Imagine for a moment you are the spokesperson for an organization that specializes in a technology that has the potential to change lives for the better and you’ve experienced this change firsthand in your own life. As a spokesperson, you’ve responded to numerous questions of all varieties, always looking to use the most precise language you can find, language that can create an environment of possibility in the minds of people you are in conversation with.
Over the years, it’s become apparent how the language that comes through you has evolved and been honed. And with some questions you frequently and repeatedly speak to, your response is never twice the same, but patterns emerge: similar sequences of words and phrases, similar intonations, cadences, emphasis.
This is the Language of Practice. It is a gift from all those who have traveled the path before us. The Language of Practice feels to me like a kind of road map with every nuance, inflection and pause coming from and pointing to the experience of the joy of being with Life exactly as it is.
Here’s an experience I’ll bet we’ve all had. I read or hear something practice-related, and it’s clear I have no idea what’s being talked about but I can feel the words have gone IN and, at some level, LANDED. I am aware of a resonance, a shift in the internal landscape—like something long forgotten trying to re-emerge, but not quite there yet! There’s possibility and mystery in it. I sense the person using those words does not want to get something from me or get me to do something, but that they’re describing something they’re looking at and inviting me to step into the place where they’re standing and experience Life from this new perspective.
Conditioned mind looks to control the opening by saying, “If you can’t have or describe the experience right now, what good is it?” It continually suggests ways to rework or translate the Language of Practice to better correlate with its level of understanding, making it a road map that only loops back into suffering.
I keep expanding the opening by recording those particular words in my own voice and then listening often, repeatedly maintaining an openness to deeper understanding. Perhaps a day or two later, or 6 months or two years, in a moment of grace and an inner exclamation of “Ah-ha!” I’ll find myself having the experience the words were pointing to. This often comes with a distinct sense I’m no longer just looking through my own eyes but through the eyes of all who have ever looked from this place, seeing what they saw—“Mingling eyebrows with the Ancestors,” as the old Zen expression goes.
From this vantage point, the accuracy and the aptness of the road map I was given in the very beginning becomes apparent. It also becomes apparent that while I am HERE, it makes no sense not to accept the second invitation implied in the Language of Practice—to stand squarely on the shoulders of all who have gone before and see ever more clearly, ever more deeply.
Gassho
Chris