Category Archives: connecting

Yoga teacher training

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Last Thursday I started my yoga teacher training.

I am working with a private teacher, not going through a studio. There are two other students. My teacher, Eleanor Harris, has trained yoga teachers for studios before. This is the first time she’s offered it at her home.

This will be my life outside work  for the next few months. We meet Tuesday and Thursday evenings, some Friday evenings, and Saturdays. She will be offering classes at her home studio, so we will have real students to work with as we learn to teach poses and whole classes.

When complete, I will be certified to teach yoga by Yoga Alliance (RYT-200). I will be able to teach beginner, mixed level, restorative, and vinyasa flow classes.

After 12 years of yoga, in two classes I have already learned concepts new to me — linking poses and the 5 pranas.

I will be taking 6 or 7 yoga classes over 3 or 4 days a week. I’m sure it will strengthen my sitting practice.

Yoga has ideas about meditation — in fact, the Buddha was a yogi before he became enlightened (only rather ascetic about it), and yoga had a deep influence on him and thus on Buddhism.

I’ll be exploring both yoga and Zen meditation and writing about my understanding and experience of them here.

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Bindu Wiles is a yogi and blogger. She is undertaking a challenge — taking yoga classes 5 days a week, writing 800 words per day, for 21 days, as an online community project. I am not going to join her, but I want to support her. I may do something similar at some point!

Here’s the link to her blog, if you’d like to catch her: http://binduwiles.com/buddhism/my-new-project-21-5-800/

Like a hammer striking emptiness

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Went to Appamada to sit with my sangha today. It’s been a couple of weeks, what with babysitting while my daughter studied for nursing school finals, weekend travel, a sinus infection sapping my energy…

It was good to be back and especially good to have practice inquiry with Peg, my meditation coach. (That’s her unofficial title. Her official title is Zen priest.) So good to see her face and be in her presence again. She is calm, accepting, direct, a bit playful, very smart. I just love Peg.

Right before I saw her, I’d been sitting in the side room where people sit when they’re waiting to do practice inquiry with her. It was on my mind that I have skipped meditating for several days. I was wondering why I meditate. It’s time consuming and some days, it’s just hard to get my butt on the cushion.

I’d finally gotten to a place where I no longer felt pain when I sat. After missing a few days, I changed my practice to where I do it on awakening.

As I waited to see Peg, I was comparing in my imagination what it’s like–how I experience myself in daily life–when I do meditate and when I don’t. When I don’t, I experience myself as kind of scatter-brained, in my head, trying to make sense of things, trying to be organized (hopeless), remembering, planning. Vata, vata-deranged.

The difference when I do meditate is that I’m also centered more of the time.

Being centered feels like at least some of my awareness is anchored in the present moment. There’s another dimension to my experience when I’m centered. I feel more grounded, more connected.

So when it was my turn to see Peg, I shared this brand new insight with her and told her that life is better when I’m centered.

She liked that and she told me that the motivation for meditation changes over time.

I liked that she told me that nowadays, after 40 years of meditation and 13 years of Zen practice, she enjoys every moment of her meditation.

She also said to just consider the brain another organ. Like the heart pumps blood, the kidneys filter blood, the lungs exchange gases, so the brain thinks thoughts. These thoughts are often opinions, preferences, judgments. That’s what the brain does. I don’t need to pay them any more attention in meditation than I do to the functioning of my liver.

So it doesn’t really matter whether I like meditating. Liking and not liking are thoughts, just the brain working. The importance is in the actual sitting, and not how I feel about it.

Our reading today was Jijuyu Zammai, Self-fulfilling Samadhi, by Dogen. Dogen is significant in Zen; orphaned early, he was a monk at 13. He wondered why we practice and seek enlightenment if we are endowed with Buddha-nature at birth. He eventually took that question from Japan to China, where he studied with a Ch’an master, later returning to Japan, founding the Soto school of Zen, and writing a lot.

In the Jijuyu Zammai, Dogen’s sparkling wisdom shines as he asserts that practice and realization are the same.

This being so, the zazen of even one person at one moment imperceptibly accords with all things and fully resonates through all time… Each moment of zazen is equally wholeness of practice, equally wholeness of realization. This is not only practice while sitting, it is like a hammer striking emptiness: before and after, its exquisite peal permeates everywhere. How can it be limited to this moment?

So. How’s that for motivation?

People problems popping up

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Had a difficult time sleeping last night because of problems at work. Wanted to go back to sleep this morning, but my feet got me out of bed and walked me to the zafu. I needed that.

In the middle of my third month of daily meditation, people problems are popping up.

The first was about working with a health care practitioner with whom I did not have rapport. After a couple of days and some wonderfully wise words from my friend Katie (“That’s not how I experience you, Mary Ann”), I decided not to work with that practitioner. She’s probably talented and certainly well-meaning. I know what it’s like to work with health care practitioners that I trust, and I’m glad I know the difference.

Now some problems with a colleague have come to a point where I feel like I need to speak to our boss. Depending on my boss’ handling of the situation, I could decide to leave my job.

Recently I ran across this quote from Chogyam Trungpa:

Without problems, we cannot tread on the path. We should feel grateful that we are in the samsaric world, the confused world, so that we can tread the path, that we are not sterile, completely cleaned out, that the world has not been taken over by some computerized system. There’s still room for rawness and ruggedness and roughness all over the place. Good luck!

So…I will remain centered, clear about my values, compassionate to others, and ready to rock and roll with whatever comes up.

Meeting with my teacher

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I had a good visit with my teacher tonight. I sat for the first sitting, and when the bell rang to begin kinhin, she tapped me on the shoulder, and we went to the practice review room.

The form is to give your name and your current practice instruction. Mary Ann Reynolds, whole body awareness.

I  talked about how my realization that everything is awareness is continuing to unfold.

It seems to be a big shift that changes everything because it changes the way I relate to everything. It seems to have softened my relationship with everything, including myself. I’ve become more aware of my awareness, and there are more moments when I am deeply present.

When the realization first began arising, I wanted to stuff it back down. I had a hunch that it was profound enough to mean real change, and part of me felt unsure and scared about that. Even then I knew that strategy probably wasn’t going to work.

The truth persisted in revealing itself. “Everything is awareness” is the best way I know of to put it into words, but it is so much more than words. It is an embodied realization. It feels like poetry.

Sometimes it seems so painfully obvious — that truth was always there, so why didn’t I realize it before? Why doesn’t everyone recognize this? Peg said that you can’t realize it as long as your conditioning gets in the way.

We also talked about pain. I told her of my experiments with perceiving it, moving it from foreground to background. She affirmed those and added something new to me that I feel curious about.

She said in her own practice, she noticed that whenever she was feeling pain, when she inquired within what the pain was about, it turned out to be some kind of resistance. Could be resistance to feeling sadness, or being still, for example. In that way, pain is a friend!

She said just the act of acknowledging pain and being curious about it softens it, and that there is almost always a response to her inquiry.

It could be a physiological shift, an inner image, a sound, a voice, an emotion.

I feel curious now about my pains! Also curious about what other truths are just waiting for me to realize without conditioning!

I shared some more of my personal history with Peg — childhood trauma, years later processing, the spontaneous release while reading Waking the Tiger. It felt good to share with her.

Working with a meditation teacher

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Before late 2009, I meditated for several years without a teacher, usually for 20 minutes a day. My meditation sessions were relaxing. Sometimes they were expanding. Sometimes my mind was caught up in thoughts. Sometimes I entered deep states of bliss.

After the first few months, I did not have a sense of progression. What I experienced seemed to repeat itself at random. It was all beneficial, but random. I didn’t have a sense of where I might be headed, except there was a possibility that something called “enlightenment” might be at the end of this path.

I discovered that Peg was a meditation coach late last year, which encouraged me to commit to a daily practice. It actually seemed like a no-brainer, as in, “Mary Ann, you live in a city with a Zen priest who can function as a meditation coach! You are privileged beyond your wildest dreams and cannot pass this up!”

Today Peg encouraged the sangha members to meditate for 30 minutes daily and to meet with her weekly, and before each meeting, to remind her of our full name and our current practice. She coaches a stream of people on Sunday mornings.

By current practice, she means what she has coached us to do in meditation. For some, their current practice might be to focus on their breath. My current practice is to start with a body scan and then focus on whole body awareness.

This isn’t random. Peg has experience with both spiral dynamics and meditation, a powerful combination that means she has the skill and experience to know what to prescribe.

For instance, often a meditator will take a big leap in growth over a short time and then will level off into a plateau. The plateau is necessary to integrate the big leap. Then another big leap occurs, followed by a plateau. And so on.

She knows what the big leaps and plateaus are likely to be about, and through her coaching, can identify where a meditator is on the path and prepare them for what’s ahead.

Now I have a sense of progression and a teacher I can trust. It makes a difference. I’m actually going somewhere. It’s called maturity or enlightenment. They may even be the same thing.