Tag Archives: vipassana

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Metta for All Beings

In these dark times, times that demand such awareness and commitment to strong action, we need to build each others’ heart strength for the suffering we will encounter, for the hard work we will do, for the long struggle we must endure.

One way of building this strength is to send out heart-felt messages to others, spoken and unspoken messages that come from the meditative state and have power to spread encouragement and support. In some Buddhist traditions, this process is known as metta, which is usually translated ‘loving kindness’, but goes far beyond that when part of a deep practice of compassion and compassionate action.

Zenju Earthlyn Manuel composed this poem, whose words speak to us so strongly in light of recent words and actions, in the spirit of that powerful form of metta:

 

For All Beings

May all beings be cared for and loved,

Be listened to, understood and acknowledged despite different views,

Be accepted for who they are in this moment,

Be afforded patience,

Be allowed to live without fear of having their lives taken away or their bodies violated.

May all beings

Be well in its broadest sense,

Be fed,

Be clothed,

Be treated as if their life is precious,

Be held in the eyes of each other as family.

May all beings

Be appreciated,

Feel welcomed anywhere on the planet,

Be freed from acts of hatred and desperation including war, poverty, slavery, and street crimes,

Live on the planet, housed and protected from harm,

Be given what is needed to live fully, without scarcity,

Enjoy life, living without fear of one another,

Be able to speak freely in a voice and mind of undeniable love.

May all beings

Receive and share the gifts of life,

Be given time to rest, be still, and experience silence.

May all beings

Be awake.

The poem was published in Turning Wheel by the Buddhist Peace Fellowship in 2009. May it be spoken, heard, understood and enacted throughout the world.

Metta!

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The Need for Silence

Reading a disturbing essay by Andrew Sullivan this morning, shared by my wonderful friend Melissa Stiers Kretzschmar, that articulates so well why we need meditative silence. Published in New York Magazine, his new venue I think, the essay is titled “I Used to Be a Human Being.”

Whatever we may think of Sullivan, (must say I’m not really a fan of Andrew’s, as he has been a leading conservative, neo-con, libertarian, neoliberal – God knows what he is) he’s an astute social observer for sure, and this account of his personal experience is telling. It’s also a chilling exposè/analysis of the dangers of the wired world… I say as I sit here blogging.

So this is not to be taken as the final word, but as food for thought. As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been trying to measure and mediate my own interaction with the news & culture media stream, and I’ve found, as Sullivan articulates in great detail, that it’s hard. Once you slip back in, it begins to grasp you more and more. Though I am staying pretty clear of the political aspects that tend to really stress me out. Didn’t even watch the debate last night. Won’t read about it. Can’t deal with it…

But I do find what Sullivan says about how meditation and retreats helped him to be very interesting. This is not a guy you’d expect to hear these things from. He’s a gay, British Catholic conservative writer, so not someone I’d ever think would do a 10-day retreat… but apparently he did.

The article is long but well worth the read. A few excerpts on silence:

Among these meditators, I was alone in silence and darkness, yet I felt almost at one with them. My breathing slowed. My brain settled. My body became much more available to me. I could feel it digesting and sniffing, itching and pulsating. It was if my brain were moving away from the abstract and the distant toward the tangible and the near.

The reason we live in a culture increasingly without faith is not because science has somehow disproved the unprovable, but because the white noise of secularism has removed the very stillness in which it might endure or be reborn. …And yet our need for quiet has never fully gone away, because our practical achievements, however spectacular, never quite fulfill us. … Except, of course, there is the option of a spiritual reconciliation to this futility, an attempt to transcend the unending cycle of impermanent human achievement. There is a recognition that beyond mere doing, there is also being; that at the end of life, there is also the great silence of death with which we must eventually make our peace.

He also weighs in strongly in favor of a disciplined meditation practice:

I cut my daily silences from one hour to 25 minutes; and then, almost a year later, to every other day. I knew this was fatal — that the key to gaining sustainable composure from meditation was rigorous discipline and practice, every day, whether you felt like it or not, whether it felt as if it were working or not. Like weekly Mass, it is the routine that gradually creates a space that lets your life breathe.

I’ve experienced much the same decline in my practice, probably due to these same influences he describes, and lately I’ve been making efforts to get my practice re-established. But it may be that I have to make a cleaner break with the media stream to actually make this work.

I’m working on a new approach to both media and meditation… I’ll try to keep blogging through this process… but it may fall by the wayside also. A conundrum.

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Mindfullness deconstructed

In a recent article posted on the Buddhist Peace Fellowship/Turning Wheel Media site, Jesse Maceo Vega-Frey, a vipassana teacher of the Mahasi lineage, deconstructs mindfulness practice, comparing the inner practice with the external practice of Marxism.

Vega-Frey says that most modern mindfulness practice is like the reformist version of socialism, whereas true Buddhist practice is comparable to the revolutionary approach favored by Karl Marx.

Essentially, the problem is – according to this author – that current fascination with meditation and mindfulness practices is aimed at using these to assist one along the path toward worldly success, rather than as a tool to transcend greed, anger and delusion – the three poisons. (Which are sometimes rendered as: ignorance, attachment, and aversion – perhaps a more accurate set of terms.)

The aspiration to attain worldly success through devotion is not at all new to Asian Buddhism but mindfulness-based meditation as an expression of it is new and seems to have parallel life throughout contemporary Asia as well. Thus, it is appears that this new phenomenon is not simply a cultural desalination program in the West that has turned the ocean of the Buddha’s teaching into vast warehouses of bottled water: It’s also a historical process of political economy, specifically, what Karl Marx termed the bourgeois relations of production.

….

But just as Marx did not call for harmony between classes as a response to the antagonisms at the root of bourgeois society, the Buddha did not call for a smoothing out of the rough edges of suffering or a negotiated peace with greed, hatred, and ignorance. He called for their complete usurpation, abolition, and annihilation by the forces of love and wisdom. He posited mindfulness as one essential tool for a process of disenchantment that illuminates the profoundly unstable, undependable, and disappointing nature of everything in existence: a revolutionary rather than reformist approach.

In the Satipatthana, Buddha explains the practice of the Four Foundations (or Establshiments) or Mindfulness as leading to a state where one finds oneself “…having gone beyond all attachment and aversion to this world.” This is the classic statement of the liberated mind. Certainly seems to me that the author is right in asserting that much of what goes on in the name of meditation these days has lost sight of that basic goal.

Vega-Frey continues:

… the inner revolution is not simply a matter of will-power but of committed ethical integrity, rigorous mind training, and deepening sensitivity to reality. Indeed, they often commit over many, many lifetimes, to cultivating wholesome mental qualities that will support them in the eventual overthrow of greed, hatred, and delusion. … Essential to this view is the understanding that the humility, kindness, and wisdom that come from this path are rewards of the practice in and of themselves and to look beyond them for our motivation, to external markers that satisfy our unexamined personal and social delusions, is folly. Keeping the north star of complete liberation always ahead of us is a fundamental part of staying on the path with integrity.

Even beyond this, Vega-Frey says that what’s like to happen is:

…the absolute bourgeoisification of mindfulness where the owning class and the bourgeois state try to use it as a tool for the reification of class dominance and imperialism.

If this sounds over-dramatic, consider another recent essay, “The Militarization of Mindfulness,” which highlighted a $4.3 million grant the U.S. Army and Department of Defense has provided University of Miami researchers for a so-called “Mindfulness-based Mind Fitness Training” for pre-deployment soldiers as well as $31 million for a “positive psychology” program that will include mindfulness education for 1.1 million soldiers.

He concludes with this thought:

Part of me longs for the day when a study proves, once and for all, that mindfulness is entirely useless for anything beside the development of wisdom and kindness.

It’s a long but very thought-provoking article. I welcome responses.

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The power of meditation

A friend, Shabnam Gideon, whom I met at the Vipassana Center when she sat a course a few years back, recently provided this explanation of what meditation is:

Meditation forces you to remember the state of YOU that is at rest, that is real, that is healthy, and reminds you of what that feels like physically and mentally. It’s a forced inward glance, honoring what is within you and ignoring what is without, if just for a little while. The plan is that you learn to remember that state in you, and eventually carry it with you, even while you’re answering emails or prepping for a meeting or trying to communicate with tact when you’re actually pretty peeved. That state affords an equanimity that tempers our reactions to events by allowing them to happen instead of stuffing them down, preventing “bad” happenings from stressing us out by giving them their due and then letting them go.

This is very true to my experience, and a very accurate, on-point description of the lived experience of meditation as it relates to everyday life.

Writing in a workplace blog, (Focus Lab) Shabnam provides some background on her experience that took me to new levels of understanding. Her experience is pretty amazing in itself, and her words give me new insight on how meditation can be very dramatically helpful:

Let me be clear: I’m a relatively new meditator, my practice is as regular as my Crohn’s-prone bowels, and the closest thing I have to a guru is the one-eyed cat next door with a steadfast gaze. But, I have learned a few things about meditating over the past few years that have seriously helped me shape and maintain my mental and physical health.

Back in the day … working for the company that gave me my software- and web- development legs, I was struggling to juggle a demanding and unrewarding job, a town that was too new and too big for me and my country britches, and a serious case of anorexia. After months of breathtaking abdominal pain, I was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease. Fast forward three years, and I was … taking 20 pills a day, had cataracts from the oral steroids, and was weak, sick and just generally pissed off at the world.

What’s a gal to do? Admit defeat, honestly. Try something else. I’d been following a detox plan that included breathing exercises and improved communication with, yeesh, loved ones. After dragging myself through the first week, I realized I was actually in less pain and had more energy and even optimism. For real. So I forced myself to do the breathing exercises for five minutes a day.

That’s like 300 seconds. I thought my brain and body would explode from the inactivity.

But no, after just a few weeks of losing a whole 300 seconds a day, I realized not only how much better I felt physically, but also how much I learned about myself and my stress levels while sitting and breathing. I was hanging onto so many thoughts and feelings that I didn’t need to be carrying around. I kept that up for months, and haven’t taken Crohn’s medication nor starved myself skeletal in the ten years since.

Shabnam’s wonderful candor and willingness to share her experience opens the door for many who may have been dubious about meditation. And it has helped me to realize that people may enter into meditation in little ways and for limited reasons and then find that it is a very powerful, life-changing thing.

Though I usually advocate for the ‘total spiritual commitment’ approach to meditation, I’m beginning to see that other approaches are a valid part of the meditation spectrum, and have real consequences for human lives.

Meditation is truly a very powerful tool that can be helpful to people in many varied ways and in a wide range of circumstances.

Just start where you are, doing what you can do. Where it takes you depends on your karmic path and the energy and dedication you bring to it.

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Lojong #14 – Seeing confusion…

Lojong #14

Seeing confusion as the four kayas

Is unsurpassable shunyata protection.

This is among the Lojong slogans that I love most. It carries deep and profound meaning and can be a powerful key to awakening, but it is also one of the most obscure of the slogans.

The clarifying insight – the message – of this Lojong is at the heart of why we are practicing. Its essential teaching is that observing the process of the mind in response to life’s challenges is one of the best ways to experience the liberating insight into the wisdom that everything is empty of separate, abiding existence.

To explain how that comes out of these few words requires some translation and background.

The four kayas are the four ‘bodies of emptiness’: dharmakaya, sambogakaya, nirmankaya, and svabhavikakaya. Without going into the theory of these too much, suffice it to say that they describe four states of mind that one goes through in the process of perception. They are simply translated as confusion, clarity, relating the two, and seeing the whole.

Careful observation of the mental processes reveals this process. When one is confronted with something new, confusion and bewilderment reign. After some experience, clarity about what is being perceived begins to dawn. Then one relates the new understanding to the original confusion, and finally one’s comprehension begins to see the totality of the whole, ‘total panoramic experience’, as Chogyam Trungpa says.

Watching this happen often enough finally leads to the perfect understanding that whatever happens, this is the process. We are not stuck at any stage, not stuck with our thoughts, not stuck with our selves. Trungpa explains that in svabhavikakaya, one has transcended the notions of the birth, subsiding and dwelling of thoughts. The idea of protection is that this understanding can free one from clinging to the self and its thoughts; indeed, when one realizes the truth of no self, it becomes clear that there’s nothing to protect!

We all are suspended in shunyata, suspended in the emptiness of the phenomenal play. When the deep implications of this are internalized, it is very freeing.

Trungpa says that this liberation comes from

understanding your mind by studying and watching yourself and by practicing shamatha and vipashyana. By practicing those disciplines, you being to realize that the essence of your mind is empty… That realization can only come about when you are sitting on the cushion. Only on the cushion can you see that your mind has no origin.

(Shamatha is basic mindfulness/concentration meditation, the first stage in the meditation process. Vipashyana (or vipassana in Pali) is meditation aimed at insight into the true nature of reality. By ‘on the cushion’ he means during meditation practice.)

Mind and thoughts and all of the phenomena we experience have no origin; they are unborn, as we saw in Lojong #3. This means we can be free of much of the worry and stress and driven behavior that plague our lives. It can all be seen in a very playful, relaxed way because we understand that we are always engaged in continual awakening.

 

 

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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.

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Feeling grief

How long has it been?

Sometimes it seems only last week that my mother died, tho it’s been over 18 months. But the ache comes back at times with such intensity that I feel it may never go away.

Just this morning I was reduced to tears and sobbing by the simple act of pouring cream into a glass of iced coffee. My mother loved iced coffee. With cream, but “only if it’s not stirred!” she always said. She loved the way the cream swirled into the dark coffee.

Watching it swirl in my coffee this morning, I could remember her sitting at my kitchen counter, holding her glass up to admire the cream swirling among the ice cubes. I’ll never see that again, except in my mind.

Why that creates such exquisite pain I can’t explain. Grief is such a complex thing. It swirls through one’s life like the heavy white cream lazily drifting around the ice cubes in the black coffee, slowly, ever so slowly blending in, settling at the bottom over time – until you pick up the glass and tip it to sip, then the swirling begins again. And only after many tips and swirls does it finally blend in totally, becoming part of one’s life.

Meditation practice, particularly Vipassana practice, helps with the process.

As I felt the stabs of pain brought on by the recollections of my mother this morning, I was able to move to that quiet place in my mind where I observed each level and layer of sensation: beginning with the constriction of the throat, the sting of tears, moving on through the ragged breath, the pressure inside my head, the tightness in the abdomen, the contortions of the facial muscles, then sobs shaking my body.

I was home alone, so I could just release, accept, not resist and supress. I sat down in the window seat and just held my face in my hands, letting it roll through me. It was not a fun moment, not one I would invite back in, but it was — well, it was just sensation.

And somehow, though I was certainly experiencing it fully, and the tears were real, there was in that quiet place the ability to focus on each sensation with the understanding that it was all gonna be okay. I don’t suppose that made it hurt any less, but I think it made it pass more quickly and not leave any scars on my morning.

I think it was the many hours on the cushion, many hours in simple life situations, practicing being aware of sensation that made me able to be aware of those sensations. And each time I go through one of these experiences, it seems to get a bit easier. The sankharas there are eased a bit.

One day maybe I’ll be able to remember those moments and just smile. Ah, Mother, I love you so much!