Tag Archives: meditation

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going nowhere

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medthroom

It was one of those days.  Beginning with much promise and sliding into unfulfilled hours. I’d like to blame it on a lot of things.  The problem with blame is that it’s only a commentary on what might be.  It’s not and cannot be explanatory.  Nor can it be motivational.  Maybe that’s why the day slipped into a string of moments that unwittingly got filled with unphotographed images.

I like to tell the participants of a stress management program I run that when we lapse into unawareness, we turn off the camera of attention.  No camera, no memory.  No memory, no learning.  No learning, lousy choices.

If I peel back the days, I can see why this particular day was what it was.  Two days earlier, my partner and I lead a retreat for over 150 people for whom the idea of meditating was “out there”.  It didn’t help to find out that their professional development day had begun at 0500 with more physical exertion than I’ve put out in my lifetime. And, they were a captive audience – this was not a choice to be there listening to a couple of shrinks tell them how to get healthy by developing awareness.

We take so much for granted.  I have hung out in groupings of professions, practitioners, and play-dates whose language and assumptions have become somewhat unquestioned as we weave our relationships.  And then (thankfully) I’m put at an edge of communication that demands letting go of everything I rely on to forge relationships.  All the concepts of assumed commonalities are stripped away and I drop into the true nature of relationship.  It can be threatening.  It can be a giggle.

So I picked up the microphone, stepped out into the center, looked around the room, went blank, and said, “Well… I haven’t got a clue what to say!”  It was as close to a standing ovation as I’ll ever get.

My job for three hours was to get across a simple point: pay attention, notice when you’ve looked away.  My partner did the rational data delivery: allostatis, allostatic load, stress, lions, elephants, and zebras, Oh My!  I did the experiential stuff, evoking a felt sense of the data – dangerously close to a tent revival meeting if the call and response is unskillfully managed.  The image of over 150 men and women sitting still and following their breath was, and still is, overpowering.

sunset2

The responsibility of a retreat, of course, is for the retreat leaders themselves to pay attention, not look away.  I call it the full-body contact version of embodied practice.  In every moment, I have to find the balance between what was unfolding in my body, speech, and mind and steer to coordinates set in a thirty second conversation we’d had the night before.  It’s our style of preparation: plan no-plan.

I suppose it’s about trust.  Not so much in the Other; though it helps that we’ve done this a couple of times before.  It’s trust in my own way of knowing, in processing the sensations sent from body to mind to speech to body to mind.  Touch, sight, sound, scent, taste, and knowing.  Powerfully elevating and equally emptying.

Somewhere in the day that was going nowhere, I woke up and remembered what I had said to those very still women and men sitting and breathing.

Pay attention.  Notice when you’ve looked away.  Come back.

There’s nowhere to go.

Thank you for practising,

Genju

Images from top: Syracuse Airport, Sunset after waking up

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2 wooden bowls

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This treasure was discovered in a bamboo thicket —
I washed the bowl in a spring and then mended it.
At night, it serves me soup or rice.
Cracked, worn, weather-beaten, and misshapen
But still of noble stock.

Our friend Ryokan (Dewdrops on a Lotus Leaf: Zen poems of Ryokan translated by John Stevens) is the master of voluntary simplicity which the Simple Living Network describes as “living in a way that is outwardly simple and inwardly rich.”  It is guided by five values, the first of which is material simplicity.  Although it may seem like an advocacy of living in mud huts and eating twigs, it’s really not.  Voluntary simplicity is about seeing that what we have is enough and living in a way that greatly reduces the drain on our resources. 

Fall Produce 2

I look around this room and wonder about my choices.  Don’t get me wrong; I love my TV (but really, three in a house with two people?), the computers (ok, we do need two for two working professionals), the cameras (OK, I’ll admit selfishness – I don’t share well), and books (non-negotiable but in my defense many are over 40 years old).  At the same time, the sofa set was the first new sofa we bought in 25 years.  Most of our cars have been 10-15 years old by the time they left for the great trade-in grounds.  The other furniture in the house are legacies of two sets of parents and thrift stores 30 years ago.  Our big exciting splurge last year was a new more efficient wood stove.  And the rocking chair in front of it was my very first furniture purchase in 1974 (and no, it doesn’t need to be fixed; the kitchen table keeps it from falling over).

We recycle, compost, shop carefully, and monitor our vehicle use.  And still, I fall into that rooster-mind of craving.  For months after the last sesshin, I found myself coveting a set of oryoki bowls of my own.  How appropriate that the definition on the Shambhala site of oryoki is “just enough”!  After much rationalizing, I forego the packaged sets on line ($100+fuel costs to get them here) and buy three bamboo bowls and spatula ($40) from a local store, supplementing them with chopsticks from the sangha collection and napkins from the linen closet.  Noble enough stock.

Practice too is like that.  There is a desire for an external rightness: right time, the right mat, the right cushion, the right room, the right atmosphere, the right community.  Ultimately, I think we wish we had the right life so that practice is a natural flow of one perfect moment into another.  And we miss that we already own all of it.

Where you meditate has everything to do with how useful your meditation will be.  But by where, I don’t necessarily mean in which room of the house, or whether you live in a quiet spot or not.  I simply mean that you should meditate inside the life you have.  If you are an accountant, meditate inside an accountant’s life.  If you are a policeman, meditate inside of that.  Wherever you want to illuminate your life, meditate precisely in that spot.  (The Wooden Bowl by Clark Strand)

Genju