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Rashid Hughes explores the significance of listening to loneliness and leaning into social intimacy when embarking on a journey of contemplative apply.
Photograph by Karl Magnuson.
Being on a contemplative path could be a very lonely journey. The emphasis typically given to silence and self research naturally constitutes a sure diploma of bodily and psychological aloneness for the practitioner. Historically, within the teachings of the Buddha, practitioners develop a relationship with solitariness by retreating in nature. The apply of separating from the temptations of the social world is a standard initiation and expression of sincerity and dedication to apply. Being distanced from social distractions is how a practitioner begins to determine a agency sense of confidence being alone with one’s thoughts. We see this expressed in a number of Buddhist texts:
“Herein, monks, a monk, having gone to the forest, to the foot of a tree or to an empty place, sits down along with his legs crossed, retains his physique erect and his mindfulness alert”
—Sattipathana Sutra
“These rocky heights delight me.
With out crowds of individuals,
However visited by herds of deer,
And crammed with flocks of birds,
These rocky heights delight me.”
—Therigatha)
I’m one who strongly believes that each silence and solitude play basically necessary roles in private apply. They assist create an setting of undisrupted and direct contact with the thoughts in methods which can be distinctive to solitary apply. Nonetheless, I additionally know from private expertise that an excessive amount of emphasis given to social-isolation can produce extra struggling for a lot of practitioners. Neglecting intimate social relationships and relinquishing contact with folks you care about can’t solely result in emotions of loneliness and displacement, but additionally stunt the religious progress you search.
I wish to have a honest religious apply with out having to neglect my social-self.
For a few years, I’ve directed loads of vitality in the direction of cultivating a sustainable meditation apply routine dedicated to common intervals of solitude and silence. I can attest that this each day regime has been central to my general religious progress and contentment in life. However even at this time, inside that disciplined routine, I encounter intervals of loneliness and disappointment. I by no means point out it to my friends and buddies, nevertheless it’s true. I typically lengthy for extra social intimacy in my life; I wish to really feel a higher sense of belonging with different folks. I wouldn’t describe this loneliness as a craving for extra buddies essentially; it’s extra like a void in my coronary heart that comes from not having the ability to actively apply giving of myself in mutual relationships. I wish to have a honest religious apply with out having to neglect my social-self. My solitary apply is deeply nourishing, however my need for social intimacy is screaming from inside and at all times lingering within the background. I’ve tried to silence the depth of the scream with extra meditation methods, solely to understand that the loneliness is desirous to be held reasonably than cured.
I bear in mind listening to Toni Morrison say in an interview that the strain present in America’s harmful concepts of individualism and self-sufficiency depart us with the query of “how you can be a person in your self, and how you can adore privateness, and on the similar time belong to one thing bigger than you. And that stress is at all times going to be there.” I personally really feel that stress as a practitioner. It’s an previous stress. I’ve misplaced private friendships as a result of I didn’t have the capability to reconcile to the strain. I do know that I’ve to discover a approach of extending compassion to my loneliness, preserve a sustainable private apply, and honor my want for social intimacy.
Many contemplatives, some Buddhist and non-Buddhist, say that being alone and withdrawing from social intimacy is the very best path of a real practitioner. I truly don’t have any resistance to that perspective as a result of I do know that is true for some folks. Nonetheless, I can clearly see how my try and drive that monastic strategy to apply has led me down a path of confusion through the years. It has taken me a while to see how this partiality in the direction of seclusion with out a wholesome social construction has contributed to loneliness in my life and likewise within the lives of a lot of my friends who apply meditation.
Considered one of my considerations is the silence round loneliness in our trendy meditation communities at this time. Many practitioners, together with myself, have felt alienated from up to date apply communities due to the absence of teachings round related matters resembling social intimacy, pleasure, and loneliness. We now have struggled to seek out locations of refuge as a result of many trendy apply communities try to stick to conventional monastic ideas that denounce social fluidity and intimacy, though we live in a wholly totally different cultural context from the unique monastic traditions of the lineage. We’ve heard many talks given by lecturers that passively devalue pleasure and intimacy, all below the guise of the Buddha’s teachings of non-attachment, renunciation, and egolessness.
Does meditation require a renunciation of social intimacy?
I’ve witnessed lecturers and practitioners keep away from having the robust conversations across the complexity of social relationships, pleasure, loneliness, and every other social orientation of apply outdoors of the normative concepts of what it means to be a meditation practitioner. I’ve heard statements resembling “all is thoughts” and scriptural references like “Monks, be islands unto yourselves, be your individual refuge, having no different…” repeated to bypass the communal duty of taking the chance to discover trendy orientations of social intimacy as apply. These deflections discourage folks from being trustworthy about their experiences of loneliness and their want for social intimacy on the trail. My best concern is that the singular overrepresentation of apply as being solely particular person and withdrawn, could not directly ship the message that loneliness and the wanting of extra social intimacy are private flaws that have to be labored out in meditation.
This concern of mine has left me reflecting on these questions as doorways into discovering an answer for this downside: Does meditation require a renunciation of social intimacy? Can social intimacy be seen as a spot of risk for contemplatives to apply consciousness and pleasure? Is there an embodied apply that’s explicitly social for individuals who have encountered loneliness on their path?
In Jazz music, a method of describing apply is thru the time period “shedding” formally known as “woodshedding.” Technically, shedding can occur with different folks, nevertheless it normally factors to solitary apply the place a musician is engaged on one thing in a repetitive method. After I was within the Music Division at Howard College, there have been small apply rooms with simply sufficient area for a piano and chair. When somebody had been working towards for a very long time you’d hear people say, “so and so has been shedding all day!” From an outsider’s perspective, it could possibly seem that the shedding is a very solitary occupied area, however the fact is, they’re fascinated by, listening to, and even feeling the opposite ensemble members — although they aren’t bodily there. When everybody comes collectively, they create their unfinished concepts and the brand new discoveries that got here forth by what they’d been “shedding on.” In some way from this withdrawing and gathering, new worlds open up for the musicians. The vibrational frequencies of the collective area offers beginning to music that’s past any of the person’s artistic imaginations. Every musician is providing one thing distinctive of themselves to the general area and from this supply everyone seems to be concurrently fed by the delicate energies of the gathering. It’s no script, simply gathering and being with others.
Silence and solitude will without end stay as cornerstones to my apply, however they may now not drown out my capability to hearken to and honor my want for extra social intimacy.
I see this musical reference as a framework to start exploring how “gathering as apply” might present the area and steadiness that I want and have been lacking in my life as a contemplative practitioner. A centering of social apply for contemplative practitioners, like myself, who discover particular person apply deeply significant but additionally want extra relationational intimacy. If “gathering as apply” might develop into an precise aspect of my contemplative life, this is able to imply that apply would at all times emphasize a balanced motion of gathering with different folks, and dispersing to shed in my private area, figuring out that the relational area cultivated within the earlier gathering will pull us again collectively quickly. It might be a apply the place the non-public and the social are at all times in dialog, and the people throughout the fields deliberately create area for steady interaction, even within the busyness of their lives. I see this as a apply of reciprocity, much like the Platform Sutras assertion “one’s each day actions should at all times apply the dissemination of profit [for others].” Gathering as apply and particular person apply begins to develop into an providing, a steady round movement of a radical relationality.
I ponder what it could be like for a complete bunch of lonely contemplatives to apply on this method. It wouldn’t have to be excellent, we might simply want dedication to completely inhabit our peculiar social encounters of on a regular basis life as profound locations of risk and potential.
There are such a lot of methods to apply. Some folks desire extra classical solitary approaches to apply and a few want a extra social strategy. Now and again, relying on the season, life can usher us nearer to a sure orientation on the spectrum of apply. Most significantly, exercising company and never being too hooked up to exterior requirements of what’s permissible and what’s not is important to sustaining a sustainable and recent apply.
At this level in my journey, I’m giving myself full permission to interrupt away from the normative representations of contemplative apply which were knowledgeable by Buddhist monastic ideologies. Silence and solitude will without end stay as cornerstones to my apply, however they may now not drown out my capability to hearken to and honor my want for extra social intimacy. I’m now not giving myself to the conceptual and hierarchical distinctions made between particular person and social apply which have influenced how I strategy apply. With the recent orientation, I now see my expertise of loneliness as an intuitive expression urging me to take the chance and reimagine myself as a social being and of a social world. I really like how Ashon Crawley poses the query in his breathtaking guide, The Lonely Letters: “Can one think about loneliness to not simply be, or to not primarily be, an expertise of the person however of a social world?”
I believe so.
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