Devon has been practicing meditation intensively for nearly thirty years. Six of those years were spent in deep retreat, where you sit alone with your mind for ten to twelve hours a day for months on end.
So it comes as a surprise to both of us when, for reasons completely beyond my understanding, I think I know what he should be doing on the pillow, or if he should be on the pillow at all.
Few things irritate Devon more than this persistent habit.
And yet. It’s here. A little tightening. It’s a quiet feeling that I’m seeing something that I’m missing. That if he just – and here the sentence ends differently on different days: Continue to sit. Go deeper. Let this go. Try this.
In the Buddhist tradition, there is a word for this austerity: upadana. Usually translated as clinging or clinging, upadana is felt in the body as a contraction, a knotting around how things should be or could be. Around a desire. A view. An identity.
And that, as it turns out, is painful.
***
One of my students, Sarah, has been practicing for eight years. Her husband never meditated. When she becomes reactive, she watches him the way you would watch someone fiddling with a lock you know how to open. He doesn’t say anything. He learned not to say anything. But the monitoring is active and he feels it. Maybe he can’t quite put his finger on what he’s feeling, but he has a faint but persistent feeling that he’s failing a test he never took.
Sarah’s slight strain doesn’t always appear as a thought. More of a little closure.
This is the upadana in the body. And an intimate relationship has a specific texture. Obviously, it doesn’t come like desire. It may seem like a neat thing. Even care. Or the oh-so-reasonable assumption that you can see something your partner can’t yet, and seeing that puts you in a position to help.
In other words, Upadana does not announce itself. He just quietly organizes his attention around a fixed point: for example, the gap between where his partner is and where he can be. And once you look at this gap, everything filters through it. Their struggles confirm this. Moments of insight may even confirm this. The gap persists because you perpetuate it.
***
There is an exercise I like to do with my students. It is mostly available from anywhere and at any time.
First of all, it’s a fist.
Hold for a few seconds.
Now squeeze harder.
Now tighter.
Hold it there a little longer.
He really can handle it.
Right now. Does that feel good? That’s what it feels like to hold on. If you have contracted around an idea of who your partner should be, what your practice should be, then this is the fist. Sometimes it took years.
Now open your hand.
This liberation, this softening, this circulation, this sudden return of space, is what it feels like to be unencumbered. The fist opened.
***
I have been practicing with Devon for almost twenty years now. I watched his mind in retreat, in conflict, in teaching, in the ordinary textures of common life. I know his practice intimately, the places where he opens up, where he clings, under what conditions he deepens.
And sometimes something slips in a person’s deep knowledge. It could be about anything—your health, your job, how you’re handling a difficult friendship. But this shows itself most insidiously in practice, in our common area.
He speaks, and I can feel the sentence forming in my own mind, a sense of where it should go, what it doesn’t quite see yet.
I am no longer fully present in those moments. I was already ahead of him. It calculates what you need. Consider, usually badly, where your practice is stuck, what stands in the way, what would help. And because I see it, or because I think I see it, it starts to feel like it’s my responsibility to do something. Or at least mention it. Or maybe to create the right conditions. Sometimes you have to wait with patience that has an agenda to reach the insight you already had in your name.
In the random unfolding of dharmic life, the conditions for awakening cannot be imported from outside. They must be grown from within.
But as much as I know Devon, his connection to his own mind remains elusive to me. I can practice with it. I can participate on his terms. Based on what I’ve seen, I can offer what I know if you ask. But I can’t practice for it. I don’t see from the inside of your experience what your path requires.
And the moment I start acting like I can, I’m out of touch with him. I am in touch with my idea of him. What can be with the project.
In the random unfolding of dharmic life, the conditions for awakening cannot be imported from outside. You have to grow them from within, through the quality of your own attention, your own willingness and preparation. Of course with others, but simultaneously and inseparably, alone.
***
In practice, the most radical turn is the one moment when we remember to pay attention.
That’s the word in Pali sati. This is usually translated as attentiveness. But the experience of sati is closer to a deep and sustained listening that does not try to fix what is heard.
So when a contraction occurs, the instruction is simple and not easy: Turn towards it. Feel it in your body. What is the actual texture of this? where does he live In the chest, jaw, abdomen? What is the story you are telling? What do you want? What are you afraid of?
You don’t need to fix these. You don’t have to agree with it or disagree with it. You just have to keep listening.
For me, if I stick with it long enough, listening reveals that . . . discomfort. Devon is a highly effective practitioner. He, like all people, can go through anxiety, irritation and the same usual difficulties over and over again. And when he does, I feel it. I tell myself I don’t want him to suffer. That I’m just trying to help. And it’s true. But underneath that, if I’m really honest, there’s something more selfish: I don’t want to feel what I feel when he’s struggling. The tension in my own body. My own irritability. And underneath that is something closer to fear. To lose my most important support, even temporarily.
The project is essentially about dealing with my own anxiety.
If I am honest with the hard fact of this, with the forgivable selfishness of my own longing, then something changes. The contraction becomes operational. I can stay with it and focus on what’s really here, with all its fuss and drama and fear and bristles, all the fuel that drives the project until the contraction resolves itself.
***
Thirty years of practice has made it clear to me that attachment is not the path to love. This is love. It is not a love that you earn or eventually achieve after any number of hours of meditation. Only what remains when the grip is released. When the project is dropped. When you stop measuring the distance between who your partner is and who they could be, and instead find yourself here, with an actual person, in an actual moment.
This is what intimacy teaches me over and over again, whether I want the lesson or not: that the most generous thing I can give my loved one is not to be aware of their path. This is my full presence, unadulterated and ready to surprise. The willingness to let them be exactly, completely, stubbornly themselves. Loving what actually appeared instead of staying true to a vision of what might have appeared at a better time.
Just this person. As they really are.
I don’t always get this right. Shrinkage still occurs and sometimes, even if I notice it, the momentum takes me straight into the project anyway. I see exactly what I’m doing and I do it regardless.
But when I turn to it, when I can stay with the pull long enough for it to go through its full arc, the project unravels. And Devon is just there.
Not the devon I’ve been quietly reworking. Nor the one whom I can see so clearly from the outside, who just needs to sit a little longer, go a little deeper, let go of that certain thing.
Only him. Do it in your own way, in your own way, in your own time.
