sitting monkey is place where
david evans
writes about meditation, buddhism, and related topics.
Author Daniel Siegel talks about education and self-reflexive awareness training in school, at a ted talk three months ago.
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assisted with a shambhala training level five this last weekend. it was wonderful, spacious, and lots of fun. this was also a bitter sweet ending to a full sequence that i assisted from a level one weekend through level five. in that sequence, i’ve gone along with a number of folks together. and that was the end. i may well see some folks again and again, but it’s not certain. so there is a sense of loss at the same time as a sense of completion.
this was the sixteenth shambhala training weekend that i’ve assisted. with each level it feels both more comfortable being on the spot and holding a roll like that, as well as giving me a sense of just how deep one can go with a meditation practice and how much better and accessible i could become as a meditation instructor. mostly that sense has been from working with such excellent directors and fellow assistant directors. they have been an inspiring group of settled, warm-hearted, and seasoned meditation practitioners.
and as usual, the participants have been just as inspiring with their dedication to a difficult practice and their determination to see it through. we all come to a contemplative path from a different place and with issues to wrestle unique to ourselves, so there is no real sense of where students should be or achieve in these levels. nonetheless, the effort and the willingness to confront one’s demons with gentleness and patience is endlessly inspiring.
we have language in english for various emotions: anger, jealousy, fear, loneliness. but when you try to talk about the experience of more subtle states of mind — below emotions — what do you do? paint a picture, literally?
i haven’t studied the Tibetan concept of “wind” at all, but i’m starting to wonder if this is what they’re getting at when they talk about the experience of one’s inner winds. Below emotion there is a kind of texture that we feel, that shifts and moves and is hard to name but we have an ordinary experience of. Maybe sometimes people say “I feel a little anxious” as a way of talking about those more subtle feelings; not quite a full blown emotion but still there.
so why talk about these textures at all? well if what i’m reading holds water, and it seems logical, that these more subtle textures are the engine that fuels then the larger negative emotions. and our discomfort, and wish to push away certain textures, that then leads to a cascading or positive feedback loop that then leads to the full blown emotion. by cascade i think this can still occur almost instantaneously, but sometimes slowly enough to see the “little anxiety” then build to be anger or something more problematic. so if we could practice resting and relaxing in the subtle irritation and subtle anxiety and subtle discomfort, without reacting to it, would that then lead to a more sane life? that’s my question lately.
not exactly the instructions i would give, but who can resist the wisdom of a cowboy alligator? so odd and cute!
from considering faith that the situation has a basic workability, including the tenderness of our situation, and recognizing our fear and not turning away from it, a kind of confidence arises they say. the logic goes, we can continue to practice in this way and it will make a positive difference; meditation has an ordinary kind of impact.
this is what to me is meant by doubtlessness in my meditation tradition. by practicing meditation, and then working directly with our fear, cynicism, and other emotions we start to develop a kind of confidence in the workability of our situation. further it happens naturally as a result of the familiarity with fear instead of ignoring fear in some kind of rambo bravado.
it’s also called ’stepping out of the cocoon’ in shambhala jargon, and here cocoon is a kind of tendency toward conceptualizing — of our self and others and the situation — as a reaction to fear and groundlessness.
like when someone looks at me funny, i have an urge to understand why. was it something i said? or did? or is there food on my face again? could be. but it also could be totally unrelated to me. or i might just remind someone of another person altogether. really what i experienced was a moment of groundlessness, of not knowing. and that not knowing was uncomfortable.
the urge to ‘figure it out’ is a kind of cocooning urge. i want to label what was going on and set it aside in a neat and orderly worldview. and i’m constantly wanting to do that, neatly organize my experiences so they make sense: which is helpful, but the ‘urge’ to do that is subconscious and can go way too far. do i really need to know why that person looked at me funny? did they even? or am i just paranoid?
so recognizing the ‘urge’ to pin things down, that is quite helpful and is cultivated by a meditation practice and leads to greater fearlessness, in my experience. it has something to do with becoming familiar with groundlessness, but for me it is mostly just seeing this very human quality of wanting to ‘pin things down’ or ‘figure things out’ all the time, at least that is my tendency.
fearlessness is another funny term with respect to meditation in my tradition. i guess you could consider the shaolin and samurai warriors, who meditated as a way to culture fearlessness. but typical macho fearlessness or bravado isn’t what was meant.
i saw a poster this week which read, “fearlessness is going forward anyway” and i think that is the kind we’re discussing this weekend. the instruction for how to do that is to feel one’s fear directly, get curious about it, notice it or become more and more familiar with it, and in doing so one naturally expresses true fearlessness. the practice is to deliberately notice the fear and not turn away from it or ignore that it is a part of our situation. allowing ourselves to feel fear, to let that be part of our makeup and not feel embarrassed or guilty or angry is a necessary step – though still really a practice for me personally. i hate to acknowledge that i’m just human sometimes.
i’m helping with a shambhala training weekend this weekend, and some of the topics planned include faith, fearlessness, and doubtlessness. the first concept, faith, makes it sound religious to my ear. but the term is not used to mean that we must have some kind of blind faith, some intentional blindness, in order to proceed. rather it conveys a trust in causality and also that a tender, genuine goodness or workability is part of us and part of all situations. that we can connect with our heart and how we feel; or that could include a sense of freshness and beauty in experience; or that the world or people can always surprise us.
causality perhaps we can agree upon, but this also means that no one is inherently bad. rather we’re influenced by a multitude of things in our lifetime, and sometimes we’re born into privilege and sometimes we were not. therefore, it all matters in some small or larger way.
that we all have some genuine, fundamental goodness or intelligence might be harder to accept. do pirates in somali waters, who murder boat crews for their cargo, have a basic and fundamental goodness? something to contemplate perhaps, but that situation may be too removed or foreign to consider. what about the jerk that cuts us off on the freeway, or the dostoyevskian clerk who ignores our pleas seemingly just to exert some power over us? do they have basic goodness? probably not displayed in our interaction with them, but with somebody else? like with a puppy or a small child? can’t we agree that everyone has something that makes them tender, vulnerable — even if it is just a memory or trigger — and that tenderness is an expression of a more basic goodness? something to consider.
boing boing discovered some silent films shot in tibet during the 1940’s, which are pretty amazing to watch:
the first is a film by tsien-line shen, resident chinese commissioner in lhasa from 1942 to 1947. it mostly shows official ceremonies but has some video of a young dalai lama.
the second by sir basil gould, the british political officer of sikkim, bhutan and tibet in 1935, documents two trips to lhasa.
and the third assembles clips from the 1940s in tibet from the BFI National Archives. it features a very young dalai lama.
the bfi apparently now has these for sale, as well as over 20 hours of films from tibet between 1922 and 1949 on their mediatheque web site.
this weekend rocked. i helped with a meditation program, the first of a five weekend series called shambhala training. we have about 27 participants. they were amazing. and we did a LOT of meditation practice together, as well as talks, discussion groups, and working with people one-on-one on their technique. i’m really inspired and feeling lighter today.