Two men meet on the street.I’m pretty good at sitting around doing nothing, but meditation is something else entirely. I've attempted to practice meditation since college. My early attempts were unsuccessful -- they were a lot like what Philip Simmons described. Go find a beautiful or meaningful spot and then expect something miraculous to happen. I was always disappointed. I don’t believe I am the only one who has had this experience with meditation.
One asks the other: "Hi, how are you?"
The other one replies: "I'm fine, thanks."
"And how's your son? Is he still unemployed?"
"Yes, he is. But he is meditating now."
"Meditating? What's that?"
"I don't know. But it's better than sitting around and doing nothing!"
But about ten years ago, I found myself in a stressful, stagnant job situation, with a long and painful commute. At a church retreat, I encountered meditation again. I learned a technique, and began a practice, and have meditated most every morning since then. I'll talk about this technique, called passage meditation, later on.
My key learning is not that Passage Meditation is the right technique for everyone. A few years ago, that is what I might have told you. My key learning is that I now accept the ordinariness of meditation. If I am in an ordinary spot, like my chair at home, I close my eyes and meditate for my half hour in the morning, and it is ordinary. If I'm in a beautiful spot -- like last week on the balcony of my brother's home in Puerto Rico, looking off over the hills, and the city, toward the sea, listening to the birds and enjoying the warmth of the sunrise, for example -- I close my eyes, and meditate, and it is ordinary.
What I've learned in my practice is to not seek perfection. I meditate not to seek some kind of blissful experience or nirvana, but for a better day, everyday. I try to seek my own version of what the Buddha called the 'middle way'. To the Buddha, the middle way was the path between living a life devoted to sensory pleasures, and the life of ascetic denial. According to the tradition, Buddha had left his position of privilege and luxury as a prince to seek spiritual understanding as an ascetic. He nearly starved to death, and came to realize that the ascetic life is no solution either. Buddha's awakening is in part a path of moderation between self-indulgence and denial.
So, in my own practice, the middle way means that I remain faithful to the practice. I try to maintain my half hour of meditation every morning, even when I don't feel motivated to do it. I do slip, and sometimes I have an immediate deadline and meditation time is impossible. But I also do not practice at extreme levels. I do not get up at 3:30 in the morning to sit for 4 hours as one friend described doing for many years. I sit comfortably upright in a chair, knowing full well my body is not able to contort into the full lotus position illustrated on the cover of the Order of Service. Most importantly: I do not beat myself up when things don't go quite right and my mind does wander. Which it does. Together now, let’s take a closer look at the wandering monkey-mind.
If you’re willing, I'd like to try a little experiment with you. Let’s start by putting your feet flat on the floor. Hands comfortably in your lap. Spine straight. Then close your eyes. For the next minute, all you have to do is silently repeat your own name. Just that. Very simple! Just repeat your name over and over again. I’ll sound this bowl to tell you when the minute is up.
ONE MINUTE - SOUND BOWL
So tell us, how many of you were able to repeat your name without interruption for the entire minute? Show of hands. How many had a few other stray thoughts wandering into your consciousness? How many of you had nothing BUT stray thoughts playing through your mind? You're with me!
Does this show you something of the nature of the mind? The mind wanders here, wanders there, aimlessly and without much logic. It’s like an untrained puppy that’s chasing a butterfly here, a ball over there, and oh look there’s a cat with a tail like mine, I think I’ll just check that out too. But often these thoughts are stressful – they are about old wounds, embarrassments, things we should have done, or things we need to do, worries about the days to come.
We know that using meditation and related spiritual practices can bring on physiological changes, such as lowering blood pressure and heart rate. More recent studies have shown that it reduces levels of the stress hormone cortisol.[1]
A few years ago, Richard Davidson at the University of Madison found that the left prefrontal lobes of Buddhist meditators are more active than those who don’t practice.[2] Now the left prefrontal lobe is associated with positive emotions, such as hope and love for one another. What’s fascinating to me is that the research showed that this heightened activity in the left prefrontal lobe went on all the time, not just when these people were meditating.
One study showed that meditation actually increased the size of the prefrontal cortex and related areas. The researcher, Sara Lazar, at Massachusetts General Hospital, points out "The growth of the cortex is not due to the growth of new neurons, but results from wider blood vessels, more supporting structures such as glia and astrocytes, and increased branching and connections."[3] It is further evidence that meditators, in Lazar’s words, “aren’t just sitting there doing nothing.”
So there is increasing scientific evidence that meditation is good for you and good for your brain. But when I started, I didn't have this evidence to motivate me. I was motivated by the simple awareness that it was good for my mind. I noticed that after a few weeks of practice, I was becoming less stressed out, more relaxed. More importantly, other people close to me began to notice this too. People began to comment that I seemed to have a calm presence, and a steady, joyful nature.
So, getting back to our experiments with meditation earlier-- if the mind wanders all over the place, how do we use meditation to cause it to stop? I think the reality is that most of us can't really get the mind to stop, for more than a few seconds at a time. We want to simply slow it down, to reduce the torrent of thoughts to a reasonable flow, then maybe to a trickle.
What we have to be careful about though, is getting annoyed with ourselves when thoughts come up. Then we'll constantly be annoyed and we'll get frustrated with meditation and we’ll give it up. Believe me, I've been there, and gave it up many times in my younger years.
The Tibetan Buddhist teacher Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche offers a more joyful and relaxed approach to meditation, which I offer you today. He calls this objectless attention meditation, and we'll try a bit of it here. He suggests we simply rest our minds. That's his term, we rest our minds. So let's try a short, simple meditation, resting our minds. Please start by putting your feet flat on the floor. Hands comfortably in your lap. Spine straight. Then close or soften your eyes.
Now just rest your mind: "as though you've just finished a long day of productive work. Just let go and relax. You don't have to block whatever thoughts, emotions, or sensations arise, but neither do you have to follow them. Just rest in the open present, simply allowing whatever happens to occur. If thoughts or emotions come up, just allow yourself to be aware of them…. This doesn't mean letting your mind wander aimlessly among fantasies, memories or daydreams. There's still some presence of mind that may be loosely described as a center of awareness. You may not be fixating on anything in particular, but you're still aware, still present to what's happening in the here and now."4 We'll continue for another minute, just resting the mind, noticing but not following thoughts and emotions.
ONE MINUTE - SOUND BOWL
So how was that? Did you seem to have fewer thoughts arise than with the previous exercise? Good! More? Also good!
Sometimes objectless meditation is too much of nothing, and we need to offer our minds something simple to hold on to. This is why many meditation techniques have us focus on breathing, or counting, or resting our eyes on an object. Let's try a meditation on something that's always around us: lets meditate for a couple of minutes on the sounds in the room. Please start by putting your feet flat on the floor. Hands comfortably in your lap. Spine straight. Then close or soften your eyes.
SOUND BOWL
Now just allow yourself to focus on sounds that are around you. Your breath. Your heartbeat. The street sounds. You don't need to identify, or analyze, these sounds. Just be aware. As your mind wanders, just come back to the sounds. If you mind rests in objectless attention for a few seconds, that's OK too. We'll continue with the sounds for a couple more minutes.
TWO MINUTES - SOUND BOWL
I've come to realize that having both objectless and a variety of object attention meditations in our spiritual practices toolkit is good: we can choose different meditations as our situation demands. I've recently been adding these techniques to my meditation practice for a deeper experience.
My primary meditation technique is called Passage Meditation[5]. It was taught by Eknath Easwaran, a Fulbright Scholar in literature at Berkeley. In this meditation technique, we focus on reciting, slowly and silently, a passage of sacred text, such as Scripture or mystical poetry.
Now it is a little hard to teach this in our limited time, since we do not all have memorized texts in our minds. So lets do a variation. What I’d like to do is invite you into an attitude of meditation, and I will recite, at a slow meditative speed, a text by Lao Tzu, "The Best" So let’s again find our center, spine straight, and eyes softened or closed. Now, just listen as I recite these words. Don’t try to analyze them, just notice them going by.
The best, like waterHow was that? For some, it might be the perfect form of meditation, for others, it may not feel quite right. We each have our preferred tools in our kit.
Benefit all and do not compete.
They dwell in lowly spots,
that everyone else scorns.
Putting others before themselves
they find themselves in the foremost place
And come very near to the Tao.
In their dwelling, they love the earth;
In their heart, they love what is deep;
In their personal relationships, they love kindness;
In their words, they love truth;
In their world, they love peace.
in their personal affairs, they love what is right.
In action, they love choosing the right time.
It is because they do not compete with others
That they are beyond the reproach of the world.[6]
There's an old analogy that I think is helpful in understanding what we try to accomplish in meditation. Our minds are like a cloudy sky. Most of the time we focus on the clouds, trying to pick out patterns, wondering if they are bringing rain, and so on. Meditation asks us to focus on the sky beyond the clouds.
Let me extend this analogy. My experience is that meditation lets us move beyond these low cumulonimbus clouds to find, not blue sky, but higher cirrus clouds. Maybe at times there is blue sky, and stars too, but the new clouds are with us too. They are different but they are still clouds. We move to a higher level of mindfulness, but we do not, at least most of us, reach that true awakening or nirvana that the mystics talk about. And that is OK. It should not be a near goal, that is, one we measure success or failure with. It is fine as a far goal, an aspiration, but if we want to make progress in meditation or in any spiritual practice, we need to accept the ordinary everydayness of our own abilities.
In his book Learning to Fall, Philip Simmons wrote about his mountain-top meditation experience, which was abruptly ended by an ant crawling on his back: "I had come for a miracle. What I got was an ant."[7]
He goes on: "Only now, years later, have I come to understand that the ant was the miracle." He says, "It was the ant that returned me to the world, that called me to another way of worship, the way of all things ordinary and small, the way of all that is imperfect, the way of stubbornness and error, the way of all that is transitory and comes to grief. The ant was my messenger, calling me back to a world that in truth I had never left."[8]
So my hope is that in all of our spiritual practices, we begin to find those ants, those annoyances and distractions, and like Simmons, begin to see them for what they are, messengers, calling us back to our place in the world.
Notes:
1 Meditation really does reduce stress, New Scientist Magazine, 13 October 2007
2 The Colour of Happiness, New Scientist Magazine 24 May 2003
3 Meditation builds up the brain, New Scientist Magazine, 15 November 2005
4 Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, The Joy of Living, p. 139.
5 see http://www.easwaran.org/page/96
6 Eknath Easwaran, God Makes the Rivers to Flow, 2003, p. 141.
7 Philip Simmons, Learning to Fall, 2000, p. 35.
8 ibid. p. 35-36.
