No Solitary Dharma Practitioners

 A friend of mine, Ryan Rose Weaver, has a wonderful Substack, In Tending, on caregiving, creativity, and contemplative practice. We held the interview over a Google doc and talked a lot about many things (including my late mother, a queer soft butch doctor with the Appalachian sweetness of Dolly Parton). One of my favorite questions that Ryan asked was what I thought about solitary dharma practitioners.

I responded to this question in the interview and wanted to share my thoughts on that topic here because I think it’s an important one. I’ll post again when the full piece comes out!

Ryan: In what ways do you think solitary practitioners waking up impacts the world at large? 

Sarah: There is really no such thing as a solitary practitioner. Everyone depends on someone else. Interdependence is one of the most profound insights of Buddhism, but because we’re so materialistic and caught up in appearances we generally don’t have strong confidence in interdependence. We assume that we must be in the world in a very visibly active way to do good and live out the Bodhisattva vow.

There’s a heritage from Abrahamic traditions that sees participation in religion as a congregational, communal activity, and so we think all dharma must be like this, and we end up elevating our cultural lens over others—including the very people who gave us these teachings. Historically and currently, there is a long-standing monastic, communal tradition in Buddhism which exists alongside the tradition of the solitary yogin and yogini (both monastic and non-monastic), and also the tradition of the ngakpa, an ordained non-monastic practitioner. There are also people who have never taken any vows, many of whom were never formally educated, who became very awake. All these ways of practicing are a skillful means for a person to recognize the nature of awareness. I don’t personally see any of these paths as being superior to the other. It really depends on what suits the person the best.

In terms of the solitary practitioner: they only appear solitary. If you are meditating and dedicating your practice to the benefit of all beings, I don’t see how it’s possible for solitary practice to reify the “I.” In my limited experience, it’s through solitude that the lonely “I” is disrupted, and an incredible connection with all phenomena can be experienced.

The web of interbeing, as Thich Nat Hahn called it, is so sensitive that someone who spends forty years in solitary retreat in a cave still has a major impact upon others. Every being who interacts with that kind of skilled, accomplished meditator will feel the benefit of that person’s clarity, and that will influence their own mind-stream, and that influence will influence others, and so on, and so on. 

In a more tangible way, I’ve seen this happen in my own lineage. My teacher, Lama Justin von Bujdoss, was taught by a Nyingma monk named Pathing Rinpoche who meditated in solitary retreat in a cave for forty years before bringing the dharma to others.

Pathing Rinpoche wasn’t well-known, and he didn’t have very many students, but his life has had a huge impact on so many people. I never met Pathing Rinpoche but I would not be a practicing in this tradition without him. My teacher was hugely influenced by this person. He has a more visibly active role in the world than Pathing Rinpche did, in that he’s bringing teachings on dark retreat to the west, and setting up programs like a vajrayana Buddhist chaplaincy training program so that vajrayana practitioners can provide spiritual care for others in places like hospitals, hospices, and prisons. Pathing Rinpoche is one of the causes that someone—maybe even right now—is holding a dying person’s hand, or why someone is comforting a grieving person who has just learned about the death of a loved one. This is how that web of interbeing works. Solitude does not mean isolation.

Because Pathing Rinpoche meditated alone in a cave for forty years, he knew his own mind in a very powerful way. He has impacted more beings than we can imagine because of this. And without all the yoginis and yogins who taught and influenced him, he wouldn’t have achieved this type of awakening. They did a great service for the world by transforming their minds in solitary retreat.

Dewdrops on a spider web. Sometimes the more-than-human world shows us the web of interbeing!

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This is a blog now.

I’ve been rethinking my newsletter, which is hosted on Substack, and shifting how I want to write in free and public formats. 

This largely came about because of my own capacity as a parent caring for two young children, one of whom is under the age of five, and as a person with a day job, and a working writer who is starting two new longer projects, one of which might be a short story (or a novel? I can never tell!) the other which will hopefully turn into a book-length memoir-in-essays. Also, I listened to this great conversation between Amelia Hruby and Seth Werkheiser on the Off The Grid podcast, and became terribly nostalgic for the way we used to keep blogs, the way other people feel nostalgic about vinyl or print photo albums.

I started my Substack at the tail-end writing of a novella manuscript. Finishing a long writing project is never easy. It’s like being a groundhog digging in a tunnel of burrows. You quickly forget what the above ground looks like, you constantly feel a wall around you, and it can be stuffy and hard to breathe, even if you’re the kind of animal that likes a subterranean home. Substack felt, to me, like a way to poke my head out of the hole to see what else was going on around me. To get some fresh air and a snack. 

One of my favorite things about Substack was finding other spiritually-inclined readers and writers who had passions and interests outside of spirituality, and who, like me, find reverence without humor and silliness to be a bit suffocating. I found other dharma practitioners who also like frothy podcasts and peonies in June and Mary Oliver and art at the Getty and the raunchy stand-up of Ally Wong. 

The best part of Substack, as I’ve seen it, is having a supportive community of other writers and readers. It feels like you can have a kind of pen-pal communication style relationship with people, a low-key sangha created through reading and commenting and sharing posts. I always love knowing that my work has touched someone in some way. It’s a huge reason why I write. Posting a short essay each month on Substack gave me a productive, creative break from the marathon pace of finishing a novella, and it felt rewarding to have my work immediately seen and engaged with. 

Also: My inner bookseller loves championing the work of writers I admire on Substack. I think this comes from being a writer in a supportive literary community like Chicago, where there is a feeling that when the tide rises, we all float up together. I’ve had way more in-depth, meaningful conversations on Substack than I ever have had on Twitter (I got off in 2020) or Instagram. I’ve met people on Substack who I genuinely think are cool and who I would have coffee with if we lived in the same place. 

I felt FOMO occasionally on Substack, and I felt downright envy occasionally, but I could deal with those. I wanted subscribers but I didn’t want to woo subscribers, so I didn’t let metrics drive my writing. Losing and gaining subscribers was a test of equanimity, one always forced me to get in touch with my own sense of truth.

The one time I received over 200 likes on a post—about the 3rd Karmapa and Milarepa no less—I was a bit horrified. 100 likes was great. But 200+? What was I doing to gain so much approval? It made me suspicious.

I had, after all, set out to write about subjects the dharma world often ignores or dismisses. Sexuality, love, art, family life, creativity, and the frivolous shit that makes life enjoyable in the ever continuing pile-on of casualties of war, genocide, political chaos, and environmental catastrophe, and not to mention, the personal tragedies and hardships and petty meanesss that so many people quietly endure. 

I was pretty sure I had found the internet that my Gen-X husband had so innocently enjoyed in 1998, when I was a high school student, a burgeoning Gen-Yer, at a time before we insisted on categorizing each generation with these sticky labels. The best of Substack reminds me of my teenage days lurking on the Tori Amos listserv I signed up for when I was sixteen. It was a world filled with weirdos and rebels and people who dared to trust enough their own experience of the world. 

It’s an important human need: to feel seen by others, and to have the pleasure of also seeing others. 

I think that this is a very natural desire that often gets lost in the way that feeling seen has been driven to online spaces, where we are both rewarded through a gamefied system of “followers,” when so many people would just like to feel seen and see others in a way that is human. More than any other platform, I think Substack has given me the pleasure of seeing others in a way that is far more genuine than most social media. That being said, I think it’s very telling that the people who read your Substack are not “readers” but labeled as “subscribers.” 

Because Substack doesn’t want the experience to be about reading. 

Substack is not a list-serv from the glorious wild days of the 1998 World Wide Web. It’s propelled by an algorithm, propelled by our engagement not only on how often we post a newsletter, but how often we comment on others work, how often we restack work, and how often we post on Notes. I was sort of okay with all of that. 

What I wasn’t prepared to deal with was losing my attention span for actual, real, honest-to-god books and long-form essays. 

As a parent of young children, reading on your phone can feel like an adult conversation at a park; you’re desperate to talk with someone who doesn’t need you to open their yogurt pouch. I read newsletters on my phone while my four-year-old daughter played in the bath, and in the car parking lot while I waited for my ten-year-old son to get out of piano lessons, and on the couch after a long day while my daughter would ask for a new kind of snack every ten minutes. The medium allowed to pause whatever I was reading, rinse the blueberries, put them in a bowl, wipe down the counter, and then continue on to an 800 word newsletter topic that usually focused on a timely but ephemeral topic that has, like art critic Dave Hickey once said, “the expiration date of a gallon milk.” 

I found that I wasn’t reading as much anymore, and I couldn’t blame it on having young children. I am a reader. Fast, note-taking, ravenous. Even in the fatigue of parenting an infant (before I ever got onto Substack) I could summon up the attention to read books that will give you carpal tunnel syndrome. I read Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism when my daughter was six months old (a feat which astonishes me, I don’t know what that woman was thinking). I read the door-stopper of a book, The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber and David Wengrow when she was a year-old, and before bed, because I’m the sort of nutty person who finds arguments about Hobbes vs. Rousseau and civilization to be kind of relaxing when they’re written for a popular audience. 

Substack made me feel like I was reading, but it wasn’t wholesome, real reading. It was sugar, a high-glycemic index kind of stuff, not a well-prepared, three course, rich meal. My Goodreads list fell to the wayside. I scrolled on my phone, reading in the spared moments of parents and work, but not in the diligent way that all writers know how to read--with a pen or pencil in hand, to teach yourself how to create from what you are taking in. There’s enough research out there (Google it) which demonstrates that we don’t read as well on screens. I started noticing that when I picked up a book, I simply didn’t have the will or attention to wade in fully.

Substack likes to claim that it’s the maverick of the publishing industry, an outlet for independent voices. And this is true. Many people have discovered that--yes--they have it in them to write to an audience that wants to hear them, and this inspires them to write books. But the medium of Substack--a tiny screen in your hand--does not lend itself to the cognitive work of reading a really damn good essay with an air-tight argument, one that has been reviewed by an editor who won’t let you be lazy about transitions or sources on hearsay. It’s definitely not the medium for a literary short story that will reward you handsomely, fulsomely, but only if you pay attention. 

It is a fancy blog. And that’s cool, because I like fancy blogs. But this isn’t the kind of reading I want to spend my life doing, and it’s not the kind of writing I want to spend my life doing either. 

I’m not an extremist about much of anything, so I’m not deactivating my account or moving to Ghost, but I am, going to blog here more, and less there, and focus the hours I put into writing and also formatting my newsletter’s short essays into a book of fully developed essays, because that is what I’m hungry for as a reader, and that’s what makes me feel full. 

What we ingest eventually becomes us--the tallow of our bones, the quantity of red blood cells, the luster of our hair. 

And I want to feel mostly made from books, not newsletter posts.

“Joyful Effort: Practice & Play”

New Substack post + A professional development workshop at StoryStudio

I wrote about the Buddhist concept of "joyful effort" as it relates to practice and play in writing. I also discuss the importance of ritual in my writing practice, Malcom Gladwell’s 10,000 hours rule, the Sanskrit word “lila,” and Van Gogh’s mediocre (and maybe just plain bad) early drawings. I'm delighted that so many people have found this article to be encouraging!

Excerpt from “Joyful Effort: Practice & Play”

I also taught a secular version of this mindset in a professional development workshop StoryStudio, a nonprofit creative writing based in Chicago where I work as a consultant. The instructors and staff are incredibly talented and hardworking. In this hybrid online/in-person workshop, we discussed strategies on how to teach practice and play in the creative writing classroom, and why these mindsets are so important in our own writing practices.

If you’re a business or nonprofit leader who would like this training adapted for your staff, please reach out using the contact form.

Below is the description for the training:

Our most dedicated students often experience the same complaint that we feel in our own writing: this work is hard.

We should acknowledge that writing takes discipline and effort, but how can we also encourage our students to infuse their writing process with joy and playfulness? What are ways in which the time spent “warming-up” for the big game invites new possibilities, spontaneity, and surprising directions? How can we communicate to our students that writing, like any other artistic discipline, takes hours of practice? And that practice is essential to mastery?

In this professional development workshop, we’ll form our own unique pedagogies around the idea of practice and peer-share some of our favorite writing exercises to help students reframe the hard work of writing as a form of play.

Thank you to everyone who showed up, online or in-person! (And thank you program curator and author, Ananda Lima, for the photos!)

Reading at Tuesday Funk on 3/2/24 + New post on Substack

Hello world!

I’m very excited to be reading at the Hopleaf tomorrow night, 3/2/24, for the Tuesday Funk Reading Series. I love, love, love the Tuesday Funk. It is never boring! I promise to read something that will transfix and delight you—and it won’t go on for too long.

Also, I have a new post on Substack, The Antidote Is Love: Relieving Chronic Pain & Less Through Meditation. Bodies are wonderful, but damn if it doesn’t hurt to have a body sometimes. This post includes Mexica/Aztec host figurines, Tibetan Body Mandalas, somatic bliss, chronic pain, my mother’s disability, holding pain with love, and the limits of healing narratives. I hope it brings a sense of comfort and freedom.

This Is All Going Away: a Substack

I’m very excited to share my thoughts on Vajrayana Buddhism in a newsletter and not just on iPhone notes! I’ll be posting observations, short essays, and sneaky-secular Dharma once a month.

You can read and sign up for This Is All Going Away here.

Or read the About page to see if this newsletter might be for you.

My first post was definitely one that made me feel a bit more vulnerable than I expected. (A new vibe for me, since I’m used to fictionalizing my emotions and dressing them up as other people). I wrote about how, as a college student, I couldn’t afford to study Dharma at a center in my hometown, and how I nearly started dancing as a stripper to study abroad in a Buddhist country.

You can read the full essay, “What Strip Clubs Can Teach Us About Dharma,” here.