I am an assistant teacher to Simone Seol(my sister)’s ongoing program, Truth or Dare. At first it was exciting to work with Simone, moderating her community Home but over time I have gotten more and more into my journey and we started diverging in terms of our approach to coaching.
Which is a natural thing, but what makes this tricky is when I first started I brought all of my coaching to Simone’s container but it wasn’t a problem because even when I was being genuinely me, there was no divergence in approach.
Now that I’m more of a suffering/Buddhist kind of a coach I need to separate my coaching identity to “assistant coach promoting and encouraging Simone’s teaching” and “pure Billy”. So because I’ve been noticing this I wanted to tone down my Billy-ness in this rendition of Simone’s program because I didn’t want to be an interfering force to Simone, but hey, old habits die hard and I’ve been really working a lot of suffering with people.
There is something I notice with the people I work with and myself as well. As I’m co-teaching this program I’ve also been ramping up my jiujitsu, training more regularly again. At first I kept on having actual reasons to not train but that eventually transitioned into having reasons to keep delaying, so I put an end to that and as I train with my gymmates who have been consistently training I notice my lag but hey, who else can I blame but me?
The thing I notice is, hesitation. Yes, there’s a 200lb man putting his knee on my belly but when I didn’t know better I was able to flail around like a fish out of water to try and get out of bad positions. The more I train, the side effect is the more I think. This is why my teacher actively encourages less thinking. The point of drilling and repetition is so that you can feel and go, instead of feel, think, then go. The more I get in my own head about negative consequences when I move, the more I hesitate.
The biggest breakthrough I have had with myself is precisely that, as well. When I was at the end of my wits, I collected myself and asked: did you come here to give up, or did you come here to break through? I answered myself with conviction, to break through. And the rest is history.
In my experience there are two primary types of hesitations when it comes to the elimination of suffering. The first is hesitation in continuing to challenge established ideas of something, and the second is hesitation in continuing to challenge the ideas of the self. In both hesitations when the teacher is not present with the participant to gently have them continue on their path, they will likely exit themselves to return to the surface, reactive, automatic way of living.
I originally wanted to write about more details in what happens in the hesitation but changed my mind. Ultimately, the process of eliminating suffering is quite simple: you keep looking for the reason to suffer, and validate whether or not if it’s an actual reason to suffer. As I was writing the above paragraph I was thinking, isn’t it really important to push through those hesitations no matter what? And to some degree, yes it’s extremely important to commit to a path. But now I remember my actual process PRIOR to the breakthrough attempt: the hesitations were almost like a wind-up to build up the momentum.
I thought of hesitation and breaks in meditation as a failure. But when I remember my Buddhist training and compare it to my approach of achieving the same outcome (elimination of suffering), the core difference is: the training was 5 days and my approach is usually within the scope of an hour. Then why did my training take 5 days? It was because there was ample, abundant space within each question and the process.
Throughout the process we had walk breaks, meal times, and sleeping so there was time to sit with the questions. This is in fact serving the same purpose as hesitation: a time to catch up and re-organize for the next steps. But when I frame it from the perspective of “there’s only one direction to go! Gotta keep pushing the pedal!”, then it becomes hesitation; when I frame it from “you’re already on the course and you just don’t know it yet”, it’s a recollection instead of hesitation.
The more I do this kind of work, the more I feel the need to host multi-day retreats and gatherings. Maybe I’ll think of one soon and invite you to it, but for now — I hope you take the idea of continuing with checkpoints to heart today.