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?

I don’t love sitting/I do love sitting

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Folks, I’m sorry for not posting for awhile. I’ve been busy at work, did some weekend travel, and have been skirmishing with a sinus infection, which after I post this is getting all my attention.

I do seem to have made it past that hump of skipping some days of sitting. I think I just needed to approach it from a different point of view. Instead of being so rigid (“You have to meditate every day–you publicly committed to doing that and you’re a failure because you’ve already missed–you should be humiliated” yada yada yada), I needed to relook at why I want to do this, and how I could make it easier to walk my talk.

I do this because it makes a difference in the quality of my existence. What I’ve learned since I started at the beginning of this year is that specifically meditation increases my awareness, and it increases my equanimity. Meditation is how that happens, for me, now.

I’ll be honest. I don’t just love sitting. It takes time, and it can be uncomfortable (though I am past the initial pain, thank goodness). I often feel like I don’t  have enough time already. I work a full-time job, have family and social commitments, have other plans for my life. Yada yada yada.

But I do love what sitting has done for me. That awareness, that equanimity. And, sometimes I do love sitting. I love experiencing a shift into expansion, a release of tension, a moment of utter dark stillness, a new awareness, an insight, a surrender, a chakra blossoming.

But not when I first sit. It takes time to get focused, to get present. And then…ah.

How I’ve made it easier to sit daily is to roll out of bed about 6:30 am, do three Sun Salutations to warm my body up, and then sit. Get it done early in the day, and I don’t have to remember later. It’s done.

And now I’m going to rest and let this sinus infection clear out.

Mystery: strange left eye energy

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Strange energy tonight in meditation. From the start and often during the half hour, I  was aware of a different sensation above my left eye, inside my head. Not pain, not pleasure, more like the ever-so-slight pressure of the subtle body’s energy.

Even with my eyes closed, I felt like I saw differently. My sense of vision seemed to be clearer.

Now, as I type this, tired at the end of the day, I do feel like my left eye’s vision is more dominant than my right eye’s. The pressure sensation is still there. There’s a space in there that’s simply different.

In NLP, when a person’s eyes look up, it indicates they are accessing a mental picture. One side is remembered, the other is imagined, and these can be different on different people. For me, looking with both eyes up and left signifies a visual memory.

This is different. It has nothing to do with eye movements. It’s there no matter how I move my eyes.

Another mysterious so-called side effect of meditation. “The Mystery” can be really specific sometimes, like tonight.

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.

I’m back, sitting without pain and with more spaciousness

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I haven’t posted for about two weeks because I haven’t had internet access at home (short version: dead tree fell and took down cable; long version: it involved finding someone to rescue the bee colony living inside the dead tree), and I’ve been super busy at work with no time to sneak a blog post in.

So here I am. This little break from blogging has given me some perspective. Here are some of my newest revelations:

  • After about 3 months of daily sitting, I stopped hurting for the most part. My body learned to accommodate the practice of sitting in stillness for 30 minutes without pain. I am grateful for this. Mind you, the pain of sitting was never severe. It ranged from just-above-the-radar discomfort, to mild pain, to stiffness, tightness, hurting toward the end of a session. Sitting through the pain with awareness taught me about the variety of sensations called “pain,” and that it’s dynamic, constantly changing. I didn’t know this would happen. I thought pain was part of it.
  • I have a sense of having more spaciousness within. I’m really unsure how to put this into words. How do you experience your own identity? Not in relation to others–how do you see yourself? I’m much bigger than I thought. Who I am is more centered and stronger, yet I have more capacity.
  • I forgot to meditate at least two more times (mumble mumble). Sometimes I remember late, and then I sit. Three times now I have not remembered until the next day that I did not sit the previous day. I like meditating at various times during the day, getting to know my various diurnal energies. And I think I’d like to start the day with it.

Okay, I’m off to zipline in Wimberley. Will post again tomorrow

Milestone, appreciation

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The previous post was my 100th blog post, and as of this moment, people have viewed this blog 827 times.

Thank you.

Pema Chodron on being open, me on lucid dreaming

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A couple of weeks ago I blogged about a Chogyam Trungpa quote on balancing attention in meditation. He said, more or less, that your sitting attention is best when it’s divided equally between your meditation technique, relaxing, making friends with yourself, and being open.

I just read a quote from Pema Chodron’s book Start Where You Are: A Guide for Compassionate Living on the topic of being open that I’d like to share.

More simply, regard everything as a dream. Life is a dream. Death is also a dream, for that matter; waking is a dream and sleeping is a dream. Another way to put this is: “Every situation is a passing memory”.

It is said that with these slogans that are pointing to absolute truth – openness – one should not say “Oh, yes, I know,” but that one should just allow a mental gap to open, and wonder, “Could it be? Am I dreaming this?” Pinch yourself. Dreams are just as convincing as waking reality. You could begin to contemplate the fact that things are not as solid or as reliable as they seem.

This reminds me of a time a year or so ago when I had a lucid dream. I knew enough about it to look at my hand, look away, and look back — it had 7 fingers when I looked back, so I knew I was dreaming.

I was curious about appearances in the dream world. With my thumbnail, I scraped some paint off a wooden structure because I wanted to find out what was under the paint in the dream world.

It was solid wood, and my thumbnail hurt a little. Dream reality and waking reality were similar in these ways.

Then I looked off into some trees with a fierce desire to really see what this dream world looked like.

And for a brief moment, all that I saw became vivid, clear, layered, suffused with light and energy as if there were many more dimensions than I had ever perceived. I saw better in the dream world than I ever had in waking reality. It was stunning, beautiful, to see like this.

And then the image faded and I woke up.

(I later learned about the physics of dream reality: if you stare, you exit that reality. You must keep your gaze moving to stay in the dream reality.)

The point here is that to find that ingredient of openness in your meditation, ask yourself if you are dreaming, and be open to not knowing.

Be able to relax into not knowing, and openness deepens. Be able to make friends with not knowing, and openness deepens.

And so to celebrate…

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After missing a day of meditation on Monday, I didn’t intend to celebrate, but today I realized it is as worthy of celebrating as anything!

I missed a day. What a load off! Now the world knows I’m not perfect. Whee! It feels like a breakthrough!

So today I was at White Crane Pharmacy and bought myself a new crescent-shaped zafu and a zabuton, which I’ve never had before, instead using a couple of folded Mexican blankets for cushioning under my zafu.

My new zafu and zabuton are beautiful. Made by Hugger Mugger, the yoga supply company, the zafu is covered in a foliage print in shades of brown, and the zabuton has a different foliage print in shades of light green and pale blue. Both are 100% cotton.

Fall and spring, yoga and meditation, crescent and square, their energies complement each other in a most aesthetically pleasing way.

When I sat today on the new zafu, I noticed that my sit bones were elevated considerably higher than on my old zafu. My legs naturally fell into siddhasana, which I have learned is also called Burmese-style. It’s like cross-legged but with the uncrossed feet in front, nestling next to each other.

I had an acupuncture session at the AOMA student clinic today. 30 needles! Released lots of gallbladder stagnation in the lower left leg, feel much better now. I decided I couldn’t wait to get in to see my regular acupuncturist. I got to talk to a 4th year student there about what it’s like.

Then I had lunch with my yoga teacher, Eleanor Harris, who is the yoga teacher I give the most credit to for helping me really “get” yoga in my body. Not to mention, she’s just a very wonderful, kind, giving person.

She’s certified to train yoga teachers, and together we are designing a yoga teacher training program that meets Yoga Alliance standards and yet is suitable for someone like me who has practiced for 12 years and picked up a lot during that time.

Then a nice visit with my friend Clarita, seeing her beautiful home and first garden ever. I know she’s gonna love gardening. I helped her find out information online about visiting the Strongheart school in Liberia, learning about that country and what shots she will need to travel there. Nice reciprocation there–she appreciates my online skills, and I appreciate her love of beauty, which shows up in her home and garden.

Then home to find my new massage table had arrived! A gift to myself from my income tax refund. Lots to learn…

All in all, it’s been a good day.

That’s better

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Just sat. How could I miss the settling on my zafu, setting the timer, body scan, awareness, breath, whole body, relaxing, noticing, the weight of my back on my sacrum?

That’s more like it.

More story came up about forgetting to meditate yesterday.

  • I’m on vacation this week, and my schedule is different.
  • I went to Keith’s yoga class at Dharma Yoga last night, and we had a long savasana and then probably 5 minutes of sitting at the end.
  • What did you expect? You set this up so that failure was inevitable!
  • Besides, it’s not really about sitting for 30 minutes every day for a year. It’s about how attempting to do that will change me.

I’ve got a busy day ahead. Have a good one, y’all!

I missed a day!

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Tuesday morning, checking email, and I just realized that I completely forgot to meditate yesterday.

So here’s the big drama you’ve been waiting for on this blog, readers! I made a vow to sit for 30 minutes every day in 2010, and I have missed a day.

What will happen? Well, I’ll forgive myself, come up with a story (“it was all that sitting I did on Sunday that made me not even miss it” and “I made it through about one-third of 2010 sitting every day, the longest I’ve ever done that”), and move on.

Like literally. Right now I am going to sit.