Category Archives: books

Sitting like a king or queen

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“Meditation practice begins by sitting down and assuming your seat cross-legged on the ground. You begin to feel that by simply being on the spot, your life can become workable and even wonderful. You realize that you are capable of sitting like a king or queen on a throne. The regalness of that situation shows you the dignity that comes from being still and simple.” -CTR, The Sanity We Are Born With

Quote found on Facebook from my friend Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche (or whomever maintains his Facebook page).

Maybe one of these days/weeks/months/years, I’ll get around to reading one of his books. Meanwhile, I totally love getting an excerpt from time to time. Brilliant teacher.

You don’t have to do anything. You can just sit and be, and be the king or queen of your own life.

Don’t forget to elongate your spine while you release tension!

Another book influences meditation

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I recently read the book Trauma Releasing Exercises by David Berceli, kindly lent to me by John Daniewicz, a member of my sangha, after we had a wide-ranging discussion that included healing from trauma.

Berceli came up with a set of seven physical exercises based on bioenergetics whose purpose is to tire the leg and hip muscles so that they tremble, quiver, and shake. He did this after spending time in war zones in Africa and the Middle East, wanting to find a way to help victims, witnesses, and caregivers release trauma energy from their bodies without psychotherapy. Some cultures don’t include psychotherapy, and some circumstances make it impossible.

The trembling releases the energy frozen in the body from trauma or prolonged stress (which in my view and some others’ has the same effect on the body as a true trauma).

I’ve been doing the exercises a couple of times a week. They take 20-30 minutes to do. At the end, I lie on the floor, knees up, with my legs going through cycles of fine tremors, visible quivering, and gross muscle shaking.

When I feel done, I just straighten my legs and the trembling stops.  I feel more present.

Berceli has a newer, more sophisticated version of the book, The Revolutionary Trauma Release Process. Both are available on amazon.com.

The exercises are pretty much the same in both books. (By the way, the latter book got 5 stars from all 21 reviewers on Amazon, pretty remarkable in itself.)

There’s a video too, which I haven’t seen.

I think everyone should at least know about the exercises, and if you’ve ever had trauma in your life or been a caregiver to traumatized people or been under prolonged stress, please consider actually doing them, no matter how long ago it was.

This is definitely remedial work, but the more we can let go of the past, even as it resides in our bodies, the more capacity we have for being present, in my opinion.

And that’s how I tie this topic into my meditation blog. It’s about cultivating presence, and this helps.

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.

Life and love are synonymous

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Today is Valentine’s Day and also Chinese New Year. The zendo was packed this morning. I usually see Peg on Sunday mornings, but not today — I got there a little later than usual, not expecting a group of people in line ahead of me, waiting to see her. She didn’t have time to see everyone, including me.

I did a walking meditation, a seated meditation, another walking meditation, and then it was time for the service.

Peg passed out a reading, which we all read together aloud and then discussed. My Valentine’s Day gift to you, dear readers, is to share the text. My skills in formatting in WordPress are not that developed, so imagine this, in the shape of a heart.

Love Beyond Emotion, by Ligia Dantes, from The Unmanifest Self: Transcending the Limits of Ordinary Consciousness

As long as our relationships are dependent on our emotional state, we cannot enjoy peace among others or within ourselves. Emotions swing between extremes and are too varied in intensity for the entire human organism to live a harmonious life. A change in this way of functioning is desperately needed if peace is to prevail in the world.

Love is true neutrality; it does not judge or evaluate. It does not feel good or bad; since it is not mere thought, it does not change into an opposite. It does not like or dislike. It does not blame, so it does not need to forgive. It does not have choices or preferences, opinions or positions. It does not dictate, is not authoritative.

Love does not differentiate between life and death. It has no expectations other than what is. Love is not an ideal to venerate; it cannot be known through knowledge or thought. Love is not words, but the energy of life itself without opposites, without death.

Love is a way of being, experienced by humans and visible only in our actions. Life and love are synonymous. They are the eternal activity of universal energy without boundaries, movement, or form.

Love, being all-encompassing, is the context of all contents of the universe, and thus is infinite. And what is infinite cannot be known within the finite mind. Only in a state of being that is beyond the finite human mind-form can love be the manifest. Thus love is manifest-unmanifest, form and emptiness. Our minds can express it only in paradox.

Love is all life is and, as such, can only be lived.

I like the equation of love being the energy of life itself, visible only in our actions.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

Wandering Mind and her family, Thoughts, Equanimity, Chakras, Pain, Curiosity, and Moments of Emptiness, came to visit

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Today is a day off work. Slept in, started laundry and set dirty dishes to soak, then sat.

Really, there’s not much to report from today’s sitting. Nothing really new or different. I sat, did body scan (now tied to breath), and then Wandering Mind and her family, Thoughts, Equanimity, Chakras, Pain, Curiosity, and Moments of Emptiness, came to visit.

I thought about last night’s class on the Diamond Sutra. Sometimes things seem funny to me that no one else is responding that way to, and I keep my mouth shut. The way Subhuti and the Buddha spoke to each other sounded exceedingly formal to my ears, and some mischievous part of me wanted to insert the word “Dude” in there. So pardon this indulgence.

“Even so, Dude, if a noble son or daughter should set forth on the bodhisattva path, how should they stand, how should they walk, and how should they control their thoughts?”

“Well, said, Dude! Well said. So it is, Dude. It is as you say.”

I am probably not cut out to be a scholar.

The gist of it is a paradox, which in my admittedly limited familiarity with Buddhism, seems most characteristic of Zen. “…I shall liberate [all beings]. And though I thus liberate countless beings, not a single being is liberated… And why not? Dude, a bodhisattva who creates the perception of a being cannot be called a bodhissatva. And why not? Dude, no one can be called a bodhisattva who creates the perception of a self, a being, a life, or a soul.”

Who creates the perception? See, this is something people struggled with in 400 BC too. Maybe creating a perception means interpreting experience. Maybe creating a perception means naming. We did an exercise in knowing and softening to not knowing.

Flint Sparks, the Zen priest who taught this class, brought up Jill Bolte Taylor’s video and book, My Stroke of Insight, and her description of right-brain awareness, as a way, in my perception, of helping us grok the shift in awareness from ordinary left-brain thinking that the Dude is pointing to.

But I could be wrong.

Book influences meditation

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This morning’s zazen was heavily influenced by a book I’m reading titled The Open-Focus Brain: Harnessing the Power of Attention to Heal Mind and Body. Les Fehmi, biofeedback pioneer and director of the Princeton Biofeedback Centre, and Jim Robbins, science journalist, are the authors.

The major premises of the book are that (1) the way we customarily pay attention is using a narrow focus on objects and details, (2) that this habitual narrow focus produces chronic stress and is useful only in limited circumstances, and (3) that there are other ways of paying attention that are immersive and diffusive — ways that alleviate physical/emotional pain and optimize performance and well-being.

I’m about halfway through reading it. The book comes with a CD with a couple of recorded trances on them, and that’s what influenced my meditation.

Simply put, one of the trances is becoming aware first of your thumbs in a three-dimensional way. Then you do that with your forefingers, then thumbs and forefingers together, then the space between them.

You add an awareness of a subatomic level in which the distances are vast. We are made mostly of space. You gradually expand to include the whole body and the space in and around it.

Doing this felt a little different from sensing my energy body. The feeling was denser, less like light, and more like pulses, currents,  and vibrations. It was not chakra-centered. It was more centered on the physical layer.

John Daniewicz, a member of my sangha, recommended a book called The Alphabet Vs. the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image, which seems to have a related premise: that when humanity became literate and used our eyes for reading and writing, we rewired our brains into left-brain dominance and lost our right-brain way of awareness. Or at least that is my second-hand understanding of it.

I’m adding it — not ironically — to my to-read list, along with Buddha’s Brain. With a note that I wonder what it would be like to read and write nothing for a year. Sounds restful.