If we get uptight about feeling uncomfortabe in meditation, just remember this simple instruction- give careful and kind attention to whatever arises.
Do you ever find yourself feeling uncomfortable in meditation after just settling in? If your mind could text you, what would it say?
Lately, mine would text:
Oh, no- not my aching knee again.
just part of the meditation experience
From the perspective of mindful awareness, an aching knee is simply part of the meditation experience.
So is dozing off, the tingling sensation of one leg falling asleep, feeling bored or restless.
When the inevitable discomforts arise, some folks “wait out” that session, gritting their teeth until the bell rings.
holding still vs settling into stillness
The next time this happens, rather than waiting out or ending a session, try to see the difference between what Jack Kornfield calls holding still and settling into stillness.
Holding still is like gripping your seat until the plane lands; there is some underlying fear and aggression going on.
Settling into stillness, explains Jack, happens when you pour a little compassion on the painful areas. And you relax enough that you are willing to truly feel knee pain, or drowsiness, or boredom, as if from the inside.
getting comfortable, for now
If you are new to meditation practice, it takes some trial and error until you find the most comfortable posture. But even when you find that magic meditation set-up, the initial feeling of settling in and feeling comfortable doesn’t last long.
Soon enough, something itches here, or there’s some new weird throbbing there.
We are always experiencing these minor aches and pains, but we are not usually aware of them, as we unconsciously go through our day adjusting our posture frequently.
If we feel dismayed about discomfort while meditating, just remember this simple instruction- givecareful and kind attention to whatever arises.
kindness is essential
This kindness is essential to our practice, as Cheryl Huber explains:
It’s not so much what happens as it is how we are with ourselves regardless of what happens –that makes the difference in our lives.
As focus and clarity improve, you notice the crucial difference between physical and emotional discomfort. Once you nail this, there’s no going back to your old ways of avoiding or manipulating your life circumstances.
The work here is simple: allow physical pains, aches and tensions, to come up on their own, and observe how they reveal themselves in the moment, with kindness.
The healing of your body and heart is always here, waiting for your kind attention.
My former teacher Sharon Salzberg has the last word this week. This is how she explains why we practice in this way:
It’s not the point to suffer; it’s the opening that’s the point. It is that lightheartedness, that bigness, that spacious mind and love that can hold the suffering and accommodate it and integrate it and understand it.
Mindfulness loosens the “interminable chain of longing” as Robert Frost puts it, so I have half a chance of living this moment now.
One of my first meditation teachers, Sharon Salzberg, often talks about her early days learning how to meditate in India under her teacher, Munindra. One of his first counsels to her was:
Try to be with each breath as though it was your first, and as though it was your last.
Being with each breath as if it were the first is a training wheel exercise for being with any moment as if it were for the first time.
Can we live each conversation we have over breakfast with our housemate as it it were our first?
Can we search for that super important email as though it were for the first time we misplaced an email- without the uncessary inner friction (e.g. why does this always happen)?
if I don’t remember this, I get bored or restless
I notice that when I don’t try to do this I fall into a kind of wistfulness, boredom, or restlessness; mind states Robert Frost perhaps describes in this line from one of his last poems:
Just being here, being present is enough– I didn’t do a good job at modeling this maxim of mindfulness to our kids as they were growing up. When some cool new event was coming up, like a birthday, or an outing, I would remind tell them from time to time- you know, your friend’s birthday party is coming up.
As if anticipating a birthday party were more important than whatever it was we were doing at the moment, like getting ready for the day or eating dinner.
Isn’t this something we all do- sacrifice the present moment for some imagined future one?
I catch myself wanting, waiting for, or expecting something, anything but this boring present moment- practically all day long.
It’s like I’m on hold on a call I placed to myself.
Mindfulness helps loosen the “interminable chainof longing” as Frost puts it, so I have half a chance of living this moment now. And having a more intimate experience with whatever is arising.
Sayadaw U Tejaniya of Burma reminds us:
Nothing is ever the same, every moment is always new. Once you can really see this, your mind will always be interested in whatever it observes. No moment will ever bore because your experience shows that “things” are forever changing
Mindfulness loosens the grip of concepts and opinions have on me about how things should be. I feel more open and soft with how things are if I can remember to invite mindfulness.
U to Shirasagi by Utamaro Kitagawa (1753-1806); original from Library of Congress
That last part of Munindra’s advice to Sharon, to be with each breath as though it were the last, becomes more meaningful the older I get. It brings front and center a complacency that can set in when my practice starts to feel stale.
It’s amazing how out of touch with reality I can get if I’m not mindful.
Sharon’s teaching partner of many decades, Joseph Goldstein, observes:
It’s like we’ve been put under a spell—believing that this or that is going to be the source of our ultimate freedom or happiness. And to wake up from that spell, to be more aligned with what is true, it brings us much greater happiness.
This is the priceless gift of our mindfulness practice- to be intimate with our moment by moment experience whatever it is– is to wake from this spell of postponement.
To answer that call you placed to yourself after being on hold so long.
This meditation is a self-discovery. We uncover the treasure of our very own being. We lose interest in listening to the voices shouting at us about our deficiencies.
Someone once asked Suzuki Roshi, the pioneering Zen teacher from Japan who founded the Zen Center of San Francisco in 1969:
“Roshi, what’s the most important thing?” and he answered:
To find out what’s the most important thing.
Byron Katie, who teaches a practice called self-inquiry, said that the world’s number one problem is confusion. As we hang in there with meditation practice, week after week, a little clarity starts to emerge.
The most important thing that brought us to the meditation cushion may not seem so important as we progress. We may have signed up to get an edge in academia or our social life, maybe to find a group to hang out with.
After a while, it sinks in: meditation is not self improvement, it’s self-discovery. It’s more about undoing and unlearning conditioned habits rather than getting some special meditation goodies.
We all just want to be happy and feel at home in our own lives
And to feel a connection with the world and other beings.
But, as the song goes, we are looking in all the wrong places. By habitually looking outside of our skin for fulfillment and happiness, we struggle.
So many of the voices we listen to- both in our own head and outside, through the media, lead us on a long walk on the hedonic treadmill Buddhists call samsara.
But one day we have this marvelous insight: We already have what we need.
This meditation is a self-discovery. We uncover the treasure of our very own being. We lose interest in listening to the voices shouting at us about our deficiencies.
As one of my teachers Sharon Salzberg says:
We learn not to get caught in trying to reach out and grasp after things we never really needed to begin with.
How long will we fill our pockets like children with dirt and stones? Let the world go. Holding it, we never know ourselves, never are airborne.
Meditation helps us put down the baggage we carry around so we can be airborne and travel lightly in this world.
This letting go can be subtle, nuanced. We usually associate letting go as letting go of something. But as the teacher Gil Fronsdal points out, there is a complimentary movement here.
With enough practice we appreciate the story doesn’t end with letting go: we discover we are letting go of something but we also are letting go into something else.
Gil Fronsdal offers this metaphor: a diver lets go of the diving board the seconds later dives into the cool water of the pool, much as we let go of impatience then seconds later relaxing into a feeling of ease.
If we find ourselves gripped in panic or fear, we learn to let go into the felt safety of relaxation.
We eventually get how much nicer it is to relax into our natural, free and easy being-ness than it is to struggle with something.
But if we haven’t tasted this free-and-easy being-ness, it’s a hard sell to the psyche.
You’ll know the sweet taste of being-ness by accidentally stumbling upon it in your practice. You can’t make this happen on purpose. You just need to meditate every day and hang in there.
Then, each moment is fine. Each moment is enough. Nothing missing or lacking, as the Zen teachers of old would say.
Every moment is appreciated as profound and meaningful.
What is mindfulness meditation, and do I have to be a Buddhist to benefit from practicing it?
I am frequently asked if someone needs to be a Buddhist to benefit from Buddhist meditation. My answer is a qualified no. I say qualified because if I simply said no and left it at that, then mindfulness meditation would be no different from mindfulness as therapy, workplace stress reduction or a way to get an edge in the cut-throat corporate world.
why miss out on the fully transformative potential of mindfulness
Not that there’s anything wrong with these applications, although some conservative Buddhists might disagree. I just feel it is a pity to miss out on the depth and powerfully transformative potential when mindfulness is not appreciated within its original framing.
I mean, if you are already into mindfulness, why sell yourself short?
The response I hear the most is having zero interest in metaphysical concepts, and being turned off by anything vaguely suggestive of religion, dogma or worship.
OK, fair enough. But what if you dig a little deeper and see that none of those objections hold water?
Traditional stupa in Sri Lanka
what is mindfulness?
The originalframing of mindfulness, in the Early Buddhist presentations, emphasizes a radically pragmatic approach centered around a core commitment to non-harming. The Buddha encouraged people, through mindful awareness in daily life, ethical practices, formal sitting and walking meditation, and community support, to alleviate the suffering of all beings, including oneself.
Worship and dogma were not a thing for Early Buddhism. Nor were the notions of a savior, or anything like a Judaeo-Christian heaven.
so when are you going to nirvana?
One of my relatives, aware of my Buddhist monk training, once quipped “Hey, so when are you going to nirvana?” I couldn’t let that go. There was a little bit of a dig there, so I asked with as soft a tone as I could muster, if we could explore this question a little. Surprisingly, he agreed.
Turns out his notion of “nirvana,” by his own admission, was “you know, like the Viking Valhalla.” I am running out of space to take this one apart, but you see what I mean? It’s amazing how many intelligent people hold such uncharitable opinions of Buddhism based on, well, nothing.
(OK, short answer, nirvana refers to completely eradicating greed, hate, and delusion from our minds–the “three roots” of our pervasive discontent according to the Buddha. The “place” of nirvana is always right here).
The original framing of Mindfulness within the eightfold path
the original framing is the eightfold path
The illustration above is original framing of Buddhist mindfulness I have been talking about- a set of eight areas we work on called the eighfold path. You’ll notice the mindfulness is just one of these eight “folds.” Within this context each fold of the path supports and affects all other parts.
The Buddha is sometimes looked on as a doctor or healer. The disease he set out to heal was our discontent, frustration, and existential malaise. He had one prescription he gave out throughout his 45 years of teaching, this eightfold path, an eight step course of treatment leading to radical well being.
Here is a simple, twelve minute introduction to the eightfold path.
When mindfulness is practiced without regard to the other seven folds, instead of purifying the mind and heart of these three poisons, mindfulness could unwittingly strengthen these negative qualities.
pitfall–mindfulness in the service of the ego
Without close oversight from the other seven folds, the ego can co-opt the practice of mindfulness for its own aggrandizement. This happens a lot if you don’t train with a wise and mature teacher.
In the coming weeks, we’ll explore these topics a little deeper. But let me leave you with an example of what I am getting at.
the practice of right speech
If you look at the diagram here, the first area of the ethical behavior group is “right speech.” (Note: some translators use the words “wise” or “correct” instead of “right”).
Right speech is an incredibly rich and nuanced mindfulness practice. And full disclosure here– this is an area I am really, really working on improving, one I have trouble with!
Let’s say we challenge ourselves to spend this next week practicing wise speech. The idea is we use our mindfulness skills to recognize what we are about to say before we say it so we have a greater choice of what to say, when to say it, how to say it, and even if we should say it.
To do this, we consider what would be unwise speech which the Buddha defined as “refraining from false speech, malicious, or harsh speech”, as well “idle chatter that just wastes time.”
the five factors of right speech
The Buddha gave us simple way to evaluate our practice of right speech, saying there are 5 factors to consider when we speak, as follows:
A statement endowed with five factors is well-spoken, not ill-spoken, blameless and not faulted by wise people. Which five? It is spoken at the right time. It is spoken in truth. It is spoken politely. It is spoken beneficially. It is spoken with a mind of good-will.
—The Buddha (AN 5:198)
We practice holding our tongue in moments of anger, or hostility. But along with the practices of loving-kindness and compassion, we train ourselves step by step to “incline towards wholesome states such as love, kindness and empathy.”
will you take the challenge with me?
There is so much to talk about here! Will you take up this challenge with me until next week? Just keep this in mind this week before speaking, reflect mindfully as you pause:
Is what I’m about to say factual, helpful, spoken with good-will, endearing, and timely?
As we soak in the healing waters of the present moment, the chasms between sacred and mundane, bearable and unbearable, dissolve.
We live in uncertain times. Putin’s recent cold threat of a nuclear strike against Ukraine, and the real possibility of our mutual assured destruction, escalates our unease. How do we live with such insecurity?
This is really the same question we looked at in a post two weeks ago. In light of the radical teachings of impermanence, do we just continue making coffee, going to work and streaming our favorite shows when we get home?
I still have that conversation with my old friend running through my mind, telling me about her stage four breast cancer. How do you live with this? Woody Allen once remarked about his own mortality:
I don’t want to live on in the hearts of others, I want to live on in my apartment.
We know we are going to die, it’s only a question of when. Yet we console ourselves we have lots of time, much of which is spent planning on some better version of now.
Ulla-Carin Lindquist, at the height of a successful career as a newscaster in Sweden, was diagnosed with ALS. She kept of journal of her few years, published as Rowing Without Oars, in which she wrote:
There is no bright future for me, but there is a bright present.
Maybe she spent some of her last years reading Goethe and found his famous line:
The present alone is our happiness.
life’s little secret
I suspect life itself let her in on a little secret– that her mortality is not a problem to be solved, but rather a “brightness” disclosing itself right here, right now, in the present moment.
At times it may feel like the present moment is a bit overrated. A blur or a poof or a blip and it’s gone, followed by a procession of more present moments similarly vanishing.
At times I’d rather occupy my internal bandwidth relishing a juicy fantasy or rewriting an awkward episode of my personal history. I used to think like this forty years ago.
then I got into meditation
It took me a few years to realize I was living in a virtual reality populated by self-constructed avatars of my past and future selves.
Meditation reveals the present moment as rich and meaningful rather than a blur or a blip. Consider being on a train moving quickly through a large city. Looking out the window, all you can make out are swirls of graffiti or the blur of buildings.
Meditation slows the train, revealing the details of a vibrant city. When we apply the brakes to our mind, there’s a richness there poets know so intimately:
There is nothing more profound, more mysterious, more pregnant . . . more dazzling than a window lighted by a single candle.
Charles Baudelaire
planning for happiness?
On one of my first 10 day silent retreats back in the early 1980s I spent hours in meditation planning how I could do another retreat later in the year. The irony of planning for something while it was already happening was sobering.
What’s more, the enormity of the time I was spending in the future floored me. I was constantly busy planning, missing out on so much of my life, as John Lennon suggests:
Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.
Not only was I frequently absent from my own life, lost in the past or the future, what little semblance of the present moment I had left was consumed with obsessive thinking, rumination and worry.
missing the moment
It’s easy to overlook the present moment for two reasons. First, it’s obscured by clouds of thought. It may look like a blurry Polaroid with no discernible image. Or a station a speeding train zips by.
Secondly, if we happen to catch a glimpse while watching a sunset or being present at a birth, or a death, when our mind suddenly stops spinning, it seems like a meaningless pause in the movie in our head.
Meditation counteracts these impediments. First, by selecting an anchor, such as the breath, and patiently returning to it when our mind wanders, the cloud-bank of obsessive thought thins out. We can now intentionally glimpse the present moment.
It’s no longer a stranger that comes to visit while watching a sunset or being present at a birth, or a death.
meditation as cultivation
Secondly, by repetitive training, meditation introduces the potential of the present moment. Rather than a meaningless break in the mental action, we learn to cultivate healing herbs in the garden of the present moment for the benefit of others.
this last point is often lost on beginners
Discovering the present moment is not the end of the spiritual path. It’s only the beginning. There isn’t a term for meditation in Early Buddhism. The work we do on the spiritual path is called bhavana, which translates as the cultivation of what the Buddha called wholesome states of mind, e.g., compassion, loving-kindness, tranquility and feeling joy in the good fortune of others.
calming the mind is just the first step
When we talk about meditation in the West, we often are talking about ways to calm our anxious minds. But in the East, calming the mind is just step one of a lifelong path of cultivating care and compassion for all beings.
As we soak in the healing waters of the present moment, the chasm between sacred and mundane dissolves, as in Baudelaire’s rapture at seeing that single candle.
We also train in being with the difficult parts of our life without being overwhelmed, allowing us to be more available to others. The chasm between the bearable and the unbearable similarly dissolves.
The joys and horrors of this crazy world are both meaningful and workable. We can grieve whole-heartedly with the father seeing his wife and two children lying lifeless after a Russian mortar attack on a street in Kiev.
As our weary minds regain their vitality, our hearts are at peace. Our life is no longer a problem to be solved, but an inexhaustible treasure for the benefit of all.
The practice of present moment awareness shows us that whatever we are dealing with does not define us. Difficult stuff comes up, but it doesn’t diminish our well-being.
Maybe right now as you are reading this, you feel a little overwhelmed, anxious or bored. There is well-being in this, too.
Give this a try.
Make yourself comfortable and become aware of how your breath breathes all by itself. How your chest rises ever so slightly on the inhale, and relaxes on the exhale.
Notice how sunlight plays on your desk, how the traffic sounds just the way traffic sounds, the way the phone rings just as phones ring.
enoughness
Notice the enoughness of just this moment, of breathing in and breathing out.
As you settle into the present moment, ask yourself Is anything out of place, really?
When sadness or frustration shrinks your sense of well-being, when worry or fear agitates the peace right out of you, try lending your attention to the nearest thing. Try watching how the dust lifts and resettles when you blow on it.
Practicing present moment awareness allows us to simply observe what’s going on in our head. As we settle into this new modality, where we are not really doing anything, it’s like you are eavesdropping on yourself.
just observing
This soft shift from going, doing, comparing, judging, and thinking, thinking, thinking into just observing is like applying the brakes as we approach a stop sign.
Only many of us just roll right through.
But as we learn to slow down and come to a complete stop, we see how much we have to do with our discontent.
I love Rumi’s line here:
Stop weaving and see how the pattern improves.
well-being in things are they are
Our practice is just coming back to this present moment awareness and discovering well-being in things just as they are. This discourages us from being pulled and pushed around so much by our judging, by our likes and dislikes.
And just this soft shift from the busyness of doing to this simple listening in shows us how we are contributing to our malaise moment by moment.
As the late Thai meditation master Ajahn Chah remarked:
If the house is flooded, can we just have a flooded house, and not also a flooded mind?
The Buddha saw we suffer because we don’t have what we want. Or because we have what we want but we’re afraid to lose it.
It’s part of the same mental programming of judging, of likes and dislikes. Living this way, we’re perpetually unhappy.
Our present moment meditation practice reveals that happiness need not be based on our likes and dislikes. There is something deeper. There is something more fundamental.
Just this, our life as it is, right here, right now.
relaxed effort
All that is required is a relaxed effort to be with whatever is coming up for us in the moment without judging or taking sides.
Can we be with our own minds in this way as we go about our busy lives?
Yes, we all have been through a lot this year. We all felt our share of panic and confusion and loss. We are human.
And because of our humanity we also are endowed with present moment mindful awareness and a way to feel pain and suffering without being undone by them psychologically and physically.
With mindfulness, fear becomes an invitation to look deeply and befriend the parts of oneself that feel afraid.
An invitation to be radically OK in the midst of change and uncertainty.
An invitation to feel pain and not be undone or defined by it.
responding with kindness and care
It’s also an invitation to respond with kindness and care.
Buddhism 101.
The American Buddhist teacher Willa Miller writes:
We are sitting with the unknown. The unknown is exactly what pulls back the veil. It offers a glimpse of the truth that nothing has ever been certain. This world with all its beauty and all its vibrancy is just so because it is not fixed, because everything is contingent. Life’s natural cousin is uncertainty.
As we prepare to go back to what we called our normal life, can we slip in a little more home mindfulness practice time?
From our home meditation huts, like the yogis of ancient times, can we keep the home fires of kindness, compassion, and present moment mindful awareness burning.
I was struck by a poem the other day while reading a new translation of the Therigatha, a small book of verse compiled in the beginning of the 6th century BC, by Buddhist nuns, chronicling their spiritual struggles and victories. It is also regarded as the earliest-known collection of women’s literature.
Here is the voice of the nun Vijaya, speaking with an elder nun about her difficulties with the practice of meditation:
When everyone else was meditating I’d be outside circling the hall. Finally I went to confess. I’m hopeless, I said. The elder nun smiled. Just keep going. Nothing stays in orbit forever. If this circling is all you have, why not make this circling your home? I did as she told me, and went on circling the hall. If you find yourself partly in and partly out— if you find yourself drawn to this Path and also drawing away— I can assure you, you’re in good company. Just keep going. Sometimes the most direct path isn’t a straight line
Just keep going is the advice given.
But more importantly, the advice is to not try to get somewhere. To stop comparing your practice with that of others, or against some lofty ideal of what practice should be.
Just be right where you are.
If sitting meditation feels too challenging, just circle the hall. But make circling the hall your practice.
Be right where you already are.
Over the last 25 years of teaching meditation, it’s become absolutely obvious to me that each person’s process is unique. And that there is a lot of suffering in comparing our meditation practice not only to some ideal but also to our past meditation experiences, enshrined in the cloudy opacity of memory.
making progress in meditation is like the meandering course of the Mississippi river
the path naturally oscillates, like sine waves
Wherever you find yourself is fine. Just work right there, with what you already have right under your nose.
Reading this poem reminded me of a conversation the Buddha had with a monk named Assaji, who asks the Buddha to come see him as he is ill and dying. The Buddha asks Assaji if he feels any remorse as his life comes to an end.
The monk replies yes, that he can no longer access samadhi, the blissful depths of meditative concentration, as he is so physically weak. He implores the Buddha:
Let me not fall away…
The Buddha responds that the spiritual life is so much about samadhi but rather more about bearing witness to what is, and noticing the impermanence of all things.
there is no falling away from the present moment
Like the nun in our poem going to her teacher confessing she can’t meditate, that all she can do is walk around the meditation hall outside in circles, Assaji begs the Buddha on his deathbed not to let him fall away because he can no longer meditate.
The Buddha’s advice is similar to that given by the elder nun in our poem–that there is no falling away as long as you remain exactly where you are.
Being where we are, and being with what at times may be uncomfortable, but that’s OK.
The advice is not to be with what is as long as it’s comfortable. The advice is just to be with it as it is. Don’t be concerned about making progress in meditation–that’s just another distraction.
troubles are emotional reactions to the world, not the world itself
The discomfort we feel is not so much located in the events of the world, but rather in our emotional reactions to them.
As the elder American Buddhist monk Ajahn Sumedho reminds us:
If we have the faith to continue bearing with these emotional reactions and allow things that arise to cease, to appear and disappear according to their nature, then we find our stability not in achievement or attaining, but in being – being awake, being aware.
Again and again just return to the present moment, opening to just what is right here for you; progress in meditation happens by itself.
Let’s let the 13th century Japanese Zen Master Dogen explain this:
Truth is not far away. It is nearer than near. There is no need to attain it, since not one of your steps leads away from it.
Let these words sink in, that not one of your steps leads you away from the truth of this moment, even if you are circling the meditation hall outside.
And following up on this own admonition, Dogen adds:
If you are unable to find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it?
So, my dear friends, as the elder nun advised us earlier — just keep going, with the “winds of the Dharma at our backs,” as my teacher Sharon Salzberg would say. That’s how you make progress in meditation.
Do you have to meditate every day? The question really should be can I be happily present with things just as they are, rather than struggling with a goal?
I find that newer students don’t ask this question much in their meditation groups, fearing, perhaps, that they might be the only ones with this concern. I still struggle with having consistent, regular meditation, and I have been at this for 41 years.
But I have noticed that I don’t have those punitive feelings about this anymore. I find myself more and more happily present with things just as they are.
And I have meditation to thank for this.
meditator’s guilt
It’s taken a while to get over this “meditator’s guilt” – a kind of shame some folks feel when they have trouble meditating regularly, feeling all meditators should meditate every day.
We can feel guilty that we are not meditating enough, or well enough, or not living up to some goal we create for ourselves.
So folks either give up, or keep plodding away out of a sense of duty, which, unfortunately, can bring more torment than tranquility.
the central issue
The central issue is the one the historical Buddha emphasized his whole teaching career–>> that we somehow insist on having an experience other than the one we are having.
For example, folks are often drawn to meditation out of a desire to feel better in some way. If we meditate with this desire to feel good, we selectively internalize that meditation is all about feeling good, calm, and peaceful.
And when we don’t feel calm or peaceful, we can get frustrated, even agitated.
So, do you have to meditate every day? Doing meditation daily certainly helps!
let go of our ideas about meditation
Despite repeated encouragement to relax and let go of our ideas about meditation, and our fantasies of how we should feel when it works, it can take a while for this to really sink in.
Crucial to the practice is being radically OK with ourselves just as we are in the present moment. In doing so, we also let go of the potentially aggressive notion of self-improvement.
Mindfulness meditation often starts out by working with an uncooperative and rebellious mind. You know this mind-it’s the one that spaces out, goes into la-la land, feels anxious, and wants out.
It’s the mind that opens its eyes during group meditation, looks at the clock, and says “Ugh, ten more minutes!”
Mindfulness takes us right up to the boundaries of our physical and emotional discomfort. But it allows us to be OK there, to settle down, and lose the fear.
the wisdom to see things as they really are
The Burmese teacher Sayadaw U Tejaniya repeats this over and over in many different ways:
Being mindfully present with whatever arises, experiencing it with equanimity, acceptance, non-identification, kindness, and compassion, develops the let go of our ideas about meditation, not just as they appear to be.
And with this understanding comes the end of dissatisfaction and unhappiness.
Do you have to meditate every day? Doing meditation daily is a concern for many I think because they are often experiencing feeling the opposite of what they expected. But if they hang in there they find that instead of “getting” happiness or relief from stress, it’s the letting go of the wanting of happiness that actually liberates them from distress and frustration.
letting go of wanting happiness
This is a huge turning point in their practice – the more they let go, the happier they are. They can see that ultimate liberation is the ultimate letting go of everything.
Sayadaw U Tejaniya gets the last word this week:
There is no way you can rush progress in meditation. We can only proceed steadily. But we don’t stop either. How much you do, how skillful you are, how much you are able to do, the benefits of that are already accruing, are already present. When you understand this then the greed to get more, to do better, to get a certain result, will not arise.
With the gradual deepening of your practice, you will feel a wonderful stillness when you simply rest your awareness on the body.
The meditation teacher Gil Fronsdal, in one of his talks, speaks about visiting his son one day when he was in preschool.
The kids were all running around, as little kids do, but when it was time to transition to another activity, the teacher stood in the middle of the room, and started to whisper.
They became very interested in what she had to say, and settled down around her. They were really calm.
why we use anchors in our practice, and what they are
I like this story because it points to how we use anchors, such as mindfulness of the body, in our meditation practice.
The teacher whispering was an anchor for the kids. An anchor which helped them become still and calm. In much the same way, mindfulness of the body helps us find the stillness within the movement of our minds.
An anchor is any place in our body where we feel comfortable settling down. For some it can be the sensation of breath in the chest or abdomen. For others it can be certain aspects of our body, such as the sitting posture.
It’s a place where it feels natural to hold our attention, just like an anchor holds a boat in place.
why we practice the anchor of body awareness at the beginning of a session
I often encourage folks as we start a session to simply feel that they are sitting. To sit and know you are sitting. We do this because body awareness is a convenient landmark that lets us see the often chaotic movement in our mind.
It is an anchor that reveals stillness within movement. We don’t try to stop the movement in our mind, just as the teacher in Gil’s story doesn’t tell the kids Hey, stop running around! That’s not a very effective strategy.
the stillness of the turning world
Borrowing a line from T.S. Eliot, body awareness can be for us the still point of the turning world.
We simply still down with the commitment to hold the body still for a little while. Mindfully aware of the sitting body, we notice it remains still amidst the movement in our heads.
The body slowly releases tension as we bathe the body with mindful attention. Tensions in the mind ease, too.
the stillness of body as a landmark
The stillness of the body awareness contrasts with the movement of thought. The body is a landmark against which we can deeply appreciate this difference.
We don’t force things. We don’t have the agenda, such as Hey, look how still this body is, why can’t you, mind, be the same way?
Just having the stillness of the body as a landmark naturally shows the organism we have a choice here.
we naturally choose stillness
Without us actually doing anything, the organism organically chooses stillness on its own. It has experienced the difference, and in time, when it feels it is safe to do so, it naturally favors stillness.
This contrast between stillness and movement is helpful because when you find yourself drifting off from body awareness back into the movement of thought, you see how different it feels to come back to the anchor.
You feel a connection when you are resting your awareness on the body.
When we drift off into thought, it’s like we enter a virtual reality that is disconnected from our life, from our embodiment.
the connection with the body brings joy
The organism feels more alive, more whole, and happier, lighter when it’s connected versus when it’s disconnected in the imaginary world of thought.
And when we transition out of body awareness back into the world, we feel much more grounded, more resilient, fresher, more supple, with a broader sense of agency, so necessary to get by in this crazy world.
With samadhi, our simple path of awareness reveals the wonderful secrets hidden in the depth of our being.
Meditation has many wonders to reveal, but they remain hidden until we develop samadhi. Many insights into the nature of our existence lay waiting for the intrepid inner explorer.
Many lost connections waiting to hook up again, like loose wires strewn about the neural frontier.
samadhi is the secret sauce of meditation
Samadhi, or focused, mindful attention in the Buddha’s vernacular, is the secret sauce of meditation.
Samadhi leads to a profound inner stillness that is frankly beyond the power of language to describe. But not just any focused, mindful attention. We’re talking very finely focused mindful attention.
how finely focused are we talking about here?
So focused you could hear the tiny bells on the anklets on the feet of an insect as it walks across the floor where you are seated, cross legged, meditating on the sensations of your breath at the entrance of your nostrils.
This focused awareness dispels the repetitive thoughts of the everyday mind.
This focused awareness allows us to see through the veils of permanence which enshroud our understanding of our lives.
It wears away selfish preoccupations.
This is samadhi.
a simple practice
It happens when we keep our attention steadily on a single “object” of our attention, such as the breath. We simply note the sensation of the in-breath and repeat the word “in” to yourself. We do the same with the out-breath and repeat the word “out.”
When we notice we are lost in thought we bring it right back. It’s not easy work.
taming the wild animal of your own mind
The ancient commentaries on this practice, originally taught by the historical Buddha in the 5th century BC, compare this process of concentration to the taming of a wild animal.
With time a patience, this focused, mindful attention starts to come together. The mind and body relax. Thoughts diminish, emotional pressures weaken, and a kind of calm sets in.
The Buddha compared this to the smelting of gold. When the impurities in the raw gold ore are slowly removed, gold becomes softer, more malleable, and bright.
We feel delight as the impurities of the mind are smelted, as it were, by the focusing of meditative awareness. Joy arises and acknowledges we are more than our emotions and thoughts, that these emotions and thoughts have causes and conditions that are impermanent.
And that we have the ability, the freedom, to be responsive to them rather than reactive.
The poet Tsuchiya Fumiaki puts it this way:
At long last my heart calms down as evening comes, And in the Four Directions I hear fresh springs.
Our simple path of mindful awareness has the potential to reveal wonderful secrets hidden in the depth of our being.
And this depth of being is experienced as pure delight.
Just set aside some time today to practice and see what I mean.
The contemplative life benefits from periodic self-reflection
We meditate for many different reasons. Often, our original motivations morph as we move forward on this path. It’s juicy to reflect why we keep this up; and to be really honest with ourselves.
Why meditate? There are many reasons. But those that stand out most strongly are learning to think clearly, and to dispel ignorance, illusion, greed, hatred and craving.”
The contemplative life benefits from periodic, intensive self-reflection. Meditation allows you to take a clean step back to see how you are behaving, what you obsess over, and what trips you up.
Institutionalized, fortnightly self-reflection
While training as a young monastic in South Asia, we would gather on new moon and full moon nights to recite the rules of the order, to openly declare our transgressions and, frankly, bear testament to each other’s humanity. To re-align ourselves with the sacred intention to “dispel ignorance, illusion, greed and craving.”
I was initially terrified to participate in these fortnightly recitations. But slowly I came to see what I was doing not as a struggle to attain some perfect monastic ideal, but as a way to affirm this deep human wish to dispel our collective ignorance.
And to aim glimmers of awareness into those dark places of wounding, of pain, of confusion.
I came to see great power in those fortnightly confessional and renewal ceremonies. This “forced” self-observation began to make some sense. We can do this ourselves.
Set up your own intensive self-reflection schedule
Try setting aside one or two days a month for intensive self-reflection. The practice can be as simple as printing out these six questions and posting them on your refrigerator. Get a cheap journal at the drug store and write down your answers, and work with the questions throughout your day.
Have I been kind?
Have I been generous?
Have I been even-tempered?
Honest?
Patient?
Empathetic?
Of course, there are all manner of exercises for self-reflection; you can make up your own practice. The main thing, though, is to find questions that resonate and prompt deeper self-examination.
Mindful of our self-deceptions
Monastics since the time of the Buddha have been keenly aware of the human proclivity to be less than entirely upfront with ourselves.
The contemporary German scholar-monk Bhikkhu Analayo observes:
The habit of employing self-deception to maintain one’s self esteem has often become so ingrained that the first step is to acknowledge hidden emotions, motives and tendencies in the mind without immediately suppressing them.”
That’s why it is so important to let mindfulness into those dark places.
a moveable monastery takes shape
We can start by bringing awareness to those ordinary moments when we resist being mindful—when we feel tired, and in the midst of everyday grumpiness.
Our ordinary instabilities and irritabilities; our ordinary struggles are the practice.
Noelle Oxenhandler observes:
What is mindfulness, if not the practice of bringing the mind to those places where it goes missing? Again and again, we wake ourselves up at the point where drowsiness, distractions, and daydreams arise.”
Wherever the mind takes us, we simply come back to the present. We pull out of the morass of mental images and settle into a very simple and bare experience of the here-and-now.
Our everyday struggles form the transparent walls of our movable monastery.
Jack Kornfield speaks eloquently about becoming your own monastery as we learn to bring our work on the cushion into the world:
When we take the one seat on our meditation cushion we become our own monastery. We create the compassionate space that allows for the arising of all things: sorrows, loneliness, shame, desire, regret, frustration, happiness.”
After years of practice, while our lives may not change all that much on the outside, they have changed fundamentally on the inside.
Choosing accommodation over contention
Sylvia Boorstein expresses this change over time as the heart becoming gradually more accommodating:
Life remains as fragile and unpredictable as ever. Meditation changes the heart’s capacity to accept life as it is. It teaches the heart to be more accommodating, not by beating it into submission, but by making it clear that accommodation is a gratifying choice.”
Our monastery, Ajahn Sumedo says, teaches you to open to the way things are. I think he means your own movable monastery, too, your own everyday struggles.
Conditions are always good enough!
Like a stern coach, Ajahn Sumedo calls us on our exit strategies:
“We can always imagine more perfect conditions, how it should be ideally, how everyone else should behave. But it’s not our task to create an ideal. It’s our task to see how it is, and to learn from the world as it is. For the awakening of the heart, conditions are always good enough.”
Let’s be patient with ourselves and each other as we walk the path that dispels all sorrows and affirms our deepest joys and connections.
The text we will be studying and contemplating for the next six months or so is perhaps the most highly regarded one in the entire Mahayana Mind Training tradition on Buddhist contemplation: The Root Text of the Seven Points of Mind Training, by the 12th century master of the Kadampa order, Geshe Chekawa Yeshe Dorje. This text was in turn based on a text by the 10th century Bengali Buddhist teacher, Atisha.
This Buddhist contemplation text was composed in the spirit of boiling down all the essential aspects of an entire lifetime of spiritual practice into one handy volume – all you ever need to know and practice was put here, with no fluff, just the most essential of the most essential. This text has been practiced and handed down for generations, and has lived up to its billing: all you need to know and do in one concise volume.
The text is composed of seven points, and in all is made up of 59 lines. Each line is pithy and pregnant. I have found it to be incredibly essential, and have studied it and contemplated its slogans for over thirty years since I first discovered it in a book published in 1977, Advice from a Spiritual Friend, by Geshe Rabten and Geshe Dhargey. I am now on my third copy of the book, as the first fell apart from use, the second was borrowed and never returned, and the third – ah, the third is the new edition published in 1996. I have received teachings on Buddhist contemplation from many teachers, and none were as powerful as the ones taught in this marvelous text.
The seven points in this Buddhist contemplation text are:
1. Train in the preliminaries.
2. Cultivate Bodhicitta, the mind of genuine altruism
3. Transform adversity into the path of awakening
4. Maintain the practice for the duration of one’s life
5. Measure the success of the practice
6. Know the commitments of the practice
7. Know the guidelines for the practice
These seven points comprise a powerful manual for the transformation of your mind and heat.
These seven points are conveyed in this order through 59 pithy lines or “slogans.” For me that’s the raw power of the Mahayana Mind Training Tradition Buddhist Contemplation tradition, their emphasis on training with phrases. As I have mentioned in previous posts in this series, by mounting a transformative phrase on the breath as we go about our day, reflecting lightly on its meaning while we are in the checkout line at Longs – this is how we bring the practice home.
I have been urging you to make up your own slogans in response to the basic ideas presented in the past four posts because I wanted to have you try your best at working this way, because after this post the phrases all are going to come from Geshe Chekawa.
Let’s recap again. This is good to do, as we get another opportunity to reflect on these precious teachings.
There are seven points of Buddhist contemplation that cover everything we need to know and practice, see the list above.
We have just finished Point One – Train in the Preliminaries.
Point One was shorthand for reflect on the four thoughts that turn the mind towards the dharma.
The Four Thoughts that Turn the Mind toward the Dharma are:
1. The rare and precious human life of leisure and opportunity.
2. Death and impermanence.
3. The awesome power of our actions.
4. The defects of samsara AKA The inescapabilty of dissatisfaction.
Here is a cheat sheet for Point One, as Geshe Chekawa simply assumes we are familiar with how to contemplate the Four Thoughts.
Deep and integrated contemplation on these for points is what is meant by training in the preliminaries. These contemplations become deep as we sit with them for half of our sitting meditation practice, and when we bring them home by mounting them on the breath as we bop around town and pick up the kids, park the car at the beach park, look at your spouse and see how lovely she or he is, wake up in the morning, or get ready to fall asleep.
Cheat Sheet for the Four Thoughts Contemplation
I. The rare and precious human life of leisure and opportunity
a. There are more than seven billion human beings on the planet; how many have the leisure to pursue a spiritual path?
b. Although seven billion humans seems like a lot, consider the number of insects, or even the trillions of cells and microbes in one human body.
c. Human life is rare.
d. We have this precious gift; it is up to use what we do with it.
e. We often overlook the things that are important to us while we still have them; we only recognize how something is as we are running out of it or are about to lose it, but by then it is often too late to do anything with it.
f. Many, many people live hand to mouth, or are devoured by addictions or trivial concerns, and have no leisure time.
II. Death and impermanence.
a. We are going to die someday.
b. In this moment right now, do you know this?
c. Death and loss are experienced every day in our lives in some way.
d. We never know when death will come to us or to our loves ones.
e. While we may think we have time left, as we grow older subjective times for many feels like it is going by faster.
f. We really don’t have as much time left as we think we do.
III. The awesome power of our actions.
a. Our actions are to a large extent conditioned by conventional models of success or failure.
b. Are we happy with these conventional models?
c. Conditioned actions create results.
d. Every moment we participate in creating the world that exists for us and others.
e. Awareness of our conditioning helps detach ourselves form it and the social model it in some small way perpetuates.
f. Everything matters.
IV. The defects of samsara AKA The inescapabilty of dissatisfaction.
a. Sorrow and discontent and dissatisfaction are inevitable.
b. We just won’t find any lasting satisfaction in the eight worldly concerns of hope for gain and fear of loss, hope for praise and fear of blame, hope for fame and fear of insignificance, hope for happiness and fear of suffering.
c. We suffer from misplaced trust and hope.
c. Seeming pleasures are only so for fleeting moments.
On this last point I love in a poignant way the following uncompromising thought by Milarepa:
Whatever one does eventually brings suffering and is futile;
Whatever one thinks is impermanent and futile;
Whatever one achieves is illusory and futile;
Even if one has it all, it is futile;
The dharmas of samsara are futile.”
I have often heard people say in our meetings that these phrases of Buddhist contemplation are downers and take away our joie de vivre, that doing these makes people feel depressed. That may happen, but that is not the purpose of this Buddhist contemplation.
The purpose of these contemplations is for us to see for ourselves that one true and authentic response to the realities of life is to give ourselves wholeheartedly to some sort of spiritual practice.
And this very practice of the First Point can be done all throughout one’s life, not just at the beginning of our journey. They help us realize that we need to live as truly and deeply as we can as an authentic response to what Norman Fischer calls “the gift and the problem that is our life.”
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.
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 Lama Gendun 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!
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