This is a repost from Elephant Journal, written by Blake Wilson. I found it quite hilarious!
My favorites:
15. I got this shit down!
12. Everyone would totally freak out if I started floating.
If you’ve spent much time on the zafu, you may like this a lot too. Click the link above to read the rest.
You can check out Blake’s blog here.
I’m sharing a link to an Elephant Journal article, an interview with meditation master Reggie Ray. It’s part 1 of 3, and after reading this, I will be looking for the rest of it.
This section of the interview particularly caught my attention. See if it catches yours.
When I found out that I was going to do this interview with you, I sat down and listened to some other interviews you had done. On your website I found an interview entitled, “The Body As The Guru.” In it you were talking about the spiritual path and daily life. The host of the show said, “We have to take our practice off of the cushion,” which I have heard a thousand times. But your response was a new one on me. You said, “Or we have to redefine what it means to sit on a cushion.” You didn’t really go into what you meant in that interview… So, I am asking you to do elaborate on it now.
Reggie Ray: When we’re sitting on the cushion we are actually extending our awareness into our bodies. We are in a way present within the totality of our being, which on the surface is a somatic being. The information we need for our life arises within us, it becomes clear.
If you get up off the cushion and there is a transition into something else, which might be a lot heavier or disembodied that means you are not present in your life. Your cushion is your body. That happens whether you are sitting on a zafu or you are in your daily life.
You mentioned the transition from the cushion to the front door, so to speak. Basically, one is meditation, but the other is not. Is it fair to say that if there is a transition taking place, not only is there something off about the way that you are being present in your daily life, but also in your sitting practice? Is it possible that in such situations meditation is contrived? Is the transition happening because we are trying to zone out on the cushion or create some sort of meditative trance? Or are we present in the body while we are on the cushion, and then migrating into our head as we walk out of the door?
Reggie Ray: That’s a good point. If you sit down to meditate with some idea about a state of mind you are trying to get to, or have memory of some pleasant experience from the past, then you’re not doing anything different than sitting in a meeting and trying to make a good presentation, trying to impress the people around you. Only in this case, you are trying to impress yourself. That is not meditation. Meditation is when you sit and let go of all your effort, and allow yourself to be present.
That’s what meditation is.
So, as you’ve mentioned, joining your practice with your daily life—9 to 5, wife or husband, kids, and work—from the vajrayana’s point of view, this is the ideal situation. These aspects of our daily life have a capacity to break through our defenses, push our buttons, and invite us to unfold. You’ve said that spirituality is the unfolding of human personality towards its perfection. I am assuming that by “perfection” you do not mean some static idea about perfection. So what exactly do you mean when you say “perfection?”
Reggie Ray: Actually, instead of the term perfection, I would rather say, “fulfillment” or “realization.” In the same way that an animal goes through it’s life-cycle—from being an embryo, all the way to death—at the moment of death the biological, and I would say, spiritual imperative of being a lion or a worm is fulfilled.
So with human beings, we could use the analogy of initiation in indigenous societies. In indigenous societies, at a certain point people go through an initiation, which introduces them to the fact that life is much bigger than what they might have thought when they were children or even during adolescence. Our natural human awareness is limitless. Everything in creation has a life-cycle, and when people are allowed to unfold—when they are allowed to follow the natural, biological, and genetically driven cycle of what it means to be human—our understanding and awareness becomes bigger and bigger. We have more appreciation for other people’s points of view, for the world beyond our world—the animal world, the plant world, and the universe. That is what I am talking about.
There is a natural tendency towards what Buddhist call “enlightenment,” but it can also be seen in the indigenous societies. That is really what we are talking about.
In Buddhism we call it buddha-nature, but buddha-nature isn’t simply an established state. It is a process of being in the river of spiritual maturation that goes on-&-on, never reaching a static point. Perfection, in this case, refers to fulfilling the journey of the human life. When are fully and completely with what it means to be human, we have let go of any attempt to pin ourselves down, solidify ourselves, or encrust ourselves at any stage. It is an unending, open process. When we have completely let go of any attempt to withdrawal from life or freeze ourselves, that’s what I mean by perfection.
A lot has been written about how the practice of meditation helps people become calmer and more centered. Here’s a link to an article about how it can help people become more creative.
…can intelligence and creativity really be as “neuroplastic” as memory and motor skills? Intelligence, much less creativity, has not been conclusively linked with any one area in the brain. The closest analogues are the so-called executive functions, brain systems involved in planning, integrating of sensory information, and abstract thinking, that are thought to be concentrated in the prefrontal cortex. There is, says Aronson, a way to improve executive functioning, and it’s the very same practice prescribed by Alexander: mindfulness meditation.
I particularly liked the description of creativity:
It involves the ability to make unexpected connections, to move fluidly among concepts, to consolidate past memories, ideas, or impressions and arrive at new insights.
I’m sharing a beautiful article from Tricycle magazine, Walk Like a Buddha, written by Buddhist monk, teacher, and activist Thich Nhat Hanh about walking meditation.
For many of us, the idea of practice without effort, of the relaxed pleasure of mindfulness, seems very difficult. That is because we don’t walk with our feet. Of course, physically our feet are doing the walking, but because our minds are elsewhere, we are not walking with our full body and our full consciousness. We see our minds and our bodies as two separate things. While our bodies are walking one way, our consciousness is tugging us in a different direction.
For the Buddha, mind and the body are two aspects of the same thing. Walking is as simple as putting one foot in front of the other. But we often find it difficult or tedious. We drive a few blocks rather than walk in order to “save time.” When we understand the interconnectedness of our bodies and our minds, the simple act of walking like the Buddha can feel supremely easy and pleasurable.
What this brings up for me is noticing where my attention is. When do I pay attention to my body? My answer has been: not often enough. It’s there all the time, so easy to take for granted. The external world seems so much more engaging because it’s constantly changing.
I walked habitually, without paying much attention (or rather with more attention on my destination than the journey), and as a result, I acquired some mindless movement patterns that actually created stress and tension in my body.
Fran Bell is helping me with that. She shows me there’s an alternative, and it feels so relaxed and healthy! I feel totally in my body. I enjoy it.
But I only see her for an hour a week, and although I retain some of what she shows me, I also become mindless again, some of the time.
The real learning is up to me. Influenced also by the book Effortless Wellbeing, I’ve been paying attention to my body when I lie down, when I sit (at my computer and in the car), when I stand, and when I walk.
Where do I feel tightest, most constrained? Can I just let go of that? Well, yeah!
Here are some of my new awarenesses:
Walking meditation is really to enjoy the walking—walking not in order to arrive, just for walking, to be in the present moment, and to enjoy each step.
I notice that walking with mindfulness adds presence and pleasure to my life.
He goes on to include some instruction about adding breath awareness to walking medication. Here’s an excerpt I liked:
After you have been practicing for a few days, try adding one more step to your exhalation. For example, if your normal breathing is 2-2, without walking any faster, lengthen your exhalation and practice 2-3 for four or five times. Then go back to 2-2. In normal breathing, we never expel all the air from our lungs. There is always some left. By adding another step to your exhalation, you will push out more of this stale air. Don’t overdo it. Four or five times are enough. More can make you tired. After breathing this way four or five times, let your breath return to normal. Then, five or ten minutes later, you can repeat the process. Remember to add a step to the exhalation, not the inhalation.
Today’s message from Tricycle: The Buddhist Review is:
If meditation is a priority, then it’s helpful to take that word literally and put meditation first. An example would be my rule of not turning on the computer before I’ve meditated. Simple, but effective. Probably the most trenchant advice I ever heard was in eight words from Suzuki Roshi: ‘Organize your life so you can sit well.’—David Schneider
My three-month contract job ends this Friday, with another week later in May to tie up loose ends.
I’m looking forward to rearranging my days around my agenda. My sitting practice has been intermittent for the last few months.
I like this: meditate before turning the computer on. I think I’ll adopt it.
Click this link to read more tips from the meditators’ toolbox.
Tonight I was reflecting that one of the things that my sitting practice showed me is just how busy my mind was for all those many years before I began sitting and paying attention to my actual experience.
Constant activity, no stillness, no silence.
One of the great benefits to me of practicing sitting was having some contrast between my active mind and my silent mind.
By silent, I mean experiencing awareness with no internal dialogue.
What was/is that internal dialogue about? (Because I still experience it. I just know I have a choice now. Before, I didn’t.)
Usually the past or the future. Anxiety-based thoughts, what ifs, and I shouldas. Also a lot of judgment.
It was just such a blessed relief, through the practice of meditation, to learn experientially that I could take a break from all that and just be. Just be aware of the present moment — of sounds, thoughts, feelings, of the spaces in between, of the theater of awareness.
It does seem now that my practice of meditation and the self-awareness it brought me has been somewhat responsible for many of the changes in my life, from quitting my job to dreaming of possible new livelihoods, to honing in on what kind of work is satisfying to me, to deciding to downsize and simplify.
You can call it congruency or integrity or whatever you want. There’s a deep need to take action so that my external life matches who I am, which is ever changing.
What a lovely challenge it means now to be truly alive and engaged. There’s no holding back, no fear (well, not much), just doing and learning, and more doing and learning.
Several people whom I follow on Twitter linked to this post, Does it hurt? Yes. Is that a problem? No.
Read it if you’ve ever wondered about the difference between pain and suffering. They’re not the same.
The title kind of gives it away, but it’s well worth reading anyway. Pain is inevitable because you have a nervous system. Pain is a form of communication. It lets us know to stop doing whatever caused it (if it is in our control — some pain is not), to seek safety, care, rest, healing.
Suffering comes from pain plus resistance. It’s the resistance to pain that causes suffering. If we could just surrender to pain, just let it wash through our awareness without judgment, it would leave more quickly.
But we judge and resist pain. “I don’t like pain.” “I hate pain.” “I fear pain.” “I shouldn’t feel this pain.”
Last year when I was just a couple of months into my practice of meditating for 30 minutes every day, my body hurt every time I sat. I kept expecting it to go away. My suffering was due to my belief that a sitting practice shouldn’t hurt.
When I checked in with my teacher, Peg Syverson, she said that pain is part of sitting. Every meditator faces this issue sooner or later.
Once I understood that pain was part of my body’s adaptation to the posture and that I might always experience some pain each time I sat, an odd thing happened. Or perhaps a natural and normal thing happened.
My body stopped hurting when I sat. The pain and the suffering both just left.
Interestingly, I’ve heard others’ stories about that: that the older you are, the more quickly your body adapts to sitting and the sooner you can sit without pain.
I suspect that in some cases, the opposite may be true. Habituation has a lot to do with it. Any new, prolonged activity that uses muscles differently than how you usually use them results in discomfort or pain.
Now it may be easier to do this with minor pain than major, but next time you feel some pain, get curious about it. Breathe slowly and deeply to relax, and feel it. Exactly where is it? Does it have a sharp boundary, or is it diffuse? What is the quality of the pain: is it dull, piercing, throbbing, steady, deep, shallow? How long does it last?
You may not feel joy, but you can rejoice in the fact that you can feel pain.
It means you’re alive.
I finally finished reading this book. It’s not long or particularly difficult to read, I just had a lot of other things going on. I started reading it the first week of July, so it’s taken about 3-1/2 weeks to finish. Not bad for nonfiction, in my opinion.
The full title is Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love & Wisdom, by Rich Hanson, Ph.D., with Richard Mendius, MD. Daniel Siegel wrote the foreword, and Jack Kornfeld wrote the preface. Big names in American Buddhism.
I expected something more related to Buddha’s teachings. Instead, it combines neuroscience with meditation and Buddhist practice. The book has a lot of brain science in it, but it’s written at a level that almost anyone who’s had a biology course in college (or a bright high-schooler) can understand. People who don’t like science can skip over those parts and still get a lot out of it.
The book contains four sections, on the causes of suffering, happiness, love, and wisdom. Each chapter has a nice summary of key points.
The book also contains an appendix on nutritional neurochemistry, that is, how you can support your brain’s functioning through skillful nutrition. It was written by Jan Hanson (whom I take to be the author’s wife), L.Ac.
This information has already influenced my diet and supplements.
Some fundamentals that underlie the rest of the book are:
I learned a lot and recommend this book for anyone interested in the meditating brain and fully awakening their body/mind.
The Well: bodymindheartspirit 