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meditation
Well once again a question, I read there are many different types of meditation, therefore what are they?, and what sect practices these
pob:skeptical
pob:skeptical
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Yes indeed.
There are forty meditation techniques taught in the Theravada tradition alone.
They can all be found in the Vissudhimagga.
Best wishes.
Jason
That's one technique among many, but a simple one to start with. Think of it this way: you're giving your mind lots of room to wander, sort of like releasing a calf in a huge field. At first the calf will run all over, jumping here and there, but eventually it will get bored with all of that and settle down. That's what you want to develop, a sort of "cool boredom" that allows your mind to settle. It's not something you can force your mind to do. You have to let it alone. As Zen Master Dogen said, "Sit like a mountain." I think you'll find it very helpful.
Palzang
Also, if you are interested, see this link: Meditations
Jason
Zen Meditation - The Seat of Enlightenment
Mindfulness in Plain English
thanks - http://www.accesstoinsight.org looks like a really interesting site!
i struggle with distraction alot. i dont know if anyone wants to share tips on how they structure their meditation? im ok with mindfullness but never get much further.
I think we all do.
Meditation can very difficult .
The mind can be so unruly, and hard to watch.
I tested out many methods until I found one that was comfortable. Generally, I sit and do my best to settle down for the first ten minutes or so. The mind is very excited and there is almost no way you can gain any sort of concentration right away.
What I do most often is I watch my breath and mentally repeat Bud-dho, Dham-mo, Sang-ho with each in-out breath. Usually my mind begins to settle down and I can focus more on my meditation without wandering away as often. I do this until I am calm, focused, and concentrated. I either follow this up with a theme of Dhamma to contemplate (body, death, impermanence, not-self, etc.), or if my body begins to 'hurt' I focus all my attention on the pain.
This can be unbearable at first, but once you really stay with it for a while the sensation itself will either disapate (which allows you to continue with the breath), or you will simply abide in the "feeling" without it being "painful" (using this as insight practice into the nature of the body). "Pain" is merely a perception. It is a geat meditation subject because it contains all three characteristics of existence (unsatisfactory, impermanent, and not-self), and it is easily observable.
Also, it heps to be consitent and practice often. The more you practice the more you will be able to concentrate, sit longer, and benefit from it.
Once I can no longer sit, I get up and do walking meditation. I take slow, dileberate steps focusing on the sensation of my feet as I place them down. I mentally repeat Bud-dho, Dham-mo, Sang-ho with each step.
I repeat this until I am unable to do anymore.
I think that is good to begin with.
I find it to be beneficial.
Jason
P.S. Yes, I love Access To Insight!
thanks Jason.
I think its because i only set aside 15 minutes or so. I need to let my mind settle beforehand. Im also afraid ill get disturbed so i am half thinking about that.
Even if you only have 15 minutes, Darryl, it is still worth taking time to 'warm up' and prepare by sttling your body and firming your intention.
Palzang
I think i was too relaxed, what about exercise before starting?
I spend alot of time, probably too much, infront of a PC (8-12 hours per day) for my work. So I get a little sluggish.
My aim is to get into a daily routine. Ideally I would like 2 small sessions per day, but im usually out of the house by 6:45am and im either daddy daycare or working until after 8pm each night. So im lucky if I can get in a position to do a session until almost 9pm. Finding time can be really difficult.
At night (due to a back injury about 12 months ago) I do yoga stretches and breathing exercises, kills two birds with the one stone!
perhaps a similar regime might help you..
I dont know any yoga. might look into that then.
I find it most useful to remind myself of those insights and that the ups and downs are all normal. Anyway - give it a shot. Can't lose much in trying. Just don't beat yourself up if it doesn't work out.
WE NEED MORE PEOPLE IN THE WORLD LIKE YOU.
Here's a nice string of thoughts to help bring on a good meditative mood:
alien and unbecoming thoughts and feelings.
"Please breathe gently through the nostrils, thinking
that you are drawing in what is pure and abiding
from the atmosphere.
"Please think that there is a wall of light around
you protecting you from all obstacles.
"Please think that body, mind, and senses are rebuilt
by divine materials which are pure and fit for
meditation.
"Please think that you are spreading loving and
peaceful thoughts to the whole universe.
"Let us meditate on the abiding Presence of the
all-loving Being, seated on the throne of our heart,
radiating, joy, light, and peace."
(Thursday evening class Meditation warm-up
Ramakrishna Vedanta Society, Boston)
Very nice, but I'm afraid, nothing to do with Buddhist meditation and in fact quite opposite to it in several respects.
Barbara Streisand....
"Funny Girl...."
What's the song......?
('Don't Rain on my Parade'.......)
Would it not be kinder - and more accurate - to say that this is not your meditation, Genryu? After all, this 'sangha' demonstrates the diversity of Buddhist practice.
"Meditation does produce lovely blissful feelings sometimes. But they are not the purpose, and they don't always occur. Furthermore, if you do meditation with that purpose in mind, they are less likely to occur than if you just meditate for the actual purpose of meditation, which is increased awareness. Bliss results from relaxation, and relaxation results from release of tension. Seeking bliss from meditation introduces tension into the process, which blows the whole chain of events. It is a Catch-22. You can only have bliss if you don't chase it. Besides, if euphoria and good feelings are what you are after, there are easier ways to get them. They are available in taverns and from shady characters on the street corners all across the nation. Euphoria is not the purpose of meditation. It will often arise, but it to be regarded as a by- product."
Venerable Henepola Gunaratana
Meditation in Buddhism is not about producing some particular state of mind but about seeing what is behind all states of mind, not in choosing apparantly good states of mind, nor in rejecting seemingly negative states of mind.
States of consciousness change all the time. There is no one state of consciousness that is lasting or fulfilling. So we stop taking refuge in any particular, temporary state of mind. As we grow up and mature, we get less and less idealistic. We get more disillusioned about the pleasures of the senses as being really fulfilling. We seek more deeply and see that it's not just the physical sensations that are fulfilling, that are the answer to our existential questions, to the crises we all face today. Pleasure and success alone is not enough, not what we really want. It's not just beautiful perceptions or sights or sounds, or hearing beautiful music all day that's going to answer our quest. It's not material possessions. It's not just having the right state of mind that's going to answer our quest. States of mind are always changing -- no matter how high, no matter how ecstatic we become, no matter what new drug or new meditation comes around; it's just another trip. This is not about getting high. This is about the inherent freedom and wholeness of being. Authentic Dharma makes us free.
Lama Surya Das
"The path can be easily misunderstood. Meditation brings one-pointedness, a mind that is stable and clear, not distracted or confused. It is not about entering into a special state..."
Shamar Rinpoche
"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
Jon Kabat-Zinn puts it even more cogently,
"For meditation, and especially mindfulness meditation, is not the throwing of a switch and catapulting yourself anywhere, nor is it entertaining certain thoughts and getting rid of others. Nor is it making your mind blank or willing yourself to be peaceful or relaxed. It is really an inward gesture that inclines the heart and mind (seen as one seamless whole) toward a full-spectrum awareness of the present moment just as it is, accepting whatever is happening simply because it is already happening. This inner orientation is sometimes referred to in psychotherapy as “radical acceptance.” This is hard work, very hard work, especially when what is happening does not conform to our expectations, desires, and fantasies. And our expectations, desires, and fantasies are all-pervasive and seemingly endless. They can color everything, sometimes in very subtle ways that are not at all obvious, especially when they are about meditation practice and issues of “progress” and “attainment.”
Meditation is not about trying to get anywhere else. It is about allowing yourself to be exactly where you are and as you are, and for the world to be exactly as it is in this moment as well. This is not so easy, since there is always something that we can rightly find fault with if we stay inside our thinking. And so there tends to be great resistance on the part of the mind and body to settle into things just as they are, even for a moment. That resistance to what is may be even more compounded if we are meditating because we hope that by doing so, we can effect change, make things different, improve our own lives, and contribute to improving the lot of the world.
That doesn't mean that your aspirations to effect positive change, make things different, improve your life and the lot of the world are inappropriate. Those are all very real possibilities. Just by meditating, by sitting down and being still, you can change yourself and the world. In fact, just by sitting down and being still, in a small but not insignificant way, you already have.
But the paradox is that you can only change yourself or the world if you get out of your own way for a moment, and give yourself over and trust in allowing things to be as they already are, without pursuing anything, especially goals that are products of your thinking. Einstein put it quite cogently: “The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them.” Implication: We need to develop and refine our mind and its capacities for seeing and knowing, for recognizing and transcending whatever motives and concepts and habits of unawareness may have generated or compounded the difficulties we find ourselves embroiled within, a mind that knows and sees in new ways, that is motivated differently. This is the same as saying we need to return to our original, untouched, unconditioned mind.
How can we do this? Precisely by taking a moment to get out of our own way, to get outside of the stream of thought and sit by the bank and rest for a while in things as they are underneath our thinking, or as Soen Sa Nim liked to say, “before thinking.” That means being with what is for a moment, and trusting what is deepest and best in yourself, even if it doesn't make any sense to the thinking mind. Since you are far more than the sum of your thoughts and ideas and opinions, including your thoughts of who you are and of the world and the stories and explanations you tell yourself about all that, dropping in on the bare experience of the present moment is actually dropping in on just the qualities you may be hoping to cultivate -- because they all come out of awareness, and it is awareness that we fall into when we stop trying to get somewhere or to have a special feeling and allow ourselves to be where we are and with whatever we are feeling right now. Awareness itself is the teacher, the student, and the lesson...
So, from the point of view of awareness, any state of mind is a meditative state. Anger or sadness is just as interesting and useful and valid to look into as enthusiasm or delight, and far more valuable than a blank mind, a mind that is insensate, out of touch. Anger, fear, terror, sadness, resentment, impatience, enthusiasm, delight, confusion, disgust, contempt, envy, rage, lust, even dullness, doubt, and torpor, in fact all mind states and body states are occasions to know ourselves better if we can stop, look, and listen, in other words, if we can come to our senses and be intimate with what presents itself in awareness in any and every moment. The astonishing thing, so counterintuitive, is that nothing else needs to happen. We can give up trying to make something special occur. In letting go of wanting something special to occur, maybe we can realize that something very special is already occurring, and is always occurring, namely life emerging in each moment as awareness itself."
Jon Kabat-Zinn - 'Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness'
No eye, no ear, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind...
Palzang
Thanks, ZenMonk Genryu. I cannot see you without somehow sensing the sword of Zen.
As for me, I'm a child at heart, and something within me craves a parent. Would Lord Buddha throw me out? If we're to do it all on our own, what's the sangha for? Can you be sure that nobody uses the sangha as a cloak of protection, as it were?
As for Buddhist meditation techniques, fine. I do what I can, when I can. But sometimes I like a little sugar and milk in my coffee. ---HOWEVER, I drink my tea unsweetened and black--- (I am not sorry that I neglected to say, "This is not Buddhist, but sets a good meditative mood. It's a translation of a Sanskrit chant," in the preface to my last post on this thread, as I had posted over two hours earlier in the Just a Question BY: Canon thread under Buddhism 101, back on January 8. I am not sorry, because I received an excellent lesson from our friend, Genryu.)
MANY THANKS TO ALL, ESP. TO OUR DEAR FRIEND ZENMONK GENRYU!
Nirvana
curious worker bee
The Buddha would disagree.
good post-I just finished telling my 11yearold daughter that her mum and I are both children inside-we always are children inside-its the outside that lies to the populace. we all have "issues" we were all in similar boats (puberty, lost love, teenagerhood etc. only twenty years ago so we "know" whats it feels like to be a child.
you hit the nail on the head and I must say you said what many of us feelbut we are *blush* embarrassed to say...
regards,
And I had an insight. The first thing was that I felt physically like a little child, so small that if I'd sat in a chair my feet wouldn't have touched the floor. And then there was a recognition that I needed to relax into the pain. Until then, I had avoided going to this place where I felt bad or unacceptable or unloved. No language could express how awful that place felt. But I just started breathing into it. I realized that this was a pivotal moment. Somehow, even with the divorce, I had never quite hit the bottom. And that evening, I did. I was seconds away from experiencing the death feeling.
The death feeling?
The deepest level of the dissatisfaction we all feel, and that Westerners misinterpret as something that's wrong with them. But as I relaxed into that feeling, it passed through me. And I didn't die. It passed right through. That was a big moment for me. I realized that resistance to the idea that I was unlovable only made the pain worse.
So you use your own life as the ground for your spiritual practice.
There isn't anything except your own life that can be used as ground for spiritual practice. Spiritual practice is your life, twenty-four hours a day. There's no time off. We do formal practice—meditation—because it brings us closer to those states of mind we experience in our lives during times of crisis. For instance, when I sat there that whole night, I was not running from what was happening to my body and mind. There wasn't any distraction from it, not even to brush my teeth or pee. It was just a moment-by-moment experience of the present.
In Buddhism, there's this idea called the alaya. It's similar to Jung's theory of the universal unconscious. Alaya is a Sanskrit word used to describe a personal storehouse of consciousness. It contains the essence of how we perceive the world and the experiences of our individual lives, and everything that happens to us arises from it. The seeds of everything you think and say and do are buried there. And if the causal conditions come together, certain seeds will ripen. That's what happened to me that night.
Do you keep coming up against painful habits and experiences?
Yes, but there are fewer and fewer of them because those seeds are being burned up.
It must be a tremendous relief.
Yes and no. For a Buddhist, negative emotions are something to work with. There's a joke about bodhisattvas, who are a kind of spiritual warrior in the Mahayana Buddhist tradition: The biggest problem for bodhisattvas is that they don't have much to work with anymore, because fewer and fewer things trigger their negative emotions. It's humorous because this is everyone else's dream come true, but it's a big problem for bodhisattvas. I'm not saying that I'm at that level, but I do know from personal experience that life can become smoother.
I once asked a spiritual teacher what happens as your life gets smoother, and he said you have to up the ante and go into more and more difficult situations. You have the capacity to go into the hell realms of the world and help the people there because you're less triggered by how awful things are. As your own life gets smoother, you can move closer to people who are in severe mental or physical anguish, because you no longer have any fear of it, and therefore you can be of some help.
Have you been doing that?
I'm embarrassed to say I haven't really gone looking for such situations. Any time a painful situation is presented to me, I jump right into it. But I haven't become a political activist or worked in homeless shelters, and I don't know if I will, because I'm getting older and my health isn't so good. All I can say is that whenever pain is presented to me, minor or major, I'm eager to work with it.
Turning toward pain instead of avoiding it is a common theme in your books.
Yes, because I realized what a source of happiness turning toward pain actually is. Our avoidance of pain keeps us locked in a cycle of suffering. The Buddha said that what we take to be solid isn't really solid. It's fluid. It's dynamic energy. And not only do we take our opponents and obstacles to be solid; we also believe ourselves to be solid or permanent. In the West, we add the belief that the self is bad. That night I spent meditating, I discovered that there is no solid, bad me. It's all just ineffable experience.
Is this experience what Buddhists would call "emptiness"?
I don't use Buddhist language very much, but yes, Buddhists would call it "emptiness" or "shunyata" or "egolessness." I would say I experienced the fluidity of what I once thought of as a solid self. And I actually experienced it in a traditional Buddhist way, by staying with the immediacy of my experience and not going off on story lines, as we are always doing. These stories we make up about ourselves distance us from the rawness of our immediate experience.
What we think of as our worst nightmares are what spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle would call "portals." They are doorways that can take you to a different state of mind. Typically what happens when we experience pain is that our habit of avoiding pain gets stronger, or the pain gives birth to other sorrow-producing habits based on the fiction that there's something wrong. But when you taste experience fully the way I did that night, the doorway opens into what I would call "a timeless now."
There's nothing wrong with our thoughts and emotions except that we identify with them and make them seem solid. But if you don't identify with them, you begin to see life as a sort of movie in which you are the main character. It still has plot and conflict—there's no other way it could be—but you don't have this tight grip on it all. We need to let the story line go and have an immediate experience of what's actually happening, without blaming ourselves or anyone else.
Pema Chodron - Turning Toward Pain - From an interview by James Kullander
Marybeth
-Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, "Mindfulness in Plain English"
I think it was Genryu that suggested this source. It happened to be the 'Daily Buddhist Wisdom' quote today from Beliefnet.
Buddha
We are thought. The self or ego (you who are reading this) arises, because of thoughts identification with sensation.
Really? And this is all happening...where?
Thank you for joining us... Pull up a chair! Fancy a cup of tea?
:grumble: I always lose the argument, which is why I don't get into them!
"There is, O monks, an unborn, an unbecome, an unmade, an unconditioned; if, O monks, there were not here this unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned, there would not here be an escape from the born, the become, the made, the conditioned. But because there is an unborn,...therefore there is an escape from the born...."
UDANA viii, 3
Well, yes he did as a matter of fact. Certainly there is the "other" state, but it is only manifest when you are not. "There is self and there is truth. Where self is, truth is not. Where truth is, self is not."
I would have to disagree with you. We are not just "thought". Thoughts (Pali: sankhara, Sanskrit: samskara) are just one of the many conditioned parts that make up us sentient beings. Thought is merely one of the five aggregates, not the totality of them all. If that were the case, then "mind" would be a "Self", which the Buddha of course rejected. Mind (Pali/Sanskrit: nama) is not a self, and nothing in mind [feelings, perceptions, thought, and consciousness] can be considered one either. Just one of them many examples of this teaching can be seen in the Nakulapita Sutta.
Jason
LOL yes, but you do realize that you can never get rid of the self I take it?