People who studied with spiritual teacher Steven Gaskins recall his direct wisdom but also how his teachings sometimes pushed followers toward conformity. The conversation then explores helplessness: meditation can create space around it, but you can also use that feeling as a signal of what matters and a trigger for prayer, compassion, and action.
Early in our life, we went to a spiritual teacher, a person named Steven Gaskins. His value system was communicating being straight. Prided himself on communicating being straight. It didn't work. What happened?
It seemed to me that Steven was one of the true pioneers of being an anchor for our values. I love Stephen. Stephen was such a great teacher of getting around with a close group of friends and sharing what you truly believed, what you truly felt. So he was a model for us of teaching that. Yet in spite of that, he also seemed to create an atmosphere where everyone had to be exactly like him. And so when we went to his ranch, everyone had the same kind of long hair, everyone smoked marijuana, no one drank alcohol, Everyone spoke language that was sort of like a beatnik hippie. And so, like so many other teachers that we followed in later years, there was this tendency to have to follow the exact traits of. Of the leader. And it created these artificial boundaries in spite of the fact there was such beauty and such wisdom and such benefit that we received. And that seems to me to be such a good example of what I, and I think we experienced with so many teachers, where the greatest benefits were received by being with them of anybody in the world. And yet there were these particular qualities or beliefs that were being asked to be followed that had separations or uniquenesses that created a barrier.
Are you saying then that even if the values are right, if they're absolute, that in a way they can go wrong?
Yes, I mean, I am saying that even if the values are right, when there's something absolute, there's a danger. However, that doesn't mean that the values aren't still valuable. So I have great gratitude towards Stephen. And at the same time, it's why I never went there to actually be a full scale participant.
For those that have been exposed to some of the Eastern practices where spaciousness or silence really can be the healing, experiencing helplessness can be seen as just one of the hindrances. And those practices oftentimes focus on silence or spaciousness as being the healer of all the hindrances. And for those that have a practice where it's deep enough, where you really can make states of helplessness just disappear on an ongoing basis, then of course, that would be a wonderful way to go. My experience is that it works on retreats and it works when I'm in my own private practice. But when it comes down to my daily life, there are always many times, usually a day, where helplessness still exists as a reality. And so one of the supplemental practices that is so beneficial is to see a paradoxical way of dealing with helplessness, so that in addition to possibly developing a meditation practice, we also can see that helplessness itself is just simply an indicator that something is very important to us, or else we wouldn't feel helpless. If you feel helpless at being able to communicate with someone you love, isn't it a sign that you care a lot about communicating? If you feel helpless when someone you love is dying or someone's sick, isn't it a sign that you really want the other person to be well and healthy and not die? So if indeed we recognize that helplessness is always a sign of wanting to help or wanting to receive help, then we can use the helplessness as a source of activating a prayer practice where we can ask for the highest capacities we have to be helpful to arise. So if we feel helpless again with someone being sick, we are asking for our heart to be evoked. We are asking for our compassion to be evoked. We are asking for our tenderness to be evoked. If we are in a situation where we are not being able to find work and we're really wanting to find that best solution as to how to do that, we might use an inquiry practice where we're asking, what is it that I can really do? And in that situation, we might be guided to reading the newspaper and find the job want ads. So the key thing is, there are completely opposite approaches to dealing with helplessness. It can be through a meditation practice, or it can be through just seeing that it can lead to both prayer and inquiry.
