Tuesday Meditation

There is no doubt that the days can be long and by the end the body, mind, and spirit can be tired. That may be one of the better times to sit mindfulness. Even though i am not fresh at the end of the day, it becomes a real practice to see if I can accept fully what it is like to sit while extremely tired and exhausted. It certainly may not be a walk in the park, and a beautiful aspect of mindfulness is that the true emphasis is on accepting what is. So, if the end of the day rolls around and there is nothing but fatigue and an exhausted existence, then simply allow it and welcome yourself home into yourself. Give yourself permission to feel what is there with kindness, love, and acceptance.

Food for thought and comment: What do you do for practice at the end of the day when you feel tired and worn out by a busy day of work?

Namaste.

New Integral Psychotherapy Book on the way!

On Mind

If you stay in the mind and never exit the mind
 You can never get to know the mind
For there is no contrast

One who is all mind can never question mind
 Mind pervades

The path to exit mind is spiritual and psychological work
 Deep inner work in relationship with environment

In meditation mind is observed
And thus mind becomes known

In knowing mind, mind is seen to not be ruler
 Mind can take its role as servant
 To a much greater guide

That guide is both within and without
That guide is All Divine
Divine is not separate
Divine fills All of Life

All Of Life is All One

Letting it be

An essential question that comes up in mindfulness practice is the question of what to do with all the ’stuff’ that comes up. Well, one way to work with all that ’stuff’ in the practice is to just let it be. Letting it be does not mean “push it away!”, rather it means to continue to be with that which arises in experience in a gentle and nonjudgemental way from a place of unconditional acceptance. Mindfulness encourages radical acceptance, that is the complete acceptance of changing experience. The key word here is changing, it is about the acknowledgment of that the objects that arise in awareness are impermanant and will continue to evolve and transform into something else. This is an inevitable, thus if one can just let it be, one will naturally observe that experience, just like everything else is evolving and in flux. As the old saying goes, ‘this too shall pass’. Namaste.

Practice

link to my meditation recordings:

Meditations

Monday

As part of my mindfulness practice, I enjoy a reading at the end of sitting that stirs the mindful way of life inside of me. The poem read today was an Octavio Paz poem entitled: “Between Going and Staying”. Toward the end of the poem, Paz writes:

“I find myself in the middle of an eye,
watching myself in its blank stare.
The moment scatters. Motionless,
I stay and go: I am a pause”

I interpret Paz’s words in the context of mindfulness in that while in sitting meditation I am able to further develop the capacity of witness consciousness, i.e., the aspect of my being that is capable of taking a step back from experience to make objective observations of what is happening in the present moment. The “watching myself” connotes a kind of witness to one’s own experience, however what is even more interesting is how Paz notes the “blank stare” and the tendency to “stay and go”, while I can never be sure what his meaning was, I interpret these words for myself as reminders of my ability to get lost in mind which leaves my present-moment bodily experience a ‘blank stare’ and through this process I get lost in a kind of coming and going, or in Paz’s words “stay” and “go”. Mindfulness teaches us how to awaken our innate capacity to be present. While there is great benefit toward having intellectual and rational mind, for this is the mind that allows for many great scientific achievements caution is needed so as to allow this mind to not take one away from being. One’s being simply is. No thought required. Mindfulness cultivates being by increasing one’s awareness of the extent to which one is living in the mind, rather than living in the world. While mindfulness practice is truly nonstriving and not attempting to necessarily achieve a particular state, it is nevertheless a path toward liberation that requires practice, thus I will close this article by inviting you to your own being.

Week of Feb 1, 2009

I came across a quote by Chogyam Trungpa this week: “The goal of warriorship is to express basic goodness in it’s most complete, fresh, and brilliant form. This is possible when you realize that you do not possess basic goodness but that you are basic goodness itself.” In mindfulness practice one learns to embody the warrior through sitting in stillness despite the spattering of consciousness of difficult feelings, memories, images, and painful body sensations- all of these arising as one sits motionless on the cushion. One is able to come into a full acceptance of these mental objects through a realization that they are “mental objects”- figments reconstructed by the mind. They may represent events that DID happen, the important piece here is that they are memory from the past. The event itself is not reoccuring, by being grounded in mindfulness, one achieves a capacity to be in the present moment without judgement or attachment. Therefore, warriorship is achieved through sitting peacefully with all objects of the mind while breathing despite their content. Through this process one will eventually achieve a state of acceptance and equanimity.

One should procede with caution in mindfulness practice if there is a history of severe trauma, as mindfulness is a form of exposure. Without the guidance of a trained spiritual guide, teacher, or transpersonal/spiritually oriented psychothreapy one may get lost in the trauma and re-experienced it to a degree that is not in service of psychospiritual integration and wholeness.

Namaste,

John