How to Meditate (13 page)

One of the things that people often say to me is: “Working with sense perceptions seems like too much for me because if anything can be the object of meditation, then I feel like I’m all over the place and I’m constantly swept away, even though I know that’s not the point.” In response, I realize that this person hasn’t fully registered the instruction on just coming back—just coming back, just coming back. I want to reemphasize this, because when you’re working with taste, after you take the first bite and move on to the second, you can actually end up wandering in that second moment—it is so easy to drift.

The first second is always fresh. Trungpa Rinpoche used to refer to this as “First thought, best thought”—even though in this case there’s no thought, but the sensation of taste. First thought is the fresh moment. If someone says to me, “Ani Pema,” and I turn, there’s the fresh moment. Then comes the second moment, the concept of the person or the expectation of what they’re going to say, or the “Oh no, I don’t want to talk to them,” or “Oh joy, it’s the person I’ve been longing to see.” First moment, best moment. Our life is full of these completely fresh moments, completely fresh tastes.

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TASTE AS THE OBJECT

The basic instruction for working with taste is simply to stay with the taste. When you take a bite of food (and I recommend you practice with a simple taste—food—perhaps it is a strawberry, or a raisin), allow yourself to deepen into the taste—just experience the taste. Not the action of chewing. Not the texture of the food. Simply the sensation of the taste.

When you notice that you’ve wandered off, just come back. If you move into thoughts, it’s not bad, and it’s not a mistake. Just simply return to awareness of the taste. The training is being fully present to the taste. Say to yourself, “I can use this taste to train myself in being present. I don’t have to be swept away. I don’t have to drown in my emotions, or persecute myself with thoughts. I don’t have to escalate stress or fear. I can stop and use this one taste as a support for stabilizing the mind, for staying present, for returning to fresh, direct experience.”

Mingyur Rinpoche has written about being a participant in a Mind and Life Institute experiment that was instigated by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Meditators were put into fMRI machines so researchers could see on a graph what happens in the minds of dedicated meditators. The scientists discovered that when you do the habitual thing, when your mind is on automatic pilot and you’re swept away, lost in thought, or escalating into your emotions, it’s registered in the brain as deep grooves. They’re like habit-grooves, and they get deeper every time you do the same thing. This is the actual neurological explanation for why it’s so hard to break a habit: it’s because we keep making the groove deeper and deeper.

However, when you realize you’ve been thinking, when you realize you’ve been wandering, when you realize you’ve been lost in thought and suddenly there’s that gap, this recognition opens up a new neurological pathway. It’s like predisposing yourself to seeing the world with fresh eyes, predisposing yourself to tuning in to the natural spaciousness, freshness, and openness of your being and the world. And every time you place your mind on the object of a sense perception and you’re there, it’s the same thing: it opens up a new pathway.

So anytime during your life, instead of reinforcing the old patterns that are going to make it harder and harder for you to not just keep on automatic pilot—reinforcing the causes of suffering in your life—you can predispose yourself to a fresh way of seeing, which on the fMRI graphs appears as unblocking or opening new neurological pathways. In other words, you’re creating your future here. The choices you make are creating your next moment, your next hour, your next day, your next month, your next year. Your whole lifetime is being determined moment by moment by the choices you make. I’ve found that working with the sense perceptions is a quite effective and sometimes delightful way of training yourself so that these new grooves can form.

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THE INTERCONNECTION OF ALL PERCEPTIONS

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ou can’t really separate out what happens in your body, your thoughts, and your emotions from one another. And it is the same with your sense perceptions. They’re all intertwined. You hear a certain piece of music or a certain sound, and then a strong emotion arises. Suddenly, you have a visual memory and a strong storyline arises and it’s all a conglomerate. So rather than allowing the conglomerate experience to become overwhelming or confusing, you can just take any part of it—any part of it—and use that as the support for your meditation.

Coming from the point of view of space and the infinite potential of space, we see that everything and anything can occur and does occur. Sights, sounds, emotions—there’s a lot going on. It’s not just a big space void, with nothing happening, but a dynamic interplay of thoughts, emotions, and perceptions that are happening all the time. We use what’s happening as a friend, as an ally on this path of uncovering the fundamental freshness, openness, and wakefulness of our mind.

There is a deep interdependence between everything we experience. For example, we call something “anger,” but it has a physical component, it has a visual component, it has a story line, and it has a texture and color. Nothing is as solid as it seems. We see that what we call “anger” is very fluid. And the anger moves; it changes, if we stay with it. If we use the energy of the anger as our object of meditation, it inevitably points us to impermanence and change, to realizing that transiency is the true nature of reality. If you want to experience transiency or dynamic flow or impermanence firsthand, practice being present with one thing—the breath, a sound, an emotion. That’s the way to do it.

It is said that all deep satisfaction, all happiness, all spiritual growth, all feeling of being alive and engaged in the world happens in this realm of dynamic flow when we connect with the fluid, changing flow of things. In some way, all of us are at least five-minute fundamentalists. In other words, where we fix it, we freeze it. Rather than being with the flow, we have a fixed view of somebody else: a fixed view of a brother or a partner, a fixed view of ourselves, a fixed view of a situation. There’s so much clunkiness in the whole thing. If you think about it, fixing and freezing is so boring compared to the real morphing quality of things.

It might take a lot of persuasion for me to convince you that your mother is not the fixed identity you hold her to be, because every time you think of your mother, she is nothing other than how you’ve always seen her. “Whenever I do this, she does that; and then she says this, and these are her views,” and so on. Then one day, you happen to meet an old friend of your mother’s, and it’s very interesting: when the old friend talks about your mother, it sounds like a completely different person. “I love your mom’s sense of humor. She’s so lighthearted and funny!” Of course, the fact that your mother has also frozen
you
doesn’t help the situation! Whether it’s your mother, partner, sister, boss, whoever it is, it is usually in intimacy that we most freeze people, but we also do it to whole racial groups, to whole cultural groups, to whole religions, to politicians who hold certain political beliefs—we tend toward getting comfort out of being fundamentalists. Which is when we say: it’s like this. But all you have to do is this practice of meditation, of simply being present to your experience, whatever occurs, letting it be your friend and support, your ally for awakening—just coming back, coming back, being here, touching in, fully present as much as you possibly can be—present to going off, present to coming back—and you immediately see that nothing is fixed. Nothing is solid except these fabrications created by your mind: these imaginary, fixed identities of yourself and others, or situations, or places.

And as for the idea that someone in your life has a fixed idea of you, keep meditating. You’ll be surprised. When something changes from your side and you see that how your emotional responses are operating, then something changes in the dynamic between you and the other person. Something new can be revealed.

Locking into a fixed way of seeing things gives us a sense of certainty and security—but it’s false security, it’s false certainty, and ultimately it’s not satisfying. The satisfaction that we seek comes from recognizing the inevitable flux and flow and morphing and changing of things, and it comes from the ability to see the organic, true nature of whatever is arising in the present.

Listen to more about relating with sense perceptions.

Part Five

O
PENING
Y
OUR
H
EART TO
I
NCLUDE
E
VERYTHING

The experience of a sad and tender heart is what gives birth to fearlessness. Conventionally, being fearless means that you are not afraid or that, if someone hits you, you will hit him back. But we aren’t talking about that street-fighter level of fearlessness. Real fearlessness is the product of tenderness. It comes from letting the world tickle your heart, your raw heart. You are willing to open up, without resistance or shyness, and face the world.

—CHÖGYAM TRUNGPA RINPOCHE

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GIVING UP THE STRUGGLE

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ne of the many boons of meditation is that it helps us take an interest in our life in a way that is curious and expansive, rather than seeing life’s complexities as a constant struggle. By “struggle,” I mean not wanting life to be the way it is. This is really common. Exploring this in my own experience, I’ve found that we aren’t just constantly rejecting our experiences in life—very often we reject the whole thing all the time!

The symptom that shows us this is true is that our minds are always elsewhere. We’re thinking about dinner tomorrow or a conversation from a year ago. We’re thinking about our to-do list or how we wish we had said this, that, and the other thing in yesterday’s conversation. Rejecting our life isn’t always about carrying a big story line such as “I hate this” or “This relationship or this job or this car isn’t working for me.” In many cases, we can even be eating a whole box of chocolates with the idea that we are doing the most pleasurable thing in the world, but the fact is that we rarely allow ourselves to eat even one bite of chocolate and be fully present for it.

The mind—the monkey mind, the wild mind—wanders. Yet in this space of open awareness that we cultivate on the meditation cushion, whatever arises becomes our support for training in being present. In order to get to this place of nonstruggling, we allow every single thing that occurs in our practice and in our life to be a support for being present. This takes an enormous shift in attitude. Rather than seeing everything as a problem, or an obstacle to being happy, or even as an obstacle to meditation and being present (“I could be present if it wasn’t so noisy here,” or “I could be present if I didn’t have so much pain in my back”), we can see it as a teacher that is showing us something we need to know.

Everything is support in our awakening. We’ve been conditioned to kvetch, kvetch, kvetch. Blame, blame, blame. One of the major ways that we don’t stay present is blaming. We blame ourselves; we blame other people. I often see students blaming the outer circumstances or blaming their own bodies and minds for why they can’t be present. Consider that what needs your attention and consideration is your own mind, and how you view these outer circumstances. You can befriend your circumstances; you can have compassion for your circumstances and for yourself. What happens when you do that?

I recently heard contentment defined as “knowing that everything you need is contained in this present moment.” Dissatisfaction and discontent are like a hum in the background that distracts us from accepting our life and the present moment. If we deeply allow whatever arises, we finally can touch, smell, taste, hear, and feel what’s really happening.