A year ago, I was on a retreat led by Joseph Goldstein, and I admitted to him that I’d been feeling lonely. “I’ve got the antidote to that!” he said, as delighted as I’ve ever seen him.

“You do?” I asked.

“Yes. Write poetry! It comes out of the same space.”

The same space: What could that mean? And how did Joseph come to write poetry? We ended the conversation with his promising to send me some poems and encouraging me to send him mine. So here we are now, he with pages of his poetry and I with a pile of questions.

“Joseph,” I start, “I was so excited to have you prescribe an antidote to loneliness—and to discover you were writing poetry—that I didn’t ask what you meant. What is that space?”

Joseph Goldstein (JG): There’s a line that’s relevant
here . . . [he rifles through his pages]. It’s the title of my poem “Love of My Lonely Hours.” That’s the feeling.

Years ago,
winter brought joy.
Now,
love of my lonely hours
fills the winter grey silence
and poems,
like Christmas candles,
illuminate the night.

Amy Gross (AG): So the poetry comes out of loneliness?

JG: We need to parse what loneliness means, because for me loneliness has more to do with the feeling of aloneness than feeling diminished or abandoned or contracted . . .

AG: . . . which is what most people would associate with the word lonely?

JG: Yes, but when loneliness transfigures into aloneness, there’s a poignancy to that space and an emptiness and a stillness and a gentleness—it’s all those qualities that give rise to poetry.

AG: After that retreat, when I would feel a stab of loneliness, I’d remember what you said, get interested in the feeling, and almost immediately feel that I was not alone. There was a sense of communion in that space, of listening, waiting and listening. I was in some kind of dialogue. I wasn’t alone.

JG: So this ties into my one- or two-paragraph book [he grins] called “The Myth of Intimacy.” The myth of intimacy is that you need two people to have intimacy. But “intimate” is another word for this space—it’s so intimate the way it’s experienced; it doesn’t need another person.

AG: You’re reminding me of a line from Rumi: “There is a voice that doesn’t use words. Listen.” What are we listening to?

JG: To quote another poet, Pessoa,

Live, you say, in the present;
Live only in the present.
But I don’t want the present. I want reality.

So in a way it’s listening to—I was going to say messages, but it’s not exactly a message. It’s just opening to some underlying reality that may be obscured in the busyness of our lives. When we’re in this quiet space, we are very intimate with what’s going on. So, for example, one of the poems goes like this:

Bird song
in the open sky
of my mind

That came when I was doing walking meditation outside. The normal understanding of reality is that the birds are up there in the sky, and I’m here and I’m listening to the bird. But in that moment there was no separation between up there and in here. I think one other quality of the poetic mind space is that it’s very sensitized. It’s very delicate and sensitive to things that are normally covered over. It can be a moment of seeing something new or having a new perception. In aloneness, it has the space to flower. And it’s appreciating the stillness and quiet in which the words can sparkle.

AG: Which reminds me of your poem about how you started writing poetry:

The Muse
Something happened
in my seventy-fifth year—
a channel opened
to oceans of space,
where words sparkle
in their sparse delight
calling, calling, calling.

You’re being called. And you notice being called. In your teaching, you’ve often talked about Noticings Per Minute—“NPMs”— how, with practice, the number of thoughts, sensations, emotions noticed goes up. The more we practice, the more mind space is available to be aware, to notice. “The Muse” is saying that when you’re alone, there’s an openness, an undistractedness, so when phenomena arise, you’ve got the mind space not only to notice them but also to let them flower—flower into poetry?

JG: What I love about the practice of poetry is crafting language. That itself—there’s great satisfaction in it. There was a big turning point when I first started writing. I showed some of the work to a really accomplished poet friend of mine, and she said something that changed my whole attitude toward writing. She said it was all about revision. I had been in this very enthusiastic, rather sophomoric state where I thought every word that came out of my mind or my pen was perfect from the start, which is ridiculous.

AG: That brings me to something I read in preparing for this conversation with you. In an anthology called Beneath a Single Moon: Buddhism and Contemporary American Poetry, the Zen priest and poet Norman Fischer mentions Allen Ginsberg’s famous writing instruction: “First thought, best thought.” Philip Whalen questions that, saying “‘First thought, best thought’ is different from ‘first word, best word.’” Leading Fischer to confide to the reader: “Allen does a lot of rewriting.”

JG: Exactly. I can see “first thought” as that spark of insight you might get about something. For example, I was just sitting with morning coffee, quiet, in that space of enjoying the solitude, and my mind and body went into noticing and feeling how everything was continually disappearing. That was the first thought for a poem, noticing that everything is swirling down the drain of time. But then there was a long process of building out from it and a huge amount of revision. So the final thing—final for now—was completely different from the first draft.

AG: When a moment of noticing arises, do you start playing with it in your mind, or do you pick up a writing instrument and go to a pad?

 JG: I’ll start off often with an insight, an abstract insight. Like with “The Drain of Time,” the first thing I wrote was the line that you’ve heard many, many times: “The thought of your mother is not your mother; it’s just a thought”—and then I noticed that that thought too had gone down the drain. So I was trying to build around that. But then I realized—and this is part of my own learning—it’s a little too philosophical or abstract. For a better poem, I needed to bring it down into the stuff of the world.

AG: “No ideas but in things,” William Carlos Williams said.

JG: “Show, don’t tell,” said one of the poets giving me feedback. So that’s part of my learning. Because my mind is so philosophically oriented, my first scribblings often start with the more abstract, but then I cut that away. I really love that part of the process. I think of Michelangelo, who said that he cut away through stone to reveal the figure that was there. With writing, it’s almost like sculpting space through words. Deletion is the best because then the poem gets pure and sparse.

AG: That taste for the pure and sparse seems to be a mark of contemporary poetry. In an essay in Beneath the Moon, Allen Ginsberg wrote “For most of the Moderns [Pound, William Carlos Williams, Jack Kerouac] . . . the motive for poetry has been purification of mind and speech. . . . Real poetry practitioners are practitioners of mind awareness or practitioners of reality, expressing their fascination with a phenomenal universe and trying to penetrate to the heart of it.” Poetry writing certainly sounds like a meditation practice: You go into the silence. Rilke says “you walk into yourself. . . .”

JG: Or walk into nonself or walk into emptiness.

AG: Rilke writes that solitude was the necessary condition for his poetry, and then, interestingly, he says this: “What is happening in your innermost self is worthy of your entire love.” That’s how I’ve come to understand meditation—as meeting every little thing that arises with love. Here’s Rilke again: “There is only one solitude, and it is vast, heavy, and difficult to bear. What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, a vast inner solitude to walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours is what you must be able to attain.”

JG: I think people who are somewhat experienced in meditation have already gone through what is “vast, heavy, and difficult to bear.” For me, not only is it not difficult or hard to bear, it is a joy. I love that space. And that also could be a link between the meditative process and the creative process of writing.

AG: I happened to open Maxine Hong Kingston’s book To Be the Poet. She had decided she had written her last long book—now she was going to become a poet. She was going to be in the moment. She asked two of her poet friends how to get the poems coming, one of the friends being Tess Gallagher. Both said you have to clear a day. No distractions. It sounds like retreat.

JG: Clearing space is a beautiful image, but I’ll say that having done many retreats and so cleared a lot of days already, I think it need not be a whole day—clearing the morning would work, and sometimes it’s simply the quiet space of a few moments. The mind needs to be quiet, and depending on how much training one has had in quieting the mind, it takes less or more time to do it.

AG:  For you, Joseph, in this space, what often arises is contemplation of aging.

JG: Which was not planned. That itself was interesting. I didn’t have it in my mind with a thought like “Oh, I want to write about the aging process.” These moments are just what came up.

AG: You’re asking a lot of questions. Here’s “Lazy Day at 76”:

Morning coffee
and a first glimpse
into the unknown day,
waiting for that pulse of life
to push through the pale joy
of sitting,
doing nothing.

Going for a walk
is almost too much
on this day of questionable ease:
Is it simply resting up
to save the world
or the faint glimmer of decline?
I’ll decide tomorrow
if I awaken in the morning light.

I remember your saying, decades ago, that meditation is practice for dying. I think about that a lot, more and more every year. One thing you’re doing in these poems is embodying ways to face the signposts with a level head, opening to the uncertainties around death.

JG: Yes, I just recently came up with “The Harbingers” as a title for the first group of poems because they were all harbingers of aging, dying, death. To me, practice for dying is implicit in all the questions about aging. There may be an unacknowledged acknowledgment of the fact that it’s coming, but it’s in there even if it’s not named explicitly.

AG:  I teach mindfulness to a group of elders, and, frankly, I’ve been afraid to share your idea that meditation is practice for dying. I dodge it by saying it’s practice for aging.

JG: Right, but in your class, it would be interesting to test the waters, and drop the D-word a few times, because my impression is that people, as they get older, are very aware of death and that it’s coming. It may be a huge relief for them to talk about it. It’s like something Sharon [Salzberg] said early on. When she first came to Buddhism, she was so relieved to hear the first noble truth—that suffering was acknowledged. It’s kind of the same thing with death. I think people may be relieved to have that opened up. Especially as they get older, in one way or another people know that they’re going to die, whether they really let it in or not. How can you be a certain age and not think about it?

AG: I’m going to try it.

JG: I’ll be interested to hear how it goes, and maybe you’ll say “Boy, Joseph, that was a stupid idea.” Since we don’t know how people will respond, you put it out and have to be very sensitive to the response. Some people won’t go there, and that’s fine. But other people may want to.

AG: Another remark about writing struck me as relevant to what you’re doing. Here’s the Native American poet Joy Harjo: “Poetry is going to the places that have no words and finding the words.” And that too can describe what happens on retreat, in meditation. You can be overtaken by a feeling and respond with curiosity: What is it? Where’d it come from? And then you find the words to understand what arose.

JG: Well, I think that one of the experiences people have on retreats is a very intimate experience with the breath, with the body, with emotions, because there’s no separation. That’s kind of the essence of intimacy: nonseparation. It’s just oneself getting out of the way. The Chinese poet Li Po ended a poem with these words: “We live together, the mountain and me, until only the mountain remains.” So that’s kind of meditative. When we take ourselves out of the picture, then all that’s left is everything. To me, that is the definition of intimacy.

AG: This ties right into Norman Fischer on what meditation can do. “The grip on self can very naturally loosen, the grip on meaning loosens, and there is the possibility of entering wholeheartedly into a dark or unknown territory.”

 JG: Or into a light and unknown territory.

AG: Yes! Once again, you’re reframing the emotional tone from frightening to delightful. In fact, Fischer goes on: “An interesting footnote is that it is not a struggle. It is the release from struggle.” After that retreat with you, I was sitting at my table facing the water and sky. The table is white, it’s shiny and reflective—and a bird in the sky streaked across it. It felt like it streaked through me too. There was a recognition of nonseparation, and the possibility of doing something with that sensation—it was a poetic moment. There wasn’t the agony of writing or the anguished-writer self. It was a gift.

JG: Yes, that’s exactly my experience. Something happens, or there’s a perception or an insight, and it sparks that interest in expressing it. So where’s your poetry?

 AG: I have nothing to show—I make notes, I pull away from them. But our conversation gave me the courage to be curious: When a friend who is a poet and meditation teacher offered an evening of teaching poetry, I actually dared go to it. And then I signed up for a Ruth Ozeki writing workshop at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies. Before our conversation, I would have been too writing-phobic to participate. At the end of the retreat, Ruth asked us to say what our plan for writing was. I said “I am never going to write something for publication, and I’m going to really enjoy writing.” She looked a little startled.

JG: That makes perfect sense. 

The post Finding the Words appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Carol Wilson grew up in the town of Huntington, on New York’s Long Island, in what she calls a typical middle-class home. Her father was an airline pilot, which explains her itch to travel, she thinks, and her mother took care of the three children—Carol, her sister, and brother. She discovered Buddhism in her teens, “the only thing,” she says, ”that has ever fired me up”—so much so that she kept interrupting her education to follow the dharma.

Wilson first went to India in l971, when she was 19, after one semester at NYU and a stint working in a hospital kitchen to raise money for travel. In India she attended her first retreat, with the Burmese meditation teacher S. N. Goenka, known for his exacting teaching style. Like many Western students of her generation, Wilson later studied with a number of teachers from various traditions. She eventually arrived at Insight Meditation Society (IMS), in Barre, Massachussetts, where she is now a guiding teacher. She teaches the way she talks—she’s down-to-earth, funny, bringing the dharma into everyday life and bringing life into the dharma.

Tricycle contributing editor Amy Gross interviewed Carol Wilson in her cottage at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies, a short walk from IMS.

What got you, a 19-year-old product of Long Island suburbia, to leave college to go sit in India? When I was 16, 17, I had some experiences with psychedelics that had the effect, as it did on many people, of shifting my view of the world. It just opened things up. I started reading Zen books, which I didn’t understand at all—I was 16, what did I know?—but when I look back now, something got sparked. I didn’t get that the Goenka retreat was really Buddhism, but it totally changed my life. I came out thinking not, “Oh, I’ve got to stay and do this,” but more— and this has been a conflict all my life—“I should go back and do something useful to help people.” My idea was that I should teach, and I finally got a B.A. in Special Ed. But the dharma, meditation, completely took everything in me. I didn’t realize you could make it your whole life. Then IMS started, and I heard they had a three-month retreat. That was ’77, their second one. So I quit [teaching] and I went to the three-month retreat. It was like, “Oh God, I’m home.” At the end of the retreat I would have left, but they needed a cook. Someone asked me to do it—I never would have thought of it. I remember telling Jack [Kornfield, one of IMS’s founding teachers], “I don’t know how to cook for a lot of people.” And he goes, “Well, can you learn?” I thought, and I said, “Yeah, I can learn.” And that was it.

Who else had an impact on your practice? There were Joseph Goldstein and Christopher Titmuss. In Thailand [where Wilson temporarily ordained as a nun], it was the quiet life in the forest that was the teacher. You wake up, you sew your little underwear, you sweep, you eat your one meal a day—it takes time for the mind and the heart to settle into that simplicity. And it was wonderful.

[The Burmese master] Sayadaw U Pandita was also very powerful for me. If you really practice the technique [noting what arises in awareness, moment to moment] with 100 percent commitment, I think it can take you to freedom. You actually experience impermanence and not-self and suffering—dukkha, the unreliable nature of things.

This is an interesting time in the story of Buddhism in the West. Many of us are mixing practices from Vipassana, Zen, and Tibetan, building our own individual fusion dharmas. You began with Zen, then moved through orthodox Indian Vipassana to Burmese. Were there other teachers who shifted your practice? I guess Poonjaji [H. W. L. Poonja] was the next big influence. That’s Advaita Vedanta. He was a student of Ramana Maharshi [the Hindu sage], and I spent several months in Lucknow with him. Partly I just loved being out of the Vipassana scene, even though half the people there were from the Vipassana world.

Escapees from Vipassana? Well, see—that’s not escaping. Here’s an example of the split so many people get into, thinking that if you’re doing Advaita, there must be something wrong with Vipassana. There’s so much sectarianism that goes on. One of the things that helps to break out of sectarianism is to see how, as you said, each of us is doing our own fusion. You can go from a really focused, samadhi-based kind of practice—like Goenka’s and U Pandita’s—to something more open, like what Munindra [the Indian teacher] practiced. When Joseph first started teaching, he taught what Munindra taught: “Just sit and know you’re sitting, and the whole dharma unfolds by itself.” I’d been practicing with U Pandita for several years, noting experience—note, note, note, 60 notings per minute—and I’d gone from being fascinated to feeling tight, kind of dry. Something was missing for me. Friends of mine had been to Poonjaji, so I went to see him in February ’91 and then again for several months that fall. It was a great, happy time. Poonjaji would talk about just “knowing the source.” He was always looking back at the source—his word for awareness. He said some people call it love, other people call it compassion or emptiness, and some people call it joy.

After Poonjaji, I didn’t really connect with a teacher for a while. I started to feel the lack of that kind of input—I felt like I was making up my own, you know, fusion. When I met [the Burmese teacher] Sayadaw U Tejaniya, I thought, he’s the missing link for me between Theravada and Advaita, yet he’s a totally Theravada teacher. Plus, I like him. He’s funny, he’s down to earth. He spent most of his life as a layman. He’s been through stuff, he’s been through life. I could talk to him.

What’s the essence of U Tejaniya’s teaching for you? If you had to say what kind of tagline he’s known by, it’s practicing with right attitude more than any particular technique. Right attitude is just checking what qualities, what mental factors, are present in the mind that‘s meditating. When we’re not aware of what’s present in our consciousness, we’re looking through its lens and it colors everything we’re doing. If we’re filled with greed and don’t see it, greed is in the background and can be driving whatever we’re doing.

U Tejaniya is all about noticing what’s in the mind in any moment of the day. Noticing when there’s greed or various forms of ill will or hatred or delusion. It doesn’t just have to be difficult stuff—you could check and see there’s interest, there’s samadhi [stability of mind] or metta [lovingkindness] or wisdom. It becomes second nature to check what’s going on in your mind— not just a few times an hour but always. Opening your attention. For me, it’s a feeling of “What’s in the mind?”

The essence of his teaching is relax, because mostly we’re trying to do something when we’re meditating, not noticing that “trying” is more often coming from wanting and self than anything else. And when you see the wanting, you just have to notice it and see wanting, wanting—you know? So right attitude in meditating and practicing is when the mind is not colored by greed or ill will or hatred or confusion. Then we can investigate, and wisdom will develop.

And you’re investigating all the time—not just when you’re sitting. U Tejaniya’s main thing is watching your mind all the time. He developed this approach as a layman, so it’s not about just being on intensive silent retreat. He has one line I really love: he calls watching the mind “a secret mission.” When he was working—he sold clothes in a stall—he’d go with his friends to a bar or a boxing match, but all he was interested in, he said, was watching his mind. So you can be with people; they don’t know what you’re doing—it’s a secret mission. You’re just watching what’s going on in your mind all the time. He says we tend to be either completely internal—looking at our stuff—or we get involved in the external and completely lose it. He’s saying: “Remember yourself, all day, every day, and mindfulness will develop a momentum.” Keep your attention 50/50 or 60/40—60 percent with yourself, 40 percent on the external. And relax; it doesn’t take a lot of force.

As soon as I remember myself, I’m here. I just relax and feel my body. Right away I can notice: my mind feels a little tired, a little heavy, but otherwise pretty calm. And I found that translated into my daily life more than anything else.

I still love intensive retreat and silence. But Sayadaw U Te- janiya doesn’t feed into the idea that retreat is superior to everyday life. He’s lifted the sense that practice has to be so forced, or that you need results like concentration states or insights. Practice becomes fun. You just want to see what’s going on in the mind. It’s fascinating.

You just drop in the question: What’s the attitude in the mind? Yes. There’s no “I” there. That’s a lot of the genius of it: he so emphasizes just relaxing, not striving. Effort always has a little sense of me in it. So yes, once you get used to doing it, it’s not me doing anything and there’s no place I’m trying to get to. It just opens up. You see how relaxing takes away that self-defense, that kind of judging? What’s to judge? It’s just dosa [Pali, “aversion”] in the mind: it comes like this, it has this effect; this feeds it, this doesn’t feed it. The other way—when I’m noting each thought very carefully, I keep looking at the person I’m angry with in my mind, and the anger actually gets stronger. But if I go, “dosa in the mind,” sometimes it goes away, and other times I can’t be with it. One sitting with U Tejaniya, I felt this energy in my body, very uncomfortable, like restless leg but all over. It was really hard to just watch the aversion and the impatience. I was describing it to him later, and I said I couldn’t bear to be there with it. He said, “Who said you had to be with it?” [Laughs.] He’s really great at hearing all the little assumptions we’re bringing in. That’s another place he’ll always go: what are the ideas working in the back of your mind that we mostly don’t look at? Part of watching the attitude in your mind is asking: What are the assumptions we’re bringing in? Like: I should be with it.

A lot of the work of teachers, I think, is just to help us reconnect to that interest and that fire, that willingness to look at the truth, at how it is. Reality is how it is. That’s another thing U Tejaniya says: “Reality is already the way it is. You don’t have to create anything. You just have to have a clear mind that isn’t colored.”

In another talk, you said, “No matter how terrible any feeling or thought is, connecting with it will be soothing.” You said that if you shut off awareness of one thing, you shut off everything. I had a very hectic drive up here, and I’d say to myself, “This is just the way it is right now.” And all the tension dissolved. Isn’t it amazing? What keeps us suffering is holding off unpleasant, scary things, or the habit of fearing something we don’t even know we’re holding off. Then we open to it and know, okay, this feels like shit, but there’s no separation of it and me.

For instance, with anxiety: opening to it, accepting how it is, and then somehow it isn’t a problem. Really for me now, the only problem with anxiety or anything is when there’s a sense of referral back to me—I’m anxious. Anxiety is just anxiety. It’s just what it is.

Accepting suffering as impersonal avoids the self-blame that usually arises when things get uncomfortable. On one retreat, a man complained that his mind was clear in the morning, but in the afternoon he’d get sleepy and at night his concentration was erratic. You started laughing. You said something like, “Are you hearing yourself? You’re saying that your practice isn’t exactly the way you want it to be.” The whole room got it: things change, and that’s just the way things are. We’ve all heard that seven thousand billion times. But our mind is just so familiar with grasping. It feels so like home. This takes us back to U Tejaniya’s “What idea is working in the back of your mind?” We could all spout about how we know it’s not true, but in the back of our mind, somehow, is the idea freedom is going to be “I’m always happy and peaceful.” And it’s unnecessary, it’s extra. I’ve been noticing lately that, say, if a car pulls out in front of me, a moment of aversion shoots up that’s completely unnecessary. I have to slow down—that’s necessary, but does it have to be a problem? Now I sense right away how yucky it feels. And then pretty much it’s over, unless I’m having a bad, down-on-myself day and self-judgment is strong in the mind. Then you can see how one moment leads to the next. That whole sense of self and our stories and all of that—it’s really extra.

I like the idea of using the “yucky feeling” to recognize what’s in the mind rather than sinking into it. That yucky feeling has less of a hook when you see it, or feel it in the center of the chest. Some people can feel it physically. It colors everything and becomes the worldview. Now, if I recognize the feeling, I know I can’t trust any thought or assessment that’s coming up because it’s colored by dosa—self-judgment, aversion. So a thought comes: “Oh, I said the wrong thing,” or “They don’t like me,” or “I have nothing to say,” or “They hated my talk.” It may be true or not, but there’s no point in trying to assess the accuracy of the thought because there’s no way I can evaluate it when this lens is on. That’s a huge thing to recognize, and you have to remember it. Sometimes the yucky feeling hits me really strong and I’m lost in it. And I can go, as Ajahn Sumedho says, “Oh, really-lost-in-self-judgment feels like this.” At other times I might notice that it’s coming in as a kind of wilting in the mind. There’s a very subtle tinge to the thoughts before it becomes a strong feeling, you know? It’s like I’m in the supermarket and somebody walks by and I can just have this subtle feeling of “Oh, they’re really cool.” And that has the effect of making me feel down. Why? Because I think I’m not cool? Other times there isn’t that referring back to me. You just walk in a room and whatever happens, happens. Isn’t that nice?

You have a chronic illness—scleroderma. How old were you when you were diagnosed? Thirty-seven. It’s not the most well known of the autoimmune spectrum of rheumatoid diseases. Scleroderma means “hard skin.” When your body makes too much collagen, everything gets hard, beginning with your skin. It can go into your organs, kidney, heart, lungs. At the time, I was having much more severe symptoms. I couldn’t walk well. If I tried to lift my arm, it felt like the skin under my arm was going to rip. And sometimes my hips would just freeze and I couldn’t take another step. Now it’s really receded. You can see I’m pretty fine.

Did your practice help you deal with it? There are a couple of ways the dharma really helped me. The first was in how the mind was relating. Not to the pain—it wasn’t painful so much as really uncomfortable and stiff, and it was difficult to do things. It was more the sense of fear and personal loss at the moment and the fear of future loss and discomfort—that’s where the mind can really go crazy. The other aspect of how the mind was relating was the idea that if you’re sick, your body is manifesting confusion and dukkha. Do you remember all the Louise Hay stuff?

Yes—the idea that the body is manifesting weakness in the mind and you should be able to cure yourself with your thoughts. Yes, exactly. I should be able to heal myself through (continued on page 112) meditation. And if I’m really sick, it’s somatizing. Take the idea of hard skin—maybe I feel I need to be more protected? And then there’s self-blame: If I’m so spiritual, why am I am sick?

I’m sure there are people who still believe they bring on their illness. Yes. And I remember Christopher Titmuss saying, “Give yourself a break, Carol. Look at your family.” My sister had just had a liver transplant. My mom had just had breast cancer. He said, “Genetic stuff happens. Don’t beat yourself up.” And I started thinking about masters like Ramana Maharshi, Ajahn Chah, the 16th Karmapa, and remembering: Oh, right— they all died of disease. But what really helps is to remember that meeting sickness with aversion is just cultivating aversion. My understanding is that awakening happens when the mind is purified. When we’re not clouded with aversion, greed, and delusion, we see the world as it is. And seeing how it is is what liberates us. You don’t have to figure something out—it’s already here. An old Tibetan lama was passing through here one day, and he bonked me on the head and gave me the Medicine Buddha mantra: Tayata om, bekandze bekandze maha bekandze radza samudgate soha [“May the many sentient beings who are sick quickly be freed from sickness. And may all the sickness of beings never rise again”]. I would imagine the Medicine Buddha in white light and say the mantra. I did it with no real wanting and no real investment, and then one day it just flooded over me—a sense of compassion for this body. I realized I had been hating the body for betraying me and bringing aversion. I said, “Ah, it’s like another being, this poor body. It’s suffering and I’m hating it. If you or whoever is next to me were suffering, would I be hating you?” The aversion melted, and there was compassion.

Compassion—the change agent! That was one thing brought on by practice—compassion instead of aversion. The other thing that’s been ongoing is the ability that comes from Vipassana meditation to watch our mind and really know that a thought is a thought. Really know that whatever the content of a thought, whatever emotion may come with it, it’s still just that—thought, energy, emotion. It’s not necessarily true. One day, in the very beginning of the diagnosis, I was leaning down to wash the bathtub, and it was so hard to stretch and move. I was really scared and upset. My mind was like, “Oh my God, I’ll never be able to take another walk. I’ll never be in another relationship”—all of this. And then I saw, “Oh, you don’t have any idea about that. You don’t need to go there.” And that’s the wisdom of seeing, as well as the mental training of our practice to say, Yes, I don’t know. Thoughts are going there, but I don’t have to. I could come back and be with the moment—which wasn’t a pleasant moment. So there’s the training: it’s not just about coming back to pleasant. I was still kneeling, doing the bathtub, and it was uncomfortable. But I could be there: okay, this is how it is now; I don’t have to go into the whole future. And that was a lifesaver. So much of people’s suffering is: this is what’s going to happen, blah, blah, blah. But we never know. We’re always stepping into the unknown. And to trust that and be present with the moment without going into the stories is a lifesaver. I was so grateful to mindfulness, to Vipassana, to mind training for that.

You once quoted Sayadaw U Tejaniya saying that you do this training “not even going for wisdom.” It’s the striving that clouds clear seeing. We say, “If I’m not striving for this, what am I working toward?” As though I create wisdom. No. Where there’s steadiness of moment-to-moment mindfulness in the moment, there’s no greed, hatred, or confusion. As awareness gets its own momentum, an insight will just arise. That wisdom is spontaneous, natural, just an accurate recognition of presence. We don’t have to strive for it. That’s the trust. We do put in effort, but striving for wisdom—when our focus goes there, we’ve stepped out of here. We’ve stepped out of total wakefulness.

I have to come from how it feels right now. If I say that we— the generic “we”—are practicing to free the heart and mind from greed, hatred, and confusion, which is a classical Theravada answer, it happens to be true for me. But when I imagine seeing that in print, we’ve moved into being object-oriented again, which is how we live our whole lives. And that keeps us from knowing if our mind or heart is pure—or colored with wanting. When we see it’s colored with wanting, right then it’s okay: wanting. The mind that’s noticing wanting is clear, is working toward freeing the mind from greed, hatred, and delusion. We’re here to see how the mind works. U Tejaniya says to beginners: We’re here to cultivate a better quality of mind.

Why are you here? Why do you sit? My reason changes all the time, but freedom from greed, hatred, and delusion is a way of describing it. There’s also the piece of being of benefit to all beings. I used to want to really understand what’s the truth, because from the first time I took acid, when I was 16, I’ve felt intuitively that some truth is shot through everything. That’s what motivated me to practice, and now I can see it’s the sense of the cyclical nature of life, of samsara, whether rounds of birth and death, or the birth and death of the sense of self over and over, going nowhere—living fully awake in that understanding. These words tend to use the mind too much, but living from that, in a moment when the heart is really pure and things are just as they are, there really is no problem, even when very painful stuff is happening. A friend of mine calls it the place of no problem. And see—if we watch, wisdom comes. That’s what’s so amazing, so amazing. Because it’s not us making it.

The post If We Watch, Wisdom Comes appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

“This is a manifesto: Writing is a true spiritual path, an authentic Zen way,” Natalie Goldberg declares at the end of her new book, Thunder and Lightning: Cracking Open the Writer’s Craft. Years ago, her teacher, the late Katigiri Roshi, asked her, “Why do you come to sit meditation? Why don’t you make writing your practice? If you go deep enough in writing, it will take you everyplace.” Goldberg figured out a Zen-based way to write and began to teach it in workshops around the country and in her first book, Writing Down the Bones. The success of that book made her a writing roshi: she’s where Buddhism meets craft. She relieves you of the usual writer tribulations: writer’s block, writer’s envy, writer’s lust to triumph in the marketplace—to rack up reviews, cocktail parties, and sales. In their place she offers a whole other kind of suffering: the pain of opening yourself to the truth of your mind, of watching mind erupt in you, bomb you, raze you to groundlessness. Not pleasant.

Here’s a quick introduction to her method. Take paper, pen, a topic like: “I remember…” Or a line from a poem. Or a remark overheard. Time yourself: You’ll write for ten minutes, without stopping. Her first rule is, “Keep the hand moving.” Okay, go. Take another topic; another ten minutes. Go! Don’t think, don’t reread, don’t judge. In that rush, that outpouring, you’ll bum through the self-consciousness that pummels the life out of writing, the fear of exposing the self, the fear of producing junk. One of her principles: “You have permission to write the worst junk in America.”

The idea is to slice through ordinary, discursive mind to original mind. Thunder is dedicated to Allen Ginsberg, who taught Goldberg to go for “first thoughts.” Ginsberg, in turn, was inspired by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s “first thought, best thought..” First thoughts, Goldberg explains, “rise full-muscled from the bottom of your belly.” They are unfabricated, unexpected, fresh and true. Listening for first thoughts takes the “I” out of writing. “Suddenly your little will is not doing the writing, but instead writing does writing.”

Goldberg’s approach is inviting, playful. There’s a zest in her teaching and in the stories she tells about herself. M.F.K. Fisher invented the cookbook-as-memoir; Goldberg’s form is writing-manual-as-memoir. After Writing Down the Bones, she published Wild Minds and now Thunder and Lightning. Her life flashes through these three books in little slices, windows on a woman who is up for adventure, testing of various kinds: Now she’s taking up running, now she’s betting at the racetrack. She’s agonizing through a twenty-one-day writing self-retreat; she’s yanking off her clothes and diving naked into a lake. (This is exactly how she teaches, by the way. She’s the friend who urges everyone to strip and jump in.)

Wild mind but strong spine: She is a model of discipline, writing under all circumstances just as one is supposed to sit under all circumstances. (Is a key to her diligence the fact that she frequently writes in a cafe, with a hot chocolate at hand, or a croissant, or two chocolate chip cookies?) She finds all kinds of ways to structure time for practice, and bats away excuses for not writing. (You say you just can’t fit it into your schedule? Her friend Kate started her first novel writing for only thirty-five minutes a day on her lunch hour. “Time to write is simply that. An hour here, a half an hour there. Go. Move pen.”)

Thunder and Lightning takes writers beyond the hurdle of getting pen to move to the next step. How do those notebooks full of first thoughts become a book, an essay, a poem? How do you build structure?

It turns out that she really can’t tell us how to do it, only suggest that when we finally understand what our book—or essay or poem—is really about, the structure will emerge. We have to wait for form to appear. Goldberg asked a student of hers, Julie Landsman, how she constructs a book. Using writing practice based on topics she’s listed, Julie piles up material. She lets it sit for a while, then rereads, looking to see what themes run through the writing, what’s alive on the pages. Structure comes from following those themes. This process, of course, requires edging forward into uncertainty. “We don’t know where we’re going,” Goldberg writes. “There is a life force that will declare itself if you let it. Get out of the way.”

Following what is vibrant for her, she spends a good chunk of time urging writers to read widely in their form as a way to absorb structure. She also tackles two abilities usually crippled in writers: how to take in a compliment and how to bear editing. (“Let yourself bristle with pure fear!” she writes. Breathing through criticism is “another way to be done with yourself. Then you can listen like a rock or a mountain.”)

Three times in these pages she wonders whom we write for. At the end, she discovers that she writes for the Natalie she was before she silenced her in growing up. She writes to record how young Nat saw and felt. “Remember her,” Goldberg tells herself. “Stand with her and you’ll be steady on your own feet. You won’t wobble.”

The post Thunder and Lightning appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

“There are no dead people,” Bob Thurman says. “No one is going to become a dead person. There is no death.” He’s launching the third Art of Dying conference in New York City, cosponsored by Tibet House, of which he’s president, and the New York Open Center. He will talk for four hours, without a lull, a rapids of ideas, imprecations, riffs. The truth is, Thurman says, “there’s no way out, no lunch break, no nirvana break, no death break.” After forty years of involvement with Buddhism, Thurman says, he is “unintimidated by death.” It’s liberation, transformation. The awareness of death “is the door for us to be alive.”

The conference is a rare meeting of the spiritual and the medical. About eight hundred people have shown up, a majority of them professionals in the field, from doctors to hospice nurses, social workers, therapists, and clergy. They’ll flock to workshops on losing a parent or losing a child; coping with sudden loss, with lingering illness, with suicide. They’ll try to understand death from the standpoints of other cultures and other spiritual traditions, from the vantage of a burly, lyrical Irish poet (John O’Donohue) and a “music thanatologist,” Therese Schroeder-Sheker, who plays the harp at the bedside of the dying. They’ll hear from impassioned doctors in the new field of palliative care, where the emphasis is on the relief of suffering rather than the prolongation of life. Ira Byock and Timothy Quill, for instance, two of the highlighted speakers, are building models of a civilized way to care for the dying. It’s stunning to see the power of medicine being used tenderly.

Fred Epstein, an engaging pediatric neurosurgeon who specializes in brain tumors in children, talks about designing his own department at Beth Israel Medical Center. Partway through the process, he called in “experts” to advise him—parents of sick kids. He pointed out the handsome new furniture. “Get rid of it,” said the parents. (Big laugh from the audience: We love to see doctors humbled.) “You need sleep-sofas wide enough,” the parents explained, “so you can hold your child in your lap.” In that detail is the agony of what parents and child go through; in Epstein’s project is the compassion that could make it more bearable.

The aim of the end-of-life movement is to give us the death we want rather than the one we fear—that lonely death in a hospital, in pain or unconscious, at the mercy of overworked, indifferent strangers. A key element is educating and sustaining the caregivers. Ram Dass, speaking of environments to die in, started with memories of Benares, with its funeral pyres on the Ganges. But in the West, he concludes, the environment we die in is the mind of our caregivers. “I see sitting with the dying person as a sadhana,” Ram Dass said, “something you undertake to meet God.” Roshi Joan Halifax founded the Project on Being with Dying and offers meditations to support caregivers. There’s no question this is tough work. “People talk about wanting ‘death with dignity,’” Halifax says. “But death is unbelievably undignified. Don’t even lay that on anybody.”

“What happens when the time of dying comes?” Gelek Rinpoche asked in his workshop. The Tibetan Book of the Dead maps eight stages of dissolution following the moment of death; a sadhana he does every day takes him through the stages, visualizing earth element leaving, fire element. . . . “It’s sad, indeed, but it’s natural,” he says. “The conclusion of birth is death. It’s nothing more than going back to primordial mind, primordial source.”

Dr. Leslie Blackhall of the USC School of Medicine tells us she read an article about a woman who felt she owed it to her daughter to die so she wouldn’t interfere with her career. “What kind of world is this?” Blackhall asks. “I’ve got two kids and I’m wiping their butts, and at the end of my life, I’m hoping they’re going to do the same for me.” But society is structured so caregiving is impossible, she says.

To Ira Byock, how we care for the most ill will be the central moral challenge of the baby boomers. “It will require a commitment equivalent to last century’s wars.” Buddhism is right at the heart of that commitment, a force in lessening the fear of death and raising the value of every moment of every life.

The post The Art of Dying appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Joseph Goldstein grew up in his family’s resort in the Catskill Mountains of New York and graduated from Columbia University, where he majored in philosophy. Courses in Spinoza and Eastern Religion sparked an interest in both metaphysics and spiritual inquiry. “I read the Bhagavad Gita, and the whole notion of non-attachment—of acting without attachment to the fruits of the action—just made sense to me.” He went to Thailand with the Peace Corps in 1965, met teachers of vipassana meditation in the Theravada tradition, and spent most of the next eight years in Asia. In 1975, he, along with Sharon Salzberg and Jack Kornfield, cofounded the Insight Meditation Society (IMS), in Barre, Massachusetts, one of the first vipassana residential retreat centers in the country. In 1989 he also helped establish the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies. The author of The Experience of Insight: A Simple and Direct Guide to Buddhist Meditation; Insight Meditation: The Practice of Freedom; and co-author of Seeking the Heart of Wisdom, Goldstein is now working on a new book, tentatively titled “One Dharma.” He is also involved in planning the Forest Refuge, a retreat center adjacent to IMS that will hold thirty to fifty people doing long-term intensive meditation practice—a next step, he says, for dharma practitioners in the West.

What drew you to Munindra, your first teacher? One of the things that I’d been looking for at Columbia, and not finding in philosophy, was a way to live life wisely rather than just think about it. I wanted some way of making sense of all the uncertainties I was feeling, a way of finding out who was behind the rush of thoughts and emotions that I was taking to be myself. When I was in the Peace Corps in Thailand, I began going to Buddhist study groups. One of the monks suggested I try meditating. At first, I sat for just five minutes. But even in that short time, I realized that this was what I had been looking for—a way to look inward at my own mind.

Then, just a few weeks before the end of my Peace Corps stay, I was sitting in a friend’s garden and he was reading to me from The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation. At one point, when the text was speaking of the “unborn nature of the mind,” there was a sudden and spontaneous experience of the mind opening to… zero. Immediately following, a phrase of wonderment kept repeating in my mind—“There’s no me, there’s no me.” This experience shifted things radically. Of course, since then, feelings or thoughts of a sense of self have arisen many times, but still, there is the knowing that even the sense of self is selfless—that it’s just another thought. At first, this new way of viewing things was very disorienting because it was so unexpected and outside any context of systematic practice. When I returned home, I tried to meditate on my own but realized pretty quickly that I needed a teacher. That’s when I decided to go back to Asia, and I met Munindraji in Bodhgaya.

One of the first things he said to me, and what really hooked me with its obvious truth, was, “If you want to understand your mind, sit down and observe it.” When I practiced meditation with Munindra, there was no form, there was no ritual, there was nothing to join, there was no cultural overlay. There wasn’t even a meditation course. He’d simply give teachings every day about meditation and then we’d go off on our own to sit.

He didn’t structure your time for you? Not much. Essentially, he told us just to spend the day sitting and walking. Munindraji’s mantra in teaching was: “Be simple and easy.” He must have said that thousands of times: “Be simple and easy; take things as they come; be simple and easy.”

When I started intensive meditation practice with Munindra, I saw clearly that I didn’t have the foundation in practice for that previous experience of emptiness. I had to start at the beginning and slowly develop some strength of mindfulness and concentration. I was not one of these people who are naturally concentrated. In the beginning I would sit, and an hour later I would get up, having been lost in thought almost the whole hour. So I had to put in a lot of hours to even begin to get a sense of what concentration was. One practice that helped a lot in this development was an intensive period of lovingkindness meditation—metta, in the Pali language. This served not only to strengthen the quality of lovingkindness—which I felt needed a bit of work [laughs]—but also helped to develop stronger concentration in the mindfulness practice.

You also studied with the vipassana master Goenka. What influence did he have on you? Goenkaji distilled most of the essential teachings of Buddhism into a ten-day retreat, which was a very good structure for introducing Western students to meditation practice. The courses were very popular and they became the models for Sharon [Salzberg], Jack [Kornfield], and myself when we began to teach in the United States. As a teacher, Goenkaji was much more formal than Munindra. I remember how it felt so strange at first to bow when Goenka entered the room. But I got to love bowing—it’s just an expression of faith and devotion and respect, and I do have enormous respect and appreciation for him.

Did you leave Munindra to sit with Goenka? No. Munindra was very open-minded. When people wanted to study with other teachers, even non-Buddhist teachers, Munindra would always say, “Go, explore, investigate. The Buddha dharma doesn’t suffer in comparison to anything.”

You’re part of a group of American teachers who invited the Burmese teacher U Pandita Sayadaw to Barre. How did he affect your practice? U Pandita brought tremendous rigor to our practice. He’s a very demanding teacher, like a tough old Zen master. He wasn’t there to make us feel good or happy or comfortable. His teaching was all about liberation, walking the path to some level of completion. He’s a spiritual warrior and he expected all of us to be warriors as well.

In 1984 we asked him to teach a three-month retreat at IMS and over the next eight or nine years I sat with him in Burma, Nepal, Australia, as well as in this country. That first year was especially tough. All the yogis (meditators) saw him for interviews six days a week and had to tell him how many hours we sat, how many hours we walked. We also had to describe very precisely what was happening in our meditation, without any interpretation, judgment, or assessment. That way of reporting demanded a great closeness of attention to what was actually going on. One of U Pandita’s great strengths was his ability to track our practice with amazing precision: He’d know day-to-day, moment-to-moment where we were.

We also had to be able to really surrender to him, to his style and his way. He was not at all interested in debating with us. From the Burmese point of view, one of the great virtues of a student is obedience. Now, that’s not a highly valued virtue in America—we’re not so big on obedience [laughs]. But to really work well with him took surrender and saying, “Okay, I’m not here to argue. I’m here to learn.”

Do your students argue with you? Sometimes. But I think I have a softer approach than U Pandita. I teach more in Munindra’s style. Munindraji was very gentle and open. He didn’t enforce a form, a discipline. But what I saw from working with him is that, even though it may take a little longer, if we are sincere in our efforts, self-discipline can come out of the practice itself, because it’s what we most want to be doing. In those early years with Munindra, for months at a time he would be away and I would just be meditating by myself—I was so enthusiastic and happy and grateful to have the opportunity to practice. The joy of this way of dharma practice is the inspiration now for developing the new Forest Refuge.

But what form is best really depends on the person and the time—for some the carrot, for some the stick. The Buddha talked about this. He gave an image of training a horse. For some horses, just the shadow of the whip is enough; for others a slight touch spurs them on; and others really need to be whacked, metaphorically speaking [laughs]. When I began practicing with U Pandita, I think it was time for that whack.

In recent years you’ve been studying with some Tibetan teachers. What inspired that? In the early nineties, our old friend Surya Das, whom we knew from India, had come back from two three-year Tibetan retreats. He told us about his practices and encouraged us to meet his teachers, particularly two great dzogchen masters, Tulku Urgyen, who died recently, and Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche. Surya Das had done some vipassana practice before his Tibetan retreats, so I think he felt that we would also have a connection with the dzogchen teachings.

What’s the connection? The connection is awareness and freeing the mind. In vipassana, there’s a great emphasis on the objects of awareness and being mindful of them. We pay attention to the breath, to thoughts, to sensations, and notice their impermanent, insubstantial nature. In dzogchen there’s less emphasis on the object and more on recognizing the empty nature of awareness and resting in that.

What do you mean by the “empty nature of awareness”? In different traditions this phrase might be explained in different ways. One way of understanding it is that when one looks for awareness, there’s nothing to find. It’s invisible, formless, groundless, and yet there is a cognizant capacity—there’s knowing. In dzogchen, this is the union of awareness and emptiness. The “pointing-out instructions” that a qualified dzogchen master will give in a variety of ways help the student to recognize this nature of their own mind.

Is empty awareness the same thing as mindfulness? In the dzogchen tradition a distinction is made between fabricated and unfabricated mindfulness. Fabricated mindfulness is the conditioned state of mind that takes note of an object. Unfabricated mindfulness is the nature of mind itself. We can use fabricated mindfulness to bring us back to the recognition of the mind’s empty, aware nature.

What was your experience of Surya Das’s teachers? We went to Nepal and met Tulku Urgyen, a really wonderful teacher. He was crystal clear and very generous in offering the essential teachings of dzogchen. This was a little unusual, since often, in the Tibetan tradition, you have to go through a much longer process of commitment to the teacher and many preliminary practices. Around the same time, Surya Das also set up a two-month retreat with Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche at Dai Bosatsu, the Zen monastery in upstate New York. Khen Rinpoche exemplified the “crazy wisdom” aspect of practice—spontaneous, unpredictable, and wonderfully humorous. There we were, in this beautiful, classical Zen monastery, with Zen, vipassana, and Tibetan practitioners all learning from a great dzogchen adept, each in our own style.

Two major things happened to me at that retreat. One is that I really struggled with the differences between vipassana and dzogchen. Because even though the dzogchen teachings, just like vipassana, felt resonant with my experience, it was saying quite different things about the nature of awareness and the mind.

What was the difference? In the Burmese system, liberation involves transcending awareness. In dzogchen, liberation is recognizing that the nature of mind is awareness itself. These are two quite different ways of expressing things. I spent a month of that retreat trying to figure it out, trying to decide who was “right.” I finally came to realize that I could understand both systems as skillful means rather than as statements of absolute truth.

Well, that was a huge relief. But, of course, then the question arises, “Well, skillful means for what?” What I’ve come to understand more deeply over the years—and what I think is supported by the teachings in all of the Buddhist traditions—is that the liberated mind is the mind that does not cling to anything. In one discourse the Buddha said, “Nothing whatsoever is to be clung to as I or mine. Whoever has realized this has realized all the teachings.”

All the different methods and metaphysical systems can be seen as skillful means to accomplish the mind of no-clinging. This understanding really freed me from attachments to metaphysical models that I didn’t even know I’d had. I’d been so completely immersed in the model of the Burmese teachings that when I came into contact with a different model, it became a huge conflict. I had just assumed that the particular way we speak of things was the truth, forgetting that the words were just skillful means for experiencing the mind that doesn’t cling to anything. That’s where the freedom is.

The other thing that was very transformative was Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche’s teachings on bodhicitta, the enlightened heart/mind (in some Asian languages the word for heart and mind is the same). He gave one talk on relative and absolute bodhicitta and something clicked in a way that I had not understood before. Relative bodhicitta is the aspiration to get enlightened in order to liberate all beings. Absolute bodhicitta is the nature of the mind itself, that union of emptiness and awareness. What opened me was seeing that relative bodhicitta—the Bodhisattva Vow—was the expression of the absolute. Previously, I had understood the Bodhisattva Vow from the place of someone doing something to liberate all. I could appreciate the Buddha’s doing it, but I could not imagine that I would ever have the capacity or the strength or the perseverance to save all beings! So I put it aside as just a nice idea.

On this retreat, by seeing that relative bodhicitta was the expression of the absolute, I could understand the Bodhisattva Vow in a way that made sense to me personally. I understood that compassionate activity is the expression of the wisdom-mind of selflessness. It wasn’t me taking on all beings. The task is just to get the self out of the way, and simply let the heart/mind of wisdom and compassion express itself. Well, that was just wonderful.

From that retreat on, I’ve been trying to bring more of the bodhicitta aspiration—may our practice be for the benefit of all, may we awaken for the benefit of all—into the vipassana teachings.

Do you see it making a difference? I feel it’s made a really big difference. In vipassana teachings there’s the implicit understanding that the practice will benefit not only oneself but others as well. In the bodhicitta teachings, this is made explicit and becomes the very motivation for practice as well as being its outcome. The bodhicitta aspiration makes the vipassana teachings tremendously expansive, and emphasizes the compassionate aspect of emptiness. So it’s been very enriching for my own practice and teaching.

And you’ve resolved the seeming conflict between the two traditions? When I could bring all the teachings back to the mind of no-clinging it felt like a great refuge. I don’t think any school of Buddhism would argue with that. There’s no school that says, “Cling.” Liberation is about cutting, or dissolving, or letting go of, or seeing through—choose your image—the attachment to anything. The description of the mind of no-clinging may be different in the different schools, but the experience of the mind of no-clinging is the same. How could it be different?

How did you settle the contradiction between the Burmese and dzogchen notions of awareness? You said the Burmese aims to transcend awareness into the “unconditioned,” or “nirvana,” which they would describe as the cessation of consciousness. But in dzogchen, there’s no possibility of transcending awareness since it’s the very nature of mind. I’ve had intimations that perhaps at a certain point these concepts of awareness and of transcending awareness are themselves no longer applicable: The actual experience may be beyond that duality. On one level of experience what may seem to be a conflict, on another level may be resolved through a deeper understanding.

How have your teachers responded to this intermingling of traditions? Within each tradition there’s a liberal-conservative spectrum. Some teachers emphasize preserving the purity of a tradition, and others are more open and engaged with other perspectives. I genuinely don’t believe that one approach is right and one is wrong. They each serve different types of people and temperaments, and each approach may also be appropriate at different times in one’s practice. There are dangers and strengths in each.

What is the danger of openness? Confusion. People can pick a little of this and a little of that and not go deep. Or we can begin to pick and choose what parts of the teachings we like or are comfortable with and discard the rest. This could lead to diminishing of the power and scope of the teachings. But if we integrate aspects of different traditions from a deep place of practice, then the traditions can support each other and be wonderfully harmonious.

You often suggest that students be aware of awareness itself, of knowing. Yet you never use the dzogchen word for awareness, “rigpa.” Is it the same as bare attention? This is a good example of the potential for confusion, of bringing terms from one tradition into another. Early on in my dzogchen practice I went to see one of the great dzogchen masters, Dodrup Chen Rinpoche, and I asked him some question about rigpa and nirvana: Are they the same? Are they different? He said that it’s very difficult to make these comparisons, because each system may use the same words in different ways. Within the Tibetan tradition, the word “nirvana” may be used very differently than the same word in the Theravadin tradition. So care is needed.

There is an awareness in the dzogchen view that is the nature of mind. It’s completely free of identification with anything, free from any fixation on an object. There’s another aspect in dzogchen of knowing where there is some level of identification with, or attachment to, something. It could be attachment to some object of experience, or it could be a fixation on awareness itself. But it’s no longer just the naked face of awareness, the innate wakefulness of the nature of mind.

One of the images used in some Tibetan texts is that of water and ice. Water is used as an image for the awareness that is the nature of mind (although as an image water is still too much of a thing). Ice is the mind that’s solidified in one way or another. Great care is needed in distinguishing between water and ice, because sometimes what we thought was water turns out to be slush – there’s a little bit of ice in there. And yet at the same time—and this is what’s so interesting—the nature of ice is water. The nature is the same, though it’s not manifesting in the same way. This is another way of saying that even the hindrances of mind like desire, fear, or doubt are themselves essentially selfless and insubstantial.

In vipassana, with regard to bare attention, in its purest, freest form, one could equate bare attention with this mirror-like wisdom of the mind: It just simply knows. But bare attention can also refer to an equanimous observer, someone who is being attentive. Well, if there’s a sense of an observer, no matter how subtle, it’s ice, not water. So even with a phrase like “bare attention” you would have to be precise about what you mean.

Why do you “never” use the word rigpa? I have enormous respect for the different lineages and traditions, and I don’t at all consider myself a dzogchen teacher. Some of the teachers I studied with particularly made the point that rigpa is a term that’s part of the context of the whole dzogchen teaching, so to take it out of that context feels wrong.

I feel more comfortable using the phrase “the nature of mind” as an expression of my own experience and understanding. I like that because, first, it implies that it’s not a thing; it’s the nature of the mind—it doesn’t reify it. And it’s poetic and deep and inviting of exploration. It’s just the nature of mind—it’s not Tibetan or Burmese or Indian.

How do you relate to aspects of dzogchen that seem to be at odds with the liberal edge of vipassana? For instance, that what makes it possible to enter the spacious mind of dzogchen is devotion to the guru. Guru devotion is a major aspect of that tradition, and it’s a tremendously effective way of surrendering the sense of self and the sense of “I.” It’s a more refined expression of what I was talking about before with U Pandita and the quality of obedience. That’s really what the obedience is about. In the act of surrender, you let go of your ego struggle.

But within the Tibetan tradition, it’s said that rigpa—the union of emptiness and awareness—is the true guru. So on that absolute level of understanding, guru devotion is the surrender to this experience of the nature of mind itself. And on the relative level, there’s the practice of guru devotion where the guru is the embodied Buddha.

We can be limited by attachment to either of these perspectives. The real maturing of practice, I think, is understanding both the relative and absolute levels, understanding their differences and understanding their union—exactly like water and ice. They’re different on one level, and yet they’re the same. The relative is not different from the absolute. And yet each has to be respected and practiced from its own side.

Over the years, your joy in the dharma seems more and more apparent. What sums it up for me is a Tibetan word you use about the dharma, “Emaho!”—“how amazing!” Well, the more I’ve gotten out of any particular metaphysical model, the more I have this wonder at the nature of our minds, at the possibility of freedom in the very middle of our suffering. It is truly amazing.

And yet for many people, these models are immutable and unbridgeable. Oh, there’s tremendous sectarianism. That’s why I’m working on a book now tentatively called “One Dharma.” I am inspired by my experience of how different traditions can come together in practice and want to try to communicate that. Because I don’t think there really is just one approach. There are different facets of this great jewel of the dharma. At different times, different aspects become relevant. But there’s a way of holding them as a unity. That’s really exciting to me. I’m just now beginning to teach from this place. And, for all the unresolved questions about the ultimate nature of the fully enlightened mind, I use a surefire magic mantra—”Who knows?”

But I would like to reiterate that I think there’s enormous value in preserving each tradition in its own purity, with its own integrity. And I think there’s a way, as well, of having them meet.

You’ve written about a few experiences that made you think you’d gotten it!—enlightenment—and the point of the stories is that there’s always further letting go. Absolutely. It feels to me that practice is a process of ripening, like a fruit ripening on a tree. Chinul, an eleventh-century Korean Zen master, described the path as “sudden awakening, gradual cultivation.” He gives value to those moments when we suddenly awaken to the nature of mind, but then we need a gradual and further cultivation of wisdom and compassion.

In a recent talk you said that the path to liberation “is a science as well as an art—it’s a path that’s open to everyone.” It is. The path of awakening is extremely well mapped, and it’s mapped in different ways by different traditions. At certain stages maps can be useful; they point out the way. But at other stages they can be a big hindrance, because we often get caught up in interpretation and judgment: “How far along am I?” “Am I there?” These thoughts simply strengthen the sense of self, while the whole path is about dissolving it. And particularly in our Western culture, which is so competitive and judgmental, instead of adding more fuel to the fire of self-judgment—“Oh, where am I? I’m not good enough”—we could see our entire spiritual journey as this wonderful flowering of understanding. We just keep going; we just keep watering the Bodhi tree of wisdom.

Goldstein’s Teachers

From top to bottom: Munindra; Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche; Dipa Ma; Sayadaw U Pandita; Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche.

The post How Amazing! appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Larry Rosenberg is the founder of the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center (CIMC) and a guiding teacher of Insight Meditation Society (IMS) in Barre, Massachusetts. His new book, Breath by Breath, was recently published by Shambhala. Born to Russian-Jewish immigrants in 1932, Rosenberg grew up in Brooklyn; his father, who had Marxist leanings, came from fourteen generations of rabbis, but thought “that only an idiot goes into religion.”

Rosenberg went to Brooklyn College, and received his Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Chicago. A highly coveted job in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School followed. But this turned out to be a “staggering” disappointment and he returned to the University of Chicago, where he began to experiment with hallucinogens. During a trip to Mexico in the 1960s, he met a cowboy-turned-holy-man who told him, “Don’t waste your time with drugs; you should start meditating.”

Thirty-five years later, Rosenberg is sitting in a wing chair in CIMC, talking to Tricycle’s contributing editor Amy Gross about the evolution of his own practice.

***

Tricycle: Who was your first teacher?

Rosenberg: Krishnamurti. I met him in 1968 while I was teaching at Brandeis University. Brandeis had this program where they’d invite a person to give talks for a week. I didn’t know who Krishnamurti was, but fortunately for me, no one else did either so we started taking walks and talking. I’d never met anyone so awake. I’d never been listened to so totally and I found it quite unnerving at first. Then, as I got to know him, I just felt so at home with him. I told him that I was a professor, but the whole academic thing was dying out from under me. I’d been extremely ambitious—on fire to get a Ph.D. and a good job—but now I thought the old cliché “publish or perish” should really be “publish and perish.”

Before Krishnamurti I’d never verbalized how I felt because I didn’t have the confidence. What he did that was invaluable was, he confirmed my perception. He said, “Just go on teaching and start paying attention to yourself. Start noticing how you actually live.” That’s a phrase he’d say over and over—“how you actually live.”

Tricycle: Where did you go from there?

Rosenberg: I started doing everything. Krishnamurti. Vedanta. I was on my way to India for a Sanskrit-Vedanta training program when a friend of mine introduced me to Seung Sahn, a Zen Master from Korea. I went on a retreat, and after that, there was no reason to go to India. I thought, “Boy, I’ve accomplished more in four days of meditation than in all the years of talking about texts.”

Tricycle: How did you know what you were trying to accomplish?

Rosenberg: I’d had a taste on drugs of a pristine clarity and a feeling of tremendous joy and peace and love. And once or twice I had it doing a primitive kind of meditation, the best I could do based on books and what Krishnamurti had said.

And that was the beginning of the end of my academic career. What I’d learned at Harvard was that I was looking for happiness in the wrong place, because if I couldn’t be happy at Harvard, where could I? And finally, the last two years or so at Brandeis I knew that I had to drop out of the university and go into this full-time.

Tricycle: How did you live after you dropped out?

Rosenberg: For about a year-and-a-half I just crashed in different places, including Asia. Somehow I always had a place. For a while I lived at Seung Sahn’s center near Providence, Rhode Island, wore the robes, and studied with him. He was grooming me to teach and I traveled with him as his aide.

Tricycle: What was your practice then?

Rosenberg: Mostly koans. And after three or four years he suggested that I spend a year at his monastery in Korea, which I did.

Tricycle: What led you from Korean Zen to vipassana?

Rosenberg: After Korea, I went back to the Zen Center, where there was a huge amount of ritual—chanting twice a day, bowing, robes, a stylized way of eating, so many ceremonies it seemed we were celebrating something every other week.

Then my close friend Jon Kabat-Zinn—we’ve gone through all these things together for thirty-five years—went on a vipassana retreat, and he pretty much grabbed me and said, “Larry, I found what you’ve been looking for.” Because I’d always say, “If we could only get rid of all this ceremony, all this stuff.” But I said, “Look, Jon, Zen is fine for me; I just want to stay here.” He said, “If I have to tie you up and throw you into my pickup truck, I’m going to take you on the next retreat.” So for my birthday he gave me a present of a retreat—it was led by Jack Kornfield.

Tricycle: And was it just what you were looking for?

Rosenberg: It was love at first sight. The retreat was basically sit-and-walk until you’re blue in the face. Breathing was the main method, and making mental notes. There was no chanting. There was no special way to eat except mindfully. Oh my God, what a relief! I didn’t realize how much I didn’t want to carry around all that Asian form and custom and just be an American guy who wanted to do this stuff.

The heart of the whole thing is understanding. Not intellectual understanding, although that’s a way to begin. It’s deeply seeing into yourself. And that to me is different from concentration, which can of course facilitate such clear seeing. Many things help you with concentration, like chanting or bowing, so they can be useful parts of practice. But finally, there is no substitute for insightful seeing or for understanding how you create suffering for yourself; and in the process—in seeing into and through it—how to let go of it. It’s a life of awareness. That’s my passion. Now, there’s a school of Zen that emphasizes just-awareness of what is, and I could easily have gone in that direction. That’s Soto Zen, and a practice called shikan-taza—just sitting—and when that ripens, that to me is mature practice. It’s nothing. You sit and you’re just totally attentive to what’s there. What I teach, anapanasati, leads to that, to more and more simplicity until finally we don’t need techniques and methods, even the breath. [Anapanasati is where breathing is used as an exclusive object of attention to develop concentrated focus; then awareness grounded in the breathing is used to see clearly into the impermanent and empty nature of all formations. Letting go into freedom emerges into insight. —LR] I don’t impose it on people. I let them come to it naturally. But for me, I’ve always been much more drawn to just awareness of the way things are. Krishnamurti—whose teaching is a brilliant modern commentary on the fundamental teaching of mindfulness—started me that way, and I’ve always come back to it.

Tricycle: It’s a hard way to start, don’t you think?

Rosenberg: I won’t say it’s impossible, but yes, I agree, it’s a hard way to start.

Tricycle: Why did you open the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center?

Rosenberg: I’d: been teaching at a bookstore two nights a week. And a lot of people started coming, and then they started saying we needed a center. I wasn’t thrilled with that. I had avoided certain kinds of responsibilities my whole life. But after a few years it became obvious that it would really be great if there was some place—IMS plus this urban place—because people were coming back from their long retreats at IMS and there was no place to practice. Also, I was evolving a way of teaching that took daily life very seriously.

Tricycle: You mean in contrast to retreat time?

Rosenberg: Yes, the idea was that people could go off and do retreats and we’d keep the sitting practice alive and also encourage them to go back to their families, school, job, and then tell us about it. And we would respond not like therapists but from a dharma point of view. Could the practice be helpful to the work and the marriage and school, etc.? It’s quite a challenge, one I welcome: What do these teachings have to offer in terms of how people can live in the world?

Tricycle: How did that differ from your own studies?

Rosenberg: Most of our teachers had been celibate monks from Asia. They had very little direct experience with women, some of them had never had a job or touched money, etc.—and they were giving us advice. To me, some of their advice seemed limited. Their advice to men about women—I’m making a bit of a joke about it, but it was sort of like: “Take care of the wife and kids so they’re adequately fed and housed and get some schooling, so they’re not a problem.” Basically it’s so that you can get on with the real thing, which is to sit. It isn’t seeing marriage itself or children or work as dynamic situations that have a lot of energy in them, that are quite challenging, and that if looked at in a certain way are not inferior to sitting as a way of growing spiritually.

Tricycle: That view westernizes the dharma, doesn’t it?

Rosenberg: Yes, I think Westerners lack respect for their own spiritual maturity. It’s as though Asia owns spirituality, and we’re these barbarians, beseeching, “Oh, Bhante, please come over and tell us how to live.” But I’ve been to Asia, and they’re just as screwed up as we are. And there’s some real wisdom in our culture; the West has a tradition, too, of compassion and wisdom. And some people who aren’t even religious have it. When I was in Asia I totally did whatever an Asian layperson would do—I have the deepest respect for this tradition—but Asia does not have a monopoly on kindness. In Asia, being a layperson is—from the point of view of meditational practice—considered second-class. I personally think that the monastic life does optimize your possibilities for breaking through to awakening. But it’s by no means a guarantee. Most monasteries are hardly crammed full of enlightened people.

But we need a teaching that addresses the lives we actually live. We do need to handle money. We are in relationships. We do need to eat more than once a day. The problem isn’t eating or sex or money; it’s that we don’t know how to use these energies. The monastic strategy is: Don’t touch it; it’s dangerous. So the monks don’t handle money, etc. To me that’s not in and of itself particularly holy. It’s a strategy, a monastic strategy to get free. I’m all for it—if you’re going to be a monastic.

Tricycle: And for lay practitioners?

Rosenberg: Our challenge is to learn how to use money and food and relationship correctly and not to look at these realms as tainted. And I didn’t see fully adequate help coming from Asians. What I’ve learned, I’ve learned from the Buddha’s teaching of the Four Noble Truths and my own pain, from not knowing how to do these things.

Tricycle: Could you describe how your own practice has changed over the years?

Rosenberg: Throughout all sorts of different schools and practices, two things have survived. One is an abiding interest in the breath. And the other is just ordinary mind power, just awareness itself. That’s what I got from Krishnamurti, and it’s in all the Buddha’s teachings. It’s just to be attentive to the way things are. In Pali, the word for mindfulness is sati and one of the definitions of it is “that which sets things right.” I don’t know if you’ve seen this in the practice, but when mindfulness touches things, they’re less problematic or not a problem at all. It’s magical. What I learned from anapanasati was that the breath is not simply to calm yourself or steady yourself or develop concentration; it can nourish awareness throughout. You use the breath the way everyone else does—to calm down—but it stays with you as you investigate the body, feelings, and all the different mind states, and begin to see that they’re impermanent and lack an enduring core; they’re not self.

Tricycle: So the breath is like background music or—

Rosenberg: It helps keep you on target. It can sustain and strengthen the awareness. It can cut down unnecessary thinking and even eliminate thinking, for periods of time anyway. It’s particularly helpful with difficult emotions that are hard to observe. It’s like a soothing friend holding your hand as you walk into fear or loneliness or anger, encouraging you to stay with it. And if you feel like running away, observe that. And the breath is always there, in, out, in, out. In the communities I’m used to teaching in—highly educated, intellectual people who live complex lives, whose work involves coordinating many activities, the use of computers, social relations—their minds have become very, very complicated. Too complicated. For those people, the breath is a relief. It’s like, “Phew!”

Tricycle: What happens to you now when you sit?

Rosenberg: The breath is still there. But my practice now for the most part is doing nothing. I just sit there. I know it sounds dopey [laughs]. Typically I’ll start off with the breathing, but sometimes not. I get calm and clear pretty quickly. Sometimes I’ll just spend a whole sitting really deeply in samadhi, which is very useful, especially if I’m tired—tremendous energy comes from it. So I’m not investigating it; it’s not vipassana at all. I give exclusive attention to the in-and-out breathing. And it strengthens the mind. It’s like a sanctuary that you can drop into to get away from everything for a while. Even five minutes of conscious breathing, and I’m ready to do what has to be done in terms of people and work. So typically, I start off with the breath. And sometimes that’s all I’ll do. But ninety-nine percent of the time, I just open the field of attention. If I had to put it into words, it’s learning the art of doing absolutely nothing. So you’re sitting there, attentive, and enjoying the show.

Tricycle: What’s “the show”?

Rosenberg: Whatever comes up. A thought. A sound. A sensation. You don’t reach out for anything. You just let life bring stuff to you. Or there’s silence. Many people have some ambivalence about silence—they fear it, or don’t value it. Because we only know ourselves through thinking and speaking and acting. But once the mind gets silent, the range of what’s possible is immeasurable. So first you taste the silence. Then you realize that it’s not a vacuum or dead space. It’s not an absence of the real stuff; it’s not that the real stuff is the doing, the talking, and all that. You get comfortable in it and you learn that it’s highly charged with life. It’s a very refined and subtle kind of energy. And when you come out of it, somehow you’re kinder, more intelligent. It’s not something that you manufacture—it’s an integral part of being alive. And it’s vast. We’ve enclosed ourselves in a relatively small space by thinking. It binds us in, and we’re not aware that we’re living in a tiny, cluttered room. With practice, it’s as if the walls of this room were torn down, and you realize there’s a sky out there.

Tricycle: Have your reasons for practicing changed over the years?

Rosenberg: I’d say that what got me into this doesn’t bear a lot of resemblance to why I do it now. The original motives were immature and romantic, having to do, at first, with wanting to get a natural organic high without the side effects of drugs. But after a while, getting high from meditation is beside the point. The point is getting free. That’s not only of benefit to you—I say this to people who think the practice is very self-centered: The greatest gift you can give to others is to become less of a problem through understanding yourself. We don’t know how to live together as human beings. To me, practice is not an act of ideology; it’s an act of intelligence or wisdom.

“Terms like ‘enlightenment’ or ‘awakening’ are important because sometimes people forget what this practice is really about. It’s not about making yourself happier. It’s not liberation of the self; it’s liberation from the self.”

Tricycle: Is getting free the same as getting enlightened?

Rosenberg: If you say, “Am I practicing in order to get enlightened?” the answer is yes. But that sounds stupid to me. The process of liberation is right now. Anyone who has practiced for a while knows there are dramatic openings—that “Wow!” where you see things very clearly. It helps a lot when you have that. But throughout any ordinary day there are so many points where, if you pay attention, you can see how you’re suffering unnecessarily. Awareness sees it and in the seeing of it, there’s letting go and you’ve liberated yourself. So liberation isn’t just a goal. It’s actually a practice. You are liberating yourself in this moment—and that’s all we’ll ever have, these moments. If you have even a little glimpse of clear mind, or that in us which is untouched by any kind of cultural conditioning, it’s hard to settle for anything less. And terms like “enlightenment” or “awakening”—which I prefer—are important because sometimes people forget what this practice is really about. It’s finally about enlightenment, about awakening, about liberation. It’s not about making yourself happier. It’s not liberation of the self; it’s liberation from the self.

Tricycle: As we evolve an American Buddhism, do we need an alternative to the phrase “not-self”? We’re raised to develop an independent, strong self. I don’t know if Asians have an easier time with the idea of the end of ego.

Rosenberg: Ego is a universal thing. Egomania is wherever you look. It’s hard for everybody to understand this “not-self” stuff. I say, Are you willing to look at your mind and learn? See what happens when you’re an egomaniac. If you find that it’s not a skillful way to live, that you’re getting hurt over and over, this is why. But you have to see that yourself. It’s not a new ideology to adopt: “I believe in not-self.” So what? Beliefs are so easy to come by. That isn’t what the Buddha is saying. The Buddha is saying, “Investigate what you call your own personal identity, and find out what that really is.”

Tricycle: Are you different from when you started?

Rosenberg: I think there’s been improvement in behavioral qualities, personality. But what practice is about is something that is beyond measure, and if you practice, you will taste that. And it doesn’t mean that you will have a perfect personality if you taste awakening. People think that’s true. But you have to express yourself through the vehicle that you have. Maybe my packaging has improved, and I don’t think that’s trivial—I’m probably easier on the people in my life. But in another sense, I don’t want to overestimate it. There’s a story that I like very much. The Zen master Sawaki Roshi was walking with a disciple who described himself as a shy, awkward person. Sawaki Roshi was a very confident, charismatic person. So they were walking and the disciple said, “If I keep practicing with you for the next thirty years, will a weak person like me become stronger?” And Sawaki Roshi said, “No. Meditation is useless. I was just born this way.” He was trying to make it not a means-end kind of thing. When people would ask Sawaki Roshi about the value of meditation, he sometimes said, “Oh, this sitting? It’s absolutely useless. But if you don’t do this useless thing wholeheartedly, your life will be useless.” Figure that one out. In a certain way you just practice. Don’t worry about “Am I getting better?” and the rest of it. Just practice dharma for its own sake and let things take care of themselves.

Tricycle: You’re suggesting that the changes wrought by practice are very subtle, but in your case, practice redirected your life.

Rosenberg: I think one of the things practice does is bring you to your own unique way of flowering. Some people are afraid, “If I meditate, will I have to quit my university life or end my marriage?” I don’t know. I think it shows you what’s true for you, and then it’s up to you to live that or betray it. You don’t have to leave the world. It’s not about being in or out of the world. You can be a monk and be ruled by ego.

Tricycle: Can you be a CEO and not ruled by ego?

Rosenberg: Why not? I think Buddha was a great CEO. Jesus was an amazing CEO. They were incredible in the way they mobilized people and orchestrated things, got a lot done in just one short life. I’m not saying that it’s easy, but in principle, why not? The suffering isn’t in functioning as a CEO; it’s that you think you are a CEO. Dharma ultimately is about finding out that you’re absolutely no one. What a relief. When you’re no one, finally you’re real. I mean, you’re living from full presence rather than from all these representations of the self that you identify with: I’m a CEO! I’m a great editor! You’re more alive than you’ve ever been. And when you practice, you don’t have to wait a long time. We all have our moments of clarity, even now.

How Breathing Really Is

It is important to emphasize, in discussing the art of meditation (and the practice as you continue it becomes an art, with many subtle nuances), that you shouldn’t start out with some idea of gaining. This is the deepest paradox in all of meditation: we want to get somewhere—we wouldn’t have taken up the practice if we didn’t—but the way to get there is just to be fully here. The way to get from point A to point B is really to be at A. When we follow the breathing in the hope of becoming something better, we are compromising our connection to the present, which is all we ever have. If your breathing is shallow, your mind and body restless, let them be that way, for as long as they need to. Just watch them. If you find yourself disappointed with your meditation, there’s a good chance that some idea of gaining is present. See that, and let it go.

One place where ideas of gaining typically come in, where people get obsessive about the practice, is in the task of staying with the breathing. We take a simple instruction and create a drama of success and failure around it: we’re succeeding when we’re with the breath, failing when we’re not. Actually, the whole process is meditation: being with the breathing, drifting away, seeing that we’ve drifted away, gently coming back. It is extremely important to come back without blame, without judgment, without a feeling of failure. If you have to come back a thousand times in a five minute period of sitting, just do it. It’s not a problem unless you make it into one.

Each instance of seeing that you’ve been away is, after all, a moment of mindfulness, as well as a seed that increases the likelihood of such moments in the future. If you already had some kind of laser-like attention that never wavered, you wouldn’t need to practice meditation at all. The object of these two contemplations isn’t to make your breathing perfect. It’s to see how your breathing really is.

♦

Excerpted with permission from Breath by Breath: The Liberating Practice of Insight Meditation (Shambhala)

The post The Art of Doing Nothing appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.