Tag Archives: meditation

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Authentic living in the 21st Century

What is it about human beings?

Beautiful, sensitive, so creative but so destructive…

Our biosphere, that fragile envelope of conditions favorable to life, seems in dire straits. In addition, the economic and social conditions of life foisted on the poor of the world by the rich seem to be growing steadily, alarmingly, worse. Fascism is on the rise, though mostly unrecognized, and the political environment almost everywhere is as threatening and depressing as the physical and social ones.

Yet there are an incredible number of beautiful, creative visions of life blossoming all around, alternative experiments that demonstrate how beautifully we humans are able to live on the planet. Even as the political and corporate structures – really one entity now – grow more authoritarian and life-denying, more and more people wake up to the potential for living in ways that are freeing to people and friendly to the natural systems that sustain us.

What are we to do? How are we to live authentic lives in the midst of the insanity of apparently imminent collapse?

For many years, I have grappled with the contradictions that seem inherent in modern life. My time in the war on Southeast Asia, as a pilot in the U.S. Air Force stationed in DaNang (Viet Nam) and Nakon Phanom (Thailand), which was at once the most horrible and the most wonderful experience of my young life, catapulted me beyond most of the concerns that probably would have dominated my life otherwise, and left me forever unable to accept simple answers, simple solutions, to these contradictions.

Even though at times I have tried to settle into some solid, clearly defined system that laid out the answers, I’ve never been able to stay with those answers. As I begin to move into the autumn years of my life, I want even more to reach some clear understandings, at least for myself, about the priorities of this life. Partly this is a practical need, as I seek to direct the last decades of my life in directions that will make some positive contributions to the world my children and grandchildren will inherit. Partly it is just the need for closure, for some sense of a philosophical story that is satisfactory and complete.

In the next few entries, I am hoping to at least outline something of where I am now in this process.

As this blog has partially described, I have followed the spiritual path of Buddhism for most of my life since the Air Force years, partly because I encountered it in Southeast Asia and partly because it seemed to be a way of thought that meshed with my own deepest intuitions of truth, and I seemed to need something to fill the void in my life after I abandoned my Christian upbringing. My experiences with meditation and the Buddhist teachings over the past 30+ years have profoundly influenced me, and no doubt are the primary filter that I bring to this quest to understand the reality of modern life.

But as I enter into this analysis of the course of our times and try to arrive at some clear distillation of how things seem to me, I am intentionally trying to step outside of those teachings, that perspective, as much as possible.

So, as we welcome this new year full of promise, this year we call 2014, I begin this new phase in my apprenticeship to the idea of emptiness.

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Eugene to Florence…

No, living in the Green Hole didn’t jump start my quest for enlightenment. It was one more step on the karmic path: one more obstacle, the navigation around which defines that part of the path.

As I look back on my time in Eugene with the perspective of the years, I can see that I learned a lot there, and even made some progress in a fairly short time.  But it wasn’t at all clear to me then that I was even on the path.

I thought of myself as vaguely Buddhist, but I didn’t really know what that meant.

I was very happy to be there. At least I was reunited with my family, superficially. For a while, I lived in the big house on Broadway where my wife and son, Connie’s sister Holly, her daughter Jenny (and off and on several others) lived in a loosely communal arrangement. I worked at a few marginal jobs around Eugene, the most interesting of which was as a casual worker on an organic farm, and helped out with the kids and the housework. It was a different life. I never really considered trying to teach school there. Somehow, I thought I was done with that life.

It became clear fairly early on that we were not going to be a family again, and gradually we drifted further apart, though we continued to have a sweet, friendly relationship. I had not yet figured out how to actually be in a relationship with another person. I more or less decided to stay out of relationships altogether, though I kept narrowly avoiding getting entangled. I won’t go into those stories. Some were painful though sweet, and I learned a lot about myself through them.

I did get an actual job working at a motor home construction plant, but I left it so I could go back to Georgia for my brother’s wedding. Hitchhiking to Georgia was another adventure! I did a few other temporary gigs to help with the finances, but eventually my daddy sold our house in Georgia and I became a full-time volunteer activist.

It was a politically charged time, Ronnie Ray-gun having just been elected, and I got involved in activism at a level I’ve never been before or since.

The US was aggressively killing Indians in El Salvador and Guatemala to protect the banana plantations and other financial investments there from the effort of the local people to regain control of their countries. It didn’t seem right somehow, so after a rally, I volunteered to help the Eugene Council for Human Rights in Latin America (ECHRLA).  The name doesn’t exactly roll off your tongue – we called it “the Council”.

I began just helping out around the office, putting up posters and such, but after a while I became a full-time volunteer, sort of an assistant to Robert, the director. Nelly, an Argentine woman who pretty much ran things there, let me live in one of her houses, and the three of us ate, drank, and slept political organizing 24-7. We hosted a lot of cultural activities, speakers, workshops, conferences, as well as fund-raisers like movies and meals, serving mostly students and church groups.

I talked to people who had been in Central America on a near-daily basis. I knew what was going on by first-hand accounts. As I compared those reports to the reports in the media – part of my job was reading the daily reports – I began to realize that nothing we read in the papers comes close to telling us what’s really going on.

A few NY Times reporters were occasionally printing accurate stories on the events there, but they were reviled and attacked by the political commentators. It was an eye-opening time for me, a radicalizing experience.

But it was a bit too intense, so I didn’t hang in very long. And then too, the money ran out, so I had to find work again. I got a job – well, sort of a job – taking care of a woman’s kid and house while she went to college classes. This involved moving to Florence, a quaint little town on the coast straight across the Coast Range from Eugene. I liked it there a lot, and eventually got a job as a proofreader and typesetter at the local weekly newspaper.

The  Oregon coast – the ocean, the dunes and the forest – were all beautiful. Florence was magical… especially because it was in Florence that I met Giana.

Life was very nice, calm, and peaceful in Florence, hiding out from the world, as my friend said. Old Town Florence, a street on the north bank of the Siuslaw River, was a wonderful scene in those days, populated with an extremely interesting array of alternative business men and women, and peopled most any nice afternoon and evening with an even more diverse group of folks from the surrounding countryside.

We’d occasionally see Ken Kesey parking his old convertible in the parking lot there, and learned that the Siuslaw was the model for the river in his novel Sometimes a Great Notion.

Everyone knew everyone on the street, it seemed, and the various parties, bonfires, plays, and other events just happened without a lot of planning or publicity, yet everyone knew about them.

One of those events was the Sunday evening guitar circle at Donnie’s coffee shop, which usually drew 10 to 20 guitar-playing folk. It was at that guitar circle that I first met Giana.

I had spotted her early in the evening, a very cute brown-eyed girl behind a big Martin guitar. As the song lead went around the circle, everyone played a song they thought the rest would enjoy and maybe play along with, so when it came Giana’s turn, she ‘lit out’ on “Friend of the Devil” and I jumped right in, following her chords and singing along. She smiled at me a lot during the song, which was the hope behind my enthusiastic response, though I had always loved the song, and when the singing was over we talked a bit, and she smiled again and waved as she went out the door.

I knew I would see her again; that’s how things were there.

We in fact saw each other often over the next few weeks; the next time I saw her she was dressed as the wind, having just come from a children’s theatre event. Before long, we were friends, and then one night on the dance floor we kissed.

The rest is history, as they say.

Within a year of that meeting, we got married in the Old Town gazebo in sight of the dunes, the bridge and the street where all our Florence friends hung out. We sent no invitations, put no announcements in the paper – tho as the classified ads typesetter, I often sent her love notes and cryptic announcements via the classifieds – yet there were, by all accounts, at least 200 people at the wedding, with lots of wonderful food and drink at the mostly impromptu reception in our apartment afterward.

Eight-year-old John was the ring bearer, and Giana’s dad was there, as was Connie.

It was a wonderful day.

Over the next few years, we lived in several different, amazing places in and around Florence, – on top of a 300-ft. high cliff overlooking the Pacific, upstairs in an old general store in a huge apartment with 20-ft. ceilings, and in a little house in ten acres of forest with a sauna and three out-buildings – Giana opened an art school for kids, and I became the manager of the print shop. We had an amazing group of friends who got together frequently, naturally, and our lives were amazing.

Pretty soon, Luke was born and our lives became even more amazing and wonderful. We had an idyllic few years there, with lots of friends, one of the most beautiful natural settings on the planet, and a fairly stress-free life.

But there always seemed to be something missing for me. I read a few books with Buddhist themes, and I tried to meditate occasionally, but I wasn’t really getting it.

Our friends Mike and Monica went to a Zen retreat in Hawaii, and I wanted to ask them about getting involved, but I was hesitant. It seemed forced, artificial, inappropriate to ask. I don’t know why, but as much as I wanted to, I couldn’t.

I think I thought that somebody was gonna come up and tap me on the shoulder and say, “Wanna get enlightened? Come with me!” Sorta the Baptist model.

But it kept calling to me, and I knew it was what I wanted.

I started a sculpture that I thought of as a Buddha-rupa (image of Buddha) in a large block of Port Orford cedar. Somehow it seemed to help me feel I was doing something in the way of finding a spiritual path.

I was really just getting very complacent, hiding out, waiting for something to happen. Then life just slapped me right down.

 

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Lojong #10 Begin the practice of sending and taking with yourself

“Whenever anything happens, the first thing to do is take the pain on yourself.” (Trungpa) — Give up the good feelings so someone else can benefit. This is connected with developing the Paramita of Discipline. Open your territory completely, let go of everything.

Kongtrul says: Take on all the suffering that will come to you in the future, then you’ll be able to take on others’ suffering.

Radical stuff. Like the Tibetan mountain paths, it’s not for the faint-hearted.

But it’s probably the best program ever devised for helping yourself learn to be more compassionate to others…

This one is a bit tricky. But on a clear, everyday practice level it can be understood simply. When you find something unpleasant – negative emotional states or other problematic things – going on in yourself, you breathe them in. Then on the out-breath, you send out to the world some positive quality in yourself, which requires that compassionate, unselfish motivation we’ve been talking about encouraging. It also helps you feel better about yourself, because you realize these good qualities are there for you to breath out.

The idea is that this is the beginning point for the tonglen practice. Things get a bit more complicated as it develops, so it’s best to be able to be very clear about ones’ motivation and willingness to do the practice. Beginning with yourself helps with that process.

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Lojong # 9: In all activities, train with slogans

In daily life, use the lojong slogans to help you put words to “the first thought” (as in arising anger, etc.). When the feeling of I-ness hits, Trungpa suggests we think: “May I receive all evils and my virtues go to others; profit and victory to others, loss and defeat to myself.”

Sort of a corrective for the usual tendencies, such as putting self first. A little additional help may come from using something like this with your morning vows: “I vow to pursue Bodhichitta and develop a sense of gentleness toward self and others; I promise not to blame others but to take their pain on myself; I vow to put others before self.”

It may seem impossible, but the nature of the Bodhisattva vow is – simply interpreted – that you vow to do what you know can’t be done. Such as save all the innumerable sentient beings on the planet, extinguish your inexhaustible delusions, master the immeasurable Dhamma teachings, and follow completely the Buddha’s endless way.

In the Japanese, it’s:

Shu jo mu hen sai gan do, (Beings are innumerable, I vow to save them)

Bon no mu gen sai gan dan, (Delusions are inexhaustible, I vow to extinguish them)

Ho mon muryo sai gan gaku, (Dharma teachings are immeasureable, I vow to master them)

Butsu do mu jo sai gan jo. (Buddha’s way is endless, I vow to follow it completely)

(Three bows.)

It’s a tall order.

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Lojong #3, Examine the Nature of Unborn Awareness

This was Monday’s slogan:

#3 Examine the nature of unborn awareness.

Ah, this is a pithy one!

Simply look at your own basic awareness, mind, noting that if you pursue it to the deepest level (which means spending a lot of very still, silent time) there is nothing there.

No color, no shape, no size, no attributes or qualities – just awareness. Sometimes referred to as “pure awareness.” Awareness that has no content. Essentially, we realize that awareness is simply the potential to be aware of some content. So the mind, in itself, without anything else, is nothing.

Pursuing this, eventually we see that the nature of everything is impermanence, emptiness or shunyata – not that it doesn’t exist, but simply that everything is empty of an independent, abiding nature. So it doesn’t exist in and of itself, it only exists in co-existence with everything else. Everything is Anicca, or changing, in the original formulation from Pali.

This is also sometimes referred to as paticca samupada, or the dependent co-arising of phenomena. This is what the Buddha awoke to, as Joanna Macy says.

As I said, pithy. You might have guessed that this is the essential thing you must get before much else in the Buddhist meditation catalog really works for you… but don’t approach it as an exercise in philosophy to be understood, just stay open, meditate and wait patiently for experience of this reality in your own life.

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Lojong #2, Regard all dharmas as dreams

Left my laptop in ATL last Sunday, just got it last night. Good lesson in mindfulness!

So, need to catch up! This was Sunday’s entry:

POINT 2A, ULTIMATE BODHICHITTA TRAINING:

#2 Regard all dharmas as dreams.

Trungpa says that this is an expression of compassion and openness… “Nothing ever happens. But because nothing happens, everything happens.” I.E. don’t take this so-called ‘reality’ too seriously. Whatever ‘reality’ is, all we can ever know of it is what our mind-system perceives and conceives. Which keeps everything light and open…. all with the purpose of developing compassion.

Bodhichitta means enlightened (open) heart or mind… ultimate Bodhichitta slogans are those that are concerned with the absolute nature of reality, as opposed to relative, which is the everyday practical stuff.

Before you get too stuck on this one, be sure you go on to #3 and #4… all these slogans play off each other, keeping things in balance, so never grasp on one as the whole truth of the matter!

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Lojong (mind training) slogan #1

Another round with the Lojong slogans!

Beginning today, I will do one each day, and try to post commentary here. I’ll probably just re-post the ones I’ve already shared here, with added comments as appropriate, and then continue all the way thru number 59.

Lojong, or mind training, is a daily practice from the Kadampa tradition in Tibetan Buddhism. These slogans were laid out in The Great Path of Awakening by J. Kongtrul, and are presented here as interpreted by Chogyam Trungpa in Training the Mind: Cultivating Loving-kindness.

I recommend reading both of these books, as well as looking for a real teacher, if these teachings seem interesting and helpful to you.

My intention here – beyond motivating myself to dwell on the slogan each day – is to simply introduce this practice, not to try to teach it. It is a fairly advanced meditation practice, and not something I would try to teach anyone. But sharing my own process of working with these slogans seems to have the possibility of helping others to see their application to whatever spiritual path one is on.

The slogans are very down-to-earth, practical admonitions (for the most part) in ways of thinking and being that will help one to stay on that path. They point out both positive ways for maintaining commitment and daily practice as well as potential traps to avoid. Trunpa says the slogans constitute a manual on how to handle life properly, a ‘grandmotherly fingerpoint’ to practice and the spiritual life.

The teachings assume that one has done considerable work in basic meditation – as Point One clarifies – and is committed to a serious spiritual practice. The main meditation practice referred to in the slogans, tonglen, is a powerful practice that requires a basic understanding of the truth that ‘self’ and ‘other’ are mistaken concepts, illusions that arise from our essential ignorance.

Only in this understanding can one grasp the meaning – even the possibility! – of a practice that suggests we take in all the bad stuff around us and then breathe out all that we have that is good. It turns our normal way of looking at the world on its head.

But properly understood and practiced, it is a powerful way to transform one’s life and transform the negative influences that surround us.

If it is helpful to you, dive in deeper and learn the practice. I welcome questions and comments here!

POINT ONE: THE PRELIMINARIES

Slogan #1: First, Train in the Preliminaries

The Preliminaries means shamatha meditation – basic, formless meditation.

This also includes the idea of the Four Thoughts that Turn the Mind (to the path of Enlightenment): 1. the precious opportunity of a human life; 2. impermanence and death; 3. the reality of karma (cause & effect); and 4. the suffering that is samsara – normal life.

Kongtrul, one of the early commentators on these slogans, says: “Take an attitude of devotion to the path of loving-kindness.”

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A very timely and to the point critique of secularized mindfulness training: Beyond McMindfulness.

A few quotes from the article:

Suddenly mindfulness meditation has become mainstream, making its way into schools, corporations, prisons, and government agencies including the U.S. military. Millions of people are receiving tangible benefits from their mindfulness practice: less stress, better concentration, perhaps a little more empathy. Needless to say, this is an important development to be welcomed — but it has a shadow….

Uncoupling mindfulness from its ethical and religious Buddhist context is understandable as an expedient move to make such training a viable product on the open market. But the rush to secularize and commodify mindfulness into a marketable technique may be leading to an unfortunate denaturing of this ancient practice, which was intended for far more than relieving a headache, reducing blood pressure, or helping executives become better focused and more productive….

Mindfulness training has wide appeal because it has become a trendy method for subduing employee unrest, promoting a tacit acceptance of the status quo, and as an instrumental tool for keeping attention focused on institutional goals….

Bhikkhu Bodhi, an outspoken western Buddhist monk, has warned: “absent a sharp social critique, Buddhist practices could easily be used to justify and stabilize the status quo, becoming a reinforcement of consumer capitalism.” Unfortunately, a more ethical and socially responsible view of mindfulness is now seen by many practitioners as a tangential concern, or as an unnecessary politicizing of one’s personal journey of self-transformation.”

From BPF: Beyond McMindfulness

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Tara on Why you want to meditate and don’t…

Tara Mackey, in “My Organic Life,” relates an amazing and wonderful story, and has graciously given me her okay to re-publish it here:

The #1 thing people ask me about after reading my blog is Meditation: they ask about it above my job, above my wellness, above the fact that I am on 0 medications to deal with pain, depression, grief and anxiety.  They ask me about Meditation above the beauty, above the fashion & above the nutrition aspect.  This actually makes me really happy, because absolutely none of the other things would be possible (or were possible) for me without Meditation.

Years and years of pain without mindfulness, of stress without gain, of time spent without tact and of sickness without cure brought me to a place of complete breakdown.  My average workday was spent getting up at 7 a.m., biking to work on an empty stomach, taking 10-12 different kinds of RX pills (none of which were vitamins), begging for 10 mins a half an hour into work to go get a bagel, spending 2 hours at work taking small bites in between other tasks to eat it, and then working on an empty stomach in a dark room with no windows for the next 8-15 hours.  Sometimes I slept there.

My average weekend was spent dragging myself out of bed at 3 in the afternoon, I’d eat one, two, three highly processed meals, take between 11-15 different pills (none of which were vitamins or minerals), go about my day, drink some alcohol at night to fall asleep, wake up the next day and do it over.

The breaking point was a few months after I was off all my meds.  I was sick.  Really, hopelessly, helplessly sick and I’d lay in bed for absolutely hours staring at the ceiling asking Why Me?  Why the hell was I, after all the tragedy and heartache and crap I’d gone through, not getting better when I was trying my damn best to do the right thing?  It occurred to me every once in awhile to just take a Lamictal (some of the worst withdrawals I’ve ever had was coming off this mood stabilizer) to feel better.  Just one wouldn’t hurt me, and then I’d be able to get up and move and speak and function without this terrible weakness, this nausea and headaches and everything looking over saturated.  Just one.

I remember going into the bathroom, opening the cabinet under the sink, and taking out the garbage bag full of Rx bottles that I had thrown together when I decided to come off everything.  It was full not only of pills that did work, but pills I had been prescribed that didn’t work – totaling what added up to almost 90 different bottles.  I kept picking up bottles upon bottles looking for the “Lamotrigine” one.  Valium?  Nope.  Xanax?  Nope.  Fentanyl?  Nope.  Celebrex?  Nope.  Zoloft?  Nope.  Flexeril?  Nope.  I discarded them one by one before I found the Lamictal bottle and emptied two, dust covered pills into my palm.  I filled up a glass of dirty NY tap water and opened my mouth.

And then something truly remarkable happened.

I stopped. 

After about 3 weeks of not taking anything, I realized what I was doing.  That taking “just one” Lamictal wouldn’t be taking just one.  That whenever I REdecided that being a slave to a pill was not what I wanted with my life, I’d be right here again.  Sick, and debating.  In 3 more weeks, or two more months, or 3 more years, this is where I’d be.  Counting the pills in bottles, nauseous as an animal, and hoping I have “the right one” for whatever ailment I was facing that day.  It felt way more helpless and WAY more hopeless than being sick, which I knew was temporary.  Being a slave to a mood stabilizer was LIFE-LONG helplessness.   And I wasn’t ready to accept that in my life.

From here I looked for other ways to cope.  Josh had helped me, truly, through his own meditations.  He’d lay in bed while I was sick and put his hand on my back and concentrate.  Sometimes his energy worked to soothe me, sometimes it didn’t.  Mostly, it didn’t work when I didn’t believe in it.  On the days where I felt impossibly sick, he had absolutely no power to make me feel better.  I designed it this way because I was scared – not only of what would happen if I stayed sick, but the longer I was sick, I started to get scared about what I’d have to do with my life when and if I got better.  This was an especially frightening thought, because I knew that the sort of jobs that I had had in the past had contributed immensely to my illness.

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To be honest, I used to think people who Meditated were foolish.  Today, I cannot picture my life without Meditation.  Even though, for me, the practice is very new.  Meditation was not a daily part of my life until the end of 2011, but it has changed me in all of the best ways since.

So why do I find that the people who come to me – even people who come to me earnestly – about wanting to try it, have completely dismissed it a week later?  I’ve compiled some proper excuses that I get:

” I Don’t Have the Time”

This is the most popular excuse that I get, and it’s a fallacy. Saying you don’t have the time to meditate is like saying you don’t have time to fill up your gas tank because you’re too busy driving.  I had to learn, actually, not to get super insulted by this excuse, because the truth is: We all have the same amount of time.  Saying that you don’t have the time implies that I do have the time – as in, I must not be busy enough if I can find 30 mins in my day to take care of myself.  The reason that I get anything accomplished with my life is specifically because I take that 30 mins a day to take care of myself.  I’ve had people sit on their computers on Facebook chat for OVER half an hour giving me excuses about why they’re not meditating.  You have the time, you just don’t value it.

” I Don’t Know How “ 

I cannot tell you how many people have come to me and said ” I tried what you said, and it didn’t work.”  or ” I’m no good at silence”  or ” My mind won’t let me” or ” I fall asleep.”  We put a TON of pressure on ourselves to do things the “right way”, and Americans tend to have very linear thinking.  If it doesn’t look like it did in a magazine, if we don’t get immediate results or if it just plain seems too hokey, we don’t give it a real shot.  The most basic, brilliant meditations involve sitting quietly and focusing on your breathing.  I can’t think of anyone I know who cannot do that. :)

” It’s Boring “ 

Well, sure it is.  It’s not an action-packed movie and it’s not Ryan Gosling making googley-eyes at you.  If your mind won’t let you, if you feel like you’re no good or if it didn’t work, or if you fall asleep, you now have all of your reasons to Meditate more.  I bet when you first laid your fingers on a piano, you couldn’t play Beethoven.  I bet when you first learned to read, you weren’t picking up War & Peace.  Meditation, like everything is, is something that gets easier with earnest practice.  We call Meditation a “Practice” for a very good reason – you are practicing it every time you do it.  And it’s certainly not going to give you the same stimulation that TV or Movies do, so don’t expect that.  This is about learning your body.

” You’re a Crazy Hippie and I Won’t Hear Any of Your Stupid Herbal Remedies to My Real Problems”

The majority of people hold themselves back by thinking that Meditation only works for certain people.  That they are not capable of learning themselves, or that it’s not important, or that it’s not worth their time.  They think that their pain, their problems, their situations, are better, more extreme, or different than what the rest of us are going through, and that spending quiet alone time can’t possibly have any positive effects on their life.  Truly, I think this is the most harmful place to be in, but one that I understand quite well.  It’s very easy to get caught up, especially when we have chronic or persistent pain.  I cannot tell you how many hours of my life were spent wishing that I had a knife to cut the pain from my back out.  I would have done ANYTHING, including surgery, to relieve the immense, throbbing, terrible, cutting pain that I experienced every moment that I wasn’t knocked out on some pain med.  And if someone had taken me aside and said “Just sit down and learn yourself, and you’ll be able to control your pain” I would have told them they were goddamn crazy.  But I am here to tell you that it’s true.

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Meditation is the most productive thing you can do, and there is nothing in the World stopping you from doing it except for yourself.   Practicing meditation regularly will bring you to a place of immense peace, physical well being, and emotional stability.  It’s the most powerful tool for creating the life you want.

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Visit her site here – Tara

And if you liked this one, check out the whole story here:

Meditate Your Life

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On the road with the Buddha

“If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!” says an old Zen story.

This is simply the Zen way of saying, in dramatic and obscure form, that whoever you may meet along the way whom you think to be Buddha is really just your own delusion and should be annihilated.

But I have had some real encounters with Buddha, in the form of developing better understanding of my practice, on the road.

Back when I was driving many hours alone to go to Zen meditation retreats, I realized that I could take advantage of those hours to practice at least some rudimentary meditation along the way rather than just waste the hours listening to music or radio shows or my own tortured thoughts. Especially on roads with little traffic, I could (quite safely) focus on the highway lines converging in the distance, the horizon line, even on other vehicles in a way that at least approaches meditation.

In heavy traffic, I could maintain equanimity and calm by approaching it as a meditation. I found I was better able to enter into the sesshin after such a trip than I had been in the past.

Earlier this week, I went on a three day motorcycle trip, spending long hours on the road, and I again noticed certain parallels with meditation practice. I was much better able to maintain concentration on the road ahead, particularly in challenging road conditions, by approaching it with this meditative mindset. I was also able to maintain the upright posture for long hours without tiring, thanks to a number of ten-day Vipassana courses!

On a mostly surface level, I think these experiences show how a good solid meditation practice can assist one in most activities in life. I am a safer, calmer, more focused driver – whether in a car or on a motorcycle – and better at most of the things I have to do in my daily life, due to my meditation practice.

I’m not sure that just any “meditation” experience would be as helpful. Weekly 20-minute sessions probably wouldn’t help much, but multiple experiences of ten hours a day on a cushion for ten days – as in a Vipassana course – makes a six-hour ride seem simple to accomplish.

On a deeper level, though, there’s more to be had here than making the trip easier.

The essence of Vipassana practice is caught up in the Pali term sampajanakari hoti: [to do something with] constant and thorough awareness of impermanence. This is one important reason why we do the meditation practice itself, so that this kind of mindfulness will come to persist in all our activities. This is the true mindfulness taught by the Buddha, and the true genius of Vipassana is in this understanding of mindfulness. Most of what is presented as ‘mindfulness training’ by other authors and teachers is simply coming to be mindful of what one is doing at the present moment. A deep reading of the Sattipathana Sutta makes it clear, however, that what Buddha was talking about in the Four Establishments of Mindfulness includes the essential element of insight,  panna, so that everything one experiences (including the most mundane activities) reminds one of the ultimate truth of impermanence.

Another important term in the teachings is atapi – ardent. The Buddha says that one is to be ardent with this awareness of impermanence.

Well, let me assure you that there’s nothing much like going into a hairpin turn on a fast-moving motorcycle to generate ardent awareness of one’s own impermanence! And when that awareness is undertaken in the context of a long and serious Vipassana practice, the riding becomes an extension of the meditation practice.

Indeed, if we remember to take the practice with us when we leave the cushion, everything in life becomes practice.

When one reaches that point, the old Zen saying is turned on its head – one can embrace anyone met, for then everything one meets on the road is the Buddha.