This
morning we continue our series of talks about the rich and profound book, Turning the Mind into an Ally, by
Sakyong Mipham, the son of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche and the student of Pema
Chodron—what a good lineage he has! The
fourth chapter might seem too simple, “Taking Your Seat”, how to begin and end
your meditation sessions. However,
Sakyong points out some important details that will vastly improve the quality
of your practice and the value you receive.
It’s worth a careful look!
He
begins with how we begin. Let’s reflect
on how each of us enter the room here.
You look around and try to find your spot—maybe someone is already
sitting in your spot, and that arises irritation. Or, you find the perfect spot and sit
down. This might seem like a simple
process, but you are encouraged to consciously, with great awareness, take your
seat and make the decision to devote these next few minutes to sitting in an
inspired way. Sakyong gives far more specific
instructions on how to sit than I do, but as I always encourage you, as long as
you back is straight and if you are sitting in a chair that your feet on the
floor, you are in good shape. We want to
open up our lungs so we can breathe freely.
So, often these days, we are in front of a computer screen, slowly
scrunched down and solely focused on the screen and in our heads. Meditation is about getting our full body
involved. We sit like a mountain, strong
and upright.
Next,
we can begin with a reflection of the greater purpose that all this meditation
stuff can have. You come here because
you might enjoy the experience of meditation, but you coming here is, in and of
itself, serving a greater purpose by your very presence. You are inspiring those around you to sit tall and give meditation our all. I do believe that us sitting together each
Sunday changes the energy of the world to a more peaceful and
kind and loving place. You do all this
by your willingness to leave that warm bed on a Sunday morning and join us for
this simple process! Thank you for being
here.
As
I have often discussed, you can make a choice whether to meditate with your
eyes open or closed, and I encourage you to explore the possibility of opening
your eyes, if even for just for a bit, in order to more fully expand your
awareness. There might be distractive
movement in and around you, but the sounds and the sights can become just like clouds in the sky. We
see and we hear but not in a focused way.
We continue again and again to return our attention to the sensation of
breathing.
I
want to stop for a moment and recognize that all this straight sitting and eyes
gazing, it might feel a little uncomfortable at first, a little contrived. Do you remember how it felt when you first
drove a car? My goodness, I remember
that I took out a few side mirrors off the cars park on the road that I first time drove down in the driver's seat! How odd and weird it felt. After much practice, and a few more minor accidents, I now
feel comfortable and at ease in my car.
That is the experience that occurs over time with your meditation
practice. Taking your seat, finding what
is the right way for you to sit, then doing it over and over again, until
it begins to feel natural and at ease.
Whenever we realize that we are slouching, that is a moment of
awareness, Oh Happy Day! Hurray! And we
sit up straight again and again. This
does wonders for your posture!
Another
important point is that we are integrating Body and Mind. In the Western culture, we spend a lot
of time being in our head. Meditation is a practice of balancing awareness of the body and the mind
together. We use the breath as our
balancing point. We are conscious of
breathing in and breathing out, and we are aware of the mind and the body at
the same time, the sensations, the emotions, the thoughts, the sights. We practice finding a balanced awareness of
both. Right now, stop for a moment and
just breathe with this sense of
balancing body and mind. This simple
practice can over time become your natural way of experience yourself and
experiencing the world. Little by little, we awaken.
This
last week, someone asked me a very important question. “Was the original Buddha an
over-achiever?” The folklore is that he
just sat down under a tree and BOOM, he was enlightened! That’s a high bar of expectation set! From my perspective that MAY have been what
happened, but I think more likely, he worked at it. First, he had been studying and practicing
many different methods for six years. He
had trained in yoga and other meditative-type practices. I also choose to believe that he most likely
had this initial awareness of what it feels like to be fully awake, and then
the story goes that he wandered around for a few weeks, letting it set in,
exploring it, maybe falling back into his old way of thinking, then remembering
and experiencing awakening again and again.
In
my Buddhist tradition, it is said that the initial awakening comes as a
glimpse, just a simple glimpse, of the greater, more spacious, more
interconnected and interdependent reality in which we live and have our being. Then, we fall back asleep, back into our old
patterns. Then, we continue to practice
so that those glimpses of awakening become more frequent. In order to create these glimpses, we must
courageously and consciously Take Our Seat.
Lastly,
Sakyong encourages us to have a clear ending.
When we are here, we always end with dedicating the merit, dedicating
any benefit that we received from being here for the benefit of all
beings. We spread it out, wishing all
beings to be free from suffering and to experience happiness. We do so, as so many Buddhists and meditation
practitioners have done for thousands of years, ending by recognizing that we
do this not only for ourselves but truly for the entire world.
When
you are meditating at home, you might also end with a reflection of
gratitude. Even if they world seems to
be crumbling around you, even if the meditation session feels awful, we can
stop and reflect on how blessed we are in some way, even if it is the fact that
we are still breathing at the end.
These
little tiny steps that all add up to TAKE YOUR SEAT can transform our lives. It’s not enough to read about or study it, we
must all do it and experience the result. Join me in this simple commitment to
sit for yourself and the world, and make a difference.
