The Groundless Ground
Feeling to freedom to fulfillment, in that order
“Anyone who has suffered real loss... has always had difficulty conveying the absolute sense of devastation to those who are at present more fortunate… It’s hard to convey the sense of emotional isolation, being left behind by someone you thought loved you and would continue to love you to the end… It is hard to underestimate the way human beings need a sense of foundation in their lives; good foundations can be consciously felt or taken for granted.” -David Whyte, from The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship
“The bad news is you’re falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is, there’s no ground.” - Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
“No creature ever falls short of its own completion. Wherever it stands it does not fail to cover the ground.” - Zen Master Dogen Zenji
Happy Sunday, and welcome to new subscribers. I have been away for a few weeks tending to family matters, but back in the saddle with my newsletter and coaching. With respect to the latter, I am winding down several multi-month programs that began in the winter, and have a few spots opening up.
In these days, with chaotic political forces de-stabilizing our economies, AI tech transforming/replacing many knowledge-worker jobs, and the amplification of our tendencies toward “convenience” and distraction by special interest groups that seek to monetize them, we are challenged to find the three essentials of fulfilling work: meaning, agency and flow.
Many of us, myself included, are feeling the sense of “groundlessness” that I discuss in this newsletter. If you resonate with the material I write and are interested in exploring how to use Zen practices and principles to be more present, purposeful and performant, sign up for a Discovery call and we can chat.
I especially love working with people in (or considering) professional transition.
The Groundless Ground
As sometimes happens, this morning I woke to a Substack newsletter that felt like the universe had opened a direct line with me.
It was David Whyte’s latest piece from his eponymous newsletter. (If you don’t subscribe, please do so immediately!) Called “The Pathless Path,” it speaks of the feeling of instability we experience at certain points in our life, when we lose a key relational attachment.
When I got to the passage I quote above, a tingle went through my spine, and I felt the universe wink at me: having recently had an experience of “being left behind by someone you thought loved you and would continue to love you to the end,” I felt another wave of bereftness, but most beautifully I felt a stronger wave of empathetic connection.
(When I got to the end of the passage, my tingling multiplied. I discoverd that the post is an excerpt from Whyte’s book The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship, which longtime readers know is one of the seminal inspirations for the Sacred Contract framework I use in Zen@Work. )
In the passage above, Whyte speaks of the importance of sound foundations, but he also invites us to explore experiences of “lost foundations” as a deeper investigation of who we are.
To love and be loved, to lose and be lost, is our human condition. Any sense of self we might establish that does not honor and accept all four of these experiences is “out of joint” with reality and will ultimately fail. (Some Buddhist teachers I know translate the Sanskrit word dukkha, which is usually translated as “suffering,” as “out of joint.”)
So, we could say the first step in claiming the birthright of our true self is to embrace love: to love and be loved. This establishes the secure attachment which we need as a foundation.
Then, the essential next step is to embrace losing and being lost. The fundamental law of impermanence ensures that everything we hold onto will pass away; every ground we depend on will ultimately shift. If we pretend otherwise, our denial will produce suffering, not only in the future, but in an “out of jointness” in our everyday lives.
If we resist this truth, we compromise our density of soul, the spiritual ballast that keeps us afloat on the sea of circumstance and karmic unfolding.
In the full excerpt that Whyte includes as today’s post, he enlists Rilke to describe the feeling of physiological disturbance after suffering the loss of an emotional ground:
As if standing on fishes, Rilke described it, as if the ground had a life of its own and were swimming away underneath him...
and he talks about how he dealt with his own feeling of bereftness:
All I could do at the time was take to my bed for forty-eight hours; pull the blankets over my head, and in that claustrophobic darkness, come to very reluctant terms with it.
The beginning of the spiritual path — to realize your true self as Big Self, or No Self — is just this: to deeply feel how your own body-mind is responding to the things that arise in your life. To come to terms with it, however reluctantly.
If we do this with the proper intent, we can actually move through this doorway to recognize two new levels of truth: that we are fundamentally free, and that we are fundamentally fulfilled.
These two levels are expressed in the short teachings from Buddhist teachers Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche and Zen Master Dogen.
Trungpa wrote:
“The bad news is you’re falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is, there’s no ground.”
When we truly embrace our existential groundlessness, we can learn to live with freedom. We learn to fly. We work with “gravity” as merely a force that happens to be impelling us in a certain direction.
We can say that “gravity” here is a metaphor for karma. Certain things in the past and present create conditions that impel us in a certain direction. Shit happens. People make decisions. They reject us. We get fired. People die.
We have no control over any of this, but we can learn to work with the gravity of our condition, our karma. After all, there is no flying in space, only floating. We fly because gravity keeps our atmosphere stable and allows us to navigate through the aerodynamics of directed resistance.
Learning to fly is a lifelong practice. Also, we have to acknowledge that often times experientially, there is a ground we crash in to. As the Crazy Heart song goes, “sometimes falling feels like flying, for a little while.” We do crash. Forty-eight hours in the claustrophobic darkness with a blanket over our heads is a crash.
That part is essential. To feel the loneliness, the isolation, the bereftness.
But on the other side of that is freedom. From it comes the knowing that your true self abides, and is not going anywhere.
Next we get to what is arguably the deepest experience of the groundless ground, one which allows us to live fulfilled in our simple fact of existence.
Dogen writes:
“No creature ever falls short of its own completion. Wherever it stands it does not fail to cover the ground.”
This level of self-understanding is as difficult to describe in words as our initial emotional response to groundlessness. But here the inexpressible devastation, isolation, bereftness, and instability becomes an inexpressible oneness, fulfillment and sense of “completion.” It is a sense of always being supported by existence itself.
All creatures are always complete. We are never falling short, not one iota, at any time. All our creature-ness — our pain, heartache, confusion, greediness, limitation and self-judgment — is fully supported by the entire universe every moment of every day.
This is one of the most amazing and wonderful experiences offered by the spiritual path. It is to feel the truth of our Zen maxim that “we are all always perfect and complete exactly as we are.” This depth of fulfillment is something we are all seeking, and can only be found inward.
What a relief to know that we can transform all of our experience, pleasant and painful, into the deepest experience of freedom and fulfillment. It’s true.
I’ve covered a lot of ground here (sorry!), so to summarize:
Humans need stable foundations (grounds) for safety and emotional health.
None of our foundations (physical, relational, financial, existential, etc.) are ever stable in an absolute way. They will all always shift and disappear.
It can be incredibly difficult to experience shifting and disappearing foundations, but since impermanence is the nature of the phenomenal world, we can work with our own experience of groundlessness to understand ourselves better (wisdom) and act more in accord with that wisdom (compassion).
Working with shifting grounds requires first of all feeling what arises as we lose our ground. These feelings are often so deep and personal that we cannot convey them to others in words. They are also often so difficult that we may seek to avoid them with drugs, intellectualizing or other forms of escape.
Through feeling our loss of ground, we can come to a profound sense of freedom and play: the ability to “fly.”
Through feeling and flying, we can come to the deepest recognition of our natures, which is that we are co-extensive with existence, and are always “completed” by all things. This is ultimate fulfillment.
I am curious what you think of this post. Does this resonate with you? I would love to hear your thoughts on your own experiences of groundlessness, and how you have worked with it. (Write me at paul @ zenatwork.org)
Our grounds are shifting every day, and I fear there is much more to come…
Gyodo! I love that you are bringing together David Whyte, CTR and Dogen! ...not a problem since there "is no ground!" (hahha!) And the very real experience of tingling in your spine and so much more. Thanks for such a generous essay.