A couple of weeks before I left for my Goenka Retreat, quite by chance I was reading "Faith" by Sharon Salzberg. Sharon Salzberg is one of the founders of the Insight Meditation Center in Barre, Massachusetts, which is where my own teacher, Victor Byrd, is headed at the end of March for a five week retreat. She is described on the back cover of "Faith" as "one of America's most beloved meditation teachers." In that book, she describes her first meditation retreat in India in 1970, when she was 18 years old. Her teacher? Goenka!
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| Sharon Salzberg |
I was delighted to read what she had to say about her experience:
"Outwardly, Goenka resembled an ordinary Indian businessman. But he radiated something extraordinary from within. Centered, unruffled, he seemed completely comfortable in his own skin. Goenka was rigorous in his approach to teaching meditation: precise in his instructions and demanding the very best effort from his students. Yet his kindness and compassion charged the air around him with warmth and light."
(I glossed over the bit about, "By the end of my first full day of practice, I wondered if I was insane to be there. I was in tremendous physical pain...")
So now, barely back from my retreat, and who should be speaking for three hours in a Santa Monica church but Sharon Salzberg? Of course I had to go to bookend my own experience. Thus it was that on Saturday, February 26th, I went with a friend from Long Beach Meditation to hear Sharon Salzberg talk about "Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation." Not coincidentally, she has just written a book called "Real Happiness". This workshop was part of her book tour.
There were about 600 people gathered in the church. Sharon sat in front of the altar, in a big comfortable armchair "with lumbar support", she informed us. She wished we could all have lumbar support too, out there in the hard pews. Big vases of yellow and red flowers surrounded her and a musical performance entertained us while we waited for the event to begin. She is older and heavier in real life (aren't we all). She is also clear and compelling, a polished and humorous speaker. Open, friendly, at ease. What follows are my notes from her talk.
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Sharon: The happiness in the book title, "Real Happiness", refers to a sense of resourcefulness, an inner abundance which can sustain us. One of my teachers said, "The Buddha's enlightenment solved his problem. Now you solve yours." So I took a step towards openness and inclusiveness and wrote the book in American, for Americans. In the U.S., the practices - concentration, mindfulness and metta or compassion - are skills training. Reflections of human possibility.
Part One: Concentration
Most of us experience ourselves as fairly scattered. Our minds jump to the past or the future, creating a scenario that hasn't happened, that may never happen. My own personal mantra is simply: "Something will happen."
We lose a lot of energy in judgements and speculation. We experience fragmentation. In concentration, we bring all that energy and power together. It is attention training: steady, steadfast, centered. A gathering, a bringing together - very empowering, a lot of energy. It is the path to healing. We bring all aspects together. We land and have home base in our own being.
We build that platform in a simple way by choosing an object of awareness. There are many ways in meditation to do this, but I'm going to use the sensation of the breath as my primary object, for a couple of reasons:
1. you don't have to believe anything to feel your breath.
2. the breath is very portable. We can practice anywhere: while waiting impatiently in line at the supermarket, or anxiously in the doctor's office, or at a contentious meeting at work. We can connect back in the moment.
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| We can begin again... |
So:
1. Choose your object.
2. Settle your attention on the object.
3. Know to return.
On my first retreat [that Goenka retreat!] when I received these instructions, I was indignant. "I came all the way to India to feel my breath?!!"
Then I thought, "How hard can this be?" [rueful laugh].
I thought I'd manage, oh, maybe 600 breaths, only to find it was two, three, maybe five breaths before the mind wandered. But there comes a moment - the magic moment of practice - where we have the chance to be really different. We can choose not to go into comparison and judgement and blaming. We realize what we are doing and we stop judging. It is so demoralizing to judge all the time. That moment of compassion is magic. We can gently let go of whatever and return to the breath. Let go and begin again, let go and begin again...
We are practicing this great life lesson in this itty bitty practice : we can begin again.
That's what we're cultivating here: the incredible renewing power that we can begin again.
Meditation practice is a question of balance. We are always working with some sort of balance:
* lovingkindness and compassion for the self, on the one hand, and for others on the other;
* deep compassion for someone, on the one hand, and the realization that we can't fix things on the other;
* energy in experience, on the one hand, and relaxing, being at ease on the other.
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| Oh, THERE you are! |
Treat your breath like a good friend you catch sight of on a crowded subway platform: "Oh, there you are!" You're pleased, so happy to see your friend. You're not paying attention to all those others crowding around you, you're just trying to keep an eye on your friend.
Part Two: Mindfulness
Mindfulness is the process of refining our attention so it's not so cluttered by projections or fears, things that distort our perception. Reactions, interpretations come - we're not trying to stop that - but we are trying to see what is actually happening without all the layers. This is not passive; in fact, it's quite dynamic.
Usually the experience and the reaction to it comes so fast, the reaction merges with the actual experience. The reaction then assumes an aura of universality and solidity: "All beings must feel this way." Everything gets locked down with that.
Not all reactions are equal. We see the experience for what it is and we have time for discernment, to decide, "Do I act on this or not?"
[Sharon told a story of going with a friend, a meditation teacher, to a prison.]
It just happened to be a prison, it's not important to the story. My friend the teacher sent three men out of the room (and because it was a prison, a guard had to accompany them) while the rest of the group were told to create a structure out of the objects in the room. There wasn't much to work with (it was a prison) but they piled chairs, flags, shoes into a tottering heap. I looked at it and declared the finished piece a monument in my mind. Something to do with the flags. So the first prisoner enters the room and is asked to describe what he sees in one word. He says, "Monument." I think, "What a discerning guy! As if it could be anything else!"
But for the others, it was something else. The prison guard, for instance, saw "Chaos."
The point is this:
We see something and we see a story. It's not a bad thing - that's how things are, it's what we do. But we need to look and see the process; stop the interpretation that says what we perceive is certain, absolutely true, the only way of seeing this thing.
We need to see we always have a choice: to further something or let it go.
Some stories are wonderful, they bring us together.
Some are very damaging, very old.
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| The problem with you is - you're you! |
Isn't this the problem with all of us? "You're you!"
How to deal with it? When something arises, mentally note, on the in/out breath, the label - anger, joy, whatever...
Repeat until you can say, with equanimity, "Hi, Lucy!" or better yet, "Chill out, Lucy". Meaning: "I see this, I acknowledge it, I let it go" - with some tenderness. This is the feeling tone of mindfulness: being aware of what is happening, in the moment, without the intrusion of bias or clinging, condemning or numbing out (disconnecting).
Be present: see things as they unfold.
[Sharon shared two noteworthy quotes from a NY Times article about a pilot program for teaching mindfulness meditation in a 5th grade classroom.]
"All day long we tell kids to pay attention but we never tell them how."
And, when asked, "What is mindfulness?" a boy replied, "It means not hitting someone in the mouth!"
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| Mindfulness: NOT hitting someone in the mouth |
Knowing we're feeling angry when we're feeling angry, as it arises, allows us to be balanced. If the anger consumes us, or we hate it or fear it, we'll get tighter and tighter until finally - we explode. With mindfulness, we can think, "Last time I felt this way, I hit someone in the mouth! It didn't work out so well. Let's try something different."
Mindfulness is our reaction to what's happening. It can go anywhere. It is not impossible to establish a different relationship with our experience. That's why you can't fail at meditation - it's based on what you're experiencing in your mind. It can go anywhere! Otherwise meditation practice can become an exercise in fear. For example...
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| Meditating in the closet |
Imagine you're meditating in L.A.. But the traffic outside is too noisy. So you clear out a closet, and set up your cushion and your candle and your gear inside the closet. And then - the water pipes in the closet start making a racket. So you go to Home Depot and buy ear plugs, and settle down in your closet with the ear plugs. And then - this memory comes... oh no! you can't extract your brain!
We are not in control of the unfolding of events, with whatever may arise. But we can meet everything that arises with clarity and precision. This is hard to believe because we are so driven by judgement.
Freedom is when we realize we can't control what will arise but we can meet it in different ways.
Mark Epstein [American psychiatrist, who has written extensively about Buddhism] has a small notebook in which he writes, after every long retreat he's taken since 1974, the single most powerful insight of the retreat. Recently he reread those insights, and found he had written year after year, the identical thing: "What arises is not so important. What's important is how you relate to what is arising."
That's a very hard thing to believe, yet freedom lies in that changed relationship. There's nothing to "get" which means freedom is available to us. Mindfulness steps us out of the ordinary way of thinking, and leads us to freedom, creativity, happiness.
[At this point, Sharon took questions from the audience]
Q: How do we deal with physical pain?
A: Physical pain provides us with a model of how to deal with pain of all kinds - emotional, for instance.
The first thing to do is look at the "add-ons": what are we adding on to the moment's experience?
Such as, "What will it feel like in an hour, a day, next week...?"
OR
"I shouldn't be feeling this!"
See if we can release these add-ons. Be with it just for a few moments, neither consumed with anger about it nor completely defined by it ("my knee", "my back" etc.). That opens the door to being able to explore it. This solid block of pain then becomes moments of pressure, of burning, whatever. We see movement within it, we recognize it as an alive system. When we see that, our relationship to it changes. "I see the space within the pain." This works with any sort of chronic pain.
[Some years back, Sharon was on a three month retreat with U Pandita, one of the foremost living masters of Vipassana meditation].
U Pandita is a very strict, very disciplined Burmese teacher. One day he was asked by a student, how to handle pain? I thought that he would say to stay with it until you drop. Instead he said, "The essence is balance. Go to the pain, stay just a few moments, then go to something easier. Then go back to the pain, when you are able." In the West we think we have to be stoic about the pain that comes up in meditation. But if U Pandita said you didn't have to stay with it more than you could bear, then you can trust that you don't have to stay with it any longer than you can handle. That's the real deal.
Q: What do you think about the Law of Attraction?
A: On a certain level, the Law of Attraction is about the power of the mind. There's a saying in India that when a pickpocket meets a saint, he only sees the saint's pockets. Who do we notice? There are the people who matter to us - and then there are the Others. There is tremendous power to attention. It is quite consequential. We focus on what we don't have rather than what we do. Therefore we are lost in the world of deficency instead of a world of gratitude. I also think it's cruel to oneself - it adds a dose of self blame and judgement to that element of "What's wrong with your thinking?"
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| Is it okay to let the mind wander? |
A: It creates a sense of hollowness. We're not connected with the ordinary moment. We wait - for some better moment. Why not connect with this moment? You see a lot. For instance, a fellow teacher noticed how hard he gripped his toothbrush and wondered if he showed inappropriate stress in dealing with other things in his life.
Q: "The problem in the world is that everyone has their reasons." So said Renoir's son. Being intellectually astute about things, doesn't that interfere with being in the moment?
A: Intellectual analysis in seeking truth is a wonderful attribute: meditation can supplement intellectual rigor. In the Tibetan tradition, for instance, you would ask yourself, "What are you angry at?" and use analysis to pull it apart.
Part Three : Metta or Lovingkindness/Compassion
The qualities of metta grow out of insight.
Think of all the people involved with your sitting here in this room. Bring those people here! For instance, when I do this meditation, I always thank the Regents of my college board for allowing me time off so I could go to India and find this path. There are so many layers of connection that make up this moment, it didn't just arrive out of nowhere. This moment is a consequence of many moments. However alone we feel, we're part of a network of connections. That is an insight. That's how things are. We can know deep down - we are all connected. Out of that comes lovingkindness. We realize we're a part of the whole.
Our attention is trained in certain ruts, so it takes intentionality to move our attention elsewhere. When you lie in bed at night and go over your day, do you think about that stupid thing you said at lunch? Do you replay it again and again? So much so that your whole self collapses - all because of that stupid thing you said at lunch! So instead, ask yourself gently, "Anything else happen today?" Experiment with not seeing the negative.
What happens when we pay attention to people instead of ignoring or excluding? What happens when I look right at you and wish you well? Everyone wants to be happy. Ignorance is the actual problem. We get confused about where real happiness lies. We're all vulnerable to change and loss. But everyone knows that life can change on a dime. Can we have a sense of connection to everyone? We don't have to like them all - but we can pay attention in a very different way. We can silently wish them, "May you be happy, may you be peaceful."
The phrases need to be big enough, general enough to fit you and everyone else. Start with yourself and end with "all beings". The middle can change. Pick "good enough" phrases.
May you be safe, may you be happy, may you be healthy, may you live with ease.
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To end the workshop, Sharon guided us in a short metta meditation. As we sat peacefully together at its close, there was a tremendous banging on the side door of the church. Life! Loud, demanding, intrusive. Everyone laughed, as Sharon said the only thing she could possibly say.
"Come in."
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