by Joelle Marlow
Kindness"You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe deserve your love and affection." Buddha
His Holiness the Dalai Lama has said: ‘my religion is simple. My religion is kindness’. If there is one stumbling block Westerners most frequently come up against, it’s this one. A connectedness to spirituality necessarily involves compassion. This core factor in our wellbeing becomes depleted when our society is driven mainly by materialist values.
Meditation is a means of training the mind which works best when compassion is part of the package. A common analogy for training the mind is that of training an animal: when you teach it with harshness, it’s not effective. It doesn’t learn flexibility, and responds to what it has been taught out of fear.
Chris Dooks, artist and former Stillpoint audio reviewer coined the term ‘kind concentration’. When we meditate, we concentrate kindly. It’s natural to discover things we aren’t proud of or don’t like when we look inward. The attitude we cultivate is that emotions, pain, and other sensations in the body are worthy of kind attention and ourselves worthy of care.
You may hate your life, and hate your illness. You don’t have to like the situation you’re in, but start by accepting yourself within it. Acceptance requires a spirit of self love. Only by starting with exactly this mess we’re in (and you can be sure we're all are in some mess or other) can we reduce how much we suffer. We stop taking suffering personally. Katy’s experience is typical. She noticed that meditation ‘helped shift my attitude towards ME from "why me" to a sort of "why not me".
In Buddhism, there are profoundly transformative practices in which one learns to cultivate positive feelings of love for oneself and others. These include Loving kindness meditation (Metta Bhavana), and Tonglen Meditation in Tibetan Buddhist practice. Marie found this transformed her life with ME which renders her mostly housebound. ‘Yesterday was the first day back alone in my flat after 2 weeks with my family. The transition was hard. In the morning I was crying with loneliness and self-pity. Then I did a Metta Bhavana meditation (which involved visualising various people in your life and wishing them well) and my mood was transformed. I had made connections with my friends (and enemies) and although I wasn’t with them physically, I no longer felt isolated. I felt loved and loving. I felt grateful that my situation was not worse, as so many people’s are.”
Recommended:- Pema Chodron, Good Medicine: How to Turn Pain into Compassion with Tonglen Meditation. 180 min, published by Sounds True (more information and a 5 minute audio clip), as a cassette (1999, ISBN: 1564557049) CD (2001 ISBN: 1564558460) and video. Also available from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
- Jack Kornfield, A Path with a Heart, 1993. E.g. Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. (Try this Loving kindness meditation, taken from A Path with a Heart.
“I have arrived, I am home
In the here, in the now.” Thich Naht Hanh
Don’t try too hard. Mindfulness is really about discovering how to be with oneself. Letting go is intrinsic to this attitude, as the ego clings to ideas that aren’t useful to our wellbeing.
Resistance takes a great deal more energy out of us than we realise; we unconsciously resist much of what life throws at us - and our reactions to it. We use a great deal of unnecessary energy trying… trying to make things different to how they are.
Once we have noticed our thoughts, we let go of the stories that grip our attention and cause us suffering. An image used by some meditation teachers is that of standing by a roadside with traffic passing by, the cars representing our thoughts coming and going incessantly. When a car passes, do we remain by the roadside passively, or do we flag it down and get inside for the ride? We eventually learn not to get hooked into the scenarios our thinking mind constructs and return to base - the present moment.
When many of us are falling ill as a result of over-filled lives, the last thing we need is an achievement orientation in meditation, too; but it’s hardly surprising this happens. Beginners are frequently blocked by what it means to be a meditator, or that there is ‘real’ meditation (as opposed to whatever they are doing!). Let go such ideas, as this isn’t just another thing to ‘succeed’ or ‘fail’ at. You can’t go wrong, as all you need is a body and a mind. The learning is itself the process.
Helen felt hindered for a long time by ideas of what ‘meditation’ was. “The term was alien to me - inaccessible - for ages it didn’t feel like something I could possibly manage to learn on my own. Funnily enough, the breakthrough came when I let go and stopped trying to ‘meditate’. I gave it a different description of my own, and just thought of it as sitting still, or ‘being’ rather than ‘doing’. It made it natural and not imposed from outside. Every time I try to describe the calm that meditation has brought into my life I give up - and I think that’s because you can’t. You can only experience it from the inside.”
PatienceAdjusting to the new skills of meditation and making it part of your life is a slow process. Our consumerist, fast paced society has set up a habitual expectation of instant gratification but patience is needed when establishing a practice. We cannot expect immediate results and it’s not helpful to expect big, dramatic experiences. It’s like building muscles when you go to the gym - it takes a long time to see a difference. Celebrate the most subtle changes. The most important, lasting changes in us are necessarily made slowly as old habits are replaced by new ones.
“I often feel ‘wired’ and wish I could find calm - it feels like my nervous system is a broken machine’, complained one Stillpoint contributor. “I never expected meditation to be so hard!’ added another. We have seen that the autonomic nervous system is affected by conditions such as ME, so its inevitable that it requires more time for agitation in body and mind to subside in this case - and depending on the way your symptoms are on a particular day. Watch the agitation, the restlessness, whatever else is happening too. Be with the process without expecting your notion of meditation to suddenly ‘happen’.
If you have trouble finding calm, a popular meditation image which you may find helpful is that of a glass of muddy water that has been shaken, and has now been put down onto a firm surface. The contents settle very slowly. Eventually the mud sinks to the bottom when it is still.
EnjoymentPleasure is an important part of life, one which is easily neglected
when you are preoccupied with the conditions imposed by ill health. It
can be lost in the distress of finding ourselves dependent on care, the
struggle with finding medical treatment or the frustration of being
unable to fulfil our usual responsibilities.
“You have to balance the boring everyday with things that feed your
emotional self too - things you enjoy,” advises Joan. “I’ve done silly
things I haven’t done for years, like build sand castles on the beach,
buying photography books to enjoy in bed, and painting again which I
love. I don’t enjoy feeling so powerless and sick, but when I can, I
focus my mind on what few pleasures I have.”
The Tibetan Buddhist teacher Ringu Tulku had a wide grin on his face at a Dharma lecture recently. He expressed delight at a new English concept he had discovered. “In Tibet we don’t have a word for this - ‘hobby’. Something that you do just for the enjoyment. It is a wonderful thing! This is how we should approach our practice!”
Try approaching some aspects of your daily life (start with whichever you find easiest) in a spirit of playfulness. Cultivate an attitude of humour, pleasure, playfulness and openness - characteristic of right brain experience as opposed to left brain which is more closed in and analytical - and your meditation will flourish. As adults, we lose our spontaneity as we become cynical and closed to joy.
Exercise: adopt the playful spirit of 3 year old child for a short while. When doing ordinary things small children don’t stick to a timetable. Everything is a game. Whatever objects come in their way are sources of wonder, fun and sensual exploration.
Exercise: make space for something frivolous in your day which has no useful purpose. Notice how it affects your mind /body afterwards. Spend time staying with any physical sensations that come from enjoyment afterwards.
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