Self-awarenessAn addiction counsellor told a crowded room in Dublin recently that the aim of most addictions from booze to shopping, work to chat rooms was to numb the pain of life, but tragically this quest to avoid suffering can itself create greater anguish.
Passionate Presence - Seven Qualities of Awakened Awareness, by Catherine Ingram, is in the same territory. Ingram describes her life of relentless search for meaning, motivated by a need to make more of herself and so feel fulfilled.
But it was only when she stopped running that she realised what she was seeking was there all the time. "If you begin to understand what you are without trying to change it, then what you are undergoes a transformation," she says in a quote from Indian religious teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti.
Ingram will be in Dublin for three weeks from October 6th to speak about her book, hold a silent retreat, and conduct workshops entitled Dharma Dialogues - dharma is Sanskrit for "truth" or "the way".
"These are discussions, interspersed with quiet to bring our attention to present awareness and to see through the mind's habitual ways of trying to squirm out of it," she says.
Ingram (52) was a campaigning journalist in the early 1970's travelling regularly from her home in America to Asia to meet spiritual teachers mainly from the Buddhist tradition. She practised meditation and studied for years under the late H.W.L. Poonjaji, himself a pupil of a legendary guru Ramana Maharash.
Today Ingram is president of Living Dharma, a non-profit service organisation with offices in Oregon and California, and she leads numerous silent retreats each year.
After one such retreat she woke during the night and wrote the seven words she felt encompassed the primary qualities associated with awakened awareness. Next morning she found she had written down Silence, Tenderness, Embodiment, (as in being fully present in this world rather than sacrificing today for some future eternity), Genuineness, Discernment, Delight and Wonder. The book devotes a chapter to each one.
This is not a how-to manual, more a how not to. The first chapter, Silence, has a subheading: "call off the search". Ingram explains how she swam with dolphins, supped with the great and the good, read hard books and still didn't find what she was looking for. It was her teacher Poonjaji who helped her to see that the search itself was the problem.
"The very idea of a search must begin by thinking that something is missing. It assumes deprivation at the outset. But in the deeper recesses of ourselves, there is a most familiar quietude. It is a silent point of peace, a silent witnessing awareness that is fundamentally unperturbed no matter what happens. Steeping in this awareness, you are at ease in the present, fully welcoming what comes, fully releasing what goes and feeling alive throughout."
Ingram's philosophy is simple but not easy. "Poonjaji would tell people he was offering the easy way and I find that teenagers respond with a facility, but it took me years," she agrees. "I didn't have to suffer more to achieve awareness, because life had hurt me so readily and so often. But I began to see the losses in a new way."
Finding this new vantage point of peace, as she tells it, is about letting go of the stories we tell to ourselves in which we figure as hero or victim or both. It's about forgiving ourselves and others for not being perfect, it's about accommodating our natural urge to be emotionally well by practising quiet and meditation. In this state we can pay attention to what is happening while it's happening, with detachment rather than being either overwhelmed or frozen by feelings.
"You will find you move from getting glimpses of this peace and presence from a usual place of neurosis, to generally inhabiting this place of peace with occasional dips into neurosis."
What about people with real problems in their lives - struggling with poverty, trapped in a relationship, being bullied at work? "I would believe the more they visit the quiet place in themselves, the more benefits they will feel, and the more control they will exert over their circumstances. Awareness brings new choices and people have left bad situations and bad relationships.
"But usually, people's lives won't change on the outside. You'll still go to work, still pick up the kids. But you will feel freer and things will flow more smoothly. The internal experience will have changed completely."
Passionate Presence - Seven Qualities of Awakened Awareness is published by Thorsons Element £10.99 (€16.20).
An Evening with Catherine Ingram "Awakened Awareness" takes place on Wednesday, October 6th, at Stillorgan Park Hotel, Co Dublin at 7 p.m., tickets €35. Book online www.jsaonline.ie or telephone 01-2875524/087 9797988.
"Dharma Dialogues" take place between October 8th and 20th at St Anne's Parish Centre, Molesworth Place, Dublin 2, at 7.30 p.m., admission €10. Telephone 01-6768087.
A silent retreat will be held at Dunderry House, near Navan, Co Meath, over the Bank Holiday weekend October 22nd-25th, cost €375, bookings 01-2819907. For all information log on to www.dharmadialogues.org