Looking deeply

“Whatever came to be, practice looking deeply into its nature.” Gautama Buddha

Once, during writing practice, after listening to several people read, our teacher Natalie Goldberg urged us to reframe our questions as statements. So many of us, it turned out, asked many things of our doubtful, doubting selves that our processing of whatever was coming up was getting stopped short.

The advice felt like a breakthrough moment at the time – this could well be the unplugging of the stem that was blocking my own flow, an unleashing of the insight that would finally be yielded after pages and pages of confused wandering.

This could be the end of what Alan Watts’ described as the samsaric cycle of getting caught up in a practice of “all retch and no vomit” – the perpetual state of dissatisfaction that comes from repeatedly doing things that betray our true desires.

In the case of writing practice, this pertains to writing around the thing we wish to write about, meandering around the point but never getting there – using questions to avoid the answers.