Sitting and Serving at Dhamma Dhara: "A Completely New World!"
Jonathan Crowley spent extensive time at Dhamma Dhara, a meditation center in Massachusetts, where he deepened his practice and integrated it into his life as a volunteer. His spiritual journey involved discovering the paradox of stability within a destabilizing path and using meditation as a tool for personal and societal transformation. Jonathan's exploration led him to bring meditation to marginalized populations, like prisoners, but he later realized the need to address issues of racial diversity and inclusion within the tradition. He recognized the importance of examining privilege and structural racism within the meditation community, a subject he talks about in more detail in his recent podcast appearance.
“It was a fascinating time. There was a sense of, with each retreat, going deeper into practice, understanding the practice at a deeper level. And then this sense of the service being a kind of way to integrate that practice in the context of being a volunteer, which is a more extroverted position.”
“It was an extraordinary time, a really precious time for me. I landed at the center and began basically alternating retreats. I would sit a retreat and then volunteer, either in the kitchen or sometimes as course manager, and did that for I think about eight to nine months consecutively. It was a very intense time. That center [Dhamma Dhara] was still in some of its early stages of development in terms of expanding its residences. There was one other server who was there with me during the winter months. All of the trustees and ATs [Assistant Teachers] who were operating the center would leave for approximately two months and go to India to attend longer retreat centers, courses there. So, there were months where there were just visiting ATs, who would come to the center from either Canada or other places, and teach, conduct the courses. And I was just there kind of holding the fort with this other server.
It was a fascinating time. There was a sense of, with each retreat, going deeper into practice, understanding the practice at a deeper level. And then this sense of the service being a kind of way to integrate that practice in the context of being a volunteer, which is a more extroverted position. You're cooking; you're cleaning. You're interacting with other volunteers, either in the kitchen or with the ATs, who are teaching the course, conducting the course. So it was like entering a completely new world! And I was very open to it. It was very fulfilling to me on many levels. I had a real thirst to sit a lot, and it was really fulfilling that. I was also going through a lot of change, you might say, existential or metaphysical, [in the] sense of who I was, in the world and what the world was about. [These were] similar to my first course [in that] my first course, initially it was, in some ways, kind of a destabilizing event. It was an extraordinary event, in the sense that I felt like I achieved a lot, just by getting through the two days, but also it uprooted a lot of who I thought I was. And that continued for six months, in an acute way. I really didn't know what was up and what was down or what my life was about, or what direction I should go. It called into question, so many different things.
But by the time I had landed at the center, to sit and serve, I had gotten to know the center a little bit and realized, ‘Okay, this is a world here. And let me enter this world.’ As I was entering this world, it was interesting. It was interesting to see that, ‘Oh, this is a whole entire world.’ Like, what I did when I set my first 10-day course was not just this stand-alone, fringe activity. There is a whole world of people doing this, sending these courses over and over again, volunteering on these courses, teaching these courses. It's like an entire whole world. And so there was a process really of getting to know the organization.
I would guess that a lot of meditators feel this way as they enter into retreats, that the retreat provides, in some ways, a container, for which to plumb and uproot aspects of identification, in the sense of questioning who you are. I mean, I think that that occurs on a typical 10-day retreat with Goenka in a profound way. You are experiencing - let's see, if I can describe this - just observing the breath every moment, observing sensations every moment, you are, in some ways, dis-identifying from what you think you are, or who you think you are, to just this bare experience. Right? And I think there is an uprooting that occurs in that process, but in many ways, it's contained. At least while you're on the retreat, there's a structure; you’re following the instructions; you’ve got a schedule.”