In the past, I have been asked something along the lines of: "With all that’s going on in the world, is it really okay for me to just...sit here? Watching my breath? Isn't that a little self-absorbed?"
It's an honest question, and a good one. From the outside, insight meditation can look like the height of self-indulgence. Here we are with our eyes closed, paying close attention to the rise and fall of the abdomen or the breath at the nostrils. A friend once teased me that vipassanā looked like "navel-gazing with flair." I laughed because she wasn't entirely wrong about the look. But she was entirely wrong about the heart of it.
Insight practice can appear selfish for an understandable reason: It begins with you. You investigate your own breath, your own sensations, your own mind. No one else can do this for you, and you can’t do it for anyone else. It is without a doubt, first-person work. To an unfamiliar observer, and sometimes even to practitioners from traditions that emphasize vows of universal liberation, this can look like a project of self-improvement, or worse, a quiet retreat from the suffering of the world into a private little bubble of tranquility.
But here's the thing about a bubble: it must keep someone out. And vipassanā, practiced honestly, does the opposite. It dissolves the walls.
Think about what we are really training in when we practice. We are learning to see clearly, to meet experience as it arises without grasping at the pleasant or pushing away the unpleasant. We are loosening the grip of greed, hatred, and delusion, one moment of mindfulness at a time. We are coming to understand, not as some concept but as a lived truth, that there is no solid, separate self at the center of all this, defending its territory.
We can ask ourselves: who benefits when we become a little less reactive? A little less likely to lash out when we’re tired? A little quicker to notice our own irritation before it spills out onto someone else?
Not just us, the meditator. Everyone in our life.
The clarity and kindness we cultivate in solitude shouldn’t stay on the cushion. It should walk out the door with us. It shows up in how we listen to our partner, how patient we are with our family, how we treat the cashier who is creeping along like a snail, how we hold the often-troubling news of the day without drowning in it. The Buddha was direct about this. In the Sedaka Sutta (SN 47.19), he offers a parable of two acrobats balancing on a pole. "I will protect myself," one says, and in protecting oneself with mindfulness, one protects the other. "I will protect the other," and in caring for the other with patience and gentleness, one protects oneself. The two are not in competition. Tending to your own mind is tending to the world.
We speak of the bodhisattva ideal in the Mahāyāna traditions, the magnificent vow to forgo final liberation until every last being is free. It is one of the most beautiful aspirations in all of human spirituality, and I hold it in deep respect. I would never dream of setting my practice against it.
But I want to gently push back on the idea that insight practice is the smaller, more self-interested cousin in the family of Buddhist paths. It isn't.
Think of a single mind freeing itself from a habit of anger. That freedom doesn't end at the boundary of one skull. The people who might have received that anger are now spared from it. Their evening goes differently. They carry less tension home to their families, who in turn pass along a little less reactivity to everyone they meet. We are not separate stones dropped in separate ponds. We share one water. Every ripple of equanimity, every wave of metta, travels outward in ways we can never fully trace.
This is a great example of the brahma vihāras made practical. The lovingkindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity we develop are intentionally directed toward all beings, ourselves included. Notice that bit - "ourselves included." In our tradition, you are not asked to wait at the back of the line. You are one of the countless beings worthy of care. Learning how to extend that care to yourself is often the very thing that makes it possible to extend it to others without resentment or becoming burnt out.
There's a saying that you can’t pour from an empty cup. A being who has done the work of insight practice does not become more withdrawn from the world. In my experience, they become more available to it. Steadier in a crisis, less prone to despair, more capable of staying present with another person's pain without needing to fix it or run from it.
The world doesn’t need more frantic, depleted helpers running on the fumes of their own unexamined suffering. It needs people like us who can show up, again and again, with an open heart and a clear head. That is what we are quietly building, breath by breath, on our cushions.
So, the next time someone wonders whether their practice is selfish, perhaps we can offer them this: sitting down to meet your own mind with honesty and kindness is not turning away from the world. It is one of the most generous things you can do for the world. You are training to become a person who suffers a little less and, because of that, you help to make those around you suffer a little less too.
We share the cushion, and we share the merit of being here. May our practice be of benefit to all beings - beginning with the one right here, right now.
May all beings be well and happy.
|
