Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche | Open Space Practice, (AKA: A Thousand Shades of Gray)

M is for Meditation

I’ve been at Shambhala Mountain Center all weekend, at the “Fearless Creativity” writing and meditation retreat with Susan Piver, so it was pretty clear what I should write about for the letter M. I’ll write a post later about how utterly amazing the retreat was, about how much I adore Susan Piver, and the impact this weekend has had on my writing practice, but for now let’s talk about the other practice I did this weekend, that I do daily: meditation.

Many of us are slaves to our minds. Our own mind is our worst enemy. We try to focus, and our mind wanders off. We try to keep stress at bay, but anxiety keeps us awake at night. We try to be good to the people we love, but then we forget them and put ourselves first. And when we want to change our life, we dive into spiritual practice and expect quick results, only to lose focus after the honeymoon has worn off. We return to our state of bewilderment. We’re left feeling helpless and discouraged. It seems we all agree that training the body through exercise, diet, and relaxation is a good idea, but why don’t we think about training our minds? ~Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche

“The process of undoing bewilderment is based on stabilizing and strengthening our mind,” says Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche. “Shamatha meditation is how we do that.”

I started a regular meditation practice five years ago. Sometimes it seems like only five minutes, and other times it feels like 500 years. The style of meditation I practice is shamatha, which means “calm awareness” or “peaceful abiding.” The focus is on the breath and the eyes remain open, inviting reality and the environment in to the experience, engaging with it but not grasping or attaching, and accepting reality as it is, not rejecting, trying to change it, and not hoping that conditions were different. Peaceful abiding, calm awareness. Being with what is, as it is. Opening your heart to the vast space, the stillness and the silence, even when your internal or external environment might be otherwise.

It’s through this training of the mind that we can regain a connection to our innate sanity, our compassion, confidence, wisdom, and strength, on and off the cushion. The practice trains our mind away from a discursive, fearful, aggressive relationship with reality, away from a confused perception of the way things are.

the view from my cushion this weekend

In some traditions of meditation, the goal is to reach a state of removal from reality, transcendence, a bliss state even, the goal being to check out, to remove yourself from the experience of reality. I won’t lie, this sounds appealing, but what happens when you come back, off the cushion in your post mediation life? How will this have helped you cope with the real deal, the shit and stink of life, what’s really going on? I prefer shamatha, the instruction to relax and be gentle with yourself, but also to open your heart and connect with reality, your current state, your life and everything in it, to experience things as they are in this moment, bravely and with confidence.

This for me is such good news, that there is a method, a way, a practice for training your mind to be with what is, come what may, to be confident and peaceful. I don’t have to fight reality, deny it, abandon it, transcend it, reject or renounce it—I can be in my life, bravely and confidently. Yes, it is messy and unkind, brutal at times, and I am at times confused, suffering, dirty and stinky, but I am also brilliant and precious. And I am grateful to have a practice of meditation that makes it all workable.

Meditation practice isn’t about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better. It’s about befriending who we are already. The ground of practice is you or me or whoever we are right now, just as we are. That’s the ground, that’s what we study, that’s what we come to know with tremendous curiosity and interest. ~Pema Chödrön

Eric and I (and the dogs, of course the dogs) went hiking and running this morning. He remarked again how much better shape I am in, that we were doing something I wasn’t always able to.

He’s completely right. I have gone through various periods of fitness and then weakness in the nineteen years we’ve been together, circled around and around wellness, momentarily maintaining it but never able to persist, coming together and falling apart. But something about this time is different. I’ve had a breakthrough, a realization, what my friend calls a “come to Jesus moment”–you cannot get healthy with diet and exercise if you hate, loathe, abuse yourself. The only way to health and well-being is through self-love.

I want to make sure you get that, because it’s so important: the only way to health and well-being is through self-love.

It is through this devotion to yourself, self-care, a sense of yourself as precious, worthy, and enough that you become well, regain sanity, connect to your innate wisdom and compassion. It’s from this base of health and well-being that you also find the strength, the courage and stamina, the fearlessness, wisdom and compassion to help others, to serve them. It’s like Evita Ramparte said in the documentary Hungry for Change:

Something miraculous happens when you take care of yourself. You realize that you are precious…You become in love with yourself basically, and it shines, it overflows to others, becomes contagious. You give others the permission to be in love with themselves, with life.

Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche has a new book coming out, Running with the Mind of Meditation: Lessons for Training Body and Mind. Chapter Two of the book is called “Building Your Base” and in it, he says that when you start running, you need to build your base. You can’t run a marathon on your first day. You start off slowly, but continually challenge your body so that it builds the structures you will need, the endurance and the strength necessary, to be a stable and smart runner. Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche explains it this way:

The base, as it turned out, was simply doing enough running, without overdoing it, to build the integrity of the bones and the strength of the tendons and muscles. This would slowly power up my basic physiology so it could handle the running. It was very similar to the first stages of meditation, in which we focus on building strength.

I have applied this wisdom directly to my running. Every time I walk the dogs, I run as much as I can, not pushing myself too far, but certainly touching my edge. I know that the more I run, the stronger my foundation becomes, and the easier running becomes.

I also am realizing how this wisdom applies to just about anything you are attempting to accomplish or change. In his book, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche relates it directly to the practice of meditation, saying:

This process of taking the inherent structure of the body and strengthening it through regular and repeated runs is very similar to training and developing the mind in meditation…The Tibetan word for meditation is gom. It essentially means “getting used to, familiarizing.” Meditation, then, is the act of familiarizing your mind with what you want it to do. That process of familiarity is just taking qualities and abilities that the mind naturally has, focusing on them in a methodical way, and thus building your base.

Learning self-love and self-care, moving towards health and well-being, undergoing this year of retreat, this life-rehab is building my base.

I am starting to be able to see what’s on the horizon, catch glimpses of what is possible, and it’s beautiful. It makes me weep sometimes, it is so amazing.