Friday, November 1, 2013

Turning The Mind Into An Ally - 4 – Taking Your Seat


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.