Aloha Sangha

ancient wisdom for crazy times

Category: progress in meditation

it’s now or never
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.
Anagarika Munindra
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:
All is an interminable chain of longing.
The Anxiety of Happiness
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
Sayadaw U Tejaniya
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.
In the words of the late Krishnamurti:
Freedom is now or never.
Choose now.
08/06/2023
the most important thing
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.
The Healing Is In The Return
Along these lines, the poet Rumi asks:
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.
07/24/2023
Don’t worry about progress
Progress happens when you don’t think about it.
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.
06/10/2021
stillness in meditation
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.
05/05/2021
the pure delight of samadhi
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.
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09/20/2020
inner simplicity
Meditation is not easy, I get it. There are aches and pains in the body and the mind can get restless … and there is inner simplicity.
But, as Hawaii-born retired Sumo grand-master Akebono would say to reporters after winning yet another match, “I just try my best.”
That’s all we ask. Try your best.
Just show up on the cushion, again and again. If you just keep showing up, the magic starts to happen – but it helps a lot to show up in the right way.
We can all dutifully drag ourselves to the cushion, set the timer, and wait it out. Or, we can discover the rapture of being fully alive in each moment.
it’s how we show up
Why do we experience these two often conflicting streams of experience? It’s how we show up.
We quietly refresh the heart with our breath meditation. Our steady intention and playful inquisitiveness nourish the inner branches and leaves to sprout green, alive, vivid shoots.
“Rivulets of delight” (as nico hase recently mentioned in a talk) flow into the spaces in our body once closed, dark, vague or numb, as we relax fully into what each moment of life brings.
There is nothing more profound, more mysterious, more pregnant . . . more dazzling than a window lighted by a single candle.
Baudelaire
How do make a grey heart green? By showing up every day to water it!
But the showing up itself is a practice—showing up with respect, patience, curiosity, and no real agenda other than to show up and see what’s here.
And stay in our aliveness.
our confidence in the practice grows slowly
As confidence in this simple practice grows, our addictions to the trinkets of the world begin to fade. We find our self sitting more and naturally being more mindful at work.
We begin to taste the fruits of an “inner austerity” — of shifting from having our own needs front and center and opening to the needs and discomforts of others as make the loving-kindness practices an integral part of our day.
a love for inner simplicity
We softly move into a keener love for inner and outer simplicity — of life style, speech, and even how arrange our sitting space and do the dishes.
We get less caught up in what others say about us, or imagine what they say. The grip on our likes and dislikes begins to soften.
The other day I read a short piece by the former Buddhist nun Marine Batchelor, in which she recalls various conversations she had while doing intensive practice in Korea. Here is one I particularly love:
I once went to speak with a nun I really respected, to ask her about meditation. “What about practice?” I asked her.
“Practice? Oh, just do it. There is nothing to say about practice. You just have to do it. You do it in the meditation hall, you do it in your daily life. There is nothing to say.”
This inner simplicity really touched me. So simple, yet so deep.
06/24/2019
a moveable monastery
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.
Dorothy Figen offers us one answer —
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.
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10/26/2018
your luminous mind
According to later Buddhist thought, human beings are fundamentally good. This is not just a theory; it’s an unmistakable meditation insight. One could say that meditation is the practice of directly experiencing our essential goodness, our fundamentally healthy and happy mind.
If we are fundamentally good, healthy and happy, then why don’t we feel this way all the time? In an early Buddhist scripture, the Buddha answers:
“Luminous is the mind, brightly shining is its nature, but it is colored by the attachments that visit it.”
shifting focus on the luminous mind
We experience these attachments that obscure the natural radiance of the mind as the problems we encounter in our daily lives. The viewpoint of later Buddhist practice was not so much battling or getting rid of these “defilements” but rather shifting one’s focus to the “luminous” nature of the natural mind that saturates the problems themselves.
When problems are seen in this way, as temporary and impermanent outcroppings of the luminous mind, everything feels more workable. The problems are not given extra oxygen by regarding them as defilements to be overcome, but rather as opportunities to look deeper into freedom space out of which they emerge and into which they dissolve.
sheaths covering the luminous quality
Meditation allows us experience them as superficial sheaths covering this basic goodness.
This approach does not support a flawed, wounded self that is stuck making one mistake after another. Everything becomes imminently workable and lighter.
dare to thrust the luminous
It’s not that we are lacking in effort or discipline in our meditation practice, but rather a certain daring to trust our basic nature. We can’t huff and puff our way to this trust, it’s more like we relax a little more and see it’s always been there.
revealing our birthright
As we learn to relax and trust we begin to part the veils that keep us from our birthright – our fundamentally healthy and happy mind.
The North American author and photographer Eudora Welty wrote:
My continuing passion is to part a curtain — that invisible veil of indifference that falls between us and that blinds us to each other’s presence, each other’s wonder, each other’s human plight.
As the veils start to come apart and are seen through, we fee each other’s human plight more profoundly.
relish the happy mind
This is the Buddhist project: to see through the “invisible veils of indifference”, relish our healthy and happy mind, shout it from the rooftops, and be kinder, especially to those who suffer.
I’ll leave you this week with an excerpt from George Saunder’s speech to graduates of Syracuse University in 2013, as published in the NY Times:
So here’s something I know to be true, although it’s a little corny, and I don’t quite know what to do with it:
What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.
Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded . . . reservedly, mildly.
Or, to look at it from the other end of the telescope: Who, in your life, do you remember most fondly, with the most undeniable feelings of warmth?
Those who were kindest to you, I bet.
It’s a little facile, maybe, and certainly hard to implement, but I’d say, as a goal in life … try to be kinder.
That luminous part of you that exists beyond personality — is as bright and shining as any that has ever been … Clear away everything that keeps you separate from this secret luminous place. Believe it exists, come to know it better, nurture it, and share its fruits tirelessly.
And someday, in 80 years, when you’re 100, and I’m 134, and we’re both so kind and loving we’re nearly unbearable, drop me a line, let me know how your life has been. I hope you will say: It has been so wonderful.
May your day be wonderful, happy and joyous, this moment, and this one, and this one …
11/16/2017
boredom
The creator of a popular Mindfulness app was on Jimmy Fallon Live last Friday night talking about how boredom happens because we have lost the skill of paying attention, and that we are all distraction junkies.
Andy Puddicombe guides Jimmy and the Tonight Show audience through a brief meditation that can be done anywhere.”
Holy Moly, I thought, the Mindfulness ship has landed.
Yes, there was that Time Magazine Cover a couple of years ago; and yes, Anderson Cooper did that story and his colleague Dan Harris is a convert. And of course the Lakers and the Bulls were coached by a Mindfulness guru.
But there was something about seeing the entire Tonight Show audience and band doing mindfulness meditation with their eyes closed with competent guidance that, well, took my breath away.
Now everyone wants to get in on this thing
Everyone and their aunty seem to want to get in on this now. Attendance at our weekly mindful get-togethers keeps going up. Yes, despite the initial enthusiasm, as a teacher getting people to stick with meditation is a major deal.
One of the most common complaints is that it’s so darn boring. This stops a lot of folks from meditating, as they don’t see the point of doing something that seems to be doing nothing for you.
Well, how long does it take to see results from the gym? Do you just give up if you don’t see any results after a couple of weeks?
boredom is just part of what happens when you close your eyes
Boredom happens. So do a lot of other mind states. Then they pass. They are mind states.
I read a hilarious description of the particular species of boredom that preys on mindfulness meditators by Brent R. Oliver writing over on the ultra cool blog Morpheus:
Amidst the insanity of your non-housebroken mind and the travails of domesticating it, there will be long, face-numbing stretches of pure tedium. It’ll make your ass go numb and your slack mouth drool…, you just sit there in the midst of a vast, arid stretch of featureless ennui, your mind is as listless and dull as Kristen Stewart’s acting.
You start to wonder if you somehow died and didn’t notice. Or maybe the timer on your phone had a stroke and will never buzz to release you from this yawn-fest..”
Picasso’s Old Guitarist (1903) expresses this pervasive boredom in our culture
Often when folks get started with mindfulness practice, it’s can fell very new and intriguing, and a cool thing to do. Sometimes little insights bubble up, like “I can really see how I make problems out of nothing, or “I never realized how active my mind is.”
As folks settle in to the routine of meditation, the experience may lose the coolness it had. It begins to seem like a chore.
And then sometimes the complaints come that nothing is happening, this is not working, or one seems to be getting nowhere at all.
And then: This is just so boring!
nothing needs to happen
Consider the possibility that nothing needs to happen.
I am not saying here some voodoo Zen thing, like we have to make our minds into “nothing” or get ourselves into some mystical other-worldly state of “nothingness.”
I just am saying, plainly, nothing (that is, no special mind states) needs to happen. It’s OK that nothing’s happening. Let’s see why that is.
When nothing seems to be happening in our mediation practice, we can become a little antsy. I suggest this antsy-ness is really a tiny “jonesing” for a fix – of anything, even uncomfortable thoughts. We just don’t do well with bland-ness, repetition, or engaging in insanely simple tasks over extended lengths of time.
Such as being with the breath sensations at the nostrils or abdomen.
we are intensity junkies jonesing all the time
Our culture induces a craving for intensity, a Jim Carrey-esque manic pursuit of peak experiences. Monster Energy drinks are everywhere, and prescriptions for powerful sleeping medications have risen many-fold in the last decade alone.
We just simply get to a point in our meditation practice, organically, where awareness sees that nothing is intrinsically boring.
Initially, relating to boredom in mediation is like seeing a blurry image, but as our senses rest a little, we start to discover intricate details.
nothing is boring
Our senses delight in details; they wake up a little. This is no easy path to be sure. But when you get through once, you realize you can do it again, and again, and again.
Mindful curiosity and careful clear seeing can take you out of the trance of conditioning so you experience of your life, just as it is.
And you begin to taste real freedom.
It’s a lovely taste.
08/10/2017
mindfulness meditation practice and the tiny purple flowers by the side of the road
We already have what we need – “your brain and your heart are your temples, and your philosophy, kindness.”
It seems many of us get hooked by trying to get somewhere in our mindfulness meditation practice. We evaluate where we are now and feel there is some ultra-cool place, where meditation, if done correctly, will eventually take us.
But what is the striving to get to that magic place is compounding our subtle (and not so subtle) discontent? This is assuming, of course, you experience even a smidgen of discontent in your life,
(And if you don’t experience any discontentment presently, once you start practicing daily, well … you just might run into some, as mindfulness starts to percolate down into strata of our minds many of us have conveniently disregarded for years and decades.)
So here we are.
As it says in the Zhuangzi, the ancient Chinese text from the late Warring States period (476–221 BC):
Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness.
Some folks I talk to seem to be unconsciously insisting they need certain things to get started with mindful meditation, such as the right book (or set of books), mp3s, DVDs.
To say nothing of understanding challenging theories and philosophies. Consider a remark by no other than the Dalai Lama:
There is no need for temples. No need for complicated philosophies. My brain and my heart are my temples. My philosophy is kindness.
Such a striking statement I feel shows that indeed, as Don Cupitt notes in his remarkable book The Great Questions of Life:
We are at the beginning (possibly in the middle, but definitely not at the end) of a global shift in the concept of religion, a shift away from the view of religion as a way of transcending the human condition and toward a view that religion is about embracing the human condition.
This “No need for temples and complicated philosophies” sounds a lot like John Lennon:
Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today …
We already have what we need – your “brain and your heart “are your temples, and your philosophy, kindness.
With your brain and your heart, and with kindness and mindfulness meditation, we can truly “embrace the human condition” as Don Cupitt says.
When we embrace with mindfulness what is actually happening in the moment, be it stubbing your toe or your pride, we learn again and again that the fuller we can embrace “what is,” the fuller mind and body can relax and rest.
And in that rest there may be found a juiciness, fullness, some call it a joy, in just experiencing, without grasping or rejecting, what arises, completely.
This is a quiet and deep joy that, in a way, has always been there, covered over by strata of reactivity and compulsiveness which subtly rule our lives, in one form or another.
In our meditation practice, the goal is not the deal, it’s the steps on the path. Each step, actually.
As Thich Nhat Hanh says, in the title to one of his books, “Peace is every step.”
One teacher I was very fortunate to sit a retreat with early on in my practice was Munindra, a Bengali teacher who trained in Burma. One of his students, Sharon Salzberg, recounts that when Munindra was asked once why he practiced his response was,
So I will see the tiny purple flowers by the side of the road as I walk to town each day.
Can we practice like this?
02/11/2016
the monkey pod tree in the beach park
Life just as it is, is eloquent. The world is its own magic. We need to need to stop seeking some additional meaning and just let things come forward and enlighten us to their magic in their own time.
Have you ever had the experience of being irritated with someone or about something, like a parking ticket, while waking somewhere when suddenly you notice a gorgeous sunset is also happening?
How long did it take you to let go of the “irritation voices” in your head to take in the sunset?
Or maybe you simply ignored nature’s evening show and continued in miffed rumination?
The ego wants to know how we can justify pausing to take in yet another boring sunset when we do not have enough time to do all we need to do, and plan for.
But as we learn to just be in the silent simplicity of meditation, we slowly let go of the life-robbing habits of worrying, planning, and seething.
As James Finley, a teacher of spiritual contemplation and student of the late Thomas Merton, writes:
We must be patient with ourselves as we devote ourselves to this lifelong, transformative process of meditation. Taking the time to transcend the tyranny of time is time well spent. In God’s good time, an underlying meditative awareness grows within us to the point of becoming our habitual way of experiencing everything that we experience.
“In God’s good time” = not according to the ego’s timetable. We are often so concerned, thinking Am I doing this mediation thing right? I should definitely be seeing some changes by now.
Results of meditation simply happen when they happen, no sooner.
Growing out of the shell of ego, leaving the nest ego has made for us, can be a little scary. It’s just part o the process, and you can’t accelerate this thing once it gets going, or you’ll risk what some folks call “spiritual bypassing.”
The caterpillar spins its cocoon of contemplative practice and emerges as a free flying being “in God’s good time.” Trying to break a little piece off the cocoon sends the whole thing crashing on the rocks of disappointment, resentment, frustration.
This is a poem from Swami Nirbhayananda, who lived in North India in the nineteenth century, which describes this process of what some psychologists call “transpersonal individuation”, or the gradual shedding of the tyranny of ego.
In this extract the Swami is speaking to his own ego:
Your thoughts are restless, mine are forever peaceful.
You are attached to name and form.
I go beyond them.
O dear one, I listen to you, but am not quick to respond.
O mind, we part company and are friends.
I salute you a thousand times.
You are all pain and tears.
I am peace and perfection.
Life just as it is, is eloquent. The world is its own magic. We need to need to stop seeking some additional meaning and just let things come forward and enlighten us to their magic in their own time, not ours.
This liberates us from the tyranny of our mind, borrowing James Finley’s powerful word. We are then potentially liberated by every moment in our life, if we allow ourselves to enter into them in intimate way mindfulness allows.
What’s the meaning of life? That sunset over there. Or that the monkey pod tree in the beach park.
There is a quiet, dignified feeling to sunsets and trees. Also to animals, children, food, sitting in the dentist’s chair, disease, frustration, impatience and death.
If I think “I see that monkey pod tree in the beach park over there” I am partly living in my own private conceptual universe, which is always a day late and a dollar short, as they say.
Our practice is experience is simply letting seeing see or hearing hear. At that moment there is no time, no space, no self, no other. There just is what is, “full and complete, lacking nothing”, as the Zen masters of old used to say.
Through our simple, quiet mindfulness practice, we shed our conditioned, conceptual approach to life.
But that doesn’t mean we somehow destroy it, no, we simply grow out of the compulsion to only experience life in this protected, safe way.
In the often quoted teaching to Bahiya, the Buddha just gave the briefest of meditation instructions, which hit the bull’s eye, and Bahiya awoke to his true nature.
In John Ireland’s translation:
“Then, Bahiya, you should train yourself thus: In the seen will be merely what is seen; in the heard will be merely what is heard; in the sensed will be merely what is sensed; in the cognized will be merely what is cognized.”
In savoring a sunset or seeing a monkey pod tree in a beach park we let go of the experience of “I see” and doing something called seeing. There is just the seen.
No mental overlays.
Then our so-called mundane experiences, of stubbing our toe or our ego, become magical, revealing to us our natural essence, which many have said is love. In this inner shift of “In the seen will be merely what is seen” mindfulness lets us in on the magic.
Of just this incredible tree. Or just this breath. Or a baby’s first tooth.
01/21/2016
Guided equanimity meditation
The main work of equanimity meditation is a kind of radical, open and healing acceptance.
We have come to the fourth of the four immeasurables: meditation on equanimity. It might be the most important of the four, as without it we can easily lose our balance or direction. Whereas the previous three meditations on love, compassion and joy have a soft, heart opening quality, this meditation is, as Roshi Joan Halifx puts it, the “strong back that supports the soft front of compassion.”
Equanimity is the quality of mind that allows us to capacity to be in touch with the suffering of others when we are doing the compassion meditations, and at the same time not be overwhelmed or become undone by what comes up for us.
Equanimity gives us a stable, quiet calm, and a sense of trust that allows us to meet the world in all its naked force and sublime beauty and at the same time to fully let go of the world.
The main work of equanimity meditation is a kind of radical, open and healing acceptance.
Equanimity meditation can feel like gazing at Henri Rousseau’s Seine and Eiffel-tower in the sunset (1910)
Jon Kabat-Zinn describes this healing aspect of acceptance very nicely:
Healing does not mean curing, although the two words are often used interchangeably. While it may not be possible for us to cure ourselves or to find someone who can, it is always possible for us to heal ourselves.
Healing implies the possibility for us to relate differently to illness, disability, even death, as we learn to see with eyes of wholeness. Healing is coming to terms with things as they are.
Equanimity comes as a pivotal juncture. In earlier meditations we practiced reflections on impermanence and karma. Now we take the mind that has practices these reflections and apply it to fully be with the whole enchilada of life as it is, the unknowable and the immediate, and trust the moment to moment unfolding as it is without clinging or aversion?
The traditional reflections on equanimity meditation from the Theravada tradition allow us to integrate the truth of impermanence and karma with these phrases:
Theravada equanimity phrases
All beings are owners of their karma. Their happiness and unhappiness depend on their actions, not on my wishes for them.”
The Perfection of Equanimity
For some people this may feel a little too hard-hearted, and clinical. But we have to remember these series of reflections happen after much work has already been done in the three previous meditations on love, compassion and joy.
Joan Halifax Roshi says that equanimity is “ruthless compassion.”
In the following guided meditation we practice equanimity meditation in the same way as we have done with the three previous meditations on love, compassion and joy: we may start with ourselves, progress with close friends, neutral persons and finally with persons with whom we may be having difficulties.
We are now incorporating in our practice aspiration verses, offering the four immeasurable phrases and phrases to share the benefit of the practice with all. Those phrases appear below the video. You can simply play the video and use it as an audio guided meditation if you wish.
Beginning the meditation session:
Reflect on why it is you meditate, why you practice, and give voice to this by the recitation of the aspirations.
With boundless compassion and wisdom I will work for the welfare of all, may we be free from hunger and discord, and have joy and the world at peace.
……
Offering the 4 Immeasurables phrases:
May all beings have happiness and its causes;
May they be free from suffering and its causes;
May they never be parted from sublime bliss free from suffering;
May they dwell in great equanimity, free from attachment and aversion toward those who are near and far.
…..
Sharing the benefit of practice for the happiness and benefit of all:
By the power of this compassionate practice,
may suffering be transformed into peace,
may the hearts of all beings be opened,
and their wisdom radiate from within.
Feel free to leave a comment below.
06/05/2013