I've been silent and struggling here recently. Meditating quite a lot (once a day anyway which is the most consistently I've done so for years) and feeling increasingly crazy. No lightness of being opening out inside me and no lifting of spirits. I sit within the rigid clasp of the terrors, restrictions and awareness of flaws that have limited and affected my life (and the lives of those close to me). I feel myself straining to loosen them, accept them, change ... and that's it really - always I am working, whatever I do I am working, straining to be different. And in the end this seems to be the thing I need to affect ...
I'm so awed by the things that you all write - the awareness and competence in life that they seem to show ..so I've been sitting tight to my cushion (meataphorical only - I 'sit' on the sofa in the spare room, usually with the dog's nose snuffled up against my leg) hoping I will soon 'get it' ... bright blessings to all of you in your endeavours ...
I'd been sitting a while before I realized the point of the preliminary prayers and shrines and all that stuff, which I at first dismissed as "all that religious stuff." It sounds like maybe you're plunging straight into meditation without doing anything to open space around it.
If you don't like the word "prayer" substitute "affirmation" or "aspiration" :-) -- but all the traditions I know of recommend beginning by widening the context. In Mahayana Buddhism it's explicitly "I aspire to achieve enlightenment in order to relieve all the world's suffering and bring happiness to all beings" -- but all the traditions do something at this point to remind themselves: this is not all about me. And the in the Mahayana at the end we "dedicate the merit to all sentient beings" -- the point of that is to give away whatever benefits might accrue from the meditation.
This is not to be high-minded and altruistic. It's because of the way that otherwise we tend to cling to the benefits of the meditation, watch for them, and set a noxious expectation for the next sit based on whatever we think we might have gotten from this one. Better to just shake ourselves, like a wet dog, and get as much of that off us as possible, because it always screws us up.
Even more generally than that, however you do it, it's crucial to do what you can to identify your expectations and lay them aside. Nothing damages meditation more than a load of expectations -- hopes for what it will do, fears that it will fail, all that. Of course you wouldn't sit at all if you didn't have hopes for it, but it's good at the start to identify them and set them aside. Let this session be absolutely fresh.
And a sense of humor about it helps a lot too. It's actually pretty comical, watching the same thoughts, anxieties, fantasies, etc. show up again and again, as solemnly as ever, expecting to be taken as dead seriously every time as the first time they showed up. Laugh at them a little. They're just thoughts, they're not you. You are something wonderful beyond their imagination.
Barbara, just a word of encouragement here. Some of what you identify as "competence" is merely articulateness about an experience that is pretty familiar to some of us by now. One reason I sit is because I know how incompetent I really am in some very fundamental ways. We are all works in progress, and we all have huge flaws as well as being perfect just as we are.
Change happens very slowly. I love the Soto Zen saying that enlightenment "is like getting wet in a fog" -- because there is so much less emphasis on a sudden "getting it" and more recognition that for most of us, the process of change is indeed foggy and indistinct, and occurs in a state where we are often unable to see clearly or know our way. I applaud your courage for sitting and facing whatever you are seeing in yourself. That is the hardest part, right there. And I think Dale has given very good advice. Meditation is much more about "being" than "becoming"; it is about self-acceptance and moment-acceptance; it's also about rest. It helps me to make my meditation space something that feels beautiful and spacious - even if that is just by lighting a votive candle, and/or some incense, and/or having a lovely flower blossom floating in water, or a calm piece of cloth on which it all rests -- just that is a gift to myself and to the world that says, OK, here, now, is something lovely and steady that I can look forward to every day. It is in many ways anti-intellectual, the antithesis of self-analysis that I also engage in nearly all the rest of the time!
Gradually you come to see yourself as part of that calm space, and the memory of that place carries along with you into your regular life; plus you know you will be going back to it soon. It's a paradox: a space where you can just "be", and NOT work, not change, not strive to understand. I know - almost impossible! Sure. But you're right when you intuit that you need to affect this sense of straining and working. So let go as much as you can, and don't judge your effort or look for accumulated knowledge or benefits: it's as useless as weighing yourself every day when you're trying to lose weight. Each session is new and fresh, and you'll only get a little tiny bit wet each time, hardly enough to notice! I'll be thinking of you today when I sit too.
Barbara: Thank you so much for your honesty but please don't be discouraged.
I am very aware of the fragility of my practice. It only needs a bad couple of days at work, or a dispute with someone I love, and my anxiety levels rise in my meditation practice and in life. Often all I can do is simply to sit still for 10 minutes and attempt to watch my breath. Sometimes that is reduced to just sitting still. And on those bad days that is enough for me. No expectations.
What I always do though even on the worst days is what Dale and Beth talk about - setting the scene - the incense, the candles, and especially the prayer. Even if the prayer is just a prayer for help on that particular day. And then just show up at my altar and sit. Sometimes I chant as well - I have a mantra I use and the use of the voice can sometimes help ground me during times of anxiety.
At the moment I am trying to look at the time at the altar as something I do for me - a treat, a rest. And on my good days I can really feel that this is the case.
The biggest hindrance to my practice is the ever-present unwillingness to enter into my own company, to see what is going on beneath the surface, to be silent. Let's watch TV instead and not look .... the escapist mindset. This never stops me from sitting but it does I think stop me from expanding and developing my practice - going beyond the minimum time, giving myself to it more.
But I remind myself all the time that it is a "practice". And that real, deep change is likely to be slow. I love the getting wet in a fog quote, Beth. Because it is practice there is no expectation that I do it perfectly - except any false ones that I set up for myself. The journey is the destination here.
Barbara thank you for your honesty. I can but echo everyone else, especially about setting the scene. because I am not religious I do simply light a candle and incense (just bought some lovely provencal whiffs), but also my chair in the vines which I simply place facing the mountain or the sun and in a different place to where i normally sit to drink coffee or write. It is a sort of sacred place for me. I alsi second the very important part of extending the meditation beyond oneself so it is about connecting not separating, about all flowers, animals and beings and not just me. Personally this seems to be one of my biggest lessons and I am definitely still just on the voyage. having said all that I did not sit today, though I did take some lovely time in the sun to read. Yoga tomorrow should help me get back on track.
Ditto on what everyone else has said. I think it's important to remind yourself, Barbara, that meditation isn't supposed to "fix" anything: this isn't a process that you need to make "work." It simply is what it is. Sometimes it feels glorious, sometimes it feels empty, and sometimes it feels scary. I find that you often have to sit through scary, disorienting shit before you break through to the calmer, clearer stuff: it's as if there's a whole layer of static you have to sit through before the "station" becomes clear.
But the static-ky meditation is just as "right" as the clear kind: there's no goal you're trying to reach. So if you feel frustrated that meditation isn't working, you're probably working too hard trying to make it (and yourself) into something you think it (you) should be.
I love Dale's comment about having a sense of humor. Meditation doesn't have to be work: it can (and perhaps should?) be a time of resting & re-connecting. So instead of beating yourself up (or comparing your experience to others') when you're feeling crazy, it's okay & even desirable to be incredibly gentle with yourself. Meditation isn't a matter of heavy lifting. It's the act of treating your own precious self with the gentle care a sacred soul deserves.
6 Comments:
I've been silent and struggling here recently. Meditating quite a lot (once a day anyway which is the most consistently I've done so for years) and feeling increasingly crazy. No lightness of being opening out inside me and no lifting of spirits. I sit within the rigid clasp of the terrors, restrictions and awareness of flaws that have limited and affected my life (and the lives of those close to me). I feel myself straining to loosen them, accept them, change ... and that's it really - always I am working, whatever I do I am working, straining to be different. And in the end this seems to be the thing I need to affect ...
I'm so awed by the things that you all write - the awareness and competence in life that they seem to show ..so I've been sitting tight to my cushion (meataphorical only - I 'sit' on the sofa in the spare room, usually with the dog's nose snuffled up against my leg) hoping I will soon 'get it' ... bright blessings to all of you in your endeavours ...
Barbara, do you do anything to set the context?
I'd been sitting a while before I realized the point of the preliminary prayers and shrines and all that stuff, which I at first dismissed as "all that religious stuff." It sounds like maybe you're plunging straight into meditation without doing anything to open space around it.
If you don't like the word "prayer" substitute "affirmation" or "aspiration" :-) -- but all the traditions I know of recommend beginning by widening the context. In Mahayana Buddhism it's explicitly "I aspire to achieve enlightenment in order to relieve all the world's suffering and bring happiness to all beings" -- but all the traditions do something at this point to remind themselves: this is not all about me. And the in the Mahayana at the end we "dedicate the merit to all sentient beings" -- the point of that is to give away whatever benefits might accrue from the meditation.
This is not to be high-minded and altruistic. It's because of the way that otherwise we tend to cling to the benefits of the meditation, watch for them, and set a noxious expectation for the next sit based on whatever we think we might have gotten from this one. Better to just shake ourselves, like a wet dog, and get as much of that off us as possible, because it always screws us up.
Even more generally than that, however you do it, it's crucial to do what you can to identify your expectations and lay them aside. Nothing damages meditation more than a load of expectations -- hopes for what it will do, fears that it will fail, all that. Of course you wouldn't sit at all if you didn't have hopes for it, but it's good at the start to identify them and set them aside. Let this session be absolutely fresh.
And a sense of humor about it helps a lot too. It's actually pretty comical, watching the same thoughts, anxieties, fantasies, etc. show up again and again, as solemnly as ever, expecting to be taken as dead seriously every time as the first time they showed up. Laugh at them a little. They're just thoughts, they're not you. You are something wonderful beyond their imagination.
Barbara, just a word of encouragement here. Some of what you identify as "competence" is merely articulateness about an experience that is pretty familiar to some of us by now. One reason I sit is because I know how incompetent I really am in some very fundamental ways. We are all works in progress, and we all have huge flaws as well as being perfect just as we are.
Change happens very slowly. I love the Soto Zen saying that enlightenment "is like getting wet in a fog" -- because there is so much less emphasis on a sudden "getting it" and more recognition that for most of us, the process of change is indeed foggy and indistinct, and occurs in a state where we are often unable to see clearly or know our way. I applaud your courage for sitting and facing whatever you are seeing in yourself. That is the hardest part, right there. And I think Dale has given very good advice. Meditation is much more about "being" than "becoming"; it is about self-acceptance and moment-acceptance; it's also about rest. It helps me to make my meditation space something that feels beautiful and spacious - even if that is just by lighting a votive candle, and/or some incense, and/or having a lovely flower blossom floating in water, or a calm piece of cloth on which it all rests -- just that is a gift to myself and to the world that says, OK, here, now, is something lovely and steady that I can look forward to every day. It is in many ways anti-intellectual, the antithesis of self-analysis that I also engage in nearly all the rest of the time!
Gradually you come to see yourself as part of that calm space, and the memory of that place carries along with you into your regular life; plus you know you will be going back to it soon. It's a paradox: a space where you can just "be", and NOT work, not change, not strive to understand. I know - almost impossible! Sure. But you're right when you intuit that you need to affect this sense of straining and working. So let go as much as you can, and don't judge your effort or look for accumulated knowledge or benefits: it's as useless as weighing yourself every day when you're trying to lose weight. Each session is new and fresh, and you'll only get a little tiny bit wet each time, hardly enough to notice! I'll be thinking of you today when I sit too.
Barbara: Thank you so much for your honesty but please don't be discouraged.
I am very aware of the fragility of my practice. It only needs a bad couple of days at work, or a dispute with someone I love, and my anxiety levels rise in my meditation practice and in life. Often all I can do is simply to sit still for 10 minutes and attempt to watch my breath. Sometimes that is reduced to just sitting still. And on those bad days that is enough for me. No expectations.
What I always do though even on the worst days is what Dale and Beth talk about - setting the scene - the incense, the candles, and especially the prayer. Even if the prayer is just a prayer for help on that particular day. And then just show up at my altar and sit. Sometimes I chant as well - I have a mantra I use and the use of the voice can sometimes help ground me during times of anxiety.
At the moment I am trying to look at the time at the altar as something I do for me - a treat, a rest. And on my good days I can really feel that this is the case.
The biggest hindrance to my practice is the ever-present unwillingness to enter into my own company, to see what is going on beneath the surface, to be silent. Let's watch TV instead and not look .... the escapist mindset. This never stops me from sitting but it does I think stop me from expanding and developing my practice - going beyond the minimum time, giving myself to it more.
But I remind myself all the time that it is a "practice". And that real, deep change is likely to be slow. I love the getting wet in a fog quote, Beth. Because it is practice there is no expectation that I do it perfectly - except any false ones that I set up for myself. The journey is the destination here.
Barbara thank you for your honesty. I can but echo everyone else, especially about setting the scene. because I am not religious I do simply light a candle and incense (just bought some lovely provencal whiffs), but also my chair in the vines which I simply place facing the mountain or the sun and in a different place to where i normally sit to drink coffee or write. It is a sort of sacred place for me.
I alsi second the very important part of extending the meditation beyond oneself so it is about connecting not separating, about all flowers, animals and beings and not just me. Personally this seems to be one of my biggest lessons and I am definitely still just on the voyage.
having said all that I did not sit today, though I did take some lovely time in the sun to read. Yoga tomorrow should help me get back on track.
Ditto on what everyone else has said. I think it's important to remind yourself, Barbara, that meditation isn't supposed to "fix" anything: this isn't a process that you need to make "work." It simply is what it is. Sometimes it feels glorious, sometimes it feels empty, and sometimes it feels scary. I find that you often have to sit through scary, disorienting shit before you break through to the calmer, clearer stuff: it's as if there's a whole layer of static you have to sit through before the "station" becomes clear.
But the static-ky meditation is just as "right" as the clear kind: there's no goal you're trying to reach. So if you feel frustrated that meditation isn't working, you're probably working too hard trying to make it (and yourself) into something you think it (you) should be.
I love Dale's comment about having a sense of humor. Meditation doesn't have to be work: it can (and perhaps should?) be a time of resting & re-connecting. So instead of beating yourself up (or comparing your experience to others') when you're feeling crazy, it's okay & even desirable to be incredibly gentle with yourself. Meditation isn't a matter of heavy lifting. It's the act of treating your own precious self with the gentle care a sacred soul deserves.
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