meditation for beginners

For T and anyone else who's interested in trying meditation:

Set aside about ten or fifteen minutes and find a comfortable place to sit.

How to sit -
You can sit indian style, lotus or in a chair. Whatever is most comfortable for you. You want to be relaxed but have pretty good posture so your breathing isn't impaired by slumping shoulders. If you're sitting on the floor, try to make sure that you are grounded with you butt on a cushion and both knees touching the floor.
Another thing to note when you're preparing to meditate is the position of your head. Try to keep your chin level. If you nod too much forward, you might become drowsy. Too far back (besides being kinda uncomfortable) your mind will be more inclined to race around.

The goal -
As a beginner, you really just want to practice calming your mind. There is a tendency to believe that we are our mind and if we stop thinking we will cease to 'be' in a way. When we take a few minutes to calm the mind down, we can pull back a little and see what it's doing. See where our thoughts take us. Instead of being 'in' our mind, we can pull back a little and observe it.
When we try to NOT think, we become aware of how busy our minds are and how little control we have over them. We can choose for the most part what we want it to focus on, but when we ask it to stop for a few minutes and be still, we can see how active it is without our choice.
The important thing to remember is not to get hung up on clearing your mind completely. That will happen after a while of practice (so I've heard :) For now, you want to see what your mind is doing, accept the thoughts that come up but don't follow them. Don't investigate or let them bloom in your mind. Just acknowledge them and let them pass.

Tips-
If you have a super busy mind, giving it something to focus on can allow the rest of you and it to relax. Focusing on your breath is a great one. Just feel the breath coming in your nose and going out your nose. This is a great way to calm the body as well. Often our mind races ahead of us and we become a little ungrounded. Meditating on the breath bridges the mind and the body and can help you feel more centered.

Too stressed to sit down? -
If you get frustrated with sitting meditation, you might try walking meditation. This is the one type of meditation that always calms me down when I'm stressed out. Just choose a path, around a room or between two and walk very slowly. Pay attention to each foot as you lift it and place it back on the floor. Having your mind pay attention to your body and the sensation of your feet on the ground can really help bring you out of your thoughts and into your body.

You can create a ritual and specific place to meditate, or you can do it whenever you are sitting with nothing to do. A friend of mine sometimes meditates on the train during her daily commute. I've meditated during terrible movies.

The main point is to calm the mind. You want to limit distractions as much as you can, but remember that when you do get distracted, just bring your attention back to your breath.

Hope that helps!

Habit Pattern

"According to Buddhist teachings, the worst plague a human being can suffer is one that s/he cannot identify, or does not even know exists. Similarly, aversions (and cravings) that lie below the level of conscious awareness fuel habit patterns of the mind that inevitably lead to suffering. "
http://info.med.yale.edu/psych/3s/metta.html


The quote above really touches on the core of Buddhism. It's about understanding our fears and motivations and concepts, seeing ourselves clearly so we are not just moving in the same patterns blindly and recreating a cycle of suffering.

The circular path I wrote about yesterday is one way I envision the habit pattern. In workshops, people usually find it easy to spot their habit pattern. It's the sequence of events that happens in your life that always brings you to a feeling or end that makes you unhappy. But it's a familiar unhappiness. People often say "Why does this always happen to me?" or "No matter what I do, it always ends up like this!" And there is sometimes a kind of comfort in that, the feeling that we KNOW how things will be. Even if we want them to be different.

It's like a self fulfilling prophecy. But we have the power to end this cycle if we can see how our feelings, fears and concepts influence the habit pattern and create the end we expect.

Seeing the pattern is the first step. One of my habit patterns goes like this:
1 - Spend a lot of time alone - reading, writing, meditating, etc
2 - feel a little disconnected
3 - spend a lot of time/interact with someone I'm close to
4 - pay attention to what they think, feel, want, need
5 - feel overwhelmed
6 - Disconnect
7 - Spend a lot of time alone...

This pattern makes me feel like a jerk sometimes. I love people, especially the people I love...so I end up feeling guilty at the disconnect part and I'm often pretty blunt and stressed by that time, so I don't always get across the love so much as the "need to get the hell away from here" vibe.

Now, even though I've been aware of this pattern for a few years now...I still do this.
Because the habit pattern is fueled by aversion or attachment to a feeling. In my case it's a feeling of powerlessness that I'm avoiding. I feel powerless to strike a balance between myself and my needs and those of people I care about. So I go back and forth - all you or all me.

The next step is where I'm at now - paying attention to the feeling I'm avoiding. Seeing where it came from, understanding my concepts and misconceptions about my power. About power in general. And hoping that by experiencing, accepting and understanding the feeling I'm avoiding, it will lose it's power to fuel this habit pattern.

Like all habit patterns, mine does not end in a confrontation of the feeling I'm avoiding. It ends in the familiar unhappiness.

My teacher once said that Zen Buddhism is about confronting your fear, which is in essence confronting the ego. It's uncomfortable and unsettling and some days (like all of last week), I end up feeling like I'm fighting dragons or something instead of engaging in a peaceful philosophy. But it's been my experience that we hurt ourselves and each other more out of fear than anything else. So it's a worthy battle.

Moving On

So the bardo is over. I am officially moved in to my new place. But I find it really strange the effect that the two week intermission has had on me. In my first week in my new house, I really feel as if I've come home from traveling. As if I've been immersed in a foreign country for a little while and the habits and objects and feelings I used to move through adeptly, have become strange and awkward - cumbersome in the new lack of familiarity.

When I was a kid I remember feeling like this when we came home after a vacation. The stillness of the house and the temporary unfamiliarity of a familiar environment used to entrance me for that first day back. As an adult, the feeling of disconnection upon return became stronger as I traveled to more foreign destinations and stayed away for months at a time.

When I travel I take my habits and experiences with me, but it's not always obvious how I fit in. How my habits and experiences fit in. So I tend to observe more.... to notice things...to recognize and learn things about myself based on my reactions to new experiences. But really it's the absence of the everyday routine that allows the time and space for insight.

When I come home I often resist the pull of the everyday routine. I resist the familiarity and the grooves in my environment where my habits fit perfectly. I know very well how my habits and experiences fit when I'm home. But they don't always mesh with the insight and perspective I gain when I'm detached.

There's a friction there. The clarity of insight coming up against the pull of familiarity, of habit.

I sometimes think "I know...but I don't know HOW." I understand what I'm doing that I want to change, but I can't understand how or what to do differently.

Essentially, karma and habit are the same thing. When we walk across a field, we choose a path. and the more we walk on it, the clearer the path is defined. The easier it is to recognize. The more comfortable it becomes. "I know where this leads, I know this one is safe."

But safe doesn't always get us where we want to go, it just keeps us from unfamiliar experiences. When we take a moment to look at the field from a new perspective we might see that our path is going in a circle. We repeat the same experiences over and over. We interact with people in the same way. We encounter the same problems, arguments and heartache.

From a different perspective it can be easy to see "I just need to stop walking in that circle."
But then, when we're in that field...the path is so clear, it's so familiar...it's a habit to walk on it. It's 'safe'. Even if the result is pain, it's familiar pain.

We walk the same path and expect a different outcome. Thinking change will come from outside or maybe we did it wrong the last time, but this time it'll work out. Or maybe if I walk in this circle long enough it will become a straight line.

But habit doesn't work that way, and neither does karma. If we want to change, we have to change our habits. We have to walk a new path.

self compassion

Buddhism is sometimes called the middle path, meaning the moderation between indulgence and self mortification. This applies to compassion as well. If we are only compassionate to others or only compassionate to ourselves we are out of balance.

I once worked as a receptionist for a doctor who specialized in chronic pain. One day a new patient came to him and she was very stoic, all business. After looking at her medical history he said to her compassionately "You must be in so much pain." Her stoicism broke completely and she started crying. Through his compassion, she was able to experience her own pain.

This is kind of backwards, yet it seems to happen often to myself or people I know. We ignore our limits and are blind to our suffering and push on until someone else says "Wow. You must be exhausted." or "That is so sad, I'm so sorry for you." and then we take a minute to reevaluate. Wait a minute...I AM exhausted! or "Yeah, now that you say that, I suddenly feel like crying."

Sometimes we're not compassionate to ourselves because of a self concept. If our idea of our self is enmeshed in what we do for others - being strong, dependable, nurturing, giving, etc. - we may find it hard to turn that attention inward. Being compassionate to ourselves might feel like being selfish. I know so many people who cringe at the idea of spending time for themselves. Again, because of the idea that it's absolute.

Sometimes we're not compassionate to ourselves because we're afraid of coming in contact with our suffering. It's important to remember that compassion isn't just about experiencing pain and suffering, it's also about understanding it - recognizing and accepting the causes and trying to find a way to end the suffering that came from them. With patience and kindness.

One of the benefits of compassion is its ability to help us realize that we are all connected. If we are truly to feel that, we need to allow ourselves to be part of the equation. If we are truly to feel that God is in everyone, we must remember that we are part of 'everyone' too.

Compassion

"You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view - until you climb into his skin and walk around in it."
- spoken by Atticus Finch, in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird

Oh, Atticus. Can you have a crush on someone based entirely on their principles? If so, I've been crushing on Atticus since 7th grade.

Walking around in someone else's skin is a great way to describe feeling compassion for them.Literally translated, compassion means "co-suffering".
The buddhist definition is "wanting others to be free from suffering."

Which is kind of the same thing. When we walk around in someone else's skin and feel their suffering, minor or major...we want their suffering to end because we are feeling it as if it was our own. There is no separation between their suffering and ours.

The focus on compassion is one of the first things that drew me to buddhism. Where many religions focus on our interactions with others as either a boon or a detriment to our relationship with God, the buddhist point of view is that our relationship with others IS our relationship to God and it is our relationship to ourselves.

There's no middle man.

Which I like. Not a fan of bureaucracy over here, especially with my spirituality.

Technically there is no God in buddhism. In my mind, the nun Tenzin Palmo explained it best "We think we are clouds, but really we're the sky."

In this quote I identify sky as spirit/light/love or however you define God or the particles you think God is made of....and ourselves as clouds - part of the sky with temporary shapes that we cling to and say "See...I'm different than the sky...I am fluffy...I look nothing like the sky." or "I'm different from that cloud over there - he is shaped like a bunny. I am totally shaped like a wave."

We each have an idea of how we are different from others. We layer it on - ethnicity, gender, fashion style, age, personality type, zip code, tax bracket. When we take a minute to walk around in someone else's skin, to share their experience for a moment...we get an idea of the ways we are all alike.

And when we realize how we are alike and the superficiality and impermanence of the differences between each cloud, we have the opportunity to recognize the superficiality and impermanence of the differences between the clouds and the sky.

"How am I not myself?"

We all have a concept of ourselves - how we are. It's important to look fully at that concept and recognize the limitations it can bring. There's a poem I've always loved that illuminated for me the polarizing effect our concepts can have on us.

In Mind - Denise Levertov

There's in my mind a woman
of innocence, unadorned but
fair-featured and smelling of
apples or grass. She wears
a utopian smock or shift, her hair
is light brown and smooth, and she
is kind and very clean without
ostentation-
but she has
no imagination

And there's a
turbulent moon-ridden girl
or old woman, or both,
dressed in opals and rags, feathers
and torn taffeta,
who knows strange songs
but she is not kind.

How much of our concept of 'self' has been edited til the final draft is acceptable to others? Much like my dream about the two dimensional moon, our concept of ourselves can be an obstacle. We need to acknowledge our full self to fully interact in the world.

I have the worst time acknowledging the fact that I can be stubborn. I once stubbornly refused to admit that I was stubborn during a zen workshop exercise intended to bring to light our self concepts. I even realized what I was doing and thought it was pretty funny, yet I couldn't say the words "I am stubborn."

What's so bad about being stubborn? The problem wasn't exactly the word or the concept of the word. It's the idea I had that it was an absolute. If I admit to being stubborn then that means I am always stubborn. Which I knew wasn't true. Sometimes, very often actually, I'm really flexible.

But our concepts about ourselves, good or bad, are limiting because we tend to make them absolutes. If we believe we are a 'nice' or 'generous' person, we might feel we always have to be nice or generous to be ourselves. Then what happens when we feel that we honestly don't have time or attention or things to share? Who are we then?

Often we will make ourselves uncomfortable and unhappy to live up to our idea of how/who we are. We limit our full experience and interaction with our environment so that it fits with our two dimensional, absolute concept.

It's comfortable to have an absolute concept and to feel like we know how we are. But is it worth the discomfort it causes living up to it?

sentimentality and self understanding

Self understanding is a key point in Buddhism. When we question why we react to situations and why our feelings are triggered by certain outside influences, we get a better understanding of the way our ego works. Hopefully with this understanding we can lessen the hold the ego has on us and begin acting and reacting from a place of love and compassion rather than fear.

I have this habit of putting a lot of weight on the ways I express my care for other people. If I am baking banana bread for my friends and it comes out wrong, I get WAY more upset about it than seems reasonable...even to me. Recognizing that my reaction seems out of proportion to reality (I mean, seriously...it's just banana bread) I try to understand what meaning I'm putting into it that makes it so life or death.

Which brings me to Ireland...

In the summer of 2005 I visited Inis Mor, an island off the coast of Galway. I was going to be traveling through Europe alone for the next three months but my mother and sisters had joined me for the first week in Ireland. The day before my mother and sisters were leaving the island, my mother and I got into an argument. We rarely argued and I'm sad to say I was the one who really started it. Without resolving the conflict we parted ways -in dramatic fashion my sister Meg joined me on a walk on the high road across the island while my other sister Mary went with my mother across the low road. (True story, there are only two roads on the island and they are appropriately named.)

When we met up later in Kilronan, my mother handed me a scarf as a peace offering. It was a scarf that said she knew me - blue (naturally), knit and longer than I am tall. But more than that, it was a scarf that said "somehow we lost sight of the fact that we love each other for a minute, but here is a physical object to remind us".

The next morning I saw them off at the ferry and waved til their boat was out of the bay, then turned to walk across some untraveled part of the island with the blue scarf wrapped several times around me. I wandered along the cliffside of the island (the picture on this blog was taken from the cliff on Inis Mor) and met a farmer who broke my heart with various sentimental stories that the Irish tell so well.

As the day went on, it grew warmer and I wrapped the scarf around my bag and started to walk back toward Kilronan. When I got there, I realized the scarf was no longer on my bag. Panicked, I walked back across the island, searching for it. No dice. By the time I returned to Kilronan the second time I was in a bit of a state. I stopped in a store I had been in before I noticed the scarf was missing, to see if I had dropped it there. When I asked the clerk she said "No, dear, no one has turned in a scarf. You should go to the police."

I nearly laughed at this, but thought maybe the sight of my face two seconds away from crying over this scarf had led her to believe it was like... a Hermes scarf signed by God or something. So I assured her that it was actually just a blue knit scarf, garden variety. She nodded. "mm hmm, go to the police."

Then I thought maybe this lady isn't quite sane. So I went to a little cafe where I had bought a water around the same time and asked them if they had found a scarf. Their answer "you should go to the police."

They even gave me directions - the police station was on the low road.

Screw it, I thought. I was still really upset about the scarf and I was leaving the island tomorrow so why not go to the police? When I got to the police station, one policeman was sitting behind a desk in the middle of a pleasant phone conversation. He waved me to a chair in front of the desk and I sat in it, wondering how I was going to phrase this.

When he hung up the phone he smiled at me. "How can I help you?"
"um..this is kind of weird, but...I lost my scarf."
He nodded, pulled out a pad of paper and said "What does it look like?"
When I had given him all the particulars of the situation and where I had last remembered seeing the scarf, he took down my name and the hostel I was staying at and said he'd call after he did his nightly drive across the island and let me know if anything turned up.

Back at the hostel, I told the story to some acquaintances, young Americans who were working there. I thought they'd be incredulous about the police intervention instead they said "You LOST the scarf your mom gave you!!!?!"

Thanks, guys.

The police never found the scarf and I left Ireland the next day. This is the example I come back to when I question why I get so stressed out about banana bread. Why does this object gain such significance? Why does the scarf carry my mother's love? Why does the banana bread carry mine?

I'm sure everyone has their idea of how they show love. But when I get stressed about a baked good or upset to the point that I will go to the police over a scarf, I have to question my point of view. And try to remind myself that love is much bigger than the gestures and sentiments that we use as physical representations of it. Because, really, such a tiny, tiny piece of my mother's love for me is still in Ireland, while the rest is much closer.

two dimensional obstructions

My sleeping mind offered up an interesting dream the other night. In the dream, I was driving a car up a mountain. It was night and the road was windy, with sharp turns. In typical dream strangeness, or perhaps to add some levity, Dwight Schrute from The Office was sitting in the passenger seat. Halfway up the mountain, I noticed the moon to my right - a huge, white full moon. It was beautiful and I pointed it out to Dwight, who was not impressed. Then I became aware that I couldn't see the road anymore.

And I couldn't figure out what was wrong with my vision. I saw the inside of the car and I saw the moon, but had completely lost sight of the road. I was still trying to drive though...probably not the best idea.

When I woke up, I understood what was wrong with my vision in the dream. When I lost sight of the road and only saw the moon... it was two dimensional. It was a picture - as if a poster was applied to the windshield of the car. There was no depth to it, no other elements to the landscape, only the moon.

In our lives we have concepts that we carry with us like two dimensional posters. They blind us from a true experience with the world around us. We do this with people, with events, with institutions. There is something about our initial experience that strikes us and it blooms into something bigger - whether we have an attachment to it or an aversion, and like shorthand or lopping off one dimension, we see only that something.

Obviously, concepts are necessary. For example, our concept of fire keeps us from directly experiencing it because that would be painful. And as zen as I'd like to be, I don't want to have a direct experience with everything around me right now. That sounds exhausting and I've got a day job.

But there are times when I recognize the limitations of a concept and I want to move beyond it. The first step is to see my concept as self created and to stop believing it is the absolute reality. If I had stopped in the middle of the road, my concept of the moon wouldn't have been a problem. But I wanted to drive forward and to do that, I had to see clearly. I had to see the full three dimensional landscape and react to all of it not to one piece of it that struck me.

Sometimes our concepts cause feelings to arise - anger, fear, sadness. That can make it even harder to move past the concept and experience reality. My teacher often said "check your concept against reality". Just this action of looking at your two dimensional poster and thinking, "maybe this is not the complete picture" can be very helpful if you want to change the way you interact with your environment.

In my dream, I ended up driving off the mountain feeling more confused than scared. Which, honestly, is probably where I'm at right now in real life. There are concepts I'm trying to shake but they're quite entrenched. And as I write this, I remind myself that while my concepts create MY reality, my reality is not the only reality. If I want to move forward, I have to be willing to truly see what's around me, not just what I think is there.

Bardo

I find myself in a space between two homes. Having moved out of my previous home under stressful and dramatic circumstances, I am now waiting through a two week period before my new lease starts. At first, this seemed like a total drag to me. Moving all my stuff to storage, crashing on someone's couch and living out of a bag are all things I'd rather do if I'm going to be living in a foreign country for awhile. As it is, a two week layover between one south philly house and another seemed to me like all the worst parts of travel and none of the good ones.

And then the idea of a bardo came back to me. Bardo is a tibetan buddhist term - so it's not inherent to my practice (zen buddhism), but I see a parallel here that I can learn from.

A bardo is an "intermediate state", traditionally the term is used to describe the experience in between two incarnations, when one is no longer attached to the previous physical body and not yet born into the new one. During this time, when not in a physical body, the consciousness has the opportunity to directly experience reality or conversely, to be plagued by delusion.

Once I started thinking of this layover in terms of the bardo, I realized how many opportunities there are in life for little bardos. Little times in life when we have the chance to stop after something is completed and try to learn from the experience before running on to the next one. A chance to really clear the slate. Yet we tend to be impatient for the next thing to start immediately and we try to avoid this intermediate place.

It's uncomfortable to be without physical groundedness. I want keys to my own place. I want mail and all my belongings around me. I want to layer myself and protect myself with all the trappings of domesticity. I want to knit, read books, bake cookies and make soup.

Yet in this discomfort, where the objects around me are not echoing 'me', I could take the opportunity to step away from 'me' and focus on something larger.

Here's hoping I come out on the other side wiser and not addled with delusion and fear :)

Applied Buddhism

"Applied buddhism" has a wonderful ring to it. It's what I find myself attempting to do in my life. Not just by meditating or being a vegetarian or trying very hard not to kill that mosquito or freakishly large spider, but by actually applying the philosophy of Buddhism to my thoughts and actions.

Some buddhist teachings can come off as esoteric or nihilistic or like a riddle that can only be understood by those who choose to devote their whole lives and focus to enlightenment. I have to be honest - when I read books on buddhism, it tends to feel very lifeless to me. Yet in the past 7 years, I have been fortunate enough to receive some wonderful teachings that have moved me profoundly through their simplicity and clarity. They've taught me to draw lines connecting vast concepts to their immediate example in the present moment. In this blog I hope to share my attempts with you all. Please feel free to comment and question :)