Sit Like a Buddha

photo by Phil Warren (creative commons)

I’ve been reading a charming little book by Lodro Rinzler, Sit Like a Buddha. When I say little, I do mean little. The text itself runs a scant 90 pages, but it is pithy. I haven’t finished it yet, but it strikes me as the kind of book you might re-read every now and then. In particular, I like the fact that it addresses some of the emotional obstacles to meditation. Worth a look.

Ajahn Brahm on Lovingkindness

I’ve recently been dipping into Mindfulness, Bliss, and Beyond: A Meditator’s Handbook by Ajahn Brahm. As is typical of him, the treatment is mostly very down-to-earth and practical. (Another title: Who Ordered this Truckload of Dung?) Mostly, because parts of it are quite religious and technical.

His advice regarding lovingkindness (or metta) meditation, which can be quite challenging for many Westerners, falls squarely in the practical category. I’ve mostly encountered this practice taught by focusing on three subjects:

1. A person you care for.
2. A person you are neutral towards.
3. A person you have difficulty with.

Many meditators have such difficulty with focusing on a person they dislike or feel conflicted about that it derails the whole process. Brahm has a different, very practical, approach:

“In metta meditation you focus your attention on the feeling of loving kindness, developing that delightful emotion until it fills the whole mind. The way this is achieved can be compared to the way you light a campfire. You start with paper or anything else that is easy to light. Then you add kindling, small twigs, or strips of wood. When the kindling is on fire you add thicker pieces of wood, and after some time the thick logs. Once the fire is roaring and very hot, you can even put on wet or sappy logs and they are soon alight.

Metta can accurately be compared with a warm and radiant fire burning in your heart. You cannot expect to light the fire of loving-kindness by starting with a difficult object, no more than you can expect to light a campfire by striking a match under a thick log. So do not begin metta meditation by spreading metta to yourself or to an enemy. Instead begin by spreading loving-kindness to something that is easy to ignite with loving-kindness.”

Note that he regards one’s self as a difficult subject for loving-kindness meditation. This is particularly true for Westerners.

Ajahn Brahm’s website includes, among other things, a list of his books and his bio.

 

Jay Michaelson On Being Weird

“Sometimes, sitting there on the cushion failing to watch your breath, it can feel like you’re the only weirdo weird enough to be wasting your time in this way. But you’re not! There are generations of weirdos, monasteries full of them, and we have the benefit of their accumulated wisdom.”
― Jay Michaelson, Evolving Dharma: Meditation, Buddhism, and the Next Generation of Enlightenment

A Little Riff on Impermanence

photo by Arohn de Leeuw (creative commons)

Impermanence is one of those Buddhist concepts that seems pretty heady and may some turn people off — it nudges a little too far into the philosophical, vague, ethereal. Here’s a little story from Ajahn Chah, an influential monk in the Thai forest tradition, that makes it a little more accessible.

“…he motioned to a glass at his side. “Do you see this glass?” he asked us. “I love this glass. It holds water admirably. When the sun shines on it, it reflects the light beautifully. When I tap it, it has a lovely ring. Yet for me, this glass is already broken. When the wind knocks it over or my elbow knocks it off the shelf and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, ‘Of course.” But when I understand that this glass is already broken, every minute with it is precious.”

— from The Trauma of Everyday Life by Mark Epstein

Epstein further notes, “Ajahn Chah was capturing the Buddhist insight into the impermanence of things but not falling into the abyss of negating them utterly.” This is an important point. Buddhist concepts like “impermanence” and “emptiness” are sometimes misinterpreted as being nihilistic.

“Is Meditation Narcissistic?” A Juicy Ken Wilber Quote

photo by balint foldesi (creative commons)

Here’s an extended excerpt from a Vancouver Sun article, Meditation: The darker side of a good thing. It answers the question, “Isn’t meditation narcissistic?” It also addresses a common misconception about “detachment”.

“Even though Wilber meditates himself, he laments how meditation in the U.S. and Canada is often accompanied by an attitude he calls “Boomeritis Buddhism.”

That is, Wilber believes many middle-aged baby-boomers who meditate bring to it an over-simplified commitment to pluralism and relativism and the notion that, “You do your thing and I’ll do mine.”

Meditation, Wilber said, does not necessarily help such individualistic people face their inner “Shadows,” the destructive aspects of their personalities.

Instead, Wilber says, when Eastern meditation teachers tell people to “kill their egos,” it runs the danger the students might “dis-identify” with their more unpleasant personality traits.

Meditation for many “becomes a process of transcend and deny … rather than transcend and include,” Wilber writes…

The Eastern teaching that people should have “no ego,” an idea espoused by Vancouver-based spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle and many others, encourages meditators to try to be “empty,” to have no viewpoint, says Wilber.

The trouble is many meditators believe that means having no viewpoints at all, even on important issues. As Wilber says, many meditators don’t believe in anything.

Although Wilber thinks people can through meditation reach elevated states of consciousness that can help them become more mature, he says there is no guarantee meditation will free men or women from their own narcissism.

I appreciate the way both Eigen and Wilber conclude that meditation can be beneficial, but that it’s only part of what’s necessary to reach maturity.

The true goal of meditation, and any spiritual discipline, is not only to “empty” oneself of negative feelings and thoughts, but to face one’s own inner demons. That leads, in a sense, to feeling “full” — in connection with yourself, others and transcendent values.

Meditation should lead to the development of wise beliefs, which Wilber says require a commitment to “compassion for all sentient things.” In turn, that requires developing a self (or ego) that is skilful enough to put compassion into practical action.”

On the Importance of Willpower

“There is a secret for greater self-control, the science points to one thing: the power of paying attention.”
― Kelly McGonigal, The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It

Jon Kabat-Zinn on Concentration

“Concentration is a cornerstone of mindfulness practice. Your mindfulness will only be as robust as the capacity of your mind to be calm and stable. Without calmness, the mirror of mindfulness will have an agitated and choppy surface and will not be able to reflect things with any accuracy.” ― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life

Something Lacking in the Secular

Melancholy by Leland Francisco

A first-person reflection — not religious — but finding the secular version of meditation somehow lacking. The post also introduces the somewhat controversial thoughts of Daniel Ingram. The original post ran in “Meditation Los Angeles.”

Still meditating, but having less to say about it. Still doing the MBSR class, but don’t have much to say about it. It’s the secular version of meditation, and body scans, and a little yoga. A kind of caterer’s platter of techniques for beginners.

I doubt very much they’ll ever talk of liberation, and while religious Buddhism turns me off I miss the jazziness of implied freedoms in the offing.

For those seeking just that kind of jazz, I recommend the page (it’s Daniel Ingram) from where the quote comes. It’s about the lack of focus, in most secular, insight meditation practices on the Three Characteristics, those being, as the writer translates them, Impermanence, Suffering, and No Self. Here’s the quote:

Somehow this exceedingly important message just doesn’t typically seem to get through to insight meditators, and thus they spend so much time doing anything but looking precisely moment to moment into the Three Characteristics. They may be thinking about something, lost in the stories and tape loops of the mind, trying to work on their stuff, philosophizing, trying to quiet the mind, or who knows what, and this can go on for year after year, retreat after retreat, and of course they wonder why they don’t have more insight yet. This is a tragedy of monumental proportions, but you do not have to be part of it! You can be one of those insight meditators that knows what to do, does it, and finally “gets it” in the grandest sense.

The wonderful Jack Kornfield has an interesting section on Wisdom in one of his recent books where he covers this issue, in typical, wise, non-dismissive, instructive fashion.

Bhante Gunaratana

Gunaratana wrote Mindfulness in Plain English (which is available both as a book from the usual vendors, and also as a free pdf file). The book is considered to be something of a classic, and is written in a clear, straightforward style. In any case, The Experience of Samadhi: An In-depth Exploration of Buddhist Meditation (here on Amazon, and also as a free pdf file) by Richard Shankman contains eight “interviews with contemporary teachers”, including one with Gunaratana.

The interviews alone make Shankman’s book worth the price of admission, highlighting a wide spectrum of opinions and approaches on meditation practice.

Here’s a quote from Gunarata’s interview. He’s speaking about the complementary use of concentration and mindfulness meditation:

With concentration, you can never practice straight away without any problem. You have sleepiness, restlessness, worry, and all the hindrances. They keep bombarding your mind all the time. In those times you use mindfulness to deal with these hindrances and then to proceed with concentration. And therefore anytime you practice concentration, you have to use mindfulness to deal with problems. You cannot simply focus your mind to get you through problems. You can’t do that.

Pema Chodron’s “How to Meditate” — A Minor Classic?

photo by Aravind Jose T (creative commons)

Here’s a review of How to Meditate: A Practical Guide to Making Friends with Your Mind I wrote a couple years ago. What I like so much about the book is that, beyond being a competent how-to manual, it addresses the difficulties — many of them emotional — that meditators often face:

Recommended. I have read quite a few meditation books and this is one of the better ones, for sure. The key is the subtitle — because really only section one is devoted to the technique of meditation. After that this book rather artfully addresses various difficulties meditators face — whether it be the ceaseless wandering of the mind, the surge of unpleasant emotions, the discomfort of crossed legs.

The book is actually more like a handbook of psychological difficulties one might encounter during meditation, and some very handy suggestions as to how one might deal with them. It’s interesting to me that Chodron studied under Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. I believe it was he that said Buddhism would come to the West as a psychology.

The writing is fresh and direct and mostly steers clear of jargon. She writes about meditation in ways that are just different enough from other things I’ve read that I found myself underlining quite a lot in the book. Many of her book covers note that she is the author of “Things Fall Apart” — perhaps one day they’ll note that she’s the author of How to Meditate. She might just have a minor classic on her hands