Tag Archives: mindfulness

Aug2

In Praise of The Huffington Post

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I have found that The Huffington Post is a tremendous source for informative articles and columns about meditation, mindfulness, and general healthy living. I don’t know why Arianna Huffington decided to make HuffPost a venue for reporting and commenting on those topics, but I am grateful that she has. And I believe it really is her, because she just chaired a conference on women and wellbeing in the workplace.

There is an entire section on Healthy Living. Not every article is right for me (see, for instance, “Are condoms good for vaginas?“), but most are incredibly interesting and relevant. The Religion section is equally compelling. There is a lot of overlap between the subsection of Buddhism stories and reporting on mindfulness and meditation. Here are some great recent pieces:

Come hang out with other folks interested in meditation and mindfulness at the Dharma Beginner page on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter @dharmabeginner.

Aug1

Coolest. Camp. Ever.

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When I was a kid, there were very few kinds of camp – day camp, sleep away camp, a handful of sports camps. These days, there seems to be a kind of camp for every kind of kid and every possible interest. Including, marvelously, mindfulness camp. The polls are now closed and the award for coolest idea for a camp goes to mindfulness camp!

I get totally jazzed by the spread of mentally and physically healthy practices like yoga and meditation in schools. It is the best evidence I’ve seen of hope for future generations. So you say that recent generations are self-absorbed and verging on amoral? I respond by pointing to kids learning to live mindfully.

The person I am, here and now, thinks wistfully about how neat it would have been to have learned meditation when I was a kid. I consider myself fortunate to have first learned how to meditate in my mid-20s and, thus, to have benefited from its practice for half my life so far. Imagine, though, if I had had a mindfulness toolkit at my disposal during my teens and early-20s… Aww, who am I kidding? The kid I was – the one that was constantly in motion, perpetually running and jumping and chasing and tumbling and swinging various sports equipment at balls and at other boys – would not have taken well to sitting quietly and still and doing nothing other than breathing.

All the more reason why I am so impressed by these kids who attend mindfulness camp in Laramie, Wyoming. (Check out this story in the Laramie Boomerang.) What do kids generally want to be doing during summer recess? Swimming, running through sprinklers, playing softball and dodgeball and tetherball and stickball and soccer, competing in Color War, building stuff out of popsicle sticks, playing on the computer. These kids are taking a pass on those activities for a week to learn how to quiet down, to breathe, to be aware of what is going on inside them and around them, and to bring those skills into their daily lives. These kids are awesome! Their parents are awesome for sending them to mindfulness camp! Michelle Visser, the founder of Mindful Kids of Laramie, is supremely awesome!!

Read more about Mindful Kids of Laramie. And come hang out at the Dharma Beginner page on Facebook or follow us on Twitter @dharmabeginner.

Jul31

Meditation and Mindfulness at Work

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Is there a place that is a greater source of stress than the workplace? Maybe, but not much greater. Yet, the workplace is one of the last places that many people think of to practice their meditation and to act mindfully.

I very much enjoy my job and the people I work with are special to me. Nonetheless, work can be intense, burdensome, and tiring. At least once or twice a day, I need to reset my brain with a little meditation, to refocus myself and set my sight back on the present moment. I have a cushion in the corner of my office; I close my door when I feel the need for relief and I sit there for 5 to 10 minutes. It is remarkably refreshing mentally and physically.

Of course, many people don’t have the luxury of a space to put a meditation cushion, or even a door to close, at their place of work. If you are not bombarded by noise and coworkers at your desk, then simply sitting up straight in your desk chair, feet planted flat on the ground, can be a serviceable meditation posture. Or step outside for a walk around the building or the block.

The idea is to break the flow that develops during the work day in which we focus intently on our work and tune out the world around us. That kind of focus is terrific for productivity but not so much for a healthy, aware mind. It is very easy to plunge headlong into that flow and lose track of time, not coming up for air until the proverbial factory whistle blows. A pause for meditation once or twice during the day – or just lifting your head up from the desk or computer, unfocusing your eyes and taking some long, deep, cleansing breaths – brings your mind back to the present and wakes you up to your surroundings and the beings around you. The result should be both a healthier mind and a better work product.

For more thoughts about mindfulness in the workplace, check out this post by Daniel Goleman. Rachel Nickless of Financial Review recently wrote, “How being mindful makes for a happier workplace.” 

And check out the Dharma Beginner page on Facebook or follow us on Twitter @dharmabeginner.

Be well and have peace in your mind and heart.

Jul30

Everyone feels stress, everyone suffers. Thank goodness for meditation!

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Everyone gets stressed out, even the “experts.”

How do you think they became so adept in the first place? They needed what meditation had to offer so much that they made a concerted effort to practice it. Meditation teachers are not superhuman, unless by superhuman you mean “even more subject to the frailties and flaws of being human.” They’ve been in the same place we all have, and they’ve survived in no small part because of their meditation practice.

So take heart: if they can do it, so can you. You have the very same ingredients in your being that they do, all the elements necessary to pursue a beneficial meditation practice and lead a mindful and compassionate life. Buddhists might say that we all have the same essential Buddha-nature inside us and, therefore, the same potential to achieve enlightenment.

All of us suffer and all of us desire to be free of suffering. That’s all that is necessary to begin meditating and for meditation to bear fruit.

Along those lines, here’s an article from Pooma Bell of Huffington Post titled, “What Does The Founder Of Meditation App ‘Headspace’ Do When He Gets Stressed Out?”

Check us out at the Dharma Beginner Facebook page and follow us on Twitter @dharmabeginner.

Jul28

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The impulse to label the things we feel and think threatens our ability to meditate in a manner that improves our wellbeing and supports our mindfulness practice. We feel sadness, fear, anger, and other emotions that discomfit us, and we call them “bad” emotions. We have thoughts that trouble us or spark attacks of anxiety, and we call them “bad” thoughts. The normal human flow of thoughts and emotions seems to get in the way of our meditation, making it difficult for us to get into a groove or a flow or to another place, however we characterize that satisfying feeling we crave when meditating.

The solution, in my view, is not to find a way to block those thoughts and emotions. Frankly, for most of us, it’s probably not even possible to shut them down. So what can we do?

At the risk of being accused of trying to perpetrate some kind of reverse psychology mumbo jumbo, I think the answer is to not block them at all. Let them flow. Treat them with compassion and don’t label them as either bad or good thoughts or feelings. They’re just thoughts and feelings — inanimate objects — and are, therefore, incapable of being either. When we cease to label them in this manner, we can pay attention to what they mean, to what our brain is trying to say to us. Many times, they are just random, fleeting, and we can let them go as quickly as they came. Other times, we make a mental note to come back to them later after our meditation, and then we let them go. And occasionally, the thoughts or emotions are worth dwelling upon for a time because they feel urgent or particularly important.

The point is, being present with and open to those thoughts and feelings allows us to treat them with equanimity and get past them. Trying to block them is like placing a dam in a river — the pressure on the dam builds and builds until, finally, the waters (our thoughts and emotions) burst through and overwhelm everyone and everything in its path (us and our meditative practice). Better to employ a sluice that directs the waters but does not attempt to block them entirely.

Like a lot of dharma, on the surface it seems like an oxymoron, but it is truth: As long as we try to resist the thoughts and emotions that arise during our meditation, the more they will undermine us; but when we learn to accept our thoughts and emotions and to coexist with them, our meditation can rise above them.

For some more good thoughts on this subject, check out Joseph Mauricio’s post, “Living Meditation,” on ny.shambala.org. And come spend some time with us at the Dharma Beginner Facebook page or follow us on Twitter @dharmabeginner.

Jul26

Can mindfulness and tangible rewards coexist?

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As mindfulness practice becomes more and more “mainstream,” it is being linked more often with various kinds of tangible rewards, like better jobs, higher pay, sexier partners, etc. It excites me that more people are becoming aware of mindfulness practice and meditation, but I worry that the push to popularize them comes at the cost of watering them down or, worse, rendering them impotent. In a recent Huffington Post column, Soren Gordhamer asked the question, “Mindfulness: What’s In It for Me?” and does a far better job than I could in highlighting this trend.

But, of course, I can’t help but chime in. I’m funny that way. In my view, mindfulness itself is the reward of being mindful. It is an awareness of yourself, your surroundings, and the beings around you to whom you are connected that makes you feel more alive. It is a kind of wakefulness that leaves you wondering if you were slogging through life half-asleep until now. Rooted in the present moment, life appears more vibrant and our connection to it more powerful. Does there really need to be some other enticement waiting on the other side of mindfulness to make one want to practice it?

Beneficial things may come to you as a result of being more mindful of the here and now, but those things cannot be the goal. Because the moment you start to think about what may be, you are no longer focused on what is. In other words, you’re no longer mindful, no longer present. That thought suggests that, if you practice mindfulness with the intention of garnering a prize, you cannot possibly achieve mindfulness to any great degree. In other words, the desire to obtain a reward by practicing mindfulness guarantees you will not get that reward. That strikes me a mighty sobering.

Nov19

Meditation, Mindfulness, and the Issue of Race

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Jaweed Kaleem writes on the Huffington Post about the growth of racially based meditation groups in and out of the Buddhist community in the U.S. (“Buddhist ‘People Of Color Sanghas,’ Diversity Efforts Address Conflicts About Race Among Meditators”). He describes one such group: “This class of Buddhist meditation was for beginners, tailor-made for minorities. … No whites were allowed.” The participants in the group – and others like them – were led to take this step because they felt excluded from the broader community, especially in areas like Seattle that are not racially diverse.

This is an issue for many religions and practices, not just meditation and Buddhism. It is fraught with contradictions. In my opinion, anything that can help people learn a practice of meditation and mindfulness is welcome, even these racially based groups. However, Kaleem gets to the heart of the controversy when these groups are not just meditation-oriented, but also ostensibly Buddhist: “One of the prime focuses [of Buddhism] is on letting go of any attachment to the individual self. The aim is to be one with the wider spiritual world in the pursuit of harmony, and ideally, that includes going beyond skin color differences.”
I am concerned that there are people of color who feel excluded from the larger community of meditators. In the short run, these race-based groups may be a reasonable solution, which may be why some prominent Buddhist leaders have endorsed them. But I think the answer, in the longer run, is to address what the broader community is doing – intentionally or unintentionally – that makes people of color feel uncomfortable or unwanted. At the same time, we need to ask people of color why they feel excluded because it is difficult for me to accept that practitioners of meditation and mindfulness would actively seek to exclude anyone. It is not that people who live mindfully are necessarily better people, or are completely free of bias – it is just that I don’t know how anyone can practice meditation and mindfulness and continue to view those around them as “different” from themselves. Perhaps I am naive or too wishful.
I believe these tings because I do not think dividing into groups based on “distinctions” such as race is ultimately consistent with meditation and mindfulness practice. I see unity as a natural outgrowth of living mindfully because I believe that mindfulness means seeing things as they really are – and in “reality,” we are all one, indivisible, connected, inseparable.
Oct31

Are thinking and meditation incompatible?

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“It’s a very deep misconception that meditation is about making your mind blank, that it involves shutting off or pushing away things so that you can achieve some kind of deeper, more desirable state of clarity and calmness. It’s not that those deeper, more desirable states of clarity and calmness do not exist and cannot be cultivated—they can. But it is a kind of learning that in some ways is akin to falling asleep—although meditation is really about ‘falling awake.’ If you try too hard to sleep, chances are you are not going to fall asleep at all. … I like to describe the mind as being like the surface of the ocean—it’s just in the nature of water to wave. And it is part of the nature of our minds to wave as well. The mind waves virtually all the time. If you try to shut off the waves, it’s a bit like trying to put a glass plate over the ocean to stop it from being as it is. It’s not going to work very well.” ~ Jon Kabat-Zinn, The Power of Meditation and Prayer

I think I know exactly what Dr. Kabat-Zinn is talking about, from my own experience and from what I have heard from others who have experience both failure and success with meditation. Sometimes my meditation can leave me kind of agitated, rather than calm, if I try to fight the thoughts that arise, to stuff them down or block them out. You know, the moment you determine not to think about something, that’s all you can think about. Likewise, the moment you decide not to think at all, thoughts come streaming in from every direction! Only by accepting that thoughts arise and treating them—and myself—with compassion can I fully benefit from my meditation practice.

Pema Chodron suggests that when you notice your mind thinking thoughts, just say quietly, “Thinking,” and let the thought go. Don’t scold yourself for doing what comes naturally to your mind. I do this sometimes, and when I do I always hear the word “Thinking” in Pema’s voice, which never fails to make me smile. And smiling is the perfect medium for letting thoughts slide away easily and without labeling them as something “bad” or antithetical to proper meditation.

If a thought is persistent, then maybe I ought to pay attention to it. If I am routinely feeling a pain in my tooth, shouldn’t I go to the dentist and have it looked at? The pain may be a signal that there is a physical ailment that requires attention. If a thought keeps popping up during meditation—even when I treat it kindly, imagine Pema saying “Thinking,” and let it go—then perhaps it is something that requires attention. Why not let the thought run its course naturally and see where it leads? Following the thought to its resolution may be the only way to keep it from coming back.

As with most things, expectations play a role in meditation. If we expect to achieve an out-of-body experience, we are likely to be disappointed. If we enter meditation, though, with the expectation that thoughts will arise, with acceptance that thoughts arising is totally normal, then we can more fully benefit from our meditation practice. In my opinion, the goal of meditation is not to experience balance and peace during meditation, but rather to experience balance and peace in our lives away from the cushion. Accept that your mind may be noisy sometimes during meditation and you are more likely to reap the benefits of meditation—a life that is more mindful, peaceful and, yes, less noisy.

Sep29

Pictures and Words

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As you may know, the Dharma Beginner page on Facebook started out as a way to make people aware of this blog if they were interested in reading it. But then it took over and largely supplanted this blog, and as of this writing there are more than 53,000 people who have liked the page. So I’ve turned my attention more and more toward content intended primarily for those people, mostly shorter thoughts, quotations, and shared articles, with only occasional forays into longer blog pieces. The pictures and quotations cover the same topics I have been focusing on here, Twitter, Facebook, and iTunes podcasts: mindfulness, meditation, compassion, peace, love.

I noticed that photographs with quotations are very popular on Facebook, and tend to get shared around quite a bit. I have been trying my hand at making my own, using my photographs and my own thoughts, and they seem to have gone over well. I thought that I would offer a slideshow of some of the initial efforts here in the blog. I would welcome your feedback and suggestions about doing more of these in the future.

Peace and love be yours.

Jul18

Is there a right way to meditate?

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A few days ago I posted a humorous picture to the Dharma Beginner page on Facebook that generated some surprising comments from the denizens of our virtual community.

The picture contrasted how the friends, parents, and coworkers of the person depicted envision him when he’s meditating—sitting serenely in lotus position, hands upturned and resting gently on his knees, back straight, eyes closed—with how he “really” is when meditating—checking his watch to see how much longer he has to meditate.

Man, I could relate. I commented that that’s the reason I don’t wear a watch while meditating, and why I put my meditation timer somewhere I can hear it, but not see it. Sometimes the temptation to check the time fills my brain and distracts me, disrupting the flow of my meditation. I need a timer because I usually have a finite amount of time to meditate on weekdays before getting ready for work or to go to bed. Setting a timer allows me to let go of any concern about how long my meditation is lasting, which in turn allows me to focus on the things that make my meditation practice work for me.

Quite a few people responded with surprise or soft chiding to the fact that I use a timer while meditating. They made quite a few interesting points about the inherent incompatibility of meditation and timekeeping, not to mention the concept of time itself. As always, I very much appreciated their insights and willingness to share their perspectives.

I did not, however, take their comments as criticism, because I firmly believe there is no “right” way to meditate. Certainly, there is a multitude of books, CDs, and DVDs, not to mention full-blown courses, which offer to teach you how to meditate. But if any of them is asserting that their way is the right way, then they’re full of baloney. I think that the most that any of them can assert is that they contain practices that have proven to be beneficial when meditating and which may or may not be practices that will work for you.

Meditation has been a part of my personal spiritual practice for 25 years, during which time I have read, watched, or listened to countless talks on meditation. Over those years I have developed my own style comprising a little bit of this, and a little bit of that. What ties those bits together into a beneficial meditation practice for me is not that they are the “right” meditation habits, but that they are the right habits for me.

My general advice to people interested in starting to meditate is that they just give it a try, but that they check their expectations about what will happen at the door. Just experience it, observe it, and let it happen. This meditation without expectation can be hard to do because we’ve been raised to believe that “real” meditation or “good” meditation is some kind of ecstatic experience. Sometimes it is, but often it is not. Thus, when we give meditation a try and fail to encounter ecstasy, we feel let down and think that we must be doing something wrong. I’d hazard a guess that the sense that we don’t know what we’re doing is probably responsible for more people giving up on meditation than any other cause.

There are three things that I think are most conducive to a beneficial meditation practice—or which have been helpful to my practice, at least, and may be useful for others to consider. First, it helps when meditation is a priority. If meditation is something you try to squeeze in on the fly, it is hard to make it a healthy habit. Pick a time of the day that is your “meditation time.” If you live with others, let them know that this is your meditation time so that they respect your need for quiet and don’t interrupt you. Try to pick a time when you are wide-awake and can focus on your meditation. My favorite time is after I wake up in the morning, but some people can’t function until that first cup of coffee. What is important is that the time you pick is a good time for you. Setting aside a time of your choosing hallows that moment for you, dedicates it to your meditation.

How long should you meditate for? As long as you want. I firmly believe that even just 5 minutes of meditation a day can make a world of difference for anyone. Maybe just 5 minutes is a good starting point; with time, you may lengthen your meditation period. Whatever works best for you.

Second, it helps to have a special meditation space. I find that I can meditate in many different places, with different levels of ambient noise. But my most satisfying meditation happens in my meditation space, in a small alcove in the loft above my bedroom. It’s kind of like a little shrine room, with a small table holding candles, an incense box, a statue of the Buddha, a picture of the Dalai Lama, and other things that help to make that space feel special to me. Dedicating and decorating a meditation space hallows it for you, just like giving meditation its own time. Sitting on my meditation cushions in that space feels like my home within my home.

Third, it helps to feel comfortable. And only you can decide what is comfortable for you. I have tried numerous meditation styles that come with detailed instructions about your posture, the position of your head, the placement of your hands, the way you cross your legs, and so on. But I sometimes found that I was concentrating more on whether I was in the “right” position, rather than on my breathing and the meditation. That is not meant as a slight to any of those meditation practices—if they work (and clearly they do for many, many people), then more power to them!

Find the position that works best for you through trial and error. Don’t worry about fidgeting (unless you’re meditating with others, in which case it could be disturbing)—feel free to keep shifting around until you find the position that allows you to relax and flow into your meditation. Sitting with legs crossed or hanging from a chair, kneeling, prostrating, standing—they’re all good, if they feel good to you. Same goes for your head and neck (straight up, slightly tilted, hanging down), mouth (open, open slightly, closed), eyes (open, closed), arms (at your sides, hands in your lap, hands resting gently on your knees), and so on. It even extends to what you’re wearing—I find loose-fitting clothes to be most comfortable, but to each his or her own.

That’s it; not exactly earth-shattering, is it? Hallowing a time and space for meditation and making sure you are comfortable when you practice hardly seem like rocket science. Because they’re not; they’re very simple things. Simple things are often quite powerful, though. It has taken me the better part of 25 years of practice to figure that out. Perhaps I’m not the faster learner. Or maybe I couldn’t imagine that meditation could, in fact, be easy. If it has been hard for me, it is because I made it hard. Because I thought that meditation was something mystical or superhuman, it became unattainable. It wasn’t until I learned that meditation is actually commonplace, and very human, that it started to be easy.