(Meditation as flexibility toward the present moment)
So if you ask why we meditate, I would say it’s so we can become more flexible and tolerant to the present moment.
So meditation helps us cultivate this feeling of no big deal, not as a cynical statement, but as a statement of humor and flexibility. You’ve seen it all, and seeing it all allows you to love it all.
So perhaps you only have ten minutes that you can commit to meditation. Just ten minutes can help you come to your senses or slow down enough that your natural intelligence, or what I call basic goodness—the part of you that knows what the right action at any given time might be—can click in.
(Checking in before settling — the first step)
The idea isn’t to just plunk down and start your timer and block out everything that you’ve brought with you. So first, have some sense of where you’re at. Ask yourself the questions: What am I feeling physically? What is my mood? What is the quality of my mind? So step one in getting settled is to check in with yourself.
Tibetan Buddhism, in particular, is about being awake to whatever is arising.
I thought that word really captured the feeling of what we’re doing with the breath in meditation, because “allowing” has such a gentle and nonclinging feel.
There can be a sense that while the breath goes out, you become part of the vast, open space around you. It’s a very spacious and allowing feeling.
and that’s the attitude of “keep coming back.”
When we multitask and split up our mind into a million directions, we are actually creating our own suffering, because these habits strengthen strong emotional reactivity and discursive thought.
(Mind as the source of both suffering and happiness)
The mind is the source of all suffering, and it is also the source of all happiness. Think about that. In fact, you can contemplate this for the rest of your life.
So whenever you find yourself caught in an emotional attack, you have to ask yourself: “How much of this is really happening on the outside, and how much of this is my mind?” I really challenge you to ask this kind of question every moment, every second of your day, and every day of your week, and every week of your month, and every month of your year. I really urge you to work on this.
The guideline is this: if you’re hooked, then you need to work on your side of the situation, no matter how outrageous and unjust the outer circumstances might seem. If you’re hooked, this is a clue that you have some work to do—and you, only you, can call yourself back. This is the basic attitude of meditation.
(Unconditional friendliness as the practice ground)
Whenever we practice meditation, it is important to try to refrain from criticizing ourselves about how we practice and what comes up in our practice. This would only be training in being hard on ourselves! I want to emphasize the importance of maintaining an atmosphere of unconditional friendliness when you practice and as you take your practice out into the world.
Judging ourselves for how our practice is going or what might be coming up for us during meditation is a kind of subtle aggression toward ourselves.
one who knows. So it’s important to be clear about what maitri means and not to come away with a misunderstanding of maitri as some kind of indulgence, which actually weakens us and makes us less able to keep our heart and mind open to ourselves and the difficulties of our life. I often use this definition: maitri strengthens us.
You sit with yourself, you move closer to yourself, no matter what’s going on. You don’t try to get rid of anything—you can still be sad or frustrated or angry. You recognize your humanity and the wide gamut of emotions you might be feeling.
Unconditional friendliness is training
in being able to settle down with ourselves, just as we are, without labeling our experience as “good” or “bad.”
In basic sitting practice, we befriend ourselves and we cultivate maitri toward ourselves. As the days, months, and years of our meditation practice pass, we also find that we’re feeling more and more lovingkindness toward others and the world as well.
You don’t turn your back on yourself and abandon yourself, just the way you wouldn’t give up on a good friend when their darker sides began to show up. When I became friends with my body, my mind, and my transient emotions, and when I was able to comfortably settle into myself more and more (and remember, this takes time), then staying in the present moment, in all situations, became more possible for me to do. I was able in meditation to return to my breath and stop beating myself up.
I still have meditation sessions when I think or stress or deal with heavy emotion the whole time. It’s true. However, after all these years, I’m definitely a lot more settled, you’ll be glad to know. Unlike
Life, as you well know, is a continuous succession: it’s great, it’s lousy, it’s agreeable, it’s disagreeable; it’s joyous and blissful, and other times it’s sad. And being with that, being with this continual succession of agreeable and disagreeable with an open spirit, open heart, and open mind, that’s why I sit to meditate.
Moments like this show us that when we get too caught up in technique and trying, we lose the point of meditation completely. As your own guide, you can catch these insights, these graces, when they show up in your practice.
Meditation is about leaving behind the idea that we are doing it perfectly.
We are opening to the wild display of surprising richness, the organic and unique display of the present moment. We aren’t trying, trying, trying. We aren’t controlling or attempting and efforting our way through it.
It takes quite a while to see that you actually can be awake and present and live your life in a creative and engaged way without letting your mind wander all the time.
Criticalness is an obstacle to meditation, and harshness is an obstacle to awakening.
back. He pointed out that this “oops” moment is actually a moment of pure meditation, a moment where you are totally centered in the present moment.
“Regard all dharmas as dreams.” This is basically saying, “Regard all thoughts as being the same as a dream.”
when you’re meditating, and even in your everyday life, notice when you’re hooked. Notice when you’re triggered or activated. That’s the first step: you acknowledge that emotion has arisen.
(Emotions without the story — accelerated transformation)
Emotions are actually very empowering; I call working with the emotions “accelerated transformation.” When you experience difficult emotions in your sitting practice, and you let go of the words and the story behind the experience, then you’re sitting with just the energy. And yes, it can feel painful to do this.
state. Emotions become your support for being fully awake and present, for being conscious rather than unconscious, for being present rather than distracted.
We turn our emotions into frozen objects and invest them with truth, and as a result they have so much power over us. So we train again and again in coming back to the object of meditation as a way of interrupting that fixated quality. The grasping and fixation—that’s really what we’re interrupting.
(Getting hands dirty with disturbing emotions)
“In the process of uncovering buddha nature, in the process of uncovering our open, unfixated quality of our mind, we have to be willing to get our hands dirty.” In other words, he was saying that we need to be willing to work with our disturbing emotions, the ones that feel entirely dark.
Fundamentally, the reason why emotions are discomforting, painful, frustrating is because our relationship to the emotions is not quite clear.”
strongly. All we need to do is allow ourselves to experience the energy—and in time it will move through you. It will.
realize the power of getting sidetracked with words, of getting sidetracked with thoughts about our emotions. We get completely sidetracked with our strategies, which are always designed to move away from the felt experience.
From that felt experience, I began to
“That which is threatening to ego is liberating to the heart.”
We’re practicing, training, in being present. We’re training in gentle, open attention to everything that’s happening—mentally, visually, audibly. Complete openness to what is arising.
Or the strong emotion arises and we go into a strategy of seeking comfort. We run and hide from the emotion. We distract ourselves through TV or food or other addictive, pleasure-seeking behaviors. We might obsess about how we can get away from facing or feeling this particular thing. We might distract ourselves by turning to pleasant memories, or planning something in the future.
The strategies for escape can show up in so many ways—even illness can be one. I’ve had a lot of illness. Illness is not necessarily a strategy, but if you’ve been ill a lot, you might begin to use it as a strategy.
What I often tell students is this: simply abide with the experience without believing in the stories or opinions about it. Go into your body, and start breathing in and out while trying to simultaneously hold the experience.
“Hold the experience” doesn’t mean we’re trying to pin it down. Rather, it is
a brave act of becoming vulnerable and allowing our humanity. From this courageous act of holding the experience, a very natural warmth emerges, for ourselves and for all other beings.
rings. An emotion, without the story, is immediate, sharp, and raw. The direct experience of the emotion creates no ripples. But with the story line, the ripples get bigger and bigger and go out farther and farther, and actually turn into waves and hurricane-velocity winds. The story line really churns things up.