Our practice is the practice of intimacy. Obviously, this is not the only way to describe practice but, to me, it is an extremely valuable one. The way I use the word intimacy probably will not be as apparent and for many as interesting as the romantic way it is used in popular culture. It ranges from what is considered the supreme experience on our path — complete awakening — to intimacy in terms of daily tasks, such as vacuuming. It includes relationships at home and at work. It includes weather — in fact everything. The meaning of the word intimacy, as used it here, is non-separation, union, and the unified experience sometimes referred to as non-dual.
When we look closely, we see that there are countless ways we are not intimate with our lives exactly as they are in the present moment… We often find it incredibly difficult to live in accordance with the way life is. And for this reason, there can be a gap between the actuality in a given moment and our ideal: how we want it to be. That gap is often filled with suffering.
Yet it is only human for us to want things attuned to our own desires. We want to become enlightened, to become a good meditator, to become kinder. We want to work out our relationships. Or our creativity. We have an ideal—and yet life keeps being just what it is. Have you noticed that? We each have agendas about what we want, how things should be, how they shouldn’t be, what we want to become or to leave behind. Yet there is a stubborn way in which life, from moment to moment, is just the way it is.
It is a huge burden to constantly want things to be other than the way they are. Yet we spend much of our life doing that. Re-education to intimacy with the present moment is an essential part of our practice and of eliminating the gap between what life is and what we think it is, or want it to be. To me, it’s the hardest thing to learn—though I don’t want to make “hard” out of it. Let’s say it’s the heart of practice, which is not so much about methods or how long you can sit or how many books you read or how many hours of walking meditation you can do. Because if we can’t learn to be intimate with our experience in this moment, then we’ll keep sabotaging even our best efforts to live mindfully and wisely.
How do we re-educate ourselves? Here is one common way that I’ve observed from interviews with practitioners on retreats. You are sitting all day and have what we call a “good sitting.” Whenever I hear someone say, “I just had a good sitting,” an alarm goes off, because it means that you’re going to have a “bad sitting.” Or as the Yiddish proverb puts it: if a child is deliriously happy, be careful. Soon they will be in tears. After you’ve had a good sitting, you can’t wait to get back to your cushion because the next sitting will be even better. And it isn’t. It’s terrible. You hate being at the retreat center and you want to leave. Just a minute before you thought it was the most fantastic practice and the teacher were wonderful people. Now you want to pack your bags.
What happened? Life didn’t behave the way we wanted it to. It was supposed to get better and better. But our practice doesn’t go straight up, it goes forwards and backwards.
The practice of intimacy is beginning to see how we separate ourselves from what we’re doing. It’s a gentle practice. Little by little, we begin to have moments when we are totally there with what we’re doing—whether sitting on the cushion or vacuuming the rug. This is the heart of the practice: the raw, direct experience of life as you live it.