Meditation
- sit until it felt like long enough,
- have a clock just in sight if I looked up and catch a glance at it occasionally to see how long I had been sitting.
- ‘1.' didn’t feel right. My mind could very easily tell me when it had had enough as it looked for a way out of the mental gymnastics.
- ‘2.' put an added distraction in my head, “was ‘x’ minutes up yet?"
- Samsara - This is the app that I use in the YouTube sessions. It has a number of options for customization. However, I have dialed it back to some simple settings. I use it in the YouTube sessions as it sounds a gong at the beginning and end of the sessions. I find the gong sounds comfortable. It also will work if you turn the display off to save the phone’s battery.
- Simple Meditation Timer - This is probably my favourite in that it is bare bones and just works. Set your time, press the button, a gong rings ‘x’ minutes later. I don’t use it on the YouTube videos as it does not have a starting gong. Like Samsara you can turn off the display and it will still work.
- Simple Zazen Timer - Another bare bones app. This has a higher pitched gong sound that might appeal better to some. I don’t use it as the screen has to be left on while the timer is counting down.
- And of course there is the countdown timer on the iPhone itself. I just don’t like the ringer sounds that come with that and so do not use it.
- Sitting - Traditionally this is taught as the Lotus posture. If this is just not possible (I can’t maintain it!), one can sit in the half lotus, cross legged, kneeling (using a stool or cushions under your bum), or on a chair (feet on the floor).
- Hands - Either place your hands palm downwards on your thighs. Or with the palms upwards, right hand resting in the left hand and the two thumbs touching. The thumbs can be used to gauge your meditation. If you are trying too hard, they will tend to press together. If they drift apart, your mind is probably distracted.
- Back - The back should be straight but not rigid. As if your spine was like a stack of coins. If you are in a chair, do not lean back into the chair for support. That can make you drowsy.
- Shoulders - Level and not slumped.
- Head - Up with the chin slightly lowered and the jaw resting naturally, slightly open.
- Tongue on the palate - The tongue rests on the palate behind the top front teeth. This helps to stop the build up of saliva while keeping the mouth moist.
- Eyes - I was taught to keep the eyes open, with a soft gaze two or three feet in front of you, down the bridge of the nose. Meditation is an internal focus, not external. Some prefer to close the eyes (I sometimes do), just be careful not to fall asleep.
- Friends asked me if I would offer some meditation instruction.
- I find that living this life of self-isolation with family, for me some days are good, some days are a struggle. The answer to this for me is to make some time where I can reset and come back to myself. This daily, midday meditation I hope will serve that purpose for me and for you.
- The first session will be streamed live on Tuesday, April 7th at 1:00pm Hawaii time (4:00pm PST / 7:00pm EST / 12:00pm New Zealand / 12:00AM UK).
- I will look to be online 5 minutes before the top of the hour.
- No meditation experience is required to take part in these sessions.
- The whole session will last no more than 20 minutes, with meditation about 10 minutes (don’t worry if that sounds too long, I will have you covered).
- You can be at home, in your office, in your pajamas, in a suit. My only suggestion (if possible) is to find a quiet place to sit comfortably (and not be driving).
- As I will be using YouTube to stream the sessions (see tech details below), they will be recorded and can be watched later if you cannot make the live time.
- As I will be at home I hope and will ask for no interruptions, I cannot guarantee that as life happens around me.
- Click on this link to be taken to my YouTube page, where the YouTube videos are now archived.
- You will see a thumbnail link to the next scheduled video (take a look now), click on that and the video will start at the designated time(ish) - providing I hit “Go” at the right time).
- Recordings of all past sessions will be available on my YouTube Channel.
- Comments and chat will be disabled for the videos, at least that is the plan so that we can concentrate on meditation. If you have any questions or comments (put anything out there as I want this to work for people), contact me if you have my contact details, otherwise there will be available via my YouTube channel (click on the About tab).
- “What are we truly aware of in the world around us?"
- “What do we see and what do we miss?"
- Relaxation
- Quietening the mind
- Developing compassion
- Developing patience
- Connecting with God
- Seeing the humanity in everyone
- Walking meditation
- Achieving better focus
- There are many different meditation instructions. Spend some time searching out a practice which works for you.
- Just follow that practice. Just follow the instruction.
- As you start to see results in your practice, your faith in that practice will increase - what you read or heard worked for you, so you go back to it and try it again. That’s what I mean by faith.
- When you are struggling in your practice, stick with the instruction. Practice it.
- Don’t use the struggle time to decide to move onto a different practice. That struggle time is when you probably need to make a bigger commitment to the instruction. Double down and stick with it.
- At these times, having a teacher with whom you can discuss your struggles can be helpful. Someone who has travelled that road before.
- If a teacher is not possible, try a friend who is also meditating, or refer to a book.
- Don’t set yourself timelines for achievements or goals. Just follow the instruction.
- Meditation is for the long haul. It is a marathon not a sprint. It is for a lifetime.
- Drop everything, get out and take a walk. Just remove yourself from the focus of your activities and change the scenery.
- If outside is not an option, change the scenery through a walk to the bathroom (whether you need to go or not), a walk to the coffee machine, or to a window with an expansive view.
- Meditate - feel your feet on the ground, the contact of your body with the chair. Become aware of the sounds around you. Bring your attention to your breath, just breathing itself naturally. Watching the rise and fall of the belly can further help to ground you.
- If you have some spiritual practice, in that moment drop into that. For example the recitation of a mantra, itself a meditation.
- Journal - just write, let the mind run free. Perhaps write about what needs to be done. If you are keeping a Bullet Journal, get more detailed in there. Break up the tasks.
May Meditation Nudge 3
Meditation Timer
This is an ongoing series running through May to compliment the twice weekly meditation sessions that I will be hosting on YouTube (and are now archived on my YouTube page). If you have any questions, please contact me.
A practical piece today.
I learnt to meditate before electronic aids were available. Well, some electronic timers were becoming available, but they didn’t work for me. Yes, I could have set an alarm clock for 15 minutes hence, but I found the sound rather jarring and so I didn’t use them. Instead I would do one of two things,
However,
With our smart phones being able to hold apps, there are now many dedicated Timers or specifically Meditation Timers to be found. I recommend finding a timer because then you can set it for how long that you wish to meditate for and then just focus on your meditation. The nagging voice might come up, “how much longer do I have to sit for?" but that is just the mind distracting you. Note that distraction and come back to the object of meditation.
Here are some apps that I recommend (all iPhone),
If you are using a phone to host your timer, I do recommend putting your phone into Airplane mode before sitting. That way you won’t be distracted by phone calls, text, notifications and the like.
If you do choose to use a smart phone timer, I do recommend finding one that will work easily for you and for which the sounds are comfortable to you. Ultimately you want something that you can just forget about so that you can just get on with your meditation.
Beware of finding the right timer becoming a more important project than your meditation!
May Meditation Nudge 2
Beware of looking for good and bad meditations
This is an ongoing series running through May to compliment the twice weekly meditation sessions that I will be hosting on YouTube (and are now archived on my YouTube page). If you have any questions, please contact me.
Whatever my meditation practice is, from my experience it is very easy to have judgements of how well I am doing. I can set arbitrary goals for myself based upon what I feel I should be aiming for, with the judge of whether I meet those goals being myself.
The problem with this arrangement is that both the self-imposed goals and the judgements of whether I have met them, is very subjective. In setting them up I drop into a duality of win or loose. There is a sense of aggression towards myself as to where I am at. This aggression can slip subtly into my daily life in my judgment of myself and others.
Instead, my invitation to you is to just follow the instruction of the meditation practice. Allow the wisdom and transformation to come out of the practice. Don’t go looking for answers, don’t go looking for insights, don’t go looking for anything. Just do the practice. Just follow the instruction.
May Meditation Nudge 1
The Meditation Posture
This is an ongoing series running through May to compliment the twice weekly meditation sessions that I will be hosting on YouTube (and are now archived on my YouTube page). If you have any questions, please contact me.
First and foremost, be comfortable. If you are not comfortable, the body will be screaming, you will be distracted and at worst be put off the idea of meditation completely. Be comfortable.
Below I will run through the seven point posture as I was taught it:
If at anytime you find yourself in a lot of discomfort, adjust your position and come back to the meditation.
May Meditation Schedule
Update on December 17, 2020: I have now moved the videos from YouTube to my YouTube page.
Following the daily meditation sessions through April, I have decided to continue the meditations through May, just with fewer sessions. During May I will host two sessions a week, Monday and Thursday. They will be held live at 1:00pm Hawaiian time (to help - 3 hours behind the US West coast, 6 hours behind the East coast, 11 hours behind the UK, and 22 hours behind New Zealand). All videos will be archived on YouTube for later watching, as are the April sessions.
On the days between the meditations I plan to post short reminders about aspects of meditation on this page of my Micro.blog site. Just bookmark this page.
If there is sufficient interest and I can work things out logistically at home, I might have a meditation day, having three live meditation sessions (morning, lunchtime and late afternoon). Please let me know if you are interested in this and I will look into the logistics. Here are my contact details.
For more details, including April’s meditations, please visit my YouTube page. Otherwise, I hope to see you this coming Monday, May 4 for the first meditation session of the May series.
May Meditation Schedule
With the April meditation series now over. The question came up for me as to “what next?”
I set up the April series not only as a class for those who wanted to learn more about meditation, but also as a resource for people struggling with the stay-at-home order. Through meditating individuals can start to build tools for themselves to work with their minds, quite often the source of these struggles.
I enjoyed running the series, and it was well received.
May Stay-at-Home
Then I heard the announcement that here on Maui the stay-at-home order will carry on through Maui (with some staggered openings). Similarly such appeared to be the case across the country, indeed the world.
Meditation sessions
So along with some interest from those already sitting, I decided to run a May series of meditations. There will be less weekly sessions, but the continuity will be complimented by some regular (daily?) posts about meditation on my Micro.blog site. Maybe also a day of sitting?
More details can be found here. I hope that you are able to join me in meditation during May.
If you want to find out more, I’d love to hear from you. Just click here.
Last April meditation soon
Update on December 18, 2022: I have now archived the videos on my YouTube page.
After 3½ weeks, in 45 minutes I will streaming my last daily April meditation session. Please do join me on my YouTube page.
I have enjoyed doing this through April and because of interest will be running further meditation sessions through May. Details to follow. 🧘🏼♂️
Days lack little variety right now. A job in the garden might take me down one road, or a work related task might keep me busier than usual, but they all happen at home, in the same environment. Yet some days feel easy and others feel like a slog!
Meditating soon. 🧘🏼♂️
Reminder of daily meditations through April
Update on December 18, 2022: I have now archived the video on my YouTube page.
Just a reminder that I am offering a daily meditation through April. You can either join me at 1:00pm Hawaii time or all videos are archived (daily streams can take 12hours+ to upload 😳) so you can watch in your own time. Just visit my YouTube page. 🧘🏼♂️
New Introduction to Self-Isolating Meditation Sessions
Update on December 18, 2022: I have now archived the video on my YouTube page.
For those who joined the first Self-Isolating Meditation Sessions today, I apologize for the loss of sound at the end of the session.
I have figured out the problem and I hopefully will be good to go for tomorrow.
I have now removed this session from my YouTube page and added an Introduction video (YouTube video link).
An Invitation to some Self-Isolating Meditation Sessions
Starting tomorrow, Tuesday, April 7, I shall be offering a free virtual meditation session each day, probably through April. The intention is to give me and hopefully you a break during your day, a time to come back to yourself in a world of self-isolation.
Details on how to join me or watch later are in the invitation below. No experience is required, just a wish to stop, breathe, be with yourself and let the world carry on without you for a few minutes.
I hope that you will join me.
The Invitation
Dear Friends,
I am writing to let you know of a daily meditation session that I will be offering during this time of self-isolation. My plan right now is offer it until the end of April, but that is open to change. My aim is to show up each day, and at the same time I am aware that life might happen to make that impossible. I shall try and inform everyone if I know ahead of time that I cannot make it.
Why am I doing this?
Logistics
Technical Details
I have decided to use YouTube to live stream the meditation sessions (These are now archived on my YouTube page, details below). This will be my first time using this platform to stream videos. I have spent time experimenting with it, but I do ask that you bear with me as I get use to YouTube’s intricacies. Here is what you need to know:
Have I missed anything? Is something unclear? Please get in touch.
Please pass this onto anyone else who you think might be interested.
Thank you for your interest in these meditation sessions. I looking forward to seeing you there.
Stay safe. Be well.
David.
If you want to find out more, I’d love to hear from you. Just click here.
Starting Tuesday I will be offering short virtual daily meditation sessions, no experience necessary. I hope these will offer an opportunity to come back to yourself during our days of self-isolation. Interested? Please contact me.
Seeing with New Eyes
I mentioned in my last blog entry how I live overlooking the Hana Highway in Maui. It is one of the major attractions for visitors to the island, to drive the two hour journey out to the town of Hana that sits at the far end of this road. Actually the two hour pin is from the town of Paia. Depending on where you are staying on island, the journey could be closer to three hours one way - and, “yes” you can stay in Hana.
Sometimes when I am driving home, following a car containing a family or persons visiting Maui, I wonder how they are seeing the road and its surrounding scenery? For them, each bend in the road will be revealing a vista that they have not seen before. Views that for me I see pretty much every day, will be a first occurrence for them. Are they seeing more than me? Am I missing anything in my easy to drop into complacency of seeing these scenes so regularly?
Bristol
I remember years ago walking through the city of Bristol in England where I grew up and looking up at the tops of the buildings that I was passing by. Aside from the more modern buildings that have gone up in my lifetime, I cannot pin point when buildings around Bristol were built? However, suffice to say that many of the larger buildings in the city centre are old and have details carved into their walls that can easily be missed if you are just walking along, head down, focused on where your next meeting is or something that is bothering you.
So what made me look up on that day I am not sure, but look up I did and saw details in those buildings that I had not noticed before. Buildings that I knew well, that I passed regularly, but took their presence so much for granted that I found myself actually not really knowing them.
What do we see?
This experience got me thinking,
Awareness
Meditation practice opens our senses to the world around us. As I build on my practice, I start to become aware of aspects of myself - how I think, how I act - that before I was not aware of. This is not always easy. I might be exposed to a behavioural pattern that I have chosen not to look at, or was simply completely unaware of. With this comes the opportunity to grow in myself as I start to make friends with and integrate this new awareness.
In the same way that my awareness of myself grows, so does my awareness of the world around me. As I start to notice aspects of myself, the good and not so good, so do I also become aware of those around me - how they are acting and how I am reacting to them! As an American Buddhist monk once said when asked what he had gained from his meditation practice, he replied,
I know that I get angry.
Sadly that is not something that we are all aware of all of the time.
The Post-meditation Practice
The effect on me is that as my awareness grows, so does the world around me, or should I say my awareness of the world around me.
All of this takes time and effort. Time in that one should not go looking for the change, but notice it slowly making its presence felt in your life as your practice of meditation grows. Effort not only in the effort that I make in my meditation practice, but also in the effort that I make in my post-meditation practice, my daily life.
My time away from the meditation cushion feeds my formal practice to the degree that I make an effort to be aware, to notice things. So as I walk the streets of Bristol I look around, see what is there. Or I strive to maintain an awareness of my emotions as I move through the day, keeping them in check if they are going to cause me to act in a way that does not serve me.
Back to the Hana Highway
Or as I drive home along the Hana Highway, while keeping an eye on the road, I notice the world around me and do not become complacent in my familiarity.
Where are you being complacent in your awareness of the world around you?
If you want to find out more, I’d love to hear from you. Just click here.
Meditation as a Toolbox
There is a Tibetan saying that just as every valley has its own language so every teacher has his own doctrine.
~ Paul Williams, Mahayana Buddhism
While this saying contains many exaggerations, it speaks to the variety of Buddhist traditions within old Tibet. In the same way meditation is not just a handful of techniques, but rather a multiplicity of methods that have evolved over the millennia as those who have used meditation have found the need and want for that development. Indeed that development continues until this day.
Meditations development
Meditation is not the purview of any one tradition or philosophy. It can be practiced by someone following a spiritual belief or none. And what that meditation practice might be, possibly even within a single tradition, can be different from one person to the next. The different mediation practices have arisen out of the needs and dispositions of the individuals who practice it.
Some things that meditation might be used to develop and work with include, but are in no way limited to,
The toolkit
Through learning meditation it is possible to develop a toolkit of techniques for working on the mind, whether that is a single technique or many. This is a toolkit that you can carry with you at all times. No one need know that you are carrying the toolkit, but when the need arises to apply a certain technique - to calm yourself down, to bring you back into the the present, to develop your compassion, to be more patient - you can reach into your toolbox and apply that meditation method, quietly and to yourself.
On the cushion and in practice
Our formal meditation sessions have their place, they are important, very important. It is there that we get to focus on the practice that we wish to develop in an environment that we control and is (hopefully) undisturbed. But our life is lived out in the wider world, and if your patience, compassion, or focus stay on the cushion, they are of not much use to you. Indeed then we might question the usefulness of our meditation practice aside offering us a quiet place to be.
So with the benefit of our formal meditation practice, we step out into the world and use the tools that we have developed in that place where the rubber meets the road.
The toolkit’s contents
There are no prizes for how full that toolkit is. What is important is the quality of the tools within it and how often you reach in to use them. In my opinion it is better to have one tool that you regularly use and develop, than have a catalogue of tools that occasionally see the light of day.
And you will find that your formal practice will feed off the efforts that you make in your post meditation practice and vice versa.
Your toolkit
What’s in your meditation toolkit? Are those tools getting some good use, or could they do with a bit of cleaning up?
If you want to find out more, I’d love to hear from you. Just click here.
Stepping out of Retreat, and Valuing Solitude
I share here an experience from a few weeks ago. I stepped outside, I made it into town for the first time for two weeks. The world appeared so vivid and colourful, so bright, so varied. I was reminded that the world carries on regardless of whether I am a part of it or not. That was freeing. Through unplanned circumstances I had spent a week in relative solitude. Let me explain.
It had been raining here on Maui for two weeks. My wife left the island to visit her mother. When she flew out the weather was good, or was maybe on the turn. When she returned, the weather was good. In between it rained, and rained, and rained. Island wide.
Now I like my alone time. I like solitude and quiet. It nourishes me, allows me to ground myself and refocus, but this was different. Why? In part because it was unplanned. While I knew that I had time to myself, I still expected to get out and about. The weather kind of put a stop to that. It just poured and poured and with that I just found myself staying at home. Commitments where I had them and work were honoured. Otherwise I just stayed put. I rested, read, reflected and fed myself. Before I knew it the first week was over…..And with it a deep sense of fulfillment, contentment and healing, but I found myself stopping and reflecting on what had just happened. I even wondered if I had been selfish?
Retreat
You see my step-daughter and her family live next door. I normally see at least one of them each day. I saw none of them during that week. My doubting mind started asking if I could have used my time more productively, more usefully, without actually quantifying what those terms might have looked like? When I sat with this, asking if it was true, what I found coming up was a question. That question was,
"Why was I questioning taking this retreat time?"
When I lived in a Buddhist Community in the early 1990’s, retreat time was part of our yearly commitment. Either supporting people who were taking time out to just focus on their spiritual practice, indeed they supported me in such an endeavour before I moved into the community, or doing a practice together as a community. There was always work to be done inside in the community. There was always work to be done outside of the community. But in these times of retreat, individuals were saying,
"I need and want to take time to feed myself inwardly. Life will carry on just fine without me, and when I return to the outside world I'll be refreshed and ready to carry on my commitments."
For me that was a major insight, maybe slightly unsettling at first, that life carries on just fine without us. It is good before you drop into retreat that you make sure that all your ducks are in a row and that you have got all necessary business wrapped up with family, loved ones and work colleagues. Don’t just disappear. But with that taken care of, you can close the door and be assured that others will get on just fine without you.
Nature of your time away
You can choose to go completely offline while in retreat, or as I did for this wet week, to honour commitments that you have but don’t do anything ‘unnecessary.' In my case, my quiet time had not been planned and so just disappearing would have been very inappropriate. People were relying on me in some areas of my life. So I did what had to be done, and then returned home, staying within the confines of my home.
I listened to my body and did what I felt I needed. This retreat was as much about resting, reflecting and nourishing my body. A retreat might be about focusing on, say, a meditation practice. That needs its own preparation, which might also include some rest before getting started for if you arrive exhausted, you will not have the mental stamina to make it through the retreat.
The men’s weekends that I attend occasionally require that I wrap things up with family before I head off (this retreat is men’s work, but is also ultimately about family and those in your life). Making sure that all unfinished business with family is made good and that they have any contact numbers should an emergency arise - otherwise I am offline.
Are you making time for retreat?
One take away for me in my week’s retreat was how much I don’t make space to take time out from my life. Going forward it is something that I want to prioritize in my life. It might not be for a week. A weekend might be more appropriate, or maybe a day, or perhaps even just an afternoon. However, I want to be wary of where I sell myself short and let excuses get in the way of time taken. Life has a tendency to make its presence felt a little too heavily at times - at least I know that I can bow very easily to my life’s demands.
Finding time
So if retreat time is something that you would like to bring into your life, how and where can you make time for it? Where are you making excuses to avoid retreat time? What needs to happen so that alone, quiet time becomes a part of your annual rhythm?
If you want to find out more, I’d love to hear from you. Just click here.
Meditation - Follow the Instruction
I sometimes say that having goals is a dangerous place to be when you are starting a meditation practice. Why is that?
What I am not saying
I am not suggesting that you should cast aside all of the reasons that you decided to start meditation. That would be ridiculous. The reasons that you started asking questions about meditation or sought out meditation instruction, are the motivating factors that will drive your initial forays into meditation. They are important and need to be respected and nurtured.
What I am saying
Let’s say that you want to learn how to meditate so that you have peace of mind. That is a quite legitimate reason to start a practice. At the same time one can start having preconceptions as to what peace of mind looks like. What you will be able to do and not do, or how you should feel when you will attain peace of mind. Even the idea of “when you will attain” can be fraught with problems - you are holding the possibility of being able to identify when you get there, and also suggesting that it is a permanent state of mind. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, but you are holding an image that you have created for yourself of a state of mind that you have not experienced yet.
And another loaded question, “how long will it take me to get there?” Once you have a timestamp on how long you will need to meditate to attain what you wish to attain, it feeds into your ideas of what it will look like, what you need to do and when you can stop (as if stopping is even an option).
With these goals in mind you are in some ways setting yourself up for failure, or at least frustration if these goals allude you, as they almost certainly will.
From my experience, the path of meditation is not linear. With steady practice there will be progress, but the path is over very mixed terrain full of bumps and smooth ground, valleys and peaks, fast roads and long treks through deserts.
So what to do?
That is a question that probably warrants a longer answer than this piece will give, but here are some pointers.
Reframing your goal
Reframing your goal as a motivation is probably better. Hold that goal as your motivation for wishing to engage in meditation. That motivation will drive your practice and stay with you throughout. It will probably also develop and mature as your meditation practice correspondingly does as well. Just do not mistake that motivation as a goal.
If you want to find out more, I’d love to hear from you. Just click here.
For meditation to be truly effective it must be integrated into your daily life. This can be helped by setting yourself some personal guidelines like watching how you speak. Such guidelines go towards increasing your awareness and with that quieting the mind.
Distracting myself - taking small bites
Those days when I can’t seem to find focus. My mind is looking for ways out. I can feel the resistance to what needs to be done. Time is wasted doing that which does not need to be done, following links on websites, reading that which is interesting but not necessary right now.
I write this as much to remind myself of what I need to do when resistance creeps into my life.
Body
As the resistance to getting things done kicks in, the body tenses. For me that sits especially in the shoulders but I can also feel in my mind. Like a caged animal, my mind wants to run from where it is being held, from the tasks at hand. Unless I can grab hold of the mind, it is around this time that I start getting distracted. It is my mind’s equivalent of escaping from the cage…though in reality it is still trapped.
Anchor
What I need in that moment is an anchor. Something firm to hold onto that prevents me running off into unproductive activities. By anchor I am not necessarily talking about a physical thing, though it could be. Examples of anchors might be:
Take small bites
And then when you return to work don’t try and get everything done at once. If you didn’t do this during your break, look at the tasks that you have set yourself and break them down into smaller bite size chunks. And then slowly work through those chucks.
Take a break
Periodically take a break, perhaps every 20, 30 or 40 minutes stop, walk around, breathe deeply, stretch for 5 minutes, and then back to work. After a longer period of time, take a loner break. The Pomodoro Technique can be helpful with this, and there are many computer and phone apps that implement variations of the technique.
Go steadily but gently
Finally, go gently on yourself. Do not set expectations that you cannot keep. Incrementally stretch yourself, trying a little more each time, each time building on the progress made the day before. With practice the distractions become less, the mind tamed, quieter, and progress is made in work.
Further reading
Steven Pressfield wrote a whole book on the subject of resistance called The War of Art. Take a look a it if you would like to look at the creative blocks in your life.
Sometimes the challenge within meditation is to stay present with yourself when a difficult emotion arises. To constantly return to the object of meditation, just observing, noting and letting go of the emotion. And sometimes it’s best just to take a break.
Running from our Thoughts
During an afternoon Mentoring circle in Maui Community Correctional Center (MCCC) yesterday, I led a meditation. The meditation was on awareness. Initially I asked the men present to bring their awareness to the breath as a means to focus ourselves and to quiet the mind. To move away from the busyness of the day to the be present in where they were now.
Next I led us on a scan through the body, bringing our awareness to sensations in the body and using that light of awareness to relax and let go of areas of tension.
Finally, I invited everyone to scan back up through the body, to sit with that silence and stillness that awareness had brought to them. I reminded everyone how that stillness is available to us at all time, standing in line, resting in bed, we just have to bring the light of awareness to our breath and our body.
As the meditation drew to a close, my co-facilitator read out the following quote. I don’t know who it is attributed to, but for me it speaks to the places that we run to in order to escape that which we do not like in our lives or about ourselves. It is the place where addiction can spring from. Meditation offers one solution, or a part of a solution to making friends with and gaining control over the agitation in our mind.
My sense is that as part of a meditation practice, it could be helpful to reflect regularly on this piece.
As you settle into your breathing, you may notice your mind telling stories, trying to solve problems, taking you away from your breath and your body? Why? Perhaps there is something there we don’t want to experience: Shame, fear, anger, sadness, feeling unloved. We hate these feelings, so we do what we can to avoid them. All addictions stem from this moment when we meet our edge and just can’t stand it. So we drink, use drugs, eat, blame, argue, fight, look for excitement, zone out - anything to avoid feeling those unpleasant feelings, many of which have been with us since childhood. And the most common addiction of all is thinking. Often we think to avoid feeling. We think because we believe we can find a solution to avoid our pain and suffering.
So now, come back to the breath and notice how it feels. Are you trying not to feel something? What is it? See if you can just be with it.
Meditation - The Intellectual vs The Knowing
If you have an intellectual leaning, it is very easy to learn about meditation, what it can do for you and the transformation that it can bring. Books about meditation are a dime a dozen these days. Magazines devoted to mindfulness, an aspect of meditation, sit on the magazine racks in all good book shops and grocery stores.
Reading through these publications, it is very easy to understand the mechanics of the meditation process and how the transformation can take place if you follow the instructions given and diligently pursue the practice.
But there is a chasm of a difference between that intellectual understanding, of getting what meditation can do, and holding the knowing of meditation practice in your heart.
My own teacher use to speak about the challenge of bringing our understanding of meditation from our head to our heart, to that place of knowing.
So…Why mention this?
From my experience many of those who are drawn to meditation feel some connection, some resonance with the practice. They sense that it will give them something that they are looking for, even if they cannot name what they will get or even what they are looking for! Their intuition, their gut pulls them towards a meditation practice.
Also from my experience, those who are drawn to meditation practice are well educated and even if they are not big readers, understand things intellectually.
However, I find that it is very easy to conflate the intuitional pull that meditation has for me with the understanding of how it works, and feel that I know the results of meditation. But life shows me that I far from do.
Let me give an example...
Loving kindness meditation if practiced assiduously will allow us to feel love - defined in Buddhism as the wish for all beings to be happy - towards all beings. I can sit and practice the meditation, and feel a sense of letting that wish reach out to all beings. I get up from my cushion feeling a heady feeling of goodness and well being.
A couple of hours later a good friend does something that upsets me, a good friend, and I have anything but feelings of goodness towards them. What happened to my love of two hours ago?
Transforming the heart
When my teacher spoke about the mind, he would always rest his hand over his heart. Meditation is about transforming the heart, the mind, so that I become an embodiment of what I am meditating on. So that patience does not become something that I lecture people on, it becomes what I am. So that I don’t tell everyone that loving my enemy is the way to be, I am love. So that compassion becomes a part of my ordinary everyday actions.
I am far from those ideals, but aspire to them, and that is why I practice meditation. To take the ideas in my head and bring them to my heart. Meditation takes time, a life time. It requires patience in itself. However, if you have practiced steadily and look back to how you were a few years ago, you will notice a change. Change takes time, but I believe that the effort is worth it.