Aloha Sangha

ancient wisdom for crazy times

Author: Tom Davidson-Marx

mindfulness: unfolding into wholeness
I was recently reading a very inspiring book by Mary O’Malley, the title of which I love: What is in the Way is the Way. In the bio blurp on inside back cover Mary writes that she “barely survived childhood.”
The compact bio continues: “Throughout her youth, she experienced an ever-deepening descent into darkness, culminating in hospitalization in 1968. After a number of suicide attempts, she had a life-changing realization in which she saw through the games of the struggling mind and experienced a full and complete connection with life which is the foundation of her work.”
I saw elsewhere in the book that she was born in 1945, and has been in private practice as a social worker and counselor for over forty years.
There is one line which truly spoke to me in her book:
When we dissolve our cloud banks of struggle through mindfulness and heartfulness, we can see, hear, taste, touch and smell the exquisite sacredness of all of life.
Most of us find ourselves living from a place of struggle more often than we may care to see. Our days can be visited by many little struggles, an occasional big one, and some that are just nonsensical. Mindfulness and this “heartfulness” Mary talks about can truly allow us to live from a place of openness and ease, even while experiencing deep challenges and struggles.
Back in the late 1930’s Carl Jung described a paradigm shift in understanding the spiritual path — rather than climbing up a ladder seeking perfection, he explored an unfolding into wholeness. He clearly saw the inherent flaws of trying to transcend or vanquish the difficult aspects of our life, our struggles and challenges, which we often associate with something being wrong with us.
Without an appreciation of our difficulties in a way which truly accepts and honors them as a part of us, fear, shame, jealousy, and anger, and other reactive patterns tend to become emboldened by our disdain for them.
But, as Mary O’Malley wrote so eloquently, mindfulness and heartfullness can dissolves these cloud banks of struggle. But we need to develop the patience and the emotional maturity to allow our stuff to marinate in mindfulness, and tenderize with heartfullness. Otherwise they simply harden into anxiety, depression, or stuffing or numbing ourselves.
Mindfulness helps us turn around and embrace life in all its messy brokenness.
Pema Chodron points out what can really keep the struggles going is a feeling that we can fix the stuff that we struggle about, or somehow fully resolve everything, though pushing through for some sort of magic breath through in our spiritual practice.
Consider this from Pema:
“We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart.”
Pause here a moment. Let this sink in.
Things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall part again.
I talk to a few folks in our group who tell me they are having a very difficult 2016 so far. But after a little prodding, sometimes I get a “but …”
As in: “Its been hell, but it’s weird, at times I feel more grounded and open than I have ever felt before.”
A kind of trust emerges in the wholeness, or holiness, of the ways things are.
There are two lines I am particularly fond of from the Persian poet Rumi:
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass the world is too full to talk about.
What he seems to be saying is that right outside of this world of your mind that is always liking/ disliking (AKA struggling) a completely other deal is happening.
Maybe at first it’s just a glimpse, or an intuition, of spaciousness, ease, joy.
Mindfulness allows us to be open to these small moments of joy and peace, such that we don’t cut them short like we always do, as we scurry back into worry, regret or second-guessing ourselves.
This “other place” is actually really a deep inner place which is always here for you. And it is absolutely trustable. It is not always likable, but it can be trusted, no matter what is happening.
It is possible to know deeply what Pema Chodron means when she says “enlightenment is all about relaxing into our life just as it is right now” — imperfect as hell, messy at times, but it’s here and now that glimpses come.
And as they come, we begin the process Jung wrote about above, that rather than trying to climb up a ladder seeking perfection and to fix or resolve things, we are unfolding into the wholeness moment by moment of the way things are.
03/03/2016
joy as a moral obligation
Acknowledging the inevitable sorrows in our lives with mindfulness opens the heart to kindness and joy as a moral obligation.
I recently read a passage from a book by the Franciscan priest and author Richard Rohr which resonated deeply. He writes in Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi:
Christianity is not a moral matter; it’s a mystical matter … The ego pattern never changes. The mystical mind is the non-dual, spacious, non-counting mind.
The ordinary dualistic mind is consumed by counting and measuring how moral I am or you are. It weighs everything up and down–mostly down. The dualistic mind moves toward quick resolution and too easy closure. It is very judgmental.
That’s why all great spiritual teachers say, “Do not judge.”
Can you see this in your meditation practice? That the dualistic mind “weighs everything up and down–mostly down”?
Neuroscience can now prove what meditators in many spiritual disciplines across the planet and across time have known intimately, that the brain has a “negative bias” — the brain prefers to constellate around fearful, negative, or problematic situations.
As the neuroscientist and mindfulness meditator Dr. Rick Hanson writes in his book Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love & Wisdom:
Our negative and critical thoughts are like Velcro, they stick and hold; whereas our positive and joyful thoughts are like Teflon, they slide away. We have to deliberately choose to hold onto positive thoughts so that they can “imprint.”
What he is saying is that when a loving, positive, or unproblematic thing comes your way, you have to savor it consciously for at least fifteen seconds before it can store itself in your “implicit memory;” otherwise it doesn’t stick.
Joy as a moral obligation
We must indeed savor the good in order to significantly change our regular attitudes and moods. And we need to strictly monitor all the “Velcro” negative thoughts.
the dualistic mind
Anything which the dualistic mind doesn’t understand, it quickly names as wrong, dangerous, and fearful. The dualistic mind is responsible for most of the disputes, wars, and violence on this planet.
This dualistic mind sees most opposition as highly justified and necessary, because it judges one side to be superior and one side to be inferior. It always takes sides!
Just have a peek at the latest news in this 2016 election cycle. Just today Mr. Trump called the Pope “disgraceful” for suggesting he, Mr. Trump, was not a Christian (in part because he wants to build a huge fence on the border).
Don’t get me wrong – I am not “taking sides” in this election here in this email, but rather simply pointing out the workings of the dualistic mind in high places.
if you takes sides in your mind, you lose
As one deeply experience mindfulness meditation teacher once remarked: “if you takes sides in your mind, you lose.”
Again, Fr. Richard Rohr:
The non-dual, contemplative mind abides in God, the Ultimate Positive. It wants the good, the true, and the beautiful so much that it’s willing to leave the field of the moment open and to hold onto all parts of it, the seemingly good and the seemingly negative, and waits for them to fully show themselves.”
One could go so far as to paraphrase Fr. Rohr’s unapologetic mystical Christian spirituality and say that mindfulness, when developed, allows us to rest in the “Ultimate Positive.”
joy as a moral obligation.
André Gide, French novelist and philosopher, asks us not to give in to this negativity bias and settle for a life of “quiet desperation” to borrow the phrase from Thoreau. He wrote:
Know that joy is rarer, more difficult, more beautiful than sorrow. To make this discovery is to embrace joy as a moral obligation.
Ah, joy as a moral obligation—what a revolutionary notion!
Acknowledging the inevitable sorrows in our lives viscerally with mindfulness opens the heart to joy, and to kindness.
I’ll leave you with this poem, Kindness, by Naomi Shihab Nye, a poet, songwriter, and novelist. She was born to a Palestinian father and an American mother.
Before you know what kindness is you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never come,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.
The Words Under the Words

Can we live this way?
02/18/2016
mindfulness meditation practice and the tiny purple flowers by the side of the road
We already have what we need – “your brain and your heart are your temples, and your philosophy, kindness.”
It seems many of us get hooked by trying to get somewhere in our mindfulness meditation practice. We evaluate where we are now and feel there is some ultra-cool place, where meditation, if done correctly, will eventually take us.
But what is the striving to get to that magic place is compounding our subtle (and not so subtle) discontent? This is assuming, of course, you experience even a smidgen of discontent in your life,
(And if you don’t experience any discontentment presently, once you start practicing daily, well … you just might run into some, as mindfulness starts to percolate down into strata of our minds many of us have conveniently disregarded for years and decades.)
So here we are.
As it says in the Zhuangzi, the ancient Chinese text from the late Warring States period (476–221 BC):
Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness.
Some folks I talk to seem to be unconsciously insisting they need certain things to get started with mindful meditation, such as the right book (or set of books), mp3s, DVDs.
To say nothing of understanding challenging theories and philosophies. Consider a remark by no other than the Dalai Lama:
There is no need for temples. No need for complicated philosophies. My brain and my heart are my temples. My philosophy is kindness.
Such a striking statement I feel shows that indeed, as Don Cupitt notes in his remarkable book The Great Questions of Life:
We are at the beginning (possibly in the middle, but definitely not at the end) of a global shift in the concept of religion, a shift away from the view of religion as a way of transcending the human condition and toward a view that religion is about embracing the human condition.
This “No need for temples and complicated philosophies” sounds a lot like John Lennon:
Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today …
We already have what we need – your “brain and your heart “are your temples, and your philosophy, kindness.
With your brain and your heart, and with kindness and mindfulness meditation, we can truly “embrace the human condition” as Don Cupitt says.
When we embrace with mindfulness what is actually happening in the moment, be it stubbing your toe or your pride, we learn again and again that the fuller we can embrace “what is,” the fuller mind and body can relax and rest.
And in that rest there may be found a juiciness, fullness, some call it a joy, in just experiencing, without grasping or rejecting, what arises, completely.
This is a quiet and deep joy that, in a way, has always been there, covered over by strata of reactivity and compulsiveness which subtly rule our lives, in one form or another.
In our meditation practice, the goal is not the deal, it’s the steps on the path. Each step, actually.
As Thich Nhat Hanh says, in the title to one of his books, “Peace is every step.”
One teacher I was very fortunate to sit a retreat with early on in my practice was Munindra, a Bengali teacher who trained in Burma. One of his students, Sharon Salzberg, recounts that when Munindra was asked once why he practiced his response was,
So I will see the tiny purple flowers by the side of the road as I walk to town each day.
Can we practice like this?
02/11/2016
meditation changes your brain–for the better
Meditation changes your brain. The you meditate, the more you respond to life from the place of calm, compassion, and awareness.

I often hear folks, when in a conversation about how they wish to improve their lives, but are struggling, or when receiving feedback from others, lament “well, that just the way I am.” Or a variation: “I’m not the kind of person that … (pays attention well, always remembers birthdays, does their laundry every week). Or the one I sometimes use “I’m too old for…”
It seems that a lot of us think our minds, the way we are, our approaches to housework or relationships or vegetables, are somehow set in place by our genetic makeup and/or our cumulative life experiences.
But a growing and seemingly overwhelming amount of scientific research challenges these assumptions.
So, as they say, I have good news and bad news for you. Let’s start with the good news.
It turns out our brains are mold-able in quite profound ways. Neuroscientists call this and this is called neuroplasticity.
Fadel Zeidan, PhD, a research fellow in the department of neurobiology and anatomy at Wake Forest School of Medicine, and many other scientists, have found that our brain structures can be changed to predispose ourselves toward contentment, compassion and connection with others.
Even in folks who believe themselves to be melancholic by nature, or feel they are somehow born homebodies, or incurably grumpy, anxious, worry-warts, or whatever.
Yes, as you have probably guessed, people who practice mindfulness meditation regularly have remarkably different neural structures from those who don’t, says Zeidan in a 2014 book chapter titled aptly enough The Neurobiology of Mindfulness Meditation.
He writes: “They (mindfulness medidators) have brain regions that can process much higher levels of compassion and awareness than a normal person.”
I remember reading in Mindful magazine online a few years about a big study that found that experienced meditators had much more brain activity when exposed to sounds like crying or laughter than folks who did not meditate. This research concluded that mindfulness meditation actually changed their neural structures in such a way that they became more in touch with the needs of others.
I can attest to this, as when I find myself at times in self-absorbed melancholic rumination, a few seconds of mindfulness practice brings me back into the world of family, work and play such that those tendencies to space out (and check my phone, for example) increasingly lose their appeal.
We can be healthier, live longer, and make the world a better place by exploring our potential for compassionate behavior, according to neurosurgeon James Doty, founder and director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, part of the Stanford Institute for Neuro-Innovation and Translational Neurosciences. And you guessed it, mindfulness meditation is at the heart of their research over there.
More and more research is showing that meditation rewires your brain for the better. It seems that the more your brain changes from meditation, the more you tend to respond to life from the place of calm, compassion, and awareness that you discover from you meditation practice.
Neuroscientists have shown that practicing mindfulness affects brain areas related to perception, body awareness, pain tolerance, emotion regulation, introspection, complex thinking, and sense of self. This “re-wiring” of our brains results in increased focus, decreased anxiety, decreased stress, and increased memory and grey matter density. If this is not convincing enough, how about increased spontaneity and creativity, lower blood pressure, and a big boost in well-being and overall quality of life..
After one has been practicing mindful meditation, there is no effort involved in bringing these fruits of meditation into our life. How awesome is that? Here is Dr. Zeidan again:
That place where being mindful becomes more second-nature is where the plastic change in the mind happens. It’s not effortful. You don’t say you’re going to be mindful, you just are. But if you don’t practice it’ll go away. Like training a muscle. If you stop, over time that muscle is going to deteriorate.
So now we hear the bad news above: that if you give up meditation altogether, it may take a while, but those brain changes may be slowly undone.
I do like the analogy Dr. Zeidan used above: meditation is like strength training. Fitness training for the mind: we know that if we want to enjoy increased strength, vitality and oxygenation through exercise, we have to work at it consistently. And those of us who meditate regularly know that training the mind, actually transforming our neural structures to gain real, tangible effects in our lives, takes time and effort.
Meditation practice is just like going to the gym. If we practice steadily, and do our “reps,” we cultivate new ways experiencing our life.
Even business high-level executives are getting in on this. Writing in the January 8 edition of the Harvard Business Review, three contributing writers put together the excellent article Mindfulness Can Literally Change Your Brain which concludes with these words:
Mindfulness should no longer be considered a “nice-to-have” for executives. It’s a “must-have”: a way to keep our brains healthy, to support self-regulation and effective decision-making capabilities, and to protect ourselves from toxic stress. It can be integrated into one’s religious or spiritual life, or practiced as a form of secular mental training. When we take a seat, take a breath, and commit to being mindful, particularly when we gather with others who are doing the same, we have the potential to be changed.
While much of the nuts and bolts of mindfulness meditation practice may sound simplistic and somewhat mechanical, as meditation starts to change our minds we start to see the world in a radically new and freeing way.
We easily learn to step out of our own way. Even the most mundane aspects of our lives become invitations to the wonder and awe of every moment.
Our practice allows us to savor simplicity and contentment, and in in doing so, compassion grows organically.
And with practice, experience the world this way.
We come to discover perhaps what was in the minds of two very wise persons, separated as far as two humans could be by time, space and culture, when the wrote the following:
In the point of rest at the center of our being, we encounter a world where all things are at rest in the same way. Then a tree becomes a mystery, a cloud a revelation, each person a cosmos of whose riches we can only catch glimpses. The life of simplicity is simple, but it opens to us a book in which we never get beyond the first syllable.
(Dag Hammarskjold, 1905 -1961, Swedish diplomat, the second Secretary-General of the United Nations)
If your mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things,
This is the best season of your life.
(Wu-Men, Buddhist meditation master teacher, China 1183 – 1260)

02/07/2016
the monkey pod tree in the beach park
Life just as it is, is eloquent. The world is its own magic. We need to need to stop seeking some additional meaning and just let things come forward and enlighten us to their magic in their own time.
Have you ever had the experience of being irritated with someone or about something, like a parking ticket, while waking somewhere when suddenly you notice a gorgeous sunset is also happening?
How long did it take you to let go of the “irritation voices” in your head to take in the sunset?
Or maybe you simply ignored nature’s evening show and continued in miffed rumination?
The ego wants to know how we can justify pausing to take in yet another boring sunset when we do not have enough time to do all we need to do, and plan for.
But as we learn to just be in the silent simplicity of meditation, we slowly let go of the life-robbing habits of worrying, planning, and seething.
As James Finley, a teacher of spiritual contemplation and student of the late Thomas Merton, writes:
We must be patient with ourselves as we devote ourselves to this lifelong, transformative process of meditation. Taking the time to transcend the tyranny of time is time well spent. In God’s good time, an underlying meditative awareness grows within us to the point of becoming our habitual way of experiencing everything that we experience.
“In God’s good time” = not according to the ego’s timetable. We are often so concerned, thinking Am I doing this mediation thing right? I should definitely be seeing some changes by now.
Results of meditation simply happen when they happen, no sooner.
Growing out of the shell of ego, leaving the nest ego has made for us, can be a little scary. It’s just part o the process, and you can’t accelerate this thing once it gets going, or you’ll risk what some folks call “spiritual bypassing.”
The caterpillar spins its cocoon of contemplative practice and emerges as a free flying being “in God’s good time.” Trying to break a little piece off the cocoon sends the whole thing crashing on the rocks of disappointment, resentment, frustration.
This is a poem from Swami Nirbhayananda, who lived in North India in the nineteenth century, which describes this process of what some psychologists call “transpersonal individuation”, or the gradual shedding of the tyranny of ego.
In this extract the Swami is speaking to his own ego:
Your thoughts are restless, mine are forever peaceful.
You are attached to name and form.
I go beyond them.
O dear one, I listen to you, but am not quick to respond.
O mind, we part company and are friends.
I salute you a thousand times.
You are all pain and tears.
I am peace and perfection.
Life just as it is, is eloquent. The world is its own magic. We need to need to stop seeking some additional meaning and just let things come forward and enlighten us to their magic in their own time, not ours.
This liberates us from the tyranny of our mind, borrowing James Finley’s powerful word. We are then potentially liberated by every moment in our life, if we allow ourselves to enter into them in intimate way mindfulness allows.
What’s the meaning of life? That sunset over there. Or that the monkey pod tree in the beach park.
There is a quiet, dignified feeling to sunsets and trees. Also to animals, children, food, sitting in the dentist’s chair, disease, frustration, impatience and death.
If I think “I see that monkey pod tree in the beach park over there” I am partly living in my own private conceptual universe, which is always a day late and a dollar short, as they say.
Our practice is experience is simply letting seeing see or hearing hear. At that moment there is no time, no space, no self, no other. There just is what is, “full and complete, lacking nothing”, as the Zen masters of old used to say.
Through our simple, quiet mindfulness practice, we shed our conditioned, conceptual approach to life.
But that doesn’t mean we somehow destroy it, no, we simply grow out of the compulsion to only experience life in this protected, safe way.
In the often quoted teaching to Bahiya, the Buddha just gave the briefest of meditation instructions, which hit the bull’s eye, and Bahiya awoke to his true nature.
In John Ireland’s translation:
“Then, Bahiya, you should train yourself thus: In the seen will be merely what is seen; in the heard will be merely what is heard; in the sensed will be merely what is sensed; in the cognized will be merely what is cognized.”
In savoring a sunset or seeing a monkey pod tree in a beach park we let go of the experience of “I see” and doing something called seeing. There is just the seen.
No mental overlays.
Then our so-called mundane experiences, of stubbing our toe or our ego, become magical, revealing to us our natural essence, which many have said is love. In this inner shift of “In the seen will be merely what is seen” mindfulness lets us in on the magic.
Of just this incredible tree. Or just this breath. Or a baby’s first tooth.
01/21/2016
Rumi’s car: metta, inclusivity and the heart
I was driving somewhere the other day with my son Kupai in the car. It was late afternoon and I had just gotten up from bed (I work nights). I wasn’t paying a lot of attention, just trying to get to where we were going.
Kupai suddenly said, “Look Dad, that license plate says ‘Be Kind.’”
I looked over and just caught a glimpse of the plate in the late afternoon sun, glimmering, glistening; a soft spear of light striking my chest.
Images of a roving messenger, a town crier, a wine-loving mystic intoxicated on love, Rumi’s car that knows all the back streets of the heart, spreading the gospel of loving-kindness in neighborhoods of the world where Love seldom visits.
Dad, you missed the turn.
Oh, yes, mindfulness. I forgot.
Balance.
Sharon Salzberg has often says in her talks that in the West loving-kindness often takes the back seat to qualities such as being brilliant, or enterprising.
She wrote recently in her column in On Being With Krista Tippett:
“The hidden message is, ‘Well, if you can’t be brilliant, or you can’t be courageous and wonderful, ok, be kind.’ It’s nice. It’s not greatness, but it’s a good thing.”
Sometimes when metta (loving-kindness practice) comes up as a discussion topic or a formal meditation practice in our Thursday evening mindfulness group I sense a collective non-verbal groan. Like, oh, not again, we did loving-kindness practice three months ago.
It’s powerful to think of kindness as a front seat power developed through our mindfulness practice. Especially in times like ours, when even a casual peek at CNN tonight revealed “Boy, 8, charged with murder of toddler while parents out clubbing.”
Metta is all about inclusiveness, like the courageous football coach of the University of Missouri Gary Pinkel taking the bold measure of supporting his black players’ boycott, of standing firm not to play in any games until the University President stepped down due to his non-action regarding racial tensions on campus.
Clearly, we need this spirit of inclusiveness, as we saw this week the arrest of one student for making online threats to black students and faculty of this university.
The biggest lessons I have learned in my life are really about kindness and inclusiveness.
Pema Chodron:
“When you begin to touch your heart or let your heart be touched, you begin to discover that it’s bottomless.”
In this bottomless-ness, there is room for everyone and everything.
For love and clarity.
To fall in love, as Rumi says, but to stay awake so I don’t miss making the correct turns while driving.
Speaking of Rumi:
Close your eyes, fall in love, stay there.
That’s pure metta.
Or my man Hafiz:
Light will someday split you open
Even if your life is now a cage,
For a divine seed, the crown of destiny,
Is hidden and sown on an ancient, fertile plain
You hold the title to.
Love will surely bust you wide open
Into an unfettered, blooming new galaxy
Even if your mind is now
A spoiled mule.
A life-giving radiance will come,
The Friend’s gratuity will come —
O look again within yourself,
For I know you were once the elegant host
To all the marvels in creation.
From a sacred crevice in your body
A bow rises each night
And shoots your soul into God.
Behold the Beautiful Drunk Singing One
From the lunar vantage point of love.
He is conducting the affairs
Of the whole universe
While throwing wild parties
In a tree house
on a limb In your heart.
Be mindful. Fall in love.
11/12/2015
We all really need each other
We all need each other
It’s been an eventful past couple of weeks. Two weeks ago we experienced yet another horror with the Charleston killing of 9 people as they were worshipping in what we all would take to be the place of Ultimate Security, their church. Mysterious fires in African-American churches in the south continue this week.
Last week, the Pope hosted a visit to the Vatican of 46 Buddhist teachers, educators and leaders who were unofficially representing so-called “Western” Buddhism in the USA. Romereports.com, a news outlet covering all this Papal, mentioned that “Pope Francis clearly enjoyed the event, as he was beaming on his way out of the meeting.”
In a meeting hosted by the Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops this week, the Pope spoke to the group and said:
This is a visit of fraternity of dialogue and of friendship. And this is good. This is healthy. In this moment in our world which is wounded by wars and hatred these small gestures are seeds of peace and fraternity. I really thank you for this. And may God bless you.
This brought tears to my eyes, having been raised in a very devout Catholic environment.
Yes, we are different from each other
It’s really funny how different people are — men are completely different from women; it’s amazing that we can’t even talk to each other! Older folks are different from younger folks. People interested in spirituality are different from those who aren’t.
We differ in socio-economic conditions, political views, moral notions, and the list goes on — but at the same time there is something very much the same about all of us.
The hugely popular Christian pastor Rick Warren recently made this very important statement:
“Our culture has accepted two huge lies. The first is that if you disagree with someone’s lifestyle, you must fear or hate them. The second is that to love someone means you agree with everything they believe or do. Both are nonsense. You don’t have to compromise convictions to be compassionate.”
These words from two very different Christian leaders with huge followings, the Pope and Rick Warren, highlight what we who identify to some degree or other with the core Buddhist teachings aspire to practice every day.
We are certainly different from each other in many ways.
But are we really?
Although we are all so different, yes, In many ways we are all exactly the same. We are born, we die, we love somebody or hope to love somebody. Everybody has something that matters to them in just the same way. Even if what matters one person is radically different from what matters to another, the way in which things matter to us is exactly the same.
The Dalai Lama is fond of saying “Everyone just wants happiness and doesn’t want suffering.”
It just so astounding to me how much we are all alike and how little we notice this. When we meet each other our tendencies seem to be wary, to wonder about the differences, to wonder if the other person is acceptable to us or if we are accepted it acceptable to them. I think that’s what we notice most.
What’s just so incredibly important for me has been to actually feel with my own heart that loving and caring for others, the heart of both the Christian and Buddhist paths, can actually be learned and cultivated
It’s not just that you are either have it or you don’t, you’re born with it or not, it is or isn’t in your genes or family upbringing.
We can actually walk a path and perform daily exercises that build our compassion muscles, to actually cultivate altruistic joy and compassion, even if we feel misery and despondency.
This just blows me away when I reflect on it.
Jesus and the Buddha on Love
I reflect on the most important teachings I received in my Mahayana training days – the cultivation of bodhicitta, or the desire spiritual awakening. Now this doesn’t sound like compassion, this spiritual awakening business, unless you look a little deeper into the philosophy.
In this tradition “spiritual awakening” equals awakening to heartfelt concern for others, no matter who they are, period.
On first glance, this doesn’t sound as flashy as liberation from our troubling inner burdens or, sigh, experiencing limitless and unspeakable bliss.
Perhaps a terse Mahayana response would be something like “deal with it.”
Now the point here is not to favor any soteriological position over another, just to bring home this point, again — that is what spiritual awakening actually is, awakening to heartfelt concern for others, no matter who they are.
In the Christian view, Jesus died to save humanity from suffering, “he stretched his arms open wide and died for the salvation of all”, and absolutely no one was excluded from that sacrifice.
We really do need each other just as we are
This is one way I began to see, from my own Catholic background, to see that any selfish wish for my own cool spiritual jollies can never lead to genuine awakening, as it just leads to more and more narrowness and self-absorption, albeit on increasingly subtle levels, often below the horizon of conscious awareness.
Spiritual awakening is dropping this separateness, based on the deep insight that none of us is alone and that we all need each other. We can’t any more simply favor ourselves over others, even when these feelings arise.
We get to see really deeply in our own hearts just how painful these feelings of mistrust and wariness really are.
And the Pope’s recent, bold encyclical on climate change brings this home: not only do we need each other spiritually, but indeed, even to survive in the coming years.
07/02/2015
Guided equanimity meditation
The main work of equanimity meditation is a kind of radical, open and healing acceptance.
We have come to the fourth of the four immeasurables: meditation on equanimity. It might be the most important of the four, as without it we can easily lose our balance or direction. Whereas the previous three meditations on love, compassion and joy have a soft, heart opening quality, this meditation is, as Roshi Joan Halifx puts it, the “strong back that supports the soft front of compassion.”
Equanimity is the quality of mind that allows us to capacity to be in touch with the suffering of others when we are doing the compassion meditations, and at the same time not be overwhelmed or become undone by what comes up for us.
Equanimity gives us a stable, quiet calm, and a sense of trust that allows us to meet the world in all its naked force and sublime beauty and at the same time to fully let go of the world.
The main work of equanimity meditation is a kind of radical, open and healing acceptance.
Equanimity meditation can feel like gazing at Henri Rousseau’s Seine and Eiffel-tower in the sunset (1910)
Jon Kabat-Zinn describes this healing aspect of acceptance very nicely:
Healing does not mean curing, although the two words are often used interchangeably. While it may not be possible for us to cure ourselves or to find someone who can, it is always possible for us to heal ourselves.
Healing implies the possibility for us to relate differently to illness, disability, even death, as we learn to see with eyes of wholeness. Healing is coming to terms with things as they are.
Equanimity comes as a pivotal juncture. In earlier meditations we practiced reflections on impermanence and karma. Now we take the mind that has practices these reflections and apply it to fully be with the whole enchilada of life as it is, the unknowable and the immediate, and trust the moment to moment unfolding as it is without clinging or aversion?
The traditional reflections on equanimity meditation from the Theravada tradition allow us to integrate the truth of impermanence and karma with these phrases:
Theravada equanimity phrases
All beings are owners of their karma. Their happiness and unhappiness depend on their actions, not on my wishes for them.”
The Perfection of Equanimity
For some people this may feel a little too hard-hearted, and clinical. But we have to remember these series of reflections happen after much work has already been done in the three previous meditations on love, compassion and joy.
Joan Halifax Roshi says that equanimity is “ruthless compassion.”
In the following guided meditation we practice equanimity meditation in the same way as we have done with the three previous meditations on love, compassion and joy: we may start with ourselves, progress with close friends, neutral persons and finally with persons with whom we may be having difficulties.
We are now incorporating in our practice aspiration verses, offering the four immeasurable phrases and phrases to share the benefit of the practice with all. Those phrases appear below the video. You can simply play the video and use it as an audio guided meditation if you wish.
Beginning the meditation session:
Reflect on why it is you meditate, why you practice, and give voice to this by the recitation of the aspirations.
With boundless compassion and wisdom I will work for the welfare of all, may we be free from hunger and discord, and have joy and the world at peace.
……
Offering the 4 Immeasurables phrases:
May all beings have happiness and its causes;
May they be free from suffering and its causes;
May they never be parted from sublime bliss free from suffering;
May they dwell in great equanimity, free from attachment and aversion toward those who are near and far.
…..
Sharing the benefit of practice for the happiness and benefit of all:
By the power of this compassionate practice,
may suffering be transformed into peace,
may the hearts of all beings be opened,
and their wisdom radiate from within.
Feel free to leave a comment below.
06/05/2013
Buddhist meditation on joy
In these past few posts we have been looking at the practice of the Four Immeasurables – Love, Joy, Compassion and Equanimity, also known as the Four Divine Abodes. Essentially these are four wholesome emotions that we intentionally develop and cultivate.
In the last four posts we practiced two of these emotions together — Love and Compassion — in progressive meditations starting with ourselves, moving on to neutral persons, then to persons we may dislike and finally extending love and compassion to all beings everywhere.
Today we start a meditation sequence in this similar progressive way, but we will concentrate on cultivating Joy and Equanimity separately, starting with Joy. We work through the meditations in the same way, starting with ourselves and ending on rejoicing in the joy of all beings everywhere.
What Makes Joy an Immeasurable Meditation?
This is what makes each of these four practices an “immeasurable practice” — by developing these four qualities and feeling them for all beings everywhere, we begin to genuinely radiate these spiritual qualities ourselves, and since we use all beings everywhere are our focus, these feelings become immeasurable, as sentient beings are numberless and immeasurable.
One of the key take-aways from this practice, even if you only read about it – we see with sincere practice that we do not have to create joy, as if somehow we mediate “strongly” enough and poof, we make joy, like rubbing two meditation sticks together.
Joy Is Already There, Just Waiting For Us
We see unerringly that joy is an innate quality already within us, however hidden it initially appear to be. We also just may discover that it is hiding in plain sight, as if it didn’t learn the game of hide and seek very well as a child. As innocent babies we possessed some innocent, natural joy. For the fortunate folks, at this point in our lives we may be able to get in touch with our natural joy, but only at times, and maybe only if the right circumstances are in place.
Meditation practice shows us very clearly, as our natural state becomes revealed, that we are joy. Our true nature is radiant joy. While so-called advanced meditation practices allow us a direct glimpse of our unconditioned Buddha Nature, and thereby allowing us to discover the Four Immeasurables as already present in our true nature, these meditation practices work to help us progressively develop this awareness of joy from a different angle — the angle of reflective practices that we have been doing in this yearly series of meditations.
These are how these specific practices of the Seven Points of Mind Training and the Meditation on the Four Immeasurables work, they help us live the Bodhisattva ideals and aspirations and discover them as already present full and complete just as we are – through direct access meditation practice and the reflections that are like prayer and spiritual rejoicing practiced in other religions with deep contemplative traditions.
The Joy we cultivate in these meditations helps us settle our often frantic mind, touches our hearts, makes us happy, and feel a profound inner well-being.
These simple meditations also help us dissolve the blockages to feeling happy for others – the main focus of the meditations. By doing these reflections on joy we also set in motion ripple effects. As we access these “divine emotions” in ourselves, and then meditate and feel joy in and for others, our meditations cannot but affect everyone we meet.
The Practice of Immeasurable Joy
With the reflective meditative practice of immeasurable joy, we reflect on the good qualities and positive circumstances that we and others enjoy, rejoicing in them and wishing that they deepen and deepen. These reflections especially recognize and rejoice in our own and others’ basic goodness.
This helps us connect with a deep sense of appreciation for all the good qualities we enjoy. These reflections just plain work, as we have seen with the previous practice of Love and Compassion meditation.
And they work I think because, as the Buddha said in one of the original Pali suttas — “Whatever the practitioner frequently thinks and ponders upon, that will become the inclination of their mind.” As we practice we make new and deeper skillful grooves in our mind, which directly counter the logjams of negative repetitive habitual and conditioned thoughts.
Meditation on the Immeasurables makes Skillful Grooves
These skillful grooves become more and more predominant as we act on those thoughts – which are what these meditations do. They are kind of like dress rehearsals. These divine emotions become more and more our default state, and we become more and more loving, joyous, compassionate and profoundly at peace with ourselves and the world.
05/15/2013
Mindfulness of thoughts
By simply witnessing our thoughts as they unfold in the present moment, without fear, excitement, or judgement, we free ourselves from deeply conditioned patterns.
Rhonda Byrne’s ultra-bestselling 2006 self-help book, The Secret, which, sold over 19 million copies and has been translated into 46 languages, is based on the so-called law of attraction. The main idea seems to be that positive thinking can lead to a person becoming a magnet for wealth, optimal health and true happiness.
While much of what Byrne teaches has been appropriately parodied in the media, the fact remains that the book reinforces the central Buddhist notion that we are what we think, as declared in the Dhammapada in its opening verses:
All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts. If a person speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows her, as the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the carriage … If a person speaks or acts with a pure thought, happiness follows her, like a shadow that never leaves her.
Sayings of the Dhammapada
the stories we tell ourselves in our heads
The Buddha, in teaching mindfulness of thoughts, was acutely aware of the human tendency to create stories from the raw data of sense impressions, self-spun narratives which often lead to distress, anxiety and illness. Rhonda Byrne is concerned with creating narratives which lead to happiness and wealth. In both cases we are struck by the centrality of personal narrative, of inner story-lines, and how they can affect us.
In the Buddhist understanding, we take in data from our six senses — yes six, as the mind is regarded as a sense faculty which produces thoughts and emotions. When one of our sense faculties, such as the eye, sees a sight, such as a red traffic light, a very subtle “feeling tone” (vedana) is generated of liking, disliking or neutrality with regard to that simple, pre-thought, immediate sense impression.
mindfulness of thoughts — the nitty gritty
Rae sensory data impinges on our organs of perception– these are called sense impressions. These impressions are below the level of conscious awareness; but in a matter if milliseconds they lead to “perception” in the Buddhist sense, which then engenders a thought. Now this initial thought moment, in the Buddhist analysis, happens just below the horizon of everyday consciousness. Milliseconds later, the thought enters conscious awareness–we may recognize we need to apply the brakes while driving, for example.
Freudian primary process
Curiously, if we lack the skill of self-aware bare attention (as Buddhist calls this, the essence of mindfulness training)–by the time a thought enters our conscious awareness we have automatically moved, milliseconds later, to the phase Buddhists call “proliferation.”
In other words: a thought or other sensory impression arises just below conscious awareness, and while in this misty space, within milliseconds reactions to that thought or sensory impression form in a manner similar to what the Freudians call primary process, or what Buddhist call craving, aversion, or ignorance.
the proliferation stage
The Buddha taught in his profound analysis of the mind that after thought blooms into conscious awareness, there often follows what he termed “proliferation” (papanca) – a mushrooming of initially related thoughts which often quickly proceed, tendril-like, to bring forth, for example, anxieties based on the past, plans about the future, or what could be simply described as inner chatter.
Mind you, this is still happening below the level conscious awareness of a person unskilled in mindful self-aware bare attention.
Milliseconds following our reception of sensory data though our six sense organs (remember, the mind, in the Buddhist understanding, is simply another sensory organ) the sense impression enters conscious awareness, bringing along a host of primary process reactive emotions, memories or random associative thoughts. In our day to day life, we are mostly aware of “proliferation” rather than the raw sense data the precedes this.
take a moment now to try this 30 second experiment
Right now, and be still. Look at the screen on which you are reading this and take a slow breath in and breath out. Settle into the experience of your body right now, just as it is.
Allow yourself to read this word: money.
Now close your eyes and be still for thirty seconds.
What happened during those thirty seconds?
Did the sense impression—the sight of the word “money” on the screen, trigger thoughts about money? If so, how long did your thoughts remain on money? Did you find yourself thinking about other, seemingly related themes, such as “I hope the rent check doesn’t bounce” or “I just can’t imagine how I am going to pay for two college tuitions?” Did you have any gut feelings, like anxiety or contentment about your retirement?
patiently practicing mindfulness of thoughts is crucial element in discovering the transformative power of mindfulness
BMW thinking
The late Indian scholar and teacher Swami Dayananda Saraswati called this mushrooming of thought “BMW thinking.”As he describes below, a person walking down the street sees a someone driving a brand new new BMW: —
He jumps from one thought to another. The lingering content of the first thought connects him to the next thought. This connection causes him to catch the second thought and leave the first.
Thus, we go from BMW to Germany. Germany takes you to World War II. World War II takes you to pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor takes you to Hawaii. Hawaii takes you to beach. The beach takes you to melanoma and you become sad. This how the mind works. If you catch one thought, it means the previous one is gone because the two thoughts have nothing to do with each other.”
needless despair and anxiety.
This mushrooming of thought often leads us into needless despair and anxiety. The sustained, patient practice of mindfulness of thoughts, that is, simply witnessing our own thoughts as they unfold freshly in the present moment, free of fear, excitement, or judgement, can free us from deeply conditioned patterns.
Let’s take a common example–I like the image Diana Winston uses – imagine a cartoon figure of a person having a distressing thought shown as a cartoon thought bubble in which we see the line “I am a failure at everything I do.”
Now imagine that mindfulness, the gentle and refined ability to be aware of whatever is happening in the present moment and is the core skill taught by the Buddha, is like a pin that gently pops this thought bubble.
In the moment of the popping of that thought bubble it’s as if we wake from a dream.
simply being with thoughts, this is mindfulness of thoughts
Mindfulness gives us the skill of seeing our natural thought-mushrooming tendencies, and to gently wake up to the present moment of simply being with what is unfolding freshly, free of proliferation, fear, dread or unbalanced excitement and agitation.
choose the right train of thought to take
It’s as if we were standing on a railroad platform waiting for a train — and a train we don’t need to take pulls slowly in, and we just watch it move by. Mindfulness of thoughts gives us this liberating freedom to see if it’s a train we need to take, and if it’s not we just watch it go by.
The problem is that in our minds this proliferation tendency is constantly presenting trains we don’t need to take, ones often heading in the wrong direction. It’s all happening in a mental fog — we just can’t see where they are headed and we just jump on. One after the other.
Enter the liberating power of mindfulness of thoughts!
the two monumental realizations in meditation
The first two monumental realizations in mindfulness practice come when you see you jumped on a train you don’t need to be on, and in this recognition of “thinking” you have the marvelous capacity to simply return to the station.
The second comes when you clearly see you don’t need to believe everything you think. Buddhists call this “non-identification.” We simply are not our thoughts.
That is, until we develop the wonderful skill of mindfulness of thoughts!
like clouds passing through an empty sky
With some practice you can see thoughts coming and going like clouds in the sky.
With more practice we may come to appreciate thoughts as friends in our mindfulness practice. The point of mindfulness is not to banish thoughts but rather to avoid maintaining chains of thought.
When our minds chill out a little and drop the conditioned reactions to thoughts that arise, we can recognize thought a as just movements of the mind. All thoughts are simply mind.
Just like waves of the ocean, thoughts are the natural movements of the mind.
the creative and freeing nature of the mind revealed
The late, dear L ama Gen dun Rinpoche said in one of his talks with his students in France not long before his death:
“When we do not become fascinated by our thoughts but look at them directly, then all of our thoughts become opportunities for recognizing the simultaneously creative and empty nature of the mind.”
And a recognition like this can free us from all distress.
How wonderful!
04/05/0201