self-liberation Through Seeing With Naked Awareness”, the first Dzogchen text I’d encountered. We were fascinated by this and read it again and again, then other Dzogchen texts. They ‘spoke’ to me and I knew they related to my experience of spacious awareness in the 70s, but I knew I wasn’t really getting it. Nevertheless, it highlighted the topic of awareness, insight and awakening for me in a new way, and from then on I spent much more time exploring the possibilities of just sitting.

Then I joined the Vajraloka team, in 1995. The meditation teaching that was being offered at that time was way more practical and helpful than I’d encountered before and I learnt a great deal in my first years here, particularly from Vajradaka. A feature of the teaching at that time was that insight reflections were not only offered on Order retreats – there was a ‘Meditation and Reflection’ retreat open to all (all men, of course, Vajraloka still being a strictly single-sex centre despite being flagged as the ‘meditation centre for the movement’). Thanks to all the new input, my practice seemed to be going pretty well for the first several years, though not in terms of any experiential insight arising.

Around 1999, I knew I’d hit a ‘glass ceiling’ in my practice. It felt like I just couldn’t get any further. In 2000, I went to the Dhanakosa bothy to do a 3 month solitary. I chose, for some reason, to follow a Burmese-style intensive approach to satipatthana (based on a book I’d been reading). Maybe I thought I could ‘blast my way’ through the glass ceiling. After 2 months of this, I was getting worrying physical symptoms – chest pains etc. and went to the doctor, who confirmed my suspicion that there was nothing wrong with me. But I’d had enough and terminated the retreat (the symptoms ceased just like that). Nevertheless, there was a shift, a slight crack in the glass, so to speak, and a feeling of things loosening up a bit. A few years later, Rigdzin Shikpo confirmed that my experience had been what is recognised in his tradition as one of the ‘false diseases’ which occur as a result of over-intense insight practice.

It’s clear now that an aspect of this glass ceiling and general lack of progress with any real insight was some prevalent attitudes around insight in the Order. Despite the fact that Sangharakshita had stated that ‘stream entry’ should be possible for Order members who practiced well and consistently over a period of time, there was sense, almost a ‘miasma, of discouragement’ around any possibility of this happening to any actual person. Something of this miasma still remains. At the time, even the quite basic reflective exercises around insight topics that were being offered at Vajraloka came in for some flack.

In 2002, I led my first retreat in the USA, near San Francisco. I focussed the first half of the retreat on shamatha, mainly approaches to the mindfulness of breathing, the second on ‘pure awareness’ (at that time, the term that Subhuti had ok’d to replace ‘just sitting’ – more on this later). I’d brought ‘Carefree Dignity’ by Tsoknyi Rinpoche with me and lent it to one of the participants as he was had interests in that area. A couple of days later, still during the ‘shamatha’ phase of the retreat, he had a spontaneous big ‘opening’ to what Dzogchen is pointing to – in other words, insight – and couldn’t really ‘hold’ it. He told me years later that it took some years for him to integrate it, but he was very grateful that it had happened.

Two observations arise from this. At the time, it was clear that he’d had an arising of insight, a direct knowing of what Dzogchen was pointing to and that, for all my interest in Dzogchen going back a decade at that time, I didn’t. Secondly, his potential preceptor later took me to task for teaching him ‘pure awareness’ and told me about all the ructions this apparently led to at his home centre, which ended up with him moving away from Triratna – a familiar story, sadly.

I was experientially naïve about arising of insight at the time but I knew that, for a few people, big insights can arise spontaneously and without regard for whether or not they are ‘appropriate’ or, indeed, for where the person stands in an institutional hierarchy. I don’t remember the exact nature of the ‘ructions,’ but I now do know of a distressingly large number of instances of people who have been treated with insensitivity and even hostility by their fellow sangha members and even ‘kalyana mitras’ because they have ‘made claims’ or even just talked about a genuine arising of insight.

Going outside

Around the same time between 2000 and 2008, there were five “Madhyamaloka-Vajraloka” forums on meditation teaching and practice, instigated by Subhuti and involving others living at Madhyamaloka at the time, including Kamalashila, the Vajraloka team and, on the first two, some Q&A sessions with Sangharakshita.  During the same period I decided, on Kamalashila’s encouragement and after quite a bit of hesitation and reflection, to start studying with (Lama) Shenpen Hookham. I already knew her quite well from collaborating with her in the early 90s when we ran an inter-Buddhist group in Oxford. During that time I also met her (then) husband, Rigdzin Shikpo, read his book “Openness Clarity Sensitivity” and attended some teachings by their lama, Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche (Khenpo Rinpoche). Now, 10 or so years later, I started Shenpen’s introductory dharma correspondence course and attended a number of retreats at her centre, the Hermitage of the Awakened Heart, about 50 miles west of Vajraloka on the Lleyn Peninsula. At two of these, Rigdzin Shikpo was present and Khenpo Rinpoche was giving teachings, mostly on Prajñāpāramitā, though he also gave us a ‘Poti Wang’ (empowerment) for Mahamudra.  

This coincidence of the colloquiums and these Dzogchen / Mahamudra based teachings highlighted contrasts between Sangharakshita's teachings and Shenpen’s. Shenpen frequently expressed appreciation of Sangharakshita’s approach, especially with regard to the structure and ‘neither lay nor monastic’ nature of the Order. But the approaches to the dharma were very different in some regards and this highlighted the ways in which I was experiencing the Triratna / Sangharakshita approach as discouraging or, indeed, lacking.

Dhyana and insight

Looking back at the record of the 2000 colloquium, a couple of things stand out for me. One is Sangharakshita strong emphasis that without dhyana, insight is not possible (or at least, highly unlikely to arise). The report of the meeting, checked by Sangharakshita and published in Shabda, included the following:

“Bhante said that reflection becomes vipashyana only with considerable experience of dhyana in-between.”

I heard Shenpen comment that in her tradition (Kagyu) there was little emphasis on dhyana and I believe she said that she had never cultivated it. I had been discovering for myself that access is a sufficient level of samadhi for really effective insight work, including the shamatha-vipashyana approach to formless meditation. I’m certainly not ‘against’ people exploring dhyana and have developed a retreat theme ‘dhyana through the body’, which seems to help people experience it. However, the development of prajñā has often seemed to take the back seat, though things have been changing in recent years.

My own reliable access to dhyana only arose on the back of the emergence of significant insight. But for a very long time, I’d had this background assumption that because I was only rarely getting any dhyana, and then in a rather forced and unsustainable way, insight was not likely to arise, and this belief in itself was holding me back.

In the report of the 2000 colloquium, Sangharakshita says that people don’t get into dhyana because they have not dealt with the hindrances. This is true – in a way it’s a truism – but at least as significant is that there was little practical advice available as to how to best approach cultivating dhyana. Or if it was available, I wasn’t finding it –all I picked up on was ‘concentrate really hard on the breathing and hope for the best’. This might be why I now have a distinct aversion to the word ‘concentration’ as a translation of ‘samadhi’.

Awareness

Another significant area was the difference between ‘just sitting ’ and ‘formless meditation’. On the colloquium in 2000, we had made this distinction because Sangharakshita had recently caused some consternation by saying to a group of Order members that just sitting  wasn’t a practice. Initially, some took it to mean that just sitting wasn’t to be done. This wasn’t what he meant though. On the colloquium he clarified that he was saying that a brief period of what he called ‘just sitting’ before or after a particular meditation practice was simply an expedient that didn’t particularly even need to be labelled ‘just sitting ’. What Order members had been teaching as ‘just sitting’ was something distinct from this which he didn’t necessarily object to, he just wanted it to be distinguished from the ’expedient’ he’d taught. Hence, we labelled it ‘formless meditation’ for the sake of clarity during this discussion.

However, for me, the definition of ‘formless meditation’ that emerged on the colloquium (I think mostly framed by Subhuti but ok’d at the time by Sangharakshita) failed to ‘get to the point’. What’s described below in an extract from the report on the 2000 colloquium is indeed a mindfulness practice (sometimes referred to as ‘choiceless awareness’), but the essential point, awareness, or ‘pure awareness’, is absent.

… formless meditation is subsumed to bhavana, but is methodologically distinct from meditations such as the mindfulness of breathing and metta bhavana … what mainly distinguishes formless meditation from mindfulness of breathing and metta bhavana in terms of method is the nature of the object. … In formless meditation, there is not a single object of concentration, but rather an ongoing awareness of whatever presents itself to the senses (including the mind considered as a sense) from moment to moment. Formless meditation is thus not an alternative to bhavana but a practice which involves cultivating awareness of whatever arises in the mind rather than of a stable object. As such, it is essentially a form of mindfulness ….

The lack of pointing to this in any practical, insight-oriented sense in Sangharakshita's teaching was a major omission from the point of view of my own progress towards insight. Pure awareness is not about the development of any quality, nor is it a form of mindfulness, but rather an opening, relaxing or surrendering into the ‘awareness of awareness’ that is already, unconditionally here. The ‘meditation’ that opens up to it is a non-forming non-meditation, as engaging in even subtle developmental meditation obscures it.

Incidentally, Sangharakshita set us the task of finding a new and FWBO-specific term for both just sitting  and formless meditation and on the colloquium the following year after considering a number of alternatives, Subhuti concluded we should now refer to it as ‘pure awareness’. However, there followed a lot of confusion and consternation about this ‘new’ practice and it quietly morphed back into ‘just sitting’.

I recently re-discovered a seminar extract in which Sangharakshita gives a quite clear description of what, at the time, we were calling pure awareness: “You just have to let go. Just let yourself sink back. So you just let yourself sink back into the absolute, so to speak. Take your ease, you know, in the absolute. Without making any sort of effort, either after samsara or nirvana. Kulamitra: Would you say this is what the just sitting practice really aims at in a way? Sangharakshita: Only in a way because, you know, if it aimed at anything there’d be no… (laughter). That’s why you just sit. That’s all that you’re doing. You don’t think of it as a means to anything.” (“Rechungpa’s Repentance”, 1980)

This is a comment on Milarepa’s evocation of Mahamudra, but only in the context of exposition – there was never any sense that this might be ‘for us’ or integrated into the system of practice. Sangharakshita and Subhuti concurred that pure awareness (or just sitting) is a bhavana practice. His reservations about tathagatagarbha was another reason why this was unlikely to become part of the Triratna approach. Though again, on the 2001 colloquium, he did wonder whether the time had come to ‘speak a little more in these terms’. The absence of this perspective is maybe why so many Order members came to be studying with Shenpen around this time – her teachings were pointing to ‘this, here’, when the gross and subtle afflictive veils drop away, which is actually beyond conditions.

At two of the retreats I went on with Shenpen (I probably went to three or four in all), Rigdzin Shikpo and Khenpo Rinpoche were present. One year, seven of us Order members had a group interview with Rinpoche during which we became tongue-tied and he presented an amazing teaching in the form of a spontaneous song, and in the following retreat on which he gave teachings, I had a one-to-one (with translator) interview. I asked him if he could give me a verse that I could recite to connect with him and instead he gave me what I experienced as a transmission of Mahamudra. Unlike the formal one he gave the previous year, this time there was a direct experience that what he ‘knew’, I ‘knew’, and vice-versa. This was a very important confirmation that I was on track. During the same period, I’m not sure whether before or after, I also remember getting off a bus in the centre of Leeds and suddenly realising that awareness was simply everywhere – it was obvious in a way it hadn’t been before.

Embodiment

After that, I started taking a greater interest in Reggie Ray’s embodied approach to meditation. Originally, it seemed to me that ‘enlightenment’ had to do with the mind and that the body was kind of irrelevant, in fact rather boring. But when ‘Touching Enlightenment’ appeared, I read it and my perspectives shifted. After that, I went through his lengthy recorded course “Mahamudra for the Modern World” several times, and the meditations in his other practice-oriented books.  

Around the same time I came across the excellent non-Buddhist writings of Philip Shepherd on embodiment and wholeness, and these also had a strong effect. I contacted my somatic being in a way and to an extent that I hadn’t before and, among other realisations, I saw that my approach to meditation, even body meditations like the mindfulness of breathing, had been quite alienated from my actual somatic experience.

Somatic presence – being in the body – became the core element of how I meditated, and remains so. Other teachers, such as Judith Blackstone, have brought in perspectives that have opened up the body further. Going back to the Dzogchen teachings in Self-liberation Through Seeing With Naked Awareness, I began to intuit why the three kayas are presented as present ‘here and now’: “Within intrinsic awareness, the Trikaya are inseparable and fully present as one.” (Section 8). From the Dzogchen point of view, the Trikaya is not other than this body experienced and known directly, as it actually is. When I first came across this, it was just conceptual information but as my somatic meditation deepened, and especially with the outcomes of inquiry (which I’ll come on to next), my experience of body was completely transformed.

Inquiry

I  came upon Liberation Unleashed on the internet around 2012. The method is a form of experiential inquiry into the self-view (or in LU terms, “the delusion of self”) conducted with a guide, or mentor, via online dialogue. I didn’t ask to get guided - when reading some dialogues in a book by the founders, the last sliver of belief that “I” was an independent, really-existing self-entity dropped away. Most of the work had been done – probably my occasional engagement with the six-element contemplation over many years softened me up and the work with Shenpen’s material softened me up further. Above all, it instilled confidence that insight and awakening was really possible.

I was impressed with the simplicity and effectiveness of the LU method, shared my experiential understanding on the LU forum and shortly after joined the forum as a guide. My first ‘client’ was a close friend and I went on to guide probably 12 or so people, mostly Order members, but some of them not involved with Triratna at all. I continued guiding until Subhuti got wind of it and asked me to stop. There followed 2 or 3 years of the first ‘commonality’ process, which tortuous and sometimes torturous process eventually reached a conclusion with the introduction of ‘insight inquiry’ as an Order practice.

This isn’t the place to describe the pilot project, but it did gradually progress from slogans like “you can’t get insight on the internet!” to an understanding that the inquiry process took place in the individual’s direct experience and the means of sharing communication about it – whether speaking with someone in the same room or exchanging in writing – was secondary. There were plenty of other issues, maybe the most testy of which was that around ‘making claims’. What I gained from guiding personally was the satisfaction of seeing a significant deepening in prajñā in the people I was working with as the belief / view of being an independent, sustained and potentially satisfactory self-entity dropped away.

The inquiry method was also used by then-Satyadhana for further and deeper exploration of the nature of our experience, using the structure of the ten fetters. I first tried to inquire into desire and ill-will using the paper he wrote describing the method, but didn’t make much headway. I was still engendering a lot of dukkha through both, primarily desire. After a couple of years, a friend told me that I really should ask for guidance and I realised that pride had been holding me back from asking for help. So, when I asked, Satyadhana very kindly agreed to start guiding me right away. We engaged with this part of the inquiry for some months before there was a definitive breakthrough – the deep assumption that there was something making me react from vedana into trsna-upādāna was seen through.

In the wake of this, I found that some of my most chronic dukkha-causing mental habits were dropping away or significantly reducing. Satyadhana was happy to continue guiding me, so we continued inquiring into the more subtle views, habits and delusions which his model of the ‘higher fetters’ pointed to. He continued guiding me after he, sadly, came to the decision to resign from the Order and the overall inquiry lasted from late 2017 to early 2020 and I finished it in Melbourne, just before getting back to the UK and being locked down.

A lot of this insight work parallels the inquiries in Mahamudra-vipashyana that Shenpen introduced and which Reggie Ray leads through in his Mahamudra course, including ‘bringing the kleshas to the path’. Mahamudra vipaśyanā also similarly goes into the irreality of the subject-object divide, space-time, perception and uprooting the most subtle levels of the self-view. There are also parallels in this inquiry approach of the Shorter Suññatā Sutta, which I’ve also explored extensively on the back of my work with Kevin. Altogether, this was an amazing period of deep insight inquiry and Kevin was an exemplary, responsive and compassionate guide. I cannot thank him enough. There have been a large number of persisting shifts in my perception of ‘how things are’ as a result of this work. And ‘secondary dukkha’ is much, much less – in fact probably absent, as my understandings of what is and is not ‘primary dukkha’ have also been shifting. Of course, I’m not making any ‘claims to attainment’. That would be self-contradictory.

Coming up to date, in terms of insight, I’ve been returning to Dzogchen and in particular of late and finding Longchenpa’s teachings much more comprehensible and relevant in a practical way than before. Resting in awareness is the major orientation in and out of the shrine room. Not that I’m ‘in that’ by any means all the time. Awareness is available, or maybe better ‘awareness self-aware’, and the ‘stuff’ of my life and relationships is happening too.

Other helpful factors

Over the years, ever since I initially encountered Buddhism in the context of purely academic study, I’ve read very widely. In the last 20 – 25 years, a large amount of truly excellent material on what might be called ‘experiential dharma’ has been emerging, and not only from strictly ‘Buddhist’ sources. I’ve read or listened to material from the perspective of all of the major Buddhist schools and would mention Reggie Ray, Rodney Smith, Daniel Ingram and Charlotte Joko Beck as having been very helpful. Non-Buddhist writers whose writings have been helpful at one time or another include Rupert Spira, Greg Goode, Joan Tollifson, Adyashanti, Tony Parsons, Cynthia Bourgeault, Ken Wilber, John J Prendergast and Judith Blackstone.

The last two are also psychologists and offer a combination of hands-on Dharma and somatic meditation with psychological insights. This is the main area that I’m exploring. The ongoing effects of infant trauma or neurotic organisation (and how that informed behaviours and attitudes that pissed-off others) had begun to become clear when I was working through Reggie Ray’s Mahamudra course. My own major ‘realisation’ over the last couple of of years has been that I still have a plenty work to do and development to realise in psychological terms. This has been ‘assisted’ no end by having started a relationship for the first time in over 30 years!

It’s clearly evident to me that whatever paradigm-shifts from insight have become persistent, there are still plenty of samskaras, or ‘trailing edges’ that are as yet far from ‘exhausted’. Psychological work still represents a grey area in Triratna but there seems to be an emerging collective awareness that working with our traumas, avoidant strategies and neuroses is necessary. Avoiding it is very unhelpful, not just in personal terms, but also in terms of the health of our collective interrelationships (which have been pretty ropey at various times and places in the past).

Reflections

Ideally we’d be working with these areas along with dharma approaches from the start, so that we do have a more realistic chance of emerging as the ‘happy healthy human being’ that Sangharakshita talked about (and avoid ending up as the ‘enlightened a-hole’ that Daniel Ingram warned against). This is a very big area, but to me it seems clear that separating dharma work from psychological work or, at worst, being in denial about any need for the latter, is not a helpful approach and it would be much better to be working on both in conjunction, from the start.

Ken Wilber points out that spiritual work reaches areas that psychological work does not, and also vice-versa. That vice-versa is crucial. I’m in the process of reading (pace Padmatara) Bruce Tift’s ‘Already Free’, which possibly brings together dharma and psychological approaches in a more integrated, embodied and practical way than other excellent dharma / psychology books that I’ve read of late. It’s clear from his approach that psychological work doesn’t necessarily mean going into therapy / counselling, though it clearly be very helpful, with the right therapist or counsellor, in order to explore sticking points (something I'm about to be doing).

What I find refreshing in the work of people like Bruce Tift, Judith Blackstone and several others is that they offer direct and effective approaches to insight and don’t ‘big it up’. Ordinary people – like everyone in any way involved in Triratna – can discover wholeness or non-separation when the subject-object distinction no longer holds up, and ‘wake up’ to the presence of awareness. When this begins to emerge experientially, it’s truly wonderful and worth rejoicing in. For some this may be at (or before) their first meditation class, for others it may be after many years of practice.  

I feel that a view-adjustment that would be beneficial would be to acknowledge that for most people, realising psychological integration and the wisdom that comes from experiential insight which persists are both necessary, and both require specific work which homes in on the essentials in the most effective ways available. It seems unlikely that our sangha relationships, communities and overall group dynamics will become significantly non-dysfunctional unless we take both dharma work, with prajñā central place, and psychological work equally seriously. For sure, things have moved on a good deal in these respects from the general immaturity and not infrequent psychological violence of the 70s and 80s, and we have a more mature sangha – in both senses of the word! However, the reflections in the above paragraphs are sketching out an area that maybe needs an article in its own right.