Nearing the winter solstice,the shortest day of the year, the invitation is to settle the mind & body. When we do that, we can attend to the deep wisdom that resides in our own hearts, and remember that we practice like this – and experience all the difficulties of life as well – not as individuals, but together.
Not different, not separate.
Nearing the winter solstice,the shortest day of the year, the invitation is to settle the mind & body. When we do that, we can attend to the deep wisdom that resides in our own hearts, and remember that we practice like this – and experience all the difficulties of life as well – not as individuals, but together.
Not different, not separate.
Wake Up Call #375: Settling In & Waking Up, Together
Hi everyone, it’s Judi Cohen and this is Wake Up Call 375. I hope you’re doing well and enjoying the season.
Last week I began talking about the perfection of meditation, the fifth of the six Zen paramitas, and I want to continue with that. The question last week was whether it’s really necessary to meditate, and the answer is yes. I know how tempting it is to want to say to myself – and maybe you do this – that taking a walk, or lying in bed paying attention to my breath every once in a while, or gardening, or whatever, is meditation. And it is meditative, but there’s a real benefit to meditation that just isn’t available in the applied or portable practices.
And, I’m always talking about formal versus portable practice. So let me say a little bit about what I mean when I say there’s formal mindfulness and portable mindfulness and they’re equally important.
There are two main kinds of meditation, in the traditions I’ve studied. One is meditation to cultivate a calm, steady mind and heart. This is sometimes called Shamata practice. Whenever we’re paying attention to the breath, noticing when the mind wanders off and coming back to the breath, that single-focused endeavor is Shamata practice.
I love what Pam Weiss, a meditation teacher who runs a company called Appropriate Response, that brings mindfulness into the corporate world, says about Shamata practice. She says, “you have to calm down before you can wake up.” This has been true for me. When my mind is racing around, bouncing off of ideas, full of aversion or grasping, not-calm, not able to “look in,” it’s hard to do anything else – hard to “look up.” Meaning, I can’t look in, at my own mind/body/system, and tune this instrument here, because there’s too much static, and I can’t look up, at other humans, other beings, at the world, and be of much use, because there’s too much static.
So I agree with Pam: we have to calm down before we can wake up.
Calming down involves settling the body in the present moment. We do that using an anchor, like the breath. We can also do that using the sensations in the body as anchors, or the anchor of sound. In some traditions Shamata is practiced by focusing on a candle, Guru, or other object; on chanting; and there are various other practices.
We never actually “perfect” this element of meditation, though. There’s no such thing as a perfect meditator, as far as I know. What there are, are people like us, who make a deep, unshakable, commitment to calming down, to finding our seat and locating our anchor and sitting still for ten minutes or thirty minutes or an hour, every day, training the mind/body/system to calm down by placing our attention on our anchor and when it wanders, coming back, with kindness, with bemusement, but also with seriousness, again and again and again.
There are deeper states of concentration that can be achieved. On a longer retreat I was in one once, one of the preliminary ones, and it was pretty delicious. But even everyday states of concentration, of paying attention moment to moment, are pretty delicious, I think. We can take it further, but we can also simply dedicate ourselves to the ordinary (and also extraordinary) practice of cultivating a calm, steady mind. This, to me, is the perfection of meditation.
Once we’ve done that – not become perfect meditators but begun living into the perfection of meditation – then what naturally arises is the other type of meditation, insight meditation. The Pali word for this is Vipassana. It’s what Pam Weiss means when she talks about waking up.
Waking up in this context isn’t the same as being woke, at least as I understand that word, although I’m not very woke as I understand the word so maybe that’s not right. But anyway what I mean is that in this context, waking up means waking up to the way the world really is. To the three characteristics of the world.
Those three characteristics begin with the insight into impermanence (the Pali word is anicca). Things are one way one moment, or we feel one way one moment, and the next moment, everything changes.
Impermanence is sometimes considered bad news, especially since we’re not excluded from the calculation. Meaning, we are born, we live our lives, then we die. We all know this, intellectually, but we don’t know it know it, and then one day, maybe our minds are calm and clear enough that we do. I was in the hospital last week – I had a relatively routine procedure and spiked a fever and had to be on IV antibiotics for a minute - I’m good now! – but while I was there, when I wasn’t being measured and poked and assessed, I was meditating on impermanence. Considering this body and how attached I am to it, and realizing it’s not going to last forever.
The next insight, or second of the three characteristics, is that everything is just a little bit unsatisfactory and so we have suffering in our lives. We might be very happy, be in a joyful relationship, love our job, have terrific kids, have had a happy childhood…and still, the temperature is a little too cold, the traffic a little too much, our partner forgot to pick up the bread, we’re late and there’s traffic…and this doesn’t even take into account that we lose the people we love – so we experience unsatisfactoriness. Dukkha, in Pali. A fundamental characteristic of being human – and Vipassana practice is about gaining insight into that.
The third characteristic or insight, is that this self that we consider so solid, so durable, so reliable, so definable – is just an illusion. The is no solid self – the understanding is called anatta in the Pali. We’re in flow, all the time. We’re changing all the time.
Mindfulness – the practice we all share - takes Shamata, the calm, concentrated mind as its foundation. And then it remembers impermanence, not self, unsatisfactoriness, as the fabric.
And then it gives us the greatest gift of all: the ability to be with whatever is arising, moment after moment, not concentrating so much as attending; not noticing “aha” insights so much as taking the three characteristics as part of life.
This is the wisdom of mindfulness.
Its compassion is that when we are calm, when we see clearly, we can remember that we are all in this together, not different, not separate. In this way, mindfulness brings compassion first as a relief, and then as a great delight.
Let’s sit.
Nearing the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year,
the invitation is to settle the mind & body,
attend to the deep wisdom that resides inside our own hearts,
and remember that we practice like this
– and experience all the difficulties of our lives as well –
not as individuals, but together, not different, not separate.
[Play the John Lennon Imagine video at the end of the Paramitas – whenever that is! (It’s bookmarked under Music.)]