Authors: Pema Chödrön
At any time during a meditation session, you can always, as Trungpa Rinpoche used to say, “Flash back to your sense of being.” If you find yourself getting spacey or if you feel tension growing in your body, you can come back to awareness of your body and these six points of posture. First, recall the seat—the well-stabilized seat. You are not tilting forward or backward. You’ve found a nice base for an upright posture. Next, call attention to your hands, relaxed, on your thighs. Then your torso, which should be a straight back with an open heart, allowing energy to move freely through your body. Then the face: Is your mouth slightly open, and are the muscles in your face relaxed? And last, your legs, crossed in front of you: Can you let go of the tension in your legs?
If during your meditation you find that you are somehow struggling physically, don’t move right away. Stay with it a little bit longer, and then slowly move yourself into a more relaxed posture as you continue your meditation. Bring ease to your posture. It’s so important not to get into a major struggle but to simply try to be as relaxed and comfortable as you can. In each of these six points, you want to embody a sense of relaxation, openness, and dignity; you want to embody an expression of being awake and confident.
4
B
REATH
The Practice of Letting Go
B
reath practice trains us in letting go. It brings gentleness to our practice, and through the breath we are able to relax and unwind. Focus on your breathing, just for a few moments, and see if that helps you to soften. Just allow yourself to feel the sensation of the breath coming in, and going out.
The instructions for sitting practice are very simple: you’ve come into your meditation room, you’ve set the timer, you’ve stabilized your mind as best you can, you’ve taken your posture, and you are gently going to place your mind on your breath. In meditation, I teach students to begin with the breath as the object to come back to. The breath is used as a basic object of meditation for many reasons, but one excellent reason is because it’s impermanent. It’s always changing; it’s always flowing; it’s not a stable thing. By focusing on the breath, you’re feeling something rather than concentrating on something. And you’re also developing your mind, training your mind, to be able to stay present to the impermanence of things—impermanence of thoughts, impermanence of emotions, impermanence of sights and sounds, all the things that don’t stay stable.
So when you sit, place your attention on your breath. Whenever your attention wanders, bring it back to the breath. With as much precision and clarity as possible, come back to its flow in and out. This is not watching the breath like a hawk; this is not concentrating on the breath. This is
feeling
the breath, or any word that you can use to describe being one with the breath. Let yourself be breathed in and breathed out.
Once when I was giving meditation instruction to a young woman and I was describing this idea of finding oneness with the breath, she used the word “allow”—allowing the breath to go in and out. I thought that word really captured the feeling of what we’re doing with the breath in meditation, because “allowing” has such a gentle and nonclinging feel.
To take this even further, you can experiment with focusing your attention on the out-breath and the space that exists at the end of the out-breath before you breathe in again. Trungpa Rinpoche used to describe this focus as “mixing the breath with space.” The breath comes in, you might then feel a slight pause or waiting or gap, and then you place your attention on the outwardness. When the breath goes out, you stay with that out-breath for as long as you can. Allow the breath to flow out in a very light, relaxed way.
Trungpa Rinpoche taught his students to practice with focus on the out-breath in order to emphasize opening to the world and letting go of our fixations. There can be a sense that while the breath goes out, you become part of the vast, open space around you. It’s a very spacious and allowing feeling.
As you work with the breath as your object of meditation, you will begin to feel your body and mind becoming synchronized. You are no longer divided. You can call meditation practice the “practice of open awareness” or the “practice of natural wakefulness.”
As your practice grows, you can lighten your attention on the breath, allowing yourself to calmly abide in the open space of the present moment. What does it mean to sit and “be present”? It means to be like space itself, allowing everything that arises—breath, thoughts, emotions, sensations, everything.
5
A
TTITUDE
Keep Coming Back
N
ow that we have the basics down—getting settled, posture, and breath—you have all the tools you need in order to meditate. Now let’s touch on the basic attitude. We will look into the finer details of attitude and working with thoughts and emotions in
Part Two
, but to begin with, what attitude should we take when we meditate?
During meditation, we maintain a simple attitude, and that’s the attitude of “keep coming back.” The basic frame of mind we want to take is that we should always come back and be present. The basic instruction is to bring out the stabilized quality of mind—the ability of mind to stay in one place, to stay present. This is the basis of all the transformation that the meditation path produces in us. It begins when our mind can stay. Our mind can take us to the most outrageous places, and meditation teaches us to recognize exactly what is happening when our mind takes us away from the present moment. It can be very subtle, and it can be very dramatic and charged. We notice it, and we come back to the breath, back to our meditation. The natural quality of mind is clear, awake, alert, and knowing. Free from fixation.
By training in being present, we come to know the nature of our mind. So the more you train in being present—being right here—the more you begin to feel like your mind is sharpening up. The mind that can come back to the present is clearer and more refreshed, and it can better weather all the ambiguities, pains, and paradoxes of life.
I began this book with a discussion on suffering as one of the reasons that people come to practice. We meditate in order to remove the root of suffering. Getting at the root of suffering begins with returning to the present moment, with coming back to the breath. This is where expansion can occur. Expansion won’t happen if you try to push through or escape your meditation. It won’t happen by resisting what is present for you in the moment. The present moment, you will find, is limitless. It seems paradoxical that expansion and settledness can happen as we learn to return to the present moment, especially when what comes up in the present moment is anger or sadness or fear. But it is precisely through this act of coming back to the present that we can open to love and joy and the dynamism of life. In other words, meditation brings us the blessing of equanimity, or emotional balance. Meditation and the dharma directly address the tension and stress that are associated with much of our life. We might call this one of the “fringe benefits” of meditation.
The root of suffering escalates into full-blown suffering when we go on and on with our habitual emotional reactivity, when we let ourselves get carried off by our thoughts and stories. There are many ways to talk about the root of suffering, but I often describe it as ignorance, because that’s very easy to understand. With meditation, we are addressing the quality of ignorance, or not knowing. The quality of not knowing refers to this phenomenon of not being aware, of not understanding what it is that we’re doing in our everyday life. This includes the smallest details of our life, such as not being aware that we’re drinking a glass of water or spacing out when we’re brushing our teeth. These everyday acts that we often do quite mindlessly can exhibit a lack of awareness, or ignorance. When we multitask and split up our mind into a million directions, we are actually creating our own suffering, because these habits strengthen strong emotional reactivity and discursive thought.
By accepting and living in the present moment, just as it is, we begin to experience more contentment, more spaciousness, and much less fear and anxiety and worry. Meditation works very directly with beginning to see what we’re doing and beginning to realize that we have a choice in any moment to either return to the present or to escalate our suffering by letting our stories and thoughts take over. In any given moment, whether on the meditation cushion or in postmeditation, we begin to perceive more and more clearly—because of our meditation practice—how we are getting hooked, how we’re attaching to a line of discursive thought, which is disastrous in terms of strengthening habitual patterns of suffering. We begin to see this more and more clearly, and we begin to realize that we can do something different.
A wonderful example of this comes from a student who told me a story about looking in the mirror and noticing that she had some gray hairs. She’d been in a contented mood, yet from that one simple observation she began a downward cycle of self-denigration and a familiar cycle of feeling very bad and low, very lonely and unloved. And this whole thing started from just seeing a grey hair! But because of her meditation, she saw what she was doing, caught it in its tracks, and she didn’t go on the downward cycle. She noticed where her thoughts were taking her, and she came back to her breath. She took this attitude of coming back. Back to the present moment.
The more we see this kind of pattern and don’t go on the downward cycle, the more our confidence grows in our capacity to awaken. As we expand our confidence in the workability of our situation, we begin to see that we are not victims of our habitual patterns. It can definitely feel like we are victims of our habitual patterns; they have a very sneaky way of getting the better of us. But the path of meditation addresses these patterns very directly, and it begins to unwind this whole sense of being imprisoned by our own mind.
The mind is the source of all suffering, and it is also the source of all happiness. Think about that. In fact, you can contemplate this for the rest of your life. When something comes up in your life that causes you dissatisfaction, or triggers habitual patterns and reactivity, or makes you angry, lonely, and jealous, ask yourself: Are these emotions happening because of outer circumstances? Are they completely dependent on outer circumstances?
The path of meditation says that we have to work with our mind, and that if we do work with our mind, the outer circumstances become workable. Things that used to irritate and bother us or that trigger our reactivity and habitual patterns begin to dissolve. So whenever you find yourself caught in an emotional attack, you have to ask yourself: “How much of this is really happening on the outside, and how much of this is my mind?”
I really challenge you to ask this kind of question every moment, every second of your day, and every day of your week, and every week of your month, and every month of your year. I really urge you to work on this. And you can do it in the manner that the Buddha suggested, which is that we look closely at where our fears and suffering originate. This is different from closing our minds to what is happening, the details of a scenario, and saying, “This is ridiculous—this is
clearly
Tim’s fault.” Or, “If those people in the office could just get it together then I wouldn’t be having this problem.” This is challenging because our experience of our minds can feel so true, so real. Meditation allows us to see the suffering our minds inflict on us.
The guideline is this: if you’re hooked, then you need to work on your side of the situation, no matter how outrageous and unjust the outer circumstances might seem. If you’re hooked, this is a clue that you have some work to do—and you, only you, can call yourself back. This is the basic attitude of meditation.
6
UNCONDITIONAL FRIENDLINESS
W
henever we practice meditation, it is important to try to refrain from criticizing ourselves about how we practice and what comes up in our practice. This would only be training in being hard on ourselves! I want to emphasize the importance of maintaining an atmosphere of unconditional friendliness when you practice and as you take your practice out into the world. We can practice for a lot of years—I know many people who have practiced for countless years, decades even—and somewhere along into their umpteenth year, it dawns on them that they haven’t been using that practice to develop lovingkindness for themselves. Rather, it’s been somewhat aggressive meditation toward themselves, perhaps very goal-oriented. As someone said, “I meditated all those years because I wanted people to think I was a good Buddhist.” Or, “I meditated all those years out of a feeling of
I should do this, it would be good for me.”
And so naturally we come to meditation with the same attitudes with which we come to everything. I’ve seen this with students time and time again, and it is very human.
Rather than letting this be something to feel bad about, you can discover who you are at your wisest and who you are at your most confused. You get to know yourself in all your aspects: at times completely sane and openhearted and at other times completely messed up and bewildered. We are all at times a basket-case. Meditation gives you the opportunity to get to know yourself in all those aspects. Judging ourselves for how our practice is going or what might be coming up for us during meditation is a kind of subtle aggression toward ourselves.
The steadfastness we develop in meditation is a willingness to stay. It may seem silly, but meditation actually isn’t too unlike training a dog! We learn to stay. When you’re thinking about what you’re going to have for lunch, you “stay.” When you’re worried about what’s going to happen on Monday, you “stay.” It’s a very lighthearted, compassionate instruction. It is like training the dog in the sense that you can train the dog with harshness and the dog will learn to stay, but if you train it by beating it and yelling at it, it will stay and it will be able to follow that command, but it will be extremely neurotic and scared. As long as you give a very clear command in the way that the dog was trained, it will be able to follow it. But add in any kind of unpredictability or uncertainty, and the poor animal just becomes confused and neurotic. Or you can train the dog with gentleness. You can train the dog with gentleness and kindness, and it produces a dog that can also stay and heel and roll over and sit up and all of these things—but the dog is flexible and playful and can roll with the punches, so to speak. Personally, I prefer to be the second kind of dog. This staying, this perseverance, this loyalty that comes with meditation—it’s all very gentle, or compassionate in its motivation. This gentle approach to yourself in meditation is called
maitri.
This is translated as “lovingkindness,” or just “love.” In terms of meditation, we learn to be kind, loving, and compassionate toward ourselves. I teach about maitri a lot, and it is often misunderstood as some kind of self-indulgence, as if it is just about feeling good and being self-concerned. People will often think that that’s what I mean by maitri. But it’s somewhat subtle what maitri is and what it isn’t. For example, you might say that taking a bubble bath or getting a workout at the gym is maitri. But on the other hand, maybe it isn’t, because maybe it’s some kind of avoidance; maybe you are working out to punish yourself. On the other hand, maybe going to the gym is just what you need to relax enough to go on with your life with some kind of lightheartedness. Or it might be one of your sixty-five daily tactics to avoid reality. You’re the only one who knows.