Jill Shepherd: talk: Right Livelihood and retreat life

Okay, so really good to be back and to see you all after this, taking this whole month away on retreat. And so tonight I thought I'd offer a few reflections on retreat life, combined with right livelihood, because right livelihood is the next factor in this noble eightfold path that we've been exploring this entire year. I just to say at the front, I'm not sure how coherent this will be because I've been using a different part of my brain for the last month and the logic kind of part is maybe a little atrophied, so we'll see. So I'll try and give it some context. So this right or wise livelihood in the context of the Eightfold Path it's the last of the three ethical factors. So if you remember we looked at wise speech and wise action and now wise livelihood and what makes all of those wise is that they're grounded and non-harming. So there is that ethical commitment to live as harmlessly as possible. And I think the Buddha may have singled out livelihood for extra attention because it's what most of us spend most of our time doing every day. So to be clear, livelihood here is not just about making money. It's about how we live our lives more generally. So whether that's whether we're in paid work, whether we are studying or volunteering, whether we're retired, whether we're bringing up kids, whether we're a caregiver, all of these are livelihood. And it's significant that what I was pointing to just before that this is how we're spending our time and energy every day. Because as Gil Fronstel points out, in general the things that we do repeatedly have much greater consequence than the things we do only once or a few times. And the effects may ripple further out into society and deeper into our hearts. Because what we do repeatedly it strengthens those pathways in our heart and mind. So if we can really bring the teachings into every aspect of how we live, turbocharges our practice. And just as a counterpoint to that, I wonder if any of you here just in terms of work have ever worked in a job that wasn't aligned with your deepest values? A few nods, a few smiles. Yeah. Something that was sort of ethically questionable. And so you probably know the sense of it's demoralizing, right? To feel like you're putting time and energy into something that's causing harm. Maybe to yourself, to others, societally, environmentally, all of that. So you might have a sense of what we might call wrong livelihood. And hopefully you all also have some sense of the relief and the ease, the energy that comes when we are engaged in livelihoods that are in alignment with our deeper values. So we can think of wise livelihood as yet another way that we support ourselves, that we offer care to ourselves and to each other. So just in line with that idea, as I shared the other Monday morning during my recent online retreat with Gil, I shared on Monday that towards the end of that retreat, somebody asked him, what have you learned from all of your decades of dharma practice? And one of the things he said was to love everyone. And that was like, boing, wow. That statement has been percolating ever since. It's inspiring and it's also a bit daunting. So it brought up the question, really, how do we actually do that? And so I have to acknowledge I'm a pretty imperfect lover of everyone. I'm highly motivated by that as an aspiration. And during the retreat, I realized that loving everyone includes loving ourselves imperfect, though we are, and that we can't actually love other beings unless we can also love ourselves too. But in the push and pull of daily life, at least in my experience, it's pretty easy for that intention to just sort of fade into the background. So I might have that orientation, that aspiration, but life assails us with its complexity and its challenges and the relentless to-do lists. And all of our time and energy gets absorbed in just the day-to-day grind, as they call it. And it can crowd out that deeper motivation to just sit, be present, be quiet, and allow that kindness and care to grow. And so this is where retreat life as an aspect of right livelihood is so important, because as most of you know, being on retreat, it quite literally opens up space. It creates a kind of clearing in the midst of our complex lives. And in from that clearing, it's more possible to access our deeper wisdom, that intuitive understanding that is often drowned out by the noise of everyday life. So stepping into the voluntary simplicity of retreat life, moving out of the complexity of ordinary life, it metaphorically gives us breathing room. And we have the time and the space and the energy to contemplate deeper questions, questions like, well, how am I living? What am I doing with my life energy? Am I fully living in alignment with my deepest values and aspirations? And when we really sit with those questions and let them settle deeper, can reveal new perspectives, so that when we do return home, we're in a better place to be able to withstand the mainstream societal pressures. And to withstand that pressure that pushes us into relentless doing and getting and having and achieving and acquiring and so on. So that's one huge advantage of taking time on retreat. A second in relation to wise livelihood is that retreat life gives us a taste of the benefits of living a much simpler life. One that's more attuned to the natural environment and has much less of an impact on that natural environment. Even if it's just for nine days during that time, we're not driving around all over the place and we're not caught up in buying stuff that may or may not be necessary. We're not chasing after comfort and stimulation and entertainment or maybe the opposite, zoning out and making ourselves as unconscious as possible to try and escape all the existential unease. So just being on retreat, our environmental impact is much simpler. Once we get there, yeah, we have to get there, right? But once we're there and we're in one place and we're eating simply and living simply, all of that feels increasingly radical in the context of consumerist capitalist societies. So for me, every time I go on retreat, it feels like remembering, reconnecting with a wiser and more compassionate way of life. And I've been thinking of it in a way is re-saining, so made up word, but we can think of re-saining as reclaiming our sanity in a world that seems to be getting increasingly insane. And one of the, we know, I think all of us know how easy it is to lose that connection to our inner life. And I think we need retreats more than ever. And yet I've mentioned this before, retreat centers too are subject to that same pressure. So in many situations, retreats are getting shorter, not longer. When actually we need them to be longer, not shorter. And sadly in some of the overseas communities I teach in, I hear people dismiss retreat practice as being unnecessary or irrelevant or indulgence or even elitist. And to me that's a tragic misunderstanding. Those of you who've done retreats know it's anything but self-indulgent. It can be really hard work. And I don't think it's a coincidence that often those comments come from people who haven't actually been on many or any residential retreats, at least not longer than a day or two. So there's, you know, growing various kinds of disincentives. And at the same time it feels important to acknowledge that, yeah, there can be genuine barriers to going on retreat. So just for those of you who may not have done that yet, I want to acknowledge some of the practical challenges. You know, depending on our life circumstances, some people are caregivers to young children or elders. Some people are in extremely demanding jobs that don't have a lot of time off. People have serious health challenges. They can struggle with financial limitations. All of these can create genuine difficulties and they're not all insurmountable. So I've seen in my own life early on things like doing a three-month retreat at IMS. That just seemed like some kind of fantasy pipe dream. But somehow, I don't know what this is, but this is it all ended up coming to fruition eventually. So I've seen in my own life and also observing many others too. Where there's a will, there's a way. I really have seen the truth of that. Where there's a will, there's a way. And so just as one example, when I was managing a retreat center in another country a few years ago, there was a woman who would come every year to do a month of her own self-retreat. And she was a migrant and she was a single mother of quite a few children. And so for her, just paying the registration fee, taking leave from work, arranging childcare, all of that was not easy. And she came many times, I got to know her a bit and I asked her, how do you manage it? And she said just from the time when my kids were really little, I knew this had to be a priority. Because it's good for me, it's good for my kids. And so I really was clear that that was what I needed to do. And my friends saw that it was important to me and my neighbors saw that it was important to me. And they all came together and they created this little community that once a year would help her to go on retreat, look after her kids. And then she said these days they all want me to go because they see the benefits when I get back. And they enjoy being around other kids and other adults besides just me. So to me she was a beautiful example of this quality of determination and how that strength of purpose can inspire others to support us. And so just in line with that, if any of you here feel like there's something practical that's been an obstacle for you in terms of accessing retreats, really feel free to talk to me about it. You know, often people have the idea that they have to sit, walk, sit, walk, sit, walk and do things in a very rigid structured way. But I'm always open to exploring more creative ways of practicing on retreat if that's of interest. And just the financial piece I'd like to remind you, we do have a scholarship fund and there's money available for people if that's an obstacle to doing the retreat. And I may have said before but quite often I have conversations with people where they say, oh I'd love to do that retreat but I just can't afford it. And I say, oh well we've got a scholarship fund, oh but other people need it more than I do and I couldn't take that. But you just said you couldn't afford it. So just an encouragement, you know, it's often hard for people to receive but that money is genuinely offered. And we want people to be able to use it. And I also just want to say it's not like I'm trying to drum up business here. So when I say retreat you don't have to be an Auckland Insight retreat. There's, you know, our friends at Southern Insight regularly run retreats. Temoata and Mana, they offer retreats by other meditation teachers. So any retreats pretty much is a good retreat. Okay, so there are those practical considerations but often the bigger barriers are internal. So for people who haven't been on retreat before, the idea of spending many days in silence can be a bit scary. And yet for most people if they try it they usually find it's not nearly as hard as they feared and actually can be surprisingly enjoyable. So again when I used to manage retreats in Australia and the US, I'd often talk to people at the start of retreat who were really quite anxious about not talking. And I remember one woman saying, you know, my colleagues at work can't believe I'm doing this because I'm the office chatterbox. And they've actually taken bets on how long I'm going to last. And so she made it through the whole retreat and when she came out I asked her how it was. She said, oh I didn't want the silence to end. It was delicious. So it was a total revelation for her. And I also don't want to give the impression that as I briefly alluded to earlier, the whole retreat from beginning to end is not necessarily a picnic. The silence and the solitude, they're intended to reveal parts of ourselves that sometimes can be hard to be with. And this can be another internal barrier for some people. An unconscious or semi-conscious fear of what's lurking in there and what might come up if I have to just be with myself in silence for days or weeks. How am I going to cope? The challenge there is the mind's inbuilt negativity bias tends to focus on the imagined anticipated difficulties and can't imagine the benefits that come from having seen those challenges and helped them to release. So difficult though it might be at times, those challenges are necessary. They're what actually catalyze our inner strength. And in the suttos there's an image for this. It's the image of purifying gold. So if you think of a lump of ore that's straight from the ground, that's full of dirt and other kinds of impurities, you can't really do anything with it. It can't be worked. It's not malleable. So Kraft's person is not able to work it. For it to become workable, that lump of ore, it has to go through all kinds of purification processes, being heated and smelted and cooled and before its true beauty can come out. So applying that analogy to being on retreat, those processes, yes, they can be uncomfortable, but they're releasing some of the distortions that are deeply buried in our psyches and it helps to soften those long held defences that we've built up to try and avoid pain. So yes, at times, going through these processes, it both takes courage and it builds courage. It takes trust and it builds trust. It takes self-compassion and it strengthens self-compassion. And ideally we also have the support of skillful teachers so we can access that metaphorical gold. That's our growing capacity to free ourselves from those afflictive patterns. And then we are able to live more wisely, more kindly, with more care for ourselves, each other, the more than a human world. So again, this is where retreat life and right livelihood connect. The time and energy that we put into retreat powerfully shapes how we live our everyday lives. So more and more, I think of going on retreat as an act of love. It's an act of love for you yourself, for everyone around you, because it lets our beautiful inner qualities grow, strengthen, flourish, manifest. So then there are resources for our families and our friends and our communities and sangha too. So those are just a few reflections for this evening and I wanted to keep it short because I'd really love to hear from you, your own relationship, both to retreat life and to right livelihood. Okay, so thank you for listening.