sitting monkey is place where
david evans
writes about meditation, buddhism, and related topics.
someone asked me on sunday how i first came to these tibetan teachings - brought to america by the escaped tibetan lama Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche - and i remembered an interesting aspect of the story. Click “more” to hear about it.
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i think our meditation director for the weekend did a great job of summarizing the focus of the weekend by quoting from a letter to another poet, written by rainer maria rilke:
we have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. if it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us, if there are dangers, we must try to love them. and if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience. how could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.
so you mustn’t be frightened… if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you have ever seen; if an anxiety, like light and cloud-shadows, moves over your hands and over everything you do. you must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall. why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don’t know what work these conditions are doing inside of you?
i’m on retreat this weekend. spending most of the day in silent meditation with a group of twenty other silent folks. doesn’t sound very exciting dialog i’m sure. but the crap that comes up in your own little head when you spend hours in silence is damn entertaining.
i’ve had all kinds of dreams and fantasies, imagining conversations with this person or that and basically letting anything come up. the instruction for this weekend is to touch each thought lightly, instead of just letting it drop. by doing this, i’m trying to get a taste of each one and be more curious. in that way, i’ll cultivate my inner awareness of where these thoughts and daydreams come from and what’s behind them. usually i find behind each thought is some emotion - like fear or frustration or sadness - though each emotion has it’s own unique texture. by touching each thought briefly, i also get closer to the underlying emotional energy that is always there but i’m not generally conscious of.
i counted today, this was my seventh day this year in silent retreat!