An evening meditation, mental illness, and emptiness

A recent Friday was busier than most days are for me. On Thursday, we’d had a heavy snowstorm that carried into the evening before tapering off. Since morning commutes are often ugly in the snow, I decided to forego a morning meditation and was on the road before six. Once I got to work, I managed a variety of matters, including a court hearing in the afternoon. I got in a yoga practice with a favorite teacher before getting home in the evening in time to run errands of various kinds. It wasn't until about 9:00 p.m. that I finally got around to meditation.

I sat peacefully for twenty minutes, watching breath, seeing thoughts, watching breath, seeing thoughts, focusing concentration, seeing thoughts, watching breath. The thoughts were random conjurations of links between memories and ideas and fantasies. As often happens, the meditative state crept in quietly, so quietly that I didn’t even notice it until I was drawn out of it by our dog coming to see if this oddly-timed sitting practice might yield food. Seeing no likely snack options, he went off to prod more likely providers. And I was left to finish my sitting slightly more aware of my own mind than I had been before the dog showed up. An evening meditation practice tends to end on an open, quiet note, while morning meditations end by launching me into my day.

So I went up to the bedroom and found my wife watching the second hour of A Beautiful Mind.

She asked whether I was willing to watch with her. If I’d not wanted to join her, she’d have ceded the bedroom to me and gone to watch the rest of the movie elsewhere. But there was more than a degree of courtesy in her question.

You see, mental illness runs in my blood. My sister was institutionalized for a time. She was, so far as I can tell, schizophrenic, though the shrinks she saw didn’t diagnose her that way. I think they hesitated in part because and she was, herself, a Ph.D. in clinical psych., and during the 1990s, a diagnosis of schizophrenia was a declaration of hopelessness for a debilitating, dimly understood, and largely untreatable condition. And that diagnosis didn’t really match Suzanne’s life. Did she hear voices of people who weren’t there? Yes. As she’d drive down the road, they’d scream in her ears to drive into the oncoming traffic on the other side of the road. But she also had an iron will. Did she show wild personality fluctuations, ranging from introspective and quiet to abrasive and antagonistic to unfocused and angry? Yes. But she also wrenched control of those personalities to impose on them her professional mask that allowed her to counsel and diagnose her own patients. And, as she acknowledged, sometimes it’s a bit easier to understand the mentally ill if you aren’t really mentally well yourself. So she Jekyll and Jekyll and Jekyll and Hyded her way through grad school in three years and into a professional counseling practice outside of Boston. Then, taking a break from practice, she spent several weeks in Utah, riding horses. One day she left to hike in a canyon, and didn’t return. Several days later, one of the several search parties found her cold body twisted and broken at the base of a cliff.

But it wasn’t only Suzanne who didn’t see only the things that were there.

* * *

I asked my wife whether the movie was past the scene where Nash is institutionalized, bound to a gurney, and overdosed on insulin to induce coma. She said, “yes,” so I figured I could deal with the rest ok. That had been the part of the movie that had made a mess of me when we saw it in the movie theater.

* * *

So the scene is Alicia, Nash’s wife, walking through the woods behind their house. She sees the door to an old standalone garage swinging open in the wind of a gathering storm. She goes to shut it, then glances inside. But instead of dusty old garage contents, she finds a paranoid’s collage of newspaper articles clipped and stuck to bulletin boards, bits and pieces underscored with markers, strings connecting one to another to another – an external representation of the bizarre, chaotic, pattern-making inside of a paranoid schizophrenic’s mind.

I see not only the movie’s story of Nash, and not only Alicia’s story-line realization that Nash is off his meds and can’t be trusted to bathe their infant daughter. What I see is the a visual depiction of a maelstrom of thoughts and ideas and concepts and assemblages that is troublingly like what I saw ten minutes earlier on the meditation cushion.

I turn away from the TV and see amassed in the bookcase at my bedside an ever-increasing collection of dharma books, philosophy, psychology. I see in my meditation practice, my yoga, a slightly frantic grasping. A bit of frightened aversion from depression. From the strange outside perspective of that moment, it all seems a little pathetic – even the grandiose notion that I’m pursuing enlightenment, rather than hiding in plain sight from imagined demons of the mind.

* * *

Me? Yeah. I’ve heard voices. Still do at different stages of meditation. Sometimes chaotic cacophony. Sometimes a thousand different voices all calling my name, some gently, some insistently, some annoyedly. You get the picture. But none really vindictive or destructive.

Seen things? Yeah, that too. Though what I’ve seen have been more like glimpses of a images from different dimensions. They didn’t strike me as “three-dimensional-world real.” More like overlays on 3-D real, making it simultaneously itself and something more. As real as anything I can sense is real. But not conventionally so.

Unconventionally? Yes, that.

* * *

So what about meditation?


Sometimes sitting on a block alone
is curiosity indulged.

Sometimes sitting on a block alone
is spacious awareness.

Sometimes sitting on a block alone
is superstitious genuflection.

Sometimes sitting on a block alone
is momentary rest.

Sometimes sitting on a block alone
is desperation embodied. And

Sometimes sitting on a block alone
is quietly empty.

* * *

What about seeing reality as it really is? I don’t know much about that.

* * *

In Arches National Park, there’s a gigantic boulder dramatically balanced on a thin fin of rock beneath it.


I remember the day it dawned on me that Balanced Rock was simply a result of largely disinterested mechanical processes that sometimes yield things that strike conscious minds as extraordinary.

* * *

One view of sanity is like that, too. An unexpectedly stable sort of awareness. One that lasts only as long as the substance undergirding it holds steady.

But that’s a bit too glib, too reductionist, too outside. Sanity is indeed a balance, and a precarious one, at that. But it’s one that can also shift, and jump, and dance from one stem of rock to another.

And sometimes to the ground.

* * *

As Neal Stephenson wrote in a recent novel, human minds are not only perceivers of sensory information, we’re nets that separate out some of the sensory input, and we’re lenses that concentrate it, and we’re communicants who distribute it. Awareness and community shape a cosmos awash in random data into form and order and beauty and balance.

I started meditating with the hope that I’d gain some clarity – that I’d better distinguish the real from the unreal. But instead of more certainty of the real, what I can lay claim to is seeing more clearly what there is to see from the inside of whatever it is that I’m inside of.

Is that the ground?

Ideas Welcome

Two details regarding the Spirit Rock retreat last week that I haven’t figured out at all:

First, I experienced a lot of anticipation leading up to the retreat. I probably talked too much about it with colleagues and friends, but they were patient and indulgent with my unfocused animation. As a yoga teacher persuaded me a long time ago, it’s often best to set aside expectations before embarking on a new sort of experience. But I didn’t manage that overly well this time.

To get to Spirit Rock for the start of the retreat on Wednesday, December 10, I had to catch a flight from DEN to SFO. Nothing terribly unusual about that. I get to the airport in the morning, check through security, find the gate, login, and field last-minute office work by email. The gate attendant calls the boarding sequence. I board, find my seat, and settle in.

And sitting there on the airplane, my mind shifts a bit, and I see everything from an outsider’s perspective – to borrow Oliver Sack’s phrase, like an anthropologist from Mars.

No, wait. That’s too cold. More like the first-time-appreciation of Miranda’s “…brave, new world…” phrasing, before Huxley turned it dark and naïve.

The people walking down the center aisle of the plane are a varied lot, each remarkable, each strange, each new. That they are embodiments of consciousness is remarkable, strange, and new. That I can see them is remarkable, strange, and new.

After a time, the sense subsides, leaving new tracings in my mind.

How? Why? Exactly what?

Couldn’t tell you.

Second, as I mentioned in a previous post, three days into the retreat, I woke, showered, walked to the meditation hall and sat the pre-dawn meditation. When the bell rang gently, I got up, left the hall, put on my shoes, and began walking down the hill to the dining hall.

As I walked on a little dirt path down the hill, my sense of self turned suddenly transparent, and I saw from the perspective of something other than Sean. Not that there wasn’t a Sean – he was there, but he wasn’t the perspective I was seeing from. He was the perspective that something was seeing through. That perspective was filled with quiet, abiding joy – joy at the cold air, joy at the diminishing cramp in Sean’s neck, joy at the emptiness before eating, joy at the peace of the retreat, joy at Sean’s sore right knee, joy at the slanting sun, joy at the cloud of exhaled air.
The sense sustained itself for a time, then subsided.

It’s hard to find the right words for the completely natural sense of seeing through the self of that experience.

* * *

Ideas or references to others’ ideas about such experiences are welcome.

Winter Haiku

Frog creaks at sundown,
Dry-throated; brown grass, acorns
Await winter rains.

Word-less-ness: Being Silently

Three days in to a five-day meditation retreat, this was my situation:

I’ve taken and lived a retreatant’s version of the Five Precepts: no harming any living being, no taking what is not offered, no speaking, no sex, no intoxicants.

At three days of silence, I’ve lived wordlessly for longer than I’ve ever done since I began talking at (my mother reports) six months of age.

The days are filled from before dawn to long after sundown with sitting and walking meditations, alternating. All in silence. After the first two hours on the first day, sitting meditation becomes progressively more uncomfortable – excruciating, if you listen to my ever-suffering mind. Briefly, the lotus blossom opens and transcendent clarity opens without notice, without words. It sustains and then subsides, its space and openness re-cloaked, re-filled with the muck of pain and suffering.

Late in the afternoon of the third day, I take a pen and write this note to my meditation teacher:

Howie,

I’m a bit frustrated with myself. I had one of those peak experiences this morning, and I spent the rest of the day in aches and pains and aversion and samsara.

Is this really the path? Does it get easier?

Sean

I fold the note and pin it to the section of the bulletin board for notes to Howie, and I go outside for a period of walking meditation.

The simple framing of my situation in words reignites my conceptual mind enough to allow me to see a space between the seeing and the suffering. My suddenly-word-re-enabled mind crafts responses from Howie to me:

Sean,

Yes, it’s the path. Easier? No.

Duh.

or

Sean,

Yup. Now go back to meditating.

I resolve to retrieve the note, as the very forming of the words has created the space I needed between the pain and the suffering. When the bell in the courtyard signals the end of the walking meditation, I return to the bulletin board and find that Howie has already collected the note. Ok. I return to silence and wordlessness.

The next morning, I find his response folded around my note, both pinned to the board. His note, of course, is much kinder than any I’d have written to myself:

Hi Sean,

Some days are dukkha days. Some days are sukkha days. Learning how to find our composure with both is the way… The by-product is more ease and consequently more pleasure. Hang in there. It is actually a sign of deepening when things get crazy.

Metta,

Howie

A most kind response to a problem that had resolved itself as soon as words were reintroduced into my mind.

* * *

I’m fascinated by the wordlessness of my time there. I became acutely aware several times of how much word-ing intervenes between experience and comprehension, how much dualistic word-ing shapes experience to fit dualistic models and understandings.

The longer I lived in silence – even for just the few days I was there – the quieter the word-ing part of my mind became. That was useful as it allowed me to see a bit more clearly what words would otherwise have obscured. But when the word-ing part of my mind subsided, I lacked the usual tool set that allows me to maintain a separation between my body’s pains and my mind’s suffering.

Makes me wonder what might be built with intention and awareness in such a space.

Buddha, Archetypes, and Coloring Books

From Wikipedia:

Archetypes are, according to Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, innate universal psychic dispositions that form the substrate from which the basic themes of human life emerge. Being universal and innate, their influence can be detected in the form of myths, symbols, rituals and instincts of human beings. Archetypes are components of the collective unconscious and serve to organize, direct and inform human thought and behaviour.
…

The archetypes form a dynamic substratum common to all humanity, upon the foundation of which each individual builds his own experience of life, developing a unique array of psychological characteristics. Thus, while archetypes themselves may be conceived as a relative few innate nebulous forms, from these may arise innumerable images, symbols and patterns of behavior. While the emerging images and forms are apprehended consciously, the archetypes which inform them are elementary structures which are unconscious and more difficult to apprehend. Being unconscious, the existence of archetypes can only be deduced indirectly by examining behaviour, images, art, myths, etc. They are inherited potentials which are actualized when they enter consciousness as images or manifest in behaviour on interaction with the outside world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jungian_archetypes (November 28, 2008)

* * *

In the religion I grew up with, trying to live in alignment with divine commandments is a pretty central feature. Commandment-style living starts with the assumption of a dictator-god, ideally, a benign and altruistic one. Mind you, I’m not saying that God is so, only that commandment-style living depends on the assumption. If we already hold that assumption, then as we interact with God we come away with commandments.

My experience with God, though, is that while I come to God with a coloring book and nicely drawn lines, God often enough colors outside the lines. When I’m paying attention, sometimes I see the coloring and I see the lines, and I say, “Oh – God has colored a bluebird.” True, when I look a little bit more clearly and honestly, I have to admit that the blue doesn’t stop at the edges of the bird lines on my paper. If I had different lines on my paper, it might look more like a flower. And, truth to tell, if I were to disregard the lines entirely, I’d probably conclude that the blue that God has colored looks a lot more like the sky than a bird. But I have a paper with bird lines on it, and they matter to me, and God has colored things blue, and I find a bluebird.

* * *

I sit in meditation. At home, I sit in a pretty sparse place. No altar, no incense, no statutes, no pictures.

My mind, as usual, flips and flops from one thing to another until jumps aboard a train of thoughts. It rides that rail for as long as it can hide from the “Hey! I see that!” part of my brain. When the mind-escape gets spotted, instantly, I’m off that particular train and back to the space between thoughts until off I go on another one.

Despite the spartan quality to my meditation space, I indulge myself one way: every now and again, when I’m having a particularly challenging time maintaining my focus, I allow myself to slip my mind into the Buddha – I let myself imagine that the “sean”-I drops away and the Buddha-I sees through my eyes. To write it out sounds artificial, and I suppose that it is from a perspective. To write it out sounds magical, and it really isn’t – at least it isn’t any more magical than identity itself.

But when I do this, I find a profoundly still and peacefulness that exists in every moment that I hold this mind-stance. Of course, that usually isn’t very long, as my monkey-mind starts scratching an itch, mentally or physically, until I’m lost once again on an ocean of thoughts.

* * *

Is the Buddha-sense and the stillness that comes from it just God-coloring in and on and over the Buddha-shaped lines of my coloring book? Is there a Buddha-archetypal built into my mind-culture? How does the form of the Buddha in my head make it easier for me to experience peace?

Off the mat -- Why Practice Yoga

A yoga teacher recently began a class I attended by saying that he’d run across an idea in his vocational rehabilitation study that he strongly disagreed with. He read:

Unless we die suddenly, we are all disabled eventually. Most of us will live part of our lives with bodies that hurt, that move with difficulty or not at all, that deprive us of activities we once took for granted or that others take for granted, bodies that make daily life a physical struggle.

--Wendell, S., “Toward a feminist theory of disability,” Hypatia, 4, p. 104 (1989)

“That may be true of people outside of this studio, but it’s sure not true of people who practice yoga.”

He said this to a room of 30-35 people, most of them in their twenties. I wondered for a few moments whether he noticed the age distribution of his class. And, if he did, I wondered how he would have accounted for the fact that there were few people in their thirties, and only one or two of us in our forties there.

The teacher was, I’d guess and as you might well have imagined, in his mid-twenties.

* * *

Aversion, attachment, delusion.

The Buddha taught that these three actions of our minds create and perpetuate suffering. The Buddha’s excellence lay not in finding a remedy for a life-scarred, pain-ridden, capacity-constrained body, but in finding freedom inside such a body.

Is a right hip joint with limited rotation a cause of suffering?

Is not being able to fly?

Yoga is a blessing. Within the context of a declining physical capacity, within the context of a limited range of flexibility, of a diminishing amount of strength, of a decreasing stamina for endurance, yoga allows us to blossom. In degrees, it does reduce pain, increase strength, advance flexibility, improve endurance. But if that is all there is to the practice of yoga, it is a band-aid on a heart attack.

Despite faithful practice, bodies age and die. Krishnmacharya died. Paramahansa Yogananda died. Vivekananda died. Gandhi died. Their yoga, as profound and committed as it was, did not save them from aging, decrepitude and death.

* * *

Asana, which we translate into the word “pose,” in the Yoga Sutra actually means “seat.” Patanjali did not seem to intend asana practice to be much more than the physical preparation needed to enable the yogi to sit quietly in meditation. That’s not to say that we should only practice asana for the purpose of enabling us to sit quietly. Much has been discovered and developed about the practice of yoga since Patanjali’s times. But it does stand as a reminder that yoga is about much more than a perfect body or a pain-free life. Over the past few years, I’ve come to realize that my meditation practice seems to bleed off the meditation cushion (actually, I use a block) and into every part of my life. As that has happened, I’ve come to appreciate Patanjali’s formulation of asana practice more. Asana practice is precisely to prepare us for our meditation practice – which practice is all of life.

The very definition of an asana practice is moving and stilling a body in a context of space and gravity. That physical embodiment is entirely defined by limitations. What is Warrior 3 pose other than an expression in and through the limitations of a particular body’s strength, flexibility, and endurance? Absent the limits, the pose isn’t a pose. Utkatasana, like lots of other yoga poses, quickly saps us of strength, of endurance. Though we often get entranced by discovering a deeper reserve of strength, of prana, a deep enough pose will never last more than a few minutes.

When I was a runner, I loved increasing the distance that I’d run. It was always a bit of a balancing act, because my mind could outrun my body, and I often found myself injured to one degree or another. One day as a part of a physical check-up, I was put on a treadmill for a heart check. The nurse wired me up, and started me running at an easy pace – well within the tolerances of my running practice. Trying to be helpful, but tinged with obvious pride, I told her that to get me to the point of exhaustion at that speed would take at least a couple of hours. She looked up from her equipment and smiled slightly, saying that this would take no more than fifteen minutes. I mentally shrugged to myself and proceeded into my mind thinking that I’d prove her wrong. After a couple of minutes at that level of exertion, she didn’t increase the speed any, but she increased the angle of the treadmill by a few degrees. A couple of minutes later, she did the same again. And a couple of minutes after that, I couldn’t run any longer.

I’d been living so comfortably within the confines of my own capabilities that it had never occurred to me to that I’d identified those conditions with the entire potential of existence. Nor did I have any idea of how short a distance there was between my relative ease and comfort and completely impossible physical experience.

Asana practice puts us into situations at the edges of our capabilities. Doing that has the fortunate side effect of expanding those capabilities to a small degree, but really not much in the over all scheme of things. But that’s ok because it’s just the side-effect. The principal effect of putting ourselves into situations at the edges of our capabilities is to train the mind, to allow us to experience pain and to discover how our minds respond to pain. To allow us to experience fear and to discover how our minds respond to fear. To allow us to experience frustration and to discover how our minds respond to frustration. To allow us to experience joy and to discover how our minds respond to joy. And as we become aware of each of those experiences, we strengthen the basic practice of awareness itself.

And awareness itself prepares us for meditation.

Bless the young yoga teacher’s heart, he meant well when he promised us that our bodies would not experience pain, would not decrease in flexibility, would not lessen in strength, in endurance. He was obviously wrong, of course, but given the age composition of the class he was guiding, he wasn’t alone in his thinking. Where were all the forty and fifty and sixty and seventy-year-olds? Their bodies, I’m dead certain, knew much of pain and stiffness and weakness and misalignment. Perhaps they, too, thought that if yoga didn’t confer on them strength and flexibility and stamina and energy, they’d failed. Or perhaps yoga had failed them.

Maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t yoga that failed them, but the unwise teaching that yoga, done right, was a panacea for ageing that failed them.

But eternal youth is not the promise of yoga. The promise of yoga is wisdom, and an end to suffering. Not an end to pain.

From a dharma talk by Pema Chodron:

The first thing the Buddha ever taught was there is suffering. It’s part of the human experience. It isn’t bad. No matter what you do, no matter how much money you spend, no matter how much physical exercise you get, no matter how many face lifts, or beautiful clothes, or the right diet, or whatever, you still have old age and death. And probably a lot of other things as well.

And so this whole attitude of the whole catastrophe living, you know, of actually opening your heart, softening around the whole thing, this is what I’m getting at here. … It’s all about learning to let go, loosen up, relax. And it’s never too late. I want to say that again and again. No matter how far you are into clutching and grasping and yelling and screaming and stamping your feet and throwing things, it’s never too late. You can never lose it. Because now is the moment. You just catch yourself right now.
-- The Pema Chodron Audio Collection, part 1.

More on Lucid Dreaming

A passing and recurring thought about lucid dreaming: if your experience is like mine, lucid dreaming arises seemingly spontaneously at some point in your life, then it subsides for a long time – for me, it subsided for many years. Then perhaps you have an experience or engage in a mind practice that touches the connection between awareness and subconscious, and it arises again for a time. Then it subsides again. It seems binary – on or off. Mostly off.

For me at present, it’s currently off.

At least mostly.

Mostly? Yeah. I’m beginning to question the binary nature of it.

Recently, I’ve been getting up early more or less consistently to meditate – earlier than I have done for a long time. I still haven’t mastered the getting-to-bed-on-time part to make this an easy process. The net result is that at least part of the time I’m meditating, I experience sleepiness.

And that, itself, is kind of interesting. I find that even when my mind is sleepy, my awareness is just pure, undiluted awareness. Not sleepy, or anything else, so far as I can tell. Just awareness. Though I don’t stay steadily in the witnessing awareness in my meditations, my mind (me?) does stumble into the state more frequently than I/it used to do. Often on my mat. Sometimes in daily life.

What I’ve come to realize is this: that “witness” state? It’s always present. Always. It’s not only present whenever I’m awake and alert – it’s present when I’m drowsy and sleepy. It’s present in the dreaming mind the instant before I awaken in the morning, and it’s present the consciousness the instant after I awaken in the morning.

But most times, my mind is not, itself, aware of the awareness.

In this morning’s meditation, my mind switched back-and-forth between normal thoughts/ sensations and awareness. And as it switched, it occurred to me exactly how much that the shift from thoughts to awareness is like waking up, like seeing clearly the background that has always been there, is always there.

And in that moment, I realized that the experience of lucidity while dreaming isn’t any different than the experience of lucidity while “awake.”

Both conditions are pretty rare. Both seem to occur more frequently when I practice mindfulness and resting in the witnessing awareness. Both feel more than a little like a kind of curious freedom.

summer haiku

On blond-striped Hosta
Raindrop sparkles, slides, lets go.
Leaf lifts minutely.

Meditation Update

Sitting is essentially a simplified space. Our daily life is in constant movement: lots of things going on, lots of people talking, lots of events taking place. In the middle of that, it's very difficult to sense that we are in our life. When we simplify the situation, when we take away the externals and remove ourselves from the ringing phone, the television, the people who visit us, the dog who needs a walk, we get a chance--which is absolutely the most valuable thing there is--to face ourselves. Meditation is not about some state, but about the meditator. It's not about some activity or about fixing something. It's about ourselves. If we don't simplify the situation the chance of taking a good look at ourselves is very small--because what we tend to look at isn't ourselves but everything else. If something goes wrong, what do we look at? We look at what's going wrong. We're looking out there all the time, and not at ourselves.

--Charlotte Joko Beck, Everyday Zen


It’s a little more than a year since I went to my first meditation retreat – one at Shambhala Mountain Center, led by David Nichtern and Cyndi Lee – and a bit longer than that – call it 14 months – that I’ve been meditating daily.

I’ve noticed that I am often judgmental of my practice. Some mornings, sitting is peaceful. Some mornings, it’s fascinating. Some mornings, it’s jittery. Some mornings, it’s a constant battle between distractions and effort. The thing is, I (or at least what I think of as the “small-I,” the self that sometimes seems all-encompassing and sometimes seems merely an object within awareness) likes certain kinds of meditation experiences, and dislikes others. And it translates “I like this experience of meditation” into “This is a good meditation session,” and it translates “I dislike this experience of meditation” into “This is a bad meditation session.” When I get into such a mind-mode, I try to remind myself of what meditation teachers constantly say to beginners: “Ignore your particular experience in meditation. Notice, instead, the effect of the meditation on the rest of your life.”

So in that vein, here’s what I’ve noticed about “the rest of my life”: whether a particular day or week or month of meditation is pleasant or unpleasant, since I began meditating, I’ve become more patient, I seem to see things a bit more clearly than I used to, I’m happier in an equanimous kind of way. I seem to be depressed a lot less, and I’m less attached to my manic days. I am more aware of my thoughts and my actions. I’m less reactive.

While it happens less frequently, I still go through lots of “small-I” experiences – getting angry at other drivers on the road, taking offense when someone says something that pushes one of my buttons, that sort of thing. But in recent months, even those experiences have changed, and that’s what I wanted to talk about here.

I’ve begun to experience this: even when I find myself unhappy or angry or offended, or annoyed – even though I still experience all of those things – it’s like they’re thinner somehow than they used to be – less substantial, less weighty, less important, less complete. (As I write, I hunt through Hartranft’s translation of the Yoga Sutra, and find that he uses the term “transparency” in expressing a related idea (III:56) – it’s a good match for what I’m trying to express.) It’s like I can see through the experiences to one degree or another, even as they happen.

Oh, don’t get me wrong – seeing through and beyond doesn’t mean that the small-I doesn’t react. If you’d been with me a couple of weeks ago when I stumbled into a bunch of stinging nettles along a backcountry stretch of the Henry’s Fork, you’d still have heard me swear loudly at the nettles. (The nettles were more equanimous and said nothing in response within my hearing.) But the negativity of the experience was easily contained in and perceived as the experience itself, not spilling out into other parts of life or mind. As I felt the needle-sharp pain in my calves and thighs, as I felt my body pull back, I was aware that it was the small-I that was responding, and not my whole being. It was like I was existence, and existence included the pain and consequences of nettles stinging but wasn’t limited to that experience, if that makes any sense at all.

* * *

In the Yoga Sutra, Patanjali says that part of our experience of life includes an unconditional part – “pure awareness” (sometimes it gets translated as the “seer” or the “witness”) – and that it is not something that can be perceived directly. But he also tells us we can still perceive it indirectly, nonetheless, because pure awareness can color the mind itself, just as the phenomenal world does, also. IV:23 In other words, while the small-I can’t see the seer, it can notice when it’s obscuring the simple experience of pure awareness – like looking through a window and suddenly realizing that you can see not only the trees and sky outside, but also a reflection of your own eye, at the same time. I’ve had this experience occasionally in yoga, more frequently in meditation – the “small-I” settling down enough to see itself reflecting the pure awareness that is the awareness through and of the small-I mind, itself.

Mirrors, everywhere.

* * *

At any rate, perhaps what I’ve recently experienced as the “transparency” or ‘thinning’ of experience is simply the small-I mind becoming a bit quieter, less impressed with itself, more aware. It is truly hard to come up with the right words for this experience. But whatever the correct articulation may be (and, dear readers, feel free to suggest any ideas that you have along these lines), the small-I seems changed by the simple experience of daily meditation practices of concentration and mindfulness.

Freer, in a word.

Off the mat -- Sadhana

Enough yoga people are refugees from overly structured jobs, overly organized religions, or just overly programmed existence that it's easy to think of yoga like we think of a massage or a soak in a hot tub -- something to be savored and treasured and absolutely free of all constraints. The relief it entails, alone, is worth the investment of time and money.

And when used in that fashion -- as a counterweight to the pressures and disciplines of the other parts of our lives -- there's lots of reason to resist allowing our yoga practice to turn into one more item on an ever-ugly "to do" list.

But if your experience is like mine and many of my friends' and students', there comes a time in your practice when the initial motivations start to transform and give way to others. If you started because you wanted to be a bit more fit, a bit less heavy, a bit more flexible, you might have been surprised to discover that your mind was responding to yoga as much as your body. And without necessarily losing interest in fitness, you might become more curious about how to live off the mat more in the "flow" state of mind you occasionally experience on the mat. If you started yoga because you wanted an escape from stresses and pressures of work or family, over time you might be surprised at the insights into those very stresses or pressures that occur to you in a particular pose, and you might find yourself wondering whether yoga might have more to offer your life than just an escape from it. If your interest hasn't transformed, don't sweat it -- there's really no point in arguing with a seed about when the right time to germinate might be.

But for those whose motivations have begun to transform, in yoga -- as in other parts of life -- if you keep doing what you've done, you'll keep getting what you've gotten. You reach a point where your current level of effort and action keep you where you are, but don't continue to carry you any farther. This shouldn't be a surprise to us. If we repeat the same poses again and again in exactly the same degree of extension, exactly the same degree of exertion, we won't increase strength or flexibility -- we'll maintain where we are, whether we're talking about Downward-facing dog, or Warrior 2 or Corpse. One of the cool aspects of yoga, though, is that while a particular stage of practice enables me to reach a particular point and become stable there, each stage also includes glimpses of the next. So "flow" states in my vinyasa practice start to persuade me that there's the potential for more grace in life off the mat. The peace and equanimity of my de-stressing yoga enable me to perceive the possibility of greater equanimity in life generally.

So as my perception of what is possible starts to shift, so too does my sadhana -- my spiritual practice -- start to change. I go from sweating happily on a yoga mat to discovering unexpected spiritual aspects to the practice to becoming curious about meditation. I go from being curious about meditation to sitting for a few minutes by myself. When I start sitting for a few minutes, I immediately discover how flitting and unsteady my attention is. But I also find a little bit more stability in my attention, a little bit greater concentration. As I reach the limits of what that practice level offers, I become more curious about what I might find with a more frequent and more sustained practice. So I go from sitting every now and again to sitting for ten minutes at a time, a couple of times a week. That lasts for months. I discover a greater awareness of my mind-chatter, of the potential for being aware of my thoughts. I begin to discover that I can perceive the experience of depression without pressing farther into depression. This is nothing short of a miracle, and I find my depression lessens in both duration as well as intensity. As I become stable in this level of practice, every now and again, I have glimpses of a much deeper perception -- of perceiving directly aspects of mind that I previously never noticed. And I change my practice, again, deepening the effort, increasing the discipline.

And so it goes.

But there's an easy-to-overlook risk to this kind of work. At each level of experience, there's a real risk that I'll attach to the practice itself, that even if I start simply going authentically where an experience leads, I'll derail at some point and pursue a practice because I "should" -- because conforming to my view of myself (or to my view of others' view of me) requires me to do certain things, to practice certain ways. Whenever we shift into that mode, we've moved into reinforcing an artificial sense of self, whether in my own eyes or in the eyes of others. Ego is a sneaky critter, and it's as content to hide behind spiritual practice as it is to parade around in more obvious forms. When we adopt a new sadhana for ourselves, when we change our current sadhana, when we continue a sadhana, it's always worth asking, "who wants this, and why?"

As plenty of Buddhists have discovered and taught, enlightenment happens as an accident -- it is absolutely not a product of yoga or meditation. So why practice at all? It seems that deep practices of yoga and meditation seem to make us accident-prone.

* * *

For myself, I haven't worked out exactly what the perfect relationship might be between structured discipline and letting go. Some days, it is clear that letting go is the answer. Others, that more discipline is the answer. I like to remember a comment from a Zen teacher -- I think it was Ajahn Chah -- to the effect that his students complained that his instructions were contradictory. He said that when his students were about to walk off the path to the left, he'd tell them to "go to the right" and when they were about to go off the path to the right, he'd tell them to "go to the left." The instructions only seemed contradictory to one who couldn't see the path or the students.

Some of the answer, I'm confident, is found in Krishna's instruction to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita:

You have the right to work, but never to the fruit of work. You should never engage in action for the sake of reward, nor should you long for inaction. Perform work in this world, Arjuna, as a person established within himself -- without selfish attachments, and alike in success and defeat. (2:47-48)

This approach is, at once, both the practice and the objective of the practice -- it is a practice that enables us to let go of the insistence that the practice deliver us the objective of the practice. If that sounds contradictory, then I think you've got it.

Perhaps some of the answer can be found in the Heart Sutra's teaching that Form is not other than emptiness -- Emptiness is not other than Form. Discipline of any kind -- like embodiment itself -- involves imposing constraints on consciousness. Imposing those constraints is a wonderful way to enable perception and attention and focus. There's nothing like a hamstring at its fullest extension to enable us to feel clearly. Similarly, there's nothing like a long meditation to enable us to see how our minds twist their ways through attachment and aversion and delusion. Maybe what we need to remember in the middle of a disciplined effort is that as valuable as it may be, it's simultaneously emptiness -- nothing to attach to. If that's right, perhaps the other side is equally true -- whenever we find ourselves insisting on freedom and liberation, it may be worth reminding ourselves that it's found in and through all Form, including -- sometimes, at least -- highly structured and ascetic-looking practices that, in the end, are just being.

Meditation Update

My recent meditation practice has become consistent recently – not consistent as in “daily.” It was already that. Consistent as in the experience.

I go through a slightly-too-precious process of settling into my meditation seat.

I draw my attention to my breath.

Once I get focused on it and once I’ve drawn a lung-full of air, I begin to count breaths. Exhale, exhale, exhale, exhale. One. Inhale, inhale, inhale, inhale. One. Exhale, exhale, exhale, exhale. Two. Inhale, inhale….

After counting up to and then down again from ten, I allow the calisthenics of breath to settle into watching the mind.

I’ll get snagged on a thought or two, away for a time, then coming back to the posture, balancing my spine. Or to the breath, feeling it crossing the nostrils’ horizon.

And watching the mind, I’ll hear a voice I’ve not heard before say something I’ve not thought before. I’ll note “voice” and wonder for a moment whether it’s just an oddment of the sediment at the bottom of my mind's pool, swirling up, or whether a quieted mind, once the self relaxes, allows others in.

Or perhaps the mind will follow some other meander or two.

But then, eventually – consistently – I meet fear.

The fear I meet doesn't seem to appear in the body it wears in daily life. And for reasons I’ve not discerned, it never seems to present itself in the same attire twice.

One day it poses as a remembered dream.

One day a kabuki-styled painted dancer who suddenly turns his gaudy eyes toward me.

One day it seems a viscosity against moving deeper into mind.

Though I’ve not discerned the why, the what is getting clearer. The fear becomes a stopping place. A door that I don’t open. A place to resist and insist and exist.

Perhaps until the -isting itself relents?

Solstice and darkness and shadows

Meditation sometimes leads to the quiet still point of mind watching consciousness watching mind watching the waves and troughs of mind itself -- Patanajali calls this dhyana.

But not usually, and not recently. Recently, it’s been a cycling sequence of distraction and a strongly a coerced concentration I can muster. When the mind quiets, I release the straitjacket and off the mind goes, less like a puppy than a rhinoceros. And when it tires of rhino behavior, a persistent cramp in my right rhomboid creates enough affliction that I find myself corkscrewing my spine to stretch the cramp before I even perceive the intention to move. Once the Kripalu-experience-borne depth and peace subsided after my return, this has been my meditation practice.

The cramp, itself, has become something of a story, but one that is terribly bland and normal. The relevant point for this post – the acupuncturist I’ve had working on it has diagnosed me with a yin energy deficiency – yin being the female, dark, stable, solid counterpart to yang, which is the male, white, willful, airy energy. Without enough yin, he tells me, your muscles lack the energy to relax and release. Hence the relatively constant cramp.

Final piece to today’s experience – I’ve been conducting the choir and assembling the Christmas program for my congregation’s Christmas service, which we presented earlier today. What is conducting a choir? It is an exercise in maintaining energy, inspiring work, maintaining attention to black dots and lines on pages of music, being in front, in charge and on display.

Knowing that the program is set for the 9:00 a.m. service, I get up early this morning, just before 5:00 a.m., so I can meditate in peace. It’s pitch dark, and I re-remember that it’s still the longest night, not yet morning.

I’m tired enough of straitjacket dharana meditation work. And it occurs to me that perhaps its time to resume a loving-kindness meditation. I begin, as I learned, first for myself. Then I’ll get to a loved one, then a neutral one, then an adversary.

That’s the sequence. I’ve done this before. Sometimes just a repetition or two at each stage, sometimes a week’s worth of repetitions.

I practice the meditation for myself. Then I choose a loved one – a happy child of some friends who likes to be tossed up into the air. Then I choose a neutral one. Then I pause for a moment to allow my mind to draw up an adversary. My mind discards the usual suspects. They don’t seem right, less substantial this morning. Then my mind shifts a bit, consciousness shines in through a crack and I see the adversary.

I have an adversary. But it isn’t another person. It is me. Jung called it the shadow. The straitjacketing-front-and-center-choir-director part of my mind scoffs: You can’t do a lovingkindness meditation for yourself.

But, of course, I can – the meditation starts exactly that way.

I allow consciousness of shadow within me – of darkness, of inertia, of stability, of grounding, of emptiness, of yin. And I extend loving-kindness to it.

On this, the darkest night of all the year.

* * *
Jean Vanier, founder of l’Arche, has said that we will continue to despise other people until we come to see within ourselves the despicable.

Stillness behind, below, between, and inside

Two things, linked:

1. Yesterday, I got around to listening to this podcast at Speaking of Faith. It is an interview of Matthew Sanford, a yoga teacher who has been paraplegic since he was in a car accident at the age of 13. The entire interview is well worth the time needed to listen to it, but one of the points he made in several different ways really resonated with me: that there is, at the core of us, a quality of experience he calls "silence" that he learned to discover, and then to perceive even in the active aspects of his life in the body and mind. I won't try to elaborate on his point, as I wouldn't do it justice. Listen to the interview.

2. Last night, I went to sleep listening to the rain falling on our roof. At some point in the night, I awoke to the sense of absolute silence. Of course, it wasn't really absolute -- I could hear my heart beating, the sound of my breath across my nostrils and through my broncheal tubes, of the shifting of sheets and blankets in the bed. But at some point in the night, the rain had changed to snow, and the snow absorbed all of the sounds that usually form the baseline that my mind has come to accept as "silence" -- traffic from the not-too-distant freeway, that sort of thing.

So this morning, I get up, shower, and decide to do my meditation practice before finishing getting ready for Church.

Usually, my meditation practice starts with about 15 minutes of mind-tennis, as my mind tries to volley with "thought" or "judgment" or "desire" each idea that flies in across the net. Then it settles into a kind of quiet vigilance.

But this time, three or four breaths in, I find this lake of silence. Then, as thoughts or desires or whatever arise, I perceive them clearly against the stillness of the background.

Yoga occurs when a body moves through space aware its interbeing with that same lake of stillness.

Off the Mat -- Svadhyaya

(Another in my series of dharma talks with my yoga class.)


Try to pronounce that one.

Svadhyaya means “self-study.” It stands for the unremarkable point that if we don’t pay attention to ourselves, we won’t understand ourselves.

The remarkable parts happen when we do pay attention to ourselves – or, rather, when we try to do so. “Self,” it turns out, is a remarkably slippery critter. To get the point, it’s worth trying to spotlight it. So by all means, go ahead. Close your eyes, and use your mind to identify what is “you.” Sometimes, we think of our “self” as an occupant of the position in space defined by the outside of our skin. But once you close your eyes, that spatial relationship mechanism starts to seem pretty artificial. Sit in a silent place, and you’ve lost the audial stimuli. Holding still, you will quickly lose track of most sensory stimuli. So once you get that far, move into your mind.

Are you your name? Well, that’s easy – of course not. You can change your name. Are you a particular set of memories? Are you the same person you remember being last week? Last year? Ten years ago? Thirty? If you’ve changed, what does it mean to talk about yourself during those periods? If you’ve changed over time, are “you” a particular pattern of behaviors and responses? When those change, are you someone other than you are today?

Whether we look at body, memory, behavior, or whatever, while we can see reasons to talk about a “self,” the more carefully we look, the less we seem to find. If you can look at something and think of it as a thing – whether it be a shoe, a fingernail, or a memory – once you see it as a thing, you realize that it doesn’t define you – in fact, it seems very much to be not the “you” that observes it. It’s just a stream of various perceptions.

If you sit in meditation (and meditation is the basic practice of “self study”) even for just a few minutes, you’ll quickly discover lots of thoughts – some are memories, some are fantasies, some are judgments. But whatever they are, they are like pictures that flash up on a movie screen. They aren’t you – you are the one observing them. Sometimes they convey a sense of familiarity – not only do you remember a particular event, you remember remembering the event previously. You can learn to recognize that sense of familiarity. But the fact that a memory is familiar does not make the memory “you.” Memories are other than “you.”

So what’s left? It’s a secret, and you have to find out for yourself. Or your “self’ Or your “Self” or your “SELF” or however you want to think of it.

Really – I’m not trying to hide the ball here. I could tell you what I’ve found when I looked, but if I did, what you would hear (or read) would seem (unremarkably) something that is not “you.”

To some degree, this is all quite sensible. If you first learned of yoga from seeing someone else practice, whether live or in a book or on a video of some kind, see if you can reconstruct what you thought yoga was and would be as you looked at it from the outside, and then compare that with your experience of yoga the first time you stepped onto a mat. And then compare that with your most recent experience on the yoga mat. One teacher I’m familiar with suggested that you perceive about 10% of what’s really going on when you watch someone else practice yoga compared with practicing it yourself. I’d go farther: they’re simply different experiences. One happens from the outside to someone else. The other is your own experience. One is a glove. The other is your living hand feeling the glove around it.

So if “self” is so slippery, what point is there in looking for it? There’s an easy answer and a deeper one. The easy one: realizing what isn’t “me” helps me to let go of ideas and beliefs that no longer serve me. I tend to get attached to things that I like, that provide security, that are familiar. While attachment itself can be a problem, attachment to things as they no longer are can really cause problems. Svadhyaya, self-study, helps bring me back to the present, to things as they are now, while I’m looking at them, rather than as how I remember they once-were-but-no-longer-are. The deeper answer to why not? Self-study, Patanjali’s svadhyaya, enables us to see our prejudices, our habits, our addictions, our self-delusions, our hypocrisies, our self-ish-ness. And seeing them enables us to work more skillfully around and through and past them. But it also allows us to see the warmth of our compassion for other beings, the clarity of our intelligence and perception, and to understand our relationship to – our “inter-being with,” as Thich Nhat Hahn calls it – all of existence. Wisdom.

When you’ve looked, what have you found?

Metta -- Practicing a Lovingkindness Meditation

For PGK, should she stop by.

I like to live intuitively. I like to believe that as I hike up a dry canyon, I'll find a spring of fresh water before I dehydrate too badly; that beauty is spontaneous; that solutions will spring Athena-like fully grown from my mind; that understanding will be revealed like a curtain swept away from a window.

Often enough, that is exactly what happens.

So I was pretty delighted when I heard about the notion of a Buddhist meditation practice, metta, that engendered lovingkindness.

And I was equally dismayed when I learned the mechanics of the practice. (A basic set of instructions can be found here.)

What? I'm supposed to practice by repeating this blather to myself about "May I be healthy, may I be happy, may I be whatever"? How can that help anything? This is just one of those self-delusional New Age indulgences. I don't want contrivance. I want to be filled with divine love.

And so I set metta practice aside for several years, focusing myself on more "important" stuff.

Then, more recently, I ran across Sharon Salzberg's book, Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness, Shambhala Publications: Boston, 1995. Reading it, she provided more context for practicing a lovingkindness meditation, and I was probably more ready for the instruction at that point. As I recall her instruction, she recommended starting the practice by reference to oneself, and sustaining the practice not just for a five minute session, but for a week or a month of daily sessions, before even venturing beyond oneself and applying it to others.

Compromiser that I am, I figured that I spend 20-30 minutes each morning on an elliptical trainer, usually reading something. I could do a week's worth of elliptical trainer time practicing the metta meditation, rather than reading. (Yes, I know. Elegant image. Now lay it aside. ;-)) The first day, the practice felt pointless. The second through fourth days, I started to become aware of the ways that I resisted really allowing myself to feel lovingkindness toward myself, even at the basic level of the meditation. By the end of the week, something inside me had relaxed enough to settle into the practice.

So the next week, I started with myself, then shifted the meditation practice to someone I loved. The instruction I had told me that it was best to choose someone to whom I was not sexually attracted, to avoid confusing the experience with the attachment that can easily arise to supplant lovingkindness. With such an instruction, I knew exactly whom to use: the 18-month-old daughter of a family in my ward. She had a penchant for wandering down the aisles of the chapel during sacrament meeting, finding me, and plopping herself down, either on my lap for a nap, or on the pew beside me for a more elaborate game of giving and taking, usually involving the sketch pencil and kneadable eraser I usually bring to Church for sketching during sermons. It was easy to desire her health, happiness, peace, and clarity. So the second week, I enjoyed the practice of desiring the best for her.

The third week, I was supposed to start with myself, then move to the loved one, then move to a person about whom I felt neutral. Feel neutral? What does that mean? I don't know that I feel neutral toward anyone. I got over the intial confusion, picked out someone whom I didn't know very well, and used him. The meditation wasn't particularly illuminating or easy that week, but it wasn't terribly burdensome, either.

The fourth week, Salzberg's book instructed me to choose someone I disliked -- an enemy. The selection proved to be more of a challenge than the neutral person. I don't have enemies. I get along with everyone. Duh. Finally, I selected a person whom I perpetually seemed to be cross-wise with online. So I started the meditation with myself, shifted to my loved one, my neutral one, and added my antagonist.

So what did I find? Much to my surprise (and with a degree of chagrin, given my preference for Athenian-birth events, rather than deliberation and incremental ones), I found that I was happier that month than I ever expected to be, even though often enough, the happiness didn't seem directly traceable to the meditation practice. But some things were more readily traceable.

By seeing how I resisted allowing myself to feel lovingkindness toward myself, I was able to relent a little, let a little more light, a little more space in. I didn't have any earth-shaking revelations about loving the loved one, though the meditation did lead me to acknowledge explicitly how much I enjoy her company. I found myself paying a little more attention to the person I was so neutral about. In realizing neutrality, I realized that much of it stemmed from just not knowing him very well. The more I noticed, the more I found to value. The antagonist? First, the practice led me to look more carefully at antagonism and adversity. (I am a litigator, after all.) Attending to it more allowed me to see more antagonism, and more subtle ways that I am antagonistic, and more ways that I project antagonism onto others.

It also made me want to test some of the hypotheses I'd developed about my interactions.

Now, more than a year later? I've decided that love is mostly a muscle -- it can be developed with practice, it atrophies with disuse. Most of my life, I've loved what I've loved and I've been perplexed by its absence when I noticed I didn't love someone.

But mostly, I'm happier. My world has expanded a little bit. I'm less inclined to flip people off during freeway commutes. I notice more when I get mad, when I think someone is being intentionally contradictory, when I am about to dismiss someone as irrelevant or boring.

And I've concluded that there really isn't any clear line between loving myself, loving my little sacrament meeting companion, and loving Bin Laden.

A pearl goes up for auction
No one has enough,
so the pearl buys itself.
-- Rumi

Meditation on Shambhala Mountain Center Retreat

A couple of weeks ago, I arrived at Shambhala Mountain Center for a four-day meditation and yoga retreat.

SMC is about a two hour drive from Denver – freeways to Ft. Collins, a two-to-four lane from Ft. Collins to a winding two-lane up and into the foothills to a dirt road, to an unpretentious faded maroon and yellow sign that marks a bumpy drive through a gap in the fenceline. With me for the drive up is a late-twenties college student who indicated a need for a ride from Boulder to Shambhala. When we met, she thanked me for the ride, we chatted for a bit, and she went quiet, napping in the hot sunshine of the roadtrip. At the gap in the fence, I slow and turn into the gate. There is an interesting sense of arrival, as I’ve much anticipated this, and there is a sense of quiet.

A sign points from the parking lot to a crushed stone path that leads a couple hundred yards to an old two-story cabin that looks like it was built in the 1920s as a ranch house. A sign in front says, “Registration.” We walk to it, my ride-sharer stops and greets some friends. I continue on. The front door is open. I climb the few steps to the front porch and walk in. There’s a table with printed clip-on nametags, alphabetized. I do a quick count – it looks like there will be about sixty of us in the program, maybe a few more, if others have arrived earlier than I. I don’t recognize any names, but I didn’t expect to.

A few paperwork items with a person behind a desk. Only one is unexpected – “rota.” The form I fill out says that “rota” is an essential part of the experience of Shambhala, and provides a place for me to record what “rota” I will be doing. The person behind the desk hands me a sign-up sheet with chores listed out – Sunday breakfast dishes, Friday sweeping Sacred Studies Meditation Room, things like that. Following many of them is a variety of handwriting styles and inks – names of people who’ve already taken on one thing or another. There is an open space beside “Saturday cleaning Sacred Studies Foyer” where I write my name. The person behind the desk hands me a map of the area that, from the looks of it, is a ninth or tenth generation photocopy of the original map. With a pink highlighter, she shows me the tent I’m assigned to, the registration cabin where we are now, the path to “downtown,” the road from registration to the bathhouse my tent is nearest.

I drive the rider to her bathhouse, we drop off her gear, and I then drive to my bathhouse and do the same with my gear, leaving it on the porch, and return the car to the parking lot.

Map in hand, I begin walking through Shambhala. It is a curious mixture of buildings – an old ranch-style cabin used for registration, a few trailers of the sort that construction crews use to house offices on work sites, some one- or two-room cabins that look cobbled together from spare parts from a building supply store, large tented buildings set on wooden platforms, and several nearly new buildings scattered around, the latter all bearing a similar style and design. Tents are grouped around bathhouses – two sets of tents are near the “downtown” area, an area consisting of a kitchen/food prep building (1920s cabin style), a massive dining hall tent, a 1920s cabin style gift-and-sundries shop, a smaller dining area tent, and a new Sacred Studies building. Other tent groups are scattered a quarter- to a half-mile from “downtown.” Mine’s an outlier, though not the farthest.

On the trip through downtown, I’m surrounded by people who are engaged in conversations, grouping here and there at improvised picnic tables. I wonder whether four days apart from my family, pursuing activities and interests they do not share, is going to be a good thing or not.

I find my way back to the bath house, carry my gear to my assigned tent. It’s a single, though there are two platforms, two foam rubber pads, two bookcase/shelves, and two racks. I grab my backpack, dropping the rest of the gear. Suddenly mindful of my non-mindfulness, I stop, unpack everything, and organize the tent before proceeding back to downtown and dinner.

Through the solitude of crowds, I get dinner and then make my way, as instructed by the schedule, to the Sacred Studies building. The entry has large doors defended by Tibetan-style stone lions. They try to look fierce, but their size puts them only slightly larger than the over-fed cat snoozing in the sun by the dining hall tent. The foyer to the building has benches, coat racks and cubbyholes, and a sign that requests we remove our shoes before proceeding through the next set of doors. I comply and push through the inner doors.

There is an entry area, and behind it, another set of double doors, these wide open, to a brightly lighted, bamboo-floored meditation hall. The ceiling is vaulted in the center, lower on the two open wings. On the back wall of the room is an altar, framed by large portraits of two men. I recognize the older one as Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche and the younger one as his son, Sakyang Mipham Rinpoche. There is no furniture in the hall, but there are lots of yoga mats laid out with meditation cushions. About 2/3rds of them are occupied. I enter the hall. Despite the people shifting around, finding places to sit, shuffling odds and ends, it is palpably quiet and still.

***

The retreat is led by Cyndi Lee, an accomplished yoga teacher, and David Nichtern, a teacher of meditation, trained in Tibetan Buddhism and a student of the lineage that founded SMC. Most of their introductory remarks are not, themselves, remarkable. They outline the retreat’s intended structure and content enough to quiet the “what will happen next?” part of the participants’ monkey minds. They talk about their own experiences and background enough to quiet the “can I trust these people?” part of the participants’ monkey minds. And they talk long enough for us to settle into the physical room, wiggling on yoga mats, shifting on meditation cushions, glancing around the room at other participants, the altar, the lights, the windows.

Two things, though, stick in my mind about the leaders’ initial remarks. In her self-introduction, Cyndi Lee says something along the lines of this: “During the retreat, I will play the role of mother – when I see things that can be done better, I’m going to tell you so, and maybe adjust your poses to get you there. Don’t be offended.”

In his self-introduction David Nichtern says something along these lines: “Most of you probably don’t know anyone else here, so you’re probably a little lonely. In a meditation retreat, being a little lonely is a good thing.”

***

I signed up for the retreat because it combined both yoga and meditation, two practices that have become central to my life. As it turns out, I find the meditation a lot harder than the yoga.

The retreat is structured in four basic sessions, each one with a headline message which is elaborated through a meditation session (including dharma talk and practice) and a yoga practice. In normal life, I practice yoga between an hour and two hours a day (sometimes three, if you count the time in classes that I teach, too). By contrast, I sit on my meditation cushion about a half hour each day, and I always wind up opening my eyes between the 20 and 25 minute marks, because I can’t really believe that I haven’t been sitting for way more than a half hour by that point.

The first headline message worked through in meditation and a yoga practice is Making Friends With Yourself. Befitting such an innocuous-sounding message, the meditation practices were brief explorations of the mind, noting the thoughts as they arose. The meditation leader introduced us to the shamatha meditation practice of watching the breath. When we notice the mind wandering from that object of concentration, he instructed, just notice the fact of the wandering, and return the attention to the breath.

In my novice-style and inconsistent pranayama practice, I have worked a number of breath patterns, focusing on them closely, so this instruction sounds pretty easy. David says, though, not to try to control the breath – just watch it. And he instructs us to do the meditation with our eyes open, something I’ve never been able to manage very well, as I tend to find visual images endlessly distracting (don’t get me in an art gallery or sculpture garden if you want me to stay focused on anything other than paintings or sculpture).

This is the first time in years that I’ve tried to practice meditation other than alone, either in my closet (it’s a walk-in, with enough space on the floor for a pad), or my basement. Despite Cyndi and David’s efforts in the introductory session to quell monkey-mind responses to the novelty of the situation, my monkey-mind churning consumes almost all of the first session, just getting used to the idea of seeing something while meditating, being aware of other people while meditating. When I meditate alone, there is always a very clear and noticeable mind response when I hear anyone – even my dog –approaching. So meditating in the same room with sixty or seventy other people requires a bit of getting used to. Still, I’m surprised at how effective my mind is at zipping off to the usual storage shed of fantasies, tangents, visual fascination with the floor, distractions, and the like.

The second session headline is Dynamic Equilibrium, a concept I’m pretty comfortable with from yoga practices. There’s no such thing as a perfectly still pose. In every pose, opposing muscles are constantly adjusting their tension against one another. David introduces us to the idea that meditation works the same way – there is no such thing as the perfectly still mind – just stillness as a function of increasingly minute adjustments.

The third segment of the program, Obstacles as Path, gives us an opportunity to see the experience of disruptions and obstacles and interferences to the objective as the object of the meditation or yoga itself. As David and Cyndi introduce it, it sounds unpleasant. As we practice it, it is unpleasant. David remarks, “why should we think meditation is only about light and butterflies?” But the experience is worse than it sounds. David strikes the bell, and we’re into the meditation session. Because my right knee is bugging me a little after the first day, I opt for a vajrasana meditation pose.

Turns out that if obstacles to meditation are the objective, this is a good call. If comfort is the objective, I could have made a better choice. After about 15 minutes, I’m starting to hurt – both ankles, right foot, and a big knot that’s beginning to form under my right shoulder blade. I’ve opted to sit with my eyes closed, as the first day, I never really got to the meditative mind state with them open. After 20 minutes, I’m obsessed with the discomfort, with the pain the back, the pain in the ankles. After about 21 minutes, I’m mad at the teacher – really, really mad, because he didn’t tell us how long he was going to keep us in meditation. At 21:20 minutes, I’m wondering how long we’ve been sitting together. At 21:35 I’m wondering how much wiggling I can get away with. At 21:37, I’m starting to control my breath frequency and depth. At 21:40, I do circles with my neck, only realizing I must have decided to move my neck and head after I finish moving them. The circles stretch the knotted muscles a little bit, and I return to the breath. At 21:44, I’m thinking about the yoga teacher’s assistant who adjusted my downward dog pose the day before. At 21:52, I’m annoyed about how long we’re going to be sitting here. At 22:03, I’m getting really really mad.

You get the picture.

When my pissed-off-ness reaches its fourteenth or fifteenth peak of suffering – “how long is he going to keep us here!?!? He’s just being mean! Why should I sit here just because he told me to? How long—”

****GONG****

Suddenly, I don’t want to open my eyes. I don’t want the meditation to end with me bitching and whining inside myself, mentally yelling for it to end.

But’s that’s exactly what happens.

So instead of feeling like my demands were met, I feel like I childishly wasted the meditation period.

No bliss. No deep insights into impermanence. No sudden understanding of interdependent arising. Barely a few split seconds of even superficial awareness of my own mind.

How long was the sitting? I really haven’t any idea, there are no clocks in the hall, and David doesn’t tell us. In retrospect, I suspect it was about 40-45 minutes, but given the drama yelling match going on in my head, it could have been 15 minutes for all I know. I feel frustrated. A bit stupid. But I come away with this: I’m truly startled by how loud my mind gets and how little space is left for anything but its vociferous suffering as I do nothing more interesting than sit still for a bit.

David leads us through a walking meditation, which is both a relief, and kind of interesting. Whatever the artificial drama of the seated meditation session, the walking session allows me to settle my mind into seeing what comes up. We return to more seated meditation, more of a “normal” experience, more comfortable, more possible. And shorter.

In the yoga practice that follows, holding Warrior 3 for an extended period feels like a blessing.

***

That evening at dinner, one of the participants in the retreat recommends that I hike up to the top of a nearby (and not-too-tall) peak on a ridge to watch sunrise dawn.

***

I awaken well before dawn, glance out the tent’s east-facing window, and see only the night lights of Ft. Collins reflected against the clouds in the distance. I roll over. I awaken again a bit later. The east-facing window shows a bit more light in the eastern sky. I realize that it’s getting near time for departure. My mind pokes at memory to guess how long before sunrise. I suspect I should get going. I close my eyes again. I awaken again. After repeating the sequence yet again, I swing my feet to the floor, put on levis and lace up my hiking boots. I have a drink of water and head out of the tent. The sky is lighter than I expected. It’s probably later than I’d planned. Following the rough instructions I remember from last night, I find a trail to the Great Stupa (about which, more later). Every now and again, maybe a half dozen times before I get to the Stupa, the trail is marked by and passes between tall poles, wrapped in vertically long, but horizontally narrow, flags. Empty gates.

I pass by the Stupa itself, navigate around it, and head up a rough and steep dirt road up the mountain. I’m alone and entirely at peace. At the edge of the road, I find tufts of silver sage growing. I pick a few fringed leaves, twisting them in my fingers to release their scent and drop them into my pocket. It blends with the dew-strong scents of morning flowers and pines. The road crests beside a rocky crag. There’s a bench to rest on, but I see a thin trail leading to the rocks themselves, and several ways up from there. The three-peaked crag seems more than 50 feet high, less than a hundred. It’s the sort of crag that any respectable primate can climb. As I go up, I find in sheltered spots beneath overhanging rocks dried masses of what looks like potter’s clay, shaped to the size of a small snowball, pressed into the rock. Clearly human-brought. I haven’t any idea what they are or why they are placed there. I scramble higher. The air temperature is cool, but not overly so. The fleece shirt I’m wearing is damp from sweat, but not wet. As I scramble to the top, I look and my brain goes through the nearly instantaneous adjustment it always does when I think I’m alone and suddenly find that I’m not. I see that there are two people here already, sitting in meditation – a man I’ve seen in the dining tent, and the yoga instructor’s assistant. They smile, I nod, bow, and find a rock to sit on. I realize that I’m probably sitting between them and the bright point on the horizon where the sun will rise in a few seconds. I shift to a lower rock, off to the side, and at the edge of the crag. I sit.

The barest shred of the sun is just above the horizon, burning its edges. We’re high enough that I can see past the foothills, and the horizon is set by the long, flat plains east of Fort Collins. I settle into my seat, focus soft, eyes half-open, and gaze toward the rising sun. Even before the sun is halfway above the horizon, I’ve noticed its north-to-south motion, its summer morning path as it rises into the ecliptic plane. There is a steady breeze pressing gently against my back, sweeping past and through me. The air has a kind of clarity that seems brilliantly present and empty. I inhale, drawing in the breeze, exhale, noticing the breath rejoin the wind. My vision set on the sun rising above the horizon, my attention on my breath, my mind stills.

Arising in my mind, the impermanence of a sun rising over eroding mountains.

Then stillness.

I hear the dopplerizing of bird calls. A dozen or so small birds speed just over our heads, flying eastward and down into the valley below us, faster than the wind.

Arising in my mind, the emptiness of space and air all around the crag, my skin.

Then stillness.

I hear the two people with me at the mountaintop shift and rustle. After a few moments, they enter my line of vision, scrambling diagonally down the rocky crag. I hear their boots crunch gravel as they make their way to the dirt road, and head down mountain. The texture of my breath changes to the shaking of grief. From the inside, I watch it. My body is sobbing. I notice that I am alone again.

Then stillness.

Something clicks in my head. I straighten my spine and bow toward the rising sun. I turn and explore the rest of the top of the crag.

I’m at the highest point on the crag. It is marked with another vertically long, horizontally short flag. There are two other lower crests to the crag, each one marked the same way.

There is, in the niche formed at the base of an overhanging boulder, a Buddha statue. Around the statue are offerings – quarters, a Chapstik, a whistle, a broken clay pipe, a rolled-up dollar bill. I find in my pocket a bit of the silver sage I’d twisted on the path up to the crag. I set it before the Buddha.

Behind the boulder is a flat stone, large enough to stand on, but only barely. I pull off my boots and socks, my shirt, and I begin a sun salutation: standing, hands at heart center. Draw kneecaps up, tightening quads to femurs. Sweep arms wide, then up, alongside ears. Turn gaze straight up. In the morning-brightened sky, directly overhead, I see the last star of the night, still shining. Bend at hip joints, flat back, arms extended to either side, swan-diving forward and down. My gaze rests on the granite beneath my feet. Half lift, to a flat spine, arms still extended earthward; full forward bend, hands grasping calves, face pressed to shins. Then sweeping up to standing, hands at heart center. Then again. And again. And again.

Each motion is practiced, familiar. My mind is embedded in my flesh, in the air of the crag, in the stone at my feet, the star above me, the sun-brightening sky.

***

As I work my way down the dirt road from the crag, the air cools in spots, warms in others. At the back of the Stupa, I see a path that branches off and upward, more southerly than the eastward path I’m returning from. A sign indicates a Shinto shrine ahead. I follow the path. A couple of hundred yards up the hill, there is an open shelter that includes instructions. I draw the cleansing water from a covered basin, wash my hands, my mouth. I bow, passing through the gateways framing the path, empty space within them, before them, beyond them. I greet the shrine, see the offerings of rice, of salt. I bow, take a grain of salt and place it on my tongue. I clap loudly, twice; bow twice. Then work my way back down the path, through the empty gates.

At the Stupa, I remove my boots, enter. There are others here. I sit and gaze at the towering Buddha figure before me.

I stand and withdraw. Outside, I re-boot, and begin walking down the path to the Stupa. I stop at an offertory that I must have passed on my way up. I don’t remember it. It is elaborately bedraped with mala beads, packets of tea, coins, hair bands, photographs, scribbled notes, bandanas, pebbles. I add another silver sage leaf. At the front of it are half-charred incense sticks in a sand-filled bowl, blown out by the wind. I find a cigarette lighter at the base. Cupping the flame from the constant breeze, I hold it up to the tallest incense stick. It smolders. The wind blows out the lighter. I try again, holding flame to the incense, cupping the incense, the flame, the air with my hand. The incense catches fire, burns steadily. I release the lighter and un-cup my hand. The flame blows out, leaving a breeze-fresh glowing ember, smoking into the morning.

Dying to see what's next...

I’ve started to look forward to meditation in ways that are confusing.

For some time, I’ve been relatively equanimous about life and death. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not self-destructive by any means, and I don’t mean to suggest otherwise. But in recent years, when contemplating death, I’ve not been particularly alarmed by it.

But that hasn’t been my situation forever. Most of my life, I feared death and tried not only to avoid it, but to avoid even thinking about it. When my younger sister died a number of years ago, avoidance became impossible, and I began a multi-year relationship with death – both her actual death, as well as my own views of my inevitable end at some point.

While I was in the throes of that process, I remember talking with a yoga teacher one day after practice, and in our discussion she remarked that she was pretty comfortable with the idea of dying at any time. Her remark was one of those crystallizing moments in my life. Not only had I never felt that way, I’d never even imagined that anyone would feel that way without the “it’s-worse-to-continue” situations of those in horrible cancer treatments or suicidal moments. The teacher, though, remarked it without any tone of pride or ego or concern. And it stuck with me.

So, like with most disturbing things in life, I found ways to practice it on the mat. The easiest: Savasana/Corpse Pose. As I breathed in, I allowed myself to experience the breath as the last one I’d take. And as I breathed out, I released it as the last breath I’d ever release. Sometimes, I alternated that practice with experiencing in-breaths as the first breath of a new-born life. With that practice, not only did I find that I paid a lot more attention to the breath than I had before, but I found that distress associated with releasing my last breath dissipated, as well. It is, after all, just a breath of air. A practice in letting go. Over time, that little breath practice changed a lot. I learned to relax my grip on things a little. I found myself more comfortable with the idea, off the mat, that the breath I’m currently drawing or releasing could be my last one.

In short, I suppose I found the balance of equanimity. In this particular dimension (heaven knows not all others) I became poised – not leaning backward toward the past, nor forward toward the future…

…which is why this morning’s realization caught my attention. I seem to be lean forward again. Or, perhaps, I’ve always been leaning forward, but I’d managed to delude myself that I was equanimous. The Yoga-Sutra teaches that “misapprehension is that comprehension which is taken to be correct until more favorable conditions reveal the actual nature of the object.” (1.8) Not sure whether I’ve simply regressed, or whether I’m just seeing a little more clearly what I’ve been doing all along. Either way, it feels a bit like standing before an open door. Just seeing the doorway open seems to create (or maybe just reveal) a kind gravity in my desire.

So this morning, thinking about my meditation, I realized that I’ve become attached to where I think/hope/wonder the process will lead. Partly, that attachment has been fed by my second read-through of Cope’s book, The Wisdom of Yoga, where he describes in both vignettes and analytic narrative the process of deepening meditation outlined by Patanjali in the Yoga-Sutra. As I’ve re-read the book, I’ve focused more on the events of my own practice that he accurately describes, as well as the events and developments that I’ve not experienced.

Yet.

See? It’s that desire for more that so easily morphs into attachment.

Seeing it there uncloaked may be all I can manage. Perhaps it’s one of those things, like vampires and political corruption, that tends to weaken when seen in the light of day.

Not sure.

But worth watching.

Meditation Darkness

I'm puzzled these days about how to tell whether a particular mind-state that I experience in meditation is something to explore or merely something to note when it arises, and then to return to the breath.

This morning, meditation began as it usually does -- several minutes of settling in, a few minutes of concentration on breath, and then the process of watching thoughts arise and subside. Then a small mind-shift occurred, and the mind-experience changed to a kind of darkness -- like being suspended in thick, black, velvety air. As an external sound would occur, there would be a mind-shift back to note the sound and the body state, all the while the mind continued to experience the black velvety air, but to perceive it more dimly. Then the mind moved back into that experience, and the external world subsided. Then the mind recalled the Yoga Sutra instruction of pratyahara (withdrawal of senses), and that brought the attention from the darkness back to the memory/mind. Then the mind moved back, a little ways, into the experience, and finally the meditation ended.

It would be interesting to know of others' experiences with such occurrences.

Irony

This morning, I sat in meditation.

My morning practice usually begins with a half hour on an elliptical trainer we have in our finished basement. I tend to start the day slowly, so the slow warming into a few minutes of cardio helps me wake up. Sometimes on the machine, I work through a lovingkindness meditation. Other days, I read. This morning, it was reading -- I'm mostly finished with Stephen Batchelor's book, Living with the Devil: A meditation on good and evil (lots of interesting ideas for later posts).

When I finish with the cardio, I turn off the lights and move into yoga. The yoga is on a mat I put facing a glass doorway out to a sunken patio. If I start the whole process early enough, I often start the practice in the darkness, with the morning sky beginning to lighten. The yoga starts in samastithi, hands together at the heart. I recite the anusara invocation, then start the asana practice. Sometimes it's as simple as a few minutes in downdog or child's pose. Sometimes it's 30 minutes of vinyasa, but at an introspective, rather than heart-thumping, pace. Today, it was brief. Enough to transition me from cardio and book thoughts to meditation.

Once I've yoga-ed my way to meditation, I roll up an old blanket as a cushion, place it on the mat, and I sit/wiggle for a minute to get my sitting bones comfortably seated on the rolled blanket. I usually sit in siddhasana, easy pose. Then I wrap my legs in an afghan my wife made several years ago. I do that because it's usually cool enough in my basement to chill me if I sit for very long, but maybe also because I'm following the practice of Manorama, who taught me a lot about meditation and yoga in a workshop last year.

Then I close my eyes, recite inside my head the second verse of the Yoga Sutra, and move from there into vipassana meditation practice.

So what arises then? Awareness of the ways that the space where I practice is really not adequate for yoga and meditation, followed by an elaborate process of thinking about what a really good space to practice meditation and yoga would be, the implication being that if I were in That space, my meditation practice would really be better.

Ha!

Meditation indeed.

Everywhere, all the time

This morning’s meditation: I started with a lovingkindness practice. When that was done, I shifted into regular vipassana meditation. I noticed that the practice was easier and quieter than usual. The standard naming practice wasn’t needed, as I could simply watch the memories and thoughts arise without engaging with them. While I sat in the relaxed quiet, I perceived simultaneously both the deeper mind conditions that I usually can only explore through pratyahara practices as well as the more focused attention mind conditions that occur in vipassana meditation.

That perception was the essential experience.

From there, my mind elaborated on the recognition: I tend to experience the world in discrete and segmented ways. As I enter a meditation, I tend to close the door to non-meditation life behind me. As I move from seated meditation, which requires the involvement of my senses to maintain my vertical posture, to reclining meditation, which allows me to withdraw my awareness from my external senses entirely, I engage in another shift of mind geography. When I lie down at night to sleep, I shift my mind into sleep mode, excluding even the remote awareness of reclining meditation. Exploring each of those mind modes separately has allowed me to encounter aspects of mind that I had not perceived so clearly without the exercise of the specific disciplines that allow me to access them. So I have continued in those practices in varying degrees for the past several years. This morning’s meditation, though, suggested to me that while the distinctions and separations may be a useful didactic tool, just as isolating an exercise for biceps and another one for hamstrings can be useful, there is a fuller state of integration possible, where simultaneous engagement of each segment allows for exploration of things impossible in single-mode exercise.

Perhaps it’s not entirely coincidental that in yoga practice last night, I found myself in a pose sequence that, without the specific and separate muscle group work I’ve been performing for the past couple of years, I’d never have imagined possible. The sequence (that I did badly, but recognizably, despite my incompetence) is a flow of poses (from top to bottom, above) from twisting prayer, to side crow, to scissored side crow, to hurdle, to scorpion. Without the hours and months of devotion to isolated strength work on abdominal muscle groups, spinal muscle groups, and shoulders, and on hip flexibility, the sequence would scarcely have been imaginable, let alone possible (albeit clumsily) last night. But with those isolated exercises, I found last night a tiny glimpse of the integration of dance that is enabled by the work.

So back to this morning’s meditation… At odd moments during the day, I’m reminded that all levels of my perception and mind are available at any moment. That feels a bit like the sense I’ve had since the day I perceived that prana is continually flowing into each of us. It’s a little bit vertiginous, but liberating. It feels a bit like the fulsome connectedness of intense spiritual experiences – a flowing of all levels of mind/body/spirit into present focused awareness.
And the all-levels-at-once experience suggests to me potentials for mindfulness that are analogous to the perception of one pose flowing into another suggests the potential for vinyasa.