Me
ditation, whatever method you are using, is simply getting to know your mind. It is not about meditating ‘on’ something or getting into a zone where you are blissfully removed from your mind’s contents.
Instead, the actual meaning of meditation is more like getting used to being with your own mind.
Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche
Buddhist nun Pema Chodron’s instruction on how to develop our hearts, how to work with the fears that arise when we touch our natural warmth and love.
Each of us has a “soft spot”: the place in our experience where we feel vulnerable and tender. This soft spot is inherent in appreciation and love, and it is equally inherent in pain.
Often, when we feel that soft spot, it’s quickly followed by a feeling of fear and an involuntary, habitual tendency to close down. This is the tendency of all living things: to avoid pain and cling to pleasure. In practice, however, covering up the soft spot means shutting down against out life experience. Then we tend to narrow down into a solid feeling of self against other.
The trick is to stay with the soft spot and not harden over it. That’s the basic instruction: stay with the soft spot.
How does this work? You’re going along, and your mind and heart are open. Then someone says something and you find yourself either frightened or starting to get angry. You feel the hair rising on the back of your neck, and something in you closes down. You’re on your way to becoming all worked up. At this point, you become unreasonable, and all your wisdom goes out the window. You’re hooked. This is what we work with as practitioners, we have to be able to see where we get hooked like this. It’s easy to see. To interrupt the flow of it, though, is another matter.
Pema Chödrön, Stay with the Soft Spot of Bodhichitta.
Everything is in process. Everything—every tree, every blade of grass, all the animals, insects, human beings, buildings, the animate and the inanimate—is always changing, moment to moment.
Pema Chodron
Stories about ourselves and how we are doing arise non-stop in our minds and influence our beliefs about reality and about what happens in each day. These mental impressions – thoughts and feelings – often revolve around some sense that we are not in the right place, that something is wrong with us. This feeling that our life is out of sync or that from time to time we do not know where we are going is not new. The Buddha’s fundamental insight, more than 2500 years ago, was that there is an unsatisfactory quality to our lives and that we are frequently aware of being out of balance. It is just the nature of life. We often have to deal with uncertainty and difficulties.
As told in the story of the farmer meeting the Buddha, we will always have our “eighty-three problems” – anxieties about our career or finances, difficulties in relationships, fears about sickness and health, getting the balance right in living with others, and so on. It is the “eighty-fourth problem” – that we think all of these should not be in our lives from time to time – that adds to our difficulty and makes our day full of distress. When we fall into this eight fourth problem we go on to make ourselves more miserable over the fact that we have problems. We judge our situation harshly because we are lacking a feeling of ease. We feel we have to “get rid of” something. We so quickly make the move from “something” is going wrong at the moment, to “I” am wrong, and read events as some sort of sign of an interior or psychological malaise. One thing which meditation does is allow us sit more easily with the gaps in our experience without panicking or needing to fix them.
Suffering becomes a block in our sense of being when any position is taken as an identity – when how you are becomes who you are. When we wake up to how human life on this planet actually is, and stop running away or building walls in our heart, then we develop a wiser motivation in our lives.
The Pope is in England for the start of the process of making John Henry Newman a “saint”. Newman was a good man and a very fine thinker, personalifying a gentle, open-minded search for truth. The school I went to in Ireland, founded in 1867, was influenced by his principles of education. Most wisdom traditions hold up examples of people wo can act as an encouragement to us, such as the Bodhisattvas in the Buddhist tradition or the Saints in the Catholic and Orthodox history. Sometimes, however, the focus is on their extraordinary deeds which can lead us into thinking that full contentment is only to be found there. In this light, I like this quote from Thomas Merton:
For me to be a saint means to be myself.
Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is, in fact,
the problem of finding our who I am and discovering my true self.
Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation
The presence of this life is like a single day.
…. Deal with life’s real meaning straight away.
Longchenpa
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