Island Meditation Project Excerpt
Introduction
We all have the ability to meditate. We all do it in our daily lives, but most of us have not learned to make the most of this remarkable state. We hear of people who use meditation to produce comforting states of health. Others tell of sustaining spiritual experiences. Perhaps you have been wanting to return to exploring this tool you encountered earlier in your life. Perhaps you are in need. Perhaps you are merely curious.
But how will you learn? Where will you find a teacher? Can you be sure you can do it? If you are reading these words, learning to meditate is possible for you. Whether you listen to someone reading to you, or you are doing the reading from a piece of paper, or you are reading e-mail or a web page on a computer screen, makes no difference. What does make the difference is that you do the practice.
We have used two books as texts. Learn to Meditate, by British psychologist David Fontana, is a lovely book that refers to all the major traditions of the world. Meditation for Dummies is equally valuable, but a very different flavor. It is written by Stephen Bodian, a former editor of Yoga Journal. You do not need any books to learn to meditate. These two are merely suggestions for further support if you are the type who likes to read.
Our classes have found support in meeting for an hour together once a week. We meditate together for ten, fifteen, or twenty minutes, and then we talk - about meditating, not about our personal problems. Perhaps you can arrange a group or find at least one friend to take up the challenge with you. That way you can keep each other going. Feel free to forward this to friends and family members who might be interested in joining you in this enterprise. Not only do you give them a gift, a tool for enhancing their well being, but their supportive company - real or virtual - may help you keep with the practice long enough to make it really a part of you.
You cannot just read about meditation or think about it: you have to do it to experience the benefits. Traditions seem to suggest that the most important aspect of learning to meditate is that you actually do it for some six to eight weeks. Forty days. (Or forty nights.) Your brain seems to need that time to develop habitual pathways. There is even evidence that the brain may be producing microstructures as well. Don't even ask yourself "Is this working? Can I really do it?" until you have completed the course. A pain clinic probably would not take you on unless you committed to a six or eight week series of sessions. Without commitment, you would be wasting their time and yours.
Marking off sessions on a daily calendar should help you keep track of whether or not you are actually fulfilling the contract you have made with yourself to do this practice. It seems that the most difficult part of meditating is learning to stick with the practice, making it a constant and routine part of your life, available whenever you need it. Use whatever enticements you think will work for you to get you through this calendar course. You begin at the beginning and work your way through to the end, preferably at your own pace, repeating until you feel ready to go on. You get to come back to the table at this all-you-can-eat feast as often as you like. If you miss a day, just go back and pick up where you left off. You may do more than one session in a day. Space them out so that you feel unhurried. Allow yourself time to absorb the material before going on. When you complete the regimen, you are sure to feel rewarded.
Each week presents a theme. You may wish to look at a week's worth of topics at a time, but please read and do each day's assignment individually, mindfully. Each deserves your full attention. Consider the meaning of each day's write-up as a whole. You will probably not do all the suggested avenues of exploration on a given day. Just be sure you do the daily assignment, the upper case sentences, the suggestions in capital letters. Review as often as you like. Look ahead as often as you will, but remember: one day at a time. A house cat can eat a moose - one bite at a time.
When? It does not matter what time of day you do your session. Dawn and dusk are among the favored traditional times. That may suggest to you that you set your alarm fifteen minutes earlier than you might otherwise. Perhaps you prefer to take a bit of your lunch hour, or use the first minutes when you arrive home from work. If you climb into bed at night and realize you have not done your day's allotment, simply tell yourself this is not a sleep session and do a practice session then. If you awake in the middle of the night, you can make good use of the time practicing then. See? There really is no excuse. You cannot say you just do not have the time do this. And why stop at a single time each day?
Where? In the morning you may just do it in your warm bed. Prop yourself up on pillows if you have trouble remaining awake. You are aiming to sit with your spine straight in the traditional variations of the meditation postures, but that is not necessary. Perhaps you have a reclining chair you like, or a favorite rocking chair in which you can sit still with your feet firmly planted on the ground. You might even try stretching out on the floor. As you meditate, your body's rate of consuming oxygen lowers, your blood pressure lowers, and your body temperature lowers. You may wish to cover yourself lightly with a blanket or shawl.
These suggestions of ways you might use meditation are meant to be used in consultation with your doctor if you have a health problem. Those who are working with a counselor or psychiatrist likewise would be well advised to use these lessons as something to be discussed with your professional. A church group, particularly a Spiritual Discernment group, might enjoy exploring these practices from many traditions.
Members of the Island clergy and Island health workers are working together on this project. Western, Christian, churches have not been historically been involved in teaching all their members much about the tool of meditation. But the tradition is there. It is found in nearly all religions, once we learn what how to recognize it in its different guises. We are currently seeing a developing interest in how one learns to use this powerful enhancer of prayer. Likewise, the Western medical community is seeing a rising contemporary interest in how patients might learn to maximize the contribution of the mind to well-being and to some aspects of healing. Modern neurological advances and quite amazing monitoring devices are making it possible to document what happens in the brain/body when we meditate. Hospice programs are finding that meditation may be useful, good to the last breath.
We feel that our little Island will be a healthier place the more its people know how to use meditation. But really, we are not an island anywhere on this planet. Welcome to the adventure.
Week 1 It all begins with breathing
You think just breathing is boring? A favorite Zen joke tells of the Master who suggested that his complaining student come look in the rain barrel. The student complied. The master plunged the student's head under water and held it there for ten long seconds. He released the sputtering student and asked him, "Do you still find just breathing boring?"
We open our life with a breath inhaled. We close this life with a breath exhaled. In between, we can use these precious couplets in a quite remarkable way. Around the world, and over the years, many people have discovered that "following the breath," counting breaths, noticing our breathing, settles us into a meditative state. You do not strain or push the breath. You don't hold it. You just watch the rise and falls as breaths come in and go out.
Breathing is one of the actions of our body that we all know how to do consciously and unconsciously. We gasp! Are we surprised or expressing disapproval? We can hyperventilate at will or spontaneously. We hold our breath in suspense - or do it deliberately to avoid a bad smell. We may scarcely think of our breathing at all in our daily lives, at least in periods of good health. As meditators, we are most interested in this interface between actions we perform consciously and those we carry on unconsciously.
This week we will focus on our breathing.
1/1 - Breath, dragons and frogs
Close your lips. Put your tongue on the roof of your mouth up front at the inside of your upper teeth. Breathe through your nose. Focus on your breathing. Sense the slight breeze that crosses the groove that runs from your upper lip to the base of your nostrils. Register the gentle sound of your breath. Rest your hands lightly on your abdomen. Feel it rise and fall. (This is like an exercise you may have encountered in which you lie on your back and place a book on your tummy and watch it go up and down with your breath.)
The sitting frog is a popular symbol for meditating in the Orient. Picture the familiar image of the bull frog's throat ballooned out. That is the feeling of taking in your breath all the way down to your abdomen. Inhale.
Exhale like curling wisps of smoke out the nostrils of a dragon. In China the dragon represents the mysterious and powerful force of meditating. This serpent from the unfathomable depths of the sea, snake-like sloughs its skin. Transformation.
You neither pull in extra breath nor let it out longer. You just watch. (It is not so easy to watch without interfering, is it?) Imagine briefly the sitting frog at the inhale. Sensing the dragon's breath at the exhale will enhance your breathing as it slows. The Buddha recommended thinking of the breathing as tuning the string of a musical instrument. Send your breath gently in and out, tuned perfectly, your whole body in harmony with the whole universe.
Breathe in. Breathe out. Frog breath - in - Dragon Breath - out. Smile. In, Out.
1/2 - Counting breaths
Prayer beads are found in several of the world's great religious traditions. Whether the strings of beads are rosaries or the Buddhist malas, you are joining mind and body as your fingers move from bead to bead and your mind moves from prayer to prayers, mantra to mantra, holy name to holy name.
Counting is often used to help beginning meditators follow the breaths. Count 'one' and inhale; 'two' and exhale, up to the number ten. Begin again, and again, and again...
If you count higher than ten it may feel as if you are focusing on counting rather than on breaths. After of a month or so of this practice, you may want to count only the inhaled breaths. Inhale, one, inhale, two, etc. You will notice that your breathing naturally gentles and slows after a minute. From about fifteen to twenty breaths a minute your respiratory rate drops to a mere five breaths per minute. Inhalations become fairly short and effortless, perhaps five seconds, followed by the lazy exhalation of the dragon smoke curling out, two or three times longer.
For a time or two you may as a matter of interest count the seconds, but then you realize that you are collecting data, rather than meditating. Instead of bothering to name any number, you may choose to imagine a touch on each of your ten fingers in turn. Touch them together at first, and then simply imagine the touch. Your built-in beads, a most useful device for ordering an agitated mind. Whenever you find your mind wandering, just return to the number 'one' and begin again. And again. And again.