Digesting Experience
byElizabeth Mattis Namgyel
As we study the life of the Buddha we realize that he asked basic human questions about happiness, suffering, freedom from suf- fering, compassion, interdependence, death, life, and the nature of things. But if we were to pare all these questions down into one es- sential question, we might come up with something like this: how do we take in the world of “things”?That is, how do we process the continuous stream of occurrences that arise in our life? How do we digest experience?
When we eat, we ingest, process, and eliminate food. Our bod- ies use food as fuel for life and eliminate what is no longer useful. It would be great to say that we digested our experience with such ease. But there is something about being human that doesn’t come naturally to us.We can’t seem to take experience in, let it work on us, and then let it go. Either we refuse to ingest experience—in which case our life doesn’t nourish us—or we hold on to experi- ence until it turns toxic. The struggle we have with experience gives us mental and emotional indigestion. Our relationship to experience is all about fighting the world, rejecting the unwanted, trying to fix things, and creating strategies for living around experience.
Someone once asked Dzigar Kongtrül Rinpoche if he was afraid to die. He answered that he was more afraid of living his life despite himself. What I think he meant here is that life presents itself to us, but we’d often prefer to live in fantasy.We’d rather not ingest our ex- perience—eat our life—in the way it presents itself to us.We’d rather be someone else, somewhere else, having a different experience.We may wonder:Why should we take in the fullness of life?That means we have to take in sadness, uncertainty, and fear. Why can’t we just take in whatever makes us comfortable?Yet this very attitude toward our experience points to the struggle we have with our world.
There is no life without experience. Life and experience are syn- onymous. Life just unfolds, so we can’t reject experience the way we can food. But we can fight it tooth and nail. And this is what I am talking about here. We can turn on the news and not really hear the names of the soldiers who died in Iraq that day. We can blame others for all the conflict in our lives and never learn to self- reflect or resolve a situation creatively. We can vent our emotions all over the place—and in doing so we may imagine that we are responding directly to life. But do we really let life in this way? Or, in reacting, are we keeping our life at bay? And if we keep our life at a distance, how can it nourish us? How can it move through us? How can we absorb it and let it work its magic?
When we look at any of the accomplished lineage masters of our tradition, we never see them struggle with conceptual or emo- tional indigestion in the way we do. They take in all experience with one taste, utilizing everything as food for realization. Experi- ence moves through their bodies, through their awareness, and nourishes them.The great masters are always “eating,” and what- ever they eat generates boundless energy, intelligence, and com- passion. It turns out that practice accomplishment is nothing more than learning to be natural with our experience—not unlike the body’s natural ability to digest food.
As practitioners we might wonder: what would it be like to be so natural, so ordinary? We should ask this question again and again, because it does away with all the fluffy fantasies we have about spirituality; all this waiting for something special to happen; all the excitement we feel when something unexplainable occurs; all the disappointment we encounter when nothing special comes our way. It directs us to the point of practice: finding contentment in being fully human, natural, and ordinary.
