A Co-Arising
Together with each other, and with everything, we sit.
Everything Arising, All at Once:
Sitting is not a single-pointed act. It is a living constellation. A co-arising system of entangled and embedded relationships.
It is not just the body, not just the mind, not just the breath. It is not just stillness, not just thought, not just silence.
It is not just me, and not just us. And not the absence of me or us. It is the shimmering complexity of all of it—interwoven, unfolding, and emerging.
You might be tempted to reduce your meditation practice to a technique. To fix your attention on one object using a particular method. Or maybe to pursue a goal of mastery, expertise, and command.
But the path of sitting invites us into a very different kind of effort. A more radical intimacy—one that does not slice reality into parts or accomplishments, but rests in their entanglement and in an unfolding process of emergence.
Sitting practice is itself a complex, adaptive, constantly changing system. Each aspect of the system—our posture, our thoughts, our relationships—whether those we practice with, our immediate community, or the larger environment—our motivation and aspirations, our momentary arising patterns of joy or pain or grief. In fact, everything about us and our messy lives is co-arising all the time, interacting with everything else, forward and backward in time, across vast distances, continuously, without stopping, and without one single exception.
When we sit, we enter a field of practice dependently co-arising in this moment. Our job is not to orchestrate, control, or manage that field. We are simply there to meet it, to participate in it. And in that participation, we are cultivating a deep sense of acceptance and of presence, we are meeting it without needing to change anything. We are making an effortless effort.
At Sitting Lab, we always sit together.
We sit together not to remove ourselves from our everyday life, but to pause from the relentless, habitual patterns that keep us separate, to interrupt them, and to allow ourselves to become fully present for another way of being. We sit together to create a safe and generative environment for each other. This enables us to unlearn our separation and remember the possibility of our wisdom, our humility, and our belonging.
From the settled ground of our interbeing to the vast open sky of our interbecoming, we sit together to become more permeable, more authentically us, more whole. We sit down not to step out of the world, but to step more fully into relationship with it.
We sit together in a collective act of stepping back and turning inward, co-creating a field of practice that supports and encourages us to fully participate in the co-arising of this moment. This is the unfolding pattern of co-arising that reveals itself to us as we tenderly touch the pulse of our life in its full expression.
This is where we cultivate our human capacities to be more sensitive, kind, and open, even in the midst of our demanding and complicated lives. This is how we move beyond an intellectual understanding and begin to become the co-arising, and let it show us directly, without filters, who we really are and how things truly are.
Together with each other and with everything, we sit.
We rest in the heart of our co-emergence. We remember life’s song of co-arising, and begin to sing its beautiful tune.
We begin to see the unfolding as a refuge and know it as our home.
The Practice: A Co-Arising
Below is a lightly edited transcript of an introduction to a Sitting Lab sitting.
“Welcome.
Allow your awareness to come down into the body, into the heart—as we begin to create the conditions for our practice this morning.
Our practice is a complex adaptive system.
It’s not one thing. It’s not just the breath.
Not just the cushion. Not just the body or the mind. Not just the relationships between those of us sitting together here today.
Not just our views of the world, our beliefs, our behaviors, our patterns of suffering, or our various ways of finding joy.
It’s all of it.
And the relationships between all of it. And more.
It is taking a moment—not really ‘out’ of our lives, but maybe ‘into’ our lives—to sit down, to be quiet in the middle of all this co-arising.
It is a co-creative act—to find our posture, to sit in a way that is relaxed, easeful, balanced, upright, vital, and alive.
All of it comes together to create the conditions to do nothing.
To give ourselves permission to not know. To wonder. To be curious.
To rest our attention in our hearts and to move, and not move, from that place. With compassion. With kindness. With acceptance.
Allowing the co-creation—the moment-by-moment unfolding—to show itself. To receive it, and to know ourselves.
From the heart—from our field of feeling, knowing, and sensing—we intuitively know we are not separate from anything. We are in the middle of it all.
This co-arising that is us is without boundaries. Limitless. Beyond what we can imagine. But still felt.
From that place, we can generate our aspirations and make a quiet commitment to ourselves and to all living beings.
Wishing for happiness, peace, a genuine state of wellbeing, joy, and freedom from suffering, for all living beings.
And now, we continue, sitting silently, together.”
The sound of three bells and then silence.
Each weekday, a small group of us sit quietly together four times a day, using Sitting Lab’s community platform. We invite you to check it out and join us if you believe that a regular, deepening sitting practice could help you become the fullest version of yourself.