Since the later Seventies and early Eighties, meditation has become almost a household word in America. Meditation is now discussed openly in ordinary medical channels as a means of reducing stress. It is taught by various offshoots of Eastern methods, from Japanese Zen to Chinese Chan to Tibetan Dzogchen. No doubt the fundamentalist churches, as they always have, find meditation to be foreign and threatening, but mainstream America has added the practice to its vocabulary.
Unfortunately, as for many things in a consumer society, we are frequently offered a watered down reductive version of the real tradition. Practically everyone I talk to these days does some kind of meditation, which generally means they sit quietly somewhere and watch the sunset, or do some concentrative exercise they have read of in a book. As "do-it-yourselfers," we tend to look for the short and easy route to everything. One popular "channeler" in our area has her "voice" saying that five minutes of meditation is enough because we are "more advanced than people of many years ago." Her listeners are also told that meditation practice is "for getting things that you want." How American can you get? Of course, mixed with the fanciful and self-gratifying are the legitimate practices that are taught in various contexts. For example, Jon Kabat-Zinn, who works with stress in Boston, has taught mindfulness practice as a way of relieving tension. Others have taught meditation in various therapeutic counseling sessions. These have a place, but they lack an overall view that can actually allow us to change how we see the self and the world in holistic terms. The root meditation practices that we have inherited from Asia, on the other hand, are said to cut the very roots of neurosis, allowing us to live openly and sanely in the world.
Traditional meditation practices from Asian sources have many varieties and emphasize different aspects of our lives. The Shambhala approach uses Tibetan Buddhist practice in which the first level involves working directly with our own mind and its view of the world. Different Buddhist schools have slightly different interpretations of the "reality" of the world whether it does or does it not exist independently of our perception of it. But all agree that the sanity or neurosis of our experience depends on how we think about things and processes.
Meditation practice is the first level of training or discipline. Once again, given our western “quick fix” attitudes, it is sometimes difficult to impress on people that meditation is a slow, lifelong discipline that cannot be used to further enhance ego feelings of “getting somewhere.” As archetypal psychologist, Robert Sardello said, long training is required if we are to release intuitive insight. Therefore, understanding how meditation practice works and where it leads develops rather slowly. The beginning practice is deceptively simple. We are told to sit upright on our cushion, eyes open, cast slightly downward, with hands on knees. Posture in meditation is considered very important. Sitting erect (an uncommon posture for most Americans) gives us a feeling of dignity. We want to maintain a connection throughout meditation between our mind and our body. Indeed, as we discover, body-mind is one holistic process. Mind is not located only up in our head, it is throughout body.
In the second step, while breathing naturally, we begin to focus our attention on our breath in a very simple, direct way. As the breath goes out, we let our mind, our attention, follow it out to the end. As we reach the end of the outbreath there is a brief gap, the inbreath follows. In basic mindfulness practice, it is important that we use our attention in a focused way to stay with our breath. Since for the most part, we “dwell before and after and pine for what is not,” we are little accustomed to being with the present moment. Think how many times we have driven from point A to point B and arrive no recollection of the territory in between those points. So, since the breath is “now,” whenever we are following our breath we are in the present moment.
In the beginning, when the technique is new to us, we may be able to sit with few distractions. Sooner or later, however, our everyday mind clicks in and we begin to follow first one train of thought and then another. The mediation technique can take these side trips into account. But we have to remember that our mind, wandering or not, is not the enemy. Thus, whenever thoughts (including emotions, which we treat as thoughts) occur, we simply label them "thinking" and return to the outbreath. As I said in the beginning, our awareness of body remains important. We are also staying in contact with the general space and atmosphere where we are sitting. Our awareness is partially on the breath. The remainder of our attention is generally on our body as it rests on the cushion, on the general atmosphere, or other things going on the world as background to our sitting. Our eyes are open because we are including our awareness of the phenomenal world as a part of our sanity. We are not trying to escape into some Platonic heaven or deep trance.
This is boring work; as Chogyam Trungpa said, it is like having only one teddy bear which we explore thoroughly. For a long time we do it more out of faith or trust in the teachings than out of any sense of accomplishment. But faith and trust in who or what? Not religious faith in this case, but faith in our own basic goodness balanced with some confidence in the teachings and teacher. The first level of faith is that we begin to find fairly soon, even on the first weekend that something is going on, something that we get very interested in.
Moreover, the teachings themselves make sense to us and those who are teaching us, as we get to know them, seem to have learned something. It is characteristic of teachings from the East that they are offered personally and orally, rather than through abstract theory given in books. Thus the Shambhala teachings are ordinarily presented in a series of sequential weekends where we interact directly with the teachers. In effect, weekends combine theory and practice. So, as we wind our way slowly through the weekends, we begin to take meditation practice seriously. There is a point, in fact, when we cannot go back to where we were. When we let our practice go for some weeks or months, we find that we miss it. Something is going on! We begin to discover, as we continue to meditate, that our mind is actually slowing down, even after meditation has ended. Instead of getting caught in every little trivial thought, we can see the thought arise and decide whether to follow it further or not.
Much of what happens to us will still resembles the old mind and memory that we originally brought with us to meditation. Still, we see enough evidence of change, even after a few months, that we are encouraged to continue. It would be nice to discover that everything mellows out, gets more peaceful, but that isn't the way it works. We actually begin to be more sensitive to our own contradictions. We begin to get glimpses of how we relate to our spouse, our children, our parents, our work. We begin to discover hidden hopes and fears that we didn't even know were motivating us. Sometimes we feel disgusted with ourselves. So, in some ways, the split between the restfulness of practice and the agitation of discovery is very painful, but we also begin to realize that we are on a very meaningful journey, perhaps the most important of our life.