Intimacy
“How can you live your life with a bare heart, irrespective of happiness or unhappiness?” – Soko Morinaga Roshi
This essay has been edited from its original form, first published to the True Nature community on June 12, 2025
Being an ordinary human being, I prefer happiness. I would choose happiness over unhappiness every time, all other things being equal.
No matter how fortunate one’s circumstances, each of us will face challenges along the spectrum from unpleasant and stressful to harrowing and heartbreaking. Conditions always change, however, so although youth and health and relationships slip away, so do hardships and difficulties. If I cling to what I want, that very clinging taints beauty with grasping. When I try to avoid what I don’t want, aversion compounds suffering. In moments of living with a bare heart though, open to love, open to sorrow, open to what I see and how I am seen, there is a stainless, clear experience that is second to none. This bare heart is one way of expressing not just what we are cultivating on the cushion as mediators, but the freedom and openness of which one might say all other desires are reflections, and in pursuit of which all other pursuits are undertaken. One thing we can gain by looking into our moment-by-moment experience through ongoing meditation practice is what advaita teachers call “knowing what you are not.”
“We all cling to something,” said Morinaga Roshi in a lecture he gave in London decades ago, “as if clinging with all our might to something on the edge of a precipice. We may not know what it is, or may not be fully aware of it, but there is something which we feel we just cannot let go of - when all that is really needed is to just let go! But please, before letting go, get clear about what it is that you are clinging to! If you do not really penetrate this, you will let go of unimportant things, and continue clinging to the central problem.”
Arguably one of the most common misunderstandings about meditation is that the point of it is to obtain a peaceful, happy state of mind. I submit instead that the truly peaceful state of mind is a byproduct of the point of practice. Although peaceful states certainly come and go for many meditators, and masters do indeed exude a profound ease that’s often perceived from the outside as peacefulness, ordinary happiness is not the natural outcome of a classically successful meditation practice: insight is - specifically insight into the nature of all things as impermanent and interdependent. While impermanence and interdependence can seem obvious on an intellectual level, the bare experience of what these concepts imply can impact meditators like a kind of nuclear bomb that silently, completely blows through hardened structures of habits and thoughts built up over lifetimes as easily as one might scatter the ashes of incense or a single dandelion seed already detached from its head.
What remains in the wake of insights ranging from the most fleeting to the most shattering can be anything from a whiff to a deep understanding of what the Song of Awakening calls the peace of extinction, what Jean Klein calls desirelessness, and what is known in Christian mysticism as the peace that passes all understanding - the natural byproduct of a reprieve from craving and aversion. Sometimes it’s even called happiness or bliss, which may lead to more confusion than clarity because of what is lost in translation not only from written and spoken languages of different times and cultures, but also because of what is lost in translation between experience and language at all.
The peacefulness that many new meditators are seeking, then, is easily reachable by most, but it’s not the point according to the greatest teachers, and it’s a poor substitute for the profound peace that is available to those who are compelled to see how far this practice can take them.
So let’s practice seeing through everything that we are not: thoughts, patterns, worries, ideas, goals, identities. On the cushion, we break down the filters of rumination, daydreaming, sleepiness, and other distractions bit by bit as we practice returning to a focus range, intentionally calming the mind and increasing sensitivity to subtle experiences. Off the cushion, these same filters get in the way of clear and skillful relating with others, and we can break them down there too.
Last Thursday, as a professional actor shared at the end of our retreat that their heart races at the prospect of speaking in a talking circle, my attention perked up with interest. That heart racing, I’ve learned, is a reliable indicator of vulnerability & authenticity about to be expressed - qualities far more valuable than talent, eloquence, or wisdom when it comes to connecting to another person.
Like everything I see in practice, and in life through the lens of practice, the talking circle works on multiple levels and in many directions - building connection among practitioners in a community, facilitating self-discovery and self-trust, stretching muscles of courage, tenderness, earnestness, compassion, and humility. To the extent each person meets this opportunity at the end of a retreat, they open themselves further to the possibility of bare experience in every aspect of life.
It is this, and nothing less that the path asks of us.
Here, with other meditators who want to know what they can know, you have an opportunity to put down or point out the masks and the habits you carry (we all carry them) to manage and smooth our interactions. We can still be skillful and careful while practicing being authentic with each other.
Connect the best you can, then, with your own experience in moments from the seemingly mundane to the seemingly important - with the next bite of food you’re about to eat, with the jump of energy in your chest when your phone pings with a notification, with the sensation of sleepiness when you’re tired and attempting to meditate, and with the co-arising of longing and reluctance in your body when you don’t feel completely safe in a conversation. Will you speak up? Will you not? It’s not the action that matters here; the best move for you depends on so many variables. It’s all in the noticing: notice how you feel or don’t feel, talk about it with someone you trust. Notice how that feels too. This is the way to bare experience, and to the peace that remains after everything not peace has been seen through as empty.
I felt my heart open and lean in when the retreatant said that they were nervous to share in the talking circle because I knew that there was something true coming - some unvarnished vulnerability being offered up to the group with open hands. It’s what makes noble company valuable, these spoken trust falls of all degrees depending on where each person is in that very moment. Together, we look at something no one has ever seen before. What is it? I don't expect to ever be able to say, but it’s the only thing that’s ever really held my interest.
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“Let me stress again, the . . . training that we are engaged in is not a training for conceptual understanding, it is not a philosophy, nor is it aimed at an abstraction of the divine, but is a direct, immediate understanding of our everyday experiences. If we become aware of this direct understanding or this ‘taking in’ - for all are capable of it - then we can never feel lonely or isolated anymore.
“Thousands of people, though inherently part of humankind, nonetheless, feel cut off and lonely even if given words of consolation by those around them. Because they live in the midst of conceptualisations, or amidst discriminations and comparisons, they have never experienced this our world as direct, immediate, absolute reality . . . happiness can only be fully realised by direct experience of the world.” – Soko Morinaga Roshi
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