Healing attitudes
By Vajradaka, London, April, 2008
There is an ancient Buddhist meditation, which strengthens the very
heart of the emotional and mental aspects of love. The spirit of this
meditation conveys the sense of a journey into the depth of the mind to engage with the essence of personal responsibility and social engagement. The Metta meditation as it is called is a journey of discovery and learning about care, kindness and responsiveness.
This whole approach of working with the mind is not just about meditation but entering into discovering everything about well-wishing. Like many inner journeys you are to some degree entering into the unknown to discover what is here and what the choices are.
Having a healing attitude to your own being well and health is at the centre of being able to have well wishing for others. The over-arching sense of being for your own physical, mental and emotional well being, rather than against it is the main working ground of a healing attitude. It is all about being in a process of finding how you can come into real and effective care for yourself. It is engaging in a process of change and transformation in ones life as a whole.
When we enter into such a vast topic as love and well wishing the relationship between receptivity and following a state of care on the one hand and personal initiative and purpose on the other become very important. It is very effective to have a whole and thorough approach to receptivity and personal initiative. So consciously engaging with these issues becomes part of the process. To have a sense of purpose and direction needs continuity and persistence. This is effectively taking on everything to do with love in a direct and purposeful way. It is taking on the attitudes and actions that lead to things going wrong with your health and bringing harmful assumptions and habits to light. This includes the more forward-thinking prevention of harm and ill health as well as dealing with existing difficulties. This is far more than a fix-it approach to curing ailments. A healing process is about reconciling harmful attitudes and their corresponding actions and replacing them with realistic care and actions. You might value your work more than your health. That set of values is directly related to your attitude to your health and welfare, and by implication the things that you do that affect your health. Emotional and mental attitudes of well-wishing and their opposite colour everything, they permeate everything you do.
Being engaged in a process of taking care of yourself is about engaging in everything that affects your well being. It’s on going, through health and illness. Taking care of yourself when you are healthy is a way of preventing difficulties later. This has to do with paying attention to the emotional and mental attitudes which affect your health and well-being. Looking to attitudes is as effective as actual practical and tangible things. This more mental side takes in all the explicit and implicit attitudes that you have about your health and well being as a whole. To take a whole and complete approach to your health is about taking responsibility for your attitudes, values and beliefs. Your actions and practical approaches to your well-being often come out of attitudes and beliefs.
This means taking yourself on with regard to every direct or indirect attitude you have in relationship to your health. By implication this means being prepared to learn from experience and change over time. Part of this is evaluating your values and committing to values that have your health as a high priority. Your values can change they are not fixed. So attitudes based on your values can change too. We can have inherited values, which in a way means that they are not really ours until we make them conscious.
Attitudes to the value of your health can be hidden from you or not taken seriously, but they can still make you do things that are detrimental to your health. Sometimes unhelpful attitudes need to be healed in themselves, by being transformed into healthy attitudes and values that are really for rather than against our own health and welfare. This means going deeper than a fix-it when it’s broke approach. It’s more about being fully behind being well, rather just fixing ailments and stopping pain.
Our primary drive is to be well. That drive can be subverted by attitudes and ideas that lead us in a direction of activities that are not actually good for us. We take on patterns of behavior that then become engrained habits, which effectively divert us from being able to wisely assess what is actually good for us in any given situation. Healing these unhelpful attitudes partly comes about by reconnecting with the underlying drive of wanting to be well and checking our ideas and behaviour against it.
Part of the healing attitude towards our health and welfare is to re-enforce positive qualities of care over time. It can be very effective to have a clear strategy to regularly bring to mind that you do value your health. That sense of what is important becomes re-enforced and goes deeper. Regularly reminding yourself of your values increases your confidence in them. Just remembering a value mentally is helpful but meditation can help the value of well wishing go deeper. When there is a time of crisis or unusual difficulty then that momentum of well wishing can be drawn on and can give you strength.
There is a kind peace that comes from having a thorough and effective approach to wishing yourself well and healthy, partially because it is so obviously affects your physical and emotional health.
© Vajradaka, April 2008
RECEPTIVITY AND ACTION IN MEDITATION, By Vajradaka
While teaching meditation or when discussing it with friends, I always try to keep basic principles in mind. Sometimes I refer to them overtly, but they are mostly in the background, providing the context within which the details of practicing meditation are explored. One such principle is the relationship between receptivity and activity. These are pillars upon which much of what happens in meditation practice rests.
Receptivity consists in the ability to notice and be aware in a relaxed manner. It enables us to absorb and integrate the different impressions that arise as we meditate. It is like a fertile ground in which our positive mental states can grow and blossom. Receptivity can include strong aspirations — what we might call faith, and even insight. If we are receptive in the face of hindrances to meditation, we can sometimes gain access to a strong intuitive response, as if a well of deeper wisdom makes itself felt. And this guides us away from what is unhelpful.
Activity refers to our endeavor and application. It is what we do in our practice, including the application of particular meditation practices and methods for stimulating positive states of mind, and overcoming hindrances. When we strengthen our positive states of mind — by using a phrase, or bringing to mind an appropriate image — we, are being active. When we consciously check for hindrances and adjust accordingly, we are being active. With practice, our ability to be active becomes intuitive rather than considered or premeditated.
We need both receptivity and activity in our meditation practice and it is sometimes useful to assess the relationship between them to see how much of each is present. However, they are often intermingled, and they are always interrelated. Even so, most people have a bias towards either activity or receptivity. When the relationship between the two becomes attenuated, our meditation will suffer. Over-emphasis on activity can make our practice dry and shallow. A disproportionate emphasis on receptivity can lead to stagnation.
It is important to find ways to ensure that these two qualities operate together. One approach can be described in terms of “noticing” and “looking.” Noticing refers to what happens when we are receptive, and we notice the appearance and disappearance of mental states. Their arising evokes an immediate response within us, which we also notice. We may then choose to be active, in order to strengthen a positive quality or undermine a hindrance.
Looking involves watching for, or searching out, particular mental states that may have been incipient but of which we were not previously conscious. We may ask: what is happening in my experience? or what is missing? or is there a hindrance present? These questions direct our awareness to areas that we might have overlooked. Of course, as well as being active in asking the question, we also need receptivity and sensitivity to what emerges.
The Buddhist tradition suggests various antidotes to hindrances in meditation. Some of these are quite active - for example, the technique of cultivating the opposite quality to what is obstructing meditation. So if one experiences ill-will or hatred in meditation, a suggested remedy is to cultivate loving-kindness (metta). In applying such a remedy, however, we also need receptivity because when the positive quality of loving-kindness actually arises, we need sensitivity and openness in order to include it into the practice.
Another traditional antidote draws more on the qualities of receptivity. This is the “sky-like attitude.” Here we are aware of the hindrance, but neither act to remove it, nor add to what is there. We feel that the mind is like the sky — huge and boundless — and that the hindrance is like a cloud, which we allow to drift away in its own time.
Balancing these qualities is quite an art. As we consciously exercise our skills of receptivity and activity in meditation, they will gradually become second-nature, and will interact harmoniously.
Anxiety
Fragment of a dialogue between two friends
J:
As you know I am in Fair trade business and have been for a long time. I don’t have any trouble with being ethical, because I seem to have a fine tuned sensitivity to what will harm me and others. In some ways I am pretty courageous especially in terms of upholding my ideals both in friendship and business. Even so what gives me most trouble is anxiety, I sometimes find it quite debilitating. Mostly it just makes me feel uncomfortable. When I notice the anxiety I become even more jumpy. I don’t have a way of relating to what’s going on in a way which helps me get out of the anxiety.
At the time I don’t know what it is about. I just have a sense that something is wrong or that something will go wrong. Of course a feeling of impending doom and not knowing what it is about makes me feel even more anxious Sometimes I later find out that there are some practical difficulties at work that have built up and are now causing problems.
V: At some deeper level there was a perception, you might even call it wisdom that circumstances were not going to go your way. In my experience anxiety is often a sign of something else that needs attending to. I look upon it as a friend who is reminding me of the bigger picture. So I see it as a signal that something needs to be looked at or considered. At that moment I would ask myself what am I forgetting? Or I ask myself whether it is a result of something important being overlooked or forgotten.
Perhaps the anxiety arises because you had not paid enough attention to some aspect of the practical things or turned a blind eye to something important. Or because you were holding on too tightly to wanting things to be a certain way.
J: Finding out what is behind the anxiety and what it is all about seems important. I do try and think about that by asking myself “What am I doing wrong?” or “what shouldn’t I be doing?” but when I’m in an anxious state my thinking is also anxious and I go round in circles.
V: We often have a habitual way of asking ourselves questions. It is useful to take a fresh look at how you actually ask yourself questions. This gives you the opportunity to review whether it is actually effective or not. Sometimes we keep on asking ourselves a question in a particular framework but it doesn’t point us in the right direction. For example if I ask myself “what am I doing that is not right?” it is too convoluted and indirect for the mind to give a direct answer. That kind of question needs too much thinking. It doesn’t allow for a direct response from the mind or body. Framing the question more positively would be, something like “what is behind this “? Or, still being direct but to give it a bit more direction asking “ Is there something I need to remember?” This is usually more effective. It might sound simplistic but the mind works best when it has direct positive questions, rather than indirect negative ones, especially negative questions such as” why isn’t it better” rather than “ what will help?” or, “What is behind this The mind needs a clear and positive direction when you are asking it to do something. ”? When I first discovered this it took me nearly a year to get over the habit of framing questions and directives to myself in the negative. I was so used to it that I didn’t even notice I was doing it till I started to pay particular attention. The mind loves to be moving in a direction where the next step is clear. It enjoys going in a particular direction even if the end goal is not clear. This is as true for the way that you ask yourself questions as it is to the way that you frame intentions
© Vajradaka 18.02.2008
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN OPPOSITES, FOCUS AND BREADTH
It is always a delight for me to explore how my own experience in meditation corresponds to traditional Buddhist teaching. What I sometimes find, though, is that a particular term in English does not quite point me in quite the right direction. For example, the terms “concentration” or “one-pointedness” do not correspond exactly to my experience.
Living and practicing meditation at Vajraloka Meditation Centre, I occasionally found new phrases that give me a better sense of what I am experiencing. I particularly favor terms that give a practical entrance into an experience, as well as describing the experience itself. What follows is an explanation of how to practice an approach which I have come to call “breadth” and “focus,” and thereby arrive at what I think is traditionally meant by “a one-pointed and concentrated state.” The example I will use here is awareness in the context of the breath, or what is often called the mindfulness of breathing, but the principle can be applied to any meditation.
Often the level of awareness you have just before you meditate and in the first few minutes of meditation determines where the meditation will take you and how deep it will go. You don’t need much experience of meditation to know that there is often a lot going on within your mind and body of which you are completely unaware. So when you sit down to meditate the first thing to do is to become more sensitive to what is actually going on. This is the basis for an important principle in meditation which is working from where you are. Approaching the meditation on the basis of this principle means you do not jump over yourself and attempt to force yourself into a particular state.
When you sit down to meditate become more sensitive to pleasant and unpleasant sensations in your body, or aware of a previously unnoticed mood. Like moving out of a room and exploring the rest of a house, you can extend the scope of your perception. Awareness in this context is not a cool observing eye, and it does not mean thinking “about” what is happening. It is the tangible experience of the qualities and tones of your body, emotions, feelings, and mental states.
First, gently pay attention to the sensations and qualities of your body. Make the transition from thinking about what is happening to a more direct, in-the-body perception. What are its qualities? If it does not take you away from the experience be open to a word or image that describes a specific experience in a part of the body. Is it hard, soft, warm, cool? While you scan through the body becoming aware of the subtleties of bodily sensations maintain a peripheral sense of yourself as a whole.
Then pay some attention to your feelings and emotions. As well as being generally open, you can seek out qualities, such as faith, kindness or contentment, which may already be present to some degree. Then bring to mind a general intention for the meditation practice, which is to be aware of yourself in the context of the breath.
Next come back to a broad awareness of yourself as a whole. As well as being useful in preparing for meditation, establishing breadth of awareness also stimulates a tangible awareness that changes and grows throughout the practice.
Having established this broad awareness, you can now allow the main object of meditation to come into the forefront of your attention. While staying aware let your awareness gently take in more and more of the breath. Notice if you have a tendency to jump on the breath, or be too forcibly fixed on it, if you are then gently soften your attention. There is a relationship between persistent attention and sensitivity to the breath. The skill is in finding the appropriate relationship between these two at any given time.
At this point you might notice a tendency to stay in a rather undifferentiated awareness, or an opposite tendency to have too hard a focus on the breath. You have to do a balancing act, to maintain the focus on the breath alongside an open awareness of yourself as a whole. In the Mindfulness of Breathing it can help to think in terms of letting your whole body be the breadth of awareness, while keeping the particular sensations of the breath as your focus. This helps to counter the feeling that there is too much going on at once. Gradually you can extend the breadth to include feelings, emotions and mental activity.
As you move further into the meditation practice, the aim is to bring that whole sense of yourself (breadth) and the main meditation object (focus) together into a unified whole. Every now and then, check whether you have slipped into being too vague and have lost clarity or if you have become too rigid and lost the sense of breadth. Gently come back to awareness of your body, establishing breadth from there, and then gently let the awareness of the breath emerge. Stay with it as it changes, being alive to the experience.
As breadth and focus come closer together, you feel increasingly present and receptive. You become more deeply concentrated, and gradually make a transition into a realm of inspiration and clarity. The unique significance and potential of the moment comes alive. You can experience clear perceptions without distraction and it is easier to apply yourself wholeheartedly. The mind can be both expansive and one-pointed. Experience can grow simultaneously broader and deeper, and it can continue to broaden and deepen without any limit to how far this process can go.
***
Some thoughts on learning about yourself and what you consider of value and meaningful, in the form of a conversation.
V: What do you think is important about learning.
A: I suppose I have an instinctual rejection of having narrow minded views and biases, so very generally I think of learning as broadening the mind . I don’t like narrow mindedness in myself or others. I cringe at the thought of turning into being hard line and narrow minded about anything. Openness and flexibility seem to be a key to learning. It is not that I never make my mind up about things, but when I do it is provisional to being confirmed as being true over a long period of time. I sometimes consciously question my own opinions, to find out if I still believe them. Sometimes I realise that those opinions just do not fit any more and need to be revised or they still seem true. It is like asking myself; are these ideas the whole story? And do they fit with a broader way of thinking about things. As a result I don’t take things for granted and usually have an open mind. I accept that it may take me quite a while to come to my own conclusions about things, but I prefer that, to coming to a conclusion prematurely which I hold rigidly and then am painfully wrenched, when I finally see that I have been deluded.
V ; Recently I have come to feel a certain amount of awe about using the word openness in terms of learning about myself. There is something so unequivocal about it. Openness means openness to everything, there are no ifs-or-buts or let-out clauses, I am either prepared to be open to learning and becoming aware of everything about how I am and can be or I am not. When it comes to openness I have to ask myself; am I really completely behind openness? Is there any aspect of myself that I am not prepared to be open about even to myself. It might be fair to say that I would like to be open, then the momentum to being more open has started and I can strengthen it as time goes on.
A; It does seem that a great way to stimulate learning is by asking questions. This is just as true for oneself as it is to being in a teaching situation. A question can draw out something that is not apparently obvious to oneself. I was in a classroom situation a couple of years back and a girl said about a teacher that he had been in a bad mood. I asked her if she had done anything to contribute to that. She said she had called him an idiot. I asked her if she thought that might have contributed to him being in a bad mood. In that moment her face showed a moment of realisation as it dawned on her that her behaviour had been a major factor in the whole situation. I think in that moment she really learned something because the question had taken her out of her narrow perception and given her a broader view. I can imagine that that moment of understanding would help her to ask herself similar questions in the future.
I have become wary of my own tendencies to rigidly believe in assumptions. But I see it in kids that I teach as well. I once showed a group of kids some pictures of good-looking and not so good-looking men and women and asked them who they thought was trustworthy. They invariably thought that the good-looking ones were trustworthy. The girls chose a particularly good-looking young man as trustworthy. I said that six other young women had thought so too and they were all dead, as he was a mass murderer.
When I am prepared to question and reflect on my assumptions about myself and my relationship to the world I am right in the middle of a learning and transformation process. We all have views and opinions about how we are and how things should be. As long as I am open to the possibility of my opinions and views changing there is the possibility of learning . Being prepared to review views is not an expression of weakness but of having the strength of being adaptable and facing the truth.
V; You are extending the meaning of learning beyond accumulating and memorising facts and also thinking of it as a personal process, in which your understanding and responses are constantly changing. Learning in this sense is a creative process where the process of discovery is expanding, learning is changing. Is there anything behind your assumptions and opinions?
A; what immediately occurs is the state of mind out of which my assumptions or opinions arise. If my underlying state of mind is biased in a particular way then my opinions will follow. Do my feelings and thinking allow me to have a whole and true picture or are they slanting me in a particular direction? For example if I have either an extremely cynical or a naïve frame of mind my assumptions and opinions will be influenced by them. Neither of those frame of minds or the assumptions that come from them give the whole picture; they are both a distortion or fragment of the truth. The same is true of the glass is half –empty pessimist frame of mind and the glass is half-full optimistic attitude. So for me to be aware of my assumptions I need to be aware of the underlying emotional tone and that in itself is a big learning area. So learning about my own assumptions is also learning about my emotional tendencies and responses to life. I find this process fascinating, although sometimes embarrassing. When I have gone right away from my home and work and had time and space to experience myself without my usual social framework I see things very differently. I was in a situation like that recently and realised that I had a tendency to be too cynical and negative about myself, it was an embarrassing moment, but it also gave me a sense of liberation, as I was free to see myself in a bigger picture and be more realistic.
Part of what I understand by learning is that it is not selective, it is consciously paying attention to a wide range of tendencies and ways of thinking about things over time. Over time I remember to pay attention not just to my strengths but my weaknesses too. It is loosely systematic because I do not have a rigid timetable but a more organic rhythm in which everything eventually has its time. We are always making decisions about what is important to us. So the less important things can get shunted to the bottom of the list.
It can be tricky to remember important qualities, even ones you value. It is possible to get so locked into being serious about learning that it is hard to be playful. . Even though it is important to be serious about learning, the process itself can be playful and light.
© Vajradaka
THE ATTITUDE OF OPENESS IN MEDITATION
An essential part of the spirit of meditation is openess, which means openess to everything that may emerge when you sit down quietly, without any particular project to occupy yourself with. Being prepared to be open to everything in meditation means you are in a position to face everything about yourself.
Being prepared to be open means you can learn directly about your mental habits over time and allows you to be in a position to bring the whole of your awareness to bear upon old habits and patterns, many of which might be outside of conscious awareness. Out of this freshness to your experience arises the possibility to assess and relate to each experience freshly. This allows you to clear the backlog of ‘no-go’ areas, which can have built-up over time.
Before you even start to meditate it is useful to ask yourself - Am I prepared to be open to whatever is in my experience? Are there some experiences that are unacceptable to me and do I know precisely what those experiences are? Do I have no go areas?
Being prepared to be open to our experience in meditation allows us to discover the underlying views and subtle stories we tell ourselves about what we are, and how we should be and what is and is not acceptable. Many of these views and stories may not have been assessed in a conscious way for a long time or are based on assumptions. An attitude of openness is appropriate to all forms of meditation practice.
This openness and awareness is not based on shoulds or dogmas about how things should be, but it is grounded much more on an honest appraisal of what is here in our experience and in relationship to pragmatic and ethical considerations at the time.
***
A metaphor for being alive to your experience, curiosity and realising your potential.
Recently I was visiting Rome with an old friend called Terry. We were walking along a pedestrian street, the walls of the houses that faced on to the street were all high but rather unkempt, the brown paint blistering and peeling off. It was a very ordinary Renaissance street, nothing special. At a certain point I noticed that Terry was walking in the way that seemed that he was slightly ahead of himself, as if he was intent on getting somewhere, but not noticing his surroundings. I noticed that I was doing the same and adjusted slightly by arriving more into myself, which naturally slowed my pace. At that moment I was more alive to myself ,which allowed me to notice more perceptively what was around me. At pretty much the same moment I noticed a large doorway to my left with a few people standing around. There was a buzz of interest and people were receiving some sort of brochure from a woman standing at the doorway. I called Terry back and we went to the doorway. I suppose we had a generally curious air about us and the woman at the door told us this was a very unusual situation. Behind this door there was a wonderful Renaissance palace that was only opened to the public for a few hours on one day every year, and this was it. As we were the only English speakers there she offered to take us around personally and give us a guided tour. We entered from the drab street into a brightly coloured and beautifully decorated palace. This palace was the most prestigious men’s club in Rome, the members of which were Popes, cardinals, presidents, nobility and the leaders of Italy’s business world. She pointed out a secret passageway that came from a small innocuous church in the neighbourhood which gave Popes and cardinals access to the palace without attracting attention to themselves. Much of the architecture and art was original and in beautiful condition. It seemed to shine with that spirit of the Renaissance and I found myself uplifted and brightened by it. When we arrived back on the street it was with a much richer sense of the context in which we were walking. We now knew something of what was behind this ‘ordinary street’.
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