Aloha Sangha

ancient wisdom for crazy times

Category: joy

not a caravan of despair
Do you have a fear of missing out on a more spiritual experience doing a mountain of laundry, washing a sinkful of dishes, or raking leaves till kingdom come?
The meditation teacher Karen Maezen Miller, in a piece published in Lion’s Roar, rightfully calls us on this thought, while describing how the domestic lives of the communal Zen masters of old offered many a critical course correction:
Rather than think of daily life chores as something to get through; it’s fully experiencing the “getting through” part that frees the mind more profoundly than running off to a cave in the misty mountains.
In Do Dishes, Rake Leaves, she asks:
Tell me, while I’m sweeping leaves till kingdom come, is it getting in the way of my life? Is it interfering with my life? Keeping me from my life?
Do Dishes, Rake Leaves
There is a break in this piece while she makes simple observations about folding clothes and washing dishes. Then she answers her own question:
Only my imaginary life, that life of what-ifs and how-comes: the life I’m dreaming of.
Then another short narrative digression, ending with:
At the moment that I’m raking leaves, at the moment I’m doing anything, it is my life; it is all of time, and it is all of me.
Pause and ask yourself:
do you really and truly feel you are missing out on some more spiritual experience by being saddled with a mountain of laundry, a sink overflowing with dishes, or a yard full of leaves to rake?
I like Josh Korda’s line, that our mindfulness practice is
not really about being above it all; it’s about being with it all.
Whether in sitting meditation or raking leaves or doing the laundry, our core practice is to notice what is happening.
When you feel irritated, bothered, or bored, just be aware of mind states and their underlying feeling tones. Or the feeling tones and their undelying mind states.
As soon as you notice these feelings, and the awareness in which they arise, you are no longer lost in them.
As the Korean monk Haemin Sunim writes:
Awareness is inherently pure, like the open sky. Stress, irritation, and anger can temporarily cloud the sky, but they can never pollute it.
The wave of irritation, anger, boredom, or whatever it is, naturally recedes on its own as long as you don’t feed it by dwelling or spinning an interesting narrative around it.
This is not just detachment; we also learn to turn towards and gently open to the sadness or grief that seeks our attention, triggering perhaps sadness, shame or fear.
I love how Pema Chodron describes this essential skill:
We join our loss of heart with honesty and kindness. Instead of pulling back from the pain of irritation we move closer. We lean into the wave. We swim into the wave.
Mindful poetry
Mindfulness is this simple: we pay attention to what’s happening in the moment, let go of any stories we may tell ourselves about our experiences, and “swim into the wave.”
As Jiddu Krishnamurti put it:
Pure attention without judgment is not only the highest form of human intelligence but also the highest expression of love.
As you get better at it, you realize that challenging mental states are just the resistance to what is. And they rise and recede within the silent space of your awareness.
When you sit down to meditate today, feel any resistance which may come up — to aches, pains, or mental states such as boredom, restlessness, or doubt.
Savor the resistance, like a fine wine or a smooth boba tea.
As it dissipates, feel the joy of the quieting mind, which is always there.
Ours is a practice of uncovering joy and fulfillment in our lives just as they are, regardless of our circumstances.
Rumi has the last word this week; on his tomb is purportedly written:
Come, come, whoever you are. Wanderer, worshiper, lover of life. Though you have broken your vow a hundred times, ours is not a caravan of despair.
Poems of Rumi
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07/13/2023
be happy, meditate
Rather than striving to get rid of stress and confusion, see how these mental states act as a false barrier to our own natural calm, focus, and joy.
Mindfulness meditation is not just another way to fix what we feel might be broken in our lives. Maybe you struggle with low moods, motivation, or existential malaise. Maybe you feel lonely, or bored.
Do you sometimes feel like Peggy Lee when she sings “Is that all there is?”
Meditation, rather, is a way of discovering that whatever you may be feeling or experiencing does not define you.
As you get better at observing your inner world in the present moment, you see this world is just made up of so many mental images, self-talk, and waves of feeling tones in your body.
Our practice is about observing how these groups of experiences interact; e.g., how mental images interact with self-talk producing waves of feeling.
And these interactions often happen will-nilly in our minds.
As you separate the sensory pieces and greet each one with kindness they simply flow through. And this flow feels good.
But more importantly, you begin to realize that what you really are is unbounded joy and peace. Bad news happens, as it will from time to time, but it doesn’t define you, as …
Your sense of well-being is still there.
Rather than striving to get rid of stress and confusion, we recognize how mental states act as a false barrier to our own natural calm, focus, and joy.
What a relief!
We learn how to simply relax back into the peace and joy that was always there.
If you meditate to get something, some feeling or some imagined mental state, it becomes another goal, one which may lead you to judge yourself as failing or succeeding.
This reinforces what classical Buddhism calls “grasping and aversion” — and often leads to a scattered, anxious mind.
With time and practice, you discover an open awareness which is inherently free, peaceful and joyous. And you recognize this as a more profound and delightful “you.”
You start to appreciate the difference between pleasure and happiness.
Many of us live from pleasure to pleasure, with some waiting around in between.
But the happiness you discover with meditation practice comes from deeply experiencing your core, who and what you truly are. It’s more fulfilling than sense pleasures, which seem pedestrian in comparison.
There is no waiting around here; it’s on tap 24/7, with all the bandwidth you need.
One of my favorite meditation teachers, Cheri Huber, reminds us that:
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.
But let’s be clear: sadness, jealousy, anger, fear, physical and emotional pain, all of it, will still arise.
But these are simply surface perturbations.
We’re talking about a radically profound change in the relationship with these experiences. Meditation is a tool to see right through them, to this inner core of unperturbed peace and happiness.
How cool is this?
Be happy, meditate!
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07/03/2023
everything is a mess and it’s fine
Yes, we are all in a mess, with suffering and despair everywhere-yet one lonely channel broadcasts the remarkable message that despite it all, everything is fine.
In a web-series from a few years ago hosted by Jerry Seinfeld, the comedian Garry Shandling recalls telling a joke once to an audience of Buddhist monks, one of whom was the Dalai Lama.
Side note here: Garry, who passed away in 2016, was a longtime Buddhist practitioner and a student of Thich Nhat Hanh.
This is Garry talking:
So one time I was with the Dalai Lama and he said,
I understand you have some joke about the Buddha.
How would you like to be in this position? And you know, he’s looking at me and he’s got the glasses on, and he’s the Dalai Lama. I’m talking to the Dalai Lama. And I’m comfortable with that.
And I said, “Well, [delivering the joke]:
Buddha never got married ’cause his wife would have said, ‘What are you gonna do, sit around the house like that all day?’
“Well, I’m meditating, honey.”
“Why don’t you meditate while you’re taking out the trash?”
And there’s dead silence in the hall, except for three American monks in the back, who are laughing hysterically. And so then I explained the joke to him:
“In American culture, the husbands and wives sometimes argue because the wife thinks the husband is lazy and sitting around…”
And [the Dalai Lama] goes,
“Oh… Funny.”
Garry’s take on this experience: “That’s what you want — a three-minute gap from when you tell the joke to when you get the laugh!”
Fortunately for Shandling, he isn’t the only one to bomb telling the Dalai Lama a Buddhist joke. Here is an Australian news anchor who waded into these dangerous waters.

Note: Should you wish to tell this joke yourself, replace “walks into a pizza shop” with “walks up to a hot dog vendor.” It will likely go better for you.
Back in ancient times, before kids, my wife and I took a long cross-country RV trip. We ate frugally on the road, with her inventive RV cooking, but we had the ritual of eating breakfast on Sunday mornings in a local diner.
One Sunday morning, in one of the Virginias I think, a dog-eared menu had a message prominently on display on the very top:
If you don’t have a sense of humor, you have no sense at all.
I think of that menu from time to time, especially when just sitting down to meditate becomes challenging.
I ask myself, what am I taking so seriously?
The whole notion of human trouble and pain is serious and not serious at the same time. As I intentionally, and sometimes with great effort, bring awareness to what is happening in any given moment, I eventually get it–what I call my life is just a stream of mental events, often tethered to anxieties about the past or the future.
When I finally see this, my heart relaxes a little.
View from the dunes on Koog in Texel (1917) by Jan Toorop. Original from The Rijksmuseum.
Yes, we are all in a mess, with real suffering and despair all around us, and yet one lonely channel broadcasts the remarkable message that despite it all, everything is fine.
Ancient telegrams telling me to relax
Reading early Buddhist texts, I feel I am receiving ancient telegrams telling me to relax, it’s all good. Nothing lasts, everyone gets bothered, but really there is no one to be bothered.
The Buddhist approach may seem cold and impersonal. But a view that initially seems absurd and depressing reveals a peaceful existential oasis. That everything is in constant flux, that distress is normal (get over yourself, already), and that there is really no one to get over anything, really – is refreshing news!
It’s only absurd if we take ourselves seriously. It takes me a while to get the message.
I have Leonard Cohen on a playlist I listen to a lot.
The other day, the refrain from his song Anthem hit its mark:
There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.
Humor celebrates the cracks. And seeing the cracks brings in enough light to discover the things we hit up against aren’t all that solid or heavy.
And if we are patient, a little joy may poke through.
The Thai meditation master Ajahn Cha once pointed to an enormous boulder and asked one of his students if he thought it was pretty heavy.
Yes, it’s very heavy, he said— to which Ajahn Cha replied:
Well … it’s not heavy if you don’t pick it up!
11/14/2022
have your self a foolish little Christmas

Ram Dass encouraged us to embrace our foolish selves rather than try to fix them

I heard the news as I was driving home from work this past Tuesday morning. Ram Dass was dead.
Maybe I will remember this drive home like I still remember that bleak winter day in late November in 1963. I was seven years old that morning our 2nd grade teacher told us that JFK had been shot.
I flash on the Beatles singing “I heard the news today, Oh, boy…”
be here now
Ram Dass made a huge impact on my life back in 1972, when I read his book Be Here Now, published the year before; I was just getting into yoga and meditation.
Be Here Now opened my eyes like nothing else had.
My pump had been already primed. I read many of the Beat Poets by the time I reached high school. My 17 year old son is reading them now, on his Christmas break from his senior year.
I like to think of Ram Dass as a Merry Prankster with soul. Playful and deep, his talks are ear-worms with substance. I listened to them over and over, finding something new each time.
we’re all fools … all the time
I flash on someone else I was reading at the time. Ray Bradbury, in the Illustrated Man:
We’re all fools… all the time. It’s just we’re a different kind each day. We think, I’m not a fool today. I’ve learned my lesson. I was a fool yesterday but not this morning. Then tomorrow we find out that, yes, we were a fool today too. I think the only way we can grow and get on in this world is to accept the fact we’re not perfect and live accordingly.
Ram Dass made fun of the fools we all are. He especially poked fun at the growing number of self-proclaimed enlightened teachers, chiding them with a line particularly apropos to this holiday season:
“If you think you’re enlightened, go spend a week with your family.”
Then we’ll really see how enlightened you are, I can just hear him chuckle, with a twinkle in his eyes.
our identity costumes
And his line about our relationships:
“We spend much of our time reassuring one another that our costumes of identity are on straight.”
Ram Dass encouraged us to embrace our foolish selves rather than try to fix them. I had taken on a Buddhist identity, trying to do the ultimate self-help fix: to see, through intensive meditation, that it never existed.
No self, no problem.
But there was a problem; this self is a hard nut to crack.
embracing our essential foolishness
While the Theravada, or old school Buddhism, sees the self as a problem and the Mahayana, coming along many centuries later, lauds our “essential goodness,” Shin Buddhism, a very late development in Japan, embraces our foolishness, our karmic shortcomings.
Embracing our selves as foolish beings, we open our to Infinite Compassion and Infinite Light. I flash on the healing depth of this view. It would do our sometimes uptight Buddhist selves some good to truly laugh at our selves the way Ram Dass did.
we all have clay feet
Buddhists have feet of clay just like everyone else. The Buddhist world has plenty of alcoholic lamas, and power hungry, womanizing roshis.
I know, my first Buddhist teacher ticked all three of those boxes.
And was my second teacher turned out to be a pedophile.
For every Buddhist saint there are a thousand struggling practitioners, and even the saint may be having secret dalliances.
Aung San Suu Kyi – quite the fool
Aung San Suu Kyi made a serious fool of herself on the international stage a couple weeks ago, defending the very generals that held her under house arrest, from charges of genocide against the Rohingya Muslims in their homeland.
For some, waking up to the imperfections of Buddhism and Buddhists shatters an idealism that really needs to be shattered.
But bitterness and depression sometimes follow.
Ram Dass helped us see these as costumes we all wear. That sinner and saint are already free, if only they let go of stubborn egos.
let’s raise our glasses
Let’s raise our glasses to toast: everything is impermanent, imperfect and incomplete!
Or stated negatively, as Buddhists like to do: nothing lasts, nothing’s finished, and nothing’s perfect!
If we stick with our meditation practice we eventually appreciate the wisdom and beauty of imperfection. Our bodies age, our minds wander, let’s raise our glass!
Perfection is fine when we fill out our taxes, the electrician re-wires the kitchen, and we have that arthritic hip replaced. But it doesn’t do us much good on or off the cushion.
the path is more about joy than perfection
For me Buddhism is more about joy than perfection. It’s about being who we are, just as we are, right now.
Let’s end this year with a reflection from an elder I hold very dearly in my heart. The American born monk Ajahn Sumedho, now 85 years old, and one of the senior Western representatives of the Thai forest tradition of Theravada Buddhism, had this to say in his book The Way It Is, freely available on the Internet:
To practice, we must start exactly where we are. Of course, we can always imagine 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.
We are all “just walking each other home” as Ram Dass would say.
So, cue the music:
“Have your self a foolish little Christmas,
Let your heart be light…”

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12/25/2019
no self help
Mindfulness meditation leaves the self-help mindset in the dust by challenging the existence of the very thing we are setting out to improve, the self.
In an article on the self-help movement in New York Magazine back in 2013, Kathryn Shultz observed she knows people who “wouldn’t so much as walk through the self-help section of a bookstore without The Paris Review under one arm and a puzzled oh-I-thought-the-bathroom-was-over-here look on their face.”
(Back when there were bookstores to hang out in).
Some of you reading this may have found appropriate advice at times in self-help literature, while some others may cringe at the mention of the topic.
Many self-help authors now embrace what our culture is calling “mindfulness” as part of the tools and skills they recommend their readers. And the research does show it helps overcome anxiety, stress, lower your blood pressure and re-wire your brain to be more caring and empathic.
more help, less self
In her critique of the self-help literature in the New York Magazine piece, Shultz quips:
God knows we all need more help, but possibly we need less self.
To which contemporary Buddhist authors might add — “touché.”
freeing up a stuck system
Mindfulness meditation leaves the self-help mindset in the dust by re-evaluating this thing we are setting out to improve, the self.
Mindfulness “teachings” do this when they enlist the help of their Buddhist host philosophy. A few clean, surgical incisions from Bodhisattva Manjushri’s razor-sharp wisdom sword can free up a very stuck system.
And after all, stuck-ness is the raison d’etre of self-help genre, right?
Many of us find ourselves stuck in financial worry, feeling awful for being over-weight, under-loved in a relationship going nowhere, existentially depressed or lost in a millennial haze of desperate distractions.
Maybe this is why we started meditating in the first place.
Buddhist mindfulness practice leads to clear insights into how we make up in our own heads the very self we are trying make happy. When these insights take firm root in our day to day life, the need to fix or cater to this fickle self can seem pretty hilarious when we’re in the right space to take this in.
the pure joy of the unconditioned
Before reaching for the next self-help trending book in your news-feed, if your are feeling low in mood, confused, or anxious, pause.
Contemplate these lines from William Butler Yeats’ poem “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,”
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.
Just lie down in the perceived stuck-ness of your heart.
Give up hope and fear.
Don’t rush to pull yourself out.
If you can hang with this mindfully, patiently, softly … an extraordinary joy can sneak up on us.
As the contemporary Buddhist writer Susan Piver writes, it’s …
the most rare kind of comfort … the comfort of coming into contact with the unconditioned.
Just life as it is, moment by moment, released from any compulsion to make it conform to some notion we have in our head.
Ah, mindfulness!

04/22/2019
refuge
We suffer because we forget what we truly are. We take refuge to remember.
We forget we are love and compassion; that we are hard-wired to feel and connect. We forget we are truly and profoundly good through and through.
Yet we settle for less, much less.
Tara Brach said in one of her talks one of her favorite Asian teaching stories is about a huge statute of the Buddha somewhere in Thailand. Since it looked like all the others in the temple, made of plaster and clay, people didn’t particularly revere it over the others.
Then came a long period of drought, and small cracks started to appear. One of the monks had the idea to shine a flashlight to look inside the crack to see if it there was some infrastructure problem.
In every tiny crack he looked into, a bright shining light reflected back. He called the other monks, and together they carefully removed small pieces of the cracked plaster and clay to reveal flashes of gold.
When they removed the plaster and clay covering, they found one of the largest pure gold Buddha statues in Southeast Asia.
tiny cracks as insights
I like to think of the tiny cracks in the story as those little insights we get from time to time throughout our day: the light is turning red, OK, an opportunity to be aware of my body just sitting here in the car, waiting patiently.
My favorite work shirt is wrinkled – a reminder to fold it nicely the next time it comes out of the dryer.
Little cracks like these appear in the plaster covering of our life all day long, we just forget to look for the gold shining through each moment.
The monks think the statue had been covered in plaster and clay to protect it from (from thieves, I imagine). But through the passage of time, people forgot what they had.
Just like we forget what we have. We put on a covering of defenses to protect ourselves so long ago; we have forgotten what it was we are protecting: our true nature, our Buddha-nature.
we take refuge in the depths of our true self
We forget the gold and we start believing we’re the covering – the defensive, small, insecure self.
The essence of the spiritual path is simply reconnecting with the inner gold, mindful moment after moment. This connection is an unassailable refuge.
refuge in traditional Buddhism
In traditional Buddhism the first step on the spiritual path is taking refuge in the three treasures of Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. We take refuge in the pure gold inner Buddha, the spacious freedom of our true nature.
Sure, it begins with some desire on our part for perceived spiritual goodies, but if we hang in there it progresses into small daily revelations through those tiny cracks in the defensive self.
Mindfulness encourages the pure gold to shine though those tiny cracks.
With deepening experience, refuge as a religious ideal fades into the liberating immanence of our true nature. We are “at play in the fields” of aliveness and mystery.
to find treasures of joy in the fields of the daily
A sangha member emailed me this poem the other day; I write this week’s this email as a sort of prologue to this poem, which is a kind of prayer:
(with many thanks to Noah for finding it)
Empower me
to be a bold participant,
rather than a timid saint in waiting,
in the difficult ordinariness of now;
to exercise the authority of honesty;
rather than defer to power,
or deceive to get it;
to influence someone for justice,
rather than impress anyone for gain;
and, by grace, to find treasures
of joy, of friendship, of peace
hidden in the fields of the daily
you give me to plow.
~Ted Loder, from Wrestling the Light: Ache and Awe in the Human-Divine Struggle.
As Noah wrote in his email to me, “treasures hidden…in the fields of the daily” speaks to the heart of this practice.
07/20/2017
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
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