The Meditator's Dilemma
Page 15
These are a few suggestions for bringing your mindfulness practice from your meditation room into the relational domain. We are all in the same aquarium but often forget it. Mindfulness can remind us of our inherent connection with our fellow sentient beings. As always, I recommend that you be creative and find personally meaningful games in this area. They can brighten and enrich your daily interactions.
QUESTIONS FOR CONSIDERATION
What should I do when my buttons get pushed by someone who is self-centered, arrogant, or aggressive?
Like every other aspect of practice, we consider a graded hierarchy, moving from simpler to more challenging scenarios. There are situations and people more likely to trigger us, but we leave those for later. It’s best to begin practicing in the shallow end of the pool. In this case we start with people who are either upbeat or neutral, those less likely to arouse negative feelings in us. So much of our experience falls in the casual or neutral category, and it is here that much of our formal meditation practice and mindful interaction with the world can be consciously brightened and enhanced. Gradually we can be less triggered even by those with challenging personality styles.
AFTERWORD: KISS THE JOY AS IT FLIES
He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise.
—William Blake
IN PSYCHOTHERAPY, a primary component and focus of the first session with a new client is to establish a welcoming, trustworthy environment, such that he or she will feel safe and sufficiently comfortable to return. As this trust in the holding environment deepens, the client becomes more willing to explore, reveal, and in time, open to ever-deepening reflection and revelation.
In similar fashion, Westerners need to feel this sense of comfort and safety early on in meditation. If this is not a priority, they are more likely to abandon the practice, and if they do continue, it may be an intermittent, frustrating, cognitive grind.
We need to take baby steps that make sense and feel good, steps that are appropriate to our cultural context. This is largely uncharted territory for us, and acknowledging that is an important first step—not an easy one in a cultural milieu that views “not knowing” as an admission of weakness.
The days of throwing a child into the water as a way of teaching him or her how to swim are over. Isn’t it time we stop approaching meditation that way, too? Granted, the sticks in the meditation hall have been put away; this is no longer being seen as a useful motivational tool. But meditation is often still perceived as rather a dry and serious enterprise, good medicine at best.
Why aren’t you meditating more regularly? Is it because you have not found it to be refreshing? Or perhaps because you feel yourself to be a failure at it? Do you often feel you are barely managing restlessness and distraction until the bell rings?
Following the sensations of the breath is simply not terribly interesting. We need to find ways to infuse interest and creativity into what is essentially a repetitive, lifelong rhythm—not unlike the beating of our hearts.
But we are not generally encouraged to be creative in that way. We are not encouraged to actively soften and enliven the body and breath and heart. We are instructed to be with the breath as it is. If it is boring, then we should be with boredom. These instructions, by and large, are far too dry.
Interest is the mother of tranquil concentration, and tranquil concentration is the mother of insight. We must therefore create the conditions to foster and encourage interest right from the start. We must put our active minds to good use by cultivating calm, by engaging the heart, by discovering enriching, personally meaningful inroads in meditation. We can only do this if we find these “preliminary” practices to be useful in and of themselves. Only then can they lay the foundation for deeper exploration, insight, and a sense of true inner peace and well-being.
So much is written about happiness these days. We all want contentment but often look for it in the wrong places. Even if we understand that happiness is not to be found in a bigger house or faster car, we still overschedule, overconnect, overeat, underexercise, and have few abiding, available inner resources for managing stress.
Mindfulness, practiced in the right way, directly contributes to this core need for well-being. It suggests that with appropriate, engaging attention we can learn how to cultivate beneficial states of mind and heart. We can learn to be less driven by desires and urges that we often intuitively know detract from our integrity and wholeness. As we come to understand these patterns that inhibit—and even prohibit—our growth and potential happiness, we can begin to unravel the “ties that bind us” and relax into a more spacious inner landscape and a far more comfortable existence in the world we share. From my retreat journal:
Mindfulness takes practice in the way that love takes practice,
in the way that enjoying a sunset takes practice,
or empathizing with a dear friend,
or listening, with a sense of wonder,
to the sound of the ocean in a conch shell.
There is a wonderful encapsulated expression of happiness in Japanese Morita therapy. Aru ga mama means “that state where the mind is not unduly disturbed by anything and runs smoothly.” I find this to be deceptively simple and elegant. “Not unduly disturbed by anything” implies an extremely welcoming posture of mind. This isn’t the same as “previously challenging things no longer come to visit.” It suggests that the mind is at home with whatever arises.
I once studied with a venerable Burmese monk who graciously offered the following instruction to me. I am forever indebted to him and will remember his words always:
Your practice is becoming fluid, but there are a few spots which are rough. As monks we only have our robes, and we learn to stitch them when they tear. When you use a rusty needle, the needle catches on the cloth when it passes through the material. But when you use a clean needle, it does not catch on the cloth. Focus on where the needle is catching on the cloth and what you can do to clean it. The less the needle of mindfulness catches on the cloth of experience, the more you will experience happiness and freedom.
In closing, these are my words, my hope, for you—which is to say, for us all:
May you create delight in your meditation.
May your mind not be unduly ruffled by anything;
may it not catch on the cloth of your experience.
May the mind, having struggled for so long trying to make things other than what they are,
rest lightly in the trustworthy stream of experience.
NOTES
Chapter 2. Different Strokes
1. “The Quotations Page: Quote from Mahatma Gandhi.” The Quotations Page, www.quotationspage.com/quote/4013.html (accessed August 31, 2015).
2. Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life (New York: Hyperion, 1994), 4.
3. Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, Zurchungpa’s Testament: A Commentary on Zurchung Sherab Trakpa’s Eighty Chapters of Personal Advice (Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion, 2006), 204.
4. Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha (New York: Bantam Dell, 2003), 3.
Chapter 3. The Inner Holding Environment
1. Bruce E. Wampold, The Great Psychotherapy Debate: Models, Methods, and Findings (Mahwah, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates, 2004).
2. David Schneider, Crowded by Beauty: The Life and Zen of Poet Philip Whalen (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015).
Chapter 5. Relaxation
1. “Maha-Saccaka Sutta: The Longer Discourse to Saccaka” (MN 36), translated from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu, from Access to Insight, www.accesstoinsight.org (accessed August 31, 2015).
Chapter 6. Playfulness and Delight
1. D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (New York: Basic Books, 1971), 38.
Chapter 7. Gratitude and Wonder
1. Dhammapada 2,
from Thanissaro Bhikkhu, trans., Dhammapada: A Translation (Barre, MA: Dhamma Dana Publications, Barre Center for Buddhist Studies, 1998). I have changed the word heart in his translation to mind.
Chapter 10. Tranquility Games
1. Oxford Dictionary of English, 3rd ed. (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010).
2. Mary Oliver, “When Death Comes,” New and Selected Poems (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 8.
Chapter 15. Rising and Falling Games
1. Muriel Rukeyser, “The Speed of Darkness,” The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), 467.
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