Song of realization #1

First be okay

for no reason

let your heart loosen

and open naturally

just be in the river of love

let it flow

let it unfreeze the layers of

pain and sorrow that have permeated your being for so long

let it soften the hard parts

like crusty dough

let it feed

let it feed you

and just be

fed

Top 10 insights of 2023

1. "Trust the clarity"  from Song of Realization wrap up  .  I went on many meditation retreats this year. The fruit of these teachings has been a stronger understanding of what clarity is.  It's not illumination in itself,  but the recognition of illumination. But it's not something to strive for, anymore than we need to hold a flashlight to a candle. Just trust it and be in it.  

2. The practice of just going beyond.  That energy is not emptiness.  That we must keep going beyond and be vigilant for when we are conceptualizing.  Energy is important, but it's not the objective of meditation.  And it's easy to mistake energy for emptiness. 

3. Effortless is most easily achieved by staying with intention. This was from a Dharma Geek session with Cortland. He took us through breathing meditation and showed us how if we focussed less on breath and simply on the intention to be with breath, samatha was more more effortless.

4. Happy for no reason. I develop the truth body

5. Compassion is the antidote to empathy burnout, but also empathetic joy. I've been enjoying feeling empathetic joy to my guru and my yidam of late. 

6. Anytime Anywhere meditation is just about being with the default mind.  Being present with it. 

7. Vajra Dakini, I really feel the clarity behind my harmful emotions. 

8. After the new ice storm, I remembered that inspiration is easier to see in emptiness.

9. Because intense emotions are effortless we can leverage them to make awareness effortless.  Like waterskiing! 

10. No fundamental difference between sleep dreaming and awake dreaming.  When I see suffering in daily life, I can awaken into lucidity in the same way I would if I recognized it in a dream. 

The impact of emptiness

  

Eight years ago I started the new year with the decision to have a word of the year, "abundance." 2015 was a good year.  But 2016, I went the other way and chose "emptiness."Looking back the emptiness year was a year that truly changed my life. 

That's the paradox of life.  If you want a sense of abundance, emptiness is the value that will generate that effortlessly.  If you focus on stuff, you just end up with more stuff. 

But the mind resists. Do I have the courage to truly value emptiness?

Read an article yesterday that claimed a focus on defined values it what gets people to stay motivated when their instrinsic motivation fails.  By definining emptiness as my value, I wonder if this is a quicker way to recharge than abundance. 

If I were to value and focus on emptiness, where do I see my life five years from now?

I'm enlightened, self realized, equipped to help others know happiness.  

 

The secret and science of compassion

I've been meditating for a long time, but there were many years, when I kind of kept this a secret  Mostly because I dreaded the question, why? Even if I was asked with genuine open curiosity what my motivation was for putting time aside every day for sitting quietly doing nothing,  I didn't really know how to explain why. This was especially true of compassion meditation. I felt very shy about volunteering the fact that I trained in becoming a  a more loving, and concerned person. Would people think I wasn't loving enough, or would they think I was being boastful about my goodness? 

Then I read Mingyur Rinpoche's book Joy of Living: Unlocking the Secret and Science of Happiness. And I came across a line that really helped me have a better understanding and explanation for what I was doing.  He wrote that calm abiding meditation (the kind of meditation we do when we are meditating on breath, on a stable object, or in a natural, open awareness,  is like charging your mental and emotional batteries.  Compassion meditation (focussing on our innate desire to be free of suffering)  is the mental and emotional "technology" that uses the recharged batteries in a proper way. 

There was something so practical about this explanation. The reason why I meditated was simple. It made my brain stronger and it gave me the emotional tools to use that stronger brain to have an impact on my life and on other lives. 

Science supports this

Over the last twenty years there is an increasing amount of science to explain the mechanics behind the "technology" of compassion. For one, brain scans of advanced meditators show that compassion meditation, more than any other type of meditation activates and strengthens the part of the brain that produces dopamine, a chemical that manages motivation, learning, and motor control. 

Dopamine is involved when we act, but also when we don't act. People with addictive or obsessive personalies often have very high levels of dopamine and suffer alot when those levels start to drop.  People who suffer from Parkinson's disease have crititically low levels of dopamine, and so are unable to control their motor movements. 

Dopamine is very powerful. We can leverage it for learning, or we can leverage it to stay on a hedonistic treadmill. But we can also leverage it to motivate ourselves to more pro social and constructive behaviour, that creates well being for ourselves and people around us.  That's where compassion meditation comes in. 

Compassion meditation is really about recognizing this desire to be free from suffering, which is arguably our natural regulation system.  In doing this we train in harnessing and strengtheing our motivation and directing it to the right objectives and behaviours.

The power of compassion meditation 

Compassion is very powerful, so a couple of caveats before you start bingeing on it.

First, it's important to distinguish between compassion, the desire to be free from suffering, and empathy, the tendency to feel other people's pain. Empathy actually engages a different neural network, and if we spend too much of our time feeling other people's pain we can develop something called empathy fatigue.  When we spend too much time feeling other peoples stress and suffering, our bodies can actually take on this stress and the suffering and become increasingly depleted and demotivated. Compassion is not about feeling others suffering as much as it is feeling the desire to relieve the suffering. 

Though it's less likely to cause burnout, like all dopamine activitating behaviours, it needs to be balanced, with time to re-charge you batteries with practices like open awareness, or meditating on the breath. 

So feel free to explore its motivation charging qualities, but also feel free to take it slow.  

I would also recommend exploring the ways that compassion motivation and its dopamine management powers can also motivates us to not act. To not say and do things that cause suffering. 

In training in not doing, we're re-charging those dopamine levels. This is not about being passive, but about training in letting go of our tendency to act impulsively. By balancing calm abiding with compassion, what we're aspiring to is more effective behaviours that in the long run increase our drive because the rewards are ultimately more meaningful, more skilled and more rewarding. 

An interesting that that science is revealing is that compassion will change your brain more quickly and more significantly than any other practice. 

So compassion really is the great secret of meditation. 

But don't feel like you have to keep it a secret.

Fruition as the Path

Not a rose apple, but close enough

There's a story about the Buddah that's useful for understanding the theory behind awareness meditation. 

You may, or may not know that the Buddah spent many years of travelling with a gang of pretty radical believers. They trained in extremely rigourous meditation practices intended to eradicate all desire, all ambition, all thoughts of anything that might possibly corrupt the heart or the mind. But one day on this path, he just hit a wall. 

At that point, he had this childhood memory. He remembered when he was a kid and he snuck away from a big festival in his village and discovered this beautiful rose apple tree. He sat down, and sitting there under this gorgeous fragrant tree, just being, with no pressure to be anything or do anything, he remembered this pure, sweet feeling of bliss. As the story goes, this memory was the gateway to his enlightenment.

The point of this story is the tree

It's important to understand that in awareness meditation the starting point for achieving happiness is not that quiet subtle feeling of being present that we might have had when we were kids. The starting point is the big beautiful amazing tree. The starting point is being able to see that tree as our mind, right now.  

The challenge is that we don't often see the spectacular beauty of our mind, and even in those rare moments that we do, we struggle to maintain that recognition. 

There are good reasons for this. First we often mistrust big experiences of happiness. This may be particularly true if you've come from any background where there was childhood trauma. You might have
developed a lot of mistrust of happiness, especially big happiness, because too often big happiness meant that big unhappiness was right around the corner.  

But awareness meditation invites you to consider the possibility that the kind of happiness that inevitably passes might be a different kind of happiness that we experience when we truly recognizee the power, clarity and natural wisdom of the mind.

Happiness and the causes of happiness

That said nobody is claiming this isn't a challenge. Awareness meditation does not ask or even recommend that you recognize the power of your mind, experience bliss and then try to lock into that as though your life and everyone else's lives depended on it.  It's perfectly fine, and even wise, that we start with brief glimpses of that big happiness, or what is called in some buddhist traditions "fruition as the path." In other words we start with a glimpse of the happiness that is actually available to us right now, get some energy from that, but then take a break a explore the kind of step by step path that might still feel more intuitive. 

The step by step path is described as using causes as the path. 

We all know the step by step path of starting with a seed and planting and watching it grow. So that might be the path more commonly understood as "mindfulness." The path of relaxing into subtly pleasant feelings like, just being, or gentle curiosity, or kindness.  For many of us that path feels more comfortable because society encourages us to think small, and likes us to work at things. 

Imagine, however, that you're a farmer who has never seen an apple tree, and someone tries to sell you some seeds, and convince you to make room for a pretty big tree, and then  plant and them and tend them and watch them for a year. That's a lot of work and diligence to expect from someone if they don't know what it is exactly that they are growing. 

The risks of taking the cause as the path

If your mind is anything like my mind, it might get excited for a little while about the project of tending tiny seeds for results long into the future. But then a week or two, or a month or two, the mind remembers those seeds and then re-discovers them all dried up, because it's way into some other seed project. 

So it's very important to keep coming back to this big vision of what your mind is. You don't have to lock into it. But you do need to make the space in your life for that recognition to become more intuitive, if you are going to experience the kind of sustained happiness that awareness meditation is promising you. 

The great news is that you don't have to wait until some day in the future to experience that happiness. You can do that right here, right now, anytime and anywhere that you want.

 

Compassion as technology

Krista Tipett TED talk on the launch of the Charter of Compassion.  Calling compassion "the technology we need." 

Body Appreciation

 I did this guided meditation today and ended crying like a baby, feeling so vicerally how little appreciation I have felt towards my body for so long. 

It's part of a trauma sensitive approach to mindfulness that I want to bring into my teaching practice