Where's the war?

During my meditation over the last few days I've started a little practice where I gently ask myself, 'where's the war?' and I'm finding it very enlightening. 
 

I've found that, almost always, there will be a war.  There will be somewhere where inside myself where I'm struggling, disagreeing, criticizing, or talking my way out of thoughts or feelings I am having.  Sometimes the 'war' appears as words and sometimes as a crunching feeling in my stomach, or a clenching feeling throughout my body. 
 

For example, I might notice that I have a pain in my back.  'Is there any war here?' I ask myself.  Then I notice a cramping feeling around the pain. It's a feeling that I don't want this pain but also feel like it's my fault that it's there. The text of the 'war' goes: 'If I was a better meditator I wouldn't have this pain. What am I doing wrong in my meditation?  Why can't I just get it?'
 

'Oh, OK,' I note to myself.  'There's the war.  I have this pain - I don't want it, and I blame myself for having it.'
 

Then, I try to bring some loving kindness to this war.  Not to make the war go away, but just to extend some compassion towards myself for having it.  'Wow...it sure is hard having this war going on.  I don't think this is my fault.  It's just hard - to see it, to feel it, to notice it.'
 

And I keep going like this - gently asking myself where the war is, and when I see it, bringing some loving kindness to it.
 

Bringing the loving kindness often attracts its own little war.  This little battle goes: 'You idiot!  You shouldn't be showing yourself kindness for having all these terrible, warring, criticizing feelings! You soft fool...you need to FIX this...'
 

If I notice this war, I just bring attention to it in the same way, 'Oh...a little war saying I shouldn't be feeling kindness towards myself.  Wow...it can be tough having these wars.  I'm sure this isn't my fault...'
 

And on it goes...I just follow the trail of thoughts and feelings.  Noticing the war...feeling lovingkindness...noticing the battle...bringing compassion. 

A Wise Break

Today's post is about a particular aspect of the teachings of  Buddhist meditation writer and teacher Tara Brach. 

One of the themes of Tara's teaching is that, whilst mindfulness is an essential component of meditation practice, sometimes we're not quite ready to be mindful of very difficult feelings and sensations. She teaches that it's important that we build up a field of compassion, and caring, before attempting to be fully mindful of strong emotions such as fear, terror, despair, or grief. 

I've heard her say in interviews that when meditation practice first became popular in the West about 40 years ago, people were often taught they had to just sit with whatever 'came up' in meditation - and that this would be of benefit eventually.  She said that slowly, teachers in the West realised that these instructions were actually exacerbating some people's suffering. 

In an interview with Sounds True, Tara said:

"When there has been trauma, a lot of meditations cause people to get re-traumatized. Especially in the early days, I would say in all of the Buddhist traditions, people would come and the instructions would be kind of Rumi's 'Guest House': open the doors and invite in all the demons and bring mindfulness.

If there is a lot of trauma and you open the door to it, and you don't have the resilience and the space and the stability, you are just rerunning the same trauma through -  and without anything added it is re-traumatizing.

So that was the kind of innocent but ignorant beginnings of meditation in this country. Not recognizing that some people with trauma would not benefit by directly going into mindfulness practice. And instead they needed more building affect tolerance, or building a capacity of 'be with.'"

Here's a quote from a podcast Tara gave called Awakening to the Sacred. I think this quote is particularly relevant to those of us with physical pain.

"I want to again say, that sometimes it’s too much to stay.  There’s nothing noble about strong-arming ourselves; to steal ourselves to endure.  It’s just not wise. 
 
So there’s kind of a compassion that knows, OK, be with what’s here, but that sometimes it’s just too much and we’re really thrown off balance by it.  So we take a break.
 
A wise break is just very mindfully saying ‘OK, it’s too much right now,’ and walking or having tea, or taking the Aspirin if we need it – just  in some way being with ourselves in a way that gives us relief."

I'd love to hear your insights and opinions on this topic.  When is it good to take a break?  How have you learnt to sit with pain?  It's a fascinating aspect of meditation practice!

To finish, a beautiful photograph from an Etsy store (my latest addiction!) called Something Betsy.  I found this little store yesterday and asked Betsy if I could put a few of her photos into my blog posts. She has a group of photos called the 'Pathways Series' - which I thought was very appropriate for a meditation blog!

Here's one taken in Alaska, called 'Where We Were.'

My Breath and I, We’re the Best of Mates

This post was written in December 2009, when I was spending a month staying at a Buddhist monastery near Sydney, Australia. 

Last night, after an intense meditation where I was feeling a lot of tension and resistance in my mind and body, I went up to the monastery library to see if I could find anything helpful to read.  I really felt completely stuck – I could observe the tension, the fighting, the utter dislike of my own thoughts and experience – but I couldn’t find any way of working with them.  Every ‘technique’ I tried just left me feeling more and more stuck. 

I found a book by the Buddhist monk Ajahn Brahm called Mindfulness, Bliss, and Beyond. Ajahn Brahm was born in the UK, but for many years has been the Abbot of a monastery in Australia.  (He’s currently in the news for controversially ordaining women, and being kicked out of the Thai lineage his monastery  belonged to...but that’s another story).

Often when I go searching for something in a book that will help me during my ‘stuck’ periods I find nothing, but this time I found a really beautiful section on relating to meditation in a friendly, relaxed, way.  It was exactly what I needed to read.  Here’s the section – may you find it useful too.

‘I love meditation.  I enjoy it so much...Meditation is like a dear old friend that you want to spend time with...as for the meditation object, the breath, we’ve had such a good time together, my breath and I. We’re the best of mates...The opposite of course, is when you know you have to be with that friggin breath and you don’t like it...you see it coming along the other side of the street and you think, ‘Oh my God, here it is again.’

I use the following method to overcome any ill will toward my breath.  I look upon my breath like a newborn son or daughter.  Would you leave your baby at the shopping mall and just forget it?  Would you drop it as you’re walking on the road? If you appreciated your breath as much as your child or someone else who is very, very dear to you and very vulnerable, you would never drop, forget, or abandon it. ...When you have loving-kindness towards the meditation object you do not need much effort to hold it.’

I just love Ajahn Brahm’s happy, uncomplicated, joyful view of meditation.  After I read this I realised how much I see meditation as a chore; ‘I’m sick, and I’ve obviously done something wrong to be given this illness, so now I’ve got to do all this awful, boring, hard work to get better.’  I usually feel like I’m trudging along a long road with a heavy load.  Reading Ajahn Brahm’s book is a good reminder to me to take things a little more lightly – and a lot more kindly.

                                                                       Ajahn Brahm

Hope Begins in the Dark

Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: You don't give up. 

Anne Lamott

I read this quote yesterday and smiled grimly to myself, because it pretty much pins down how I'm feeling at the moment. If I had to draw a picture of how I feel there'd be a cartoon character hanging by one fingernail to the side of a cliff while a bunch of coyotes waited at the bottom (with a few buzzards circling in the sky too - just for good measure).

OK, a bit dramatic - and I'm not so sure buzzards can even fly - but I'm sure you get my drift.  I'm just hanging in there; stubbornly hoping, and not giving up.

This meditation caper aint easy!  True, there are occasional moments of insight and peace, but I'm spending an awful lot of time just feeling pain, feeling distress, feeling despair, feeling hopelesness. Just to make life a little bit harder for myself I'm also feeling that if I was a better meditator, if I just 'got this', then I wouldn't be feeling all this...this...CRAP!

So, it's good to come across quotes like the one above.  I just hope my stubborness will see me through. 'One more breath, just one more breath...'

  

An hour later... 

Well! Waddaya know?!  Buzzards can fly  - and here's one doing it...

Source: Wikipedia Commons

Staying tactics

It struck me last week that most of my meditation practice is about learning ways to stay with whatever physical sensation, thought, or emotion is presenting itself in the moment. I don't do a lot of meditation where I concentrate on a single sensation, such as my breath.  Most of what I'm doing is just showing up for the moment - being present. I think, in Buddhism, this would be called more a mindfulness meditation practice than a concentration practice.

 

Over the last few years I've developed some different techniques that help me to stay with what's happening.  The interesting thing about these techniques - which could involve words or images - is that they change all the time. Maybe for a week or so, I repeat one phrase - 'yes, this is really happening' - to help me stay with difficult thoughts or feelings. Then I listen to a meditation podcast and hear another phrase which resonates with me and I find myself saying - 'this feeling is difficult, but somewhere it has meaning for my life.'

 

At first, when I noticed that I was changing my little 'staying tactics' every few weeks I was a bit concerned.  'Don't I have to have steadiness in my practice?' I thought. 'Shouldn't I just be saying the one thing, and not jumping around all over the place?'  I thought this was yet another example of my impatient, easily bored mind.

 

Then I saw the bigger picture - that my little techniques might change, but what I was using them for wasn't changing. I was using them to deepen my ability to stay, and that ability was slowly becoming steadier, and deeper, and richer.  I could see that sometimes I needed the simplicity of just one word to try to stay with a feeling - 'yes, yes' - and sometimes I needed some support from outside myself -  perhaps the image of a kind person placing their hand on my arm and saying 'yes, this is difficult...just try to stay.'

 

It was good to see that there was some pattern, and some progression, in my practice. It was also comforting to just start trusting my intuition about what might help me stay present at a particular time - and to recognise that I do have some internal wisdom that helps guide me in this practice (however much I might second-guess that wisdom at times!)

Simple, but not easy.

I've just been listening to an interview with Dr Jon Kabat-Zinn,who founded the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Mass Medical School.  He's also the author of many books on mindfulness, including 'Wherever you go - there you are.'  Such a good book title, becuase it's true...dammit! 

I haven't read any of Kabat-Zinn's books yet, but, after this interview  I'll be tracking some down. He seems to be an excellent communicator, describing meditation as 'simple, but not easy,'  and saying the process of meditation is about 'bringing out own shadow back into the light.' 

Part of the interview was about some common misconceptions about meditation.   If I ever write a book about meditation it'll be called 'It's not about the breath'  - becuase I spent about 10 years fixated on the idea that clinging rigidly to my breath (and slaying my thoughts and feelings) was what meditation was all about.  Doh!  So, these misconceptions abound, and I don't think they're addressed often enough in meditation classes, or teachings. 

Here are Kabat-Zin's top three meditation misconceptions - 

1) Meditation is 'kind of like making your mind go blank,' so you'll be like a 'glowing, lightbulb of happiness,' with no worries or thoughts.  This is a misconception;  meditation is about really getting us in touch with all of life -  not being blank, or empty. 

2) The aim of meditation is to achieve a state of pure bliss. A lot of what we experience moment-to-moment isn't blissful.  We can aim to chase a certain state, like bliss, overlooking the fact that the bliss comes from  just being in contact with life as it is. State-chasing can result in a lot of frustration and confusion in meditation practice.

3) Meditation involves stopping.  Yes, formal meditation does involve stopping, but it's possible to meditate running, chopping vegetables, making love.  We don't have to stop our lives to meditate. We can meditate wherever we are, however we're feeling.

Interesting stuff.  I wish I'd listened to this interview when I began my meditation practice. But, hey, maybe learning the hard way is my karma.  (What the hell did I do in my last life?  I hope it was fun, that's all I can say.)

Here is a list of Kabat-Zinn's books -

• Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain and Illness (Dell, 1990)

• Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life (Hyperion, 1994)

• Everyday Blessings: The Inner Work of Mindful Parenting (Hyperion, 1997) 
  

• Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness (Hyperion, 2005)

• The Mindful Way Through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness (with Williams, Teasdale, and Segal - Guildford, 2007)

Temple - Chiang Mai, Thailand

Photoshop meditation analogy

 Over the last few days I've been fiddling around with Photoshop - trying to learn how to use the darned thing!  Determined to overcome this little Everest of computer software I started looking around for some on-line tutorials and, joy oh joy, finally worked out how to open a photo. My next task was looking at layers.  If you haven't used Photoshop, the layers are a little bit like working with transparencies. You can layer image upon image. Then, you lock all the layers together to form one picture.

Yesterday I did a little meditation session and realised how like 'layers' my mind is. I would have a thought, let's say - "I really haven't been feeling so well the last few days." And then, layer upon layer, other thoughts and emotions would start appearing -

"Actually, I haven't been so well all this year, is that right? Yes, I think that's right."

Anxiety.

"Maybe I'm slowly getting worse.  Not only will I never get well, I'm going to get worse!"

Despair.

"It's my fault, I've always push myself too much, my body is just wearing out."

Blame.

"But, heaps of other people have been as sick as me and got well."

Hope.

"But, really?  Could that happen to me?  I don't think so."

Hopelessness

And then, just like in photoshop, all these layers lock together. They become one picture, which then plays over and over in my mind. Maybe one of the tricks with meditation is to learn to see these layers, and then become adept at recognising, 'OK...I'm layering my thoughts and then creating a mental picture of what I think is happening. Hmmm...let's just watch that.'

In truth, I really don't know what is happening with my health, and that makes me anxious. Living in the unknown, with no definite picture, is very difficult. But, having the 'layers' image in my head has helped to give me a little bit more perspective on my thoughts and feelings. I'm trying not to dismiss or fight these layering thoughts, but  just let them exist without investing too much energy into them.  A tricky balance.

So!  Enough of meditation...here's something I've been mucking around with in photoshop. It's a photo of my sister that I've turned into black and white, and then into a stencil design. (She said it was very 'first year art school' which I'm taking as a yuuuuge compliment!)