Three Big Misconceptions About Meditation and Spiritual Practice. From Susan Piver and The Open Heart Project

Transcription

1 Three Big Misconceptions About Meditation and Spiritual Practice From Susan Piver and The Open Heart Project

2 Hello, fellow teacher and seeker. I ve been a meditation teacher for over a decade and, like you, have seen amazing strides made in bringing ancient practices to modern life. Yay! However I ve seen my own students encounter the same obstacles over and over. If you are a yoga teacher, life coach, or therapist, it is likely you have too. I hope that the following suggestions and insights into these obstacles will support you to bring even more goodness to your students, clients, and the world. Your feedback means a lot to me, so feel free to drop me a line and let me know what you think. Thank you for your work! Love, Susan

3 Misconception #1 In order to practice meditation, I have to clear the mind of thought. This is the big one. Somehow, people have the idea that to meditate, you must clear the mind of thought. What does that even mean? Please think about that, ironic as that request might be. Who would you be without any thoughts whatsoever? Some might say you d be an idiot. Some might say you d be Buddha. Personally, I have no idea. In all cases, attempting the mysterious clearing the mind of thought through an act of will is contraindicated. So if you think meditation means not thinking, stop thinking that. Your mind exists to produce thought. That s what it does. It thinks things. Getting it to stop is akin to opening your eyes and telling them not to see anything. Go ahead. Try that right now. Look out through your eyes and plead with them not to see anything. Try really hard. That s how frustrating it is to think you re supposed to hop off the 190-mile an hour freight train in your head and onto a meditation cushion where you will somehow have magically stopped dead on the track. 2

4 You can have so much more faith than this. Your mind is supremely spacious. It is so much bigger than any one particular thought or school of thoughts. Fearing your own mind is like the ocean fearing waves. Others may think that meditation is about thinking only positive or affirming thoughts. Even just the other day, I was listening to a young Western spiritual teacher who was offering her followers the potentially useful advice to choose between love and fear, that every thought was a manifestation of either one or the other. However, when I began examining my fear-based thoughts (hopeless, anxious, mean), I didn t know what to do. Was I supposed to cut them out? Ignore them? Turn them upside down? Whatever I attempted felt like pretending and I became more and more worried that my thoughts were somehow going to poison me unless I could think only good ones. It quickly became claustrophobic. know exactly how to return to balance. I m not saying you can always do it but, still, you know how. So, all this goes to say: meditation is not about ceasing thought, certainly not at the outset. It is not about thinking only loving thoughts, certainly not at the outset. Perhaps the objective is just this: a mind that is utterly relaxed within itself. Yes, let s go with that. All the great dharma teachers tell us it is so. But the path is not self-criticism, nor is it willfulness or some form of pretending. It is a gradual path that is built literally breath by breath, each inhalation an act of faith, each exhale a gesture of relaxation, until, suddenly, we are liberated. There is another choice beside love or fear. The third option is to relax with both loving and fearful thoughts, see them for what they are impermanent arisings and recognize that through your spiritual practice, you 3

5 Misconception #2 Meditation is a form of selfimprovement. It is absolutely true that meditation brings positive change to your sense of self, relationships and quality of life. It has also been scientifically shown to make you happier (by increasing activity in the prefrontal cortex) and relieve stress (by reducing cortisol.) However, meditation is so much more than this. In fact, its greatest benefits are realized when attempts at self-improvement are abandoned in favor of accepting yourself. Pema Chodron once said that cultivating gentleness toward yourself is the single most important aspect of meditation practice. When you draw attention away from the inner chatter that is usually grading you for everything on a scale of one to 10, you make space for another kind of awareness to arise: your own natural, complete and indestructible wisdom. This is a guarantee. Through meditation, you tune into your life rather than your thoughts about your life. You see that it has an arc, rhyme and pattern. In fact, your life has a life of its own and you are its guardian, not its master. Your unique path, the one that reveals to you who you really are, appears. You can see it. You can feel it. There is a sense of definitely being in the right place. 4

6 Ultimately, meditation is nothing more or less than the path to enlightenment. That it also happens to be an astonishingly effective way to like yourself more and accomplish your goals is peripheral. Using it solely as a means to conventional ends robs it of its elegance and power and you miss the verdant and fertile forest that exists in the unending now for trees that have yet to flower. (Thus have I heard.) 5

7 Misconception #3 Meditation makes you more peaceful. It often happens with my meditation students (as also happened with me), that at some point they say, The more I practice, the more raw I become. I m not becoming more quote-unquote peaceful, I m actually becoming more vulnerable. What the hell is going on here? Now we get to a little secret about meditation practice. It does not make you more peaceful, if by peaceful you mean unflappable or unperturbed or some other kind of state where everything is always OK. Rather than creating an inner environment that is akin to a still pond (which can only remain so if the wind never blows or a leaf never drops or the temperature never shifts), your practice drops you into the deepest part of the deepest sea, a place that sometimes sparkles peacefully and at others roils as if blown by the winds of hell. It reveals you to be the wave form that is capable of all such manifestations and that has no option but to eventually be reabsorbed into stillness. This is you. THIS is you. This you is so much bigger than having to choose between each little thought as either for or against you. 6

8 Instead of making you untouchable, meditation makes you like the most touchable person ever. However, it does indeed pacify your mind, not by weeding out the bad thoughts and keeping the good ones (as encouraged by the thought police), but by noticing both and not necessarily believing either one. Freed from absorption in thought, you can open to what is actually happening. Into this opening come all sorts of things, wanted and unwanted, including all your good feelings and all your icky ones, and, notably, the joy and suffering of others. The more you practice, the more open you become. The more open you become, the more you feel. The more you feel, the more vulnerable you are. Meditation actually cultivates vulnerability, not impenetrability and it is right here that all the goodies reside, although it might not feel that way at first. Once, I asked my teacher, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, what was up with all the crying that had been accompanying my practice of late. In fact, I said, the more I practiced, the more I cried. The suffering of my fellow humans seemed untenable. What was I doing wrong? Surely this couldn t be what the Buddha intended as the path to enlightenment or a helpful gift I could offer others. When it came to empathy and care for my fellow humans, wiping my nose on their sleeves did not seem like the best I could do. He looked at me so kindly and said, You know, some of the worlds greatest meditators have cried a lot. This simple answer was so liberating. I thought of the world s meditation masters and sages, like the Buddha, like Jesus, like Gandhi and tried to picture them, not as implacable adepts who always knew what to do and say, but as human beings who cried under the Bodhi Tree, atop the Mount of Olives, in a prison cell for all of us. But then what? They didn t just wipe their eyes and return to their lives, hoping for the best. Somehow they were left with a greater capacity for love, not less. The profound opening that is the result of a strong and steady practice and which includes deep, painful 7

9 emotions as well as boring and joyful ones actually creates the perfect circumstances for you to become a more truthful version of who you already are. This you can open to joy, outrage, boredom, terror and love without losing her seat. Occasionally, she is completely at peace, but she knows that it is not the result of using meditation to withdraw from this world, but to fearlessly enter it, take it on completely and stabilize her heart in the open state. 8

10 Please accept my deepest thanks for the work you do in the world. I hope that the information in this PDF will support you to continue to offer your gifts to all who could benefit from them. We need you! With love, Susan ix