I totally agree about political compassion, just like with any other compassion. If we hold some one in a rigid 'opposite' position to us, surely it means we have blocked our own flow aswell as theirs, and possibility of balance and change between us, and sice we live largely in the space between this seems a bit silly.
Dale, the tong len practice you describe is exactly what I have occasionally practiced since I read about it years ago in pema Chodron. I wove it quite profoundly in to my thesis too, so was a bit anxious there for a while.
In her book 'When things Fall apart' She says alot about it, starting with this:
'Tonglen is a practice of creating space, ventilating the atmosphere of our lives so people can breathe freely and relax. Whenever we encounter suffering in any form , the tonglen instruction is to breathe it in with the wish that everyone could be free of pain. Whenever we encounter happiness in any form, the instruction is to breathe it out, send it out, with the wish that everyone could feel joy. It's a practice that allows people to feel less burdened and less cramped, a practice that shows us how to love without conditions.'
Remembering this practice now, I realise it would have been helpful to me whilst Julian was suffering from depression.
Good morning, wishing all of you a good day and a good week. I must come back and read yesterday's discussion, which looks very interesting. Spent the weekend clapped out, just resting and enjoying the very welcome sunshine and hoping to regain some strength after feeling so ill for one reason or another these past few weeks. I've been meditating every day, though, and was there on Friday. Fell asleep on the sofa much earlier in the evening and woke up with a start at 5 to eleven, thinking: what? oh! now! So I was a bit distracted, as all my meditations lately have been tired and distracted. But I was there. Been finding that even when I feel so tired and distracted, after 10 or 15 minutes my mind and body drop into somewhere quieter. Just have to sit there and it happens 'on its own'. Being very still mobilises the sympathetic (or do I mean parasympathetic - my mind is really vague and unfocused lately) nervous system, or something? anyway, I appreciate it very much.
Briefly before my next client arrives ... what a discussion yesterday - it has raised so many things to the surface for me. I have realsied that although my meditation practice is very 'mechanical' (and thanks all for the input on that - I feel more at home here now) my counselling practice is much closer to the descriptions of tonglen ...I need to look into it a bit more and am aware that we all understand words differently but there is a definite sense for me, in my work of holding the other in relation, in their pain, anger, whatever. It is also my particular struggle - to let go, to accept ... I sometimes see it in terms of simple respect, both for myself and the other - and I manage it so infrequently. I see it too as an attempt to remain loosely open to the world whilst taking care of myself - again a balance I achieve rarely ...
I need to think about these things more especially in relation to my political leanings ...but jsut wanted to say thank you right now.
(Lorianne, I left you a brief note at the end of yesterday's discussion.)
Jean, I do hope you will feel better soon. So sorry you've had so many days of feeling wiped out and ill.
Barbara, yes, I agree about applying these concepts to political thinking. It's hard for me, because I have such strong political feelings but I do try to never hate or ridicule anyone. Some of this is an attempt at "right speech", but letting it go deeper than that is the real practice for me.
(The following is something I wrote & saved earlier, before Blogger crashed temporarily. Beth, I'll go & read your comment from yesterday after I've posted this...)
I haven’t yet sat today, but I re-read yesterday’s discussion & had something to add. I think part of the language difference amongst folks here has to do with the difference between “prescriptive” and “descriptive” terminology.
When I read (and I’m probably misreading!) people talking about loving-kindness practice, it sounds prescriptive to me, like a recipe. “Sit down, think about A, then think about B.” It’s as if someone has charted a path toward a compassionate place, and they’re giving you the landmarks so you can find your way there.
As such, this sort of prescriptive loving-kindness meditation seems entirely foreign to my experience of Zen: we don’t do that! We talk about compassion, but we don’t have a structured recipe for achieving it during practice time (although I suspect a lot of folks do it based on their reading of Pema Chodron & other writers).
In Zen, all we do (really!) on the mat is follow the breath, using a repetitive phrase to bring awareness back to the breath. In my tradition at least, doing or thinking about anything else (even one’s kong’an, or koan) during practice time is a distraction: your time on the mat is strictly for following the moment/breath.
But. Zen’s all about compassion, so that previous paragraph is misleading. I think a lot of folks get the idea that Zen is cold & intellectual because it doesn’t talk about loving-kindness & other practices involving emotion & imagery, but again that’s a fault of language.
In Zen, compassion happens naturally & subconsciously: if you train yourself to accept the present moment in all its varied forms (which is what you do when you sit with your breath), you’ll naturally & subconsciously become more compassionate.
So Zen doesn’t talk about loving-kindness in prescriptive terms: when you meditate, do this, then do that. Instead, Zen talks about compassion in descriptive terms: if you practice, your True Compassionate Self will naturally awaken. You don’t really “make” it happen: you simply “watch” it like a flower unfurling.
So the end result is the same, but the language to describe the path to get there is different. Dale & others are describing the landmarks for one path to loving-kindness, and Zen says, “Don’t worry about landmarks. Just train yourself to love the present moment, and you’re already there.”
LATER: well, I have read the long discussion now, but rather quickly, and I think I'd like to print it out and read and ponder over it at much more length. What I find is that I identify somewhat with what everyone says! Maybe that makes me hopelessly vague, woolly and intellectually lazy. But also I think it comes from the fact that my relationship to meditation is very experiential (one of the very few areas where I 'do it a lot more than I think about it) and so what I have most strongly is a sense of the feelings that are common to all the 'types' I've tried. Having practiced both mindfulness of breathing and loving kindness (the one absolutely bare attention and the other detailed and discursive) from my very first experiments with meditation, because that just happened to be what I was taught, I have found that I tend naturally more to one, or the other, or both, at different times. And I have certainly found what Lorianne says today to be true - 'just sitting' has been a powerful route to melting my stony heart, to a place of greater compassion for myself and others. So the two kinds of meditation just feel like different paths in the same direction. As for the discussion about difference between tonglen and other kinds of loving kindness and compassion-based meditation, I have to say that I have, supposedly, practiced both loving kindness in the Theravadin tradition, and Tonglen, and I have found the difference to be in degree (maybe Tonglen explicitly goes further), emphatically not that they are fundamentally different. I feel that true attention, true compassion, inevitably encompass, in time, a complete reframing of our feelings about both self and others. My teachers at Gaia House retreat centre (who are former Theravadin or Zen monastics now teaching fairly 'ecumenically', but with undiminished respect for their own past teachers) are wont to say that following specific instructions and techniques, especially if one feels 'right' for you, is fine, but that if you just sit without any instructions at all, and with sincere attention, you'll still go on the same journey. I'm not, in general, one for agreeing with everyone and smoothing over differences (sometimes wish I was a bit more like that), but it's truly what I feel in this context.
Having moved very far from my former steely, marxist, rationalism, I still don't quite feel comfortable with the word 'religious', as opposed to 'spiritual'. But I also am not very interested any more in labels.
Interesting that the discussion about political compassion should come up now. There's a big political scandal just now involving my member of parliament, a female Blairite clone whom I have always instinctively disliked. I've found it hard not to feel satisfaction at her likely downfall. It's certainly a good test of compassion.
Jean, I think it's natural to find oneself at various points of the spectrum, so to speak, as one's practice continues. These various schools (Zen, Tibetan, etc) have formalized various aspects of experiential practice, and just as "Your results may vary," you may find yourself going in & out of prescriptive, descriptive, theoretical, experiential, and other modes.
I also think there's a strong component of personality & learning styles involved. If you want to learn to play golf, for instance, there are many ways to proceed. One personality/learning type will read a book or watch an instructional video which breaks down the "steps" to a proper swing. Another personality/learning type will hire an instructor to show you how to hold the club, how to set your stance, etc. Another personality/learning type will buy clubs & head out to the driving range determined to figure it out themselves, damnit.
For good or ill, I'm that third type of learner. :-) When I first started meditating, I considered myself a Christian, so I was suspicious of any sort of guided meditation that "sounded too Buddhist." Zen worked (and still works!) for me because it didn't get in my face trying to "show" me how to do thing. Other folks, though, appreciate the help of more prescriptive practices...and other folks, I think, enjoy the richness of imagery & emotion that loving-kindness & other meditations afford.
Personally, as a writer, I find myself up to my neck in words, thoughts, and images most of the time, so I appreciate the chance to *let go of all that* when I'm meditating. But not everyone can stand the bleak starkness of "just sitting": you have to have a pretty high boredom threshold to tolerate it, I think.
This discussion is fabulous, I am learning so much.
While I am gathering from the different traditions being expressed by practitioners, I could not follow a specified practice. At this point in my life, anything outlined is too prescriptive.
The most we can do, I feel, is speak of our own experience, and that way we both explain to ourselves what it is we do and convey our immeasurable wisdom to each other.
When I do my version of loving-kindness I find the heart is full of tiny knots, resistances, pressures, dips and hollows and peaks, spirals of wind and clear skies. What I presently do is focus on an unconditional love, perhaps my father who died 22 years ago, there's a superb clarity to that love, or the Divine Mother as I understand her, and then my heart becomes filled as if with clear light that is overflowing love that I can focus wherever, specific individuals (including myself, in the places I'm wounded), projects, political causes.
The latter I have some difficulty with. I do believe in unconditional love but not in forgiving horrendous acts. Could I unconditionally forgive and send love backwards in time to the Nazis for what they did to the Jewish people during the war? No.
Can I include Mugabe in my meditation? Mugabe where I see paranoia (against all whites/white regims/Western world), stupidity (decimating the economy by ousting the tobacco farming that undergirded the country's financial stability without training new farmers [tobacco is another issue embedded in there, it's complex isn't it]; ignoring the AIDS epidemic, etc.), and greed (a multi-million dollar hotel outside of Harare for him to 'retire' to, lavish trips to Europe while the country literally starves - they will run out of wheat in a few weeks).
But to suppose paranoia, stupidity and greed is to project onto him my judgements. To recognize them is to affirm them. Rather I would focus on awakening compassion in Mugabe, to open his heart so that he can see the extent of the suffering in his country, the one I was born in, Zimbabwe.
I would not focus on my perception of his 'sins,' 'evils,' 'faults,' 'errors,' 'ignorances.' I do not know enough about the workings of karma to do this.
When the love in my heart clears through the knots, whorls, resistances, and is fully open, like clear light, I can focus on Mugabe's intentions, on him seeing the consequences of his actions, on the suffering of his people, on his compassion.
Whether it has any effect or not is not for me to know.
It is a prayer I offer to one area of the world where there is terrible pain.
Before I rush off into the day, let me say that I am very wary of "armchair acitivism."
It's an issue with the New Age movement that I've been at logger-heads with.
Can you sit in your comfortable and safe room and meditate nice thoughts on terrifying political realities around the world and actually be doing anything other than assauging your own guilt?
I would say no. Nothing replaces putting yourself out there and doing something. Marching, writing, being present.
That is why I ascribe no 'end result' to my meditation on areas of political strife. Meditating with loving-kindness on Mugabe may or may not have any 'effect,' I have no way of knowing. It does make me 'feel better' to do such a meditation, but does it help that country in any real or substantial way?
Do I believe in the ether that much?
I am wary of 'armchair activism,' and don't abide by the supposed efficacy of James Taylor world prayers except as beautiful ways to unite us, and, I suppose, if enough people are publicly praying, that's a social movement, that makes the papers, that has an actual effect in the actual world.
Forgiveness - such a hard thing to discuss. Not least because I keep finding that different people mean such different things, and sometimes it feels like completely opposing, things by the word. Whereas many seem to talk of 'letting the person off the hook' if you forgive them and thus of whether or not particular people or acts are 'forgivable', I understand what buddhists, for example, mean by forgiveness to be entirely about letting myself off the hook of the endlessly repeated painful cycle of my own anger and hatred. That seems as desirable as it is difficult in itself, and not necessarily prescriptive in terms of what therefore ensues for the guilty party, though obviously it would be likely to have an effect on what you wanted to happen to them. As someone who has not been able to forgive her own mother for being nasty, this is very much a distant aspiration for me. But I do nonetheless feel that I've been profoundly affected by seeing forgiveness in these terms.
Jean, I like what you say about *self* forgiveness: "letting myself off the hook of the endlessly repeated painful cycle of my own anger and hatred." Yesterday I finished watching (on dvd) the film *What the #$*! Do We Know,* and it talks about how emotion becomes embedded in our neurology on a cellular level: if you think a particular thought (or feel a particular emotion) repeatedly, your neural networks will literally re-wire themselves to allow that pattern to repeat.
In other words, there seems to be a cellular basis for what we might call "karma": a mind habit so pervasive we literally become addicted to the neuro-chemistry of it.
Meditation offers the possibility of re-wiring one's mental chemistry. If you practice compassion, you become compassion. If you practice cutting off your tendencies toward judgment, hatred, and anger, eventually those neurological connections become less entrenched.
It's a fascinating, thought-provoking film: at times funny, at times bizarrely "trippy":
I disagree completely, Brenda. Not because I think that my meditation has any effect on the world -- it may or may not -- but because it clearly reduces my contribution to the world's hatred and anger and destructiveness.
After all, everyone who's active in politics believes that they're working for the common good. That's no guarantee that we're actually doing so. It looks to me like nearly everyone active in politics, from George W. Bush to Osama bin Laden, is convinced that they are engaged in productive politcal action that's tending to the improvement of the world. So the fact that I also am convinced of that doesn't mean much.
I'm moderately politically active -- I worked hard to try to defeat George W. in the last election -- but that's more out of a lingering sense of duty than out of a conviction that I really know what actions of mine will make the world better.
I no longer think the problem is out there. It's in me as much as it's anywhere. To work on myself is to work on the problem in the one place where I can have confidence that I actually understand it.
Again to Brenda -- I really think that the attitude of "not letting people off the hook" is superstitious. Our attitude towards those people has no effect on them whatever. What it has an effect on is us.
Our actions have an effect on other people. I applaud political action, when it arises from compassion, at least. But as the Dalai Lama said, "if I hate the Chinese, the Chinese don't lose sleep. I lose sleep."
If you're afraid that you will be less politically active if you don't nurse anger against those people, well, it may be true and it may not. You can see. If it is true, you can always pick up the anger again -- that's easy, all too easy. But it hasn't been true of me, so far. It turns out that my productive action was not tied to my anger. What was tied to my anger was depression and despair. I don't mind losing those.
Did I detect a hint of frustration with Pema Chodron Lorraine??
I think the golf metaphor is beautiful and it is really worth emphasising the fact that we are all trying to learn a practice in our different ways, and , as lorraine reminds us, we all learn very differently.
My experience with the 'tong len' is, as dale says, counterintuitive in a way, but it is this very conterintuitive part which jolts me out of my usual arrogance and judgement. This is why this particular meditation has helped me.
Today I practiced it again, with a 'very arrogant' conductor in mind I have been having problems with since he basically unjustly sacked me from Glyndebourne. I was amazed to note, as I brought to mind what I percieved as 'his suffering', that actually I suffer in exactly the same ways. If I just sent out loving kindness (and this is me not everyone) I might continue in the illusion that I was somehow superior to him.
I also understand and agree with the idea that just practicing is enough. If I do my scales every day, regartdless of lofty thoughts about the spiritual and healing aspect of music, I am a better cellist and in so being, freer to express my voice. -Though many of us (who, unlike writers, just play wordless notes most of the time!) like to hash out the ideas!
reading all these words from so many meditaters, and sinking deeper and deeper into the muddy depths of my warthogness … I felt tongue-tied and stupid because I couldn’t express myself adequately, feeling like a ‘stranger in a strange land’, wanting to say something, but not knowing how …. UNTIL
Lorianne expressed so clearly, what I could not say for myself. My Zen practice is in the Soto tradition (Japanese) wherein “compassion happens naturally and subsconsciously”. I hadn’t thought about it until I read your comment about boredom, and I guess I have a very high threshold.
We practice shikantaza, a form of zazen in which there are no supporting techniques. It means 'just sitting' … from the Japanese shikan ‘nothing but’ ta ‘precisely’ za ‘sitting’, facing a blank wall. At the first retreat I attended, I always tried to get the cushion near the electrical outlet, figuring that when the ‘light came on’ I’d be right there and ready to plug in.
Most of you spoke about some form of loving kindness meditation. I experienced tong len with a visiting teacher when I was at SMZC in California. It just didn’t feel right for me, probably because of a strong streak of independence and rebelliousness against being told what to do.
The dharma name given to me at my ordination is Jisho which means ‘giving birth to compassion’. I’m happy and content just sitting here in the mud and growing a lotus blossom … watching and waiting for ‘the flower to unfurl’
Appreciation and respect for all the differences is part of compassion … we have such an abundance in this group. I’m grateful to each of you for so much generosity of sharing.
(Actually, I'm probably quite as impatient as you are, Brenda, with the people you have in mind. Such as my brother, who went to Tehran with a group to meditate there in order to stop the incipient civil war in the 1980s. They got an apartment there and meditated a lot, and seemed quite surprised when they came back to find that the revolution had happened around them. They'd seen a couple cars burning, but they hadn't thought a lot of it :->)
Brenda, I appreciate what you said earlier about sharing our various practices and not judging. It's important, I think, to stress that no one here has a corner on what's right or wrong, and we're all just trying to be better people.
My (mostly Zen) practice coexists with (mostly Christian) prayer addressed to a "God" who I understand more and more as "the ground of being" and less and less as a force "out there somewhere". Whether I've admitted it to myself or not, I've done intercessory prayer for years and years, and it is certainly a form of "loving kindness meditation." When I hope for, pray for, whatever is best for someone else or myself, I am giving up judgement about what that is. "Judge not, lest ye yourself be judged" has always seemed like good advice to me!
However, there is a lot that's clearly wrong in the world, so what do we do with that? I also feel called to work for social and economic justice, and use my life to help others. The people who impede that, and who destroy hope and opportunity, are obstacles and are easy to hate. however, I'm with the Dalai Lama and other great spiritual teachers in believing that the hate only hurts me. The DL has worked tirelessly for justice for Tibetans - but without hating. That's the challenge, I think - to BE "political" without contributing to polarization, which comes from hatred, rigidity, self-righteousness.
I also think it's not my job to forgive Hitler, or Bush, or Nixon and Kissinger or whoever. I believe the universe has its own system of justice, although I don't necessarily see it or understand it. I see my job being to take care of myself and guard my own heart against hatred and judgement; and to forgive both myself and the people who are close to me. That's hard enough, but it spills over into increasing love and compassion toward everything and everyone.
Ruth, I've not read any Pema Chodron, so I have nothing to get frustrated with. What I was trying to suggest is that these traditions get mixed since we live in an era when you can sit at a Zen Center, read books by a Tibetan nun, go to church on Sunday followed by a 12-step program afterward, etc. So whereas I can say "Zen does X, Y, Z," there are probably many Zen practitioners who do loving-kindness practice just as there are probably some Tibetan practitioners who have tried zazen.
Blending traditions can muddy the waters, or it can allow one to pick a style/practice that appeals to one's personality. Personally, I bridle against practices that seem even the least bit "touchy-feely": that's just my own personality. I resent being "told" how to think, feel, etc, even if it's simply part of a guided meditation: I prefer pure silence without instruction.
But I also realize that's a *very* narrow path, so I'm glad there are other paths for folks who appreciate a more emotional approach to practice. Emotions are very powerful, and there's nothing "wrong" with them. I just don't like being told what to do with *mine*: it's part of the stubborn pig-headedness of my warthog nature. ;-)
Piggy-backing (no pun intended...) on what Beth said, I don't think it's our job to forgive Hitler. I think the real challenge of our practice is to let go of the habitual hatreds that hit us much closer to home: forgiving ourselves, our spouses, our exes, our parents, siblings, children...
I'm thinking of what Jean said about struggling to forgive a parent: that's serious shit, much more difficult than forgiving Hitler. It's easy to say "I forgive Hitler" because Hitler is a theoretical abstraction: we don't have to *live* with him. But if you've spent most of your life struggling with a parent (or even a dozen-some years struggling with a spouse, which is the example that hits *me* closest to home), how do you let go & "reprogram" those mind-habits? That's a big job, one that seems logically impossible. I guess that's where an element of faith comes in: somehow, we believe that there is a pristine Buddha somewhere within our angry, unforgiving warthogginess, and we keep trying even when it seems that our Inner Warthog is undeniable.
PS: It occurs to me as we're having this conversation that we're trying to do two seemingly contradictory things. First, we're trying to believe in our own practices 100%: really, why would you continue doing your practice unless you *really believed* it was efficacious, the best possible practice you could choose?
At the same time, we're trying to believe that other meditators are on paths that are just as efficacious as our own, that "all roads lead to the mountaintop." The temptation, I think, is to say that "roads don't matter," but they do. It's easier if you're on a road, and you'll make more progress if you stick to one road rather than racing around trying to take a couple steps on all of them.
But when your road runs parallel with another path, it can be helpful to hear what the view looks like from over there, trusting that the road under your feet is as perfect as the parallel path trod by a fellow traveller.
lorraine you sound like me on the subject of crossover music and I totally understand! PC i found rather unemotional for my taste but very instructive and beautifully written. Whatever, the book came into my hands at the right time and started me on this particular road...
Beth, lovely things you write and they strike a chord.
My mother is very politically active - infact her whole life is dedicated to her (in my opinion very just) green peaceful cause - so much that she has said that she will leave everything she has to the insects (you gotta laugh... i could actually do with a few bucks to create the life - and start the festival - she has taught me to value! but hey! it seems i'm creating it anyway.) However, it seems to me that her motive has always been and still is anger - anger towards my father who left, then me who apparently betrayed, then Bush and everyone else. So it's not actually about leaving her money to the insects, it's about not leaving it to me.I do not actually believe any peace or love can come of words or actions motivated by anger and hatred and therefore I am always heartbroken but never surprised when her wonderful plans are incessantly spoiled or aborted.
This brings us back to the simple thing of kindness and compassion starting at home, in each one of us, which is where I feel many religions and philosophies meet.
I'm thoroughly enjoying these discussions, the diversity of views, the nuances. Fascinating stuff.
Lorianne, I smiled when I read that you "resent being "told" how to think, feel, etc, even if it's simply part of a guided meditation: I prefer pure silence without instruction."... smiled only because the loving kindness meditation I sometimes do is what I invented for myself, whereas pure silence feels more like the instructed part! Ah, see... we all have our ways... many currents to the river.
A well-meaning elderly friend recently gave me a guided-meditation CD, knowing I'd had a lot of stress in my life and wanting to help. When I finally listened to it, I got about five minutes into it and started crying out of sheer frustration - I'm sorry, I just can't make myself into a seagull flying over the beautiful ocean, and the whole concept just really bothered me. I'm like Lorianne and others who say the touchy-feely approach doesn't work for them; it never has - it gives me the heebie-jeebies. Too rebellious, and also too Episcopalian, I guess! On the other hand, I don't have a high boredom threshold - I am very easily bored - so the difficulty for me is stopping the words and discursive thoughts and images with which I try to amuse myself during meditation! Today I'm sure I will be *thinking* about this fascinating discussion!
Fascinating, just fascinating. I've been reading along and saying little, feeling very much the uncertain newcomer not wanting to expose my ignorance. I have been reading with an eye to selecting a direction for further study and development, because there seem to be an intimidatingly large number of styles & traditions on offer.
One of the things that last year taught me (via meditation among others) is that I am just as much in search of the missing piece to fit the "God-shaped hole" as anyone else.
The "warthog" motif seems to have struck a common nerve! Perhaps we should get team T-shirts printed saying "I met my Inner Warthog at 100 Days"?
Dale, Jean, and Beth Adams, I see you've addressed some aspects of my earlier rant, and I think you have cogent points but I have to walk the dog, deal with my daughter's identity crisis as she attempts to draw a self-portrait for class, and get to bed for an early appointment in the morning. Sigh. Oh, and meditate. My head is swimming with a current ethical issue where I chose the student's needs over the cost of my services and the agency's outrageously high fees, and if I get into trouble I don't care. An elderly grandmother, a stressed mother, and a daughter who's taking one course, the first anyone in her family has ever taken at university, they are Chinese, and they live in circumstances not unlike my own. So I must pray for forgiveness from the gods of capitalism as I help her in whatever way I can. I can't abandon people.
Ok, enough rant. If we could but wish a world free of conflict into being, a world where liberating love existed always and completely, ah...
Yes, one enlightened person does change the world, Dale. Surely that...
28 Comments:
What a fantastic discussion yesterday!
I totally agree about political compassion, just like with any other compassion. If we hold some one in a rigid 'opposite' position to us, surely it means we have blocked our own flow aswell as theirs, and possibility of balance and change between us, and sice we live largely in the space between this seems a bit silly.
Dale, the tong len practice you describe is exactly what I have occasionally practiced since I read about it years ago in pema Chodron. I wove it quite profoundly in to my thesis too, so was a bit anxious there for a while.
In her book 'When things Fall apart' She says alot about it, starting with this:
'Tonglen is a practice of creating space, ventilating the atmosphere of our lives so people can breathe freely and relax. Whenever we encounter suffering in any form , the tonglen instruction is to breathe it in with the wish that everyone could be free of pain. Whenever we encounter happiness in any form, the instruction is to breathe it out, send it out, with the wish that everyone could feel joy. It's a practice that allows people to feel less burdened and less cramped, a practice that shows us how to love without conditions.'
Remembering this practice now, I realise it would have been helpful to me whilst Julian was suffering from depression.
Good morning, wishing all of you a good day and a good week. I must come back and read yesterday's discussion, which looks very interesting. Spent the weekend clapped out, just resting and enjoying the very welcome sunshine and hoping to regain some strength after feeling so ill for one reason or another these past few weeks. I've been meditating every day, though, and was there on Friday. Fell asleep on the sofa much earlier in the evening and woke up with a start at 5 to eleven, thinking: what? oh! now! So I was a bit distracted, as all my meditations lately have been tired and distracted. But I was there. Been finding that even when I feel so tired and distracted, after 10 or 15 minutes my mind and body drop into somewhere quieter. Just have to sit there and it happens 'on its own'. Being very still mobilises the sympathetic (or do I mean parasympathetic - my mind is really vague and unfocused lately) nervous system, or something? anyway, I appreciate it very much.
Briefly before my next client arrives ... what a discussion yesterday - it has raised so many things to the surface for me. I have realsied that although my meditation practice is very 'mechanical' (and thanks all for the input on that - I feel more at home here now) my counselling practice is much closer to the descriptions of tonglen ...I need to look into it a bit more and am aware that we all understand words differently but there is a definite sense for me, in my work of holding the other in relation, in their pain, anger, whatever. It is also my particular struggle - to let go, to accept ... I sometimes see it in terms of simple respect, both for myself and the other - and I manage it so infrequently. I see it too as an attempt to remain loosely open to the world whilst taking care of myself - again a balance I achieve rarely ...
I need to think about these things more especially in relation to my political leanings ...but jsut wanted to say thank you right now.
Good morning, happy Monday to all...
(Lorianne, I left you a brief note at the end of yesterday's discussion.)
Jean, I do hope you will feel better soon. So sorry you've had so many days of feeling wiped out and ill.
Barbara, yes, I agree about applying these concepts to political thinking. It's hard for me, because I have such strong political feelings but I do try to never hate or ridicule anyone. Some of this is an attempt at "right speech", but letting it go deeper than that is the real practice for me.
Good morning, everyone!
(The following is something I wrote & saved earlier, before Blogger crashed temporarily. Beth, I'll go & read your comment from yesterday after I've posted this...)
I haven’t yet sat today, but I re-read yesterday’s discussion & had something to add. I think part of the language difference amongst folks here has to do with the difference between “prescriptive” and “descriptive” terminology.
When I read (and I’m probably misreading!) people talking about loving-kindness practice, it sounds prescriptive to me, like a recipe. “Sit down, think about A, then think about B.” It’s as if someone has charted a path toward a compassionate place, and they’re giving you the landmarks so you can find your way there.
As such, this sort of prescriptive loving-kindness meditation seems entirely foreign to my experience of Zen: we don’t do that! We talk about compassion, but we don’t have a structured recipe for achieving it during practice time (although I suspect a lot of folks do it based on their reading of Pema Chodron & other writers).
In Zen, all we do (really!) on the mat is follow the breath, using a repetitive phrase to bring awareness back to the breath. In my tradition at least, doing or thinking about anything else (even one’s kong’an, or koan) during practice time is a distraction: your time on the mat is strictly for following the moment/breath.
But. Zen’s all about compassion, so that previous paragraph is misleading. I think a lot of folks get the idea that Zen is cold & intellectual because it doesn’t talk about loving-kindness & other practices involving emotion & imagery, but again that’s a fault of language.
In Zen, compassion happens naturally & subconsciously: if you train yourself to accept the present moment in all its varied forms (which is what you do when you sit with your breath), you’ll naturally & subconsciously become more compassionate.
So Zen doesn’t talk about loving-kindness in prescriptive terms: when you meditate, do this, then do that. Instead, Zen talks about compassion in descriptive terms: if you practice, your True Compassionate Self will naturally awaken. You don’t really “make” it happen: you simply “watch” it like a flower unfurling.
So the end result is the same, but the language to describe the path to get there is different. Dale & others are describing the landmarks for one path to loving-kindness, and Zen says, “Don’t worry about landmarks. Just train yourself to love the present moment, and you’re already there.”
LATER: well, I have read the long discussion now, but rather quickly, and I think I'd like to print it out and read and ponder over it at much more length. What I find is that I identify somewhat with what everyone says! Maybe that makes me hopelessly vague, woolly and intellectually lazy. But also I think it comes from the fact that my relationship to meditation is very experiential (one of the very few areas where I 'do it a lot more than I think about it) and so what I have most strongly is a sense of the feelings that are common to all the 'types' I've tried. Having practiced both mindfulness of breathing and loving kindness (the one absolutely bare attention and the other detailed and discursive) from my very first experiments with meditation, because that just happened to be what I was taught, I have found that I tend naturally more to one, or the other, or both, at different times. And I have certainly found what Lorianne says today to be true - 'just sitting' has been a powerful route to melting my stony heart, to a place of greater compassion for myself and others. So the two kinds of meditation just feel like different paths in the same direction. As for the discussion about difference between tonglen and other kinds of loving kindness and compassion-based meditation, I have to say that I have, supposedly, practiced both loving kindness in the Theravadin tradition, and Tonglen, and I have found the difference to be in degree (maybe Tonglen explicitly goes further), emphatically not that they are fundamentally different. I feel that true attention, true compassion, inevitably encompass, in time, a complete reframing of our feelings about both self and others. My teachers at Gaia House retreat centre (who are former Theravadin or Zen monastics now teaching fairly 'ecumenically', but with undiminished respect for their own past teachers) are wont to say that following specific instructions and techniques, especially if one feels 'right' for you, is fine, but that if you just sit without any instructions at all, and with sincere attention, you'll still go on the same journey. I'm not, in general, one for agreeing with everyone and smoothing over differences (sometimes wish I was a bit more like that), but it's truly what I feel in this context.
Having moved very far from my former steely, marxist, rationalism, I still don't quite feel comfortable with the word 'religious', as opposed to 'spiritual'. But I also am not very interested any more in labels.
Interesting that the discussion about political compassion should come up now. There's a big political scandal just now involving my member of parliament, a female Blairite clone whom I have always instinctively disliked. I've found it hard not to feel satisfaction at her likely downfall. It's certainly a good test of compassion.
Jean, I think it's natural to find oneself at various points of the spectrum, so to speak, as one's practice continues. These various schools (Zen, Tibetan, etc) have formalized various aspects of experiential practice, and just as "Your results may vary," you may find yourself going in & out of prescriptive, descriptive, theoretical, experiential, and other modes.
I also think there's a strong component of personality & learning styles involved. If you want to learn to play golf, for instance, there are many ways to proceed. One personality/learning type will read a book or watch an instructional video which breaks down the "steps" to a proper swing. Another personality/learning type will hire an instructor to show you how to hold the club, how to set your stance, etc. Another personality/learning type will buy clubs & head out to the driving range determined to figure it out themselves, damnit.
For good or ill, I'm that third type of learner. :-) When I first started meditating, I considered myself a Christian, so I was suspicious of any sort of guided meditation that "sounded too Buddhist." Zen worked (and still works!) for me because it didn't get in my face trying to "show" me how to do thing. Other folks, though, appreciate the help of more prescriptive practices...and other folks, I think, enjoy the richness of imagery & emotion that loving-kindness & other meditations afford.
Personally, as a writer, I find myself up to my neck in words, thoughts, and images most of the time, so I appreciate the chance to *let go of all that* when I'm meditating. But not everyone can stand the bleak starkness of "just sitting": you have to have a pretty high boredom threshold to tolerate it, I think.
This discussion is fabulous, I am learning so much.
While I am gathering from the different traditions being expressed by practitioners, I could not follow a specified practice. At this point in my life, anything outlined is too prescriptive.
The most we can do, I feel, is speak of our own experience, and that way we both explain to ourselves what it is we do and convey our immeasurable wisdom to each other.
When I do my version of loving-kindness I find the heart is full of tiny knots, resistances, pressures, dips and hollows and peaks, spirals of wind and clear skies. What I presently do is focus on an unconditional love, perhaps my father who died 22 years ago, there's a superb clarity to that love, or the Divine Mother as I understand her, and then my heart becomes filled as if with clear light that is overflowing love that I can focus wherever, specific individuals (including myself, in the places I'm wounded), projects, political causes.
The latter I have some difficulty with. I do believe in unconditional love but not in forgiving horrendous acts. Could I unconditionally forgive and send love backwards in time to the Nazis for what they did to the Jewish people during the war? No.
Can I include Mugabe in my meditation? Mugabe where I see paranoia (against all whites/white regims/Western world), stupidity (decimating the economy by ousting the tobacco farming that undergirded the country's financial stability without training new farmers [tobacco is another issue embedded in there, it's complex isn't it]; ignoring the AIDS epidemic, etc.), and greed (a multi-million dollar hotel outside of Harare for him to 'retire' to, lavish trips to Europe while the country literally starves - they will run out of wheat in a few weeks).
But to suppose paranoia, stupidity and greed is to project onto him my judgements. To recognize them is to affirm them. Rather I would focus on awakening compassion in Mugabe, to open his heart so that he can see the extent of the suffering in his country, the one I was born in, Zimbabwe.
I would not focus on my perception of his 'sins,' 'evils,' 'faults,' 'errors,' 'ignorances.' I do not know enough about the workings of karma to do this.
When the love in my heart clears through the knots, whorls, resistances, and is fully open, like clear light, I can focus on Mugabe's intentions, on him seeing the consequences of his actions, on the suffering of his people, on his compassion.
Whether it has any effect or not is not for me to know.
It is a prayer I offer to one area of the world where there is terrible pain.
Before I rush off into the day, let me say that I am very wary of "armchair acitivism."
It's an issue with the New Age movement that I've been at logger-heads with.
Can you sit in your comfortable and safe room and meditate nice thoughts on terrifying political realities around the world and actually be doing anything other than assauging your own guilt?
I would say no. Nothing replaces putting yourself out there and doing something. Marching, writing, being present.
That is why I ascribe no 'end result' to my meditation on areas of political strife. Meditating with loving-kindness on Mugabe may or may not have any 'effect,' I have no way of knowing. It does make me 'feel better' to do such a meditation, but does it help that country in any real or substantial way?
Do I believe in the ether that much?
I am wary of 'armchair activism,' and don't abide by the supposed efficacy of James Taylor world prayers except as beautiful ways to unite us, and, I suppose, if enough people are publicly praying, that's a social movement, that makes the papers, that has an actual effect in the actual world.
Forgiveness - such a hard thing to discuss. Not least because I keep finding that different people mean such different things, and sometimes it feels like completely opposing, things by the word. Whereas many seem to talk of 'letting the person off the hook' if you forgive them and thus of whether or not particular people or acts are 'forgivable', I understand what buddhists, for example, mean by forgiveness to be entirely about letting myself off the hook of the endlessly repeated painful cycle of my own anger and hatred. That seems as desirable as it is difficult in itself, and not necessarily prescriptive in terms of what therefore ensues for the guilty party, though obviously it would be likely to have an effect on what you wanted to happen to them. As someone who has not been able to forgive her own mother for being nasty, this is very much a distant aspiration for me. But I do nonetheless feel that I've been profoundly affected by seeing forgiveness in these terms.
Jean, I like what you say about *self* forgiveness: "letting myself off the hook of the endlessly repeated painful cycle of my own anger and hatred." Yesterday I finished watching (on dvd) the film *What the #$*! Do We Know,* and it talks about how emotion becomes embedded in our neurology on a cellular level: if you think a particular thought (or feel a particular emotion) repeatedly, your neural networks will literally re-wire themselves to allow that pattern to repeat.
In other words, there seems to be a cellular basis for what we might call "karma": a mind habit so pervasive we literally become addicted to the neuro-chemistry of it.
Meditation offers the possibility of re-wiring one's mental chemistry. If you practice compassion, you become compassion. If you practice cutting off your tendencies toward judgment, hatred, and anger, eventually those neurological connections become less entrenched.
It's a fascinating, thought-provoking film: at times funny, at times bizarrely "trippy":
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0399877/
I disagree completely, Brenda. Not because I think that my meditation has any effect on the world -- it may or may not -- but because it clearly reduces my contribution to the world's hatred and anger and destructiveness.
After all, everyone who's active in politics believes that they're working for the common good. That's no guarantee that we're actually doing so. It looks to me like nearly everyone active in politics, from George W. Bush to Osama bin Laden, is convinced that they are engaged in productive politcal action that's tending to the improvement of the world. So the fact that I also am convinced of that doesn't mean much.
I'm moderately politically active -- I worked hard to try to defeat George W. in the last election -- but that's more out of a lingering sense of duty than out of a conviction that I really know what actions of mine will make the world better.
I no longer think the problem is out there. It's in me as much as it's anywhere. To work on myself is to work on the problem in the one place where I can have confidence that I actually understand it.
Again to Brenda -- I really think that the attitude of "not letting people off the hook" is superstitious. Our attitude towards those people has no effect on them whatever. What it has an effect on is us.
Our actions have an effect on other people. I applaud political action, when it arises from compassion, at least. But as the Dalai Lama said, "if I hate the Chinese, the Chinese don't lose sleep. I lose sleep."
If you're afraid that you will be less politically active if you don't nurse anger against those people, well, it may be true and it may not. You can see. If it is true, you can always pick up the anger again -- that's easy, all too easy. But it hasn't been true of me, so far. It turns out that my productive action was not tied to my anger. What was tied to my anger was depression and despair. I don't mind losing those.
Did I detect a hint of frustration with Pema Chodron Lorraine??
I think the golf metaphor is beautiful and it is really worth emphasising the fact that we are all trying to learn a practice in our different ways, and , as lorraine reminds us, we all learn very differently.
My experience with the 'tong len' is, as dale says, counterintuitive in a way, but it is this very conterintuitive part which jolts me out of my usual arrogance and judgement. This is why this particular meditation has helped me.
Today I practiced it again, with a 'very arrogant' conductor in mind I have been having problems with since he basically unjustly sacked me from Glyndebourne. I was amazed to note, as I brought to mind what I percieved as 'his suffering', that actually I suffer in exactly the same ways. If I just sent out loving kindness (and this is me not everyone) I might continue in the illusion that I was somehow superior to him.
I also understand and agree with the idea that just practicing is enough. If I do my scales every day, regartdless of lofty thoughts about the spiritual and healing aspect of music, I am a better cellist and in so being, freer to express my voice. -Though many of us (who, unlike writers, just play wordless notes most of the time!) like to hash out the ideas!
I'm loving this debate!
dale - as ever your words are thought provoking, awe inspiring and beautiful. Thank you.
ahem, I don't think Brenda said anything about letting people off the hook - that was just me imagining a putative person I might disagree with...
Warthog report update ,,,
reading all these words from so many meditaters, and sinking deeper and deeper into the muddy depths of my warthogness … I felt tongue-tied and stupid because I couldn’t express myself adequately, feeling like a ‘stranger in a strange land’, wanting to say something, but not knowing how …. UNTIL
Lorianne expressed so clearly, what I could not say for myself. My Zen practice is in the Soto tradition (Japanese) wherein “compassion happens naturally and subsconsciously”. I hadn’t thought about it until I read your comment about boredom, and I guess I have a very high threshold.
We practice shikantaza, a form of zazen in which there are no supporting techniques. It means 'just sitting' … from the Japanese shikan ‘nothing but’ ta ‘precisely’ za ‘sitting’, facing a blank wall. At the first retreat I attended, I always tried to get the cushion near the electrical outlet, figuring that when the ‘light came on’ I’d be right there and ready to plug in.
Most of you spoke about some form of loving kindness meditation. I experienced tong len with a visiting teacher when I was at SMZC in California. It just didn’t feel right for me, probably because of a strong streak of independence and rebelliousness against being told what to do.
The dharma name given to me at my ordination is Jisho which means ‘giving birth to compassion’. I’m happy and content just sitting here in the mud and growing a lotus blossom … watching and waiting for ‘the flower to unfurl’
Appreciation and respect for all the differences is part of compassion … we have such an abundance in this group. I’m grateful to each of you for so much generosity of sharing.
(Actually, I'm probably quite as impatient as you are, Brenda, with the people you have in mind. Such as my brother, who went to Tehran with a group to meditate there in order to stop the incipient civil war in the 1980s. They got an apartment there and meditated a lot, and seemed quite surprised when they came back to find that the revolution had happened around them. They'd seen a couple cars burning, but they hadn't thought a lot of it :->)
Devon, how did the showdown at the OK corral go?
Brenda, I appreciate what you said earlier about sharing our various practices and not judging. It's important, I think, to stress that no one here has a corner on what's right or wrong, and we're all just trying to be better people.
My (mostly Zen) practice coexists with (mostly Christian) prayer addressed to a "God" who I understand more and more as "the ground of being" and less and less as a force "out there somewhere". Whether I've admitted it to myself or not, I've done intercessory prayer for years and years, and it is certainly a form of "loving kindness meditation." When I hope for, pray for, whatever is best for someone else or myself, I am giving up judgement about what that is. "Judge not, lest ye yourself be judged" has always seemed like good advice to me!
However, there is a lot that's clearly wrong in the world, so what do we do with that? I also feel called to work for social and economic justice, and use my life to help others. The people who impede that, and who destroy hope and opportunity, are obstacles and are easy to hate. however, I'm with the Dalai Lama and other great spiritual teachers in believing that the hate only hurts me. The DL has worked tirelessly for justice for Tibetans - but without hating. That's the challenge, I think - to BE "political" without contributing to polarization, which comes from hatred, rigidity, self-righteousness.
I also think it's not my job to forgive Hitler, or Bush, or Nixon and Kissinger or whoever. I believe the universe has its own system of justice, although I don't necessarily see it or understand it. I see my job being to take care of myself and guard my own heart against hatred and judgement; and to forgive both myself and the people who are close to me. That's hard enough, but it spills over into increasing love and compassion toward everything and everyone.
Ruth, I've not read any Pema Chodron, so I have nothing to get frustrated with. What I was trying to suggest is that these traditions get mixed since we live in an era when you can sit at a Zen Center, read books by a Tibetan nun, go to church on Sunday followed by a 12-step program afterward, etc. So whereas I can say "Zen does X, Y, Z," there are probably many Zen practitioners who do loving-kindness practice just as there are probably some Tibetan practitioners who have tried zazen.
Blending traditions can muddy the waters, or it can allow one to pick a style/practice that appeals to one's personality. Personally, I bridle against practices that seem even the least bit "touchy-feely": that's just my own personality. I resent being "told" how to think, feel, etc, even if it's simply part of a guided meditation: I prefer pure silence without instruction.
But I also realize that's a *very* narrow path, so I'm glad there are other paths for folks who appreciate a more emotional approach to practice. Emotions are very powerful, and there's nothing "wrong" with them. I just don't like being told what to do with *mine*: it's part of the stubborn pig-headedness of my warthog nature. ;-)
Piggy-backing (no pun intended...) on what Beth said, I don't think it's our job to forgive Hitler. I think the real challenge of our practice is to let go of the habitual hatreds that hit us much closer to home: forgiving ourselves, our spouses, our exes, our parents, siblings, children...
I'm thinking of what Jean said about struggling to forgive a parent: that's serious shit, much more difficult than forgiving Hitler. It's easy to say "I forgive Hitler" because Hitler is a theoretical abstraction: we don't have to *live* with him. But if you've spent most of your life struggling with a parent (or even a dozen-some years struggling with a spouse, which is the example that hits *me* closest to home), how do you let go & "reprogram" those mind-habits? That's a big job, one that seems logically impossible. I guess that's where an element of faith comes in: somehow, we believe that there is a pristine Buddha somewhere within our angry, unforgiving warthogginess, and we keep trying even when it seems that our Inner Warthog is undeniable.
PS: It occurs to me as we're having this conversation that we're trying to do two seemingly contradictory things. First, we're trying to believe in our own practices 100%: really, why would you continue doing your practice unless you *really believed* it was efficacious, the best possible practice you could choose?
At the same time, we're trying to believe that other meditators are on paths that are just as efficacious as our own, that "all roads lead to the mountaintop." The temptation, I think, is to say that "roads don't matter," but they do. It's easier if you're on a road, and you'll make more progress if you stick to one road rather than racing around trying to take a couple steps on all of them.
But when your road runs parallel with another path, it can be helpful to hear what the view looks like from over there, trusting that the road under your feet is as perfect as the parallel path trod by a fellow traveller.
lorraine you sound like me on the subject of crossover music and I totally understand! PC i found rather unemotional for my taste but very instructive and beautifully written. Whatever, the book came into my hands at the right time and started me on this particular road...
Beth, lovely things you write and they strike a chord.
My mother is very politically active - infact her whole life is dedicated to her (in my opinion very just) green peaceful cause - so much that she has said that she will leave everything she has to the insects (you gotta laugh... i could actually do with a few bucks to create the life - and start the festival - she has taught me to value! but hey! it seems i'm creating it anyway.) However, it seems to me that her motive has always been and still is anger - anger towards my father who left, then me who apparently betrayed, then Bush and everyone else. So it's not actually about leaving her money to the insects, it's about not leaving it to me.I do not actually believe any peace or love can come of words or actions motivated by anger and hatred and therefore I am always heartbroken but never surprised when her wonderful plans are incessantly spoiled or aborted.
This brings us back to the simple thing of kindness and compassion starting at home, in each one of us, which is where I feel many religions and philosophies meet.
I'm thoroughly enjoying these discussions, the diversity of views, the nuances. Fascinating stuff.
Lorianne, I smiled when I read that you "resent being "told" how to think, feel, etc, even if it's simply part of a guided meditation: I prefer pure silence without instruction."... smiled only because the loving kindness meditation I sometimes do is what I invented for myself, whereas pure silence feels more like the instructed part! Ah, see... we all have our ways... many currents to the river.
A well-meaning elderly friend recently gave me a guided-meditation CD, knowing I'd had a lot of stress in my life and wanting to help. When I finally listened to it, I got about five minutes into it and started crying out of sheer frustration - I'm sorry, I just can't make myself into a seagull flying over the beautiful ocean, and the whole concept just really bothered me. I'm like Lorianne and others who say the touchy-feely approach doesn't work for them; it never has - it gives me the heebie-jeebies. Too rebellious, and also too Episcopalian, I guess! On the other hand, I don't have a high boredom threshold - I am very easily bored - so the difficulty for me is stopping the words and discursive thoughts and images with which I try to amuse myself during meditation! Today I'm sure I will be *thinking* about this fascinating discussion!
Fascinating, just fascinating. I've been reading along and saying little, feeling very much the uncertain newcomer not wanting to expose my ignorance. I have been reading with an eye to selecting a direction for further study and development, because there seem to be an intimidatingly large number of styles & traditions on offer.
One of the things that last year taught me (via meditation among others) is that I am just as much in search of the missing piece to fit the "God-shaped hole" as anyone else.
The "warthog" motif seems to have struck a common nerve! Perhaps we should get team T-shirts printed saying "I met my Inner Warthog at 100 Days"?
Udge, you make me laugh!
Dale, Jean, and Beth Adams, I see you've addressed some aspects of my earlier rant, and I think you have cogent points but I have to walk the dog, deal with my daughter's identity crisis as she attempts to draw a self-portrait for class, and get to bed for an early appointment in the morning. Sigh. Oh, and meditate. My head is swimming with a current ethical issue where I chose the student's needs over the cost of my services and the agency's outrageously high fees, and if I get into trouble I don't care. An elderly grandmother, a stressed mother, and a daughter who's taking one course, the first anyone in her family has ever taken at university, they are Chinese, and they live in circumstances not unlike my own. So I must pray for forgiveness from the gods of capitalism as I help her in whatever way I can. I can't abandon people.
Ok, enough rant. If we could but wish a world free of conflict into being, a world where liberating love existed always and completely, ah...
Yes, one enlightened person does change the world, Dale. Surely that...
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