Gentler Meditation

 Your comments on my first writings on mediation and enlightenment had concerns about how that was a bit of a harsh view.  Very guy oriented.  I agree.  I tend to take the warrior’s view toward life.

 

Yet, I had one of my most profound openings to “all that is” during a session devoted to Metta, also known as loving kindness meditation. 

There are 2 general forms of meditation, concentration and open.  In concentration meditation there is a single focus.  This is especially useful at your beginning.  Such methods include, counting the breath at the nose or belly, walking and very closely observing your every step, concentration on a candle flame.   These techniques have been likened to keeping a demon busy by giving them a task of straightening a curly hair with its fingers.  Giving an impossible task, done over and over again, can focus the mind.   Perhaps we are keeping the monkey mind busy. 

Open meditation expands the use of the senses.  You might listen to all the sounds you can hear.  You might feel all the sensations in you body as they arise.  You may keep your eyes open and watch the mind drink in everything it sees.  You might sit in a room or walk in nature.  Again, we are still watching the mind, and using careful observation, we still avoid the “story telling.” 

Often when we walk in nature we are commenting and narrating within our mind.  We get lost in the past, “ Oh wow, I remember the last time I was walking in nature and…”  Or lost in the future, “Next time I’ll come back with my lover, they will love this too!”  Can we be in the present, right here, right now, without any running commentary? 

Metta is a path that is a little different from both concentration and open meditations.  It still involves concentration and focus, however, you bring in an “other.”   Of, course there really isn’t an “other.”  There is only “all that is.”  But in our everyday life, there are “others” that we distinguish from “ourselves.” 

I used to look down on Metta.  What is this loving kindness meditation?  Sounds soft.   Where is the warrior in that kind of mediation?    Yet, I was in an 8-day silent retreat at the Insight Mediation Society in Barre MA, and the meditation of the day was Metta, with Sharon Salzberg.  I was resistant.   I almost went out walking in the woods instead.  Nonetheless, I knew that part of the 8-day practice was doing things that we do not find so comfortable.  

Really, looking at the whole retreat, who wants to just sit for 8 days almost totally in silence, alternating with zombie walking? 

So, I went.  Repeating these words of loving-kindness.  First to a loved one, that is easiest, then to someone we are neutral about, then to an “enemy,” and then, perhaps the hardest for some, to yourself.  

 

May you be safe. 

May you be healthy. 

May you be happy. 

May you live with ease. 

“What was this namby-pamby, soft style of meditation?”  My warrior side rebelled.  But, somehow in that 45 minutes there was this opening.  This compassion, for all that is, and all that is not.  The world fell away.  Empty-Fullness.  The light-in-the-dark.  Wow, blown away. 

Tonglen is another useful technique.  I teach Metta and Tonglen to the medical students in their Healer’s Art class.  These are techniques you can use in general meditation, but also, when you are confronted with something you cannot easily change.  You may see someone suffering, someone in pain, and you have nothing else to offer.  In Metta you repeat these 4 phrases above, while holding that individual in your mind.

In Tonglen, you use a visualization.  You breathe in that person’s suffering.   Within you, that suffering transforms into a bright light energy, that you then breathe back out to that person.  You might visualize that suffering as a grey dark energy when you breathe it in.  In your deep presence, that grey energy transforms into energy filled with peace, freedom, health, and all that is good.  Again, as a practice, you can start with someone you love, proceed to a neutral person, then to an “enemy.”  Powerful stuff! 

You say, “Whoa, hold on there, I’m not breathing in that grey suffering, that will be harmful!” 

The truth is that there is never any harm in entering into another’s suffering.  The only thing that another’s suffering can do to you is to burn away your own ego.  Burn away everything that gets in the way of radical acceptance, of all that is. 

Radical acceptance?  

That is a topic for another day…