Our life is Our Practice by Joe Goodding

April 1^st, April Fools’ Day… How appropriate that today is the day that Ivolunteered to lead the Sunday meditation for Janet! Actually, doing

this on April Fools’ Day is a support for me to relax into my humanness and not take myself so seriously, and decreases my internalized pressure and stress to be perfect, to do this perfectly.

As I speak, simply let my words pass by as if you are sitting on a river bank and are watching the water flow past. May what I say be beneficial to you. If it is not, simply let it go by.  This is the title I have chosen for today’s dharma talk, “Our Life Is Our Practice”. This means that everything in our life, everything we encounter, everything we experience… what we label as the good, the bad… the beautiful, the ugly… the easy, the difficult… the pleasant, the unpleasant… everything is potentially useful for our practice, whether you consider your practice as “Buddhist” or not. Now the above dichotomies are simply labels that we may impose upon our experiences to help our human mind relate to our world, categorize our world, make sense of our world. However we interpret our experience or label our experience, we can bring attention and mindfulness to everything we experience in this life of ours, our thoughts, our emotions, our perceptions, our actions and reactions, our interactions, and our relationships. All is relevant to our practice. In this way I also believe that we can say, “Our Practice Is Our Life”.

I had thought that perhaps I could call this talk, “My Life Is My Practice” in that my life experience is different from each of yours which is also different from everyone else’s in this room. If we do this, if we say, “My Life Is My Practice”, and everyone else’s life is his, her or their practice, then it seems to me to imply a greater separation among us, that each of us is going about her/his life independently from each other while occasionally bumping up against or interacting with one another.

However, I think that we are more interdependent upon one another than we consider. In studying Buddhist thought and philosophy, I often hear and read that no thing exists independently of everything else. Consider, how did you get here this morning?...  For those who rode in a car, who made your car? Who designed, mined, milled, manufactured, and produced all of the parts and substances (including the gas and oil), and put them together to make up our “cars”? How did we “obtain” our cars? Who designed and made our streets upon which we drive our cars? For those who walked here, as well as all of us, who made and produced our shoes or sandals?... And our clothing?... Who has provided us with the use of this room in this building?... Who designed and built Unity Temple?... We can expand this to consider all life upon this planet, the development of human culture, language and civilization, our interdependency with our natural environment … and our connection and relationship with our sun and solar system… and the entire universe. Therefore, our interdependent life is our interdependent practice.

Come back to the present moment, feel your breathing, in and out… feel your life force in your body. Feel your aliveness. You deserve to be here. You deserve to be alive.

This relates to another concept that I frequently hear or encounter along this Buddhist path. That is the Preciousness of our Human Birth. I know both personally and professionally that many of us, perhaps all of us, have had difficult and painful life experience in our relationships with our parents, caretakers, family members and/or partners. (My personal life experience has significantly influenced my professional career in mental health, substance abuse treatment & prevention, and social work.)

Regardless of trauma that we may have experienced, our biological parents conceived us and birthed us, and for that fact alone we may be grateful. Yes, there may also be traumatic experiences and feelings to process, and the fact that we are alive with consciousness as human beings places us upon a path that Buddha encourages us to follow.

The Buddha described the Four Noble Truths which include the existence of suffering, the origin of suffering, the cessation of suffering, and the way out of suffering that is the Noble Eightfold Path. This is the path that the Buddha asks us to try out for ourselves, not to blindly accept his words, but to put it into practice in our daily lives.

I am certain that each of us could describe suffering that we personally experienced in the past or now in the present, and that each of us could describe that which we wish we did not have to deal with in our personal lives, whether it be personal habits, self-concepts, emotions, relationship patterns or anything else that brings us to suffer.

That which we find personally difficult is where we need the compassion of the Buddha (the Buddha nature of ourselves and others), the Dharma (teachings of love & understanding) and the Sangha (those who love us & support us) to guide us along our respective paths. I believe that we are doing the best that we can do, and that we deserve to love ourselves and to be loved by others.