Part three of three

Practical

How this is done today, by people with jobs, families and not much spare time.

Part three is for those who feel they have crossed the bottom point of most separation, which Part two called the turn, and who want to begin the journey back to unity.

What if I’m not sure?
  • From the outside:
  • For driven people it is usually a crash: burnout, a body that stops cooperating, or a depression that lands right after the goal is reached.
  • Something happens to someone close, a relative in the hospital or a partner’s betrayal. Values shift, and for some people that is where this begins.
  • Sometimes there is nothing left to try. The founder in Part one kept building up tension until the old way stopped working, and out of options went on a retreat.
  • Some meet someone who has what they want. My teacher did, in his teens.
  • For one friend of mine it was a single talk. After years of trying everything spiritual, my friend decided it was all nonsense and went into business, and within months felt empty. One talk by my teacher was enough to sense at once that the point was the middle of Part one’s chart, letting go and action together.
  • From the inside:
  • Some start with questions, the kind that ask why things are the way they are and why we are the way we are.
  • Some feel an emptiness that results can’t reach. For me it showed up whenever I had time to myself, and it made the weekends the worst part of the week.
  • Others have nothing to complain about. Nothing crashed and everything works, and a quiet question shows up anyway: is this all there is?
  • Some reach a plateau, years of calm and comfort with nothing changing, until the calm itself starts to feel pointless.
  • And some only feel that something is off. They can’t say what, and there is no event to point at.

It makes no difference whether a person comes through the outside or the inside. Some understand with the mind that this is what they need. Others don’t understand it at first, but they feel it, or they feel that something is not right. Each of the eight billion people alive is unique, and so is the way each of them arrives. How someone comes to this has no effect on how ready they are for it. One of the students I take a lot of personal example from started because sleep would not come. That was the only reason meditation mattered to begin with, and the idea itself met years of resistance. Today I count that student among the most exemplary people I know.

Two things a life needs

Anything that moves needs two things: energy and direction. A car with plenty of fuel and no steering is a bomb with a radio. A car with a perfect map and no fuel is a very well informed parked car.

Most of us know both failures from the inside. Energy without direction is the Driven room from Part one: plenty of drive, pointed at whatever was loudest, until the old way stopped working. Direction without energy is the person who knows perfectly well they shouldn’t shout at their kids. They’ve read the book. They can explain why it’s a bad idea. And then they shout, because knowing what to do and being able to do it turn out to be two separate supplies.

You can start tonight, alone. Close your eyes and give your attention to the sensations in your body. If thoughts come, don’t push them away, come back to the sensations, and learn to enjoy it. Start with five minutes. You can sit for as long as you like, and you can do it several times a day. That’s stillness, and section 8 says more about it. It’s also a good way to start on the question Part two ended with, where the border of you sits. Tomorrow, add three small choices: go first instead of waiting for the other person, say the sentence now instead of carrying it, and don’t rehearse the argument in the shower. Each of them keeps a little new tension from building up. The rest of this part is about what keeps it going.

Part two’s step on energy says where more energy comes from, and there are two places. One is letting go: the wall that holds us apart sits in the body as tension, and tension is a tax on energy, so some of it comes back as the grip loosens. The other is access to more than one person could hold alone, and the practical way I know to widen it is a reason bigger than you, together with people who share it. A team can be as small as two friends.

Direction has its own problem. Part two gave you two instruments for it, and they come into their own after the turn. The compass is your own sense, over the months, of whether life is getting fuller or emptier, and the mirror is whatever keeps hooking you, which shows where the work is. Both are yours to read. What you can’t do is see yourself from the outside, and that part usually comes from someone much further along who can. Everything else is the daily work those two supplies make possible.

Life nudges a person toward this work on its own, through the mirror, when the same lesson keeps coming back, and through the turn, when everything works and it still feels flat. It is patient about it. If your life is going well and feels well, you have no need of a method. A method is a way to do on purpose, and faster, what life does slowly, which comes down to acting as one in the spots where you still act as two.

Turn up the energy before you have a direction and you get a louder version of the wrong thing. The sections below go in an order that suits most people. The decision comes first for everyone. After that the order changes from person to person, because people arrive from different places.

1. Making the decision

This comes first and matters most, because the rest of Part three has nothing to work with until someone has decided.

By the decision I mean something plain: to commit to the journey and to keep to it. A wish is the wanting. A decision is the yes that goes with it, the point where the wanting turns into a direction you are going to follow.

Teachings from very different places call this road hard, and they say the greatest victory on it is the one over yourself. They speak of a narrow gate and a razor’s edge. The opponent in those pictures is the one you carry with you: the old habits that keep pulling toward the way things were. Several of these traditions give the title of hero, or of the truly strong, to the person who conquers themselves.

That is why it matters to make this decision seriously. It can be quiet. What it needs is that you mean it, with your eyes open about how hard the way is. A decision like that gives you something the rest of this part depends on: you no longer have to bargain with yourself every morning, and the energy that took goes into the work.

A narrow way, and the greatest victory
  • The Katha Upanishad tells the listener to arise and awake, and says the wise call the path hard to go by, as hard as the sharp edge of a razor (1.3.14).
  • In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus says to enter by the narrow gate, because the way that leads to life is hard and few find it (Matthew 7:13 to 14).
  • In the Dhammapada the supreme conqueror is the one who conquers a single person, himself, and the verse sets that above winning a battle against a million. Another verse says no god, and not even Mara, the tempter of the Buddhist stories, can undo the victory of someone who has tamed themselves (103 to 105).
  • In Pirkei Avot Ben Zoma asks who is mighty, a word that can also mean hero, and answers: the one who subdues his inclination. He backs it with Proverbs, which says it is better to have self-control than to conquer a city (4:1, quoting Proverbs 16:32).
  • The Jain Uttaradhyayana has almost the same verse as the Dhammapada. King Nami has given up his throne, and Indra, king of the gods, in the guise of a brahmin, tells him that a true warrior would bring every prince who does not acknowledge him into subjection. Nami answers that a man may conquer thousands and thousands of valiant foes, and greater will be his victory if he conquers nobody but himself (chapter 9).
  • The Daodejing says that whoever overcomes others is strong, and whoever overcomes himself is mighty (33).
  • A hadith in Sahih al-Bukhari reports the Prophet saying that the strong one is the one who controls himself while in anger, which he sets against overcoming people by strength (6114).

2. Your own wish

A decision needs something to stand on, and that is the wish. It’s the one thing in this part nobody else can supply. A mentor can point, a team can lift, a teacher can try to wake it and pass it on, but none of them can want it for you. It gets made inside each person, and as Part two put it, the controller was put in your hands on purpose.

What is the wish for? These are the reasons people give for starting, and they are not promises the method makes. Life pushes people toward this kind of work in very different ways, and the reasons often change along the way. Most of them fall into a few groups.

Some come with questions: why we exist, how the world works and why it is the way it is, and whether this is all there is. That is where mine started, with the questions from Part two.

Others come for steadiness. They want to stay calm when the inbox explodes or a family dinner goes sideways, and to stop replaying the same old conversation on the drive home. They want to stop being run by old habits of mind and painful memories, and to see life as it is, without the mind getting in the way.

Some start with something much more ordinary and pressing. They can’t sleep, or the stress has gotten too high, or they are simply worn out. They aren’t looking for anything spiritual. They want to feel better, and that is reason enough to start.

And others come because they want to do more with their lives and be better to the people around them: to finally start the thing they keep talking about, or to be someone their family can lean on. They want to take their life into their own hands, starting with the people closest to them, and for that they work on understanding people and on their own emotions, which is what opening your heart looks like day to day.

Most people recognize themselves in a few of these, and which one is yours matters less than that it is really yours.

You can see it from the outside, and quickly. A project that never gets built, a plan that stays a plan: the wish behind it was probably weaker than it felt. It shows in what you build with your hands far more than in what you say about it.

It also fades. Nearly everyone has days with a lift and days with a slump, and the wish needs feeding to survive them. Plenty of people take a few steps and stop, for all kinds of reasons. A low wish is no ranking of who is better or worse. It’s a day, and days change.

The wish can be grown. It isn’t equally strong in everyone from birth, and it gets brought up, partly by the people around you helping each other. A goal you love, sitting in the background of everything even when you never mention it, feeds it. So does real work for other people, done with your hands. Underneath those sits the decision, made on purpose and made again when it slips. A bigger wish also crowds out smaller ones, so you don’t have to fight the small ones one at a time.

Two things quietly drain it. One is feeling sorry for yourself, which everyone does and which takes more from the wish than almost anything else. The other is a half-wish that changes its mind every Tuesday about how much it’s willing to give.

So ask yourself, quietly, how much you want this, and take the answer as information. If the answer is low, nothing is wrong with you. Do something concrete, and decide again.

3. A goal, and a reason

Part one’s chart put DO and BE on two axes and said you need both. This section makes that practical: you set outer goals, and you judge the inner growth by them.

A goal in this method has three properties. It’s short, meaning weeks or months. It’s measurable, so at the end you can say yes or no. And it’s tied to reality, so it lives in the world and not in your head. Plan the family trip for the summer. Finish a draft of an essay. The outer result is the check on the inner work, because it’s very easy to feel like you’re growing when nothing around you has moved.

Inner work is real work, and from the inside it can be hard to tell whether it’s working. A calm sit feels like progress whether or not anything has changed. The compass will tell you, but it reads over months. A goal turns the calm into something you can test sooner. It also gets your energy moving, which is its second job. A goal you care about pulls effort out of you that plain willpower never would.

Then there’s the reason behind the goal. Part two called mine a point of support, the thing I live for that is bigger than me: to know who I am and what it means to exist, and to share it so that other people’s lives get better and happier. Building systems and institutes that help others do the same in the best way possible is part of it. The goal can be small as long as the reason is bigger than you, and Part one made the case for that. The reason keeps a person going after the first excitement has worn off.

One caution, since the outer goals can turn on you. Doing more with your life is one of the wishes in section 2, and results are how you check the work. They are an indicator and never the aim. If you start chasing them for their own sake, you’ve rebuilt the Driven room with better vocabulary.

4. Giving

Giving here means putting effort into the good of other people, or of something bigger than you, and not counting what comes back. An hour of real attention counts. So does using your skills on someone else’s problem. This is where the reason bigger than you from the last section turns into something you do.

It starts with the people closest to you. If you accept what Part two said about the fingers of one hand, then helping you is helping me, as a matter of plumbing, with niceness left out of it. And if love is what the wall dropping feels like, giving is a way to practice it on purpose. The circle widens from there, one step at a time, toward the people who are hard for you.

It has two rules. The first is to give without conditions: don’t demand thanks, recognition or a result in return, and don’t hold the person hostage to the goal behind it, however big that goal is. The second is to give to something bigger than your own comfort. While you’re busy with something larger than yourself, there is less of you to guard, and that speeds up the one thing almost nothing else touches, the slow change in the ego. It doesn’t make you less yourself. What wears away is the part of us that keeps defending, and what is left is what we bring into the world.

Inner work done only for yourself can go in a circle. You improve your own state, then you improve it more. That has real value, and it can turn into polishing the same stone. Giving sends the energy somewhere, the way a mill lets the river through, and it is also where the work gets tested, because other people can tell you whether it helped.

5. The team

A pair is two people doing this together, and a team grows from there. It combines the other parts of the method: you work on your attention, you build discipline, you meet your mirror, you pursue a goal and you give, all at once and with other people around.

The first thing a team does is hold you up in the hard moments. When your mood falls through the floor, the other person’s mood hasn’t, and the pair holds longer than either half. I tend to be the one who holds others, but I have my moments too. Most often it is when we have set goals and haven’t reached them, or a deadline is close and the task looks unmanageable. I used to slide into despair then, and my close friends helped me come back to myself, calm down and let it go.

The second thing is the one everybody expects: a team gets more done than the same people working alone. People keep a promise made to another person more reliably than one made to themselves, and effort is contagious, so it is harder to coast next to someone who is really trying.

It comes with conditions. The people have to be aimed at something, because a group of people who simply like each other can have a lovely time and still go nowhere. The group also has to settle its conflicts quickly, by talking them through. A quarrel reverses the effect: the same closeness that lifts a team weighs it down when there is a wall between two of its members.

The people also have to want it, and this is where the team meets the wish from section 2. A team multiplies whatever is put into it, and anything times nothing is still nothing, a fact your math teacher and your guru would both confirm. A good team that doesn’t want to play is a good roster with a bad season. A group of people who each really want to move gives everyone in it much more than any of them could find alone, like a cable made of many strands.

The team does something for the wish itself, too. On your own it dies down faster. So people meet to reignite each other’s passion and to remind each other, and when your own spark drops, lighting up a partner gets some of it back. The company of people who want the same thing is one of the best things to feed it. Ananda, the Buddha’s attendant, once said that good friends are half of the spiritual life, and the Buddha answered that they are the whole of it.

The modern world makes this harder. In an earlier age the other people came with the village. Now you can order food, learn skills and find company from a phone without anyone seeing you need anything. That is convenient, and it also removes the one thing that did the work. You have to build the village on purpose.

6. The teacher and the method

A team has energy, and a team can still be going in a circle. Someone who is much further along can see where the team is growing and where it is stuck, which is hard to see from inside.

My teacher is Genadiy Givin, whom Part zero named. He was born in Riga and studied at Riga Technical University. In his teens he met people who, as he tells it, had woken up from the forgetting Part two describes, and what he saw in them gave him a huge wish to know what they knew. That wish led him to the man who became his teacher. He describes the people who handed this on to him, himself included, as ordinary people without titles. For him the knowledge is what matters.

What he does is easy to describe. He doesn’t walk the path for you, and he can’t create your wish to walk it, which stays yours. What he can do is point out where you have drifted, and give you something to try on Monday. He also has a steadiness that spreads, the way a calm, experienced guide on a mountain path steadies everyone walking behind.

A teacher does one more job. In any group, people carry private opinions of who is wrong, and two people who are each sure they are right often stay stuck while each holds on. The first sorry is how one of them steps out, and that is the inner agency from Part one. A teacher can make that step easier. Genadiy almost never tells two people which of them was right. He says what he sees to the whole team, and each person goes looking for their own part in the conflict. When one person is simply wrong, that gets said too. The sorry itself still has to come from one of the two.

The knowledge behind the method is older than he is. It came to him through a line of teachers, and what he did was adapt it to the realities of life in the 21st century. The way we have arranged ourselves around it is ours. Other teachers and methods help people too. This is the one I chose, and the one I know from the inside.

7. Mentorship

Think of how someone becomes a blacksmith. There is no syllabus. The apprentice stands next to the smith for years, doing small jobs and watching how long the iron stays in the fire and what the smith does when a piece comes out wrong. After a few years the apprentice can do things nobody ever explained, and if you ask how, they shrug.

Mentorship in this method works the same way. It runs on personal example, and it is closer to a workshop than to a classroom. Most of what you are learning is hard to put into words anyway: how to stay steady when a plan falls apart, how to say sorry first without making a ceremony of it. You can read about those, and you pick them up by being around someone who does them.

A mentor is simply a person who has had more time to practice what you want. What they say matters less than you would expect, and only a small part of it is telling you what to do or where you are right or wrong. When they do say something, it is short, and it comes from having stood where you are standing. A lot of what was said to me was about attention, and it took me a while to see that most of it had been right.

The biggest effect is that you get to feel what it is like to be a person a few steps ahead: how they sit through a tense meeting, how fast they come back from a bad day. It is one thing to be told that something is possible and another to sit across from someone for whom it is ordinary.

You could call it osmosis. Nobody sets out to copy anything, and after a while your own reactions have moved toward what you have been around, the way you pick up an accent from a roommate without trying and without the roommate noticing. It is a big part of why people mature much faster with a mentor than alone.

A few steps is the useful distance, close enough that you can see how they got there and far enough that you want what they have. It might be someone in your team who started a few years before you, or someone outside it who has had more time with what you want. You have probably felt a small version of this already: an afternoon with the calmest person you know, and you leave a little calmer without having done anything. Look for that on purpose, and do your own practice in between visits.

8. Work with attention

This is the work you can start today, alone, with no equipment, and it has three jobs.

The first is to be here, in the body and in this room, with no detour through later or through the story about it. Part one called the vertical axis BE, and this is its plainest meaning: how much of you is actually present for what is happening right now. It sounds trivial until you try to keep it for a minute.

The second job is letting go of the tension you’ve already built up. Tension sits in the body as clamps, and you can find them: a jaw, a shoulder, the muscles around the eyes. Part two said that suffering measures resistance, the pain plus the grip we hold around it, and the clamps are that grip. Attention is the tool. You put it on the clamp and keep it there, like a flashlight held on one spot, and you don’t push, because pushing is more tension. Eventually the clamp goes.

Stillness is the simplest form of this, and it’s the one from the start of this part: eyes closed, attention on the sensations in the body, and back to them whenever a thought pulls you away. There is no breath to slow down and nothing to adjust. It’s one practice among several, and the others are more active: relaxing a muscle group, reviving a part of the body, holding the breath for a moment, a plain sentence spoken inward toward the center of the chest, laughter when it comes naturally. Nobody needs all of them. Together they are the inner practices, and they are the quieter half of the method. I name them so you know what they are and why they are there. This essay is here to convey ideas, and it isn’t a manual. Stillness is the one practice here you can try straight from the page. The others are learned with a person who can see what you’re doing.

The plain sentence in that list is a form of prayer. Prayer is the part turning toward the whole, and in the method it means learning to talk with life itself. The point is to lower the wall a little so the conversation is real. Our teacher’s way in is a question: how would you talk if you met God, or whatever you call the source? You would take off the masks and speak as you are. Asking is part of it, for help with that and for other people, and the asking points toward giving, so a request for yourself can turn into a wish to help. You can tell the conversation is real the way you can tell a person is really listening to you. And it doesn’t replace doing: prayers alone don’t bring rain, and someone has to dig the ditches for it.

The third job is not to accumulate new tension. This is the one people forget, and it matters most. If you clear your shoulders in the morning and spend the day clenching, you’ve bailed a boat with the hole still open. Not accumulating mostly comes down to small choices like the three at the start of this part, and each of them is a clamp that never forms.

Underneath all three there’s a plain skill: seeing your own mind at work. Most of what you do in a day gets triggered, with very little choosing involved. Someone says a thing, something fires, and you’ve answered before you’ve decided to. Mental tools for watching that happen, to see the habit and not run it automatically, are what turn attention from a relaxation exercise into a way of steering. One I use: when something fires, notice where it lands in the body, for example the jaw or the stomach, and look at it there for a moment before you answer.

Regularity starts with the daily sit, every day, even when it’s a short one, because the drift from Part two takes no days off. How often you meet with others varies with where you live, and I won’t pretend there’s one correct timetable. What matters is that it happens, that you keep wanting to grow, and that you carry the method into the rest of your day, at the checkout and in the argument, so that the daily sit is the smallest part of it.

If you already sit, you know the sitting. What this adds is what surrounds it: a pair who notices when your attention has wandered, a mirror that shows you the hooks you can’t feel on a cushion, and a mentor who can see what you can’t.

9. Discipline

Every other part of this method leans on discipline, and so does anything else that matters in life. The decision is the yes, and discipline keeps it true on the days when the wanting is quiet. Nobody learned an instrument or a sport on inspiration alone.

By discipline I mean something plain: doing what you decided to do after the mood for it has passed. Part one gave a boring test for DO, how well you follow up on your words, and discipline is the same test applied to the words you give yourself. The method works on habits of mind and body, and habits were built by repetition, so repetition is also how they change. The daily sit is a good place to meet it: five minutes that happen because they were planned.

In this method discipline grows from the outside in. A fixed time for the sit and a meeting that is on the calendar are the outside, and keeping them is something you can do even on a day when you don’t feel like it. After a while you see what they give you, and the keeping starts to come from you. That is inner discipline, the strength to carry out what you decided, and it is built the way a muscle is, by use, every day and in small things. It works like going to the gym: some mornings you’d rather stay in bed, and you go anyway, because of the body you want a year from now.

Keep it light, and keep it yours: a demand you make on yourself, in a friendly tone. Gritting your teeth through a sit adds tension, which is the thing the sit is there to remove, so keep the frame small enough to hold without a fight. Five minutes every day is a frame you can keep, and a frame you keep teaches your mind that you can trust your own word. When a day slips, pick it up the next day without a speech about it.

Other people make all of this easier. A pair who notices a missed day and a team that meets at a set time carry some of it for you.

10. Mirror work and ego work

Part two said that what happens to you works like a mirror. A colleague’s tone, a partner’s silence, a stranger in traffic: whatever hooks me points at something in me that still needs work. This section takes that seriously as a working rule: I take responsibility for what happens around me. That never means letting people hurt you.

It sounds like an insult and it’s closer to a lever. If I can’t control the world and I can control myself, then the only place I can ever change a result is on my side of it. If a person hooks me, something in me is not in order, and I don’t need to work out whose fault it was. I go first, I say sorry first, I take the step in the conflict, and I check what shifted.

When someone harms you, you react, and sometimes the right reaction is to walk away or even fight back. What the mirror asks about is the state the reaction comes from. Do I do it because I see it as the best course of action, or because hate or fear is making the decision for me? The same step away can be a clear choice or a flinch, and from outside they look identical.

There’s no beating yourself up in it either, because guilt is another clamp. Mirror work is looking, and a person who looks without flinching is in better shape to change than one who is busy punishing themselves. The mirror is something you hold up to yourself, and holding it up to someone else is a way of skipping the work.

The clearest case I have is a team member I worked with very closely, and we had regular conflicts. This person was very stubborn and very emotional, and once the emotion rose, nothing I said landed. It happened with many people, but I dealt with this team member more than most. In that period our teacher was trying to get across that if we make the internal decision to change our relationship to another person or to a situation, we can change it almost at once, and that learning to make this internal click is one of the biggest keys to growing. I decided to take it seriously.

Then we had an enormous fight. I got crazy angry because once again the team member would not understand what I was trying to say, and I said we should stop and go our separate ways for a moment. I sat in another room, livid, asking how I could change my relationship to this and how I could let it go. It was close to prayer. It felt like the lever on a railway track in the cartoons, the one that is supposed to switch the rails and is so rusty it barely moves, except that this lever was inside me. Moving it was one of the hardest things I have done. After about ten minutes it moved.

I went to find the team member to apologize. Calming down quickly after a fight had never been this person’s way, and the anger could last for days. But before I had said more than my first word, the team member was in a completely different state. So I learned that the internal click is possible and that it works. I did it a few more times over the years, it got easier each time, and it was never that hard again. I haven’t been that angry in many years.

That is also what repair looks like: quick and light. A person who has hurt someone and leaves it for a week has added a clamp. A person who says “I’m sorry, that was me” the same afternoon, without an essay, has removed one. The usual suspects behind the hook are pride, offense and the habit of judging, and the work on them has a name, ego work, which is a grand title for noticing them every time they show up.

It’s much harder alone, which is why it comes late in the list: you can’t see which hooks you have until someone else leans on them.

What you can check

After a few months of practice, alone, in a pair or in a team, ask: do you produce the thing you said you would? Does anything outside you change, and if it doesn’t, why not? How fast do you say sorry first now? Over the last year, are you more fulfilled, or more bleak? Put the answers on the chart from Part one, and ask again a month later.

And one question for the road: if you had the energy of a whole team and no direction, what would you do with it? Then ask who in your life could tell you.

Sources

1. Making the decision

5. The team