Practice in a Working Life

The picture most people carry of a serious Buddhist practitioner is a monastic in a monastery — or, in the Dzogchen tradition, a hermit in a cave. The picture is not wrong. Every generation of every lineage has been carried by practitioners who left ordinary life for long stretches.

What is incomplete about the picture is that every generation has also been carried by householders who received the same teachings and applied them inside a life they did not leave. Śāntideva was a monk, but he wrote the Bodhicaryāvatāra as a manual any bodhisattva could work from. Longchenpa taught householders. Patrul Rinpoche taught them. Nyoshul Khenpo’s biographies include lay yogins alongside the monks.

I am one of the householders. Twelve years running boats. What I have to say about practice comes from inside that arrangement.

The mistake

Around 2016, when I had a captain’s ticket and enough Buddhism in me to be dangerous, I decided I would sit two hours a day on the boat. Small shrine in the cabin. Monk-style discipline.

It lasted a few weeks. The boat does not have two hours of consecutive quiet for the person in command. It has a night watch during which the eyes stay open. It has weather that shifts in the small hours and needs a decision. It has communications from the shore team at any hour, because the shore team keeps its own schedule and the boat is where the day lands. On rotation, whatever you build ashore falls apart on day three at sea.

The next time I saw Rinpoche I complained about the impossibility of it. He said, in a tone I still remember, that the ambition was the problem, not the boat. Learn the instructions the tradition has for people whose lives cannot be rearranged. Stop practising against the boat.

The lay lineage is old. I had imported the wrong template.

Four sutrayana habits that survive contact with the work

None of what follows is my invention. Each element is standard across the traditions I have studied — the Theravada framework I first met in Thailand, the Mahayana ethics of Śāntideva, and the preliminary discipline of the Nyingma. The specific ordering below is personal. It is what has held for me for years.

Short sessions, distributed through the day

Instead of one long sit the mind fatigues in the middle of, several short sits across the day. Three minutes before the day begins. Two minutes before a difficult conversation. Five minutes after lunch. Two before sleep.

The shortness prevents the mind from wandering into elaboration. The frequency keeps the substrate of practice present through the day rather than dropping out of it for eight hours between formal sessions.

For a working practitioner this fits the actual physics of a day better than one long session at dawn. It is also, once you try it, more effective.

Walking as continuation, not as a break

Formal walking meditation is a slow, deliberate walk. The lay instruction is different. The walk between the wheelhouse and the mess, between the port office and the gangway, between one meeting and the next — that is not a gap between practices. It is the practice. Whatever awareness was present in the morning sit is present as you walk. If it slips because you have picked up the phone or begun the next email in your head, you set the phone down and return.

This changes what the walk feels like. It stops being lost time.

Watch the emotion in the moment it arises

Vipassanā on the difficult feeling as it appears, not after. Notice the heat. Notice the story assembling. Do not follow the story; do not suppress the feeling. Watch it. It moves. That movement is the whole of the instruction — I have written a separate short piece on it under the title Three Ways With a Hard Emotion.

The point is not to always be equanimous. The point is not to be the story.

Know that you are thinking

The fifth chapter of Śāntideva is the classical treatment — guarding the mind. Not by shutting thinking down (impossible) but by knowing what the mind is doing. When you notice you are thinking, know that you are thinking. Do not narrate the thought. Do not push it away. Return to whatever the day is asking of you.

Thinking is not the enemy of practice. Thinking as the master of you is a different matter.

And, closing the four: dedicate whatever the day produced

Every sit, every hard task, every ordinary meal — silently dedicate whatever benefit arises to every being. A short formula is enough. Śāntideva’s dedication verses take one line.

What this does is close the mind’s tendency to store the merit as private capital and, instead, keep the practice pointing outward.

It sounds sentimental. It is not. It is the piece of the lay tradition that keeps practice from becoming another form of self-improvement.

The teacher is not optional

None of the four works alone. All of them assume that you have received instruction from a qualified teacher and have someone to correct the drift you cannot see in yourself.

Left to yourself, “short sessions distributed” becomes “short lazy sessions distributed.” The walk becomes just a walk. The direct look at the emotion becomes a narrated look. The dedication becomes a mumbled phrase.

A living connection to a lineage is what keeps practice honest. If you are drawn to the tradition and do not yet have a teacher, the way to find one is not fast. Read the primary texts, watch several teachers over years, look at their students at ten years in, ask yourself whether these are people you want to become, and approach the teacher whose students you can most respect.

How to begin this week

If you are entirely new: sit for ten minutes tomorrow morning. Read one chapter of The Words of My Perfect Teacher over the week, or one section of the Dhammapada if that fits better. Keep the reading and the sitting separate — do not intellectualise the sit.

If you are already practising: try the four habits for seven days. Notice which one you already do without thinking. Notice which one you resist. Bring the resistance to your teacher when you next see them. It will tell you more about your practice than any book.

The working life is not what stops the practice. The working life is where the practice happens.

— Оргьен Йентен Дордже