What I Mean When I talk About "My Practice"

On paying attention, and giving a shit

It’s very common in Dharma communities to hear someone mention “my practice”. These communities are orthopraxic (right practice) in orientation, as opposed to the orthodoxic (right opinion/belief) orientation of e.g. Christianity or Islam. To a large degree, group membership is determined by having a practice and interacting with the group about the practice. No profession of belief will suffice. It’s about what you do and how you do it, not what you believe and how you speak about it.

So what do people mean when they say “my practice”?

The most common reference pointer here is usually aimed at meditation. More specifically, usually one (or several) of the various forms of Silent Sitting. Secondarily, the pointer might be referencing some kind of movement practice or practice with the subtle energy body. These aren’t disjoint categories. They overlap quite a bit. What they have in common, though, is that they are usually formal methods found in the context of formalized systems.

Going back to the most ancient expressions of Dharma pedagogy, we find in the Eightfold Path that steps 6 (Right Effort), 7 (Right Mindfulness), and 8 (Right Samadhi) are concerned with meditation practices. This has always been a central topic of discourse and an emphasis of teaching. It’s understandable, then, why the default reference is to formal practice methods, particularly Silent Sitting.

Is this a good default? Could it mean something else? Should it?

Well, its probably not a bad default. It fulfills the basic objective of being a convenient shorthand that saves people discursive effort and establishes a common reference frame. That’s pretty good. What’s wrong with it though? My opinion is that it tends to constrain both discussion as well as thought about what a practice is, and what it means to practice.

Certainly it’s true that formal practice methods are important. It’s also true that formal practice methods are a kind of glue that bonds together different practicioners across time and space. It’s useful to be able to read a text written 1200 years ago in a completely different society and still understand what is being discussed. And yet…

Life isn’t lived on the meditation cushion. Meditation is itself a preliminary practice. The real thing we ought to care about is what you do off the cushion. There are no formal methods in engagement with life as it unfolds all around you in realtime. Doing a formal method is a carve-out of time from one’s life in order to reinforce a core set of skills, perspectives, and mental patterns. What are these?

What are we really practicing when we do a formal method?

To begin with, a bit of via negativa. We ARE NOT practicing counting our breaths or scanning our bodies. We ARE NOT practicing enduring leg cramps, lower-back pain, boredom, rumination, frustration, disappointment, or confusion. We ARE NOT practicing bliss, comfort, joy, excitement, or arousal. We ARE NOT practicing mental athletics. We ARE NOT practicing harnessing magical power. We ARE NOT practicing calm-abiding. We ARE NOT practicing seeing-further. We ARE NOT practicing loving-kindness. We ARE NOT practicing single-pointed-concentration. We ARE NOT practicing realizing-the-nature-of-mind.

All of the above may be the results of practice, but that’s not the thing being practiced. This is an indistinct boundary at times. Many formal practices have a close linkage between the method of the practice and the result of the practice. An instruction for loving-kindess meditation might be “call to mind persons with whom you would like to feel loving-kindness towards, and then instigate that feeling in the space of your own awareness.” Still, the method and the result are facets of the formalization of the practice, they aren’t the thing we’re practicing.

I expect to find some disagreement about the above paragraph. Bear with me a while longer, it will come together.

When we practice a formal method, we are really using a structured framework to create an accessible path to practicing two qualities of mind. First, we are practicing paying attention. Second, we’re practicing giving a shit (n.b. I could have said “caring” but I said what I said). These two qualities underly the formal practices. We practice seeing-further in order to improve our ability to pay attention and give a shit in our lives off the cushion. There’s an explicit claim that improving one’s skill at seeing-further is strong correlated (perhaps causal) with improvements in paying attention and improvements in giving a shit. It may or may not be. Many practicioners appreciate their results from practicing seeing-further.

My point is that the reason we engage in the practice is not because the act of sitting still and observing the locus of awareness in the sense fields, interior mental space, and movements of the subtle energy body is itself a compelling thing to do. Those are some extremely niche skills of limited and esoteric appeal on a good day. We engage in the practice because we expect it’s an effective way to improve the skill of paying attention and improve the skill of giving a shit.

These are skills?

Yeah. What else would they be? Like any skill, we can have different levels of proficiency at doing it. Like any skill, it requires focused practice to improve at, and like any skill, neglecting to practice it will lead to diminishment of one’s performance at it.

Paying attention and giving a shit are extraordinarily difficult skills. For all their simplicity and mundaneness, they are among the least tractable, most challenging skills to work on. They’re so hard to improve at, and so important to be good at, that people do ridiculous and extreme things like sit on their ass for an hour or more every day for their entire lives just to get basic traction.

Why is it so hard to pay attention? Because our senses are unreliable and limited and we are easily misled or confused into misinterpretation. Because attention is a scarce and valuable resource and the world is filled with things that are making claims on your limited attention resources. Because prioritizing well is non-obvious, error prone, and has serious consequences for mistakes, resulting in a lot of anxiety and uncertainty.

Why is it so hard to give a shit? Because we are subject to emotional pain due to desires and attachments, and apathy is defensive. Because our attention is limited and precious and we must have some kind of awareness of something in order to care about it. The prior condition of ignorance is inherently obstructive of caring. Because caring about the wrong things, like paying attention to the wrong things, has serious consequences for mistakes, resulting in a lot of heartbreak and grief.

How do we practice paying attention and giving a shit?

One moment at a time, every moment of our lives. With determination and resolve.

We practice paying attention by familiarizing ourselves with the basic mechanics of attention. Formal methods, particularly those in the “insight” family of practices, are designed to facilitate this.

We practice giving a shit by familiarizing ourselves with the basic sensations of emotion. Formal methods, particularly those in the “compassion” family of practices, are designed to facilitate this.

By practicing giving a shit, we remove many of the obstacles to paying attention. When we know what we care about, and how it feels to care about them, it’s much easier to know what to pay attention to, and how to attend to it.

By practicing paying attention, we remove many of the obstacles to giving a shit. When we know what to attend to, and how it feels to attend to them, it’s much easier to know what the worth of something ought to be, and how much we should care about it.

We do not need to do a formal method to practice paying attention and giving a shit. We can use formal methods to provide structure to practicing. We should not make the error of assuming the formal method is essential or indispensable. Formal methods produce formal results. Experiencing the formal result of a formal method is a very good way of familiarizing and internalizing the sensation and experience that the method is oriented around. We don’t have the luxury of sitting silently for an hour before going into a challenging work meeting, or dealing with a family member in a heap of trouble, or forcing ourselves to do our taxes. We hope that the experience of the formal result makes accessible the lived experience of paying better attention and giving more of a shit when it arises in the circumstances of our lives.

What do I mean when I refer to “my practice”?

I’m pointing to the way it feels when I’m out on a walk and the ruminations of my conventional state-of-mind quiet down or cease and my attention is fully engaged with the immanent wonder and vivid beauty of the world.

I’m referring to the way it feels when I’m at the shopping mall and I notice a young mother with her baby in a stroller struggling to get up a set of stairs, so I decide to offer my help and carry the stroller up the stairs for her while she carries her baby.

I’m talking about the way my entire body shivers and tingles when the right song comes on in my headphones and for 4 minutes and 13 seconds I can perceive the boundaries of my own mind in the dimension of sound.

I’m trying to find words, clumsily, for the reasons why I stand in front of a brick wall and trace the lines of weathering and the play of shadows and the creeping remnants of vines and ivy written across the wall. The way carefully directed attention transforms it from an a set of stacked rectangles, into a fractal explosion of shape and texture. The way that explosion blows away the lie that a brick wall is only a brick wall.

I mean that I remember the nature of mind when I’m feeling the flow of warm water over my hands as I wash the dishes. I mean that I experience a sense universal worth and the value inherent in all things especially when I take my first shit of the day in the morning and the smell reaches my nose and reminds me that I am alive and that I have (once again) expelled some of the parts of me ready to decay.

When I’ve been negligent or careless I feel a contraction of my attention. I feel the pain of this. It reminds me to give a shit. This is my practice.

When I’ve been distracted or obsessed I feel a weight on my caring heart. It hurts in a way that we have no word for in English (by might be called Dukkha, in Sanskrit). It reminds me to pay attention. This is my practice.