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Using meditation to change onself for the better
specialkayme
Veteran
I have been meditating for about a year. Mainly counting breaths, focusing on single objects, keeping the mind from wandering, sitting still, the like.
I've heard alot about using meditation to change onself. Improve on qualities that you think you need improvement (such as anger, frustration, ect).
I know this is a very basic question, but how do you use meditation to accomplish these goals? Just focusing on "anger" and seeing how you react?
Any help would be appreciated.
I've heard alot about using meditation to change onself. Improve on qualities that you think you need improvement (such as anger, frustration, ect).
I know this is a very basic question, but how do you use meditation to accomplish these goals? Just focusing on "anger" and seeing how you react?
Any help would be appreciated.
0
Comments
To be peaceful & calm is a pleasant abiding.
:smilec:
Rather than pursue peace just see what comes up? What is peace in fact?
In the subtle delusions we are just thinking if we will get what we want this day (in the morning). Or we are thinking about what that person said at work. And how could they have said that?
In my experience of anger, the secret to seeing the joyous irony is in recognizing the faulty view that anger punishes someone else, and so holding in it in our body is something they 'deserve'. If you accept that anger is something that corrodes you (and only you) then in the moments of anger you can see that irony and open up the anger into something else. From there, cushion like awareness re-blooms, at least for my mind. Granted, it does work differently for everyone, but this is the alchemy I use.
Of course, it is better to catch the anger before it arrives... which is what will certainly happen with continued right effort on your part.
With warmth,
Matt
This makes it possible eventually to just notice and then relax into an emotion (such as anger) as it arises - and it will subside again.
.
Whilst my own experience suggests that a regular practice of meditation results in changes, arising as if naturally, just as physical fitness improves from regular exercise, we do need to pay attention to our intention in the practice.
As with physical exercise, why are you doing this sitting, watching breath, etc.? In some schools of Buddhism, you will be told that meditation is an end in itself but you appear to want it to be a means as well, which fits with other Buddhist schools. In the P.E. analogy, meditation for its own sake seems to me to resemble the body-builders: beautiful, sculptural, self-controlled but (to me) sterile and ego-centric. I don't go quite as far as an elderly Thai monk friend (of the Thich Nhat Hanh school) who refers to it as "masturbatory meditation".
When I was a boy, we used to have our tea with a school-friend whose mother was Irish. She would give us children twice as much as to adults on the grounds, she said, that we had "two jobs to do: grow and improve." My own practice is just like that: the growing is the practice itself, the improvement is about my attitudes, beliefs, actions, etc.
This doesn't mean that I sit and think about 'improvement'; quite the contrary. My practice is one of stilling the mind so, within the silence, such 'thinking about' is a distraction. It belongs to the preparation for meditation.
And that is the crucial point: coming back to the P.E. analogy, we need a 'warm up' time. Now I am in my later 60s, I need some physical warm-up and loosening of legs and back before I sit. Prostrations help me, although I admit that the first few may be as painful to watch as they are to perform. But far more important is the time I spend which my first teacher called Purifying the Intention. I have found many ways of doing this and whichever one fits the day-as-it-is-today precedes even the prostrations. It is like digging a channel for water to flow through, diverting where necessary, so that the line of least resistance leads towards the fulfillment of the intention. Having spent time on Intention and warmed up aching muscles and stiff joints, I blow my nose, set everything else aside and sit.
This is, I stress, only my experience. You will have to ask those around me and the world at large if my practice has made any improvement at all. For my own part, it brings me peace, a grateful and (more often than not) a benevolent mind.
example:
many people get angry, they believe: "he said this to piss me off so i got angry, he made me angry, if he didn't do this i would not have been angry..."
once you meditate for a while you see how it really works, that you make yourself angry and nobody else, that noone has ever made you angry, you did.
You see how you made yourself angry, so you understand it truly.
eventually you have this realization and it changes the way you were dealing with life. From now on it will be almost impossible for you to ever get angry again.
You could do it, you could make yourself feel angry again but you would never take yourself seriously, like acting...
Meditating by yourself is better than nothing, but it could be really beneficial to go to a 10 days Vipassana retreat.
http://www.dhamma.org/
Learn properly and have a good practice, then you can do it yourself.
Although I personally know many long-term meditators whose examples support the above statement, I give the case-in-point that I know the best: My mother ...
My mother died at age 86, and she had been meditating for over 65 years. She'd been a personal student of Paramhansa Yogananda since the early 1930's and had practiced yoga, not Buddhism.
Note that her meditation technique was essentially the same as that taught by the Tibetan Buddhist monk who is my teacher.
Also note that she was taught that meditation alone would accomplish the goals.
I only knew her for 48 years, but she never calmed her "demons" or tamed her wild personality. She remained as angry, prideful, touchy, vindictive, blaming, and self-hating as the mom I remember from my childhood. My sister called her "Hell on Wheels" and my brother-in-law "The Wicked Witch of the West."
Even as a young child, I called her by her name (not "mother"), realized that she was suffering profusely, and knew that she parented the best as she was able. She exposed me to the concept that true happiness does not lie in the outside world. She taught me to meditate (the 1950's were not a "hotbed" of meditation in the US), and she indirectly taught me that meditation does not change the person. She has been the strongest influence in my desire to practice Buddhism, especially compassion. And I do not regret being born to her.
I think we are born to our parents to learn from them, for better or for worse. Your mother sounds like a really amazing, interesting woman.
Mtns
If you try to build a brick castle but do not use mortar, you might work really hard all of your life and make little progress.
A skillful effort is necessary.
If you find peace and wisdom in your meditation, then you know you are doing it properly.
If you don't, you should seek guidance from those who did.
However, the peace found on the meditation cushion fades ... I say this from my own experience (47 years), from my readings, and from my teacher of 10 years.
It might be useful to define terms here ... when I talk about change, I am not talking about a short-term emotional feeling. I am referring to a change in how I respond and how I act ... this is a change that is observable and measurable by other people, and it is not a short-term change but rather a new set of behaviors.
To mountains ... actually, my mother WAS an interesting woman ... a concert pianist, an activist in many groups (including the labor union movement in the 1930's, and the peace movement during the Viet Nam war years). She retired onto a 10-acre plot in the country, lived simply, and donated all extra money to charity ... all so she would not have to pay taxes ... because she believed that the US government aggressed against people and if she paid taxes her monies would be used for this. She believed it was morally wrong to contribute to this and that she would earn negative karma for supporting military aggression.
Good for you.
Notice I live in Canada, now, too ... for the same reason.
I believe meditation itself brings a significant change for the better. A positive karmic shift is an inevitable "side-effect" of the process: the more you meditate, the closer you get to the Buddha-mind; the closer you get to the Buddha-mind, the purer and nobler you become. Your character is positively transformed in the process.
But there is also something more "active" that can be done during meditation, which I have seen practiced at my meditation center. It's called "reciting the bramahivaras," and it involves radiating positive mental states in the areas of 1) loving-kindness or benevolence; 2) compassion; 3) sympathetic joy; and 4) equanimity.
I have not yet begun this practice myself, but I intend to do so soon. I wonder if anyone here practices this?