Holy Ground

https://youtu.be/Wx0yDbJbcBQ
 

 

Ibn "Arabi: I am closer to you than your self.

Tara Brach

The Insight Meditation Center of Washington (IMCW) makes available many of Tara Brach's talks which bring a Buddhist perspective to modern psychotherapy practice in a blend that speaks powerfully to the root causes of suffering. Follow the link to access the homw page of Tara Brach and the many audio and video presentations freely available.

http://www.tarabrach.com/index.html

How To Become Generous

How to Become Generous

The movement from ordinary states of self-concern to selfless giving always involves a gradual transformation of character, not a sudden leap. Like any form of strength, generosity needs to be intentionally cultivated over time, and everyone must begin in whatever state of mind they already happen to be. Understanding and accepting who you really are right now is as important as the commitment to become someone more open and generous. Whatever the quality of motivation, when we intentionally reach out to others in giving, some degree of transformation occurs. We become what we practice and do in daily life.
 
For the entire article follow the link:
 
http://www.tricycle.com/feature/bodhisattvas-gift

Body Ecology

A meditation on dependant arising and the body.

In the Samyutta Nikaya, the Buddha says, “This body is not mine or anyone else’s. It has arisen due to past causes and conditions.” The Buddha intuited some type of evolutionary process that creates our bodies, and his essential point is that they are neither formed nor owned by us. We now have evidence that our bodies arise from the forces and elements that make up the entire universe, through a complex chain of interdependent events. Internalizing this understanding can help liberate us from the powerful sense of ownership and attachment we have to the body, which is a cause of tremendous suffering, especially as the body grows old and we must face its inevitable destiny.

The following guided reflections from the Buddha are adapted from the classic exercises on mindfulness of body found in the Mahasatipatthana Sutra. Here we combine the experiential aspect of bringing mindfulness to various parts of the body, with some simple reflection on the evolutionary origin of those body parts. These exercises can help to reveal that this body is not ours; it is evolution’s body. The body we live in is a loaner. The exercises are best done in a seated position (sitting in a chair is fine), keeping the spine as straight as possible. It is useful to read through the entire series of exercises, and then return to the beginning and focus on a single reflection at a time. After reading a reflection on one particular body part or function, close your eyes and bring your attention to that area of the body and begin the exercise. These reflections can be done in any order, or separately, and you may take as long as you wish for any of them.

THE BODY AND THE ELEMENTS

Begin by bringing attention to your entire body, and for a few moments just feel the body’s warmth and strength, its ability to hold itself upright. The vitality and aliveness that you experience in your body require various chemical and mineral substances, a continuous supply of oxygen, the energy of the sun, and the cohesion and conductivity of water. The Buddha instructs us to reflect on the body as composed of the elements of earth, air, fire, and water, so that we will see how this life is interwoven with universal processes.

Resting attention on your breath for a few moments, sense the fact that you are located in an atmosphere - the medium through which you move, and by which your body lives. Can you feel the air all around you as a substance? Move your arm and feel it parting the air, almost as if you were swimming through this medium.

Now bring attention to your breathing, and simultaneously look at a plant in your house or the plants growing outside, and realize that with each breath you are feeding the plants and being fed by them. Doing this simple reflection just a few times can begin to alter your feelings about the plant kingdom.

As you sense yourself exchanging nutrients with the plants, you will be able to recognize that you are not only located in an atmosphere, but are an integral part of it. With every breath you are participating in the great cycles of water and gases, the hydrosphere and atmosphere. With each breath you are joining in the single great breath of all earth life.

THE SKELETAL FRAME

Focus attention on the great bone of your skull. Let awareness roam over the entire area of your head, feeling this massive bone that houses the delicate brain. Notice the holes conveniently placed for the sense organs of hearing, smelling, tasting, and seeing, and the great opening at the bottom of the skull for the spine to enter. It has taken 500 million years of vertebrate evolution to get your skull into this shape, with its narrow, brooding forehead.

To get a better sense of the skull bone, gently clench your jaw and grind your teeth together a little. As you feel the power of your jaw, you might reflect on the fact that the jaw began developing in an early, wormlike marine creature, which gained great survival advantage with the newfound ability to eat things that were bigger than itself. The vast number of chewers now alive in the world testifies to the usefulness of this powerful hinge.

Next, move awareness down from the skull into your spine and ribs. See if you can sense the entire skeleton of bones extending outward from that central ridgepole of spine. If you move your limbs or head around a little, you might get a kinesthetic sense of the skeletal structure. You could also visualize the skeletons you have seen, from Halloween, anatomy books, or Grateful Dead posters. As you visualize and feel the bone structure, be aware that there are over six hundred separate bones in your body.

While you are feeling the entire skeleton, you might also reflect for a moment on the fact that our bones are composed of calcium phosphate. They are, quite literally, the clay of earth, molded into our human shape. Our bodies are not only on the earth, they are of the earth. When seated or walking, you can feel your body as a kind of earth sprout that gained mobility.

While on the subject of bones, we can draw a good lesson in dharma practice from the early microbes, which apparently were irritated by calcium phosphate and other sea salts and would flush them from their bodies. Then some enterprising microbes, perhaps after “sitting through” the irritation (so to speak), discovered that the mineral substances could help protect their bodies. Thus the bones of the first skeleton began to take shape. It is interesting to note that in mineral content and porosity, human bones are nearly identical to certain species of South Pacific coral, and plastic surgeons have begun to use this coral to fix and replace human bone.

THE DIGESTIVE SYSTEM

Next, move your mindful awareness to your stomach area. Although you may not feel many distinct sensations, let your awareness linger there as you reflect on some of the activity taking place in this region of your body. For instance, at this moment, along with digestion taking place - nutrients being extracted from food substances and waste being processed for disposal - there are thousands of cells being born and dying. Your stomach contains hundreds of thousands of digestive glands, and the stomach must produce a new lining every three days to protect itself from its own digestive juices. For this task, your stomach is producing up to five hundred thousand new cells every minute.

Along with all of this activity, you might consider that at this very moment there are more living beings inside your stomach than all the humans who have ever lived on earth. Considering the billions of bacteria and microbes that live inside each of us, microbiologist Lynn Margulis writes, “Our concept of the individual is totally warped. All of us are walking communities.” We are not separate selves. Each of us is an ecosystem.

THE HANDS

Bring attention to your hands. Spread your fingers out, wiggle them, press them against your palm and thumb. The five-digit design of your hands goes back 370 million years to the first land vertebrates, called tetrapods. Maybe five digits were the minimum number needed to hold on to the land and not slip back into the sea. As you feel your hands, consider that just two million years ago, a blink in biological time, our ancestors could barely manipulate rocks and sticks, and now some of our hands can play the piano, type over a hundred words a minute, and build rockets and computers. You can experience the great dexterity of your hands right now, by simply unbuttoning a button. You don’t even consciously have to direct those movements! Our hands (and brains) definitely deserve a round of applause.

As you clap, you might also notice the flexibility of your wrists. Most people can move their wrists around in an arc of almost 360 degrees, and our shoulders are almost as flexible. According to the evolutionary biologists, this range of movement in our wrists and shoulders came about because for millions of years our ancestors got around by swinging through the trees. How many of our physical characteristics are inherited from the life that came before?

Recent research indicates that the dexterity of our hands was also very important in the growth of our brains. As our hands began to manipulate tools, a bigger brain was required to direct the movements and store the enormous new amounts of information being learned. The interaction and mutual stimulation of hand and brain created an evolutionary feedback loop in which both developed to an unprecedented degree. As you move your fingers around - buttoning, typing, playing an instrument - you might reflect on the complex acti-vity going on simultaneously in your brain to direct those movements.

As we feel our arms and hands, we can also reflect that these appendages were once fins, and not just in our distant ancestors. Each of us, in the womb, develops both fin and gill-like structures as we cycle through the genetic instructions of the many life forms that preceded us. Our body and brain are built out of the triumphs and defeats of all earth life, an amazingly complex stream of causes and conditions.

THE WHOLE BODY

Finally, bring awareness to your entire body, sensing the complete organism. Feel the energies within the body, the streams of sensation, the points of twitching or tension, the great pulses of breath and heartbeat.

Realize how much activity is taking place at this moment within you - and without you. Right now there are literally millions of brain cells firing signals to one another, a veritable storm of electrical activity taking place inside your head. Your brain stem is busy monitoring your body temperature and rate of heartbeat, while your limbic system remains on alert for possible survival threats and opportunities.

Meanwhile, oxygen is being inhaled and transported throughout your body and burned as fuel in the process of transforming the stored energy of the sun into your own living energy. In every second, millions of cells are dying and millions more are being created. Chemicals that do the work of the brain, stomach, liver, and kidneys are being manufactured and secreted. As we contemplate our body, we begin to realize that we don’t direct most of these processes. We don’t live, so much as life lives through us.

These are just a few reflections on the evolutionary sources of the body and behaviors: They are practices of both deep ecology and self-liberation. Using scientific information as a skillful means, we can experience what has been called our “ecological self,” or “species self.” Through such exercises we can begin to realize that our individual human life is first and foremost life: second, it is human; and only third is it individual. Getting to know ourselves as biological beings, interwoven with all of earth’s elements and other forms of life, can be a good source of both our liberation and compassion.

Wes Nisker is the author of Buddha’s Nature, recently issued in paperback by Bantam. His book Crazy Wisdom was reissued by Ten Speed Press last year. Founder and co-editor of the Buddhist journal Inquiring Mind, Nisker is a meditation teacher affiliated with Spirit Rock Center in California.

Morning meditation

Changing Habits

Like a turtle we carry this shell around which announces our arrival. The shell is made up of habitual behaviors. We are hardly aware of it because it has become associated with who we think we are. It has become fused to our identity.

Like a force field, it affects the immediate surroundings and to a certain extent determines the quality of our experience in those surroundings. I know this to be true because I have experienced how something as simple as smiling can dramatically affect my interactions and general experience of life. Things just seem to go smoother and often it feels as though the universe is arranging itself around a positive axis for me.

Once I experimented with this in the Atlanta Airport, a very busy place. While listening to the 7 universal tones on headphones I just sort of wandered around aimlessly. It seemed as though people could almost feel the positive vibration through me, and they were quite friendly and accommodating in response to this energy I was putting out.

If we want a new shell, one that will allow the universe to arrange itself in positive ways for us, then we need to change some of those negative habits; replace them with positive habits.

Here are a few habits worth changing:
1. Always having the last word
2. The need to be right
3. Reluctance to show joy or smile
4. Seeing seriousness as more worthy than playfulness
5. Reluctance to be silly and playful
6. Paying too much attention to the outcome and not the process or intention
7. Being bi polar instead of omni polar (seeing the points in-between)
8. Judging
9. Being critical instead of inquisitive
10. Expecting people to understand you

Morning Meditation

Many of my friends are turning 60! In fact we just celebrated Jane's 60th and I will turn 60 in a few months as well. Visiting family have already passed that milestone. We are all getting older. Often in my men's group (where everyone except me is 60+) our discussions turn around the fact that life as we know it is speeding up toward the end of the road.

So that tends to focus the mind on the question "How do I want to spend my remaining moments? What is important now?"

It seems to me that I have spent my life polishing the mirror of ego, making it conform to some idea of what is admirable from an external perspective. And from an internal perspective, much of what is deemed admirable has been shaped by society. For example, much effort and thought have gone into comparing myself to the physical ideal put forth by the culture, which is a struggle since rising to the level put forth by the culture is not achievable by most. I am often left feeling inadequate or defective somehow. One never gets to arrive at that destination! That target is always moving and never quite achievable.

So now I am surrounded by this somewhat crumbling matrix of scaffold holding up the ego. And it seems to me an increasing folly to think in terms of keeping up the effort of maintaining this scaffold. The more sensible approach is to begin dismantling it bit by bit until it no longer exists; until the true immutable nature of pure mind, pure soul is revealed.

I vow to look carefully at how ego obscures the true nature of pure mind and prevents me from living in the moment, which diminishes true happiness by externalizing the idea of perfection.

Stage Directions: A meditation on beauty (WS)

Background:

Soft pink clouds floating by. The sunlight should diffuse through the cloud and accumulate in exquisite brilliance around the edges. All this against an almost indescribable blue. This seen through the lattice of gently swaying tulip poplar branches; upon which sseveral tenacious leaves still quiver. 

Action:

To and fro the small warm body of a squirrel gathers twigs for its winter nest. Each twig carefully examined for suitability, then delicately excised and carried into the crook of the tree below. Up and down tirelessly, collecting each twig with single mindedness, agility, and most of all, natural grace.  

Audience participation

It is intended that the audience become aware of the beauty that is innate in the mundane.

Pushing into the light

Morning meditation

The imagination is always pushing against the confines of language just as the interior world of ideas constantly seeks to transcend the cultural limits of society. There is a never ending struggle on the frontier between light and dark, knowledge and ignorance, creativity and destruction. The uncovering of the soul is accomplished through this dynamic interplay of opposites, and it is always progressive toward God, however incremental it might seem.  (WPS)

Meditation on a morning walk.

I know not how or why God has seen beyond the meager sum of my earthly parts and fills me with joy, but I vow to dwell in the light of gratitude, knowing that my devine nature is always present, always waiting to be revealed.

Seeing Beyond The Edge: To Really See Someone, We Have To Bother To Look.

A wonderful meditation by Sharon Salzberg founder of The Insight Meditation Society in Barre Massachusettes. Taken from Tricycle
This article appears in 20 Years, 20 Teachings: The Tricycle 20th Anniversary E-Book. It's free to all Supporting and Sustaining Members. Get the e-book.






Advice

A young friend once came to me seeking advice. He had been to India, where he met a guru who had become very important to him. Now my young friend wanted to bring his father to that crowded, hot city, halfway around the world, to meet the guru. I thought about it for a moment, and then said to him, “You know, I don’t think it’s a very good idea. That particular city in India is very unpleasant. The food will be foreign, he may well get sick, and there will be annoying bugs. Besides, I myself found the scene around the guru kind of strange, and your father might well be repulsed by it. He may then dismiss all spiritual endeavor, which would be a terrible outcome. My suggestion is, don’t do it.”

The young man completely ignored my advice and did indeed go off to India along with his father. When he returned a few months later, I immediately saw how very wrong I’d been in my counsel. His father just loved everything about India and felt right at home there. Not only did he admire the guru, he became his disciple. And not only that, he was determined to teach in the guru’s lineage, and was initiating a complete life change. My friend and his father were extremely happy. Having been proven so wrong in my advice, the question was, could I be happy for them?

Sometimes we feel a need to be proven right as we look at someone else’s life choices; it is not that they are necessarily doing anything wrong or hurtful, but they may be living in a different way than we have decided they should be living. Or perhaps our advice turns out to be unappreciated or incorrect, as mine was, and we come face to face with the fact that someone’s happiness does not revolve around us and our fabulous prescience and good sense; instead, it is based on their own good sense, or even on sheer good luck. Can we let go of our need to try to dominate people’s lives and our determination of what the correct outcome of their decisions should be?

Sitting with my young friend and hearing about the glorious experience of his father in India, I saw the cascade of emotions in my mind—embarrassment, skepticism, a touch of derision, and even a little resentment—and I knew I had a choice: sometimes kindness takes the form of stepping aside, letting go of our need to be right, and just being happy for someone.

Sometimes I intentionally ask myself the question, “What would I gain from this person’s loss?” and it is quite clear to me that I don’t benefit at all. The true benefit is in stepping off of center stage, and experiencing the kindness of delighting in someone else’s good experience.

Rules for Kindness

Once I was leading a meditation group in the D.C. area. The group had rented an elementary school auditorium for the day. All along the walls of the corridors were posted rules for being kind. During the breaks in the day, I would just stand and read them again and again. They seemed so simple, yet like many simple truths, if we were to live them rather than merely admire them, they could change our life. They rest on principles like dissolving the rigid boundaries we hold between ourselves and others, including rather than excluding, recognizing our actions (and words) are consequential, and being thoughtful.

Carderock Elementary School rules for being kind:

• Treat people the way you would like to be treated.

• Play fair.

• Respect everyone—other students and all staff.

• Everyone can play.

• Help others when they need help.

• Don’t hurt others on the inside or the outside.

• Honor all of the pillars of ethics.

I decided that weekend that every week I’d take one of these rules and hold it as a touchstone: to remember, to make choices by, to experiment with deepening, to enjoy. One of the most provocative and poignant rules was “Everyone can play.” When I first read that rule I imagined a child who was left out, staring at the in-crowd, feeling unwanted or unseen—then being beckoned forth, invited to join in, affirmed.

As I practiced this tenet, I seemed to notice more hints of loneliness in those I encountered than I had seen before, more subtle echoes of that forlorn child than I expected. When I began to include others, I watched as something unfurled within them and began to flower. In making a point of including others in conversation, I felt some subtle walls within me dissolve as well. There was a growing sense of rightness, of balance, because, after all, everyone should get to play.


Paying Attention


A friend once told me about repeated fights he and his wife would have early on in their marriage. Much of their conflict centered on how to have dinner. He liked to eat hurriedly, standing up in the kitchen, getting it over with as quickly as possible. She liked to set the table elegantly, sit down and eat leisurely, together. Many nights they fought instead of eating with each other. Finally they sought the help of a marriage counselor.

As they examined the layers of meaning hidden in the simple and familiar word “dinner,” they each discovered how much association, and how many people, they were actually bringing to that table. He talked about his father, a brutal man, often only home at dinnertime, which became a nightmarish experience he wanted to escape from as quickly as possible. She spoke of her fractured family, where her mentally ill brother consumed her mother with worry. It was mainly at dinner that an effort was made to talk to her, to find out about her day, where she felt she indeed belonged to a family. Dinner was rarely just dinner for either of my friends, and their partner was often not the person standing in front of them, but an “other” made of an amalgam of past hurts, long-held dreams, and tentative new yearnings.

Can we ever actually see another person? If we create an “other” out of our projections and associations and ready interpretations, we have made an object of a person—we have taken away their humanity. We have stripped from our consciousness their sensitivity to pain, their likely wish to feel at home in their bodies and minds, their complexity and intricacy and mutability. If we have lost any recognition of the truth of change in someone, and have fixed them in our mind as “good,” “bad,” or “indifferent,” we’ve lost touch with the living essence of that person. We are dwelling in a worldview of stylized prototypes and distant caricatures, reified images, and often very great loneliness.

Meditation practice is training in stepping back—in getting a broader perspective on what’s happening. Mindfulness, one of the tools at the core of meditation, helps us refrain from getting lost in habitual biases that distort what we’re seeing about our feelings. Without mindfulness, our perception is easily shaped by barely conscious decisions like “My stomach is roiling with what seems to be fear, but I could never allow myself to admit that. I’ll pretend it never came up.”

Mindfulness also helps us see through our prejudices about another person. For instance: “All older women are fuzzy thinkers, so she can’t possibly be as sharp as she is pretending to be.” Mindfulness works by showing us that conclusions like these are simply thoughts in our own mind. Mindfulness enables us to cultivate a different quality of attention, one where we relate to what we see before us not just as an echo of the past, or a foreshadowing of the future, but more as it is right now.

Making the effort to truly see someone doesn’t mean we never respond or react or take very strong action to try to settle the matter of dinner. We can and do attempt to restore a failing marriage, protest loud cell phones in public places, or try, with everything in us, to rectify injustice. But we can do it from a place that allows people to be as textured as they are, and that admits our feelings to be as varied and flowing as they are. A place open to surprises. A place that listens, that lets the world come alive.

One essential step in learning to more genuinely see each other is to bother to look. If someone yells at us, or annoys us, or dazzles us with a gift, we do pay attention to them. Our challenge then is to see them as they are, not as we project or assume them to be. But if they don’t make much of an impression on us, we have a different challenge; it is all too easy to look right through them.

In particular, the meditation exercise of offering lovingkindness to a neutral person confronts this tendency. We choose a person whom we don’t strongly like or dislike—we feel, indeed, rather neutral or indifferent toward them. Very often it helps to select a near stranger, or someone who plays a certain role or function in our lives—the grocery store checkout person, for example, or the UPS delivery person.

When we send a neutral person lovingkindness, we are consciously changing a pattern of overlooking them, or talking around them, to one of paying attention to them. We are experimenting with the notion of “loving thy neighbor as thyself ” when we don’t know the facts about their dependent elderly parent or at-risk teenager.

When we think of our neutral person, we haven’t learned the story of their suspicious mole or empty evenings. We have no knowledge of their inspiring triumphs or their admirable philanthropy. We aren’t seeing their tension after a disappointing job interview, or their sadness after their lover leaves. But we practice wishing them well anyway, simply because they exist, and because we do know the beauty, the sorrow, the poignancy, and the sheer, unalterable insecurity of existence, which we all share.

On trains, in the street, in our homes and communities, we practice paying attention—through developing mindfulness and lovingkindness and through letting go of projections—partly because a more complete attention proffers many special gifts. These gifts can penetrate through the exigencies of social roles, the seeming hollowness of chance encounters, and even through terrible hurt.

Paying attention provides the gift of noticing, and the gift of connecting. It provides the gift of seeing a little bit of ourselves in others, and of realizing that we’re not so awfully alone. It allows us to let go of the burden of so much of what we habitually carry with us, and receive the gift of the present moment.

Sharon Salzberg is a cofounder of the Insight Meditation Society, in Barre, Massachusetts. This article has been excerpted from her latest book, “The Kindness Handbook.” Reprinted with permission of Sounds True. To participate in a multimedia course on the Four Immeasurables led by Salzberg, visit community.tricycle.com.

 

Deep Relaxation music

Don't forget to breathe!

Follow the link for 3 beautiful tracks of calming music.

http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=zencollection&annotation_id=annotation_108347&feature=iv#p/c/6CAD8CA86EC5053E/1/6A1FREzu-Zg

Prayer Flag

Let us each hoist an invisible flag of love to flutter and bear witness constantly to the only thing that has any intrinsic merit in our lives, LOVE.

All that surrounds me is Love.

All that I experience is Love.

I see Love.

I feel Love.

I know Love.

I believe in Love.

This is my truth

and no illusion of fear

enters my being.

I am one with God.

God is one with me.

God surrounds me.

God.

Love.

Me.