THE ULTIMATE SOURCE OF NOURISHMENT
-- an interview with Stephen Archer
On a beautiful Spring morning recently, I climbed the concrete stairs to Stephen Archer's house for a conversation on teaching, learning and teaching, giving and receiving...
INSIGHTAotearoa : I'm really looking forward to this interview because I have the impression that you have some ideas and reflections that we might tease out together. Is that your style of teaching and learning?
Stephen Archer : Yes, very much. I find that the more I can get myself present the more that it assists me to deepen into my meditation and also to teaching. Absolutely, the less theoretical the better for me. I always like to start from a blank page. My teacher taught me this. He said that if you have to teach just clear your mind. Empty your mind first and then talk. I always figured that if I'm not willing to get present with people then how can I teach about being present?
IA : So, your teacher, is that back then or now? How long have you been working in this 'just getting present' way?
Stephen : I had a teacher for a couple of years when I was 20, but my main teacher I met when I was 22. Ajahn Sumedho was very much a great inspiration for me to ordain, he was a great role model. Although I haven't seen him for a couple of years, he has an enormous quality of stillness around him and clarity and tremendous strength, and vitality and commitment to truth. So many qualities there which inspired me hugely as a young man, enough to keep me going for a lifetime.
IA : So it still does?
Stephen : Precisely. Although I did reach a point in my thirties when I got quite a strong message from inside that it was time for me to leave the monastery. That really assisted me to expand and deepen more at that time. It seemed like a really necessary step.
IA : I'm not sure if this is a diversion or not, but I was just talking yesterday about spiritual life and being in the world, about wanting to go on a retreat and wanting to care for my granddaughter because my daughter needed me to… not just because my daughter needed me to, but because my granddaughter's company is very seductive, very lovely. I was saying, it must be much easier to live in a monastery. But you're saying that coming out into the world is also good for an expansion of spiritual life -- is that what you're saying?
Stephen : Yes, yes. Ultimately I don't think it's about location. I think the path is always in the heart wherever we are. It's just that fundamental turning, opening up -- but also of course on a conditional level I'm hugely affected by environment and people. So being in the monastic environment for thirteen years had a huge effect on me. The contrast of being out of the monastery generated insight because, in my experience, contrast can generate insight.
Being celibate can create an understanding of what sexuality is about, fasting can generate insight about what food is all about and keeping silent can give a lot of insight into what speech is all about. So just shifting context sometimes if you are a meditator can be a great learning experience.
IA : What do you think your biggest learnings were from that contrast… coming out of the monastery?
Stephen : One of my big learnings was that awakening doesn't belong to the monasteries exclusively and monks don't have a kind of monopoly on that one. So it was wonderful to see spirit in family life and working life and to meet good-hearted people and see beautiful people -- the diversity of our humanity in all its colours -- and to sort of have a sense of feeling my way into all of that and my connection with it all, making myself a part of it.
You know, monastic life is very cloistered. There was a lot of experience I didn't have from that perspective, so that was one of the releasing things for me. And it sort of deepened my trust because I didn't have the monastic discipline any more to hold me. Because you must... be celibate, you must not take drugs, you must get up at five o’clock and meditate, you must not have money. To have all that taken off and then to deepen my trust because awareness continues.
IA : When you describe it like that, referring to what you said before about being present, I find sometimes when I am surrounded by lots of rules that I become less present because I am thinking, "I must not… I must not… I must…".
Stephen : It's a slippery fish isn't it, being a human being! When the impulse towards spirit awakens within us it seems very simple and direct in what it's inviting us into, but to really embrace the whole of our self and to sustain a relationship where we are developing mindfulness is such a huge task. There are so many devious ways that our minds and our egos resist the process. So it can be incredibly useful to be inside of quite a rigid container because all our resistance suddenly becomes very obvious and is up for grabs -- because we can reflect on it and see it. It flushes a lot of stuff out. But then the other side is that a container like a monastery can become routinised and institutionalised, and there is a great danger that bits of ourselves will go dead. We can go unconscious and just repeat rituals and routines over and over -- and can get narrow and fixated.
A lot of the time in meditation and spiritual life, I am working with the tendency for my attention and my energy to get fixated on the conditioned realm and what's required to have to keep relaxing and letting go of the places where it is fixated. I see people who have a 9 to 5 job for years and they just get into that. They might have entered into it with great sincerity and meaning, but after a time it just becomes a prison for them, so they leave that job and have a huge release of expansion of a bigger world view and bigger view of themselves. Other people can have that releasing out of twenty years of family life, or leaving a country, or becoming sick and overcoming an illness, or whatever.
[Silence]
IA : So, I'm caught up in what you're telling me so I have no question in me at the moment… silence… peaceful silence…
Stephen : Well, it's really nice just to be isn't it? We could get limited by thinking that an interview has to be questions and answers! We sort of step out of that and here we are still going, aren't we?
IA : Although we are somewhat limited by the printed page as long significant silence only takes a small space on the page.
[Laughter]
IA : But what came up in me when you were talking about being present, and I don't know if it's relevant, but recently I was with a young teenager who is very angry and suicidal, whose mother is on the methadone programme. The mother came in with a brand new baby and I was working with another mental health worker who said, "Here's the problem, right here". Then, when I was sitting with this mother who was quite spacy, as I just sat with her not doing anything, not trying to find out anything, just being with her, she began to tell me in this very slow motion way about all the things she'd tried to do to help her daughter. She had been to the school and talked to the Dean, and she'd done all these things. I thought it would be so easy just to discount her. She looks like an addict, and we know she is, but this could also just be her way. And it is so easy to go through the motions, to think you know yet actually lose the ability to find out...
Stephen : Well, good on you for just pausing there.
IA : ...rather than filling out the risk management forms. But I think more and more in my own work practice, now that I am older and practice mindfully, I've discarded a lot of methodologies and can just be in the present moment rather than searching for a route to this person's recovery. But in the mental health system, you are supposed to have a route that can be measured to everything.
Stephen : I really respond to that with the monastery thing -- the container. It opens the question of methods and non-methods -- having techniques -- whether it's in therapy or meditation, versus not. And it's always a challenging dynamic because I keep thinking in my teaching -- I teach beginners a lot which is a great joy. People come along and ask, "Where do I begin? How do I get started? Which bit do I have to hold onto which bit do I let go of?". As we know, meditation is not like that.
I can't say to somebody, "It's already happening, relax … just be", because just being is not easy. If they could just be, they wouldn't be coming to do beginner's meditation. So giving people some sort of step-by-step thing to go by is useful, but it's a delicate thing because I don't want people to become attached to the steps and to think that if they sit here and follow their breathing for an hour, that that's going to do it for them.
Even though we'd like that. When we get started, we'd like something to do it for us. But at a certain point it's as if the techniques fall away and people are in freefall in the universe.
IA : A wonderful image
Stephen : Well, I do talk about buoyancy. I see how the technique thing, whether it's a technique of being in a monastery or whatever, is definitely functional. A meditation technique holds us, a monastery holds you, and there are various effects that come from that. One is its steadiness. I think a lot of us are very unsteady in our thinking and our energy, our emoting, and all that. And just to get steady and then -- because we can start to relax -- then we can experience ourselves in a more natural and relaxed way and we can just experience the impulse of what is just here, like the experience of just being human, and we start to feel into that. At a certain point I give them a bit of a push and say, "the present moment is buoyant, let yourself feel the buoyancy of the present moment, you can float in it and you don't need to be doing a breathing technique or some meditation thing, this is it."
I think of it as falling back into awareness. That's a big trust thing and normally, like an animal, we check out something and give it a sniff and get a bit closer before we feel safe. People don't normally take a running jump into the present moment because it requires a lot of trust to let go that much and to be trusting that we won't sink -- that something actually holds us up. We don’t trust that the universe is buoyant and we are madly kicking and swimming and struggling because we think we're going to drown. We are always trying to get somewhere, whereas actually we're okay. And that's one of the big discoveries available in meditation.
IA : It's huge isn't it, and one of those discoveries we have to do over and over again?
Stephen : Yes, for sure. It’s not a one-shot affair for most people. And there's a whole lot of paradoxes around that. We can get lost in thinking, "how many times do I have to do this and why?” and get frustrated. I think part of the trouble is how much we assess our own practice. I was talking recently to someone who was a teacher and a headmistress for about twenty to thirty years. During a retreat she expressed a concern that children in school are over-assessed and she didn't think it's good for their well being or their growth. I think it may be the same in mental health. In meditation we do this to ourselves: we assess our practice, "Am I making progress?", and then the judgements follow. So, when we have an experience of coming home to ourselves in a really satisfying and beautiful way, then wake up the next day and feel like crap, we think, "what's happened here? I've lost it, how do I get it back?"
IA : Or you think you've managed to discover that really the universe does what it does despite all your worrying and cogitating, but then something happens and you find yourself doing the same worrying over and over again, even while thinking, "why am I, because I know this, but why am I doing this again". Did you read Christine Dann's article in the September INSIGHTAotearoa? She was talking about research on neural pathways and saying that, in an evolutionary sense, we needed to be planning in order that our species might survive, and that is why the mind does so much planning. It's not biological for us to just let the universe support us.
Stephen : Well, that's interesting. I'm thinking of a caveman with a year planner, a Filofax -- and I always thought things were much simpler then.
IA : Well, they probably were, but a certain amount of vigilance would have been required, I suspect.
Stephen : Vigilance ... it's the huge challenge isn't it, being in a body in the conditioned world, dealing with mortality and the limitation of it all, and to trust what it is that has brought us into birth, what has brought us into life, and what will take us out of life. To let ourselves be taken by that is a tall order, as you say.
IA : And it's a tall order in market-driven, capitalist economies where people keep telling you that to be old and poor would be the worst things, and we should be worried about the future all the time.
Stephen : That's right. There are huge forces in the world playing on us. I see meditation and spiritual life as a very radical thing. It starts off very small, innocuous even, as it doesn't look like we’re doing anything. It doesn't look like the action of a revolutionary! But internally, the shift is huge -- to start being referent to awareness itself rather than the conditioned realm. To actually trust that, rather than to just go to something out there, because whatever we are trusting out there is impermanent, as the Buddha said.
IA : Everything is. The idea that you can control where your life goes is part of that too.
Stephen : Yeah, but we want the story to have a happy ending.
IA : So when you were talking before about teaching beginners, how would you teach the letting go?
Stephen : I'm glad you asked me that because this year we started this new group in Wellington. A practice group for intermediates. Ramsey suggested it to me -- a downtown group that can be a context for experienced meditators who can be nourished by getting together and sharing about like matters. It made me think not just about the issues that face beginners, but what kind of issues people might face when they're several years into this or several retreats into this. I'm thoroughly enjoying the group and the opportunity it gives me.
So with your question, one way I think about this is that when people start in meditation, their experience of themselves is often busy, active, chaotic, distracted. If they try to make an effort to centre attention, or rest attention, or rest in being, they may not find that they can get much of a feeling for it, because their energy is shooting all over the place. To address people in this state, a simple meditation technique is really helpful. Whatever that technique is, it's often repetitive and symmetrical -- like the breathing. You repeat it and it's a symmetrical pattern. If we bring a symmetrical pattern into consciousness then it balances our attention and the result is we start feeling more harmonious within ourselves. We experience great benefits in our body, because our body loves it too. I mean there is so much research now about the medical benefits of meditation -- beyond a doubt we know that good things happen in the body. We've known this for thirty or forty years -- huge benefits just on the physical level.
IA : There's a study I read years ago where someone tested the effects of Prozac on a group of depressed people and the effects of meditating and exercise on another. The results for the group using meditation and exercise were as good, even better in many cases, than the results for the people using Prozac.
Stephen : Yes. It really is significant because meditation helps to balance the body. Then because the mind starts to get calm with the meditation object, and then with a symmetrical pattern, it's much easier to see the centre. With an asymmetrical pattern we don't know where the centre is, so it's also a centring technique because when you're with your breathing for a while you start to be aware of where your centre is. So without really trying, being with the breathing hour in, hour out, teaches us these things.
People need to have a phase where… I just say, "Head down, bum up. Just go for your breathing. Don't think about anything else. Do that for quite a while." Once people start to get into that and get some calm, the next stage is to slowly peel back the meditation object to the point where it can become disposable.
So next you're in awareness, you're present, because of course that's the next thing. Getting present with ourselves is a huge part of it, but we think we're present with the breath, so I then say, "Okay, now, ever so slowly I'm going to take the breath away and you're still here and you can still be calm and centred and present." And it's like, just feel this, just notice this, and so people start moving out into that and trusting. That's where people start waking up to the fact that the Buddha is within them or the path is unfolding from within their own heart.
They're not externally referenced with meditation technique or a teacher. They realise that their own being is, moment by moment, inviting them into a relationship with life and that then becomes their meditation. And there is no way that anyone can say what that is going to look like for anyone else. There is always a unique creative journey for everyone. It might take one person to a monastery, somebody else might end up digging ditches in Ethiopia, someone else might end up being a mother, somebody else might be working in a bank. It is just whatever unfolds from there. It is just that fundamental relationship and commitment that people have within themselves, so there is a lot of surrender in that. That's the funny thing: we all want to come home to ourselves, we all want peace, we all want to feel good and well and healthy -- and yet very often we're not prepared to give what it takes to get all that.
Just think what it takes to be physically healthy: it means we don't eat a load of junk food -- but how many people are prepared not to eat junk food? How many people are afraid to exercise regularly? With meditation, the demand is invisible and subtle but mountainous as well. And that is the demand: to get present, and to get present we have to let go. And to let go, we have to get rid of the big preoccupation. The demand is to let go of "I", me, mine, that big static blur -- our greatest addiction really -- and to get present.
Ajahn Chah, my teacher's teacher, used to say, "If you let go a little you have a little bit of peace, if you let go a lot you have a lot of peace and if you let go completely you have complete peace." So when we start meditation, we sense our impending doom. We sense that if we keep going down this path we've got a horrible feeling we know what it's going towards, which is to letting go completely. It's not like there’s something in this for us. We're going to get this or that. It's that we're being invited into falling back and trusting in not knowing. So, when I'm working with the practice group I reflect on what is it that will assist people to move forward with this process.
These are a different set of considerations from those I have when I set out to teach beginners, because then it's more a matter of crunching the techniques, inspiring them to give it a go. We've got to start drawing upon much deeper resources within ourselves to keep going. That's where community comes in: we're only just beginning to tap into the resource of community. I mean we are a fledgling community here in Wellington and, you know, I don't think it's about ideas. We can have ideas of how to grow the insight community -- let's have a barbie, a discussion group or whatever -- but for me, the consideration has got to come out of our own practice, which is a deep listening intelligence. It's that which assists us to move forward and then recognise that in community there is an enormous strength. Because when you meditate and when you are true to your own heart, you communicate that to me simply through your being -- you don't even have to look at me, you are it. It's real and so it's community. We communicate our practice to each other all the time and there's tremendous nourishment and tremendous mirroring and companionship that comes from that.
That's one of the big strengths and it's the challenge: when you're talking about the secular society, we've thrown out so much of the spiritual. You were saying before the interview that you don't like getting too close to isms. We don't want to get like we're a club here, I agree. We don't want to go there. So what do we do? How do we address this change? Otherwise we may find ourselves as isolated meditators that have a deep yearning to grow and feel lonely with that. Not just alone but also lonely. Also, that spiritual companionship is priceless.
IA : And is that also about the "I"? Is the "I" a kind of anathema to community in a way?
Stephen : Yes, well, I've lived in community of all kinds for years and you've got to be prepared to be very flexible with the "I" bit. I think that there needs to be a transpersonal commitment -- something beyond the personal. Otherwise if we get together as a community -- you and me and her and him -- we may just have endless friction which could be quite damaging and disheartening. Whereas if we focus on the transpersonal bit, it's like saying, what is the ground we all stand on here? What is our business together? What is the business we've got together which is not about who is right or wrong? We haven't got time for that stuff. We're all going to die. But we have got some business here and it is the most meaningful business going -- you don’t find it in the Yellow Pages! It's very real for us and it makes a difference: our practice, our spiritual life. That's what we want -- to keep that always in sight. Now what that will look like we don’t really know. Whether it's three people in a room or three hundred people, whether Wellington Insight Meditation Community has a big centre downtown with gold doors and flashing lights or just sits in Island Bay for the next twenty years, is not it.
All that other stuff will grow if we get conscious. When we come together, what is it that emerges in the present moment when we come into relationship, when we meditate together? It's very new ground. We don't even know how to articulate that very often. We can talk about everything else but we don't really have words for this -- what emerges when we go into meditation with great sincerity together and what is it that promotes that emerging. I think it requires deep listening. I don't think we can rush in with too many answers and ideas and plans -- I think we have to stay with the listening.
IA : I'm having a million thoughts, like if only we'd listened more over time the planet wouldn't be in the shape it's in, and all kinds of ideas. I was talking to someone recently who talked about the liberation of being on retreat where no one knew her and because of not talking she felt very known in a profound sense.
Stephen : That's right. We need to be quite mindful of the power, the place, of words, and I realise for yourself with INSIGHTAotearoa it's words. And it's interesting because our practice has a huge component of silence as well. So there's an amazingly creative relationship there. I think as long as that relationship is even there is no problem. But we must be careful that the words don't start dominating the silence or co-opting the silence, taking it into itself, because the deep listening can get lost if we fill it up too much.
Another thing about beginners is normally, as they get started in meditation, they have to start emptying themselves out because they are too full, they have too much inside themselves. It doesn't help, it makes us confused. We're all really intelligent people: we've all studied way more education than our parents or other generations have had, we're as clever as hell but we're still suffering.
When I was living in Thailand as a monk, they had just passed a law that everyone should have six years' education. I thought, "that's funny". I'd had sixteen years or something, but I was just reflecting on what we consider to be standards in society. Again, coming back to meditation, there was a radical thing to say there: okay you're a professional person, you've been to university, you've got all this stuff in your mind, all this thinking. How can you start making more space in your mind? More quiet? My god, I'll have to let go of something to make room inside, make a space there and not fill it with anything. That's essential, otherwise meditation is hopeless.
IA : I just got into this conceptual thinking about postmodernism. I heard this postmodern sociologist talking to psychologists a couple of years ago and arguing the postmodern idea that there is no true self, no "I". In his argument he said, "Just imagine that you could achieve it. Peeling away all the layers, the skins of the onion until you reach it, the centre, yourself... and it turns out to be Bart Simpson."
Stephen : Yeah right! [laughter]
'IA : But it's interesting isn't it, that academic thought is moving towards those principles of buddhist thought or eastern thought -- that what exists is only the stories we tell ourselves? We are only the story we tell ourselves about ourselves in any one moment, which is what one finds out without going to university if one meditates.
Stephen : That's an amazing insight isn't it. The stories we tell about our lives -- ongoing, incomplete always.
[Long silence]
IA : So who looks after the teachers? I was thinking, here you are, holding all these people and helping them with their practice and sharing what you've learned over a long period of time, loving people through it in a way. So who looks after you?
Stephen : That's a great question. It sparked something off in me. I hadn't thought of that really. First of all it's a reciprocal process and I don't know if people realise that. Because often people say oh thank you, thank you, but I get nourished as well by sitting with people. I love it, I really do, and it calls up a discipline in me which is good for me. And I love the diversity of when we sit together. The different things that different people bring and share and what we work through together. It's incredible to just feel all of that. So I do get nourishment from just sharing my practice in that way. I also get some financial nourishment which is very important for me … hugely!
I take time out to do my own retreats. I just spent nine days fasting, I broke my fast yesterday. So I go off and go to retreats.
IA : So do you go to other people's retreats?
Stephen : Yes, This last retreat was run by someone I know well. I go to men's groups. It's important for me to have contexts where I am not the teacher, where I can fall apart. It's not appropriate for me to fall apart when I'm a teacher, say when I'm teaching a retreat in Hamilton, because people have driven a long way and they have come to receive what I can share with them. But there are times when I need to feel into my weaknesses and feel the pain or vulnerability of that in contexts where I can explore what that's about for me in a peer situation. So I've done a lot of psychodrama and men's groups, and I do my own meditation practice.
I sit here, with my partner Rachel and that's hugely nourishing. The other thing is that Hugh Tennent, Lucy Schwabe and Jeremy Logan, all the teachers, we're very good friends. We don't just do meditation. We come together socially and we've just started having teachers' meetings. The four of us got together and looked at how we support each other. So those are the nuts and bolts things. Ultimately, who takes care of me is the same person who takes care of all of us which is … what do we want to call it? The presence of spirit? That which I bow to. We call it the Buddha. Buddha takes care of us… Buddha awakened… Buddha knowing… Buddha alive and breathing and knowing and feeling. That's my ultimate source of nourishment and as long as I'm referent to that and as long as I'm breathing that and feeling the breathing of that, I'm good.
IA : I just got an image of that: you in touch with the Buddha in you, and me in touch with the Buddha in you and the Buddha in me, and the person next to me in touch… and then the next person and the next and the next, and that's probably the fundamental value of the sangha?
Stephen : Yes, it's magic. Magic. Just one taste of that is just extraordinary. It's a nourishment which we rarely feel from anything: watching TV, getting on the internet, it's priceless. It's what we need to claim if we want to empower ourselves as a community.
-- Stephen Archer spoke with Gaye Sutton in September 2006 at his Wellington home