Living on the Edge

Find your edge--and then learn to go beyond it.

By Ezra Bayda

However, understanding the connection between practice and the rest of our life means addressing many different concerns. For instance, how are you practicing in your relationships—with your spouse, your children, your parents, the people at work? How many resentments do you still hold on to? Do the same people as ever in your life trigger anger, contempt, or other believed judgments? To what extent can you say, "I'm sorry," and really mean it? When a problem arises, can you say yes to practicing with it, even when you hate what's happening? And when criticism comes at you, are you willing to work with your reactions when they arise, instead of justifying them?

The Heart of Experience

The answers to questions like these give us the measure of our practice. This measure is nothing magical or mysterious. It's simply the increasing ability to know what our life is, as well as the growing understanding that to practice with our life means to practice with everything we meet. Practice isn't just about sitting on a cushion trying to feel calm.

It is not at all uncommon for students to ask their teachers to measure their practice for them. The question itself, if we're not aware of what we're really asking, is already one small measure of where we are. Asking "How am I doing in my practice?" is like asking "Am I OK?" or "Am I acceptable the way I am?"

A friend recently told me she learned three things about herself in assessing her practice: She was addicted to her thinking, she was attached to her emotions, and she didn't want to stay in the present moment for more than a few seconds at a time. This might sound like familiar bad news, but is there really any problem with this? At least there's awareness of where she's stuck. What is unfortunate is believing our judgments and discouraging thoughts about what we see—"I'm a bad student," "I'll never really change," and so on.

We all want to change, to make our lives better. What we don't realize is that most transformative changes are slow and almost imperceptible; we continue to believe that our lives should be significant-ly different after practicing for only a few years. But it's not as if we go in to see a teacher, full of our fears, and come out fearless! Nor can we go to a retreat full of confusion, have a deep experience, and then remain permanently clear. We would like to see dramatic changes, but this isn't how practice works. Sometimes we don't even notice the ways it erodes our habitual protective strategies, until one day we find ourselves in a situation that had always made us anxious or angry or uptight, and we notice that the anxiety, the anger, or the closed-down quality is gone.

Seeing Beyond Confusion

Rather than "How am I doing?," the real questions are "Where am I still shutting down in fear and self-protection?" and "Where do I meet my edge, beyond which I'm not ready to go?" Practice is about noticing and experiencing these places—not with heaviness or guilt but just as something to be worked with—and then seeing how to take small steps beyond them.

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