ORIENTATION FOR ANY MEDITATION PRACTICE
In traditional Buddhist trainings, when one steps onto a spiritual path, the practice that is always given first, before any mindfulness or meditation practices, is a generosity practice.
Why?
Because the quality of relinquishing, the letting go that is central to generosity, allows all other efforts related to the cultivation of mindfulness, meditation, compassion and joy to flow more easily. The ability to let go is essential.
The spiritual path tends to follow a different route here in the West, because we like to be skillful with our minds. We are enticed through the intellect and by mental challenges. But our intellect and our clinging to control are also major obstacles to reaching the depths of meditation, because they are the opposite of relinquishing.
It’s the vast heart space we ultimately want to occupy in our spiritual practices, including meditation. Because a spiritual life is not an intellectual pursuit. In fact, the Buddha described the path of enlightenment as “a liberation of the heart into love and connection”.
The overreliance on the intellect in the West (which runs concurrent to our fear of the heart space) is why many in the West mistake the aim of meditation as merely a training or quieting of the mind or a practice in concentration.
The ability to focus the mind is a step in, but there’s so much more on offer. Because concentration and meditation are not the same thing. Concentration has a point of focus. Meditation is an expansive awareness with no point of focus. Concentration is about control and with concentration we’re still in the mind. Meditation is about putting the mind and its need for control down, and opening up to a greater state of vastness and surrender.
To be clear, this isn’t a criticism of concentration-oriented practices. Concentration techniques are valuable techniques that can help us move towards surrender. What I’m proposing is that concentration is not the same as meditation, and concentration alone will not transform us.
What will transform us is finding our way into the beautifully still, deeper aspect of the heart space, where a great settling and spreading can occur. Where love becomes infinite. Where the dualities between self and other disappear, the veils between the seen and unseen are lifted, and our suffering fades alongside fading thoughts of not-enoughness, superiority, and separation in general.
SKILLS OF THE MIND VS SKILLS OF THE HEART
While the mind excels at making distinctions and differentiations (and there are plenty of places in our lives where such capacities serve us), the heart does the opposite. The heart is a holder of all things. Of all truths. Of all realities. Of all paradoxes. It’s like an antenna that connects us to all things. If the heart is in a protracted or protective state, we feel cut off and isolated, sometimes from our own selves. But when we enter the heart and open the heart, that antenna extends in all directions and connects us to all things. With an open heart, we can be alone any time, even all the time, and never feel cut off.
So as difficult or terrifying as it may seem, we ultimately want to put down the intellect and view our meditation practice not so much as a doing, but more as a relinquishing. A relinquishing of control. A relinquishing of productivity. A relinquishing of self. A relinquishing of our story and our attachment to it. A letting go of thought in general. So that in that emptiness, in the space made available by your relinquishing, your true nature and the true nature of all things can be revealed to you.
I know, that’s a very abstract thing to be talking about — your true nature and the true nature of all things revealing themselves to you. But unfortunately, there are no better words for these things. Great poets can get close to what that is but ultimately, the only way for a person to really understand what that means is to experience it and to experience it, you have to let go.
This takes patience and commitment. And for the modern mind, it also takes trust. Trust to stop thinking, trust to stop trying to make things happen, to suspend your mental efforting and open yourself to a different kind of knowing if you’ve been relying almost exclusively on the mind for all these years. It’s an act of trust to put that down.
All this to say that when we close our eyes and turn our gaze inward, what we’re really doing is meeting ourselves. Meeting our true nature. We’re opening to and through the vast heart space, allowing something quiet and eternal to come forward and in its reflection, you see that you’re already complete. You’re already perfect. And that you need not look any further for love or for happiness. It’s right here.
When we close our eyes and turn our gaze inward, we’re creating a container in which to bring back together our disintegrated parts. We bring the body, our attention, and our feeling-self together in the same place at the same time. A feeling of rest and calm comes instantly, simply for no longer being so pulled apart. And through this process of reintegrating ourselves, we also begin to reintegrate our personal self with the totality that we belong to. Through that comes an even deeper feeling of quiet and stillness. The end of searching. The beginning of being. So simple.
WHAT ARE WE SO AFRAID OF?
There are two fears that typically rise up when we consider the idea of encountering ourselves so openly.
One is that you won’t like who or what you encounter. For Westerners, with our problems with self-love (which is a large topic in my 6-week compassion immersion if you might like to join me in that program), allowing your true nature to be revealed can be a frightening idea if you believe your true nature is not good enough or that it’s somehow fundamentally bad.
But I assure you, nothing could be further from the truth. As you encounter your true nature, you’ll find there’s no such thing as not enough or not loveable. Those thoughts are symptoms of the shortcomings of our modern societies and just aren’t true. But you can’t know that just by someone telling you that. You have to encounter this truth yourself. So it takes a little bit of that trust I mentioned earlier.
The second fear is that all the undealt with pain that one has been storing away will all come up at once, like a great flooding, and that it will be overwhelming and unmanageable.
While it’s true that in this process of meeting yourself you will begin to encounter and release your pain, it’s also true that our psyches have lots of self-protective mechanisms built into them. So this releasing doesn’t happen as a flooding. It happens in manageable bits. One thing will arise, and in time you release it. Then another thing arises and in time you release it. Until one day you’re actually free of the pain you’ve been holding. I’m not saying it’s always easy, but it’s not a flooding. If you experience something that feels like a flooding, it’s more likely the fear of the flooding that you’re experiencing.
Having oriented yourself to meditation in general, please click here for FOUR COMMITMENTS to make as you approach any meditation practice.
