On death, wonderment, and rituals...

My deepest gratitude to you all for all the expressions of sympathy, condolence, and wisdom that I have received.  As the Buddha noted in his teaching of the mustard seed*, there isn’t a household that has escaped loss.  My loss resonates because of all the other losses each of us has known and lived through.  Thank you for your abiding compassion and beautiful hearts.

In the past year or so, I have been drawn to the Clear Mountain Monastery community and their two young founding ajahns - Ajahn Nisabho and Ajahn Kovilo - often attending their morning meditations via zoom.  These two young monks trained in the Thai Forest Tradition of Ajahn Chah and decided to form a monastery in Seattle.  For the past five years they and their growing community of practitioners have met in a welcoming Christian church on Wednesday evenings and Saturday mornings and utilized zoom and YouTube for many connecting events.  This past March with support from a growing community around the world, they found and purchased land in North Bend, Washington, 40 minutes from Seattle by car.  

In September, they commemorated their transition to the land with a three-day walk that commenced at the welcoming Christian church with short talks by Bhikkuni Anandabodhi, Ajahn Kovilo, and Ajahn Nisabho. Bhikkuni Anandabodhi has been a seminal part of reviving the Bhikkuni tradition in the west - restoring the order of  Buddhist nuns as a separate and equal lineage rather than as a perpetually lower order of the monasteries for men.  We listened to those talks in September.

Recently, they published a short documentary on that three-day walk with their comments about their intentions for the walk and their vision for the monastery.  We will watch that documentary tonight.

This desire to be closer to and more cognizant of the monastic orders and monasteries has been growing in me for some time.  It has always been a tradition since the second half of the last century for Westerners to find opportunities to take robes and live in the monasteries with the monks for some period of time.  Jack Kornfield spent 10 years in robes in Thailand.  Many monks in the UK and Australia are Western born.  And some numbers of Western women became nuns or Bhikkunis for periods of time.  One of my teachers Guy Armstrong spent two months in robes in Myanmar.  

I have lost a number of people in my life who I was very close to and that is one of the reasons I began to meditate and take my first steps on this path.  The recent deaths of my close friend last fall and then my brother early in October were both staggering losses to me and I found I wanted some further way of practicing that acknowledged these losses more directly and helped me carry the grief.  The tremendous compassion I have received from family and friends and some total strangers has been foundational for helping me bear these burdens.  And my compassion and caring have helped others bear similar losses.  We are none of us alone although we may allow our minds and concepts to separate us.  Community is how we can find strength.

My brother called himself a Quaker Catholic.  Quaker by birth, he grew up as I did in the silence of meetings for worship on Sundays with a wide variety of beliefs held in the community.  He became a Catholic after or during his Peace Corps years in Costa Rica and his marriage and birth of his daughter.  He remained in the Catholic church after the separation and with his second wife singing in the choir and partaking of the community of the church.  In his death, he was attended by his wife, a gathering of nearby family, and a priest he had known who came, sat with them, prayed with them, and helped them absorb the shock of his rapid passing.

He had a traditional Catholic mass but his sisters requested and were able to offer a quasi-Quaker opportunity later at the reception for people to stand as the spirit moved them and relate a little of the joy he brought into our lives, the gratitude we all felt for his life and for his wife who gave him such happiness, and the sadness that lives in our hearts at his passing.  

So I have been thinking about rituals and about churches and monasteries, priests and monastics.  In my community, those who attend church had traditional church rituals.  But many do not and for them, rituals are private, often self-organized, and sometimes almost non-existent.  We send cards when we can.  But often close friends don’t send each other cards.  Some rejected all the rites and rituals associated with churches but still their friends organized gatherings that were reminiscent of more traditional gatherings.  

And I have also been astounded by the power of death to shake our concepts of reality.  The question, how did I get in here and how did you get in there is often the beginning of such questioning.  How did life begin?  How is this earth possible?  What are the laws of gravity?  What is the relationship to the number of petals on a flower to the lengths of sound waves and the overtone series in musical notes?  And is there a relationship between that and the movement of the planets?  Remember the recently discovered six planet system where all six planets move in a gravitational rhythm known an orbital resonance with their orbital periods locked into a fixed mathematical ratio?  And more astounding, how is it that human beings developed ears and brains to hear these mathematical relationships as music, eyes to see and appreciate aspects of vision, miracles of nature?  And humans and animals sometimes share appreciation for beauty as in bird plumage? 

And recently, I heard a meditation from a nun at Plum Village, the center Thich Naht Hanh founded. The last line was “You are alive without boundaries.  I am alive without boundaries.”  We know so little of the mystery that surrounds us, that is at the center of our lives.

All Buddhist traditions share some form of chanting as do many other religious traditions.  My brother’s participation in the church choir is another version - lifting the voice in resonance with others in reciting or singing the teachings.  Many religions have kneeling, bowing, hands together in prayer.  Some have full body prostrations.  I listened to one teacher recount her need to lay her body flat on the ground in acknowledgement, in devotion to goodness, beauty, perhaps majesty, power, incomprehensibility. And often we find the word surrender to have resonance unlike almost any other.

Everyday life is often quite manageable without the words spirituality or sacred.  But conception and the birth of a child often shakes that secular vision.  And certainly death - our own and others - challenges us to maintain our balance.  And beyond that, the intense suffering found in wars, in intentional cruelty, and in catastrophic natural events such as the one that occurred in Nepal recently, how are these life events to be held with equanimity?

Our practice is key certainly.  The lessons of freedom can be found in the present moment.  But our practice is stronger when it is joined by devotion and by the power of community, of sangha.  

The first Buddhist chant many meditators learn is the simplest.

I go to the Buddha for refuge.
I go to the Dharma for refuge.
I go to the Sangha for refuge.

For a second time, I go to the Buddha for refuge.
For a second time, I go to the Dharma for refuge.
For a second time, I go to the Sangha for refuge.

For a third time, I go to the Buddha for refuge.
For a third time, I go to the Dharma for refuge.
For a third time, I go to the Sangha for refuge.

The Buddha said all three - the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha - were important refuges but the most important was sangha.

*A woman’s baby child dies and she carries the dead child around asking someone to help her.  She is sent to the Buddha who tells her to bring him a mustard seed from a household that has not known loss.  She goes from house to house seeking the mustard seed but instead is brought in to the house where she hears the story of loss that this family has sustained and they in turn hold her own loss in compassion.  Eventually she has to return to the Buddha and tell him she was not able to find a household without loss from which to gather the mustard seed.  But she had learned the lesson he wanted her to learn, had been heard and cared for, had shared her loss with many families who shared their losses with her.  And she was able to release her child and feel supported by the community.

Impermanence and my brother...

Among the Buddha's many wonderful teachings, the law or fact of impermanence was the single most important teaching he offered.  And he gave it over and over again.  That which arises, passes away.  Where there is birth, death must follow.  That which arises out of causes and conditions cannot lead to anything that is unconditioned.  The unconditioned is other than that.

And yet how often does the simple truth of impermanence catch us by surprise?  So with my brother who died suddenly last week.  He was the youngest sibling and first of our generation to pass away, and we all reacted with shock and the universal sense that it shouldn’t have been that way.  He was healthy, comparatively young (although not a young man), had just retired to spend time traveling with his wife of 35 years, and had so much to look forward to.  He was a sweet man with strong family ties who would do anything to help those he loved. 

And he died in his time.  Causes and conditions supported his life until Tuesday evening last when they abruptly didn’t.  Was it the way it was supposed to be?  Was it for the best?  Was it not in the order of things?  Was it too early?

These are the irrelevant questions and thoughts that naturally arise around sudden death.  We humans need time to process and our first reactions in our shock are a form of denial.  

There are many ways we honor and process the death of a beloved family member.  Although there was no formal viewing, I drove to Maryland over the weekend to see him before he was cremated.  It was my first tribute to him and an important part of my journey toward acknowledging the truth of his impermanence.  And of my own.

“We shall be changed, in a moment, in a twinkling of the eye,” sings the bass in the Messiah, famous words from the Bible.    

Changed into what?  we may ask.

The Buddha was ever silent on this point because the teaching he wanted us to ponder was that attachment, clinging was the cause of suffering.  Anything we grasp, cling, hold on to, “in the twinkling of an eye” will be changed and we will suffer.  The Buddha knew that any answer he gave would inevitably lead to more thinking and more attachment - one way or the other.  What he wanted us to learn and remember was that freedom lies in letting go.

When we let go a little, we get a little peace.
When we let go a lot, we get a lot of peace.
When we let go completely, we find complete peace.

Nevertheless, we grieve.  But our task for ourselves is make space for our love, to grieve with compassion for ourselves and others, and to bring kind awareness to our denial and clinging to allow letting go to arise naturally from the depths of that awareness.

Reconciliation and forgiveness...

I wrote last week about the Buddhist concept of not-self - so important on the path to freedom from suffering.  I also referenced two community groups that were at odds about a particular hurtful and offensive action taken on one side against the others.  There are attempts to move on in both groups but any attempts actually to reconcile have fallen on deaf ears and there is a process underway to cover over rather than repair and heal.

The Buddha taught often about Reconciliation.  Thanissaro Bhikkhu’s good article in Access to Insight quotes these wise words from the Buddha’s teachings: 

"These two are fools. Which two? The one who doesn't see his/her transgression as a transgression, and the one who doesn't rightfully pardon another who has confessed his/her transgression. These two are fools.

"These two are wise. Which two? The one who sees his/her transgression as a transgression, and the one who rightfully pardons another who has confessed his/her transgression. These two are wise."

— AN 2.21

"It's a cause of growth in the Dhamma and Vinaya of the noble ones when, seeing a transgression as such, one makes amends in accordance with the Dhamma and exercises restraint in the future."

— DN 2

 https://accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/reconciliation.html 

In those few short phrases, the Buddha outlines the essential ingredients to reconciliation - confessing or acknowledging the transgression or the wrong doing and agreeing that it was unskillful and harmful, pardoning one who has confessed or acknowledged a transgression, and seeing the process of making amends as a cause for growth in the individual and the sangha on the path to freedom from suffering.  

Thanissaro Bhikkhu goes on to write:  

Reconciliation — patisaraniya-kamma — means a return to amicability, and that requires more than forgiveness. It requires the reestablishing of trust. If I deny responsibility for my actions, or maintain that I did no wrong, there's no way we can be reconciled. Similarly, if I insist that your feelings don't matter, or that you have no right to hold me to your standards of right and wrong, you won't trust me not to hurt you again. To regain your trust, I have to show my respect for you and for our mutual standards of what is and is not acceptable behavior; to admit that I hurt you and that I was wrong to do so; and to promise to exercise restraint in the future. At the same time, you have to inspire my trust, too, in the respectful way you conduct the process of reconciliation. Only then can our friendship regain a solid footing.

This process usually includes a heart-felt apology.  In my own family, apologies were few and far between and often to apologize meant to be wrong, to be somehow bad or less.  Sometimes the wrong person ended up apologizing.

In our society, that tendency has been present as well.  One discussion showed that there was a divide in that women were more likely to apologize than men, and worse, that apology put the apologizer in the “one down” position, inferior to the one being apologized to.  Men were more resistant to apologize and assume the “one down” position than women.  There was and sometimes still is a stigma of shame and wrongdoing that weighs down apology and robs it of its otherwise inherent capacity to bring reconciliation and healing.  

In Buddhism, there is distinction made between feeling guilty and feeling remorse.  Guilt is less helpful - it is more centered on the self than other, and includes harsh self judgments.  Remorse places the change in feeling around the action.  The person can feel remorse about the action and also wish not to repeat it, without feeling evil or wrong.  Guilt can be debilitating.  Remorse leads to uplifting intentions.  It encourages making better choices in the future.  It also helps purify by shifting perspective and resolve leading to a furtherance along the path that might not have been possible without it.

Last week I quoted the late Jack Engler, Harvard psychotherapist and early science-of-meditation pioneer, who said, “You have to be somebody before you can be nobody.”  Often the inability to acknowledge one’s own transgressions or harm to others results from a weakness or insecurity in the “being somebody” department, the psychological concept of ego.  A person with a stronger sense of themselves can admit wrongdoing without bringing down the whole psychological structure.  And paradoxically, that stronger sense of self can allow for a thinning or letting go of the “selfing” - the “I” making and “my” making I wrote about last week.  That thinning of “selfing” is what makes apology possible - that allows the acknowledgment of unskillful or hurtful actions or words, that fills the heart with cleansing remorse and the desire to make amends.  

And sometimes, sadly, reconciliation does not arrive, apologies are not forthcoming, and we may be left with our wounds and even a sense of shame for having been the recipient of harm.  Forgiveness is the necessary step whether an apology is forthcoming or not.  The forgiveness is not for the transgressor so much as for ourselves.  

Thanissaro Bhikkhu again:  

The Pali word for forgiveness-khama-also means "the earth." A mind like the earth is non-reactive and unperturbed. When you forgive me for harming you, you decide not to retaliate, to seek no revenge. You don't have to like me. You simply unburden yourself of the weight of resentment and cut the cycle of retribution that would otherwise keep us ensnarled in an ugly samsaric wrestling match. This is a gift you can give us both, totally on your own, without my having to know or understand what you've done.

The inner reflections of the one wronged also need to be deep and honest.  

To prevent those in the right from abusing their position, he [the Buddha] counseled that they reflect on themselves before they accuse another of wrongdoing. The checklist of questions he recommended boils down to this: "Am I free from unreconciled offenses of my own? Am I motivated by kindness, rather than vengeance? Am I really clear on our mutual standards?" Only if they can answer "yes" to these questions should they bring up the issue. Furthermore, the Buddha recommended that they determine to speak only words that are true, timely, gentle, to the point, and prompted by kindness. Their motivation should be compassion, solicitude for the welfare of all parties involved, and the desire to see the wrong-doer rehabilitated, together with an overriding desire to hold to fair principles of right and wrong.

To encourage a wrongdoer to see reconciliation as a winning rather than a losing proposition, the Buddha praised the honest acceptance of blame as an honorable rather than a shameful act: not just a means, but the means for progress in spiritual practice. As he told his son, Rahula, the ability to recognize one's mistakes and admit them to others is the essential factor in achieving purity in thought, word, and deed [MN 61]. Or as he said in the Dhammapada, people who recognize their own mistakes and change their ways "illumine the world like the moon when freed from a cloud" [Dhp 173].

High aspirations indeed.  And worthy of our reflection.

"We do what we can do"

The Buddha’s concept of non-self is probably one of the most difficult of all the Buddha’s concepts to understand.  In psychology, the importance of a well-formed, stable self is central to mental health.  To illustrate this conundrum the late Jack Engler, Harvard psychotherapist and early science-of-meditation pioneer, famously said, “You have to be somebody before you can be nobody.”

Meditation teacher and Spirit Rock founder Jack Kornfield said in an interview I shared here some months ago said the characteristic that most distinguished all the meditation masters who had gained freedom was this quality of non-self.  It meant that they could laugh at themselves uproariously when they made a mistake or looked silly.  There was no holding on to self-image.  They could work toward an objective - even a deeply felt objective -  and also be happy if their objective was not met.  And regardless of that, they could continue working towards that objective.  They could lose country and fellow country men and women to tyranny and still find a way to be happy - observe the Dali Lama.  This quality of not-self opens up the vistas of freedom from being bound to results, from being bound to suffering because we can’t make things the way we want them to be.  It doesn’t mean the Dalai Lama doesn’t care deeply about his country and his country people.  He most certainly does.  And if there is something he can do, he does it, someone to comfort, he comforts, someone to grieve for, he grieves.  But he is not pulled off balance, not a slave to the suffering, he is still able and willing to be happy and joyous when he can.  

Mindfulness of Breathing is one of the Buddha’s seminal teachings and can be found in the Anapanasati Sutta.  The practice predates the Buddha by some good amount of time but he refined it into 16 stages from the beginnings of finding one’s breath and establishing mindfulness all the way through to enlightenment, freedom from suffering.

These teachings are very familiar, we see iterations of them in practices offered by Thich Nhat Hanh to MBSR to the Henry Benson Institute of the Mind.  This summer I dove into the formal study and practice of the sixteen steps of mindfulness of breathing.  Step 12 was as follows:  I breathe in liberating the mind.  I breathe out liberating the mind.  What was this mind liberation?  According to Venerable Analayo, liberating the mind is letting go of the burden of “I am,” of “selfing,” of making a “me” out of something, of appropriating something as “mine.”  In meditation it can be as simple as saying, Look how good a meditator I am.  Or how bad a meditator I am.  This breath is mine.  I’m going to make this breath be the way “I" want it to be.  I’m going to hold my breath until I’m enlightened!

At first I was frustrated because I didn’t find any great revelations during this step of the meditation.  But I usually found, after even just asking where is selfing in this meditation, when I went about the rest of my day, examples of selfing showed up all over the place - in anxiety about a meeting with an organization, or preparing for a class, in being put on hold for the tenth time by the phone company, in having someone wheel their cart in front of mine at the supermarket.  It’s “my” place in line, my “time” that’s being wasted.  There isn’t enough respect for “me.”  “I” have to get this assignment, presentation, conversation right.  Can you hear the sages laughing uproariously when they put a foot wrong?

One way the idea is described in the Buddha’s teachings is “Me-ing” and “My-ing” - the habit of considering my body, my mind as “me? and thinking of my qualities, intelligence, property, family, possessions as “mine.”  And in conventional terms, this is fine and acceptable.  But my body and mind are not permanent, are subject to aging and illness, will eventually die.  Where is “Me?”  If I lose a finger or a toe to an accident, was that me?  Am I less me?  As to my possessions, how can I say another person is mine?  Or property mine?  I have a relationship with those people but I don’t own them. Even children I may be responsible for, I don’t own them.  They have their own personalities, their own gifts and flaws, and most especially, they have their own fate.  While I may care for them, I cannot control their fate.  The Buddha’s own father tried to shield him from the realities of the world, but eventually the Buddha went out (snuck out like any adventurous son?) with his charioteer and saw aging, sickness, death and a holy man.  He left his home then and there to try to understand the inevitable fate of our bodies and to find freedom in this life.  

As to property, I “own” it but for how long?  If I die, I don’t own it anymore.  If there is a hurricane and the property becomes uninhabitable, what is ownership?  If I own it, why do birds fly over and nest in my trees so freely?  Bugs, deer, rabbits, all manner of small creatures live on my property, roam freely at night and much of the day.  At best, I am a steward of my land.  The concept of ownership doesn’t apply to the other inhabitants.

Recently, I had occasion to think about organizations large and small but especially two in my small community.  Both were highly respected and deeply revered groups.  Both had deep roots in the community.  One was given the deed to the property used by the other with provisos that the occupying group could use it as they always had and if the first organization no longer wanted the property, they had to give it back.  The first organization was the steward of the property.  But stewardship involved time, money, effort, pride, and other purposes the property could be used for.  So the concept of “my-ing” crept into the leaders of the first organization.  In Buddhism, it is called appropriation.  The taking of something to be mine or myself that didn’t start out that way.  Me-ing and my-ing involves wanting, grasping, craving, clinging, attachment, greed and once one takes “possession,” defending," fighting for, constricting around.  In other words, stewardship has turned into selfing - making a self out of the “ownership” - and has now become a source of suffering.  Like two small children struggling to possess the same toy, the two groups are struggling against one another.  The smaller occupying group have long, deeply held traditions they are holding to - with good cause. And the smaller group has also been doing some deep reflection about whether the oppositional struggle can be converted to mutual caring, concern and respect.  

They know this truth from the Buddha, “Hatred is never ended by hatred in this world.  By non-hatred alone is hatred appeased.”  Sometimes in modern circles, non-hatred is translated as “love" but what the Buddha was really talking about was non-aversion, freedom from hatred, which includes patience and calm.

That quality of non-hatred is also freedom from selfing, from making a self around the conflict, the property, winning, prevailing, having my way.  And letting go of selfing is letting go of a burden, relaxing muscles, letting go of effort, striving, being more in accord with the flow of our own true nature.

One more example.  See if you can see the non-self in this story. In Trail to Kanjiroba, the medical teams on the Nomad expeditions hike for weeks through the Upper Dolpa, Nepal, a remote region high in the Himilayas near Tibet where small villages cling to the sides of the mountains, persevere in constant winds, short summers, freezing winters, often snow bound passes.  Our author Bill DeBuys (pronounced De Bweeze) is talking with a seasoned trekker who is in charge of the piles of duffle bags of medicines and supplies they carry into the mountains.  He is pronouncing a good day for their first clinic - over a 100 villagers seen and ministered to, antibiotics for ulcers handed out, analgesics for arthritis, sunglasses to protect the vision of people exposed to brutal sunshine.  They treated kidney trouble, respiratory illnesses from living in smoke-filled huts, a leaky heart, and one pregnancy.  A good day.  He was surprised when the keeper of the medicines demurred.  “The situation is absurd.  Look around you:  our camp equipment is worth more than the annual incomes of this entire community.  We’ll go away and pretty much everything here will revert to how it was, including the health of the people we’ve treated.  Follow-up is impossible.  It’s entropy, impermanence, like the Buddha says.  Even the mountains and this village will wear away, let alone the little things we try to do.”

“So why do them?” DeBuys asked.

The man zips the last duffel and gives a wry smile.  “How else are you going to spend your time?  Just because in the end it doesn’t make any difference - why should that matter?  There is no problem here.  It’s fine.  Always will be.  We do what we do, and nothing lasts.”

His answer combines DeBuys concept of applying Hospice to our changing world - care, not cure - they cared for people and the people were grateful, with the concept of letting go of results.  "We do what we do.”  Certainly nothing lasts, but lives are changed in ways we can’t foresee.  One villager with support from within and from outside organizations managed to get an education first in her village, then in Kathmandu, and finally in a medical school in the states.  She returned as one of the doctors on the expedition. 

Walking in stillness...

My telephone service has been out for three weeks.  Land line, not cell, thank heaven. Practicing the dharma while fuming at yet another customer service agent who is following the script to try to persuade me to wait patiently is a practice in itself.  By the end of the process, I would pay my bills, get out my calculator and balance my checkbook, answer emails, and make lunch while waiting to speak to the supervisor and then the supervisor’s supervisor, and then the manager.  By the end, multiple teams were conferring by phone, some computer person worked over the weekend programming something, the manager had given me her private line, and I got two phone calls on a Saturday (!) reassuring me that they were still working on it. 

Then today, the phone rang and, for an instant, I looked around wondering what that sound was.  Service is restored and I’ve had a number of very pleasant and interesting conversations with technicians, night supervisors, and the kind manager who gave me her cell phone number.

For the last year I have been meditating with the Clear Mountain Monastery’s zoom meditation group in the mornings.  Clear Mountain Monastery was started by two monks - Ajahn Kovilo and Ajahn Nisabho.  I found them through listening to a talk by Ajahn Kovilo on Dependent Origination that I shared with this group.  They were working to buy land in the Seattle area to establish a physical monastery.  They closed on the land in March and early in September they memorialized their transition to the land by making a walking pilgrimage from Seattle to North Bend where the land is located, a journey of three days.  

Recently, I attended a program called "Encountering the Buddha as Teacher" at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies.  There I met a nun - Bhikkuni in Pali - named Anandabodhi.  I mentioned her last week.  She ordained and began her own vihara or abode for bhikkunis near Seattle and it turned out she had a close association with Clear Mountain Monastery and had walked with them the first day of their journey before she had to come to the program at BCBS.

The morning of the first day of the walk, Ajahn Nisabho, Ajahn Kovilo, and Anandabodhi met with the sangha to share their reflections on the journey they were about to begin. Anandabodhi and Ajahn Kovilo talked about walking - and how to walk in the dharma.  Walking is something we all do everyday if we are so abled and blessed.  

I recently read Trail to Kanjiroba by William DeBuys who chronicles his 5 week walk into the Himalayas with the Nomad Project begun and led by Roshi Joan Halifax, founder and guiding teacher of Upaya.  Part of his purpose was to find a way to live and hold his own grief at the destruction of our world as we know it and loss of animal populations while continuing to make meaningful efforts toward preserving, saving, caring for our painfully changing world.  Somewhere in his fifth week of walking as the journey neared its end, the phrase came to him out of the rhythm of his steps:  “The right way of walking is the right way to carry the grief.” 

Then he wrote:  “When I thought about grief,  it was not hard to identify.  It was the stew of sorrows brewed from climate change and Petri Earth (his term for the experiment of humanity on this earth).  It was the distress aroused by our planetary dilemma and by our failure as a society, even as a species, to assent to what we know.”  

He goes on, “Grief wasn’t the riddle.  Walking was.  What was the right way? Our expedition had walked for five weeks.  Life had contracted to the essentials of food and shelter, movement and rest, work and play.  Every hour’s effort had been embedded in a stern geography.  The requirements of place and mission asserted demands that none of us could meet alone.  We had to cooperate, act together and so we formed a community.  We served.  We learned.  We walked.  We found a settled pace, literally and figuratively.  For a time we were nomads.  The trail became home.”

Although not a Buddhist, his words align with those of Anandabodhi as she urges us to be present for each step and Ajahn Kovila’s reflection that the Pali language word for walking meditation is “go  go” and yet the paradox is how to walk in stillness.  We are urged to practice in walking, to walk in stillness - our path becoming our home, to go somewhere without leaning forward to get there, to bring peace to every step whether we are scaling the jagged Himalayas, making signs and marching in protest, writing postcards to neighbors in other states, or simply talking with customer service.

Crossroads...

I find myself in a cross roads this entire year - having lost a long-time, deeply loved friend who, as I reflect upon it, was sort of a mother to me and our relationship was just about as complicated.  I met her just after my mother died and after her husband died. My other best friend, my husband, had died several years before.  We formed a widows friendship and, of course, grieving the loss of my mother was part of that.  We could meet in the kitchen at one or another of the many social gatherings she would hold and acknowledge that the sadness was there in the midst of the gaiety.  She was my person and I was hers, in that regard.

Since her death, I have had to grapple anew with the fact of death, the immediacy, the finality.  I was with her the second to last night of her life.  I had hoped to give her comfort and to keep watch/vigil.  At one point toward morning, when I thought she was sleeping and heavily sedated, her eyes opened to slits and she looked at me.  I looked into complete lucidity, burning knowledge glowing in embers of suffering.  I felt the energy of her leaving this world weighing heavily upon me.  I thought I should go home but could only stand in the middle of the room.  Eventually I lay down on a sofa and fell into a deep sleep.  When I awoke 2 hours later, I felt completely rested.  I also felt confused.  Part of me felt like Peter who couldn’t stay awake until the cock crew.  Another part of me felt relieved and alive - the weariness and heaviness of the night was gone.  I wondered whether the heaviness I had felt was our living bonds having to separate - hers to follow her path out of this world and I to remain behind.  For now.

These 10 months since have been a bit of wandering in the desert.  As I approached and passed a milestone birthday, I was acutely aware of time running short.  My own parents lived only a few years beyond this age.  I felt the effects of time on my body and on my will to resist.  I felt the futility of lifelong efforts to be in control, to stave off aging, to shape my destiny to my desires.  I felt in short that I was at a turning point of some kind - able to see that the old world would never go back to the way it was.  This applied to my body, to my interests, to my energy, but also to the community I lived in, the country I loved, and the world I depended upon.  Change had been happening all along but suddenly it felt accelerated.  The periods of stasis or denial were over for the time being and there was a hurtling through movement, change, one thing turning into another, desires, resentments, division, love, hope, energy.  It was all swirling around and through events and weather and everything we have depended upon and still grasp on to. 

I found myself fulfilling a half promise to my mother 28 years ago to gather her memoirs and publish them. I thought there were only 15 that family hadn’t seen but then I realized I had to gather them all together - all 74 plus of them - in a single document.  It came in at 175 pages, included some pictures, and few other writings and documents that support her preservation in memoir form of her Quaker upbringing in a small farming community.  Just outside of Washington, DC., ancestors came from William Penn’s Pennsylvania 8 generations ago and remained passing houses and farms down to generation after generation shaping their lives and destinies in place.  Her life began without electricity, at the end of the era of horse and buggies.  They were dairy farmers, born in the same farm house generations before had been born in, into a community that believed so strongly in education that they build their own high school.  That education stood them in good stead in the transition into the modern world.

I finished the first edition in July and shared it with family at a gathering that month. I also looked at retirement communities and wondered if that would be a workable support for aging, sickness, and death.

During this time I took two at-home courses that were developed and offered by Venerable Analayo - The Four Foundations of Mindfulness (The Satipatthana Sutta) and Mindfulness of Breathing (the Anapanasati Sutta).   With each course, I was able to enter into a space of retreat in my own home - defined more by the time of day than by the location.  Mornings were devoted to practice and reflection of the teachings offered.  Some of these teachings I have shared with you.  

This last month has a culmination of sorts that is still unfolding.  We have gone through a primary season in the political sphere with the midterms coming up.  The rhetoric has increased, the insanity has revealed itself, war and depletion of our resources rage.  Desperation and ignorance seem in control with flashes of hope like points of light coming from all around us.  We are unsettled in one moment, encouraged in another, confused and uncertain as to the outcome.  And perhaps we are questioning how do we hold our ground during these upheavals?

During that time I was unexpectedly invited to join a study/retreat on Encountering the Buddha as Teacher.  The highest form of learning is learning for self and others with learning for self alone the next highest form.  That sounded about right to me.  I learn more from teaching and from students than I learn on my own although learning as a student has been a rich and enriching experience.  Co-learning, co-teaching - we are each others teachers.  We are each others students. 

The 25th anniversary of 9/11 has come round and we are reminded of how the forces of catastrophic events have impacted our country and our world.  We have barely emerged from the worse pandemic any of us personally have lived through only to see our systems of health and public safety eroded or destroyed.  We have watched our forests burn, our very air turn against us, our summers sustain withering heat.  We have witnessed the creation of ICE and the unloosing of dark energies into communities all across this country.  And yet we have seen our communities rise up in resistance, our elected leaders begin to leave behind passive cooperation and search for more effective responses to the designed chaos and destruction of a way of life.  Yet the suffering intensifies.  The struggle, once engaged, escalates.

And we come to the very last teaching of the Satipatthana - The Four Noble Truths, the first of which, that there is suffering.  Suffering exists.  This is what drove the young man who became the Buddha from the comforts of his father’s palace out into the world in search of a way to understand, relate to, and finally free himself from the ravages of this truth.  There is suffering - in the body through aging, sickness, and death.  There is suffering of the emotions as we find we cannot hold onto any relationship we hold dear, any ideal that sustains us.  Even our physical world shifts, groans, gives up vast habitats, animal life, diversity.

We are told in the second noble truth that craving and attachment are the root causes of this suffering.  We suffer because we love, because we want, because we acquire, accumulate, possess.  Some of the ways in which we are attached seem more noble, more right, more just.  We are attached to ideals and values, as well as the well-being of family, friends, community.  And this is a complicated truth to understand.  How is it wrong to love, we ask?  To care about the preciousness of human and animal life?  To hold to values and ideals that are worthy?

An article in Lion’s Roar (https://www.lionsroar.com/buddhism/four-noble-truths/)  says we suffer because we see ourselves as separate, independent, solid.  We think we can posses things, hold onto people and relationships.  We think that our attainment of things, people, relationships will bring us lasting happiness.  The article concludes this truth in this way, “The painful and futile struggle to maintain this delusion of ego is known as samsara or cyclic existence."  

Then we are told there is an end to suffering, a way out of this cycle of craving and loss.  And that the way out of this morass of misery is the Noble Eightfold Path - Wise Intention, Wise Resolve, Wise Speech, Wise Action, Wise Livelihood, Wise Effort, Wise Mindfulness, and Wise Concentration.

And out of our own glimmerings of wise intention, resolve, action, effort, we come to mindfulness and concentration.  And we learn that the first instructions for mindfulness and concentration, begin this way, “Here gone to a forest or to the root of a tree or an empty hut, one sits down; having folded the legs crosswise, keeping the body erect, and having established mindfulness to the fore mindful one breathes in and mindful one breathes out.”   

From that simple beginning, all things flow - we learn to find peace in the center, to release all our grasping, our wants and desires, to hold our caring for others in a different light - at least for a time.  We learn that we will grieve the loss of a family member, of a friend, of our animal companions and fellow travelers, of the natural world.  But we will grieve differently - knowing that what was lost was impermanent, ephemeral, a gift for a time but not forever.  We learn compassion for ourselves and our frailties and for the suffering of all.  And we learn that we will still be moved to action but perhaps in a more sustainable way because we learn to offer our hearts without knowing or expecting results to be any particular way.  We learn to give without expectation but knowing the giving, the showing up is necessary, is our journey.  

And just as we learn to return to our breath over and over again whenever our minds wander and to do this without chastising ourselves, understanding that this is just the ways things are, we also learn that we can be called to put one foot in front of the other over and over again, to make efforts to relieve the suffering of others, to see and bear witness to the inevitable and increasing losses in our world, without giving up hope and without losing our resolve to do what we can when we can.  We learn that while we have life and breath in our bodies, we can practice for our benefit and the benefit of others.  

There are several different directions I am called to share in this space in the coming weeks.  I don’t know which will dominate and when but I list the two main ones here just briefly as a guide post for myself and for those of you who are still reading.  One is the fuller teaching of Mindfulness of Breathing.  This was the teaching the Buddha offered because it was the practice that led to his enlightenment.  Having taken Venerable Analayo’s course this summer on Mindfulness of Breathing, I now have a greater understanding why that was so, how that is possible.  

The other is women in Buddhism, beginning with the first woman who importuned the Buddha to allow women to learn the teachings, engage in the practice, take robes and follow him.  That woman was the Buddha’s step-mother, the one who took the newborn from her dying sister, the Buddha’s mother, and raised him as her own.  Another is Roshi Joan Halifax, 84, the first woman to found her own center, who is a medical anthropologist, and a teacher of the dharma and of compassionate care to chaplain trainees, who worked with the dying, who mounted and traveled to Nepal on annual Nomad journeys to help the people in the high country of the Himalayans with their medical needs.  These journeys took 5 or 6 weeks, all on foot or horseback, with a solid week or two of walking just to reach the first villages.  A third was a bhikkuni, a Buddhist nun, I met last week who had left her home monastery in a highly respected tradition to join a tradition that offered ordination to bhikkunis.  The ordination of nuns has been a controversial subject in Buddhism for many years with many holding that the line of ordination had been broken and couldn’t be repaired.  Venerable Analayo put his scholarship skills to work to prove an unbroken line through China that restored ordination to nuns in the west.  Not all monasteries accepted this.  This nun had swiftly chosen ordination over security and started her own monastery for bhikkunis in Washington state with two other nuns.  Her courage and also her grief were palpable - for the gains the Buddhist women had made during the Buddha’s lifetime were lost after his death until this ordination was restored.

But for now, we pause and consider how life and practice has been during these last weeks of summer - what we aspire to, how our longings and reflections manifest in our lives, what trail our footsteps have been following step by step, what trail forward…

Equanimity and a look back over where we've been...

Tonight we will finish Guy Armstrong’s talk on Tranquillity, Concentration, and Equanimity - the last three of the Awakening Factors - and more or less, the last item on our journey through the foundational teaching of the Four Foundations of Mindfulness.

The Four Foundations of Mindfulness - sometimes referred to as the Four Establishments of Mindfulness - is the Buddha’s teaching on how we should practice.  Mindfulness is the key ingredient here, sometimes defined as paying attention to our present moment experience without judgment.  To start with, our mindfulness is a bit episodic as we get pulled away by the habits of our wandering mind again and again.  The key to practicing mindfulness is beginning again, over and over, whenever we notice that our mind has wandered off into the past or the future, started building castles in the air, intently tracking old arguments, planning future activities.  The mind has lots to do and our one task is to bring it back to the present moment again and again.  Often, even usually, we will have a focal point for the mind to stay with - often, usually, but not always, the breath.  The breath coming in; and the breath going out.

Then the teaching invites us to place our mindfulness on our bodies and do various explorations of our bodies to learn that they are not permanent and that they are made of matter, just like everything around us.  That the first foundation.

The second foundation invites us to notice feelings, but not just any feelings, feelings that are positive, negative, or neutral.  For instance, we smell freshly baked bread.  That is usually an immediate positive feeling for most people.  A loud crash is usually negative.  The sensations of breathing are often neutral.  To distinguish these positive, negative, and neutral feelings from emotions such as anger, sadness, joy, frustration, we call them feeling tones.  And learning to be mindful of feeling tones is what the second foundation of mindfulness is all about.  The reason this is so critical is that positive feeling tones lead to wanting something, craving something, which leads to attachment.  And attachment is what the Buddha tells us - and we can check this out for ourselves - leads to suffering.  Because whatever we want doesn’t last, and what we don’t want lasts too long.  So we are constantly in an argument with reality about the way things are.  If we begin to see attachment or its opposite, aversion, we can hold it more lightly - appreciate positive feeling tone without getting caught up in wanting it, making our happiness depend upon getting it.  That’s the key right there.  When we make our happiness depend on something that is impermanent, we are going to suffer - and have already suffered.

So feeling tone is an important object for mindfulness and thus the second foundation of mindfulness.

The third foundation of mindfulness some of you may remember is the arena of the mind.  Here is where we begin to turn inward, to investigate the nature of our own minds and thoughts, emotions and moods.  We can begin to see our thoughts running along, shaping our experience, criticizing, coaching, wanting this, not wanting that.  We can begin to see how thoughts shape emotions and how emotions can shape our perceptions, how the way we view the world is a lens filled with our mind contents and often a distortion based on those contents.  We can also begin to become aware of awareness itself - begin to see the subject-object duality of our experience - I over here am looking at that over there.  When we see how our minds shape our perceptions, we can begin to see there is no over here and over there - it’s all our perception.

The fourth foundation of mindfulness is mindfulness of dharmas which is the Pali word for teachings and also for the way things are.  So this foundation is a big of a grab bag of how to be mindful and progress along the path towards freedom from suffering.  There are a number of lists contained in the fourth foundation - some of which may not have been in the original teaching of the Buddha but added later.  There seems to be agreement, however, that the five hindrance and the seven factors of awakening were contained in the original teaching.  

The five hindrances you may remember are craving, aversion, restlessness and worry, sleepiness and torpor, and doubt.  These are the most common hindrances to meditation that practitioners run into and it’s helpful to become very familiar with them, how they arise, and how they are abandoned.  Meditators can spend a lot of sitting time caught by one hindrance or another.

The seven factors of enlightenment are factors of mind that lead toward awakening.  They are mindfulness, investigation, energy, joy, tranquillity, concentration and equanimity.  These factors arise naturally in meditation and also off the cushion but we can learn to identify and foster their arising and continuing so that they become more central to our practice and help foster states of happiness, joy, tranquillity and letting go.  We have just explored the last three over these past weeks.

Also contained in the Fourth Foundation - although I don’t know if this was added later or not - is the teaching on the Four Noble Truths and the Eight Fold Path.  The Four Noble Truths tell us there is suffering and we need to learn to embrace it, there are causes for suffering and we need to see them, there is an end to suffering, and the Eight Fold path is the path out of suffering.

The Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eight Fold Path is a monumental teaching on its own.  We have reviewed it in the past and we may yet review it again.  

Tonight we’ll listen to the last third of Guy Armstrong’s talk on the last three awakening factors - tranquillity, concentration, and equanimity and then have a brief discussion about how practice is going before our two week break. You can find Guy’s talk on the Spirit Rock Website: https://www.spiritrock.org/talks/the-seven-factors-of-awakening-part-2

One note, Guy talks about the Brahmavirharas - which is Pali for the sublime abidings, vihara is the Pali word for home or house or place of abiding.  These are the four sublime mind states that elevate us when they are present.  They are loving kindness (metta), compassion (karuna), sympathetic joy (muditta), and equanimity or equipoise (uppekka).  The last quality here equanimity is the same quality as the last awakening factor and Guy will guide us to a better understanding of what is meant by equanimity.  

And, of course, then we’ll have time to sit and practice mindfulness of our bodies, feeling tones, minds, and the ways things are.

Hindrances and the multi-hindrance attack...

We have devoted some time to the hindrance of aversion listening to Joseph Goldstein’s talk on the subject.  We also listened to his teaching on the hindrance of sloth and torpor which was quite rigorous and quite Joseph.  I was reminded of an article written by a black woman called something like “Napping Buddha” about the deep rest needed by those who have endured the sustained stress of racial prejudiced and poverty.  I would add the various weird illnesses we have come to know that leave us with debilitating fatigue.  So sloth and torpor as a hindrance needs to discerned from genuine fatigue and the need for rest. 

For an interesting discussion of sloth and torpor and the need for sleep, I have included this conversation among meditators and monastics on the Buddha’s instructions on sleep and warnings against the hindrance of sloth and torpor.  

https://discourse.suttacentral.net/t/whats-up-with-the-recommendations-for-little-sleep/30979

There are three hindrances we have not talked about - a reminder that a hindrance is that which interferes with our meditation and our mindfulness.  The three we have not touched on are greed or craving or just wanting, restless and remorse - worry and agitation are also included, and doubt.

It might be helpful to illustrate these hindrances through the common experience of a multi-hindrance attack.  It may begin with restlessness, some agitation in the body.  This is considered one of the last hindrances to go in the meditative life - perhaps because it has its root in our existential fear, the constant present of death in life.  It can take the form of anxiety, of nameless fears, of late night worrying, of physical itchiness that makes us move around.  In meditation we may have already discovered that our greatest desire is for peace, for calm, for tranquillity.  Restless and remorse, agitation and anxiety are anything but that.

So it makes us dissatisfied.  We want to be peaceful and tranquil and instead we may experience tension, or flashes of excitation in the body, especially the tummy but also the arms, chest, legs, the mind jumping around.  Without mindfulness (and even with mindfulness), we might look around for a cause outside of ourselves.  And usually there is something in our lives to be dissatisfied with and our minds might latch on to that something as the “cause” of all our worries and anxieties - or bodily agitation.  So we may focus on the “cause” with aversion and distaste.  So now we have restlessness and remorse, wanting to feel some other way, and aversion to our perceived “cause” for feeling this way all showing up all at once.  

This may lead to a fourth hindrance - doubt.  We may also decide that all of our misery at not getting what we want, not being able to find peace in our meditation is caused by the meditation itself - with the wrong practice, or maybe the wrong teachings or teacher, or maybe we’re just no good at this meditation business.  We just can’t do it.  Doubt has now joined the other hindrances.  It is good to be discerning about our practice but wisdom feels clear and alert.  Doubt is cloudy, murky, resentful, accusatory, and self-judgmental.  We may feel so down that we get sleepy so now our multi-hindrance attack is complete with all five hindrances in a tangle.

This is one example of a multi-hindrance attack.  Sometimes just bringing awareness to it, turning towards it, seeing the empty nature of these thoughts and suppositions, and remembering that this too shall pass - impermanence - is sufficient to begin to dissipate these energies.  Sometimes relaxing into the suffering and saying,”This is just the way it is” can be freeing. 

Being content with what is is a powerful antidote to the hindrances.  Content to just sit, content to investigate, content to know that meditation has its ups and downs and grasping onto the highs is no more useful than pushing away the lows.  If we practice - whether sitting, standing, walking, or lying down - we are moving forward on the path.  It is not for us to understand how our practice is unfolding.  Sometimes it seems like nothing is happening and other times we can see decided movement and change.

I was recently reminded of the story of the little boy who planted carrot seeds.  Every day he went out to check if the carrots had sprouted.  Finally, one day, there they were, little wispy shoots emerging above the ground.  But the little boy was impatient and wanted to know if they were carrots yet.  So he pulled up the tender shoots.  Of course they weren’t and the story doesn’t tell us if there were enough sprouts left to develop into carrots.  In meditation, as long as we persist, there will be.    

So why is it important to know about the hindrances?  We all encounter obstacles to our meditation along the way.  They are part of the path - see Jack Kornfield’s article below.*  There are a few reasons - one is that these energies appear in our daily lives, not just during our meditation periods.  If we experience a lot of agitation in our lives, it will surface when we quiet our minds.  If we slide and glide through life, always putting off, making excuses, taking naps, this energy will also be present during meditation.  Jack Kornfield surprised me into wakefulness during one sleepy meditation period by asking, “What is it you don’t want to feel?”  Sometimes sleepiness is our way of avoiding feelings that are difficult to experience.  And as much as these energies hinder us in our daily lives, they will appear in our meditations and invite us to see them, work with them, understand them, and eventually be free of them.  In the here and now, our understanding of the hindrances can help us learn to hold them in abeyance to go deeper into our meditations.  * https://jackkornfield.com/making-the-hindrances-part-of-the-path/

And that leads to the other reason to be aware of the hindrances.  There are antidotes to the hindrances that will help us disentangle from them, measures we can employ that will help us gain insight into the hindrance and find release from its constricting energy.  Mindfulness is key.  It can help us see the energy for what it is, investigate it further, find connections, and free ourselves.  Loving kindness can counter aversion and can soften our hearts toward ourselves and others.

The Buddha had a set of similes for considering the energies of the hindrances:  The teachings compare a person enslaved by covetousness (greed, wanting) as being in debt, a person caught by ill will or aversion as sick, gravely ill, a person entrapped by sloth and torpor as being imprisoned in jail, a person caught in restlessness and remorse as a slave, and a person enthrall to doubt as a person traveling a perilous journey across a desert with nothing to eat.  Freedom from the hindrances is like getting out of debt, recovering from illness, being released from prison, being freed from slavery, and arriving to safety.  This freedom from the hindrances is the ground for awakening.

When the path gets rocky... working with the five hindrances

Meditation always sounds so easy.  All you have to do is sit down and follow your breath - the inhalations and the exhalations.  Simple, right?  And sometimes it is.  And for a brief time it is.  But then something happens.

Suddenly the meditator becomes aware that they have not been following the breath but instead have been fantasizing about getting a cup of coffee or having a conversation with someone or tackling their to-do list.  

What happened?

What happened is that the meditator sat down to meditate and expected to meditate - which translates into "expected the mind to do what was asked of it.”  And the mind most certainly did not do that.  

So what’s the problem?

The problem is not with the mind. The mind is the mind.  Everyone has one.  They behave in somewhat similar ways and also with infinite variety.  

The problem was with the expectation.  The conversation with the mind might go something like this: "I want to be peaceful.  Being peaceful looks so nice.  Meditation helps you be peaceful.  OK, I’ll meditate.  Meditation is sitting and paying attention to your breath.  I’ll do that and then I’ll become peaceful.”

So the first insight is that the mind doesn’t stay put.  Seeing the monkey mind is considered an achievement in meditation circles.  So we learn that meditation is a training as well as a practice and that repetition is key to training the mind.  We learn patience as we bring the mind back to the breath - over and over again.

A year passes or five or more.  And we understand better this aspect of bringing the awareness back to the breath - over and over again.  And over and over again.  And over and over again.

Sometimes the mind calms down and stays with the breath for a while.  And sometimes the mind bounces off the breath like a drop of water on a hot skillet.  What’s going on?  Why is the mind so settled one moment and so squirrelly the next?

And it seems like it’s always changing.  One time we forgot to have tea before meditating and all we can think about is the tea.  Another time the body just won’t settle down, won’t cooperate.  The pain in the knee, back, side, neck, gets in the way of the meditation and we’re squirming.  Or a really unpleasant situation in our lives keeps intruding during our meditation and we can’t make it stop.  Sometimes we're jumpy and irritable and others we're falling asleep - repeatedly.  And then we think this is no good, my mind is not like other people’s minds, the meditation book, teacher, app is wrong, this meditation thing is just not for me.

And yet every once in a while, we sit down and drop in - sitting for 15 minutes or half an hour is bliss with the mind calm and the body still and aligned. 

How do we deal with all these different situations?  How do we get more of the good stuff and less of the bad stuff?

The Buddha was a very smart man.  He learned through his own practice what supports meditation and what gets in the way of meditation.  And he made a list of five of the most common things that interfere with meditation.

And he also understood that underlying all of them was the basic fallacy that our happiness depends on our getting more of the good stuff and less of the bad stuff.  To be fair, it is certainly more pleasant to be comfortable, peaceful, serene, content than to be uncomfortable, agitated, anxious and irritated.  And sometimes we drop into some beautiful blissful states in our meditation.

But sometimes we don’t. Then what?  

What the Buddha knew was that the attachment to being comfortable, peaceful, serene was going to be one of the major impediments to our being comfortable, peaceful, serene.  And what he learned and taught was that lusting after pleasures of the senses was a hindrance to meditating.  The term lusting is one useful term.  Greed or craving are other ways of describing the mind state dominated by wanting things to be other than what they are. The word wanting or phrase the wanting mind have turned out to be good descriptors for our modern minds that evoke the sense of the state with perhaps less judgment than greed, lust, craving.

The Buddha realized there are five such mind states that interfere with meditation.  The first is the wanting mind.  The opposite of that is the mind filled with hate or disgust or revulsion.  In short, aversion to anything - pain or discomfort, people, bad smells, memories of unpleasant events or conversations - distorts the mind and makes it difficult to concentrate or to sit peacefully.  Restlessness and agitation is another mind state that interferes with meditation, as does sleepiness and torpor or sluggishness.  The last one is perhaps the most insidious of all - doubt.  When we begin to doubt our own capacity for mindfulness or perhaps doubt the teacher or the book or app we’ve been following or even doubt the wisdom of the teachings, mindfulness and meditation become almost impossible.

Meditation teacher Leigh Brassington who likes to bring both humor and brevity into the Buddha’s language shortens the list to this:  wanting, not wanting, too much energy, too little energy, and doubt.  These are the five hindrances and they occupy first place in the list of Mindfulness of Dharmas.  The five hindrances are the five mind states that hinder mindfulness.  

Here is what the Spirit Rock Meditation Center* has to say about them:

At most Spirit Rock retreats, usually on the second or third day, one of the teachers will give a “hindrance talk.” It is a standard feature for a reason—everyone encounters these difficult visitors at some point in their practice, and it’s imperative that we recognize them and have tools for working with them. The word “hindrance” suggests that they are blocking our path, but it can be more helpful to think of them as the landscape the path inevitably passes through, which is sometimes smooth and pleasant and other times difficult and uncomfortable. The hindrances are the painful but natural expressions of the heart and mind when it is suffering, and working with them is how we deepen on the path.

One traditional way to think about the hindrances is as obstacles to deepening in both mindfulness and meditative concentration, or samādhi. The concentrated mind is focused and relaxed, and the cultivation of samādhi depends more on being able to let go into calm, easeful presence than focusing the attention relentlessly on one thing. The hindrances obstruct concentration because they all are active in a way that’s not helpful for calm and clarity. They are signs that the body, heart, and mind are stirred up...

The first task of the meditator is to recognize these mind states when they are present.  Sometimes the thrill of recognition can free the mind from that state temporarily.  Basically, mindfulness is one possible antidote for these hindering mind states.  

The Spirit Rock article goes on to say…

"The instructions for bringing mindfulness to the hindrances start with recognizing when a hindrance is present and when it is not. These are habitual energies, and can be so familiar that they feel like part of our personality, but in our practice we begin to see that they are sometimes present and sometimes not, depending on the conditions we find ourselves in. We are then encouraged to actively set up the conditions for the hindrances to diminish.

They understand how [the hindrance] arises; how, when it’s already arisen, it’s given up; and how, once it’s given up, it doesn’t arise again in the future. (MN 10)

Our practice asks us to be skillful in how we work with these energies so that instead of succumbing to their seductive power we learn to contain them, understand what is causing them, and set up the conditions for them to weaken and arise less and less.

I found this Spirit Rock article so clear and comprehensive that I have included it in its entirety below.  If you go to the article itself, there will be recommended talks on the hindrances which are accessible for those who want a deeper dive.  

*https://www.spiritrock.org/practice-guides/the-five-hindrances

It’s interesting that they and I both began our articles with the idea that meditation is easy.  And perhaps that’s the beauty of it.  Would we have embarked on this journey if we truly understood how difficult it could be?  I voiced this realization to one of my teachers once who simply pointed out the obvious - yes, but knowing what I know now, would I go back? This toothpaste will never go back into the toothpaste tube.  Or put another way, human development moves toward knowledge and awareness and away from ignorance - present circumstances notwithstanding.    

Four Foundations of Mindfulness - Overview and Review

We have been exploring the Four Foundations of Mindfulness (the Sattipatthana Sutta) for the past few months.  This teaching was one of the two fundamental teachings the Buddha gave on mindfulness.  The other was the teaching on Mindfulness of Breathing (the Anapannasati Sutta) - the sixteen steps from contemplating the breath to enlightenment.  And they both are mirrored in each other.

To review, the first foundation is Mindfulness of the Body which includes the breath.  We first become mindful through paying attention to bodily sensations and processes.  We access the world through our bodies.  And our minds.

The second foundation is Mindfulness of Feeling Tone - the positive, negative, or neutral feeling we instantly have about any experience that we have.  This feeling tone tells us to jump back when we step off a curb and a car honks its horn or to duck when we hear a crash above us.  It tells us delicious bread is baking somewhere or to turn our heads toward a wonderful heady scent because flowers are nearby.  Feeling tone is a critical connection between the body and the mind.  

The third foundation is Mindfulness of the Mind - becoming aware of thoughts and feelings, emotions and mind states, our mood at any given moment, fantasies, plans, memories.  And mindfulness helps us learn what is in our minds at any given moment.  Are we happy?  Content?  Irritated?  Annoyed?  Sad?  Depressed?  Further, mindfulness of mind helps us discern when our meditation is off, what is distracting us?  Are we pulled to get up from our meditation early because we want something or we want to avoid something?  Do we short circuit our practice at home because our mind is too busy and we say to ourselves "I can’t meditate right now”?  Mindfulness of what is going on in our minds can help us realize, “Oh, restlessness is here,” or “Aversion to this discomfort is present.”    Mindfulness gives us a choice.  If we believe the thought that our minds are too restless, we try to avoid the restless feeling by distracting ourselves with other activities.  Or we can acknowledge that restlessness is present and tolerate it long enough to investigate.

Now we have moved into the territory of the fourth foundation - Mindfulness of Dharma or "the way things are".  Dharma means both the teachings and the way things are.  Here the emphasis is on the latter.  At first glance, this fourth foundation looks like a grab bag of all the teachings the Buddha couldn’t fit in anywhere else.  And to a certain extent it is.

Included in the Fourth Foundation are the Five Hindrances, a list of the five mind states that interfere with our meditations.  Then there are the Five Aggregates - one of the Buddha’s important models for how we experience the world.  This model is so central to our experience that the Buddha included it in the First Noble Truth - the truth of suffering, as this passage from the Spirit Rock Meditation Center website shows:

"Now this, monks, is the noble truth of suffering: birth is suffering, aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering; union with what is displeasing is suffering; separation from what is pleasing is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering; in brief, the five aggregates subject to clinging are suffering.

It goes on to explain, “The five aggregates is a list that includes all the aspects of experience we tend to cling to…”  

The third list included in the Fourth Foundation of Mindfulness is the six senses doors or bases, sometimes referred to as the six sense spheres.  The six sense doors include our five senses and the mind and are doorways between the world and our experience.  Investigation of the our experience through these sense bases is critical because suffering begins when sense experience leads to attachment, aversion, or delusion.  Again from the Spirit Rock Meditation Center: 

“The most common list is of six “sense bases” or “sense fields” which include the five physical senses and a cognitive sense that processes the complex emotional and mental content that creates our story and sense of self.  Understanding the sense bases is central to understanding liberation because suffering arises directly from sensory contact, and it is in sensory contact that we can let go of clinging.

“In the fourth foundation, we bring the awareness of body, feelings, and mind states cultivated in the first three foundations to investigate important qualities of present moment experience. Investigating the six senses deepens our inquiry into how suffering arises through our relationship to embodied life, and how equanimity can grow in its place. “

~~https://www.spiritrock.org/practice-guides/the-six-sense-bases

 These first three lists included in Mindfulness of Dharma or “ the way things are” help us explore what hinders our meditation, how our clinging causes us suffering, and how attachment, aversion, or delusion arise directly through our senses.  

The fourth list - the seven factors of awakening - helps alert us to and explore the positive, wholesome qualities that arise when the hindrances are at bay, when clinging and aversion are not present, when our suffering has ceased.   The first three investigations have prepared us to recognize and rejoice when the one of the seven factors of enlightenment appears.  And part of that preparation is to know what qualities are not present as well as what qualities are. 

The final list is the most important of all and in some sense encompasses all the other lists and that is the Four Noble Truths - the truth of suffering, the causes of suffering, the end of suffering, and the path out of suffering.  The path out of suffering - the noble eightfold path -  is taught separately.

This is just a brief (!) over view of the riches contained in this Fourth Foundation of Mindfulness.  This is the foundation that the first three foundations have been preparing us to engage with - namely how our bodies, feelings, and mind lead the ordinary human into suffering and how with wisdom, understanding, and compassion, those same aspects of experience can be harnessed to lead us to freedom.

Mindfulness of mind revisited...

We’ve spent a few weeks considering the vastness of mind - how the mind is intrinsically empty or spacious, luminous or knowing, and ceaselessly compassionate.  We’ve begun to explore how the mind and the objects of mind are not the same phenomena, how we can get caught up by the endless flow of thoughts, remembered or imagined conversations, moods, mind states and not remember that there is a mind through which these ephemera pass.  

Now with that perspective in hand, we turn back to investigate what is actually flowing through the mind, when it is present, and when it is absent.  But to do this, contrary to my intentions of last week, we need to dwell a little longer on the third foundation of mindfulness, mindfulness of mind.

Below is the complete text of this foundation - as found in the Sutta known as the Satipatthana Sutta or the Four Foundations (or Establishments) of Mindfulness translated by Venerable Analayo.  As you can see below, the text in this sutra doesn’t mention vastness or emptiness or cognizance or even compassion.  

[MIND] 

“And how, monks, does he in regard to the mind abide contemplating the mind? 

“Here he knows a lustful mind to be ‘lustful’, and a mind without lust to be ‘without lust’; he knows an angry mind to be ‘angry’, and a mind without anger to be ‘without anger’; he knows a deluded mind to be ‘deluded’, and a mind without delusion to be ‘without delusion’; 5 5 he knows a contracted mind to be ‘contracted’, and a distracted mind to be ‘distracted’; he knows a great mind to be ‘great’, and a narrow mind to be ‘narrow’; he knows a surpassable mind to be ‘surpassable’, and an unsurpassable mind to be ‘unsurpassable’; he knows a concentrated mind to be ‘concentrated’, and an unconcentrated mind to be ‘unconcentrated’; he knows a liberated mind to be ‘liberated’, and an unliberated mind to be ‘unliberated.’

 [REFRAIN]

 “In this way, in regard to the mind he abides contemplating the mind internally … externally … internally and externally. He abides contemplating the nature of arising … of passing away … of both arising and passing away in regard to the mind. Mindfulness that ‘there is a mind’ is established in him to the extent necessary for bare knowledge and continuous mindful- ness. And he abides independent, not clinging to anything in the world. 

“That is how in regard to the mind he abides contemplating the mind.”     ~~ translation by Analayo

It asks us to consider whether the mind is “lustful” - or grasping, wanting, craving - or “without lust.”  Is the mind “angry” or "without anger?”  Is the mind “deluded” or “without delusion?”   Is it “contracted” and “distracted?”  As our practice becomes more subtle, so do the qualities we can become more mindful of.   

The Buddha is asked us in this third foundation of mindfulness to look into our minds and know what is present and what is absent.  And the easiest of the list mentioned are greed, hatred, or delusion - their presence and their absence.  

So our investigation of the vastness of the mind has given us a little preparation for distinguishing these qualities or movements of mind as temporary occupiers of our minds, passers through, one might say, that are not the same as the mind that knows them.  And once we get familiar with how the mind is with greed or wanting present, we can become familiar with the mind that is free of greed or wanting.  

These mind states of greed, hatred and delusion with all their refinements and variations will be very familiar to us.  Knowing that these states are present or absent may not be.

This is a key turning point on the path.  To be able to distinguish wanting in the mind from its absence is to begin to understand when we are identified with our mind states and when we are not, when we are free of the bondage of identification.  And an interesting thing to note is what happens to the craving or wanting when we see it, “Ah, craving or wanting is present.”  

An example of this can occur right in the middle of meditation.  How often do we sit to meditate and say, I need a sip of tea, I need to get a sweater, I need to get up to open/close a window, before I can settle down.  Ah, craving or wanting is present.  Do we reach for the tea?  Get up for the sweater?  What happens when we simply stay with the wanting?

How often do we say I can’t sit still, I’m too restless, my mind won’t calm down.  Ah, aversion or not wanting are present.  Do we get up and do something else?  If we do this often enough, we practice responding to aversion during meditation by getting up.  What happens if we simple stay with the aversion a little longer?  Does it become interesting to know wanting or aversion when they are present?  To watch them grow and then fade away?

Here is scholar and founder of the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies Andrew Olendski’s take on mindfulness of mind from their newsletter in 2004:

"With the third foundation of mindfulness, mindfulness of the mind, it becomes a little more evaluative. We are asked to notice, when there is attachment present in the mind, that the mind is attached. When that attachment—also known as greed or want­ing—is not there, we notice that the mind is not attached. The same thing happens with aversion, also called hatred or resistance. If it is arising in the mind, then we can notice that the mind is beset by aversion. If it is not there, then we notice that the mind is with­out aversion. The idea is not, as I understand it, to compare the two states of presense and absence. But one cannot help, on an intui­tive, almost cellular level, to begin to discern the difference between what it feels like: what you know about yourself in the world when the mind is beset by attachment or aversion, and when it is not. [My italics] The same pro­cess is outlined for confusion or delusion.”

We’ll listen to a guided meditation by Analayo as he takes us through this investigation.  This was a guided meditation we have heard before but the repetition with the above emphasis will help us pinpoint the experience of the mind when greed, aversion, or delusion are present.  And/or when they are absent.  As with all his guided meditations on the Satipatthana Sutta, he guides us first through scans of the body parts, the four elements, and feeling tone before centering the investigation on mindfulness of mind.

Spacious, knowing, compassionate...the nature of mind

One more post on the nature of mind.  And then we’ll move on to the fourth foundation of mindfulness - mindfulness of the dharmas which translates to mindfulness of the way things are.  After all, the path is not just understanding nature of mind.  It’s knowing what to do with it, working with it to free ourselves of our delusions about ourselves and the world and the ways things really are.  And, as well, it can be an enormous help to have a little understanding of what the mind is like when we experience it.  We are so distracted by things and experiences all the time that when we get a chance to drop in between the gaps in experience, we might allow ourselves to continue dropping and not look for the next experience to take us to the surface again.  Distractions and experiences will show up on their own but we might have a glimpse of non-duality/our minds/the ultimate and then because of our understanding and contemplation of nature of mind, we might know the glimpse of mind for what it is.

Our ultimate purpose on the path is not a thing or an achievement but a state of increasing freedom and increasing kindness.  Ven. Analayo says, when measuring our progress along the path, it’s helpful to ask am I kinder to myself and to others.  The nature of mind is intrinsically kind.  Our practice helps us access what is already there - waiting for us to embrace it.

So, below is an excerpt from a book The Heroic Heart: Awakening Unbound Compassion by Jetsunma Tenzin Palma, the British woman turned Tibetan Buddhist Master who spent 12 years in a cave in the Himalayas.  She talks and writes often about the nature of mind.  

...The mind is empty by nature.  What does that mean?  The classical description is that all phenomena are empty of inherent existence, which means that we cannot find anything existing independently and say that this is the thing itself, whether a table or the mind or anything else.  We can never find the actual thing itself.  Everything is made up of bits and pieces put together and labeled. 

Where is the tableness of a table?  It cannot be found.  After all, anything can be used as a table if it is slightly flat.  We use another object as a table and say, “Now this is a table.”  Yesterday maybe it was a box, but today it is a table.

Even though that is a simplistic explanation of a profound understanding, it is an important one, because we do label everything and then believe our label instead of recognizing that this is just a label, just a convenience.

The Buddha said, ”I too, use conceptual language, but I am not fooled by it.”

            And that’s the difference:  we are fooled by it, and we think that if we give something a name, it exists as a separate, independent entity.

            But here we are dealing specifically with the mind, not tables, and so the point is, what is the mind?  Why is the mind empty?

            First of all, the mind is empty because our thoughts are flowing endlessly, like bubbles swept along in a stream.  We cannot pick one up and say, “This is the mind” or even “This is a thought” because the moment we identify it, it is gone.  Anyone who has tried looking at the mind can see that when we say, “thinking,” we can never find the thought itself.  It is like the frames of a movies moving across the projector so fast that they seem to project out this whole drama.  Each individual frame is moving too fast to be identified.  By the time, we’ve notice it, it is gone.

            The mind’s emptiness also connotes its spacious quality.  The mind is empty but also luminous or cognizant.  Mind is not something graspable – it is something vast and open, luminous, clear, and knowing.  The nature of the mind is compared to the sky.  If we look at our mind, we realize that there are two processes going on:  There are the thoughts coming up and disappearing, moment to moment, just flowing past.  Then there’s awareness – the mindfulness that observe the thoughts.  Now that observation is already a step forward.  Normally we are just engulfed in the flow of thinking and swept along by our thoughts.  But now we are stepping back and observing the thoughts, so there is a space between the observer and the thoughts.

            However, that is still a dualistic situation, because there is the observer and the observed.  This observing mind is called “mindfulness.”  We are now conscious of our mind and in being more conscious, we are no longer so completely enslaved.  We can begin to see that all these feelings, these thoughts, these ideas, these beliefs, these memories, prejudices, judgments, and clinging are just thoughts.  Merely thoughts.

            So here we are, observing the mind.  Watching the thoughts as they go past, recognizing that thought moments come and go.  In the beginning the stream of thoughts is like a waterfall cascading down.  Then it becomes like a fast-flowing river, gradually moving more slowly as the mind quiets down until, eventually it enter the ocean of samadhi.

            This is the conventional mind. That mindfulness that watches is also the conventional mind.  Think of the clouds in the sky during a rainstorm.  The sky is completely covered by clouds; only clouds are visible.  Likewise, the nature of the mind is covered by all our conceptual thinking and, therefore, when we look at the mind, all we see are the clouds of conceptual thought.

            But those clouds could not exist if it were not for the sky.  The clouds come from the sky, and they vanish back into the sky again.  But we usually identify with the clouds.  When the clouds part, we see the sky.  It is rather like flying in a plane through thick clouds until suddenly the plane ascends, and we are above the clouds and there’s this vast blue expanse with the clouds below.  Clouds float within this open spaciousness, which is empty.  It is empty insofar as we cannot grasp it, it cannot be seen.  Yet without space nothing would exist.  Space is everywhere.  Where is space not?

            If we are asked to describe a room, then we will refer to the furniture, decorations, and any people present.  But what is really there is space.  But we usually don’t notice that.  Yet without the space there could be not furnishings, there could be no people.  Furnishings and people can only exist because there’s space.

            Also the people and the furniture themselves are ultimately space.  Every cell in our body is space.  If the physical body is reduced infinitely, there are perhaps just vibrations of light.  We are all space.  There is nowhere that space is not.  It is all-encompassing.

            Therefore, the nature of the mind is compared to space and is likened to the sky.  Mindfulness is a good step in advance of being completely engulfed in our thinking, yet even our mindfulness is based on the sense of my mindfulness.  It has not transcended the subject and object duality.  There’s mindfulness and something to be mindful of.  But the ultimate nature of the mind is like the sky because it cannot be divided.  There’s no center, there’s no end.

            When we talk about Buddha-nature it could sound like everybody’s got a little Buddha sitting inside them.  “This is my Buddha.”  “Keep your Buddha to yourself.”  “Actually, my Buddha is rather a special Buddha compared to an ordinary person’s Buddha!”  It is not like that.  It is not like everybody has a little Buddha-nature sitting inside them.  That would just be another ego projection.

            Buddha-nature is empty.  Buddha-nature is like space.  We can’t grasp space.  We can fight over our particular seat in a room, but we cannot argue about the air.  We are all sitting here, breathing in and breathing out the same air.  I cannot say, “Excuse me, I don’t want you breathing my air!”  Even if we were the bitterest enemies, fighting and shouting at each other, we are actually intimately connected because we are breathing in and breathing out the same air, which descends deep into our lungs.

            We cannot own air.  Air is something shared by all the beings on this planet, not just human beings.  Animals, too, and the trees and the plants are also breathing in and breathing out, helping us to live on this planet.  Space has no center, and it has no boundaries; it just is – vast empty space like the true nature of our mind.  But, unlike the sky, which is just empty, the nature of the mind is also cognizant.  It knows.

            The Tibetan word often used to describe one aspect of the true nature of the mind is sal, which is a hard word to translate into English.  Sal means “clear” and also “bright,” “luminous.”  It also has the connotation of being cognizant.  The mind is empty – meaning it is spacious, open, unimpeded, and ungraspable – and at the same time the mind is clear and luminous.  The mind is naturally cognizant. 

            If it weren’t, we could not know anything, we could not be aware – but we all know.  The Tibetan term rigpa (or the Sanskrit term vidya) means “to know,” but it is usually translated as “pure awareness” or “primordial awareness.”  It is the fact that we know and that knowing is unimpeded, spacious, clear, and luminous – and it is who we are.

            But that knowing quality of the mind, which we all possess and is right here all the time, is beyond duality, meaning when we are in a state of rigpa there no sense of “me” and “others.”  Such duality just does not exist.  It is not that we are spaced out; it is more like we are waking up.  The word buddha is from the root buddh, which means “to awaken.”  And it is just like that – we suddenly wake up.

            We are able to see and hear things because we have awareness.  But when we see or hear something, we immediately superimpose on it our ideas and judgments, so that the underlying clarity is obscured.  The luminous clarity is always present, but we cover it up with all our dualistic thinking. We don’t allow our mind to remain in its naked awareness, which is its natural state before we cloth it in all our concepts. 

            Without this underlying awareness we couldn’t exist.  But we are so busy thinking, comparing, conceiving, judging, and talking to ourselves that we don’t recognize it. 

The aim is to recognize this fundamental quality of the mind.   (pp.139-143)

We have all had hints that the fundamental nature of our minds is empty, spacious.  We drop into a deeper meditation and our mind stills into a vast silence.  We also know logically and intuitively that it is the nature of our mind to know, to be cognizant.  Empty and knowing, spacious and cognizant.  Out of these qualities arises a third quality - compassion.  Our minds are empty, knowing, and naturally compassionate.  The fruits of our labors can be measured in our kindness to ourselves and others.

Yet, it is impossible to describe the indescribable.  So let these words roll off or sink in.  And simply return to the practice of paying attention to the breath or whatever meditation object is chosen.

April is the cruelest month...

April is a month of renewal, rebirth.  I always thought Carl Sandburg also called it the cruelest month as the Union soldiers, moving up through Maryland to Gettysburg, left their jackets and blankets on fenceposts to escape the sweltering heat only to shiver in the freezing temperatures a few nights later. I was mistaken.  Instead AI tells me the following:  "April is called the "cruelest month” the opening line of T.S. Eliot's 1922 poem, The Wasteland. It is considered cruel because it breaks the "numbness" of winter, forcing life and growth out of the dead land, which brings painful memories and desires back to a world that feels deadened and shattered.”  Except for the repetition of “deadened”, not a bad description of the renewal of life after the ‘deadening' blast of winter.

The brilliance of daffodils has graced our landscapes, borders, and garden corners surviving freezing temperatures far better than those poor soldiers in the Civil War (even though the poem was not written about them, Carl Sandburg did describe their suffering in some poem somewhere.)  And a bounty of flowers - emboldened by the daffodils - have come leaping out of the ground, buds opening full on bushes and trees alike.  Blinding yellow displays of forsythia, colorful displays of tulips, bleeding hearts.  Nature’s life force bursting forth in spring as birds nest, animals prepare for their young.

And this immediacy of grace - the fundamental creativity of reality - can lift our spirits, remind us of the stability of nature in the midst of such horrendous happenings around the country and the world.  We might remember that the Buddha encouraged placing our awareness on the body before the mind as the body was slower to change.  The lightening speed of our changing thoughts, feelings, moods leaves us with no footing.  And the news keeps those changes churning.  The body comes to rest as we breath in and breath out and our rest deepens and the breath slows and we can take refuge in those slower rhythms.  We can use that refuge to calm and restore, to replenish from the spring of our own deepest well, to touch into the equanimity that lets us know we can’t control everything and neither can anyone else - neither can anyone else, that allows us to flow gently with the unfolding of our experience, to understand the earth can absorb the willfulness of mankind and will continue its revolutions around the sun unabated by the worst humanity has to throw at it.

Remembering the beautiful verse I shared a week or so ago from the The Dhammapada, translation* by Gil Fronsdal:

All experience is preceded by mind,
Led by mind,
Made by mind.
Speak or act with a corrupted mind,
And suffering follows
As the wagon wheel follows the hoof of the ox.

All experience is preceded by mind,
Led by mind,
Made by mind.
Speak or act with a peaceful mind,
And happiness follows
Like a never departing shadow.

Mindfulness of mind...

Deep gratitude to the group for holding the space for mindful practice for each other during my absence. Mindfulness groups like this are strengthened by the generosity, commitment, and practice of its participants.  Mindfulness and meditation are not spectator sports!!!

Retreats are always different and sometimes odd and this was no exception.  But the process works regardless and the learnings were a profound as ever.  Thus, I am still in a somewhat wordless state of mind after 10 days of silence.  Nevertheless, the world of words has returned, clamoring for my attention.  So this email will be necessarily short.

 We’ll delve into mindfulness of mind in the coming weeks.  I’ll just lift up Ajahn Chah’s beautiful teaching on the still flowing mind here - the mind that is vast and still while experiences flow through it.  Leigh Brasington, one of my teachers on this retreat, teaches us to look at our experiences not as discrete events happening one after another but as processes continuously unfolding.  Ajahn Amaro whom I am reading now (and for a long time) points out that the mind is not in the body - rather our bodies and all our experiences are actually in our minds.  Rodney Smith, well known insight teacher in Seattle, says the process is hermetically sealed - everything we think we know, think we perceive, think we conceive are simply processes of our minds unfolding.  There is no there out there except for the mind’s unfolding.   

And finally, the beautiful first verse of The Dhammapada, translation* by Gil Fronsdal.

All experience is preceded by mind,
Led by mind,
Made by mind.
Speak or act with a corrupted mind,
And suffering follows
As the wagon wheel follows the hoof of the ox.

All experience is preceded by mind,
Led by mind,
Made by mind.
Speak or act with a peaceful mind,
And happiness follows
Like a never departing shadow.

*Thanissaro Bhikkhu in his translation uses the word “heart” instead of “mind” in his translation.  They are both correct and actually better together than separately as the Pali word they are attempting to convey is citta which, in Buddhism, is our heart-mind center.

Mindfulness of mind...

This week we move on to the mind-blowing mindfulness of mind.  As we began to take a closer look at feeling tone, identifying a positive feeling tone, a negative feeling tone, a neutral feeling tone, we might have given some thought to feeling tones that originate in the mind.  Remembering a phone call with a sibling might bring up a pleasant feeling tone in the chest and belly.  Or thinking about a doctor’s appointment might be accompanied by a little anxious tremor in the stomach or throat.  As we experienced with body scans, we might reflect that we directed our attention to a certain part of the body - our foot or our leg - and, lo and behold, there was a sensation in that part of the body with perhaps a neutral feeling tone.  

What knows sensations?  What knows feeling tone?  

Now we’ve entered into the realm of mindfulness of mind.  Feeling tones have been connecting our minds with our bodies all along.  Our mind has been the knowing component of knowing positive, knowing negative, knowing neutral feeling tones.  

We are asked to turn our awareness to that which knows - to our minds.  And the first question we ask is this:  Is mindfulness present in the mind?

Are we mindful right now?  If we’re paying attention, the answer is yes.  But we will learn (or already know) that mindfulness can be stronger or weaker.  How does our mind feel right now when mindfulness is present?  Is it alert?  Soft?  Open?  Awake? Spacious?  Easily distracted or concentrated?  What is the quality of our minds when mindfulness is present?

I find it helpful to attempt to describe the mind when mindfulness is present.  It helps orient me to the quality and texture of the mind that is mindful. It also helps in discerning a bit earlier when mindfulness is lost.  

Our next task is to discern major mind movements in the mind of craving or wanting, aversion or not wanting, delusion or mind wandering searching for something pleasant or trying to get rid of something unpleasant.  Just being able to note, Oh, craving is in the mind! is an amazing discovery.  We’ve heard so much about craving and aversion.  But to experience its flavor, its pull or push, its quality of leaning forward or away, this is truly to see the little man behind the curtain in Oz.

There is an additional bonus when mindfulness is present in the mind.  Not only are we alert and awake, aware and discerning, but we might become aware that this state of mindfulness in the mind is a pleasant state.  This is an unworldly pleasant feeling tone.  We might even become aware that the pleasant feeling in the midst of our presence in the present moment is joy.  Sometimes this joy is very subtle - nothing more than a generally pleasant feeling of being alert and awake.  But sometimes the joy is a bit more concentrated and can be experienced more clearly as joy or happiness.  You may already have had this experience but perhaps not put words to it.

It’s probably not too productive to go searching for the happiness and joy right away as the desire for joy can cause the joy to evaporate.  The desire can easily become craving and then striving for a result to arise.  But if we stay steady with our mindfulness and just notice with a light sense of detachment, we might notice the presence of joy as well.

Looking into our own minds can sometimes feel like we are attempting to see our own eyes.  But if we remember, that whenever we know a feeling or sensation, our minds are present, doing the knowing.  We can know the feeling or know the sensation and then sit back and know the knowing.  

The general arc of practice is from mindfulness of the larger, more easily experienced elements of our world to smaller, lighter, wispier, more subtle elements of experience.  We can experience stubbing our toe as a large “ouch” feeling.  We can experience our leg resting on the sofa.  We can experience our breath when we’ve been running, then when we’ve been relaxing, or sleeping, and then after a half an hour of meditation.  The sensation of breath can be a grosser, larger experience or a more subtle experience.  When we’ve been meditating a while, the breath can become so subtle it almost disappears.  So the arc of our practice is to become more and more sensitive to the currents of our experience, to the increasingly subtle sensations.  Becoming aware of our minds takes us into the realm of the quite subtle.  Our minds will have a tendency to catch the next thought train out of there because the experience of mind is so subtle.  

Ajahn Chah often asked newcomers if they’d experienced still water.  They would reply, yes.  Then he would ask, have you experienced flowing water?  Yes, they would respond.  Then a gleam would appear in his eye as he asked, but have you ever experienced still flowing water?  There would be silence, confused looks, uncertainty.  Finally when he had tormented them enough with his riddle, he would explain.  The mind is empty and in the emptiness is still.  Thoughts, memories, experiences of sensations, sights, sounds flow through the mind and be known by the mind but are not intrinsic to the mind.  The mind is intrinsically empty, intrinsically still.  Still flowing water, he would pronounce triumphantly.

As we investigate mindfulness of mind, we turn toward all of it.  The stream of experiences flowing through the mind will attract us first.  But as we look from the experience to the knowing of the experience, we begin to sense directly into the stillness of the mind that knows.

And as we keep investigating our minds in this way, we will see that as changeable as our physical experiences are from moment to moment, by comparison, the mind is like quick silver in its changeable nature.  This is one reason why the Buddha put so much emphasis on mindfulness of body.  Even though experiences from both mind and body are changeable, the body changes more slowly giving the impression of greater stability.  There is a greater chance for the mind to come to rest when mindfulness is embodied.  It’s the difference between sitting solidly on the ground and being flung around and around in a ferris wheel.  

A word of reassurance.  Do not become discouraged that the mind wanders more frequently when investigating the mind.  It’s immensely helpful to begin with grounding practices to establish mindfulness of the body before moving into mindfulness of feeling tone and mindfulness of mind.

Last week we talked about feeling tones a little and had a more open-ended practice.  This week we will listen to Mark Williams’s guided meditation on feeling tones which may help further orient us to the universe of feeling impulses that shape our actions.  

The Buddha considered these feelings tones to be the ideal place to discern the beginnings of craving and thus to abandoning the craving before it can develop into clinging and attachment.  Mark Williams (bio given below) developed a full 8 week course on feeling tones in the format of MBSR which demonstrates the importance of these early signals to modern researchers on meditation as well. 

It bears repeating that these feeling tones have an ethical dimension to them.  We can discern worldly versus unworldly feelings tones by whether they lead to thoughts and actions that lead us forward on the path or lead us into craving, aversion, or delusion on the level of bodily sensations.  

One key to distinguishing unworldly feeling tones is whether they arise out of some renunciation - turning away from a sensual pleasure or pain or a lessening of attachment to sensual pleasures.  A rather clear and not terribly subtle example might be renouncing a food not on one’s diet and feeling a temporary freedom from the temptation of that food.  This could also apply to checking texts, news feeds, etc on one’s cell phone.  

The temporary freedom from a compelling sensual desire is key.  It embodies a sense of no longer being in thrall to such temptations - at least for a time.    

I’ve included a quote from from the website of the course again this week. The course is called “Deeper Mindfulness:  Exploring Feeling Tone Frame-by-Frame:

Ancient traditions saw feeling tone (vedana) as a fundamental element of every moment of experience and a central aspect of mindfulness practice. Learning specific practices to help us become aware of feeling tone allows us to see clearly the very instant where we become caught up in pursuing or rejecting something and become entangled in a web of emotional distress. Meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein has said that mindfulness of feeling tone is one of the master keys that both reveals and unlocks the deepest patterns of our conditioning.

https://oxfordmindfulness.org/course/deeper-mindfulness-exploring-feeling-tone-frame-by-frame-3

Mark Williams’s short bio is here:  

Mark Williams is Emeritus Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Oxford. He co-developed Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy for prevention of depression. His books include The Mindful Way Through Depression (with John Teasdale, Zindel Segal & Jon Kabat-Zinn); Mindfulness: Finding Peace in a Frantic World (2011) and Deeper Mindfulness: The New Way to Rediscover Calm in a Chaotic World (2023, with Dr Danny Penman) which shows how feeling tone can be a new gateway to mindfulness.

Some of you may want to hear Mark Williams’s wonderful reading of the poem “Hokusai says” by Roger Keyes.    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkTvAi9UdLw

There are a few other things to say about feeling tones.  

First, it may help to remember that feeling tones are not emotions like anger, joy, fear, grief.  Those emotions are not specifically singled out in Buddhism but fall under the heading of the Third Foundation of Mindfulness - mindfulness of mind.  Feelings tones are simply the valance of feeling - the immediate positive, negative, or neutral tone that arises in response to a contact.

Last week we talked about feeling tones that arise from input from the body in the form of the five senses - sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and sensations.  

In addition, feelings tones can have as their contact events that originate in the mind.  Here feeling tones link us to the third foundation of Mindfulness - mindfulness of mind.  An example of a feeling tone that arises from a mind event would be when we suddenly have an unpleasant memory, or thought or imagining.  Or conversely, if we imagine how good chocolate cake would taste right now or how pleasant it would be to visit with family.  

These feelings tones are mind only events - starting with some arising in the mind that prompts a feeling tone.  These feeling tones can lead to more thoughts about the contact proliferating and expanding and taking us into more arisings that can each engender their own feeling tones, cascading one upon the next in a profusion of feeling tones each building or adding to the one before.  

These mind-induced feelings tones can be felt in the body as when the memory of an unpleasant event to come or just past is felt as an ominous feeling in the pit of the stomach.  Or the memory of the wedding of a loved one brings tears of happiness to the eyes.  

So feeling tones (vedana) link body and mind by responding to either bodily sensations through the five senses or mind events like memories, thoughts, fantasies, planning.  Whether from contacts with body or with mind, feeling tones are positive, negative, or neutral.  They arise in immediately response to an initial contact and are not under our control.  They may be influenced by situations which are under our control, but the feeling tone itself is not.  

The Buddha makes a further important distinction in our vedana/feeling tone experiences - the distinction between those which are worldly and those that are unworldly.  The basic distinction here is whether this contact and its ensuing feeling tone will lead us forward on the path - such as the pleasant feeling of deep meditation or will not lead us forward on the path such as a pleasant feeling that leads to craving chocolate.  Unpleasant unworldly feelings might include a sadness when it becomes clear to us that we are not awakened yet or perhaps when we did something unskillful we regret.  These feelings lead us forward in our practice.  Neutral unworldly feelings might be wisdom or equanimity - clear seeing and balanced view versus worldly neutral feelings of delusion or mind wandering.

So feeling tones (vedana) have an ethical component to them.  They help us know at any moment whether our thoughts and speech and actions are leading us forward on the path or not leading us forward.  It is reassuring to know that we have an ethical weather vane so close at hand.

This week we’ll listen to a different feeling tone meditation, this one created by Mark Williams, scholar, professor, researcher who co-developed Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) and the new course "Deeper Mindfulness: Exploring feeling tone frame-by-frame”, an 8 week course similar in structure to Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction and MBCT which I mentioned last week.  

I’ve included a quote from from the website of the course again this week:

Ancient traditions saw feeling tone (vedana) as a fundamental element of every moment of experience and a central aspect of mindfulness practice. Learning specific practices to help us become aware of feeling tone allows us to see clearly the very instant where we become caught up in pursuing or rejecting something and become entangled in a web of emotional distress. Meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein has said that mindfulness of feeling tone is one of the master keys that both reveals and unlocks the deepest patterns of our conditioning.

https://oxfordmindfulness.org/course/deeper-mindfulness-exploring-feeling-tone-frame-by-frame-3

Freedom from suffering lies within us in every present moment and it begins with feeling tone.

Feeling Tone...bridge between mind and body

This week we move to the critically important second foundation of mindfulness - mindfulness of feeling tone or Vedana in Pali.  

Feeling tone is our very first response/reaction to a contact through our 6 sense doors.  Remember the Buddha considered the mind the sixth sense door.  So through any of these portals, we can receive a contact - a sight, a sound, a physical touch, smell, taste or some mind event - a thought or memory or mind state.  We immediately get feedback through these feelings tones about that contact.  A large percent of these contacts are registered as neutral which for most of us is nothing at all.  Others register as pleasant - the scent of flowers, a gentle breeze on the face, deep blue water, a spring bird call.  And still others register as unpleasant - a loud screech of brakes, too bright light as we emerge from darkness, a sewer smell, hitting our funny bone. This initial feeling tone is most often a conditioned response - except for the more elemental ones such as loud noises or maybe funny bones.  And it is followed by other reactions.

Feeling tone occupies a unique position in our inner world - linking the information, the input from the outer world which is felt by the senses in the body (and mind) with our mind’s ability to receive and know the positive, negative, or neutral reaction that arises in response.  I call it a reaction because it is immediate - occurring in the first micro seconds of contact - and without moderation. When our minds register feeling tone, they kick into gear.  If the feeling tone is pleasant, the mind wants more and instructs the body to get it.  When the feeling tone is negative, the mind doesn’t want and, depending on the strength of the negative feeling tone, moves the body away faster or more slowly.  When the feeling tone is neutral, the mind registers it as nothing much and looks for happiness elsewhere.  

The important aspect of the reactions and responses laid out above is that the feeling tone, while a conditioned response, is automatic.  The response that follows - even as immediate as it is - is a choice. The choice is largely based on habitual patterns of attempting to satisfy our wants and cravings with immediate actions to obtain something, avoiding unpleasant contacts with evasion or direct opposition, or becoming distracted when it is unclear with mind wandering, fantasizing, searching for something pleasant - delusion.  

Mindfulness gives us a different choice.  

When we experience a pleasant bird call sound, we also experience and respond to the pleasant feeling tone that arises.  Then we begin to want, to crave, to take action to get more of the bird call and that pleasant feeling.  We stop and listen, cup our ears, hold our breath, and sometimes follow the sound deeper into the forest.  What we often fail to do is to turn inward and investigate that pleasant feeling.  Where is it arising the body?  How does it feel?  Expansive?  Soft?  Happy?  We may fail to notice the pleasant feeling turning into craving, even greed for more.  

Once that pleasant feeling has turned into wanting, the enjoyment has become anticipatory and in the future.  The pleasant feeling we initially had in the present moment of the sound has been transformed into a subtle suffering. 

In meditation, we can sit and notice the pleasant feeling of listening to the bird call and see how it turns into leaning forward into the silence for the next bird call and the feeling of disappointment when it doesn’t come right away.  With mindfulness we can enjoy the pleasant feeling, notice the beginning of the leaning in, release it and linger longer with the pleasant feeling.  We can be with the silence without the leaning forward for something to happen.  If the bird call returns, we can enjoy it.  If the silence remains, we can be content with silence and let it deepen.  

If the craving has progressed a little farther, we can notice the wanting and striving for more, the leaning forward, the tightening in the chest and we can let go right there.  Mindfulness can track these initial movements from expansion and softness to tightening and constriction and then mindfulness can investigate, learn how the suffering arose, then sit back, relax, and let go.    

Mindfulness can be introduced at any point in our experience.  But no where else are the forces of greed and aversion and delusion as weak as when they are first arising.  It is here at the feeling tone arising, the first breath of vedana, that mindfulness can be most effective, can interrupt the automatic habit patterns of suffering.

When I learned this on retreat at IMS many years ago, Guy Armstrong explained that vedana or feeling tone was a critical choice point in the chain of  reactions that lead to suffering.  Recently, its importance has grown in the field of psychology and mindfulness study to the point where Mark Williams, well known meditation teacher, researcher, and co-founder of Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) for prevention of depression, has created a new course which puts vedana squarely at the center of our investigations into the causes of suffering.  The course is called "Deeper Mindfulness: Exploring feeling tone frame-by-frame”, an 8 week course similar in structure to Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction and MBCT.   

This paragraph from the website of the course helps illuminate the quality and importance of feeling tone:

Ancient traditions saw feeling tone (vedana) as a fundamental element of every moment of experience and a central aspect of mindfulness practice. Learning specific practices to help us become aware of feeling tone allows us to see clearly the very instant where we become caught up in pursuing or rejecting something and become entangled in a web of emotional distress. Meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein has said that mindfulness of feeling tone is one of the master keys that both reveals and unlocks the deepest patterns of our conditioning.

https://oxfordmindfulness.org/course/deeper-mindfulness-exploring-feeling-tone-frame-by-frame-3

Tonight we will listen to Ven. Analayo’s guided meditation on feeling tone*.  This meditation deepens and widens with repeated listenings.  Once the meditator has become familiar with the guided meditation, it is beneficial to go through the meditation without the guidance taking time where time may be needed to explore more deeply the different arenas of feeling tone in the body.  

Freedom from suffering lies within us in every present moment and it begins with feeling tone.

*The mediation on Feeling Tone can be found on the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies website under Resources>Bhikkhu Analayo Resources.

Why mindfulness of death matters....

Was it only a week ago that a blizzard shut down the East Coast?  And now our fearless leaders have involved us in a war in the Middle East.

We’ve been exploring the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, a teaching we looked at last fall and now have returned to for a deeper look.  Why is this teaching so important?

When the young Siddartha Gautama who became the Buddha discovered the existence of aging, sickness, and death, he changed his life.  He gave up the comforts of life in the castle - security, beauty, sensual pleasures, position, career as head of his clan, even family, and went in search of a better response to what he had learned.  

What he discovered was awakening.  First he basked in the happiness of his enlightenment and reviewed how it had come about.  When he was persuaded that some people might understand, he went in search of his fellow travelers.  As he was walking along the road, he was met by a traveler who, noting his radiant countenance, asked him about his radiance.  The Buddha replied, I am awake.  The traveler hurried off without looking back perhaps fearing that this person was not only a nutcase but possibly dangerous to boot.   

But the new Buddha’s reply conveyed the essence of the fruits of the practice - why we all practice to this day.  To wake up.  To be awake, alert, clearly seeing, mind not ajumble with half-perceived thoughts and emotions, clouded by doubts and dark thoughts, endlessly pulled around by our desires and aversions.  He was awake, calm, peaceful, centered.  And thoughtful.  He realized he needed to be more subtle than to proclaim he was awake and expect people to immediately follow him.  He also realized that everyone he ever hoped to share the teachings with had to come to it from the same direction he had - from understanding suffering and wanting the end of suffering.  Thus, one of his first teachings was the Four Noble Truths - the truth of suffering and how realizing that truth deeply leads to the path out of suffering, leads to understanding the causes for suffering, that suffering can end, and the way out of suffering - the 8-Fold Path.

The Four Foundations of Mindfulness was the how of practice - how we practice to become free of suffering.  

The first foundation mindfulness is mindfulness of the body culminating in practices that bring us into direct contemplation of the fact of our own mortality, that this body is made up of interconnecting parts, of all the same qualities as all matter, and that this body is impermanent, will sicken, age, and die and when it dies, it will decay, crumble and return to earth.

Why is it so important to realize or understand the fact of death and dissolution of this human body?  

The answer lies in the fact that not being fully awake to our own mortality is largely responsible for our lack of clarity, our dark, jumbled half understood inner world.  We only need to have a near miss on the highway, or stumble on a set of steep steps or get a piece pf food caught in our throats to experience the spike of fear that tells us how we feel about dying.  Our settled stable life can be set a-jangle with a direct experience that threatens our lives.  Depending on a number of factors, our reactions can range from momentary upset to PTSD. 

But being awake is not about being in a state of terror.  To some extent, we already are there.  There is a field called Terror Management Theory.  On the one hand it sounds preposterous and on the other, it seems about time.  Existential terror is alive for everyone at some point in their lives - for some it can be held at bay until it can’t.  For others, it is more pervasive, closer to hand.

But one of the studies which is especially relevant today is that unacknowledged terror can have some extremely negative consequences.  This I learned from the course on Sattipathana I am taking with Venerable Analayo and can be found in his book The Sattispatthana Sutta: A Practice Guide.  Subjects were divided into two groups.  One group was driven by a graveyard everyday.  No mention was made of the graveyard, no attention was drawn to it.  They just drove by it every day.  The other group existed in identical circumstances except no drive by the graveyard.  In subsequent testing which involved questions of how much punishment or leniency fictitious offenders should be given, the group that drove by the graveyard recommended tougher sentences and less leniency than the group that didn’t get any graveyard exposure.  The implication seemed to be that the low level of exposure to death every day without any processing of what they saw or felt made the subjects less compassionate, perhaps more callous to the suffering of those being sentenced.

I’ve been a resister of AI from the beginning but I want to share what AI had to say when I looked up Terror Management Theory:

Terror Management Theory (TMT) is a social psychological framework proposing that human behavior is largely motivated by an unconscious fear of death. Developed by Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon, and Tom Pyszczynski in the 1980s, it posits that people manage this existential terror by adopting cultural worldviews that provide meaning, and by building self-esteem.

Psychology Today +2

Key Aspects of TMT:

• The Problem: Humans are biologically driven toward survival but possess the cognitive ability to realize their death is inevitable, creating potential, constant terror.

• The Solution (Anxiety Buffers):

This overview may help us make a little sense of what we are living through right now.  In the past five years, the world has been confronted with a global pandemic larger than we have ever seen, a breaking point in global warming that suddenly made it clear to everyone through heat waves and huge wild fires on the one hand, and monster storms and droughts on the other that our world had lost the balance we took for granted for so long, and a shift in world view toward authoritarianism and intolerance. 

It has made me wonder how the world received the shocks of the Pandemic of 1917-8 and two world wars.  The McCarthy era, while bad, was probably one minor element of the aftermath.

It also made me wonder - and this is not scientific but intuitive - if, when the world is confronted with enough death and destruction, the reality of death and the vulnerability of all beings is finally realized by enough people that the arising of compassion and kindness overtakes the aversion and judgement and harshness that the unprocessed terror supports.  Maybe that’s more hope than intuition.  

Martin Luther King, Jr. said the arc of moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.

But where does this leave us as meditators?  

Perhaps this.  The Buddha meditated as if his life depended on it.  Then he taught as if the lives of others depended on it.  Nothing less is at stake here. We have one precious life, one precious opportunity to wake up.  We’ve all allowed ourselves to go with the flow and to be lulled by the twin defense of “Not Me!” and “Not Now!”  And we’ve all had moments of clarity - this life is all we have.  This opportunity to wake up, to be awake is finite.  

And…and we have all had experiences of being awake, fully awake in this moment.  Perhaps what we lack is the confidence and the knowledge that it is possible for us too to be awake in more moments, to see clearly.  When we’ve had those moments, we understand those are the moments when we feel fully alive, with an energy and a love of life and of other beings that surpasses other more worldly pleasures.  When we are fully awake in this moment, we have a temporary experience of what the Buddha realized when he was enlightened.  

One of the words the Buddha used to describe enlightenment is “the deathless”.  Ven. Analayo has written about this deathlessness.  The realization of deathlessness is to attain a release from the fear of death, to no longer be held in its basilisk gaze, frozen to the spot.  

This is what is possible for us.  And the Buddha assures us this is so because he is a human, not a god, and that being awake is possible for all human beings.

Thus, the Four Foundations of Mindfulness.  The next critical step through this process of awakening goes through the second foundation which is feeling tone. The Pali word is Vedana.  It is the initial spark of positive, negative, or neutral feeling that registers upon contact with a sight, sound, sensation, taste, smell or mental input such as a thought, memory, mood.  

We will delve into this important topic of feeling tone and how it connects body and mind next. 

With an eye toward balance in practice...

People come to meditation and the Buddha’s teachings for a number of reasons.  Many of them involve suffering. A recent death, some disruption,  illness - one’s own or that of a close family member or friend.  And the overarching desire is for peace, for a sense of calm and ease, to be free of the clamorous voices of need, of want, or inadequacy when we can’t satisfy those needs or wants for ourselves or for others, when we can’t prevent the inevitable, when we can’t stop the suffering.  

Breath awareness practice is often the first practice we learn - the gentle awareness of breath entering the body, breath leaving the body.  Bringing the mind back from its wanderings to rest on this moment’s breath, this experience of breathing in and breathing out.  And we might learn to add a single word to keep our minds focused.  In. Out.  Rising.  Falling.  Budd—ho.  We might learn to sense how we breathe in new life on the in breath, let go a little more on the out breath.  We begin to feel this rhythm - breathing in air, life, energy, and breathing out tension, holding, suffering, just letting go, relaxing, allowing, letting be.  

And our bodies relax, our minds begin to let go, the misery and suffering begins to seep out of us.  We begin to feel peaceful, tranquil, serene.  

These past few weeks we have been exploring the first of the four foundations of mindfulness as taught in the Sattipathana Sutta.  And Indeed, mindfulness of breathing was the very first practice.  In conjunction with that, the Buddha taught mindfulness of the body in all the postures - sitting, standing, walking and lying down, and in all activities throughout the day - getting up from a chair, washing the dishes, dressing, walking to the car, driving.  Any activity we engage is can be mindfully held in awareness.

The next three practices in that foundational teaching of the Buddha have been a bit more challenging - mindfulness of the anatomical parts with an eye to their lack of beauty so that we don’t idealize the body and get lost in our own fantasies about it, mindfulness of the elements which helps us see how our bodies are made of matter symbolized by earth, water, fire, and wind just like all matter everywhere with the reminder that each of these qualities of matter is empty of a solid self directing the body and mind, is impersonal and is not entirely under our control.  The third practice which we will take up later is mindfulness of the body in death - the process of disintegration after death and a practice which reminds us that our bodies are impermanent, death is inevitable for all living beings.

These, especially the last, are challenging as noted above.  The Buddha wanted to wake up his students to the realization of the impermanence of life and how it applies to all of us.  He knew that we shield ourselves from our own inevitable ending with two main ideas - not me and not yet.  Both are powerful defenses against what we intellectually know to be true.  But the Buddha also wanted these contemplations to be done from the serenity of the mindfulness of breathing practice.  With this serenity as the base, the meditator would be able to loosen the bindings of desire and aversion, ownership and appropriation, and gain freedom from the weight of those delusions.

Nevertheless, those contemplations can be disturbing.  A sudden insight into the body as made up of skin, flesh and bones can be disorienting until we get more acclimated to seeing the body as it is.  Clear seeing.  We might lose our sense of calm and composure for a time, however, feeling unsettled or restless.  This is a normal part of the process.  

The practice is never straight-forward, unfolding in a straight line.  Tranquillity found is not to be owned or kept.  It is impermanent like the breath - coming and going.  We might have periods of calm where insights and revelations unfold.  Those may be followed by periods of confusion and suffering, doubt about ourselves, our teachers, and our practice.  I’ve heard it said that the periods of calm are islands of purity which prepare us to dive a little deeper into the sources of ignorance within us, to swim in the depths, and eventually come to the surface a little lighter and freer for having done so.

So it’s important to think about balance in our practice.  If we have engaged in the elements practice and are feeling out of sorts, disturbed, it might be useful to return to the mindfulness of breathing practice for a period.  Or we might engage in a compassionate body scan such as that of Christopher Germer’s body scan. https://chrisgermer.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Compassionate-Body-Scan-Germer.m4a   Perhaps some loving kindness practice or hand over the heart compassion practice would soothe our minds and spirits.  

Tonight we’ll explore balance in practice - how do we recognize we are out of balance, can we allow that out of balance-ness to be?  Do we try to push away the disturbing thoughts and feelings or can we turn towards them?  What practice will help restore our balance without judging ourselves for being out of balance in the first place?  

These disturbances themselves are not in our control. We may feel responsible for them and as if we failed as a meditator for being out of balance at all, but it is helpful to know that these disturbances themselves are empty of a solid sense of self.  We did not will the disturbances into being and we can’t will them into not being.  But we can gently incline the mind towards peaceful practices of mindfulness and compassion.

Today I am drawing on Thich Nath Hanh for re-inspiration around breath awareness and mindfulness of breathing.  In my early days, I practiced exclusively with his gatas - verses of mindfulnesses especially the one he writes about below:   

Breathing in, I calm my body. Breathing out, I smile.

Dwelling in the present moment, I know this is a wonderful moment!

I found remembering that practice and hearing his words on mindful breathing brought me back to the serenity of breath awareness practice.  The peacefulness in his heart comes through in these passages below and may remind us of the peacefulness we all wish for ourselves and each other.  

Mindful Breathing

Mindfulness is always mindfulness of something. In Plum Village, mindfulness practice begins with mindfulness of our breath and our steps. It is very simple, but very deep.

As we breathe in, we simply become aware that we are breathing in, and as we breathe out, we become aware that we are breathing out. It can be very relaxing and pleasant to follow our breathing flow naturally in and out of our body. We may choose to follow our breathing at our belly or at our nostrils. As the air enters our body, we can feel it refreshing every cell. And as the air leaves our body, we can gently relax any tension we find.

Following our in-breath and out-breath brings us back to the present moment. We arrive in our body in the here and the now.

Our breathing is a stable solid ground that is always there for us to take refuge in. Whenever we are carried away by regret about something that has happened, or swept away in our fears or anxiety in the future, we can return to our breathing, and re-establish ourselves in the present moment.

We don’t need to control the breath in any way. We simply encounter it, just as it is. It may be long or short, deep or shallow. With the gentle energy of mindfulness it will naturally become slower and deeper.

Conscious Breathing

There are a number of breathing techniques you can use to make life vivid and more enjoyable. The first exercise is very simple. As you breathe in, you say to yourself, “Breathing in, I know that I am breathing in.” And as you breathe out, say, “Breathing out, I know that I am breathing out.” Just that. You recognize your in-breath as an in-breath and your out-breath as an out-breath. You don’t even need to recite the whole sentence; you can use just two words: “In” and “Out.” This technique can help you keep your mind on your breath. As you practice, your breath will become peaceful and gentle, and your mind and body will also become peaceful and gentle. This is not a difficult exercise. In just a few minutes you can realize the fruit of meditation.

Breathing in and out is very important, and it is enjoyable. Our breathing is the link between our body and our mind. Sometimes our mind is thinking of one thing and our body is doing another, and mind and body are not unified. By concentrating on our breathing, “In” and “Out,” we bring body and mind back together, and become whole again. Conscious breathing is an important bridge.

To me, breathing is a joy that I cannot miss. Every day, I practice conscious breathing, and in my small meditation room, I have calligraphed this sentence: “Breathe, you are alive!” Just breathing and smiling can make us very happy, because when we breathe consciously we recover ourselves completely and encounter life in the present moment.

Present Moment, Wonderful Moment

In our busy society, it is a great fortune to breathe consciously from time to time. We can practice conscious breathing not only while sitting in a meditation room, but also while working at the office or at home, while driving our car, or sitting on a bus, wherever we are, at any time throughout the day. There are so many exercises we can do to help us breathe consciously. Besides the simple “In-Out” exercise, we can recite these four lines silently as we breathe in and out:

Breathing in, I calm my body. Breathing out, I smile.

Dwelling in the present moment, I know this is a wonderful moment!

“Breathing in, I calm my body.” Reciting this line is like drinking a glass of cool lemonade on a hot day—you can feel the coolness permeate your body. When I breathe in and recite this line, I actually feel my breath calming my body and mind.

“Breathing out, I smile.” You know a smile can relax hundreds of muscles in your face. Wearing a smile on your face is a sign that you are master of yourself.

“Dwelling in the present moment.” While I sit here, I don’t think of anything else. I sit here, and I know exactly where I am.

“I know this is a wonderful moment.” It is a joy to sit, stable and at ease, and return to our breathing, our smiling, our true nature. Our appointment with life is in the present moment. If we do not have peace and joy right now, when will we have peace and joy—tomorrow, or after tomorrow? What is preventing us from being happy right now? As we follow our breathing, we can say, simply, “Calming, Smiling, Present moment, Wonderful moment.”

This exercise is not just for beginners. Many of us who have practiced meditation and conscious breathing for forty or fifty years continue to practice in this same way, because this kind of exercise is so important and so easy.

Hanh, T. N. (1995). Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life. Random House. (pp. 8-9)