Camping-In Our True Nature

The Path to Undoing Doership in our Meditation Practice

By Acharya Satyam Ehinger

We all know what a distracted mind feels like when we meditate, how we can drift invisibly from a to-do list to a potential-purchase to a new-idea and so on. When we realize what’s happening, we try to get back on track by saying our mantra louder, breathing deeper, or sitting straighter— but that just brings us to the other end of the pendulum, from a distracted mind to a doozer mind. What lies between these two pendulum swings is a state of balance, but finding that middle path requires a special kind of work, what Swami Rudrananda called the “double work” of surrender. This ‘double work’ requires that we use our mind to do a practice without allowing ourself to slip down the slippery slope of doership. We find that the key to unlocking this double work isn’t ‘more work’ or ‘harder work’ but actually relaxing into our work. That’s right, relaxing might just be the ‘work’ you’re missing. But before we can fully comprehend this statement, and put it into use, we have to reflect on our understanding, and tendency, towards doership itself.  

In our physical life, we feel the slide into doership when we try to ‘push through’ an activity without maintaining awareness of how our body is actually doing— like that last half hour of yard work that seemed so important at the time, but ended up straining our back. Similarly, we can slip into doership in our meditation practice, such as when the Guru Gita tells us that “long and windy pranayamas” actually lead to disease when done with doership (verse 53). The Shiva Sutras gives us the same precaution about doing mantra with doership: “The life of all mantras is solely the energy of God consciousness. When that energy is absent, all those collections of words are useless just like a mass of clouds in the rainless autumn sky. (Tantra Sadbhāva)” (LMJ Shiva Sutras, 2.1). This means that saying your mantra louder or faster may produce impressive clouds, but it will never make it rain. Overall, the shortcomings of doership teach us that how we practice is more important than how much we practice. One conscious breath is worth alot. 100 willful breaths… not so much. 

But why do we error so often towards over-exertion? Just look around you and you’ll see that we’re all drowning in a culture of doership. To excel in sports we must always give hundred and ten percent, right? To succeed in the world of business you’ve got to ‘pull yourself up by your boot straps’. Our national bird always flies solo, and freedom itself is often defined as being able to ‘do what you want when you want to do it’. So when you sit down to meditate, you can assume that if your mind is not distracted by a thought, then it is caught in the throes of doership trying to repel them.

And who can blame you? If somehow you weren’t programmed to be a doozer by your culture, then you may fall into the shortcomings of doership simply because it takes effort to meditate. There is no doubt that it often takes an internal push to make it to your cushion before dawn, or after work— but at some point that pushing has to transform into something more nourishing, or else you never ‘arrive’ at your destination. It’s like driving your car right up and over a mountain without stopping to take in the view. Sounds ridiculous, but we do it all the time when we practice with doership.

Transcending doership takes work, but not just any kind of work. In Rudi’s words it takes a type of “double work”. We can’t just put the pedal to the metal in the vehicle of our practice, that would be ‘single work’— we have to apply effort while feeling that effort effect us, that’s double work. As Rudi teaches, “The mind is the greatest danger— it must be continually surrendered to allow the force to spread. You must do the double work of opening within and using the mind to keep from narrowing the open areas and stopping the process. The student will often find that the entire work process has taken place in his mind. He thinks it through and in reality has expressed nothing” (Spiritual Cannabalism, 13). As Rudi says, we must use the mind to open within, but not let the mind narrow your experience of that opening. Otherwise we may find that we have spun our wheels for a half hour with nothing to show for it.  

And this all makes sense if you think about Rudi’s original spiritual equation: Effort x Time = Growth. Look closely and you’ll see that effort and time are two categorically different things, and that no matter how much effort you put into a practice, growth still requires time. Effort alone is doership, ie. windy pranayamas and rainless clouds, but effort over time, that’s growth. So transcending doership requires that we embrace the element of time in our practice. 

How do we do that? Rudi once said in a satsang that ‘when we drop a rock down a well we will always be surprised by how long it takes for the rock to hit the water below’. This means that we always tend to overlook time in our daily life. “Very rarely do we let the energy rise high enough,” he says, “everything needs time to build— a spiritual life or a house” (Spiritual Cannabalism, 14). It’s easy to drop rocks, it’s hard to consciously wait for them to land. Doership is like dropping mantras like rocks, for example, without feeling their vibration land within us. So how can we get better at letting our practice land within us, to start to employ this all important second half of our ‘double work’ as well as the second half of the formula for growth itself? Whoa there…chill out for a second…take it easy…relax. (that was actually the teaching). 

As Babaji says: “You may think, “I have to surrender harder,” but that doesn’t work. Working harder to surrender means that you let go. You let go, you relax, and you become expansive.” (Spiritual Practice, 67) Babaji also teaches, “That kind of frantic practice can have the opposite of the desired effect. The goal is to open up, let go, relax, and release the tensions” (Spiritual practice, 35).  As hard as it may be to believe, relaxing could be the very ‘work’ you’re missing.  

But as we all know, relaxing on cue can be quite challenging. Usually, to “relax” we stimulate or distract our mind, which is not really the kind of conscious relaxing Babaji is referring to. To do this kind of relaxing you have to do nothing, on purpose, for a while— until your mind actually starts to slow down. It’s not as unusual as it sounds, in fact, it’s how most of us feel when we go camping, or even on long walk in nature. Nature has a miraculous way of calming the mind without distracting it, something no app will ever be able to emulate. We don’t always have time to go for a walk in nature though, much less a camping trip— which is why I’m happy to introduce you to a little thing called “Camping in”. 

Camping-in is alot like a camping-out, except you don’t have to pack any supplies or go anywhere to do it. In fact, not packing and not going anywhere is what camping-in is all about! Camping-in is a time you set aside (5 minutes, 15 minutes, 25 minutes), to purposefully, and consciously, do nothing. When I say nothing, I mean all the obvious stuff like no phones, music or podcasts. But the list continues— nothing also means no talking, no list making, no drawing, no poetry, not even any ‘decision making’ (which is actually the most important one of all). I know, it sounds crazy, but in my experience I have found that any one of those things can quickly and silently steer me into ‘doing something’ which sort of misses the whole point of the exercise. 

As a meditator, you might say, ‘oh that’s easy, I’ll just do mantra’ as you lock into your meditation posture—  but for the sake of this experiment, we are even going to postpone mantra, pranayama, as well as our ‘meditation seat’, and even the tendency to ‘fix your gaze on a single point’. Why? Because too often we are infusing these elements of our practice with subtle tinges of doership, and the purpose of this experiment is to really neutralize all possibilities of doership in order for us to get a glimpse of what lies beyond it. In my experience, I have found that by really committing to camping-in can I let go of the most nagging thoughts and tensions. Rudi often taught that surrender must be total, not partial, and camping in is one way of accessing that potential as it really asks you to totally do nothing. But don’t worry you over achieving yogis (myself included)! You will definitely be utilizing your practice in order to ‘do nothing’ for even a few minutes- you’ll quickly feel the inner work of surrender taking place as you come face to face with the raw activity of your mind. And because you don’t have your normal bull-doozer tools for dealing with those thoughts— like a ‘deep breath’ or a ‘loud mantra’— you’ll actually feel a deeper glow of consciousness begin to burn within you as you access more natural reserves of surrender. When “Camping-in”, your only goal is to keep coming back to the present, to see, hear and feel your life happening without being sucked into any one aspect of it— it couldn’t be simpler, and yet you may find tremendous growth in it. 

Ideally, “Camping-in” produces a state of mind is similar to how you feel when you’ve been camping out— you know, ‘doing nothing’ for a while. That calm, contented, yet fully aware, state of mind that nature so readily produces in us.  But this isn’t a miracle of the forest, it’s a miracle of your being— it’s your true nature. So don’t worry if you can’t go camping out the next time your mind is caught in the the throes of doership— you can always go camping in. In fact, there’s absolutely nothing that could ever keep you from camping in because it literally requires nothing at all. Which reminds me of one of my favorite poems from the Tao Te Ching, a text that Babaji always says makes him laugh… “Doing less and less, until there is nothing left undone.” I hope this summer, whether camping in or camping out, we all get a chance to experience such bliss. 

Click this link for a 25 minute guided camp-in and breath meditation session with Satyam.