Why Understanding Emptiness Doesn't Change How I Feel

We come to Buddhist practice because we feel confused, unaligned, lacking something. We listen diligently, practice earnestly, maybe even purchase the beads, bells, and brocades. And we experience the effects of our listening and practicing: some insight, some clarity, some calmness… that is why we keep coming back. But the confusion, the lack, also comes back alongside it. This is a pattern I know all too well.

Early on after a meditation or dharma teaching, I would often feel more calm, present and open to experiences. The pace, colour and sounds of life were deeply moving, and people’s presence seemed almost miraculous. But… the habits and patterns of my life pulled me back into a narrow, reactive point of view: the one where I put myself at the centre of the universe, climbed over others to get what I wanted, and allowed desire to drive my decisions. The result was once again feeling confused, unaligned, lacking something.

It did not take long to see the pattern: struggle with internal mental states, dedicate time to study and practice, a positive change observed, eventually drawn back into mental struggles… requiring further dedicated study and practice. But I am practicing — why this continued suffering?

I asked many teachers and it would always boil down to “you need realisation not just understanding” or “accumulate merit”. I took it at face value for a few years, but after seemingly endless cycles of the pattern I felt increasingly frustrated, confused and unseen… the doctrinal answers were as accurate as they were useless at guiding me out.

Transformation came for me though, and it’s as alive as my heartbeat or breath. But it wasn’t a single moment, it wasn’t a light switch, and there were no angels or harps involved. It was drop by drop.

In one way it’s hard to replicate or teach because meditation and contemplating have no objective measurable progress markers. It is both fascinating and friction-filled: you have everything you need, and nothing is in your way. But you are expecting something other than what is: wonder-filled dependent arising and emptiness.

It might seem that practicing diligently or neglecting the view both contains struggle: warmth and cold, confidence and doubt. Days of increasing depth, days of shallow concerns. And in a way, they do. But in another, more lived way, they feel different. One has less grip. Less permanence. Less cramping. Less neurotic panic. Less suffering. But nowhere is a single moment where, ‘before’ I was totally deluded and ‘after’ I thrust into permanent enlightenment. That story is soaked in the essentialism and svabhava-grasping that Madhyamaka is purpose-built to refute. Because awakening, like everything, happens in dependence.

We might have a story of ‘the’ transformational moment because it would validate our prior efforts or match a constructed narrative. The single ‘aha’ that changed everything for us, forever. But this is not how causation works. It is always made of constant change, that is itself moving into further changes. The discrete cause-effect pair looks to be the final layer, but does not describe the way that causation actually works, nor usefully describe living the view. Instead there is dependent arising and emptiness of countless prior causes and subsequent effects. It is not some jaw-dropping transcendence; it is one drop, then another drop, then another.

My view has changed, touching every sense of experience. But not in ‘a moment’ that can be pointed to. There were times I thought I saw emptiness, but it was just a projected concept. There were times I felt boundless compassion, but it contracted back again. It is in repeating these that develops a habit, orienting toward awakening. Each of these insights was like a drop in a bucket, overflowing into how I meet the world. So which drop filled the bucket? Or if you like destructive metaphors, which snowflake caused the avalanche? You can’t say. And that inability is not a failure… it is the madhyamaka insight.

Intertwined with this is the covert desire to ‘complete’ the practice. We want the single transcendent crescendo in order to point to it and say ‘I am done’. But we are never done, the view enables a practice to deliver continued insight, clarity, and peacefulness. If you approach practice with the goal of being done, you will be perennially disappointed because you will never get there. If you approach it with the view that there is only ever continual arriving, you never have to get anywhere, and you never leave.

The search for the single transformative moment is the same grasping the practice is aimed at undoing. The practice is alive now in you as you. The question isn’t how to arrive beyond it, instead, we stop expecting it to announce itself. It won’t arrive the way you imagined, and it certainly does not finish… it only ever endlessly dependently arises.