The Cycle of Hatred Continues....

The news of the sad and disturbing events over the weekend with the attack on Israel landed with a sickening resonance in my life in the midst of a reading on the Buddhist precepts, first among them to refrain from harming living beings.  

Having a moral foundation is the first task of Buddhist meditators.  The reason for this is simple.  If we are behaving in immoral ways, we will suffer because of our actions either directly or indirectly.  And thus, we will not be able to meditate or concentrate too well.  In spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, human beings are not happy when they behave in immoral ways.  Their minds - our minds - are not clear when we have harmed another living being.  

In Buddhism there are three supports for the life of freedom from suffering.  Sila, samadhi, and pañña are the Pali words - ethical behavior or morality, concentration or serenity, and insight or wisdom in English.  The first among these is sila - morality.  The initial and oft repeated act of monks and nuns then and now, and also retreatants throughout the world is the taking of the precepts.  The first precept is to refrain from harming living beings.  The next four include not stealing, not lying, not spreading malicious gossip, and not imbibing in consciousness-distorting substances.

We start with just the first precept - to refrain from harming living beings.  The chapter I was reading listed some of the questions that arise with this precept.  If we eat meat, should we become vegetarians?  How do we relate to all the small creatures that seek to invade our homes?  Paris is freaking out about bedbugs.  We might feel the same.  If our pet is sick, do we put them down?  

And then the question came that rocked me:  “What if your country is invaded by hostile forces?  Do you support your country’s military in defending itself?” *  Suddenly I was seeing the attack by Hamas on Israel through a long lens.  This lens only goes back as far as my awareness of the issues though.  I remembered why the Hamas was formed - out of the rubble of a town called Hamas flattened out of existence by Israelis in revenge for deadly acts emanating from that town.  I remembered the ’67 Six Day war and the taking of the Gaza strip and the West Bank by the Israelis and the subsequent population of some of that territory by settlements at the behest of the Israeli government, remembered reading how the Palestinians were crammed into a smaller space with no room to grow and no resources, a perfect fermenting ground for anger, resentment, desperation right next to the newly formed settlements.  Maybe my historical and geographical rememberings are off here and there and there is lots more before I became aware and in between.  But the pattern of pain, desperation, hardship, and grief leading to violence has been played out on both sides of the conflict.  Over and over again….

And yet the instinct is alive to defend one’s country, one’s friends and family, one’s neighbors.  Of course it is.  And the momentum builds up and countless beings are swept up in another round of horror.

Sharon Salzberg tells a story of a king surveying the wreckage of the battlefield with the Buddha.  Bodies of men and animals, blood, battle equipment everywhere.  And a lone monk softly picking his way through the battle field stopping here and there, a peaceful expression on his face.  The King asked the Buddha about this monk.  The Buddha replied that as a King he had to make different decisions from the monk but there was much he could do to ward off the possibility of such carnage in the future - namely sharing the resources of the kingdom more equitably, and listening to grievances of his subjects, so that people were treated fairly and knew they were sharing in what was available.  The King listened thoughtfully and went off and did exactly that.  Peace and prosperity reigned during his lifetime.

Now with burgeoning populations and resources more and more scarce, fear, grief, trauma, blaming falsely or in truth, the incapacity of the planet to absorb our excesses more apparent, our conditions may appear more extreme.  Passions run high - fueled by increasing desperation in more and more people.

And yet the Buddha’s directive to refrain from harming living beings is piercingly obvious in its simplicity.  How else are we to co-exist in this world?  How else are we to find solutions to insoluble problems?  To share the dwindling resources?  To live in peace?

But equally pressing, how are we to live with the pain inflicted by others, the pain inflicted by ourselves?  How are we to hold our own grief, sorrow, anger, frustration, desperation?  

We can only start with ourselves - with mindfulness, with compassion, with loving kindness, with forgiveness, cultivating and sharing this heart abundance.  The sublime qualities of loving kindness, compassion, joy and equanimity are, as described in the suttas, "abundant, exalted, immeasurable.”  

And we can begin to widen our world so that it becomes our shared world, our shared resources.  Our families and friends and neighbors connect to all families, friends and neighbors.  Our compassion extends to all beings caught in this terrible conflict.  No one escapes suffering.  All need our compassion.

“It is compassion that removes the heavy bar, opens the door to freedom, makes the narrow heart as wide as the world.  
Compassion takes away from the heart the inert weight, the paralyzing heaviness; it gives wings to those who cling to the lowlands of self.”  

~~Nyanaponika Thera.

First we begin.  And then we continue.

And finally we come to the 8th path factor of the Noble Eightfold Path - Wise Concentration.  This may seem like familiar territory and, to some extent, it is.  

Most meditators, and indeed most meditation techniques, begin with concentration.  In the west, the object of concentration is most often the breath.  The Pali words for Wise or Right Concentration are sammā samādhi.  Samādhi refers to a particular kind of concentration.  While one might know concentration in various ways, sammā samādhi is exclusively a wholesome one-pointedness, concentration that arises in a wholesome state of mind not engaged in craving, aversion, or delusion.  And only intensified concentration arises from ‘a deliberate attempt to raise the mind to a higher, more purified level of awareness.”   ~~Bikkhu Bodhi The Noble Eightfold Path

We will touch on what is meant by “intensified concentration” at a later time.  For now, the important point to know is that concentration can be practiced with any number of objects - including the breath.  There are 40 included in the Buddha’s teachings.  Different masters and abbots would assign different objects to the monks depending on what was needed.  Meditation objects included the 32 body parts which supported letting go of sensual desire and non-identification.  Monks were often assigned to sit in the charnel grounds where bodies were taken to be burned in order to know the truth of impermanence.  Other meditation objects included the four elements of earth, water, fire and wind, the colors blue, yellow, red, and white, and various others that were more or less abstract or subtle.  

There is one set of meditation objects that we are familiar with although not in this context.  And that is the Four Brahmavirharas or Sublime States of Being - loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy (joy for the good fortune of another), and equanimity.  The Pali words are metta, karuna, mudita, and upekka.  We will begin to dive into these practices in the fall.  

They all support the arising of a sense of warmth and kindness in our practice that Westerners in particular are in need of.  In all cases, kindness towards ourselves and others is an important part of practice.  And these practices remind us of those qualities while at the same time serving as effective objects of concentration.   

So as we all move toward the fall, reminding ourselves of these sublime states of mind and bringing their contemplation into our practice is a worthy use of our time and effort.  

As we stand in the middle of The Fourth Foundation of Mindfulness, with its welter of five hindrances, the five aggregates, the six sense doors, the 7 spiritual factors, and the 4 Noble Truths, let us reflect on how we got here to get a better sense perhaps of what is happening in this Fourth Foundation of Mindfulness.

We began several months ago with The Four Noble Truths - there is suffering, there are causes for suffering, there is an end to suffering, and the Fourth Noble Truth, the path to the end to suffering - the Noble Eight Fold Path.  So we started bravely down the Noble Eight Fold Path encountering wise View, wise Intention, wise Speech, wise Action, wise Livelihood, wise Effort, and here at the seventh path factor, wise Mindfulness.  Wise Concentration is the 8th path factor.  In wise Mindfulness, the Buddha taught how to practice mindfulness through the Four Foundations of Mindfulness - mindfulness of the body, feeling tone, mental events and finally, this, the Fourth Foundation of Mindfulness and its veritable grab-bag of lists.  

But the Fourth Foundation of Mindfulness takes us on a little journey within the larger journey.  As soon as we begin meditating, the hindrances arise.  We may not recognize them or even know about them for some time but eventually we begin to see the wanting or craving behind jumping off the cushion to get a cup of coffee, a snack, or  indulging a “very important thought.”  Or we begin to see how we lose our concentration because we are drowsy or our knees or backs hurt.  Or we get discouraged because we’re convinced we don’t know how to do it or the instructions are flawed or the teacher talks too much. 

So our first task is to learn to recognize and work with the hindrances.

The next two categories - mindfulness of the aggregates and mindfulness of the sense spheres - are different models for looking at our own experience.  And the contemplation of experience through these two lenses helps us begin to loosen our grip on identifying with our experience.  To take the model more familiar to us, mindfulness of the sense spheres, we can begin to contemplate our experience of sight, hearing, sensing, cognizing without all the add-ons of our thinking, conceiving, and appropriating minds.  In the seeing is just the seen.  In the hearing is just the heard.  In the sensing is just the sensed.  In the cognizing is just the cognized.  The “I” is extra.  Not inherent in the experience.  The I, me, and my-making is how we attempt to control our experience.  With mindfulness of the senses, we begin let go of inserting our add-ons and to see more clearly.  

The seven factors of awakening - mindfulness, investigation, energy, joy, tranquillity, concentration, and equanimity - are qualities we have all experienced.  They begin to arise more obviously as we see more clearly.  Here we are asked to recognize when they have arisen and what supporting factors helped them arise so that we can enhance their arising and not support conditions that subvert their arising.  Important to remember that we can’t make them arise, but we can create the conditions for their arising.  Our habits of striving and achieving are useless here - except perhaps as markers of identification.  

So the arc of the Fourth Foundation of Mindfulness is sort of a practice map - noting and working with the hindrances, practicing with the aggregates and the sense spheres to see more clearly and weaken our identification with experience, recognizing and supporting the awakening factors.  

This is the beautiful arc of practice and to ground this arc, the Buddha reminds us why he and we are here in the first place.  The Fourth Noble Truths.  There is the truth of suffering - physical, mental, psychological, individual, family, community, global - there is suffering.  There are causes for suffering - internal, external, and both internal and external.  And because there are causes, there can be an end to suffering.  The Buddha offers us this pathway out of suffering - The Noble Eight Fold Path.  

It was out of his immense compassion that the Buddha offered these teachings.  He went in search of the truth out of his own suffering, his own shock at the suffering of sickness, aging, and death.  When he awakened and achieved his own release from suffering, he at first despaired that anyone would understand these teachings.  But, as he began to teach his old colleagues, he saw that the teachings were helping them gain freedom as well.  And his confidence grew that just as he had found freedom, so could others, his monks and nuns.  And so could we.  

So can we.

So this Fourth Foundation of Mindfulness is a sort of road map within a road map.  A road map of specifics about the hindrances, the awakening factors, and two models for seeing experience more clearly.  And this map is inside the road map of the Noble Eight Fold Path which in turn is the Fourth Noble Truth.

The Refrain:   “In this way, in regard to dharmas {the teachings and the way things are}, [the meditator] abides contemplating dharmas internally…externally…internally and externally.  She abides contemplating the nature arising… of passing away… of both arising and passing in dharmas.  Mindfulness that 'There are dharmas’ is established in him to the extent necessary for bare knowledge and continuous mindfulness. And she abides independent, not clinging to anything in the world.” 

First you start, and then you continue.  

The Fourth Foundation of Mindfulness: MIndfulness of the Dharmas

And finally we come to the Fourth Foundation of Mindfulness.  This foundation is often referred to as Mindfulness of the Dhammas in Pali, or in Sanskrit, Dharmas.   The word “dhamma” or “dharma” has two foundational meanings - the first is the body of the Buddha’s teachings.  The second is the way things are.  

And its refrain begins to hint at the wisdom of this teaching.  “In this way, in regard to dharmas, [the meditator] abides contemplating dharmas internally…externally…internally and externally.  She abides contemplating the nature arising… of passing away… of both arising and passing in dharmas.  Mindfulness that 'There are dharmas’ is established in him to the extent necessary for bare knowledge and continuous mindfulness. And she abides independent, not clinging to anything in the world.”  from Joseph Goldstein’s Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening, translation by Venerable Analayo.

There is much in that paragraph but for now, it is enough to read it and begin to wonder at it.

There are five aspects to the dharmas/teachings and perspectives on the way things are.  This is a cursory look.  The first is the hindrances which we have touched on before - the five hindrances that interfere with mindfulness and meditation.  There are sensual desire (wanting, greed, craving), aversion (or not wanting), sloth and torpor (too little energy), restlessness and worry (too much energy), and doubt (doubt!).  Just becoming aware of these hindrances is a significant achievement.

The second and third sections in the Fourth Foundation are different lenses through which we can view the totality of our experience.  We are more familiar with the six sense spheres - seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, sensations, and the mind and mind-objects which includes everything else.  The other is the lens of the aggregates of clinging - material form, feeling (feeling tone), cognition, volitions, and consciousness.  

The fourth section teaches about the seven factors of awakening - mindfulness, investigation of dharmas, energy, joy, tranquillity, concentration, and equanimity. 

And the last is the Four Noble Truths - the truth of suffering, the truth of the causes of suffering, the truth of the cessation of suffering, and the path out of suffering g - the Noble Eight Fold Path. 

And with each of the teachings above, the Buddha encourages us to know when a factor has arisen whether it’s a hindrance, a sight or sensation, an awakening factor such as mindfulness or energy or joy, or whether suffering is present or absent.  And further the Buddha encourages us to know when a factor that has arisen, ceases, what are the causes for its arising and what might prevent its arising.  

The Buddha assured his monks that if they practiced these four foundations of mindfulness - mindfulness of the body, of feelings, of mind and of the dharmas, they would achieve the fruits of partial or full awakening.

This may seem like a tall order but many of us have tasted of these experiences, struggled with the binds of clinging, aversion, delusion, and reveled in the freedom of release and understanding.  And these fruits are available to us all.  They can be gleaned and refined by looking at our present moment experience with mindfulness, by cultivating our sensitivity to our experience through our practice, and by following the two most important instructions:  First you start.  And then you continue.

The Buddha assures us that if it could not be done, he would not encourage us to do it.  

In Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening, Joseph Goldstein quotes Sayadaw U Tenjaniya on the importance of Mindfulness of the Mind which is the Third Foundation of Mindfulness:  “One thing you need to remember and understand is that you cannot leave the mind alone. It needs to be watched constantly.  If you do not look after your garden it will overgrow with weeds.  If you do not watch your mind, defilements will grow and multiply.  The mind does not belong to you, but you are responsible for it.”

The Third Foundation of Mindfulness asks us to look into our own minds and contemplate two aspects - the contents of the mind and the nature of the mind.

Feeling tone is one of the movements of mind we became aware of in The Second Foundation of Mindfulness.  Now we widen the field to bring awareness to anything happening in the mind that we can catch hold of - thoughts, moods, feelings, emotions, memories, fantasies, plans, stray images.  This is slippery work as we tend to get caught in the content of a thought and get carried away.  And our thoughts arise about practically everything going on in our minds.  If we feel anger or pain, our mind rises up in protest and a dust storm of thoughts and feelings can clog our minds for hours - unless we take a step back and look at the dust storm itself.  We may or may not halt the progress of the dust storm and that is not as important as simply holding it in awareness and allowing it, without pushing it away, encouraging it, or judging ourselves for having it.  With patience, we will realize the dust storm was, like all storms, impermanent and passes out of the mind.

The other key practice instruction is to bring awareness to our mind’s tendency to identify with the dust storm as “my dust storm”, that “I created”.  It’s simply a dust storm kicked up by the arising of anger or pain and our aversion to them.  It didn’t arise because we engineered it or instructed it to.

As we look at these contents of the mind, we notice the connectivity of thoughts.  Each thought arises out of a thought and leads to another thought in what appears to be an unbroken progression from one fantasy or thought to another fueled by desire or aversion or confusion.  There may be an initial thought - that might have arisen from an external events or a bodily sensation - that triggers the progression and there may be an apparent halt to the thinking as a new external event intervenes or awareness arises and periods of calm ensue. 

As we step back from our thoughts, we can begin to discern whether this thought or emotion or mind state is wholesome or unwholesome.  And that is what the Third Foundation of Mindfulness asks us to do.  It asks us to discern as we practice whether our minds are in a state of wanting or lusting or craving or whether they are free from wanting or lusting or craving. Similarly, are our minds in a state of anger or free from anger? Distracted or contracted? Deluded or free from delusion? and other qualities along the path to freedom including whether the mind is liberated or un-liberated.

As our minds settle in mindfulness and concentration, we naturally begin to discern if we are identifying with these states or not.  Are we the creators of these mind states?  Did we decide to have them?  Or did they arise out of causes and conditions without our orchestration?

And then as our practice deepens and we become aware of more and more subtle movements in the mind, we may begin to discern that these mind states arise and pass away moment by moment - a breath, a sound, a thought, a sensation, a pain, a relief, a joy, another breath.  And beyond that, we begin to see that these mind moments are passing more and more rapidly as we discern smaller and smaller units of change until we begin to see the mind movements as a continual process, moving and changing, shifting, arising and passing away in a flow of activity not under our control.  

We approach the understanding that our minds operate both as waves of activity and as a series of discrete particles (mind moments) arising one after another.  According to Cynthia Thatcher’s article in Tricycle, “How Long is a Moment?” (Winter 2006), a practice moment is around 1 to 3 seconds long.  However, a unit of consciousness is considerably faster than that - millions of times faster than that.  As we practice, we begin to discern some of these flashes of consciousness within the space of one breath or one step or one movement of the hand toward the door handle.  

And with these flashes, we begin to approach the nature of reality and long with it the perception of impermanence, the unsatisfactoriness, the impersonality.

As Bhikku Bodhi says in The Noble Eightfold Path, as “mindfulness becomes clearer, it remains intently aware, watching its own process of becoming…[dissolving] into streams of [mind moments] flashing into and out of being, moment by moment, coming from nowhere and going nowhere, yet continuing in a sequence without pause.”

On the First and Second Foundations of Mindfulness...

Recently, we’ve been exploring the first two Foundations of Mindfulness - Mindfulness of the Body and Mindfulness of Feeling Tone (Vedana).  This every day, on-going miracle of our body has always been how we know our world so it’s not surprising we take it for granted.  Much of what we expect from our bodies is not what’s happening in the present moment. 

So mindfulness of the body allows us a deeper exploration of what is true in our bodies and what our experience is actually like.  But when we sit in meditation, we regard and explore this body with our minds - something much more amorphous than our bodies.  And our mental experience is different from our bodies.  It doesn’t conform to the shape of our bodies, it is not bound by form or shape, it doesn’t restrict itself to bodily sensations, it layers on thoughts, images, emotions, mind states, wanting and not wanting.  

So when we place our awareness on our bodies, we are observing our bodies through the lens of our minds - a lens we also take for granted and merge with what we’re observing but which has completely different characteristics and yet still allows us to experience our bodies.

As our mindfulness deepens and we become aware of more and more subtle experiences, we begin to notice that along with a physical sensation or a thought arises an immediate liking, disliking or overlooking.  We like this, we don’t like that.  This smells or tastes good, that doesn’t.  The vast majority of sensations are relatively neutral so we don’t pay attention to them.

These subtle feelings tones are the heart of the Second Foundation of Mindfulness - Mindfulness of Feelings.  

 Bhikkus Bodhi points outs in The Noble Eight Fold Path that “Feeling acquires special importance as an object of contemplation because it is feeling that usually triggers the latent defilements into activity.  The feelings may not be clearly registered, but in subtle ways they nourish and sustain the dispositions to unwholesome states.  Thus when a pleasant feeling arises, we fall under the influence of the defilement greed and cling to it.  When a painful feeling occurs, we respond with displeasure, hate, and fear, which are aspects of aversion.  And when a neutral feeling occurs, we generally do not notice it, or let it lull us into a false sense of security - states of mind governed by delusion.  From this it can be seen that each of the root defilements is conditioned by a particular kind of feeling:  greed by pleasant feeling, aversion by painful feeling, delusion by natural feeling.”  

To be clear, these feeling tones lead to or trigger the wanting, the rejecting or the over-looking but are not the same as the feeling tones. Those are separate mental events - subtle but separate - and can be discerned when mindfulness is strong.  Thus, when held in awareness, these feeling tones don’t have to lead to unwholesome events.  

Since this all occurs in nano second time frames, it takes a bit of sitting in stillness and letting the mind settle to become aware of these more subtle movements of the mind.  And this investigation is critical because this is the chain of cause and effect that can lead us to one action versus another, toward suffering or liberation in this very moment.  

Below are the first two tetrads of the the Sixteen Steps of Mindfulness of Breathing contained in two separate teachings of the Buddha.  The first tetrad corresponds to Mindfulness of the Body, the second to Mindfulness of Feelings (or Vedana).

The Sixteen Steps of Mindfulness of Breathing

1. Breathing in a long breath, I know I am breathing in a long breath. Breathing out a long breath, I know I am breathing out a long breath.

2. Breathing in a short breath, I know I am breathing in a short breath. Breathing out a short breath, I know I am breathing out a short breath.

3. Breathing in, I am aware of my whole body. Breathing out, I am aware of my whole body.

4. Breathing in, I calm my whole body. Breathing out, I calm my whole body...

5. Breathing in, I feel joyful. Breathing out, I feel joyful.

6. Breathing in, I feel happy. Breathing out, I feel happy.

7. Breathing in, I am aware of my mental formations. Breathing out, I am aware of my mental formations.

8. Breathing in, I calm my mental formations. Breathing out, I calm my mental formations.

https://stillwatersanghamn.wordpress.com/2017/02/13/the-16-steps-to-mindfulness-of-breath/

"As the Buddha declared in the Anapanasati Sutta, 'When mindfulness of breathing is developed and cultivated, it fulfills the four foundations of mindfulness. When the four foundations of mindfulness are developed and cultivated, they fulfill the seven factors of enlightenment. When the seven factors of enlightenment are developed and cultivated, they fulfill true knowledge and deliverance.’”  ~~ Shaila Catherine, Lion’s Roar, Aug. 2022. https://www.lionsroar.com/all-you-need-is-breath/

The First Foundation of Mindfulness: Mindfulness of the Body

In the past few weeks, we have been talking about the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eight Fold Path contained in the Fourth Noble Truth, the path out of suffering.  The seventh path factor is Mindfulness.  

The Four Foundations of Mindfulness
Tonight we’ll begin our exploration of one the Buddha’s major teachings which falls within this path factor of mindfulness known as the Four Foundations of Mindfulness.  It has also been referred to as the four abodes or dwelling places of mindfulness.  

The Buddha made a rather bold assertion here.  Bhikku Bodhi writes in The Noble Eightfold Path that these four foundations form, according to the Buddha, “the only way that leads  to the attainment of purity, to the overcoming of sorrow and lamentation, to the end of pain and grief, to the entering upon the right path and the realization of Nibbana.”  

The First Foundation: Mindfulness of the Body
The first Foundation of Mindfulness, Mindfulness of the Body, explores our experience through the most tangible or gross (gross as is large or most obvious) aspect of experience - our bodies and physical form.   The other three Foundations - feeling tone, mind and mental events, and the dharmas which means both the truth of the world and the Buddha’s teachings - explore the more mental and progressively subtle experiences.  We’ll look at those more deeply in coming weeks.

There were several practices that the Buddha introduced to his monks for Mindfulness of the Body.  

Breath Awareness Practice
The one we know the best is breath awareness, mindfulness of breathing.  The Buddha taught this practice in sixteen steps starting with the investigation of whether this breath is a long breath or whether it is a short breath.  As practitioners learned to discern the length of the breath, they learned to observe the breath without attempting to change it - simply allowing it to arise and noting the length of the breath.  As their practice deepens, they observe the breath over the entire length of the breath as we have been practicing.  Sometimes teachers call this the four stages of the breath - from the in-breath to the pause/change to the out-breath to the rest at the end of the out-breath.  Then practitioners use this practice to calm the bodily function, progressively allowing the breath and all the processes associated with it to become more subtle.  Steps five through sixteen direct the practitioner toward more advanced and subtle practices with breathing that calm the entire body and mind and allow for progressive letting go and liberation.

Other Mindfulness of the Body Practices
Other practices of Mindfulness of the Body include investigating the 32 body parts - a practice designed perhaps for the wandering minds of monks of teen and young adult years whose fantasies might drift toward young women.  The 32 body parts promotes a dispassionate look at the composition of the body including all the various bodily fluids with the idea of interrupting the fantasies and breaking the enchantment with the body in the young monks.

A practice we are familiar with involves practicing with the body sitting, standing, walking and lying down.  These four postures encourage practicing with the body in all of its activities - encourage continuity of practice.  

Another practice involves contemplating the body in terms of the four elements to discover how like the entire world the body is - composed of the earth element, water, wind, and fire.  

The Body Scan 
The Body Scan is not included in the Buddha’s original teachings of Mindfulness of the Body.  Many people ascribe it to Jon Kabat-Zinn who developed Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR).  However, it is thought that it originated either from a Myanmar master U Ba Khin or he preserved it from earlier teachers.  https://www.buddhismuskunde.uni-hamburg.de/pdf/5-personen/analayo/buddhistantecedentsbodyscan.pdf

Nevertheless, the body scan has been extensively studied by various researchers and has been found uniformly to be one of the most effective practices for relieving tension and reducing stress. "Time spent engaging in the Body Scan was associated with increased psychological well-being and greater levels of two components of mindfulness—non-reacting to stress and observing thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations." https://ggia.berkeley.edu/practice/body_scan_meditation

More on the Sixteen Steps of Mindfulness of Breathing
For a taste of how the practice of Mindfulness of Breathing deepens through the sixteen steps and leads progressively toward enlightenment, you might want to try some of Bhikku Analayo’s guided meditations on breath awareness.  I found them very enlightening up through the fourth guided meditation.  Beyond that they are interesting and enlightening but pretty dense.  They can be found here:  https://www.buddhistinquiry.org/resources/offerings-analayo/breathing-audio/

The other resource you might find of interest is Larry Rosenberg’s Breath by Breath which explores in depth the sixteen steps of the breath awareness practice taught by the Buddha as the “only way that leads…to overcoming sorrow and lamentation.”  The sixteen steps are divided into four tetrads (four lines each) with each tetrad corresponding to one of the Four Foundations of Mindfulness.  

I have included the first tetrad from the Buddha’s teachings here.

1. Breathing in a long breath, I know I am breathing in a long breath. Breathing out a long breath, I know I am breathing out a long breath.
2. Breathing in a short breath, I know I am breathing in a short breath. Breathing out a short breath, I know I am breathing out a short breath.
3. Breathing in, I am aware of my whole body. Breathing out, I am aware of my whole body.
4. Breathing in, I calm my whole body. Breathing out, I calm my whole body.  
https://stillwatersanghamn.wordpress.com/2017/02/13/the-16-steps-to-mindfulness-of-breath/

As Shaila Catherine writes in The Lion’s Roar Aug. 2022, 
"The practice of mindfulness of the breath gradually exposes all areas where attachments might fester—to the body or meditation object, mental functions, mind, or insight knowledge….
As the Buddha declared in the Anapanasati Sutta, 'When mindfulness of breathing is developed and cultivated, it fulfills the four foundations of mindfulness. When the four foundations of mindfulness are developed and cultivated, they fulfill the seven factors of enlightenment. When the seven factors of enlightenment are developed and cultivated, they fulfill true knowledge and deliverance.’”  https://www.lionsroar.com/all-you-need-is-breath/

Transitions...

This week has been a sobering transition of sorts.  Due to an unusual weather pattern, smoke from wildfires plagued us last week from Nova Scotia, a part of Canada we never imagined on fire.  Homes were lost and people displaced.  Resources were expended immediately to combat those fires.  

Then Monday night, the weather pattern changed again and smoke from even more horrendous wildfires in Quebec descended toward the east coast in billows and plumes, white skies obscuring blue in the mornings, thin sunshine with pallid shadows emerging and disappearing during the day, a red ball seen through grey smoke in the afternoon one could directly behold.  We exchanged numbers on the air quality index with friends and family around the east coast as we watched the index soar into the unhealthy to very unhealthy ranges.  Pictures in the news showed New York City disappearing from New Jersey in a dense orange haze, the AQI topping out at 414 - hazardous, the lurid purple of the end ranges of the index adding to the sense of the disaster.

And we learned that the worst of the fires were uncontrolled, occurring in uninhabited forest land - places that were difficult to get to.  

So we all woke up to a new reality - one that we thought was confined to the west and midwest with only mild inconvenience to our way of life here.  We learned once again that we are not separate, that what happens in one part of the country, one part of the world, makes its effects apparent elsewhere, even here, where we live.   And we grapple with the knowledge that the fires continue, only the shifting weather patterns have spared us their fierce and deadly reminder.  For now.

How do we as meditators relate to, respond, live with these events, this stark evidence of our changing world?  

On one level, just like everybody else - with growing fear, horror, anxiety.  Or the false comfort of denial.  We can perhaps relate to climate deniers a bit here.  Or passive resignation and hopelessness.  These are very human responses to this increasingly terrifying world.  As Wendell Berry wrote (quoted in Elizabeth Drake’s excellent book Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore), “It is the destruction of the world in our own lives that drives us half insane, and more than half.”

I met with a group of dharma friends this week - windows and doors closed, dehumidifier and air purifier running full on.  One of our members was not present, having at long last entered Hospice for her final transition.  Our sadness, hidden behind everydayness, emerged over the hour as we talked about our friend, how her illness had progressed and how her practice progressed with it, how one of us assisted her on a retreat as she adjusted to her confinement to a wheelchair, how she waited patiently in this wheelchair at the bottom of the endless ramp to the meditation hall on a different retreat for someone to push her when she tired, what a gift it was to arrive and give her that assist,  how her courage and good will and loving kindness were grounded in her fierce independence, and how in recent days as she began to accept more and more help, she came to understand on a deeper level, at her core, just how loved she truly was.  

Stephen Levine’s Healing into Death and Life chronicles just such a journey into grace.  And we as her dharma friends came to glimpse what a gift accepting help can be to those offering, what a privilege and an acceptance into intimacy being allowed to help can be.  

One of our group joined us from her shift as a volunteer at a Hospice facility many states distant from our friend, the atmosphere of the Hospice - murmured conversations of love and condolence - permeating our zoom room with a kind of whispered sanctity.  And over the course of our time together, our grief merged with our love and a rich joy suffused with sadness grew in each of us.  We felt blest by our coming together, by having one window open to the caring and transitioning of the Hospice, by having the darkness surrounding each of our separate windows filled with the presence of our transitioning friend, our gathering giving each of us the courage to come into direct experience of all that we were feeling, all that was unfolding.

In Rising, a student of the author sends her a poem in the voice of God. It goes like this:

What do you expect me to do

I am not human

I gave you each other
so save each other.

After a period of travel, I found one of the books that grounded me was Bhikku Bodhi’s The Noble Eightfold Path: Way to the End of Suffering.  I’d been reading it on-line and thinking it was just an on-line book.  But after returning home, I began clearing out books, reorganizing and re-discovering in the process.  I found that I already owned it in book form!  

According to Wikipedia, "Bhikkhu Bodhi, born Jeffrey Block, is an American Theravada Buddhist monk, ordained in Sri Lanka and currently teaching in the New York and New Jersey area.”  He is well-known as an author but also as an editor and translator of Buddhist teachings.

I want to take some time and space to share what Bhikku Bodhi says about mindfulness both as a practice and as the 7th path factor of the Noble Eightfold Path.  I found this exposition illuminating and I think will help give a context for practice.  

“The Buddha says that the Dhamma, the ultimate truth of things, is directly visible, timeless, calling out to be approached and seen.  He says further that it is always available to us, and that the place it is to be realized is within oneself. The ultimate truth, the Dhamma, is not something mysterious and remote, but the truth of our own experience.  It can be reached only by understanding our experience, by penetrating it right through to its foundations.  This truth, in order to become liberating truth, has to be known directly.  It is not enough merely to accept it on faith, to believe it on the authority of books or a teacher, or to think it out through deductions and inferences.  It has to known by insight, grasped and absorbed by a kind of knowing which is also an immediate seeing.  

“What brings the field of experience into focus and makes it accessible to insight is the mental faculty called in Pāli sati, usually translated as “mindfulness.”  Mindfulness is presence of mind, attentiveness or awareness.  Yet the kind of awareness involved in mindfulness differs profoundly from the kind of awareness at work in our usual mode of consciousness.  All consciousness involves awareness in the sense of a knowing or experience of an object.  But with the practice of mindfulness awareness is applied at a special pitch.  The mind is deliberately kept at the level of bare attention, a detached observation of what is happening within us and around us in the present moment.  In the practice of right mindfulness the mind is trained to remain in the present, open, quiet, and alert, contemplating the present event.  All judgments and interpretations have to be suspended, or if they occur, just registered and dropped.  The task is simply to note whatever comes up just as it is occurring, riding the changes of events in the way a surfer rides the waves on the sea.  The whole process is a way of coming back into the present, of standing in the here and now without slipping away, without getting swept away by the tides of distracting thoughts.

“ It might be assumed that we are always aware of the present, but this is a mirage.  Only seldom do we become aware of the present in the precise way required by the practice of mindfulness.  In ordinary consciousness the mind begins a cognitive process with some impression given in the present, but it does not stay with it.  Instead it uses the immediate impression as a springboard for building blocks of mental constructs which remove it from the sheer facticity of the datum (NB: Facticity!  Great word!) The cognitive process is generally interpretative.  The mind perceives its object free from conceptualization only briefly.  Then, immediately after grasping the initial impression, it launches on a course of ideation by which it seeks to interpret the object to itself, to make it intelligible in terms of its own categories and assumptions.  To bring this about the mind posits concepts, joins the concepts into constructs - sets of mutually corroborative concepts - then weaves the construct together into complex interpretative schemes.  In the end the original direct experience has been overrun by ideation and the presented object appears only dimly through dense layers of ideas and views, like the moon through a layer of clouds.  

“The Buddha calls this process of mental construction papañca, “elaboration,” “embellishment,” or “conceptual proliferation.”  The elaborations block out the presentational immediacy of phenomena; they let us know the object only “at a distance,” not as it really is.  But the elaborations do not only screen cognition; they also serve as a basis for projections.  The deluded mind, cloaked in ignorance, projects its own internal constructs outwardly, ascribing them to the object as if they really belonged to it.  As a result, what we know as the final object of cognition, what we use as the basis for our values, plans, and actions, is a patchwork product, not the original article.  To be sure, the product is not wholly illusion, not sheer fantasy.  It takes what is given in immediate experience as its groundwork and raw material, but along with this it includes something else: the embellishments fabricated by the mind.”  There’s more but I’ll save it for next time.  

It is thought that what occurs in our minds is only about 92% based on our experience of the outside world.  Whether the percentage is correct, it’s clear that a great deal is add-ons, made up, scotched-taped on proliferations of our minds reflecting what we want, what we don’t want, and otherwise how we are deluded.

So this mindfulness becomes a critically important practice in beginning to ground our own minds in the truth of the way things are, to see clearly.

The Noble Eight-Fold Path

The truth of the Fourth Noble Truth is this:  The Noble Eight-Fold Path is the way out of suffering.  

The Noble 8-Fold Path is composed of the following:

Right view

Right Intention 

Right Speech

Right Action

Right Livelihood

Right Effort

Right Mindfulness

Right Concentration

In case you’re wondering about the word “Right” which sounds a bit judgmental and clearly calls its opposite “wrong” to mind, another word that could be used is “wise.”  Wise View, wise Intention, wise speech…etc.  This allows the invitation that is extended here to investigate and see for yourself what leads to suffering and what leads to freedom from suffering.  

But to be clear, sometimes “right” is exactly what is meant versus “wrong.”   When the Dalai Lama first heard the phrase “self-hatred” from Western scientists, he simply couldn’t understand it.  When it was finally translated to him in a fiercely whispered exchange with his translator, he looked up at the assemblage of scientists and declared with energy, "That is just wrong view!”

This teaching, as are all the Buddha’s teachings, is an invitation to come and see for yourself.  There is nothing to believe, no doctrines to memorize.  The truth is what you discover in your own hearts and minds, in your own experience.  These teachings are like the finger pointing to the moon.  Do not be confused by the finger; look in the direction the finger is pointing and see the moon for yourself.

Thich Nhat Hanh says it so eloquently: 

"Bhikkus, the teaching is merely a vehicle to describe the truth.  Don’t mistake it for the truth itself.  A finger pointing at the moon is not the moon.  The finger is needed to know where to look for the moon, but if you mistake the finger for the moon itself, you will never know the real moon.

"The teaching is like a raft that carries you to the other shore.  The raft is needed but the raft is not the other shore.  An intelligent person would not carry the raft around on his head after making it across to the other shore.  Bhikkhus, my teaching is the raft which can help you cross to the other shore beyond birth and death.  Use the raft to cross to the other shore, but don’t hang onto it as your property.  Do not become caught in the teaching.  You must be able to let it go." 

― Thich Nhat Hanh, Old Path White Clouds: Walking in the Footsteps of the Buddha

The path factors of the Noble Eight-fold Path are divided into three groups - the Wisdom factors, the Moral or Relationship factors, and the Mental training/discipline factors.

They are, nevertheless, inextricably linked.  Suffering cannot be eliminated if one is stealing and harming no matter how blissful the meditation.  And by the way, the meditation (mindfulness and concentration) will not proceed well if the mind is disturbed by unwholesome states of harming - whether to self or to others.

The Wisdom Factors are Wise View and Wise Intention.

The Moral or Relationship Factors are Wise Speech, Wise Action, and Wise Livelihood.

The Mental Training/Discipline Factors are Wise Effort, Wise Mindfulness, and Wise Concentration.

A quote from Bhikkhu Bodhi’s The Noble Eightfold Path: The Way to the End of Suffering (1999):

To follow the Noble Eightfold Path is a matter of practice rather than intellectual knowledge, but to apply the path correctly it has to be properly understood. In fact, right understanding of the path is itself a part of the practice. It is a facet of right view, the first path factor, the forerunner and guide for the rest of the path. 

One of the delights and surprises for me in looking more deeply into the The Four Noble Truths and The Noble Eightfold Path is how, as one teacher said, like a hologram it is.  The Noble Eightfold Path is contained in the Fourth Noble Truth.  And in turn, the Four Noble Truths are contained in Right or Wise View, the first path factor of the Noble Eightfold Path.  

As the we begin to explore the Noble Eightfold Path, we’ll see the worlds within worlds it contains.

Last week when I conducted the lightening tour of Buddhism around the world, I mentioned that all forms of Buddhism were based on the Four Noble Truths.  
In their barest form, they are as follows:

First Noble Truth - There is Suffering.

Second Noble Truth - There are causes for suffering.

Third Noble Truth - There is an end to Suffering.

Fourth Noble Truth - Here is the Path to the end of Suffering.  The Fourth Noble Truth contains the 8-Fold Path as the way out of suffering.

When I began to contemplate teaching the Four Noble Truths as part of this Insight teaching stream I have embarked upon, I began to have my doubts.  I’ve heard these teachings for years and have learned to appreciate them more deeply as time went on, but they are not taught overtly in the MBSR.  And they may be considered too simplistic or, in their simplicity, not relevant to today’s life.  Or perhaps just a relic of Buddhist thought.

Then I found an article in Tricycle Magazine on The Four Noble Truths which contained this paragraph:

"The Buddha is said to have realized these fundamental truths on the night of his great awakening. But fearing they were too far removed from ordinary experience for others to understand, he decided to keep them to himself. Legend has it, however, that the god Brahma Sahampati intervened, convincing the Buddha he must pass on what he’d learned. So the Buddha tracked down his former meditation companions, the five ascetics, who were residing in the Deer Park near Benares. In what is known as his first sermon, the Buddha taught them the four noble truths. The ascetics are said to have been enlightened on the spot.”   ~~ from The Sri Lankan monk Walpola Sri Rahula’s book What the Buddha Taught

I was a little taken aback that my doubts were shared by the Buddha who also had his doubts about teaching what he had learned.  But as one of the profound insights of his awakening, he recognized these truths as profound truths.  This is the way things are and this is the way out of the suffering we experience in the way things are.  So you dear reader/meditator will be like the Buddha’s former meditation companions for me.  I will talk about the first three Noble Truths this week and the fourth subsequently.

Let me start by just saying, the Buddha was a human being.  He never said otherwise and his teachings reflect this.  The importance of this fact of his being human was what he often said, to paraphrase, if I can do this, so can you.  

The First Noble Truth - There is suffering - may seem a little obvious.  And also a bit of a downer.  The Noble Truth part of this statement is that in this very life, there is sickness, aging, and death for all.  In addition, there are floods, fires, wars, famines, natural disasters for many.  We know this and yet life goes much better is we can keep some of that at bay and appreciate friends and family, art, beauty, nature, connections of all kinds.  Except that we find our selves suffering nevertheless.  The Buddhist word is Dukkha and refers to big suffering such as the dire list above and little suffering - annoyances, irritations, not getting what one wants.  And even if we do get what we want, there is unsatisfactoriness.  The good experiences are soon gone.  The bad experiences aren’t gone quickly enough.  And in between there is a lot of confusion.  The suffering being referred to here is the suffering our minds can cause us - thoughts, feelings, ideas, beliefs, desires, hatreds, aversions, fear of aging, sickness, death, other people, getting hurt….the list goes on.

The teaching here is to know at the depth of our being that there is suffering.  Not just in the generalized way - sooner or later the big stuff is coming for me.  But in the moment by moment way, Oh, I’m hurt by that person’s comment.  Here is suffering.  First Noble Truth.  The traffic is making me crazy.  Oh, here is suffering in the frustration and irritation, fear of being late, etc.  First Noble Truth right here in the car.  Or the supermarket line or the family fight or the pain of a teen-ager.  There is suffering.  Can we be with that basic truth?  Can we recognize and open to the suffering and the truth of suffering?

So when the Buddha got to the Second Noble Truth - There are causes for suffering - the monks were paying attention.  The cause of all suffering is attachment, wanting, clinging.  Attachment of wanting things to be other than they are.  Wanting the good to stay and the bad to go away.  Wanting what we want when we want it.

There are four kinds of attachment:  1) Attachment of sense pleasures (think ice cream, or wanting to be comfortable when the body isn’t, or an insufferably hot summer day.  2) Attachment to ideas and opinions.  Ever get into an argument with a friend over a different point of view or even some fact that could easily be checked but neither of you could back down to check?  3) Attachment to spiritual materialism, different spiritual forms.  Any questions?  4) Attachment to the concept of self and who we think we are - or should be.  We’ll circle back on this one frequently.

Second Noble Truth:  There are causes for suffering.

The Third Noble Truth:  There is an End to Suffering.  Really.  A lot of our suffering is caused by our delusions about the way thing are, about how much control we have, about how we should be able to be a certain way, live a certain way, think and feel in certain ways and not in others.  Delusions, assumptions, habit patterns.  One of my teachers calls it “mental furniture.”  That furniture got moved into our minds.  It wasn’t there to start with.  And it can get moved right out again.  Simple.  And not so simple.  But still simple.  It can be moved right out again.  We can wake up to the way things are, to the truth of this moment, to freedom from suffering.  Really.

This musing has gone on long enough.   I hope to follow up in subsequent musings and begin to wade into the Fourth Noble Truth - There is a way out of suffering.

Transitions...

This spring season is a time of transition.  It’s a beautiful spring day with daffodils and magnolias in bloom, ospreys active with their nests, animals of all kinds nesting and beginning to reproduce.  And a poem that I found today in Joseph Goldstein’s Experience of Insight from an old Zen nun was more powerful than any description I could give:

Sixty-six times have these eyes beheld the changing scenes of (spring).
I have said enough about moonlight; ask me no more.
Only listen to the voice of pines and cedars when no wind stirs.

I was re-reading Joseph’s book because I have been thinking about my roots in the Insight Meditation tradition, known as Vipassana as well, or early Buddhism or the Theravadan tradition to be distinguished from the Mayahanan tradition from which Zen springs, or the Tibetan tradition of the Dalai Lama.

I thought a little orientation to the various Buddhist schools might be helpful.

Buddhism thrived in India about 2500 year ago.  The language of the Buddha was Pali but, as there was no writing at the time, the tradition was oral.  This is why there is so much repetition in the Sutras (or teachings) we have now.  Repetition was the recognized mnemonic of the day and amazingly successful.  The teachings were only written down 400 years later in Pali - the original language of the Buddha.  This was the Theravadan tradition of Buddhism and, by modern day, there were something like 27 volumes of teachings in what is now known as the Pali Canon.  This is also the only document written in Pali.  So the language of the Buddha is synonymous with the only document written in that language - the teachings of the Buddha.  They exist only in each other.    

Buddhism was pushed out of India about 800 years after the Buddha’s death.  Hinduism took on some of its forms and ideas as it took over.  Buddhism spread to China where it was called Chan and then to Japan where it was known as Zen.  Or Mahayanan Buddhism.  The famous Heart Sutra and Diamond Sutra were written in Japan - 1000 years after the death of the Buddha.  It also spread across the Himalayas to Tibet where it was known as Vajrayana Buddhism.  Tibet was pretty isolated from the rest of the world and an amazing city grew up of the highest Buddhist scholarship, monasteries all over the place, universities, the works, all devoted to Buddhism.  It has been said it took 5 years to get enlightened - like going to college.  And stories of the powers - people flying around, walking through walls, being in two places at once - come out of Tibet.  

So these are the three strains or baskets of teachings - the Theravada which is the root lineage for Insight or Vipassana here in the west, Mahayana of which Thich Nath Hanh is the most renown teacher and the Japanese Zen perhaps the best known form, and Vajrayana of Tibet - known for imagery and for meditating on images, for Lamas, and of course, the Dalai Lama.

The Theravadan tradition spread to Sri Lanka, Burma now Myanmar, and Thailand where Ajahn Chah lived and taught.  It didn’t return to India until the early to mid-part of the last century and the Pali Canon didn’t return until a teacher/monk named Anagarika Sri Munindra who was one of Joseph Goldstein’s main teachers talked a copy of it out of the Burmese military and physically transported it back to India - a pretty exciting story contained in Munindra’s biography Living This Life Fully.  

 Jon Kabat-Zinn had the inspiration for Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) while on a retreat in the late 1970’s at the Insight Meditation Society practicing in the Theravadan tradition introduced at IMS as Insight or Vipassana meditation.  I always assumed  MBSR was all based on the Theravadan teachings which contain The Four Noble Truths and the Four Foundation of Mindfulness.  Probably the three marks of existence – impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and non-self - as well.  But these teachings traveled to China and Japan as well so Buddhist scholars have found a remarkable faithfulness to the teachings as they traveled - probably in part because of those repetitions.   All forms contain the Four Noble Truths.  But Buddhism developed in other ways in these traditions - notably into the area of non-duality. It turns out Jon Kabat-Zinn was deeply influenced by these other traditions so MBSR also has significant roots in the Mayahanan and Tibetan traditions.

The other thing to note, and Joseph Goldstein wrote a book about it called One Dharma, is that all these teachings from all over the world, all the countries, all traditions, everywhere made their way to the United States where they rubbed elbows with each other in a somewhat cacophonous co-existence with some cross pollination for the better part of a century. 

This is a bit rough as my fact checker was on permanent vacation so all mistakes are mine.  But it will give you a little background color for the way Buddhism traveled from India to the United States.  Not by a direct route by any means.  

And a little background for where I plan to go next.  Into an Introduction into Insight Meditation. 

"Faith is the beginning of all good things."

"The Buddha said, 'Faith is the beginning of all good things.’”  ~~from Sharon Salzberg’s Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience.

Today I have been thinking about change - what inspires us to change.  Perhaps this was prompted by a talk I heard this week by Saki Santorelli.  He talks of the human feeling of yearning, a longing that often leads us to try something new - a new course, a retreat, or some other form of exploration and becoming.  This yearning is some sense we have of what’s possible.  Saki goes on to say, our yearning is pointing to what is deepest in us, what is already there.  We can only long, he says, for what we already are. 

The first ingredient in this quest is awareness.  Our awareness helps us center on what is wholesome in our lives and what is not so wholesome in our lives and can become very fine tuned.  We carefully pay attention to the smallest moment because, as Thich Nhat Hanh said, each moment is the mother of the next.  Take care of this moment and it will take care of the next.   So we start where we are - fully seeing what is true now.  We can’t move from our present condition, whatever it is, if we don’t see it clearly.  Or as Billie Jean King once famously said, “You can’t hit a ball you don’t see."

We encounter this seeing and not seeing in our negative habit patterns - whether around eating, playing with our phones or social media, watching or reading the news.  Perhaps shopping or worrying or misusing substances of one kind or another.  Our less wonderful habits fly under our mindfulness radar and obscure our true natures to ourselves.  

Although there are several qualities that come to mind as being important to this endeavor to change our less than wholesome habits - setting an intention, courage, resolve, and patience to name a few.  

The most important ingredient may be faith.

This quality of faith is not something we make happen although in many religions faith is a verb.  It is our belief or confidence or inner heart that tells us that even when we can’t see the path for the brambles, the path will open up.  

There are two kinds of faith in the Buddhist tradition - bright faith which is the faith based on hearing the wisdom of others and resolving to try it out for ourselves.  In this bright faith, we don’t give over our will blindly.  Or at all.  This bright faith is the willingness to try for ourselves to see if this way is helpful to us.  

The second kind of faith is verified faith.  If we have ventured out with bright faith and found the practices helpful, our bright faith becomes verified faith.  Yes, this path is wholesome, this path is helpful, this path is leading me toward greater peace - toward deeper union with my own yearning.  Or no, this path is not wholesome, not helpful; not leading towards peace.  We decide based on our own discernment.  

Sharon Salzberg has this to say in her book Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience:

“Faith does not require a belief system, and is not necessarily connected to a diety or God, though it doesn’t deny one.  This faith is not a commodity we either have or don’t have - it is an inner quality that unfolds as we learn to trust our own deepest experience.  

The Buddha said, “Faith is the beginning of all good things.”  No matter what we encounter in life, it is faith that enables us to try again, to trust again, to love again.  Even in times of immense suffering, it is faith that enables us to relate to the present moment in such a way that we can go on, we can move forward, instead of becoming lost in resignation or despair.  Faith links our present day experience, whether wonderful or terrible, to the underlying pulse of life itself.”

The Joy of Taxes....

Spring officially arrived a week ago.  Daffodils are bravely raising their heads - those that survived the late winter freeze.  The finches are twittering away in mating and house hunting mode. 

And taxes are upon us.

I was surprised at how energizing and cleansing my tax process was this year.  Also how sobering and a cause for rejoicing.   Sobering as I got to see what the last three months - six months, maybe, the last year - have meant in terms of my mind’s capacity to organize and stay ahead of paper.  A cause for rejoicing because I could see it and deal with it.  

I finished the process last night after an intensive day and a half of sorting, searching, assembling, and happily, recycling.  And I felt good.  It took me a while to recognize that the persistent good feeling I was having was joy.  And another while to realize what had been missing from my entire two day process of organizing and clearing out.  

Aversion.  There had been no aversion.  

Well, almost.  Just one brief incidence of stomach tightening which I noted.  But then, it disappeared and didn’t return.  I just went from one task to another.  And tedious as they might seem, I didn’t find them tedious.  I just recognized the the next step in a logical progression of steps and did it.  

I am reminded this morning of the story of the two arrows.  I have shared that story here.  A person is shot by an arrow and feels the pain of the arrow.  Then she begins to  worry about who shot it, will he survive, what was the arrow made of, how long will it take to recover, and most importantly, what does she have to do to prevent getting shot by an arrow again - ever!  That is the second arrow.  That is the suffering of aversion.  Pain is inevitable.  Suffering is optional.

Taxes are the first arrow.  You remember, death and taxes?  But there was no second arrow for me.  No worry, no frustration, no overwhelm, not even a sense of regret or of personal criticism for having let things slide.  When I found a file missing, a bill unpaid, an accumulation of receipts, I just found the file, paid the bill, sorted the receipts.  And when I saw how I could have organized things better, I remembered how I already had made things easier this year over last and just resolved to extend those methods into the coming year.

Joy was present.  Without aversion, I could do my taxes with joy.  And that in itself was another source of joy.  Joy and wisdom beget joy and wisdom.

Just a quick reminder:  According to the Buddha and our experience bears this out, we have an immediate conditioned response to every experience that arises - pleasant, unpleasant or neutral.  Pleasant when we smell bread.  Unpleasant when we hear a jack hammer perhaps. Neutral when we notice our breath or pass through a doorway.  The Buddha called them vedana or feeling tones.  And each of these feelings tones leads on toward wanting or grasping if pleasant, not wanting or aversion if unpleasant, and delusion if neutral.  The suffering is the clinging of wanting, the avoidance and pushing away of not wanting, and the delusion of thinking that either of these will make us happy.  

Can we learn to see the subtle aversion that may pervade our lives?  Not wanting to do taxes is just one example.  What are some of the things that cause the suffering of aversion?  That block joy just as surely as clouds block the sun?

Spring is here.  The sun is shining after rain has watered the ground.  And hope is present…the stirring of new life…the cycle coming round again….

And the opportunity for joy is always present.

...in love, not hatred

I received this quote from Thich Nhat Hanh this week.  

“Someone asked me, ‘Aren’t you worried about the state of the world?’  I allowed myself to breathe and then I said, ‘What is most important is not to allow your anxiety about what happens in the world to fill your heart.  If your heart is filled with anxiety, you will get sick, and you will not be able to help.’” ~~ Thich Nhat Hanh

What I like about this quote from a master is the reminder of the many realms of our existence that can contribute to our suffering.  We are very aware of our personal suffering whether aging, sickness or loss and how that impacts our hearts and minds.  Many of us come to mindfulness and meditation because of acute disturbances in one or another of those areas.  But we may overlook or discount how much impact the suffering of others around the world may have on our ability to be happy and peaceful.  And there are other issues people face that cause ongoing stress and anxiety - issues around financial security, the stress of discrimination whether based on race, sexual orientation, religion, or simply being a woman or an older person.  For some, this may be the back ground drip drip drip of people in the news striving to deprive a group of people you might belong to of their rights to adequate health care, or housing, or simply the right to walk around freely without insult or threat.  For others, the threats are more imminent and visceral.

Mindfulness and meditation have been havens for many of us on all of these fronts.  But we can easily image how useless mindfulness and meditation sound as a balm to the people of Ukraine for instance or young black men stopped by police or incarcerated people.  

And yet, we can remind ourselves that it was Viktor Frankl, who spent 4 years in a concentration camp, who wrote:  "“Everything can be taken from a man (or woman) but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.” "When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”

And it was the Dalai Lama who fled his native land and endured many hardships including the death and torture of many of his monks, who still counsels finding joy in this life, saying, “Everybody wants to be happy.  Nobody wants suffering.”  And it was this truth which brought Thich Naht Hanh to the US after years in the war in Vietnam, because he realized that the suffering being caused by our country in his country was the result of intense suffering in our country.  And it was Thich Naht Hanh who said as I quoted above:  "What is most important is not to allow your anxiety about what happens in the world to fill your heart.  If your heart is filled with anxiety, you will get sick, and you will not be able to help.” ~~ Thich Nhat Hanh

And that brings us back to our most basic freedom to choose to be happy, to choose peace, and to choose to bring mindfulness into our lives - to sit in meditation and cultivate our minds and hearts in freedom from suffering, in compassion, and in equanimity.  

And from that place of peace, any help we bring to the world will be grounded in peace, not suffering - in love, not hatred.

"Never underestimate the power of compassionately recognizing what's going on." ~~ Pema Chodron

I’ve been pondering this phrase from Pema Chodron’s book Comfortable with Uncertainty that has been with me all week. 

 “Never underestimate the power of compassionately recognizing what’s going on.” 

It’s from a chapter called “Slogan:  If you can practice even when distracted, you are well trained.”  She goes on to say, “If we can practice when we’re jealous, resentful, scornful, when we hate ourselves, then we are well trained.  Again, practice means not continuing to strengthen the habitual patterns that keep us trapped; doing anything we can to shake up and ventilate our self-justification and blame.  We do our best to stay with the strong energy without acting out or repressing.  In so doing, our habits become more porous.”

Her phrase “without acting out or repressing” is a reminder of the Buddha’s Middle Way.  He was talking about the extremes of over-indulgence or self-mortification and "acting out" or “repressing" can be seen in this light too.  "Acting out" is our tendency to blame others or to lash out at those closest to us when we’re upset.  Or perhaps speaking harshly to a neutral other such as a bank clerk or a customer service representative.  Maybe that’s the more extraverted path.  “Repressing” is our more introverted tendency to blame ourselves, say it doesn’t matter, pretend nothing happened and we’re not having any feelings about it, or simply bury so that even we don’t know anything happened.  Except we don’t feel good.  

These two extremes come into play more frequently when some strong feeling has arisen around a disturbing event. And this brings me back to Pema Chodron’s wonderful phrase, “Never underestimate the power of compassionately recognizing what’s going on.”   The power of that process comes in both aspects of that sentence.  The one most easily understood and hardest to practice is that of bringing an active compassion to ourselves for these disturbing feelings we have.  Until it becomes a deeply grooved habit, this compassion towards self is something we have to remember to practice towards ourselves and to monitor to see if our compassion practice is as wholehearted as we can make it in that moment.

The second aspect is equally important.  “Recognizing what is going on.”  The word “recognizing” implies that we’ve been here before - this is a familiar territory, an old feeling, a pattern.  From our MBSR training, an automatic habitual reaction.  It has automaticity to it.

If we can turn towards our more difficult feelings or experiences and look into them more deeply, we can begin to see their habitual nature - we can recognize, “Oh, yes, I’ve been down this path before.”  And if we can bring compassion to ourselves for that habit pattern before we sweep it under the rug in denial, we can begin to see the underpinnings of the pattern more clearly - what it feels like, what thoughts arise, where is it in the body.  Following these threads, we may begin to remember other times we felt this way or this pattern arose, and perhaps remember when it would arise when we were younger.  

Eventually our investigation may yield up further truths.  We may begin to recognize how impermanent the pattern is, it arises and then is gone.  We may  feel more fully the suffering in this pattern.  And we may, with our compassion as our support, see that this pattern arose as a habit, not under our conscious control, not something we wanted to arise.  And that lack of conscious control can help us see the impersonal nature of this pattern.  As the Buddha taught, "This is not me.  This is not mine.  I am not this.”

All of these investigations help weaken the habit pattern and allow us to abandon the pattern, to let it go just a little bit more with each round of investigation until the pattern dissolves in the warm broth of our compassionate recognition - our awareness.

We are not two....

Thich Naht Hanh gives a talk on non-duality.  Non-duality is not something I’ve talked about.  It’s related to concepts of emptiness and non-self.  What non-duality is saying is that we are all connected - TNH calls it interbeing.  We inter-are.  He uses the metaphor of the ocean and the wave.  We are both individual waves and we are also ocean - as in physics, a tiny piece of matter can be both a wave and a particle.  This interconnectedness of non-duality in meditation is the understanding that there is no subject separate from the object of meditation.  There are not two.  There is one event - the meditator and the object of meditation are one.  Logically this makes sense because the object doesn’t exist in our experience if we aren’t experiencing it.  The object and the experience of the object are a single event.  

Although non-duality is not ever mentioned in the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program (MBSR) - and you perhaps can see why, it is at the heart of it.  Jon Kabat-Zinn developed this program with the deepest intentions for participants to develop a life-long practice that could be transformative in freeing them from suffering. And non-duality is a key concept in that transformation.

Thich Naht Hanh continues then to talk about suffering.  If someone has made us suffer, we suffer.  And that’s not all bad.  Suffering is useful.  

I know.  I know.  Wait a minute here.  But remember TNH lived through the Viet Nam war leading a monastery of monks and nuns to go out into the villages to help ease the suffering of many people in many different ways.  He knows trauma.  He knows the worst of war and the worst of humanity.  And yet he says suffering can be useful.

Here’s how.  When we suffer and we can be with and look deeply at our suffering, it opens our hearts.  We can begin to feel compassion for ourselves.  And when our hearts open, we can look deeply at those who made us suffer and our hearts perceive the suffering in that person as well.  He points out we are only the second victim.  The perpetrator is the first victim.  This looking deeply gives rise to compassion for that person as well.  We access compassion through our own suffering and then we can see with compassion the suffering of that other.  

And here we circle back to non-duality.  The reason we can see the suffering of that other is because that other is not other.  That other and ourselves - we are one fabric.  We inter-are with each other.  We are not two separate anything except in our own mental constructs  - in the small “I” of identification.  Thus, when we begin to see non-self, we begin to see interbeing in a deeper, visceral way.  We have all seen this.  And we also continually get caught in our own separateness.

This applies to all people, all animals, all trees and plants, to our earth.  We inter-are with our earth and, yes, with the vastness of our universe.  And we watch in deep compassion as we allow ourselves to see our earth and all its beings suffer.

It has been said the universe is one consciousness manifesting in different ways.  And our understanding of this starts with the simple breath.

The End of Suffering....

One of my meditation teachers on the retreat I sat a few weeks ago gave a morning reflection which I adapted in part.  It went something like this:

Why are you here?  (Here she leaned forward and peered at each of us.)  Why are you here???

To end suffering!  Isn’t that right?  (We all nodded.)

And what causes suffering?  

Clinging.  The Buddha said, “Nothing whatsoever is to be cling to as me or mine.”

What do we cling to?  We cling to our bodies.  Then we cling to ideas about what our bodies should be like - thinner, stronger, younger, more attractive, with hair like this or that, able to wear different clothes, healthier.  Think of the various ways we attempt to change our bodies.

And our thoughts and feelings.  We should like this person more, we should be kinder, we shouldn’t think this thought or that thought.  We shouldn’t feel sad, or angry, or impatient, or frustrated, or anxious.  And yet sometimes we do.  

Does any of this sound familiar?  She went on to say:

The Buddha was very clear.  When we think or do something that is unwholesome, we suffer.  When we think or do something that is wholesome, we don’t suffer.  So we can end our own suffering by abandoning what is unwholesome and embracing what is wholesome.

And how do we know what is wholesome?  The Buddha pointed the way in the Fourth Noble Truth.  The way to the end of suffering is the 8-fold path:  

Here I am inserting the Buddha’s original teaching on the end of suffering and a link to the entire teaching which is fairly short."The way leading to cessation of suffering, as a noble truth, is this: It is simply the noble eightfold path, that is to say, right view, right intention; right speech, right action, right livelihood; right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration.”       https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn56/sn56.011.nymo.html

And before you give up with the magnitude of what is being suggested here.  Consider this:  The key to it all is in each moment.  Moment by moment we can end our own suffering by abandoning what is unwholesome and embracing what is wholesome.  If we are stuck in a negative thought pattern, we can bring mindfulness to it, which is wholesome, accepting that it is here and holding it with the thought, this is a negative thought pattern, I didn’t choose to think it, it just arose.  But I can choose now to be aware of it and I can choose to let it be without taking it on as me or mine, without hooking my identity to this thought pattern, without encouraging, feeding, supporting, or reinforcing it.  It arose and I can allow it to fade away.  

That is abandoning a negative thought pattern that was causing suffering.  That is abandoning an unwholesome habit pattern.  That is ending suffering in that moment.

"Are our lives leading onward...."

I ran across this quote from Joseph Goldstein who has been one of my main teachers and a guiding light in how he has conducted his own life. It comes from a book Creating a Life of Integrity: In Conversation with Joseph Goldstein. Joseph says:

"We must continually ask ourselves, are our lives leading onward in any way?

Of course, we also need to find the line between being impeccable and being rigid,

so that we refine our understandings with a light heart.”

What I have followed and noticed about Joseph’s path is how his heart and his generosity and his onward path are merged. He along with Sharon Salzberg and Jack Kornfield purchased with collected donations the land and buildings they developed into the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, MA. They began offering retreats themselves and training Western teachers to offer retreats as well. They also invited many of their esteemed teachers from India, Thailand, Burma, and elsewhere to come and teach at this new center. Dipa Ma was one of those teachers.

Joseph supported women teachers from the beginning at a time when the women’s movement was still in its beginning efforts. He organized a trip to the Burmese monasteries that have been so important to the insight tradition asking sizable donations from the travelers for these monasteries. And with his leadership, the retreat center began offering scholarships specifically to encourage people of color to attend.

More recently, say in the last 10 years or so, realizing the debt of Western Buddhism to the Eastern traditions which were held by people of color, he led his colleagues to investigate why there weren’t more people of color or of difference attending the many retreats. What they realized is that people of color weren’t attending in larger numbers partly because of economics and having the time and opportunity, but also because they didn’t see themselves reflected in their teachers. So Joseph began widening the search for and the training opportunities for teachers of color. Today Insight Meditation Society has a robust roster of retreats taught by people of color for people of color. It is perhaps the most diverse retreat schedule of any retreat center anywhere.

And all because Joseph continually asked himself, is my life leading onward in any way?

Of course, you know where this is going because we have all become more aware how our personal happiness and well-being is connected with the well-being of the planet and the health and happiness of its many inhabitants. Just as in psychology, we have moved beyond the Freudian model that says our personal happiness is entirely rooted in our personal past to the family systems model that says that a troubled child is not an isolated event in a family but often the "identified patient” in a malfunctioning family. As we look around, we see that is true in community systems, political systems, national systems, and world wide systems. And perhaps it makes the question "are our lives leading onward in any way” almost overwhelming to contemplate.

Which is why Joseph added the second part, “Of course, we also need to find the line between being impeccable and being rigid, so that we refine our understandings with a light heart.”

So can we begin to bring this question more into the light, "Are our lives leading onward in any way?" And at the same time, allow our consideration of this question to develop naturally and "with a light heart?"

Self-acceptance and the Marlboro Man

I’ve been thinking about self-acceptance recently. I’m sure many of you can relate.

We’re pretty hard on ourselves as a culture. The Marlboro man epitomized the solo persona the country admired - strong, independent, self-reliant. I don’t think the Marlboro man had much of an emotional life which is probably why he was a chain smoker. Probably not much in touch with his feminine side either. Vestiges of that image still linger to a greater or lesser degree as a powerful archetype in the American personality.

We often encounter our unwillingness to accept ourselves when we feel inadequate or criticized or shown up in some way. Or when we’ve blundered or suddenly come face-to-face with some unseen and unseemly part of ourselves. And it can be a pretty painful process if we ourselves pile on the criticisms and join forces against ourselves in what we perceive to be a well-deserved self-bashing.

It is my fervent hope that by this time, we’ve all begun to recognize the signs and to marshall our inner resources to practice loving-kindness and compassion towards ourselves.

But I’ve also begun to wonder if we can’t approach this at a more elemental level working up and out as well as down and in. By that, I’m referring to our basic building block of mindfulness - awareness of breath. And this also refers to any focus of body awareness we choose such as the sensations in the hands or feet or seat. Or the sound scape.

When we practice breath awareness - and I’ll use that as my example, we pay attention to the breath as it arises and falls in each passing moment. The instruction is to allow the breath to be just as it is - without trying to make it into anything else, without judging it as being less than any other breath. This is the breath the body called for. This is the breath the body is capable of. And the question for us as meditators is this: can we be with it? Can we accept this breath as it is? And this breath as it is? The ragged as well as the smooth? The shallow breath as well as the full breath?

And even, the breath that feels inadequate as well as the breath that fully satisfies?

In this simple practice, we can begin the process of accepting - ourselves and reality - just as it is in this moment. Are we anxious and breathing rapidly and shallowly? Can we be with that? Are the wildfires making our air smoky? Can we be with that?

Can we accept our breath - just as it is? Our bodies just as they are? Our world just as it is?

It doesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t attempt to improve any of it. But first we have to start where we are.

I wonder what the Marboro man would make of that.