| | Find like-minded folks to talk about and share your practice with. It doesn't have to be this lonely thing you do every morning and occasionally turn to the internet for advice.
Having a teacher helps in some ways because it establishes a personal connection which encourages you to continue to practice in moments of weakness or doubt. In my experience, these relationships often turn into great friendships (depending, of course, on the types you run across) and can be very inspiring and helpful.
In addition to finding someone whom you can trust, find some friends. A good place to start is attending lectures at meditation centers. A better place is to go to retreat centers (maybe later on in your practice) where there's an opportunity to talk to retreatents. I'm new to Theravada, which is the prevailing "style" here, so I'm not sure if there are any points during retreats when people can actually sit, drink tea, and talk about whatever if you're doing a vipassana or samatha retreat.
Friendship's not really talked about much in spirituality, mostly because we're a bunch of misanthropic introverts (joke!), and usually when it is it's in an oblique, "community"/"sangha" way. Not so helpful. It's refreshing to go hiking through the mountains to find that perfect spot to sit in the mountainside with an close friend, or to be able to be together all day without ever feeling you have to say a word or entertain someone (one of the big hindrances of many friendships and why, I think, people devoted to liberation tend to avoid them - a waste of time and energy). Friends keep the practice alive and fun.
So, find someone you can talk Buddhism about and share a beer with or play a game of put-put golf with. If you decide to devote more and more of yourself to waking-up, you might find yourself surrounded by bark-wearing ascetics in the mountains of India, or giant spiders in a cave somewhere in Thailand. At some point, everyone's good company, but it's always important to find a middle-way, realistically trying to assess where you're at in terms of interests and devotion, and who you would like to become, and then going from there.
This usually happens in a natural way - when I stopped dropping acid, popping ecstasy, and snorting cat-tranquilizer, strangely (although not really), all those friends that I partied with fell away and I found myself surrounded by new people who shared my new interest in living a genuine life of compassion and wisdom. Being more deliberate about this, though, helps, especially to get away from friends or environments which continue to distract and hurt us. The problem usually is not that we want to leave those situations, but that we so desperately want to be in them, like with all our neuroses.
Here's a nice quote from the Buddha to give some authority to all my pro-friendship rambling:
Ananda, the Buddha’s friend and personal assistant, once said to the Buddha that half the spiritual life consist of kalyana mitrata, spiritual friendship, or friendship with what is lovely. The Buddha replies, ‘Say not so Ananda. Say not so. It is the whole, not the half of the spiritual life.’
Good luck and practice hard! |