Book Review

Down to Earth Dharma: Insight Meditation to Awaken the Heart
BY: Rebecca Bradshaw
Publisher: Boulder, CO: Shambhala Publications, 2024.
ISBN 9781645473213

As human beings, we have an inner compass that calls us to our true home. The author describes this using an analogy from nature, the homing instinct of wild geese. Just as geese take off in the morning after a night on a lake, resuming their migratory journey,

…each day we too take off in the morning light, embarking on our spiritual journey, courageously facing the ups and downs of life, embracing the inevitable joys and sorrows…. Just as the geese courageously travel through all the obstacles, answering an ancient call from the depth of their being, we claim our own age-old calling from the depths of our being to fly to our true home…. We have a long journey ahead of us. May we meet it with grace, courage, and a willingness to open to this wild human life.

In the title of this book, Down to Earth Dharma: Insight Meditation to Awaken the Heart, “dharma” means the teachings of the Buddha. While the book covers all the basic tenets of those teachings (the Four Noble Truths, the four Brahma Viharas, and the three poisons of aversion, greed, and delusion), its major objective is to encourage us to go beyond a merely conceptual understanding of these teachings to understand them deeply through down-to-earth experience and a genuine connection with the world.

According to the author, an important balance needs to be struck between the individualistic conceptual mind and the receptivity that comes with love and compassion. The conceptual mind tends to view meditation as working toward the goal of enlightenment sometime in the future. However, when we are too fixed on the goal, we risk missing the journey. We want to reach enlightenment, but we may miss the important moments along the way that lead us there. Adopting a more receptive perspective grounded in a state of openness and love, we can, while still remembering our goal, also learn to love the journey itself. We orient ourselves to the present moment in a state of restful openness and relax. This allows us the space to experience the mystery of life here and now, “unconfined by the limits of concept.”

A “down-to-earth dharma” approach encourages us to deeply understand ourselves and the world around us. “We discover that we are larger than we thought, more capable than we knew, and wiser and more loving than we believed possible. This too is part of intimacy with our own experience, familiarity with who and what we are as a living, breathing human being.” As we make a deeper connection with ourselves, we also develop more intimacy with the world around us, valuing the earth and all the beings we interact with. The author quotes the philosopher Thomas Berry who said, “We are most ourselves when we are most intimate with the rivers and mountains and woodlands, with the sun and the moon and the stars in the heavens; when we are most intimate with the air we breathe, the Earth that supports us.”

Our expectations about what happens in our meditation practice can become a hindrance when we fall into the trap of spiritual idealism. We expect that our meditation will make us a perfectly transcended person full of light, equanimity, and love. Too soon in the process, we try to make ourselves look like this ideal, and we reject qualities we deem to be “unspiritual.” Unfortunately, this separates us from what is really happening in our lives and can lead to something called “spiritual bypassing,” trying to be conceptually spiritual while denying the ups and downs of life. The author says, “We forget that the purpose of practice is to be with what is true, not to attain an imaginary ideal.” The key is to move beyond our conceptual framework, to accept our own humanness while practicing with receptivity and openness, and to gradually work toward the qualities of a spiritual seeker.

In Buddhism these qualities are known as the four Brahma Viharas of lovingkindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity, and to further illustrate her theme the author explores each one of these. On lovingkindness, the author suggests that when we want to measure our spiritual progress, we can ask ourselves the question, Am I kinder? She uses the example of Dipa Ma, a well-known spiritual adept who was a mother and lay meditation teacher. Dipa Ma went through tremendous suffering before she began her spiritual practice. Her husband and two of her children died and she was so wracked with grief she nearly died. She began to meditate out of the sheer need to survive and to heal her misery and sadness. As she practiced, she became a highly evolved meditator and began to teach lay students from her small apartment in Calcutta. She was once asked by one of her students what was in her mind. She answered, “Concentration, lovingkindness, and peace.” The student persisted, “That’s all?” Dipa Ma replied, “That’s all.”

In explaining the Brahma Vihara of sympathetic joy, which the author describes as “the heart’s release of gladness,” the importance of gratitude is emphasized. Gratitude for all we have been given softens the individualistic, competitive and self-centred viewpoint that is dominant in today’s world. We are not self-made, but rather we have been given many gifts:

Gratitude softens the aggressive tendencies of our hearts by deepening and understanding all the way down to the cellular level that this world is generous. Moment by moment we are receiving countless blessings, including air to power our cells, food to energize our bodies, sunlight to brighten our hearts, and beauty to nourish our nervous systems. It is extraordinary to be a live human being on this vibrant earth… With gratitude, we let ourselves be touched by the generosity of life.

On the Brahma Vihara of equanimity, the author explains how we need to understand impermanence and letting go. Impermanence is an undeniable truth about life. Everything is shifting all the time, like walking on “the deck of a ship at sea.” Certainties we have counted on become unpredictable. Our conditioned response to change is reactivity; we want to hold onto things or push them away and this creates a constant restlessness. When we stop resisting impermanence, we begin to be able to rest in the middle of the flow of life.

Letting go is also key to equanimity. Grasping at the ever-changing circumstances of life causes continued suffering. The author says, “Letting go ends our argument with reality…. Reality always wins.” Ending this useless argument leads to becoming balanced within the vicissitudes of life: pain and pleasure, gain and loss, praise and blame, fame and disrepute. The author writes, “We experience freedom from entanglement and burden right in the middle of this very life… We’re left with just life – awesome, mysterious, ordinary, simple, and just what we’re looking for.” She describes a sign on the office wall of a meditation centre where she was a teacher: “This is the way things are right now.”

The book returns repeatedly to meditation as the means to realization. The author writes,

What is meditation? It is a technique that facilitates directly experiencing our lives as a way to understand deeply the nature of reality, the way things are…

We acclimate to the silence that emerges from the vast spaciousness of our own heart-mind. Stillness, silence. We listen to the world and receive it rather than own and demand it. Backing off from our mind-activated assertive stance with the world, we rest in receptivity. We are not separate…. We can hear this space below the hum of the traffic and the symphony of the creek. We can sense it but never own it. It belongs to no one and to nothing and to everyone and everything.

Meditation is relaxing into ever-deepening intimacy with the mystery of life.… We open out of the contraction of the small ego-centric self and relax into being life itself.