Christina Feldman - Woman Awake: Women Practicing Buddhism

Table of Contents

Also by Christina Feldman

Silence: How to Find Inner Peace in a Busy World (2003)
Woman Awake: Women Practicing Buddhism (2005)

THIS BOOK has been inspired by so many rich sources. It contains the teachings and the voices of the numerous teachers who have had a profound influence on my own understanding and vision.

I feel deep gratitude for the presence and teaching of the teachers in my own practice who offered their wisdom, patience, and compassion so freely. The greatest gift they offered was the vision they treasured of freedom and love.

I thank my parents for giving me the freedom to follow my own path and direction. My husband and children continue to give support and encouragement.

I would like to acknowledge the encouragement and support of so many women I have had the privilege of being with in retreats. This book is their story: without their honesty and courage, there would be no story to tell. I feel deeply grateful for their presence, and continue to be awed by their quest for a way of being in the world and with themselves that is rooted in integrity and wisdom.

I thank Roz for her encouragement and patience in helping me to begin this venture. I deeply thank Shannon Gilligan for her unflagging enthusiasm and skill. Without her heartfelt dedication, I would still be muddling my way through the introduction.

A WOMAN EMBARKING on a spiritual journey travels a path on which there are few sure guides to inspire and affirm her. The institutions and traditions we are heirs to have been primarily formulated, structured, and maintained by men, with their own vision and application of spirituality. Each of these authorities offers a sanctioned pathway to living and being. Each pathway has its own expectations, values, and models to strive for. There is an underlying message common to all of these voicesto conform is to be offered safety, acceptance, and, most of all, love. To step outside of these institutions is to lose approval and shelter, and to be alone.

This situation is exacerbated by the fact that we carry with us a history of learning to listen outwardly rather than inwardly. As children we have thrust upon us the values of others telling us how we should be, what a nice and good person is. We respond to these demands in order to win a degree of affirmation, approval, and safety in our lives, and the pattern becomes set. Through fear and inner alienation, we form static relationships to authority. It is perceived as all-powerful and also infallible.

Not surprisingly, when we begin on a spiritual path we find ourselves looking outwardly to tradition and authority, for they appear to hold the answers we are seeking. Thus we acquire approval and safety in the conformity that these spiritual authorities require, only to discover that approval and safety are poor substitutes for freedom. There is no tradition or person who is qualified to tell us who we should be, what we must strive for or achieve. Established religions have repeatedly armored themselves against women, seeking to silence their voices. Our blind acceptance of models and expectations, and the inner denial and division they represent, can only serve to suffocate the inner spiritual vision from which our freedom is born.

We need to be willing to risk the loss of external affirmation and approval if we are to know ourselves deeply. We need to be willing to risk listening to ourselves as well as others. The validity of our spiritual path can only be qualified by our own experience and understanding. Through a path of contemplation and meditation, we can untangle the conditioning that leads us to prostrate ourselves before authority. By cultivating a deep inner aloneness, we can nurture our inner resources of awareness and understanding. A vision of our uniqueness is born, an authentic vision of who we are, as opposed to who we have been told we should be.

We discover a freedom not limited by models, or dichotomies, by divisions between inner and outer, mind and body, spiritual and worldly. Instead, a visionand a path of spiritualityarises that affirms and celebrates the interconnectedness of all life. This is not to reject outright and with hostility religion and tradition. Tradition is rich in experience and has the power to inspire us and guide us. But we need to be vigilant in our listening, so as not to repeat the errors of the past. We must find the balance between, on the one hand, being able to listen outwardly and not to be overwhelmed by what we hear and, on the other, the ability to learn without feeling compelled to conform. With sensitivity we can listen to and learn from the richness of tradition, while still cherishing, preserving, and nurturing the integrity of listening within ourselves.

For me, spirituality is awakening. This awakened seeing embraces a vision of oneness, truth, and reality that transcends difference, division, and separation. Spiritual vision is a mystical onecut free of linear space or timewhich frees us to extend ourselves with love to every area of our lives. A spiritual life is a celebration of inner wholeness, joy, connectedness, and serenity. The love that is born of this vision of oneness impels us to act and to direct our lives with sensitivity and integrity. The spiritual woman is a woman of joy, who knows what it means to trust in herself. She lives her spirituality and, free from fear, she rejoices in her own uniqueness.

IN 1984, the Insight Meditation Society, in Barre, Massachusetts, sponsored a rare initiative: the first womens retreat in the Theravadan Buddhist tradition. It was soon followed by a similar retreat at Spirit Rock, in Woodacre, California. It was a significant beginning, with fifty women gathering together to contemplate what it means to walk a spiritual path as a woman, in a womans body, and with a womans story and voice.

The first years were tentative but rich, as we discovered together that we had much to explore and understand. Times of silent meditation were interspersed with focused dialogues exploring questions of power, authority, autonomy, and what it means to be truly awake in every area of our lives. Twenty years later, this retreat continues annually, and convenes a community of women who are awakening and deepening in understanding together. We have become more silent, more contemplative, over the years. Within the retreats there is a palpable dignity, trust and respect, and a sense of community. These two decades have borne witness to countless social and political changes in our world that embody the maturing wisdom of women. Underlying these outer changes is a powerful dedication and understanding: the commitment not only to liberation in the world, but to a profound inner liberation.

Like all spiritual traditions, the womens retreats have a history. When I first began to practice meditation in India in the early 1970s, I embraced the teachings and path of Buddhism as a homecoming. For several years, I lived a dedicated meditative life, blithely assuming that gender was not an issue. It came as something of a shock when I first undertook to practice in a monastic setting to have it brought forcibly home to me that my assumptions were wrong. Although women practitioners were frequently and effusively praised for the sincerity and depth of their practice, it was also true that the monastic forms would have struggled to survive without the devoted support, commitment, and work of the lay and ordained women. Equally, it was apparent that gender was a very real but mostly unspoken issue. Women were barred from full ordination, and consequently barred from holding authority within the tradition. There was a dearth of women teachers, and the most senior woman practitioner in the monastery was required to bow before the most junior monk; in age-old tradition, the women were required to attend to the domestic duties that benefited all, sat at the end of the food table, and were allocated the worst accommodations. My heart broke when an elderly nun told me she served and meditated to accumulate sufficient merit to be reborn a man, because then she would be worthy of enlightenment. My profound gratitude for the monastic lineage that had kept alive the teaching of liberation co-existed with a growing sense of unease that it was this same lineage that carried an institutionalized rejection of women.