Though countless translations for any of these mighty words exist, I often refer to the Dharma as a field of wisdom, a ground of timeless and unconditional ‘wiseness.’ I do experience it as an energetic field of wisdom, palpable, immediate and instinctive. It is an energy that, when it permeates a room or a gathering, one feels oneself to be immersed in a wisdom that is larger than one’s own personal ideas, conclusions and agendas. And one also feels the inner urge simply to be Good; and to do the highest good, to resonate at the same vibration as the Dharma itself. Out of this arises our sense of personal duty, or dharma. I liken it to the experience that people have when they walk into a house of worship. There is a palpable sense of energy that is holy, timeless and wise, untouched by the craziness of humanity’s plundering agendas. When you pray in that house, you can feel the magnetic pull of your own heart toward that which is, above all, benevolent, grace-filled and sacred.

The field of the Dharma is as immediate as the air that we breathe; and it is as life-giving. Without it, our physical and intellectual lives can continue on, but the life of our Spirit may grow dull in its joy or dim in its luster.

In my own life, when I first experienced the Dharma, specifically as the evening discussions the teacher offered at the Insight Meditation Society silent retreat I had signed up for, I felt the lights go on inside and I began the process of reconciling my personal angst with my longing to understand myself and to be free of suffering. He wove personal experience and universal understanding into his talks, helping us to see how the habits of our own minds toward distraction, forgetfulness and agenda were the very obstacles to recognizing this Dharma that is always immediately available. We are like fish in the ocean, looking for water, he said. And I knew it was me he was talking to. As my frantic searching slowed down, I recognized my personal doorway into the Dharma as the still point where my grasping, story-telling and complaining ceased. This inner stillness is my awareness free of story, free of agenda, free of past or future. Suspended in this moment, in this Now, we taste the stillness out of which the holiness of all life arises.

Sadly, one of the shadows that I have seen arise in the Dharma community arises out of the very searching for this stillness. There is a kind of self-absorbed introspection that resembles the stillness of meditation but unconsciously aims to prevent the arising of any emotions or thoughts that might cloud the stillness. While the stillness is a ripe and vital field through which our awareness is clarified, people sometimes make an assumption that if only they were ‘more still’, ‘more dharmic’, ‘more meditative’, ‘more good’ then these difficult emotions or conflicting thought patterns would no longer arise. So in the arising of these ‘non-dharmic moments’ the student makes an internal pact to simply get more serious about meditation, to get more silent, more still, to make more effort, to, essentially, ward off the difficulties. But difficulties do and will arise in life!

Years ago I was cooking for meditation retreats and happened to land a gig in southern California at a retreat being led by a famous Burmese monk. This retreat coincided with a visit my mother was making to California to visit my sister. Before heading to my sister’s place, she came to the center where I was serving the retreat. As this was a month-long retreat people were very steeped in silence by the time my mother arrived. Her first observation into the world of Buddhist meditation looked like a gathering of zombies. She had come during a walking meditation period! The students were walking so mindfully and so slowly it looked as if seasons would come and go around them before they made it to the next sitting period, so absorbed were they in the process of lifting, stepping, placing, lifting, stepping, placing!

Of course, my mother could not have understood this practice from her vantage point. And there are many great gifts discovered through the practice of mindfulness, whether it’s walking meditation, eating meditation, washing dishes meditation or sitting meditation. Mindfulness practice brings us back to the stillness of awareness and allows us to re-orient ourselves in the Dharma.

But if the mindfulness practice is making the circumference of your manageable life smaller and smaller, then possibly the practice is causing a self-restricted implosion, a contraction by which small disturbances create an overpowering wake of darkness. If you are telling a story that difficulties ought not to arise, then no matter how small the difficulty it will instigate that wake!

The walking meditation students would often come into the kitchen for their seva, their service, and would break their silence in long rambles of complaints about how the teacher did not understand their questions or the dukha, the darkness, that had surfaced for them in the silent walking. We were not inclined to respond to these reports or to engage with them on this stuff since it was their practice and their retreat. But, one of my fellow cooks would always utter, with her German accent, condescendingly under her breath as the student was leaving the kitchen, ‘go watch your breath’. (We were all denying the lessons of these difficulties!) Perhaps these students needed real psychological intervention, I wondered.

The field of the Dharma, that energetic field where we sense the holiness of life, is wide enough to allow for difficulties, darkness and the changing weather patterns and seasons. While the Dharma, vast as the sky, is not diminished by dukha, the dark clouds that pass through it, the crops in the field are affected. To the extent that we are living embodied lives, those crops are the events of our lives. Understanding the dharma, the vastness of the sky, and being able to clear some of the mental cloud formations makes it possible to utilize the full power of the dharma in tending to the field of our lives. Then one comes to recognize that the dharma is ever present, even amidst our darkest storms. Understanding how the storms originate, often stirred by our thought processes, stories, and unskillful perceptions of life, gives us the tools of insight and wisdom.

The people whom I have met who are really steeped in the dharma have a graceful way of surfing through the full spectrum of human emotion, without adding any story to it! They are not suppressing, repressing, denying or distorting their experience. What falls away is not the rising and passing of emotions or thoughts, but the self-referencing story that what is occurring should not be. What falls away is the resistance to what is. And when resistance falls away, we recognize ourselves, again, buoyed in the ocean of the Dharma.