Monday, September 27, 2010

Basics of Meditation

We all know that meditating on a regular basis is “good” for us, so why is it so difficult to do? We each will need to ask ourselves three questions: Why meditate? What is meditation? And how to meditate?

To begin, we can ask ourselves why would we want to meditate in the first place? Why are you trying? …you may want less stress in your life, or maybe you want to have a spiritual experience…but don’t we all just want to be happy? This is something innately within all beings. We want to not suffer, we want to be happy. Thomas Jefferson thought it was so important, he made it one of the top three inalienable rights in the Declaration of Independence. The Buddha thought it was so important he noted that life is suffering as his very first teaching. No matter how unskillfully we think or act, we are all just trying to be happy or trying to relieve suffering, either our own or someone else’s, in whatever conditioned way we have learned. The Buddha also recognized that we suffer because we seek happiness in inherently dissatisfying ways.

So, why meditate? To increase the happiness in ourselves and others. But more importantly, each of us must find our own specific motivation. When the going gets tough, you will need to be clear on why you sat down to meditate in the first place. Meditation can be a powerful transformer, but it doesn’t work to just read about it or hear about it. It requires actual practice. So ask yourself, why try? What is going on with me or my life that is motivating me to meditate? What motivated you to read this material? Be honest with yourself. Because when the alarm goes off tomorrow morning, and you’re supposed to get up and meditate, at that moment, when you really just want to hit the snooze button, you’ll need to remind yourself of this specific motivation.

Second, what is meditation? Meditation in all its various forms begins with one objective: To train the mind. The mind is the most powerful tool that we have. The mind determines how we perceive everything and everyone in our life. The interpretation that our mind gives any situation is so strong that we believe that it is absolutely true. When you walk down the street, you see people who you didn’t know. Think about some stranger you recently. Bring them to mind. What were they wearing? How did they look? Now recognize some judgment you may have about them. What opinion did you already form about them? It seems so real, these opinions and perspectives that we have, yet they are mostly built on our conditioned habits of relating everything we see, feel, experience with something we previously saw, felt, experienced.

In this moment, point to your gizzard. Where did you point? How did you decide where to point? We search our internal database for any information we might have about a gizzard. Maybe something to do with chickens? Maybe something to do with eating? Thoughts and sensations and experiences might seem so real, but mostly we are making up stories about what is going on around us, based on our experiences in the past. Meditation is about helping us recognize these stories for what they are. Just stories. We have the power to transform our lives by looking at our stories, dropping the stories that aren’t serving us, and seeing things and people, including ourselves, more clearly. This is what meditation is all about.

What Meditation is NOT about is stopping our thoughts. Anyone who has tried to meditate even once knows the frustration of trying to stop thinking. The more we try to stop, the more it seems we think. Our mind is like a little puppy running around with too much energy, running from one thought to thought, sometime with very little connection. We spend most of our time either rehashing the past or fantasizing about the future, either can be pleasant or painful, but both the past and the future take us away from being fully present in this moment. Meditation is training the mind to see ourselves and the world more clearly. So, we begin by making friends with our thoughts and emotions, not pushing them away, not clinging to them, not ignoring them, letting them rise and fall of their own natural process.

Meditation falls in two primary categories: concentration or insight. There are techniques for increasing the level of concentration on a particular object, like a candle or a mantra or our breath, and techniques for increasing the level of consciousness we bring to the entirety of our experience.

In Buddhism, the term for concentrated meditation is shamatha. In shamatha practice, we start by focusing all our attention on an object, like our breath or a candle or a mantra. If you’re new to meditation, we usually start with our breath. Breathing in, know that you are breathing in, Breathing out know that you are breathing out. Be aware of all the sensations in your body of breathing. It helps to begin by focusing on one specific area, like the rising and falling of your chest as you breathe. Imagine experiencing each breath like that first breath you take after having your head under water. Breathe naturally but with full awareness. Then, when you realize that you have become distracted and are no longer focused on your breath, you gently, ever-so gently silently note, “thinking” and return awareness to the breath. Again and again as many times as needed. This is the basics of meditation.

The second primary type of meditation is insight or Vipassana. Once we start to concentrate our attention, the mind begins to settle down. The thoughts may still be coming and going, but slowly the hum of random thoughts have less power over us. In Vipassana or insight meditation, awareness then rests in the moment of just being, just sitting. No place to go, nothing to do, resting in the natural perfection of just living. Often, we make things a whole lot harder than they need to be. Just taking it all in, and seeing everyone as interconnected and perfectly placed. In Dzogchen, a particulat Buddhist tradition, it’s called the Natural Great Perfection. Seeing the innate perfection in things left just as they are. Jack Kornfield, a Buddhist teacher, says that 50% of meditation is simply self-acceptance. Carl Rogers, a noted psychologist, says that we must first accept ourselves, before we can truly change.

So, meditation is not just about focusing on our breath, that is the first step. Meditation is a process to reveal the world around us and within us in all its glory, no matter what form. The flower is beautiful but will wilt and become garbage, the garbage will decompose and become a beautiful flower. With meditation, we can begin to look at life more wholistically. Things that we think are beautiful and things that we think are grotesque, they are all part of this incredible process called living. Meditation is ultimately about how to see it all and maintain a compassionate and loving presence--the happiness that lies deep within each moment, regardless of what is happening.

Third, we need to know how to meditate. As many of you may have already figured out, there are many different ways to train the mind--transcendental meditation, Insight meditation, Zen meditation. How to sort it all out? Well, we can start with these basic teachings, and then it’s time to explore the possible traditions. This upcoming Wednesday, September 29, 2010, at 7 pm – 9 pm, you will have an opportunity to experience some of the different kinds of meditation and the groups here at Unity Temple that practice those methods—Thich Nhat Hanh, Korean Zen, Tibetan Buddhism, Vipassana--find what fits for you. This is an opportunity to find a small sangha to support your meditation practice.

I encourage everyone to try creating a meditation practice at home. It takes three essential ingredients. First, pick a place in your home, with a chair or a cushion. Designate a special room or corner as the place for meditation. You can make it fancy or plain, just make it consistent. Second, pick a time. It helps to have a specific time in the morning or at night, where you commit to making meditation the number one priority. Sit for five minutes or 20 minutes, the amount of time is less important than the consistency of doing it each day. Third, pick a practice, a type of meditation. I encourage those of you beginning to start with some guided meditations. I can suggest some CD’s that I’ve found helpful. So, you pick a place, a time and a type. That’s it.

Armed with our personal motivation, knowing what is to be done, and making it a priority to do so, we can now begin incorporating this simple practice into our daily lives, a simple practice that turns out to be incredibly transformative. Give yourself 30 days to try this “different” activity. Albert Einstein said that we can never solve a problem with the process that caused the process in the first place. Try out this new process, and let me know how it goes.

Lama Surya Das, a Dzogchen master, relates to life in this way, “Things are not as they seem to be, nor are they otherwise. So, we might as well burst out laughing.”

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

The Basics of Dzogchen

There are many different practices in Buddhism, just as there are in Christianity. Dzogchen is a set of practices within Tibetan Buddhism. Dzogchen is translated as the Great Perfection or the Great Completion. These teachings are based on the understanding that within each of us lies a primordial state of perfection. Lama Surya Das, a leading Buddhist teacher and author of Awakening the Buddha Within, has many books and lectures that cover this special set of practices. We also talk about this state as Buddha nature or our innate goodness. However, I’m sure many of us have days when we don’t feel like there is any goodness to be found. But even then and even now, it is here, just waiting to be uncovered, just waiting to be nurtured, just waiting to be allowed to shine. The teachings of Dzogchen encourage us to discover this innate goodness, to practice cultivating it, then put it into action in our lives.

We don’t have to wait to get reborn, we don’t have to even decide whether reincarnation is true or not. We just need to practice being present, and find out for ourselves if what they are saying is true. A great quote from a Dzogchen master named Manjusri is, “One instant of total awareness is one instant of total freedom and enlightenment.” Dzogchen breaks down this idea of “enlightenment” into bite size pieces.

There are three primary points in Dzogchen: View, Meditation and Action.

The Glimpse/View: To recognize one’s own nature

Meditation/Practice/Path: To practice resting in that nature

The Result/Fruition: To sustain that awareness

The basic premise of Dzogchen is that everything exists in the natural state. Imagine that everything you need right now exists in this present moment. No place to go, nothing to do, just be present and you will find whatever you need. How can this be? Imagine that whatever answer you are struggling with, whatever situation is worrying you, that the process for solving this issue is to first do nothing. Now, of course, many of us already choose the method of “doing nothing”. We do nothing because we are afraid, or we do nothing because we can’t decide, or do nothing because it seems too difficult to think about the problem. So, I’m not talking about THAT kind of doing nothing—I think most of us have all already mastered that. This is actually a different kind of “do nothing”. This is about being fully present in this moment and being open to the huge potential that exists in each moment. So maybe “being open and present” is a little doing, but mostly not doing--not being distracted, not struggling, not over-analyzing--just relaxing into the fullness of the present moment.

Most of us have already had a glimpse of being fully present. Recall a time that you were in nature or playing a sport well or listening to a great piece of music or see great art, when you felt “in the zone”, a sense of all things being connected, a sense of life being perfect, nothing to be added or subtracted. That is awakening. That is what this is all about. There is a state of being that we all can realize and cultivate.

One of the things I love about Buddhism is that it is very practical. This is not about anyone telling you what to believe. Buddhism is about offering up a new way of looking at the world, then you have to go try it out for yourself. It’s not enough to just read about it or hear about it. Test is for yourself. You decide if it works. And Dzogchen teachings are the same. There are people who came before us, who were kind enough to show us the path that worked for them. They found some techniques that worked, for breaking down pre-conceived notions of how they viewed the world, and now we have an opportunity to learn from their experience.

Dzogchen is the meditation teaching of non-meditation. We’re not trying to get to some higher level of consciousness; we are not trying to create some vision or special experience. We are practicing just being. We begin by bringing awareness to the breath, just breathing in and breathing out with awareness. But focus on the breath is not the end process. It is a stepping stone to just resting naturally in the moment. Imagine that you are in a dark room, with windows so dirty that you can’t see out. Your sense of the world would come from all the experiences that you have had inside that dark dirty room. Now, imagine one day that your arm accidentally brushes up against the window, and a little dirt is removed, enabling you to see a little bit of what lies outside the window. This little glimpse might encourage you to begin washing the window little by little until you see more and more of what’s going on around you. The dirt symbolizes all the thoughts and sensations that cloud our sense of being. There’s no reason to get mad at the dirt. We don’t need to feel badly for having the dirt—everyone has some. We just need to clean the windows. We are cleaning the windows of our awareness. With all this cleaning, we might then realize that, in truth, there is no window; there is no room. It’s just a mental construct that we created in order to define who we are. But with the practice of awareness, of seeing beyond our thoughts and sensations, we start to experience the fullness of life. When your window was dirty, the fullness of life still existed. There were still many other things happening beyond your small room, but YOU didn’t know it. This is a good illustration of the glimpse that Dzogchen is talking about. The glimpse of the fullness of life begins with just washing the window a bit.

The second step in this process reminds us that, to expand the number of moments we experience fully, we need to commit to and then follow through with practice. We commit to practice no matter how difficult or frustrating it might sometimes be. Oftentimes, early on in practicing mindfulness and meditation, we are struck by all the crazy thoughts and projections that we place on ourselves and the world. It can be somewhat unsettling. It may make you want to jump up and run out of the room and never meditate or be mindful again. BUT, this second step reminds us to stay put, to hang in there, to keep trying. As Pema Chodron says, if you can manage to hold your seat, especially during the tough times, great progress can be made. if you can manage to not get freaked out by what you’re experiencing, and to just sit and observe how your mind tries to hold onto its old way of viewing the world, then you start to see the incredible possibilities that truly do exist in this world.

Another powerful mindfulness exercise is described by Don Miguel Ruiz, author of The Four Agreements. He suggests that we imagine we go back to our childhood, before we were given words to describe everything, before we personally had an experience of so many things. From this place of innocence and not-knowing, look around at everything and everyone and imagine that you are seeing and experiencing this world for the first time, without words or experiences to pre-judge. Imagine that you are experiencing yourself without words, without preconceived notions about who or what you are. By taking away our words and our memories, we can start to recognize what a huge impact our words and memories make on how we interpret the world that we live in today. In this way, we start to see the world anew. Dzogchen teaches that this is NOT just a mental exercise, that you really do have the ability to start fresh in each moment.

The last step and of course continual step, is action, continually expanding the moments spent in full awareness. With the glimpse, then practice, you begin to embody this new way of living in more and more moments of each day. You discover more and more ways to see the world and yourself in a fresh new way. You rest in the full view of life more often and that becomes your pattern, your “habit”, when the synapse of your brain become rewired.

There is a wonderful Dzogchen poem by the Venerable Lama Gendun Rinpoche:

Happiness can not be found
through great effort and willpower,
but is already present,
in open relaxation and letting go.

Wanting to grasp the ungraspable,
you exhaust yourself in vain.
As soon as you open and relax
this tight fist of grasping,
infinite space is there -
open, inviting and comfortable.

Nothing to do or undo,
nothing to force,
nothing to want,
and nothing missing -

Emaho! Marvelous!
Everything happens by itself.