Read Online Finding the Center Within: The Healing Way of Mindfulness Meditation. by Thomas Bien - Free Book Online
Authors: Thomas Bien
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back to one. Continue for five to ten minutes. Practice in an easygoing, relaxing way. When you are ready to stop, pause for another minute, and feel the effect of having done this on your body and mind.
THE EXPERIENCE (BEVERLY)
It’s about 5 A.M. on Thursday morning and I’m sitting in meditation. I felt so peaceful sitting down in my usual meditation chair. But as soon as I close my eyes, my work projects and worries are bouncing in my head, ricocheting in and out of my meditation. I decide to focus on one current personnel issue and hold that person in my attention for several minutes. I invite the universe to present possible solutions and then just hold her in my attention. No miraculous answers are evoked, but as I continue to focus on holding her in my attention, my mind calms down a bit. Breathing in and out, I feel more peaceful. My bouncing mind quiets and my focus shifts to my breathing.
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F I N D I N G T H E C E N T E R W I T H I N
Killing the Buddha
There is always a risk of getting so caught up in your technique that you miss the point. The goal of spiritual practice is to come into your life more fully, to be more aware of the life you actually have. The secondcentury church father Saint Irenaeus said that the glory of God is a human being fully alive. The true goal is to be just that. As you become more fully alive, what initially felt unsatisfactory, boring, or even painful, becomes full and satisfying. But in the meantime, you can get caught up in the means and forget the point.
Meditation, for example, is about learning to be more mindful, about coming into your actual life and experience, about enjoying the present moment. But many people turn meditation into a project. As a project, meditation can become rigid and goal oriented. You fantasize about a time when you can meditate so well—when you are so enlightened—
that life will always flow smoothly and everything will fall easily into place. Or worse still, you start to think of yourself as “spiritual.” This becomes yet another role you play, an image to live up to. And in living up to that image, you become selectively open to certain experiences and closed to others that you would prefer not to notice. You may allow yourself to experience peaceful feelings. But you may resist noticing that you feel bored, because boredom does not fit your idea of yourself as a spiritual person. And it is even harder to admit that you are angry. Any teaching, any approach or method, becomes an obstacle if we let it. The Buddha described his teaching as being like a snake. It must be taken up very carefully, or you will get bitten, and be worse off than you were before. You can take any teaching, no matter how useful, and make an idol of it, constantly checking your experience against it. And if your experience doesn’t fit, you force it into the mold of what you think you should experience.
This is not the way. The way is to be with whatever you are experiencing, and to acknowledge it not only as legitimate, but even as primary.
There is a Zen saying that if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. This is a shocking notion. But the shock impresses the point. As with religious language in general, this is not to be taken rigidly or literally. What is implied is that even the Buddha—a fully enlightened being—can be a danger to you. If the Buddha becomes an idol, if you try to conform to your image of what a Buddha is like, this becomes de-02 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 9:46 AM Page 29
F I N D A PAT H T O T H E C E N T E R
29
structive. In fact, conforming to any image whatsoever is the opposite of mindfulness. Whether the image you are conforming to is positive or negative, mindfulness is absent whenever we try to make our experience be what we think it should be instead of allowing it to be what it is. This struggle within ourselves to have only certain kinds of experiences is the main reason we lack peace. Accept
THE EXPERIENCE (BEVERLY)
It’s about 5 A.M. on Thursday morning and I’m sitting in meditation. I felt so peaceful sitting down in my usual meditation chair. But as soon as I close my eyes, my work projects and worries are bouncing in my head, ricocheting in and out of my meditation. I decide to focus on one current personnel issue and hold that person in my attention for several minutes. I invite the universe to present possible solutions and then just hold her in my attention. No miraculous answers are evoked, but as I continue to focus on holding her in my attention, my mind calms down a bit. Breathing in and out, I feel more peaceful. My bouncing mind quiets and my focus shifts to my breathing.
02 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 9:46 AM Page 28
28
F I N D I N G T H E C E N T E R W I T H I N
Killing the Buddha
There is always a risk of getting so caught up in your technique that you miss the point. The goal of spiritual practice is to come into your life more fully, to be more aware of the life you actually have. The secondcentury church father Saint Irenaeus said that the glory of God is a human being fully alive. The true goal is to be just that. As you become more fully alive, what initially felt unsatisfactory, boring, or even painful, becomes full and satisfying. But in the meantime, you can get caught up in the means and forget the point.
Meditation, for example, is about learning to be more mindful, about coming into your actual life and experience, about enjoying the present moment. But many people turn meditation into a project. As a project, meditation can become rigid and goal oriented. You fantasize about a time when you can meditate so well—when you are so enlightened—
that life will always flow smoothly and everything will fall easily into place. Or worse still, you start to think of yourself as “spiritual.” This becomes yet another role you play, an image to live up to. And in living up to that image, you become selectively open to certain experiences and closed to others that you would prefer not to notice. You may allow yourself to experience peaceful feelings. But you may resist noticing that you feel bored, because boredom does not fit your idea of yourself as a spiritual person. And it is even harder to admit that you are angry. Any teaching, any approach or method, becomes an obstacle if we let it. The Buddha described his teaching as being like a snake. It must be taken up very carefully, or you will get bitten, and be worse off than you were before. You can take any teaching, no matter how useful, and make an idol of it, constantly checking your experience against it. And if your experience doesn’t fit, you force it into the mold of what you think you should experience.
This is not the way. The way is to be with whatever you are experiencing, and to acknowledge it not only as legitimate, but even as primary.
There is a Zen saying that if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. This is a shocking notion. But the shock impresses the point. As with religious language in general, this is not to be taken rigidly or literally. What is implied is that even the Buddha—a fully enlightened being—can be a danger to you. If the Buddha becomes an idol, if you try to conform to your image of what a Buddha is like, this becomes de-02 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 9:46 AM Page 29
F I N D A PAT H T O T H E C E N T E R
29
structive. In fact, conforming to any image whatsoever is the opposite of mindfulness. Whether the image you are conforming to is positive or negative, mindfulness is absent whenever we try to make our experience be what we think it should be instead of allowing it to be what it is. This struggle within ourselves to have only certain kinds of experiences is the main reason we lack peace. Accept
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