I ran across this quote from Joseph Goldstein who has been one of my main teachers and a guiding light in how he has conducted his own life. It comes from a book Creating a Life of Integrity: In Conversation with Joseph Goldstein. Joseph says:
"We must continually ask ourselves, are our lives leading onward in any way?
Of course, we also need to find the line between being impeccable and being rigid,
so that we refine our understandings with a light heart.”
What I have followed and noticed about Joseph’s path is how his heart and his generosity and his onward path are merged. He along with Sharon Salzberg and Jack Kornfield purchased with collected donations the land and buildings they developed into the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, MA. They began offering retreats themselves and training Western teachers to offer retreats as well. They also invited many of their esteemed teachers from India, Thailand, Burma, and elsewhere to come and teach at this new center. Dipa Ma was one of those teachers.
Joseph supported women teachers from the beginning at a time when the women’s movement was still in its beginning efforts. He organized a trip to the Burmese monasteries that have been so important to the insight tradition asking sizable donations from the travelers for these monasteries. And with his leadership, the retreat center began offering scholarships specifically to encourage people of color to attend.
More recently, say in the last 10 years or so, realizing the debt of Western Buddhism to the Eastern traditions which were held by people of color, he led his colleagues to investigate why there weren’t more people of color or of difference attending the many retreats. What they realized is that people of color weren’t attending in larger numbers partly because of economics and having the time and opportunity, but also because they didn’t see themselves reflected in their teachers. So Joseph began widening the search for and the training opportunities for teachers of color. Today Insight Meditation Society has a robust roster of retreats taught by people of color for people of color. It is perhaps the most diverse retreat schedule of any retreat center anywhere.
And all because Joseph continually asked himself, is my life leading onward in any way?
Of course, you know where this is going because we have all become more aware how our personal happiness and well-being is connected with the well-being of the planet and the health and happiness of its many inhabitants. Just as in psychology, we have moved beyond the Freudian model that says our personal happiness is entirely rooted in our personal past to the family systems model that says that a troubled child is not an isolated event in a family but often the "identified patient” in a malfunctioning family. As we look around, we see that is true in community systems, political systems, national systems, and world wide systems. And perhaps it makes the question "are our lives leading onward in any way” almost overwhelming to contemplate.
Which is why Joseph added the second part, “Of course, we also need to find the line between being impeccable and being rigid, so that we refine our understandings with a light heart.”
So can we begin to bring this question more into the light, "Are our lives leading onward in any way?" And at the same time, allow our consideration of this question to develop naturally and "with a light heart?"