Monastic training, a training in living.

I lived in a Buddhist monastery for most of my twenties, it was an amazing time. It was my initiation into my humanity. While in the monastery and since leaving I have heard many miss understandings of what the monastic training is.  So I thought I would share my experience and how my own view and perspectives changed as I grew up with the robe and without them.
I had entered the monastery at the same time as giving up drugs and alcohol, I had issues with boundaries( would take other people's stuff).This had lead to me not being very happy with the experience of being me. The monastery was a simple place, not much to stimulate the senses apart from Dhamma talks and books on Dhamma. There were people who were intending to be kind and seemed genuinely interested in me and my experience. Living within the monastery meant living by the 8 precepts. These are to abstain from harming/ killing others, abstain from stealing, abstain from acting out of sexual desire, abstain from lying, abstain from intoxicants, abstain from eating in the afternoon, abstain from entertainment and sleeping too much.
When we reflect and notice that most of the time we tend to be good wholesome humans these precepts are not that threatening. What they helped me do was to begin to align my energies, I began to feel directly my unwholesome tendencies that would be harmful to myself and others, my views and reactions matured into views that were more responsive to myself and my environment. They also helped to highlight the movement of my mind towards distraction due to not understanding my sensory experience. It was like living is a house of mirrors where I was developing the ability to reflect on my intentionality. I then took the ten precepts, then the 227.
The precepts which some, if you read their description in the books, seemed outdated, if I reflected upon the intention of the training rule it made sense. The training was creating a framework to investigate intentionality without being caught up in the complexity of jobs, sexual relationship and whatever else manifests. It was not a denial of the world it was an intimate connection to our relationship to this world. This is my sense of the goal of the training was to allow awareness to mature into the depths of this human being, as wisdom grows into the conditionality of the body/mind, freedom naturally arises. The training is like a picture frame that highlights the picture of life.
As human beings, we have agenda's these are conditioned by the needs/desires that arise due to the body/mind. So these agenda's taint how we see things. This is the same with the monastic training, some people will feel the need to rebel, some will do their best to be the good child to get praise from their projected mother/father figures. Our psychologies are complex, making our views and opinions complicated. They need to be questioned. It does not mean you do not question the training. In this day and age, it is time to have equality between men and women in the monasteries. This I feel comes down to an attachment to tradition, and the complexity of male/female relationships. From what I witnessed I feel a lot of monastic men lack the understanding and wisdom around sexuality and the conditioning process which is natural and needs to be understood not hidden from, shamed etc. Those senior monks that have opened to and understand this are the only true men I have met. This is a complicated area for men in or out of monastic life.
For me, the monastic training was a framework that reflected back to me my goodness, and highlighted my unwholesome areas, helping me to contain and develop awareness around these behaviors. This leads to the condition of trusting oneself, when we trust our self there is kindness, compassion present. This becomes the ground for a mature mindfulness to arise, which leads to letting go, this leads to joy, enjoyment of living and a natural unforced samadhi.
For me, I came to a point as I grew, that areas of my life that I had not explored due to my own psychological issues, which had lead to drugs and alcohol abuse. My low self-esteem, self-hatred had lessened to a point that I was feeling the need to explore my human life. The monastic life had given my life back to me. Since leaving the robes which were almost 15years ago I still feel the powerful conditions the training had established. A foundation in an awareness that senses a flexible organic ethic in each context I am in, which comes from a trust, a compassion that arises from learning to rest upon the groundless ground of life, watching the conditioned self-grasp for control. Becoming familiar with the reactivity that arises when we touch the groundless ground, being gentle and caring towards this reactivity until the reactivity is known and there is a settling down.
My training now is being a dad and a husband. As with the monastic training, the kids reflect back to me my intentions. They show me that as a human being I have needs and desires. I respond to these with kindness and care, giving them permission to be here. This means I have moments of grumpiness as I catch up with the reactivity to my not being able to be selfish. What this does is help me to actually share my life and live life rather than have my own precious special experience.  This I noticed a quality in the senior monks that I respected, their ability to create a space for another human to be present. Being a parent is a very flexible experience compare to the relative protection of the monastery, If you can be aware of intention in either context and let life live you, then freedom will naturally arise.

Mature effort

The mature effort we find after the mature speech, mature action, and mature livelihood in the classical description of the eightfold path. This to me makes sense as I like to perceive the path as one of maturation each aspect growing out of the previous aspects. The path begins with the corrected view that there is suffering we step upon the path, where we set up a corrected intention. This being gentleness and care towards our experience, this intention as it continues to be corrected and matures leads on to compassion, joy, and equanimity. This intention feeds into the quality of our speech, action, and choice of livelihood. It is a kind of sensitizing to ourselves and our environments.  We become aware of our own vulnerability and our desire not to feel pain, and wanting pleasure.

So not wanting to feel pain and desiring pleasure is the ground for Mature effort to arise. It is in this process of being aware of our vulnerability, the push and pull of pleasure and pain and in its extreme version fight and flight mode. This maturing, being with and understanding our vulnerability, becoming aware of our stories which have grown out of the unstable ground of the human sensory world. We begin to stabilize into a mature effort, it is a sense of becoming stable and not being pushed around by the polarities of life. This is the ground for mature mindfulness to arise, a sense of being with the whole of the experience. It is the ground for equanimity to grow and mature.

A mature effort is not so much a doing as learning to be with experience and become intimate with our reactivity. As we mature in relation to becoming familiar with the reactivity. This steadiness of being with leads on to a mature skillful mindfulness arising, which leads on to a mature samadhi, one that is not efforted and based on an object, which arises from wisdom in relation to our reactivity and our freedom from reactivity, which gives rise to joy.

*By corrected I mean through being with our experience our views begin to attune to our direct experience, as our view becomes corrected the other aspects of the path begin to mature from an ignorant position towards one of wisdom.