What’s Your Dharma?

We all hit moments in practice where the questions we think we should know the answer to suddenly land in a deeper way.

For me, that happened recently when someone asked, “What’s your Dharma?”
And I froze.

I didn’t have a polished answer…at least not the nice, tidy Buddhist one I thought I was supposed to give.

So I’ve been sitting with it. The word Dharma gets used in so many ways. Sometimes it means truth. Sometimes teaching. Sometimes cosmic law or just the way things are. The nature of things.

And nature itself is a great teacher, right?
Rupture and repair.
Change.
Birth and death.

But the more I reflected, the more I realized…for me, Dharma isn’t abstract or locked up in old texts. It’s something alive. Something I can actually feel in my own heart.

Dharma as Heart-Truth

For me, Dharma is the truth of what’s most alive inside.
That might be sadness, or fear, or longing. And it’s also the capacity to love.

So Dharma isn’t just some lofty idea, it’s deeply personal. And at the same time, it’s universal. We all know these experiences. The rawness of being human. To me, Dharma is those truths we can’t really turn away from, no matter how hard we try.

Dharma as Relationship

Another way I feel Dharma is in relationship.  In how I connect to myself, to the people I love, and to presence itself.

Ram Dass said, “If you think you’re enlightened, go spend a week with your family.”

That’s the real practice right there.

It’s not about escaping pain or fixing it or rising above it. It’s about being willing to meet it honestly. And that’s pretty radical in our culture. We tend to think of truth as certainty, as having the right answers. But Dharma, at least for me,  is more about openness. It’s about showing up with what is, even when I don’t know what the hell to do with it.

Dharma as Holding

Sometimes Dharma feels unbearable.
It’s grief, or fear, or the weight of loneliness.

Other times, it feels like the warmest embrace - love, belonging, joy.

And what I’ve come to see is that Dharma isn’t one or the other. It’s big enough to hold both…the tension between fear and love, suffering and belonging.

So Dharma isn’t about perfection. It’s not a goal or a state to achieve. It’s just the flow of life itself…sometimes unbearable, sometimes beautiful.

Closing Reflection

So if someone asks me again, “What’s your Dharma?” I’d probably say something like this:

My Dharma is the truth of being present with life as it is,  the pain, the love, and the belonging in between.

Or maybe even simpler:

My Dharma is meeting the full truth of my heart, moment by moment.

That’s what feels most honest to me right now. And I’ll end with this. 
That's my Dharma.

But what about you?

Take a moment, if you can.

Feel into what’s most alive in you right now — the joy, the ache, the quiet hum beneath it all.
If Dharma is the truth of how life moves through you…

What’s your Dharma?

Written by Joe Clements — meditation teacher, musician, and founder of the Sit.Feel.Heal. Meditation Center in Santa Cruz, CA. For weekly talks, meditations, and upcoming offerings, visitsitfeelheal.org.