Waking Up to Dharma: Reflecting on a Decade of Practice

Every Moment

“Although even when we ‘lose sight of’ the present moment, that is the quality of our present moment” (Uchiyama 2011, 152).

The path of following Dhamma is a full time job. Every moment, you are either moving towards, or away from liberation. You are either planting seeds of future becoming, or uprooting old habit patterns. As public figure Henry Rollins said:

“No such thing as spare time, free time or down time — all you got is life time. Go.”

We see this in Dhamma too — there is not a single moment in which the five aggregates are not clinging. The notion that practice can wait, is a misconception I’m slowly waking up from. Retraining the way in which one’s body-mind system is oriented towards the world is a gradual process. Moving from being patterned by five-clinging-aggregates (pañca-upādānakkhandha) to simply five-aggregates is a journey of letting go, and it takes immense practice. The practice consists of finding all the areas where you are clinging to life — where you remain under the delusion that there is something to hold on to. The first step is seeing that it’s happening all the time. The second is that it is both subtle and obvious.

The Three Poisons are neither gross, nor rare. They operate constantly, and…