Finding the Center Within: The Healing Way of Mindfulness Meditation. (10 page)

The Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki wrote: “To give your sheep or cow a large, spacious meadow is the way to control him.” In other words, the more we try to clamp down on our awareness and force it in a particular direction, the more resistance we get. But if we give our thoughts and feelings plenty of space to romp around in, they begin to tire themselves out and settle down, all on their own. In practical terms, when you sit down to meditate, say something to yourself like, “I welcome all that I am into this sacred space.” Sometimes this is not easy. THE EXPERIENCE (TOM)

It’s my first day back to work after vacation. My mind is racing. I’m thinking about the pile of mail, about how many phone calls I will have to return, about the clients who will cancel after my being away, and about a million other things. I know I cannot force these feelings to settle down, so I just breathe in and out, and let myself be present to the roller coaster ride of my thoughts. I just sit, breathing in and out, watching all these thoughts come and go. After a while, they begin to calm down. And when the meditation bell sounds, my mind is clear, energized, ready for the day. I am no longer resisting either my worries or my return to work. I have stopped struggling with myself.

Peace Is the River

The flow of thoughts and feelings is like the flow of a river. Each thought and feeling as it passes is just one drop in the river. Sometimes if there is rain or melting snow from the mountains, the river flows with a lot of energy and noise. The current is strong and dangerous, and we know we need to be careful if we are to avoid drowning in it. At other times, the river flows along more peacefully and gently. And watching the river is more pleasant.

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feelings. Some are drops of worry, fear, anger, hatred, and other emotions we would rather not experience. But all of them are drops in the same river. Beginning meditators often try to make more and more peaceful drops in the river and less of the more painful ones. When we try to do this, we end up frustrated. We wonder whether we are meditating correctly, or whether meditation is really for us. But the frustration is itself a teaching, telling us that we are attempting to do something that we cannot do. We cannot force the river to be calmer. It is what it is. Peaceful feelings, like all other feelings, will come and go. The deeper peace is found, not in these temporary thoughts and feelings, but in the river itself. As we learn to accept
all
the thoughts and feelings passing by, we come to see that peace does not reside in any particular mood, but in the whole flow. As you look more deeply, you see that no matter what is happening on the surface of the river, deep down it is always the same: cool and calm and serene.

The true, solid foundation of peace does not lie in forcing feelings of calm-
ness, but in a radical willingness to experience whatever comes up.
Coffee-Break Attitude

If in your meditation, you try to restrict yourself, or struggle with yourself, your meditation imprisons you. Then it will be no wonder if you give up on it.
The purpose of meditation is to enjoy it.
The proper attitude to take toward it is a little like your attitude toward a coffee break. You know that a coffee break is good for you. You know it increases your productivity and helps you feel better. But that is not why you take a coffee break. You take a coffee break to enjoy it. You do not have to push yourself to do it. You don’t end up arguing with yourself: “I know I should take a break. It’s very good for me. It lowers my blood pressure and helps me work more efficiently.” More likely, you look at the clock, anticipating break time. “Twenty more minutes and I can take my coffee break! Hooray!” Then you use the coffee as something to do to get your mind out of your work and into a different space. It is the same with meditation. Meditation is not like taking castor oil or forcing yourself to jog if you hate jogging. It’s a little like the coffee break. It is something to look forward to, something you will miss if for 03 BIEN.qxd 8/18/03 12:25 PM Page 51

It is important for people from the Western world to approach meditation in this spirit. We inevitably want to turn meditation into more doing and accomplishing. So forget about meditation being good for you. Just sit for a few minutes, and enjoy your breathing in and out. If you become too goal oriented, you will miss how wonderful it is to simply have this time set aside from your busy life and many worries and enjoy your breath.

Finding the Discipline

When we teach, we are often asked, “How do you find the discipline?”

In a way, the question itself is misleading. The ancient Chinese sage Ma-tsu expressed the paradox of discipline this way: “The
Tao
[the way of harmony and balance] has nothing to do with discipline. If you say that it is attained by discipline, when the discipline is perfected, it can be lost . . . If you say [on the other hand] there is no discipline, this is to be the same as ordinary people.” (Bracketed material added.) If you observe a meditation master in traditional meditation posture, what you see is a careful balance—upright, but not rigid, alert, but relaxed. This posture demonstrates meditation as a balance between discipline and effort on the one side and a peaceful, relaxed state of being on the other. It is easy to err on one extreme or the other. Some teachers focus on strict posture, allow no movement, and require even beginning meditators to undertake long periods of sitting. They teach you to be present with the pain in your legs or back, and to use it rather than give in to it. If these stricter approaches appeal to you, by all means follow them. But there are dangers. You might view your meditation as a personal achievement and develop spiritual arrogance. You might lose the freshness of your “beginner’s mind.” Too much discipline results in a cold, frozen, abstract kind of awareness, which is quite different from the living, warm, flowing water of true meditative awareness. When that kind of awareness results, there is a great risk that you will stop meditating altogether, and become one of the many who say they “tried meditation for a while.” We have met far too many 03 BIEN.qxd 8/18/03 12:25 PM Page 52

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people in this category—people who may have done better with a gentler, more patient approach. Let the path you choose be based on an honest self-knowledge. If you are a highly disciplined person and can follow a strict approach without losing your zest for meditation, wonderful. If that is not you, however, proceed more gently and slowly—as we teach in this book. Practice Meditation as Self-Love

We cannot stress enough the importance of not forcing anything to happen. If you feel anxious and you try to force yourself to feel peaceful, you have declared war on yourself. You have divided your original wholeness into warring factions: the part that wants to feel peaceful and the part that feels anxious. At this point, you trade one problem for two, because now you are not only feeling anxious, but you are also struggling with yourself not to feel that way. You are both anxious, and anxious about being anxious, and you are worse off than you were to begin with.

Obviously, it is not good to wallow in negative feelings. But at the same time, when you feel anxiety (or some other emotion you would rather not have), that feeling is you. You cannot force it to change. To destroy the anxiety is to destroy yourself as well, since you and it are the same. When you learn to be present with it in an accepting way, breathing in and out, the energy behind the anxiety can be gently transformed, without any special effort to do so. You just meet the energy of this anxiety and observe it lovingly. If you try to disown it or push it away from you, you are damming up psychological energy. You are becoming a person whose energy no longer flows freely. When this happens, you will only feel more anxious. Do not declare war on yourself. You need all that you are and all of your energy. If right now, some of your energy is coming to you in a form that you would rather not have, the practice is to let it be so for the time being. As you bring a gentle, accepting awareness or mindfulness to this feeling, it changes and shifts. When we declare war on ourselves by trying to disown some of what we think and feel, we are a house divided. And when we are divided, this gets reflected back to us externally. We find ourselves in conflict with many people and at odds with our life situation. As
within
, so
without
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So meditation is an exercise in self-love, not by trying to force anything, but by accepting whatever is happening just as it is, by being willing to experience our thoughts, feelings, and emotions, just as they are. When we do this, we create a harmony within that has a way of being reflected back to us in the outer world as well. When we do not struggle with ourselves inside, we see this reflected back to us as lack of struggle on the outside.

Refuse to Compare: Betty and George

As Betty sat in meditation, her thoughts ran off like this: “Well, here I am again, sitting at the meditation hall. I don’t know why. (Oh yeah, remember, breathing, in, out . . .) Look at these other people around me. They are sitting so straight and tall. They look so peaceful. And here I must sit in a chair instead of a meditation cushion because of my weak back. None of these other people seem to struggle with wandering thoughts the way I do. They all look like they know just what they’re doing. Like George there across from me. He always seems so happy and peaceful. I don’t want to admit it, but I don’t think I know what I’m doing at all. (Oh yes, the breath, in and out, in and out . . .)”

In the meantime, George was thinking: “Here I am again, meditating with these same people, in this same place. I know this is helpful to me. As busy as my mind still is, I have felt different these past months now that I have been meditating regularly. (Breathing in, breathing out, watching these thoughts, in and out.) But I wonder: Am I really doing it right? All the other people here seem so peaceful. That woman Betty looks radiant. And she’s only been coming here a couple of weeks. She can’t even sit on a cushion but has to use a chair, and yet she seems more advanced than I am.”

Stop.
Meditation is not a competitive sport. Sometimes it can indeed seem like everyone is better at it than you are. But that is because you lack direct access to their wandering thoughts, while you are acutely aware of your own. Remember that you are not trying to get anywhere, and not trying to accomplish anything. So what does “better” mean? It has no relevance. If you are able to sit and smile and enjoy this time for meditation, you are doing just fine.

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Buddhism teaches that there are three kinds of problems you can have with self-esteem: thinking that you are worse than others, thinking that you are better, or thinking that you are as good as others. Why include thinking that you are as good as others? Because you are still comparing.

If comparing yourself is a problem, give yourself some encouragement: “I am doing just fine,” or, “All that matters is to enjoy my sitting,” or, “I am just as I should be.”

Make a Start

All you need is a relatively quiet place, a comfortable way to sit, a bit of time, and something to focus on besides your usual planning and worrying. You don’t need to feel that the place has to be a perfection of silence. In fact, any sounds or distractions can actually be used as part of your meditation. But especially in the beginning, it helps to find some quiet. If you know your phone may ring, for example, turn the ringer off. Let the answering machine do its job. Just taking the action to set the stage is an expression of your commitment and already a help.

Find a Comfortable Position

If you don’t know what the full-lotus or half-lotus positions are, wonderful. That’s one less obstacle in your path. If you do know, you may need to let go of some images of how you should look when you meditate, unless you are one of the few Americans who can sit comfortably in this posture.

Recently we saw a show on public television concerning a Third World country. One thing stood out for both of us at the same time:
They were all sitting on the ground.
It is no wonder that meditation teachers who come from these cultures teach that you have to sit crosslegged on the ground to meditate. For them, the lotus position is just a variation on normal sitting. For many of us, however, backs, legs, and knees, unaccustomed to such positions, protest at such abuse. And for us, that’s just what it is—abuse. Remember, meditation is the art of enjoying your moment-to-moment awareness. It is a way of being more 03 BIEN.qxd 8/18/03 12:25 PM Page 55

You can meditate lying down, walking, sitting, kneeling, or standing. The reason you hear so much about the sitting posture is that it is relatively comfortable and stable. Many traditions emphasize the importance of sitting upright. There are many esoteric reasons for this, concerning opening up the spiritual channel to the chakras, or energy centers in the body. But if you sit comfortably but upright (not wooden or stiff), you can be relatively relaxed and alert, and less likely to fall asleep than if you are lying down. So for sitting meditation, just find a way to sit that is relatively comfortable and upright. We love those statues of the Buddha sitting in that wonderful lotus posture. But killing the Buddha here means letting go of images that don’t fit our own circumstance. Once when I had injured my back, I could not sit in my usual meditation posture. Though I was glad to get back to my regular position, I found that I could even meditate quite nicely with my feet up on my recliner. Don’t get caught by preconceived ideas. Set the Stage

It is helpful to use props to set the stage for meditation. Whatever invokes a sense of peace, wholeness, or holiness may help. This may involve incense, a statue of a holy person, a bell to sound at the beginning and end of your meditation, a flower, and so on. Choose these items with care. If you have a statue of the Buddha, for example, make sure it is one that expresses peace and is very beautiful. Though meditation purists may object, sometimes you may wish to use some gentle music in the background. If you are a musician, you may want to meditate on the music itself. Otherwise, it is best to choose something quiet and repetitive, something that does not call attention to itself. If there is a lot of activity, sound, and commotion around you when you meditate, it may be helpful to mask this with some peaceful music. After working with music, sometimes you begin to hear all sound a little differently, as though it, too, were music coming from your stereo. This gives you a deeper perception of sound in general. For meditation, choose music that helps you to feel peaceful, calm, and happy.

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