Blaze Your Own Trail: How A Suburban Catholic Boy Discovered Meditation and Found His Dharma Path
“Well, I’m a Buddhist.”
I first said those words aloud in April 2015, and a heaviness that I didn’t even know I was carrying departed from my shoulders. I had said something true, self-evident now, but not before.
“What does that mean?” my wife, Jenn, asked delicately, surprised perhaps by how definitive my revelation had sounded.
My mother was more direct. “So you won’t be coming home for Christmas anymore?”
“No, Mom, no no of course I will, Christmas is really more of a cultural…”
“So you don’t believe in Jesus?” She sounded deeply concerned, sad even, which took me aback, as she knew I no longer attended church, any semblance of Christianity gone casual at least a decade ago.
I took a deep breath.
I began a meditation practice in 2011, attending, on my own, the weekly general practitioner meetings hosted by the local chapter for the New Kadampa Tradition (NKT). Weekly turned into daily, and NKT turned into unaffiliated, but gradually as my meditation practice grew more robust and my meditation breaks (otherwise known as everyday life) became more balanced, friends and colleagues began to become curious. At first, it’d come up in casual conversation, “Oh hey, so you’re into meditation now? I just downloaded Headspace…” or “It’s really cool that you can meditate, I wish I could but my mind is always racing…”
But as the years went on and our lives became complicated by partners and children, by death and illness, by houses and divorces and politics, the questions became less casual, more urgent. “So what does it mean to be a Buddhist anyway?” and “I need this in my life, how do I get started? How did you get started?” Often it’s become “Can you teach me?”
Enlightenment is enlightenment, but the trails that make up the dharma path can be numerous, bewildering, and imposing, particularly for people like me who have come into this of their accord, without a family or community background in Buddhism to provide some basic structure and a starting point. I am woefully unqualified to teach anyone, but I hope that the example of the long and winding road that I’ve followed can be useful in providing ideas to others just beginning theirs.
I. On the Road to Enlightenment
I grew up in an Irish Catholic family in suburban Philadelphia, religion more heritage than faith, as I dutifully obeyed my parents and attended my weekly CCD classes while I received my sacraments, up to my Confirmation. It was an empty gesture, something we all had to do, like homework. My religion existed without a second thought. If you had asked me, I believed it all, but with the shallowness of a faith inherited and unquestioned. Outside of Christmas, Easter, and the occasional funeral, Jesus Christ was ever-present but rarely thought about, everywhere but connected to nothing.
That changed for me in high school. My mother had begun to attend a non-denominational Christian church with her friends, and after enough gentle haranguing and the promise of bagels for breakfast I agreed to attend with her. I found myself captivated by the pastor, the passion in his voice, the tears in his eyes, the way he paced the stage and stormed down the aisle. I began to go with my mom more regularly to see this pastor, and even began to attend the youth group once a week at night. Between the basketball games and the pizza and the flirting with other teenaged attendees, I found a voice for myself debating different issues in the Gospels with the others. Christianity felt alive for the first time in my life, something that had depth and something to teach me.
I moved to Washington, DC to attend college and took classes on religion, focused almost exclusively on Christianity. When I wasn’t out too late partying with my friends, I prayed at night, much to the delight of my more urbane roommates. But the more I studied it, the less faith I was able to maintain. Without that primary leap of faith, that Jesus Christ was the actual Son of God and that he died and was resurrected for the forgiveness of our sins, it all falls apart. And I found that no amount of study or practice would bridge that gap. I leaned into classes on the historical figure of Jesus, and away from the Gospels relaying stories of his miracle works. By graduation, I was calling myself an atheist and meaning it.
At this point in my life, the Buddha was nothing more to me than the gimmicky plastic statues of a jolly, overweight bald man (I know, I know, the Laughing Buddha is not THE Buddha) commonly found in local Chinese restaurants. A hairless Santa Claus. Did he deliver presents?
Jack Kerouac changed all of that for me. As it has been with college students since it was first published in the late 1950s, someone gifted me a dog-eared copy of On the Road at just the right moment, when I was feeling particularly lost and impressionable as a junior in 2007, and reading it set my mind on fire. I felt unshackled. No longer was my uncertainty about the future and the nervous energy it gave me a burden to bear. Now it was a gift! A guiding star! I began to travel, I’d hop in anyone’s car and go anywhere, at any time, I wrote constantly, I began a love affair with backpack traveling that saw me spending months wandering through southeast Asia, South America, Morocco, Australia, India and Nepal. And all the while I was tearing through Kerouac’s extensive catalog, riveted.
I found his Buddhism particularly inspiring. Curled up on the back of a bus somewhere in the world, I’d find myself fascinated by his long and endearing discussions of meditation, emptiness, bodhisattvas, and Zen lunatics in books like Desolation Angels and Big Sur, and in poems like Mexico City Blues. But it was The Dharma Bums that really captivated me.
I’m not here to defend the consistency or the caliber of Kerouac’s Buddhism. The withering criticism he faced for his writings on the subject crushed him, some of it well-deserved and some of it not. Kerouac’s infatuation with the dharma during his most prolific period as an author planted a seed in my soul (I can say soul, because I know there is no such thing as soul), and I am eternally grateful for the harvest that it has produced and continues to produce as my own dharma practice grows. As the Buddha says in the Diamond Sutra, concepts and ideas as they come to us can be used to advance our dharma practice the way a raft is used to cross a river. While rafts can and should be discarded once that particular river has been crossed, we can still be thankful that they carried us. Jack Kerouac carried me across that initial sea of total ignorance into a brave new world.
But Buddhism remained little more than a literary concept to me until 2010. A friend of mine, with whom I often had long, philosophical Gchat discussions to bide time in our boring jobs, asked me if I wanted to go to the Vajrayogini Buddhist Center for a general meditation session with her in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington, DC. “You talk like a Buddhist,” she said, and I was flattered because of my interest in Kerouac, even though I had little idea what she meant. I thought maybe she meant that I sounded smart, a deep thinker. Excitedly, I took her up on her offer. I was eager to meditate like Kerouac had done, have these great holy epiphanies beside the roaring ocean or on the backs of railcars, to explore my mind and write about it. I went once, loved it, thought I had a knack for meditation, then came up with excuses the next several weeks in a row to go to happy hour instead and I promptly forgot about it.
II. Fear and Self-Loathing in Law School, or the Rise and Fall of My Time With the NKT
I went back a year later, less as a lark and more as a desperate search for a life raft.
I started law school in DC in the fall of 2010 and felt deeply conflicted about it. It was a move borne out of desperation. I was 25 and more than a year out of college and struggling to find steady and fulfilling employment as the country thrashed in the throes of the Great Recession. Growing up, I had always been told that I should be a lawyer, and out of a lack of imagination had gone along with it until a transcendent experience volunteering in New Orleans after Katrina opened my mind and implanted a new sense of purpose. I joined AmeriCorps and served a year with New Orleans Area Habitat for Humanity after college, and after, I returned to DC full of inspiration. Now here I was only months later broke and capitulating to something that I felt was, at best, morally dubious and was sure to shackle me with the kind of crushing debt that made a career of service all but impossible. I told myself that I could do good in the world with this, but in the corporate and competitive environment of my law school, gnawing self-doubt ate away at my confidence. How many other young lawyers also told themselves the same thing as they accepted positions working 70 hours per week at the city’s biggest firms?
I hated myself for being there, and that internal criticism externalized itself in the form of judgmental rage towards my classmates. I stalked campus like I had a thunderstorm tethered above my head, lashing out, making few friends, while everyone else seemed to relish the camaraderie that comes with the pressure cooker of 1L year.
I went back to Vajrayogini Buddhist Center just as my second semester began in 2011, alone this time. From my very first meditation, my mindset began to change. My teacher, Varahi, was an ordained nun who had given up her career as a practicing physician to shave her head, wear the maroon robes, and live a life of charity teaching the dharma. I was struck by her commitment to her values and beliefs, and juxtaposed it with my own. “This can be done, if you choose it,” I thought. Her first lessons focused on our emotional responses to external phenomena, framing them as a choice. Those classmates of mine were enduring the same conditions as I was at school, and yet they smiled and laughed with each other. They chose to be happy. I was choosing anger, and there was no source for it but my own mind, and I suffered because of it.
This rang deeply true for me. I had long prided myself on possessing a short temper, I was quick with words and sharp on the attack, and it’s probably why law school had seemed to the outsider like such a perfect fit for me. But I was hurting, and envied those who were seen as “nice people,” the ones who nearly everyone agreed were kind and magnanimous and peaceful. These personality traits are choices, I learned, and to be thought of in that way all one had to do was act that way. Just like those in top physical shape train their bodies, the mind can be trained as well, and the dharma was that regimen.
Varahi encouraged her class to be skeptical of what we were being taught, to test out the Buddha’s conclusions for ourselves. This was completely contrary to my Catholic upbringing, and the leap of faith that I could never make in church. If the dharma lessons we heard were found to be false for us, then so be it, they simply wouldn’t take you anywhere. The power of our meditations to calm my mind, and the weekly practices we were sent home with, made an impact on my life quickly, so that even when I felt skeptical towards something we were taught, I felt I owed it to this experience to find out why it worked and committed to sticking with it. If a few months of general practitioner classes could resonate this strongly, then why would I doubt my ability to grow with this if I practiced for a year, or ten, or a lifetime?
My days at law school improved, and so did my grades. I grew confident in my commitment to public service, and focused my coursework on civil rights and environmental protection. After graduation, I began a career as a civil rights attorney with the federal government, leading external disparate impact investigations into allegations of discrimination on the basis of race under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 against state and local governments. My dharma practice was invaluable to my ability to maintain and express empathy for both the victims of discrimination and those who, often unintentionally, perpetrated policies and developed projects that had the effect of discriminating against communities of color. Almost no one wants to be called a racist, or to even have it implied that they may have done something that could be discriminatory, and so empathy and compassion are crucial for engineering effective and efficient solutions to deeply-set social injustices. I’ve found that building trust in relationships and constructing willing partnerships is far more effective, when possible, than battling as adversaries.
At Vajrayogini, I joined the Foundation Program so I could dig more deeply into studying the dharma, and became a program coordinator. We met in smaller groups and studied books in a more methodical fashion every week, and classes became more formalized. I didn’t dive headfirst into a new religion, however, and my skepticism about some of the more ritualistic elements and the iconography at the Center persisted. I liked the dharma for its logical and philosophical underpinnings, and the demonstrable benefits that practicing meditation and the control of my mind had produced. But questions were encouraged, and debate and conversation were part of our program. I developed a daily practice on my own, and over years of study and training I came to understand the purpose of these previously off-putting features of the dharma, the many-armed bodhisattvas and lions and lotuses, the lineage holders and the lessons from mythical heroes, the long prayers. Like anything worthwhile, it took time.
Our classes were structured in the following way: opening prayers, a breathing meditation, a lesson from Varahi and a break to discuss in groups and formulate questions, and then a guided closing meditation on the topic. One day in early 2015, after our first meditation, Varahi made an announcement instead of beginning the week’s lesson. She was being removed from her post as Resident Teacher at Vajrayogini, and replaced with someone else. The class was stunned. Through the weeks that followed, we discovered the tangled web of politics that led to her removal, and petitioned international leadership to reconsider. How could they do this to a woman who had given up a lucrative medical practice and dedicated her life to teaching dharma, and had benefited all of our lives in such a profound and meaningful way? How could they just throw her out on the streets? No response. Varahi used her final few weeks to demonstrate the pitfalls of attachment, and the incredible power of dharma to overcome. Eventually I secured a private meeting with someone from leadership in Baltimore, after he led a moving Heart Jewel empowerment. He treated our protestations dismissively, noted our attachment to Varahi as our teacher as part of the problem, and told the story of Milarepa, notably the portion where he was subjected to years of abuse by his teacher, Marpa, who was only treating him so in order to purify him of his substantial negative karma. I felt sick and walked out.
I was at a crossroads. My dharma practice had substantially changed my life for the better, and there was so much further to go. I believed in it not because I wanted to, but because I could tangibly account for the results. As Varahi taught us, casting a critical eye on my development allowed me to build a strong foundation for my practice. But this episode left me feeling disillusioned, perhaps Buddhism was just another religion, a power structure existing for the exercise of control by the stronger over the weaker. Using the story of Milarepa to justify abusing Varahi like that cast far too close to cultish for my comfort, just as so-called Christians cherry-picked items from the Bible to justify oppressing others that refused to conform.
I decided that I wasn’t an adherent to the NKT, but that I was a Buddhist. Organizations and religions are created by people and for people and are therefore as fallible as the people that run them. While this branch had provided me with the introduction and foundation for my dharma practice that I needed at the time, and I was grateful for it, everything I had learned and valued thus far about compassion and loving-kindness led me to conclude that I’d gone as far as I could with them and needed to continue my practice elsewhere. Ironically, Varahi’s many lessons on mindfulness and bodhichitta helped me to take ownership of my path and strike out searching for new teachers. I cast the raft aside when I realized I had crossed that river and set out for the next one.
III. Impermanence As It’s Defining Feature
The six of us in my Foundation Program left NKT in 2015 and began meeting on our own, continuing our studies in rented rooms in Unitarian churches and in our DC apartments. Instead of Varahi guiding the meditations and discussions, we rotated amongst ourselves, setting weekly practices based on passages from the books we were studying. At first, Varahi attended too, listening and available to answer our more difficult questions, but over time, her presence slowly drifted away, until we only saw her occasionally at birthday parties and going-away dinners. I learned a lot more about the difference between attachment and love, and how to be grateful for something beautiful without clinging to it. I learned a lot about impermanence and the nature of samsara. We continue to meet and study to this day, no longer limited in our practices by the proscriptions of the NKT, though I know now that this too will someday fade away. Someday I’ll have finished crossing this river as well and it will be time to leave the raft behind.
Leaving the NKT liberated me to look for answers to more questions than ever before. My studies expanded to include works by His Holiness The Dalai Lama and Shantideva, as well as Jack Kornfield, Pema Chodron, Thich Nhat Hanh, Ram Dass, Gary Snyder, and others. My meditation practices continue to grow as well, bolstered daily by the addition of my own personal shrine in the basement of the townhouse my wife and I purchased. I also have a small shrine in my office at work, where I meditate before lunch each day. In the summer of 2017, my wife and I traveled to Nepal and the Ladakh region of northern India, where we visited Lumbini, the historic birthplace of Buddha Shakyamuni, and spent weeks trekking in the Himalayas, chatting with our guide about Je Tsongkhapa and circumambulating shrines as grand as the great stupa at Bodhnath and as humble as piles of stones set up by villagers off the trails in the Markha Valley. I became a father, and the lessons I learned about impermanence and the patience taught to me by Shantideva in “The Way of the Bodhisattva” have allowed me to be fully present and joyful as I watch my daughter grow and change so quickly. Recently, I’ve begun utilizing float therapy in my meditations, spending 90 minutes at a time in sensory-deprivation tanks meditating on emptiness and universal compassion. I meet with my old group of dharma rebels weekly, but have also begun exploring the local Shambhala center and its different approach to practice. Next year, I hope to be able to embark on my first real retreat, perhaps in the Vipassana tradition. A friend recently began attending a Zen center, and I’ll likely check that out too.
So when I say that I am a Buddhist, what am I actually saying? It means that I believe in the basic tenets of the Buddha’s teachings. I believe that all of our suffering in life comes from our attachment to ever-changing, illusory phenomena, like people, institutions, relationships, and ourselves. We perceive the outside world and assign some value and meaning to it, good bad or neutral, and then as it changes, as reality turns out to be different from the way we calcified it in our minds, it causes us to suffer. This is why relationships between people cause suffering, and this is why our desires and our aversions ultimately cause suffering as well. They aren’t what we grasp at them to be, and when we finally realize the disconnect between perception and reality, it hurts. This is why pure, unconditional love cannot cause suffering, because pure love is not attached to any conception of what the loved phenomena is actually supposed to be, it can shift with it. The Buddha teaches about bodhichitta, universal compassion, and this is what I believe he means.
By removing our attachment to these perceptions of the world around us, and even to ourselves, we can remove the suffering that they cause us. Removing these attachments is the dharma path. And so Buddhism to me is a means for identifying the roots of attachment in my mind and digging them up, not by becoming neutral or ambivalent, but by becoming compassionate and loving towards everything. This covers attachment to other people and experiences that I enjoy or despise, all the way down to attachment to this idea of myself as an independent entity. I am a Buddhist because I believe, through my experience, that the dharma path is the way to remove those attachments and to overcome suffering for myself, and that through this practice I can help others overcome suffering too. Dharma provides the regimen for training the mind to undertake this task, to see the world more clearly, and to be happier for it.
