Many of you who read this newsletter are probably working with one aspect or another of practice. Here are a few thoughts, prompted by a conversation with a friend and colleague.

Practice is about failing. That's what makes it practice. We fail, and then we fail again, and again. But failing is not enough. We have to be able to learn from our failing. That's where feedback is helpful. We usually rely on an external source for feedback, but it is equally important to learn how to receive feedback from our own experience.

In sitting practice there is a lot of feedback. What we experience is constantly telling us what effort to make or not to make. Unfortunately, most of us don't hear it, and even when it is shouting at us, we often don't listen to it. A big part of practice is learning how to hear and listen.

Thoughts and feelings may be nothing more than mind in motion, just as waves are nothing more than water in motion. But if you are in a kayak out on the water, waves can capsize you, and that's feedback. Some where in the encounter with the wave, you lost attention, you lost your balance or you did not know what to do. In meditation, thoughts and feelings can consume you. You may completely forget that you are meditating. You may even forget that you are sitting on a chair or a cushion, until you come spluttering up for air. That's feedback, and you go back to practice, but now you start to pay attention to how you are consumed by a thought or emotion.

Many people want to get rid of all distractions, external and internal, when they meditate. That may be helpful in the beginning, just as it is helpful to learn basic paddling techniques on a calm lake. But you'll never develop any real skill there. You can't learn how to keep your balance in serious waves by practicing on a calm lake. Sooner or later you have to venture out into the ocean and learn how to stay in your boat as it is pushed by wind, pulled by currents, and thrown about by waves big and small.

You can make use of your failures in practice in the same way. Among the first lessons we learn is to distinguish between sensation and reaction. Pain and pleasure are sensations. Aversion and attraction are reactions. We learn how to experience sensations without falling into reactions by learning how to differentiate sensations from reactions. Then, later, we come to see that aversion and attraction have their own associated sensations, and when we are able to experience those sensations, we do not get lost or consumed by those waves of emotions. In this way we progress, by learning from our failures.

Mind is like the ocean. It has its own moods. Sometimes it is quiet and peaceful. Sometimes it is stormy and treacherous. We don't get to decide. Our minds and the worlds in which we live are so complex and so intimately interconnected that, despite our best efforts, we do not really control how we feel or how our mind is from one day to the next.  

I remember one particular retreat many years ago. I was doing guru yoga. Tsultrim Allione had let me use an old cabin on the property where she was living on Vashon Island, near Seattle. Four times a day I'd sit down to practice, and I soon came to appreciate that I could never know how a practice session was going to go. Sometimes I'd be feeling relaxed and open, and the meditation session would be a descent into hell. Other days, I felt utterly defeated, with not a shred of faith or confidence, and the meditation session would open into a profound and beautiful experience. There was no rhyme or reason, and I learned to take whatever came, without hope, fear or expectation. Quite a valuable lesson, actually, and one that served me well in the three-year retreat.

I also learned the importance of relaxation, though it took me many more years to learn how to relax inside. Relaxation is important because we cannot hear the feedback we are getting from practice when we are tense and rigid. Even in the Zen tradition, in which great emphasis is placed on posture, my colleagues tell me that they really only began to practice effectively when they learned how to relax in the posture.

In the end, mystical practice is about finding a way to be at peace in our experience of life. As it says in the four seals, nirvana is peace. But this peace is no ordinary peace. It is a peace that cannot be put into words, a peace that frees us from the compulsion of reactivity, a peace that frees us from the distortion of conceptual thinking, a peace that has no bottom, a peace in which there is nothing left of us as a separate self.

You may find it helpful to remember that it's about peace when you are struggling in your practice. Instead of trying to make the experience of practice what you want it to be, try relaxing into whatever you are experiencing, and keep relaxing until you find peace and clarity in the experience itself.