Pith instructions, also referred to as heart teachings, essential instructions, or direct pointing-out instructions, are a form of concise yet rich teachings that distill the core essence of Buddhist philosophy into clear, experiential guidance. Such instructions aim to bypass intellectual complexities and lead practitioners directly to transformative insights. They cut through complicated doctrines to provide a direct and profound experience of the nature of reality and the mind. They are shortcuts to understanding and experience. It has been said that pith instructions are like a special key that opens the door to our own deeper being.

The quiet heart

is the only place

where true satisfaction can be found.

In Tibetan or Himalayan Buddhism, pith instructions are called the Vajra shortcut. They get right to the point, taking the practitioner from where they are—their point of departure, as it were—to their destination—insight or even awakening. Rather than merely indicating the general direction—like someone you meet on the road to ask for directions who waves vaguely toward the horizon—they take you straight to where you want to be. Furthermore, by implementing the pith instruction method, the practitioner is liberated from having to study every inch, every possible route. They don’t need to stumble around trying different methods before they find the right path for themselves. In other words, pith instructions are the most essential and user-friendly advice about Buddhist practice. They are usually passed from master to disciple but also from practitioner to practitioner. One of the earliest examples of the pith instruction transmitted from practitioner to practitioner is the Therigatha, the Verses of the Elder Nuns. Pith instructions tend to focus on how to apply Buddhist teachings in practice as well as in daily life. It is a very direct, very pared back, and very simple form of teaching—so pared back that the late Tibetan lama Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche used to call them “naked teachings.”

Historically, pith instructions were most often transmitted orally, but there is also a long tradition of written pith instructions dating back to the 12th century CE with the mahasiddhas of India. In Vajrayana, the dharma is commonly divided into tantras (which are the source texts), commentaries on these texts, and pith instructions (which are focused on practice). In Sanskrit, pith instructions are called upadesha, and in Tibetan, they are known as me-ngak. Other translations for upadesha and me-ngak are “crucial instructions,” “foremost instructions,” and “quintessential instructions.” One can see from these different translations that pith instructions are not merely concise. They contain the most essential and the most important advice for undertaking and realizing the Buddhist path.

Know this! 

No matter who you are or what you have done

there is always a place for you in the Dharma. 

Always.

A practice rooted in experience

Pith instructions serve several crucial roles in Buddhist practice. First, they emphasize direct experience over theoretical understanding. Rather than getting lost in the intricacies of doctrine, practitioners are encouraged to engage in experiential practices that bring them closer to enlightenment. Pith instructions enable individuals to bypass mental constructs and connect with the essence of their mind. In theory, they can even directly introduce the practitioner to the nature of the mind beyond conceptualization, leading to the recognition of our ultimate nature.

Second, pith instructions are personalized and adaptable. Skilled teachers tailor these instructions to the needs of individual practitioners or specific communities and time periods, ensuring that the guidance resonates with their experiences and dispositions. This personalized approach enhances the effectiveness of the instructions, facilitating a deeper understanding and connection to the teachings. 

Pith instructions are an essential component of the Dzogchen tradition. Dzogchen, which translates as Great Perfection or Great Completion, focuses on recognizing the innate nature of the mind and reality. Pith instructions in Dzogchen are the primary practice method for cutting through conceptual elaborations to directly experience the nature of mind, known in Tibetan as rigpa, or nondual awareness. As such, pith instructions are the most direct and immediate means to recognize our inherent enlightenment. As Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche makes clear:

“The instructions of the Dzogchen lineage are used to directly point out the nature of mind and bring the experience of enlightenment into our ordinary life and experiences. Therefore, these teachings are known as ‘pith instructions,’ the heart or quintessence of pure knowledge that cuts through all confusion and gets straight to the point. There is a saying, ‘don’t beat around the bush,’ meaning ‘get to the point.’ That is Dzogchen.”

One of my teachers, Chogyal Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche, always made it very clear that Dzogchen is a completely separate vehicle to the tantric practice of the two stages (generation and completion). Jamgon Mipham Rinpoche (1846–1912) states that the Dzogchen path does not use complex tantric methods that require significant effort, such as the subtle energy practices or purification rituals, but rather uses pith instructions to reach Dzogpachenpo, the ultimate, self-perfected natural state. Mipham writes:

“Instead, they will be able to enter this state merely by the power of the master’s pith instructions and the transference of blessings. In either case, this is the sacred fruition of all other completion stage practices. Moreover, the master’s pith instructions enable one to recognize, directly and nakedly, that the nature of one’s own mind is empty yet aware, that it is self-occurring wisdom, innately free from constructs. With this recognition, one comes to rest in a state without accepting or rejecting and without artifice or fabrication.”

A step-by-step guide to pith contemplation

How are practitioners meant to engage with pith instructions? Pith instructions are not merely for reading; participants need to contemplate the pith instructions and integrate their meaning into the core of their being. The practice of pith instructions has three simple steps: reading, contemplating, and integrating. All three of these steps are done in a single session.

When you look into the eyes of another

and see your true nature reflected back at you,

you know for certain that we are all one.

First, participants read the instruction, focusing on one pith instruction at a time. They read it closely, not in a distracted way, and with an open mind. Practitioners should be heedful of engaging with thoughts like “this is too simple to be helpful” or “this is too short to be truly profound” or even, “I already know this.” Dismissive or overly confident thoughts poison the practice and cut off any possibility for accomplishment. 

Once participants have read the instruction a few times, they then sit in quiet contemplation. This means to simply be with the instruction, or rather to be with the feeling or sense that the instruction evokes. They are not unpacking the words, digging for some deeper truth, nor are they analyzing the words, trying to squeeze out every last drop of meaning. They are not engaging with the words intellectually at all. They are just sitting with the pith instruction and being aware of how it feels to them. That being said, some users prefer a more active contemplation. They might like to read the pith instructions out loud, and hear how they sound, how they resonate. They might like to silently repeat the lines to themselves. They might like to write them out. They might even want to sing them. All of these are useful ways to engage in contemplation, so long as they are primarily focused on how the instruction makes them feel.

Once a participant has done their contemplation, has spent some quality time with the pith instruction, they then sit in meditation, in simple silent sitting (or shamatha). While they are sitting in shamatha, they are not trying to dwell on the pith instruction or remember it word for word. They are simply sitting. That’s it, just sitting, still and silent, allowing themselves to rest in simple awareness and be in the natural presence of the moment. 

This style of meditation, simply resting in awareness, brings the pith instruction from the head down to the heart, from the realm of words and feelings to the realm of timeless nondual awareness, where it will do its work. If one practices in this way—reading, contemplating, and meditating, all in a single session—the wisdom that the pith instructions point to will come to life for them, and in time they will awaken to their ultimate nature. 

The past is dead.

The future does not exist.

The present cannot be found.

Rest there.

In the tapestry of Buddhist teachings, pith instructions stand as luminous threads that illuminate the path to enlightenment. Rooted in the desire to facilitate direct experiences and insights, pith instructions serve as an essential bridge between complex doctrines and personal transformation. 

In the profound Dzogchen tradition, pith instructions are treasured as a direct and potent means to recognize the true nature of the mind and reality. By embodying the spirit of experiential wisdom, pith instructions guide seekers toward the ultimate goal of liberation and awakening. Indeed, according to many great masters, such as Mipham Rinpoche, the pith instruction method is a complete path in and of itself. Pith instructions offer a simple, direct method for engaging in meaningful practice that is both effective and an antidote to our already overburdened lives. 

If one approaches pith instructions as merely something to read and enjoy, beautiful in their poetic simplicity, they will have some benefit, but they can be so much more. If one applies them to their practice, the benefits are literally inconceivable. The choice is yours.

♦

Pith instruction excerpts from The Awakening Heart: 108 Pith Instructions for Buddhist Practice by  Jamyang Tenphel, Timeless Awareness Publications, Copyright September 25, 2023.

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There’s a fake Buddha quote you may have heard. It quotes the Buddha as saying, “I teach one thing and one thing only: suffering and the end of suffering.” The fake part is the “one thing and one thing only.” He did say, “All I teach is suffering and the end of suffering,” but people tend to focus on the “one thing only.”

I’ve read some teachers interpret this, saying that there’s a subtle teaching here: that suffering and the end of suffering are the same thing. From there, they go on to say, “What this means is that if you learn to accept the fact of suffering, then there’s no more suffering,” which is a pretty bleak teaching. It goes together with the One Method and One Method Only teaching, i.e., that the basic teaching is simply to watch things arising and passing away, and that’s all you have to do. Learn not to get involved and everything will be okay. That’s the highest happiness you can expect.

Again, the Buddha didn’t teach that. Suffering is one thing; the end of suffering is something else. They both come from actions—different actions—which makes all the difference in the world. If there’s only one thing to do, such as just passively accepting whatever’s going on, then you’re let off the hook. There wouldn’t be a need for very much discernment to go into the path because there wouldn’t be many choices made. In fact, you’d be learning how not to make choices—trying to develop choiceless awareness.

But the fact is that you’re making choices all the time, and what you’re experiencing right now is the result of choices you’ve made in the past plus choices you’re making right now. A major part of the path is learning how to accept that fact and then to work with it—to do something positive with it. In other words, if there’s suffering right now, you’ve been making some bad choices in the past and you’re making some bad choices right now. If you weren’t making bad choices right now, there wouldn’t be any suffering. So wherever there’s any stress or dukkha in any of its forms, you’ve got to look into what you’re doing. Then you can change what you’re doing and shape a different present: that’s the positive point.

Now, because what you’re experiencing right now is a combination of different factors, that means you have to look and look again. Those pleasures and pains don’t come marked with a country of origin, i.e., past karma or present karma. A large part of the meditation is learning how to sort that out: which things are coming from past intentions and which things are coming from present intentions. And what are your present intentions right now? This throws all the responsibility on you. The teacher’s here to give advice, to see if you’re going off course and to help with a little course correction. But then again, you have to be responsible for deciding whether you want to take the advice or not.

This is the hard part of the path, and it’s one of the reasons why people like to hear that there’s a One Size Fits All meditation method, and the method itself has just one option: accept. It takes the responsibility off their shoulders. But you’re not going to gain discernment that way. You gain discernment from making choices and then learning how to read them. It’s not the case that you’ll go immediately to total understanding of what’s the past karma you’re experiencing right now and what’s the present karma. You learn bit by bit.

Start by trying to get the mind as still as possible. This is the basic pattern in all the tetrads of the breath meditation. You sensitize yourself to what you’re doing, and then you try to do it in a way that leads to greater calm, to more subtle forms of concentration and more subtle levels of pleasure. You work through this process of sensitizing and refinement step by step by step, which means that you have to be very observant.

The Buddha gives you some guidance. If you notice that things are inconstant in the mind, especially if the level of stress or ease in the mind is inconstant, look at what you’re doing. When the level of stress goes up, what did you do? When it goes down, what did you do? When things seem to be perfectly still and perfectly at ease, try to maintain that stillness and see if you can begin to sensitize yourself to more subtle ups and downs.

This keeps throwing the responsibility back on you. The Buddha’s there with guidance. He gives you lots of different meditation methods to deal with specific problems as they come up. Breath meditation is your home base because it’s a method that sensitizes you directly to bodily, verbal, and mental fabrication, and points you in the direction of learning how to calm these things.

But sometimes issues come up in the mind that are a lot more blatant than that. That’s when you need contemplation of the body, contemplation of death, contemplation of the principle of karma, reflections on the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha: all of these things are there to help you with whatever the specific problem that’s coming up, whether it’s laziness or lack of self-confidence. There are ways of thinking that can get you around those problems, all with the purpose of getting you back to the breath—because it’s when you’re with the breath that you can see your subtle intentions most clearly.

Those are the troublemakers. Those are the things you want to see more and more clearly so that you can figure out exactly where you’re making choices right now, and who, in the bureaucracy of your mind, is making the choice. Sometimes decisions get sent up to the top, and you realize that there’s an issue you have to deal with. But there are a lot of lower-level management people who will make quick decisions and send things back down again without consulting you. If there weren’t, your mind would be totally flooded with all kinds of stuff. The problem is, though, that some of those middle-level decisions are not very wise. So you’ve got to get the mind more and more still to see where the subtle decisions are being made and if they’re actually in your best interest.

So suffering is not the same thing as the end of suffering. The Buddha didn’t teach just one thing; he didn’t teach just one method. The mind, after all, is a complex thing, and you need lots of approaches to work with it. Which is why we need all this time to meditate: to get to know things, to stick with something for a while until you can see where you’re doing it wrong. Then you can do a course correction.

So, accept the fact that there will be some right and some wrong in what you’re doing all the time. You have to approach this with a certain amount of humility: Okay, yup, you are doing something wrong. But you’ve also got some rightness, too, and a lot of the practice is learning to figure out which is which so that you can increase the rightness. It’ll be up to you to make the distinction. After all, when awakening comes, nobody else does it for you. That’s a matter of your powers of observation, your discernment, and your sensitivity to the choices the mind is making. This gets more subtle with practice as you take on the responsibility.

You say, “Okay, there’s suffering there, I know. I’m not going to blame anybody else.” But blaming yourself doesn’t mean that you’re a bad person—simply that there’s been a lack of skill, and that’s something that can be corrected. This will take time; it requires patience. Just as the Buddha said that to get to know someone well, you have to spend time with that person and be with them in lots of different situations to get a rounded view, the same principle applies to your mind. To get a rounded view of what’s going on in your mind—where there’s suffering and stress, and what’s causing it—you have to spend time and be observant.

Remember that the responsibility lies here. You are making choices. You’ve made some bad ones, but you’ve also made some good ones, and you want to be able to learn from both.

♦

This article originally appeared on dhammatalks.org.

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To love, in the context of Buddhism, is above all to be there. But being there is not an easy thing. Some training is necessary, some practice. If you are not there, how can you love? Being there is very much an art, the art of meditation, because meditating is bringing your true presence to the here and now. The question that arises is: Do you have time to love?

I know a boy of 12 whose father asked him one day: “Son, what would you like for your birthday present?” The boy did not know how to answer his father, who was a very rich man, able to buy anything for his son. But the boy did not want anything except his father’s presence. Because the role the father played kept him very busy, he did not have time to devote to his wife and children. Being rich is an obstacle to loving. When you are rich, you want to continue to be rich, and so you end up devoting all your time, all your energy in your daily life, to staying rich. If this father were to understand what true love is, he would do whatever is necessary to find time for his son and his wife.

The most precious gift you can give to the one you love is your true presence. What must we do to really be there? Those who have practiced Buddhist meditation know that meditating is above all being present: to yourself, to those you love, to life.

So I would propose a very simple practice to you, the practice of mindful breathing: “Breathing—I know that I am breathing in; breathing—I know that I am breathing out.” If you do that with a little concentration, then you will be able to really be there, because in our daily life our mind and our body are rarely together. Our body might be there, but our mind is somewhere else. Maybe you are lost in regrets about the past, maybe in worries about the future, or else you are preoccupied with your plans, with anger or with jealousy. And so your mind is not really there with your body.

The most precious gift you can give to the one you love is your true presence.

Between the mind and the body, there is something that can serve as a bridge. The moment you begin to practice mindful breathing, your body and your mind begin to come together with one another. It takes only ten to twenty seconds to accomplish this miracle called oneness of body and mind. With mindful breathing, you can bring body and mind together in the present moment, and every one of us can do it, even a child.

The Buddha left us an absolutely essential text, the Anapanasati Sutta, or Discourse on the Practice of Mindful Breathing. If you really want to practice Buddhist meditation, you must study this text.

If the father I was talking about had known that, he would have begun to breathe in and breathe out mindfully, and then one or two minutes later, he would have approached his son, he would have looked at him with a smile, and he would have said this: “My dear, I am here for you.” This is the greatest gift you can give to someone you love.

In Buddhism we talk about mantras. A mantra is a magic formula that, once it is uttered, can entirely change a situation, our mind, our body, or a person. But this magic formula must be spoken in a state of concentration, that is to say, a state in which body and mind are absolutely in a state of unity. What you say then, in this state of being, becomes a mantra.

So I am going to present to you a very effective mantra, not in Sanskrit or Tibetan, but in English: “Dear one, I am here for you.” Perhaps this evening you will try for a few minutes to practice mindful breathing in order to bring your body and mind together. You will approach the person you love and with this mindfulness, with this concentration, you will look into his or her eyes, and you will begin to utter this formula: “Dear one, I am really here for you.” You must say that with your body and with your mind at the same time, and then you will see the transformation. 

Do you have enough time to love? Can you make sure that in your everyday life you have a little time to love? We do not have much time together; we are too busy. In the morning while eating breakfast, we do not look at the person we love, we do not have enough time for it. We eat very quickly while thinking about other things, and sometimes we even hold a newspaper that hides the face of the person we love. In the evening when we come home, we are too tired to be able to look at the person we love.

We must bring about a revolution in our way of living our everyday lives, because our happiness, our lives, are within ourselves. 

⧫

From True Love: A Practice for Awakening the Heart by Thich Nhat Hanh © 1997 by Éditions Terre du Ciel and Unified Buddhist Church, Inc. Translation © 2004 by Shambhala Publications. This edition published in 2023. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO. www.shambhala.com

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A mantra is a syllable, word, or group of words that has psychological or spiritual power. The earliest mantras go back three thousand years, when they were first used on the Indian subcontinent. The resonance that arises between a sound vibration and our thoughts, feelings, and intentions happens naturally, much like two tuning forks resonating at the same frequency. Today, there are a multitude of phrases readily available throughout the world’s meditative traditions. 

The word mantra is derived from two Sanskrit words—manas, meaning “mind,” and tra, meaning “protect.” Together they translate to “protection,” and in some cases, “compassion.” Our original, still mind is always here, but our worries and fears leak all over everything, so our original self goes unnoticed. 

A mantra has the power to protect us from this leaking. And since compassion can be described as wisdom actualized, a mantra also cultivates clarity and wisdom. A mantra, then, is a tool that protects the mind, cultivates clarity and wisdom, and actualizes compassion. 

Although most prominent in Eastern traditions, mantras are also used in other traditions and religions. A popular mantra for Protestant Christians is simply the name Jesus. Catholics commonly repeat the Hail Mary prayer or Ave Maria—my Catholic grandmother used to work her prayer beads continually with the Hail Mary or Ave Maria. Many Jewish practitioners recite Baruch atah Adonai, meaning “Blessed art thou, oh Lord.” 

The very first phrase I used to mindfully focus my thoughts, feelings, and highest intention—knowing almost nothing about Buddhism—was from The Teachings of the Mystics by W. T. Stace. It was Jesus’s simple phrase, “the peace that passeth understanding.” I repeated it, over and over, during a train ride from San Francisco to Salt Lake City. This was before I began a meditation practice or even knew what meditation was. I discovered that if I repeated it continually with heartfelt effort throughout the trip, I became surrounded and permeated by a feeling of deep spaciousness and joy. Once I fell into the groove of it, the sense of spaciousness sustained itself through the remainder of the trip. 

Most of the mantras I have used since then have come from the Buddhist tradition, with one exception. During the three or four years I spent with a Lakota spiritual guide, I followed his advice to repeat Mitakuye Oyasin, which translates to “all my relatives.” Whenever I felt walled off, as if I were somehow excluded from the interbeing nature of all life, I would chant Mitakuye Oyasin. 

Mitakuye Oyasin reflects the Lakota worldview that all beings are interconnected. And time after time, I fell into the same deep spaciousness and joyful sense of interbeing I’d experienced many years before when I first heard it. If you do this yourself, you may find that the joyful stillness you aspire to is closer than you think, closer than your own breath. 

Teacher and author Sally Kempton said that a mantra is “a bit like rubbing a flint against a stone to strike fire.” She goes on to say that it’s the friction between the syllables of the mantra that ignites the fire and, over time, shifts your inner state. 

One way that the fire shifts your inner state is by burning through the turmoil and the incessant mental chatter that can get so stirred up during our meditation. As we come back to our word or phrase again and again, there is the potential to open into a great spaciousness that includes everything and is, at the same time, infused with a deep calm—even in the midst of so much seemingly insurmountable turmoil. 

Yogis have used mantras for hundreds of years to experience the profound sense of calm that mantra practice can bring about, and Western science is finally catching up. Modern brain-imaging techniques have confirmed the benefits of this ancient practice. In one study in 2017, researchers from Linköping University in Sweden measured activity in a region of the brain called the default mode network—the area that’s active when we are remembering, regretting, and rehearsing—to measure the effects of mantra practice. The researchers concluded that mantra practice induced a state of deep relaxation, and furthermore, they found that a regular practice could promote the ability to deal with life’s stresses more skillfully. 

Mantra Practice 

Find a mantra that resonates with you and try to set aside ten to twenty minutes a day to practice. Once you’ve chosen a specific mantra, it’s best to stay with it for some months, giving it a chance to do its work, before considering a switch to another one. 

Begin by sitting in a comfortable position. Repeat the mantra a few times silently, on each inhale and exhale. Don’t try to focus on the mantra too hard; simply allow your body and mind to relax into it. Just like you would in any other type of meditation, when thoughts or feelings enter your mind, simply notice them and then return to silently reciting the word or phrase. 

The most frequently recited mantra in the Zen tradition comes from the Heart Sutra: gate gate paragate parasamgate (gate is pronounced ga-tay). It translates to “gone, gone, gone beyond, gone completely beyond.” You can repeat one word or the entire series of words. 

When I was having an especially difficult time staying focused during a seven-day retreat, Suzuki Roshi suggested that I make this mantra the focus of my meditation. It was a surprising suggestion because, at that time, Suzuki had never talked about using techniques of any kind, much less mantras. All these years later, I continue to be grateful for this instruction, and I still use it whenever I’m experiencing some difficulty in my meditation. 

Gate gate paragate parasamgate is about going beyond our limiting beliefs, which cloud our ability to see clearly. And going beyond strongly held beliefs requires that we go beyond the three types of poisonous glue that hold these beliefs in place. The first type is greed: we grasp at any shiny object that promises immediate pleasure. The second poisonous glue is hatred: we push away anything that interferes with our getting what we want. And the third is ignorance: our tendency to ignore everything else. 

So far, I have mentioned several mantras from which you may choose. Here are three more that you might find to be useful: 

May I meet this moment fully.
May I meet it as a friend. 

In the first sentence you are affirming that an alert and balanced mind, which is not caught by before or after, is a possibility for you. In the second sentence, you are affirming your ability to welcome whatever comes with an open heart. 

Real, but not true 

This mantra affirms that your thoughts and emotions are real— but not necessarily true. When we believe something to be true, we naturally contract around it. If you can relax into this short but insightful mantra, new meanings and possibilities may be revealed. 

Things as it is

This expression originated with Suzuki Roshi and has since become a popular mantra. While grammatically incorrect—which I foolishly pointed out to him once—Suzuki’s odd nomenclature has a unifying effect. It acknowledges conventional reality, which is often referred to in Buddhism as “the 10,000 things”—and then, in the same breath, affirms the no-thingness of ultimate reality. 

Choosing a mantra is not complicated. Just select one that resonates with you, engages you, and burns through your mental chatter. Thich Nhat Hanh suggested “deep” on the in-breath and “peace” on the out-breath, or “present moment” on the in-breath and “only moment” on the out-breath. It really can be that simple—and at the same time quite powerful. 

The nineteenth-century poet Alfred Lord Tennyson discovered that he could calm his mind by merely sitting still and repeating his own name. Here’s how he described the experience: “My individuality itself seems to dissolve and fade away into boundless being . . . the loss of personality seeming no extinction, but the one true life.”

I’m sure it’s obvious by now that the specific mantra is not so important. What is important is consistency and engagement. When you catch yourself trying to empower the mantra yourself, just return to the actual practice of pouring your whole body and mind into the mantra and letting go of any thought of gain or loss. Your effort is to simply be present with the mantra—wherever it takes you, there you are, fully present and at one with the mantra, which, within itself, includes all beings.   

⧫

From Enlightenment Is an Accident: Ancient Wisdom and Simple Practices to Make You Accident Prone by Tim Burkett, edited by Wanda Isle © 2023 by Tim Burkett. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO. www.shambhala.com

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Times are urgent, and we need to slow down in order to decide how to respond to the many challenges we face—from environmental degradation to widespread war and violence, to name just a few. We need to make space to be with our experience as it is, to allow what is and to relax into it. 

Connecting with our experience teaches us a lot about ourselves and how we meet and interpret the world. We can begin to notice our attitude towards what we encounter in any given moment by asking ourselves, How do I deal with this? What do I do with it? How do I relate to my experience? This investigation is the hallmark of the Buddha’s teaching, while experience itself is actually secondary. By looking at our lives in this way, we begin to see with increasing clarity that all phenomena are constantly changing and are therefore unable to offer us lasting satisfaction. This insight is the master key to freedom and the reason why we meditate.

First, find a posture you can sustain for half an hour or so, and as you take your seat, do so with all the beings behind you who have brought you to this moment—all the human ancestors, animal ancestors, and plant and mineral ancestors. Be aware of all of them behind you and all the future generations in front of you, and in the midst of all this, take your seat. Take your seat in order to know the path in this moment, to see yourself and the world a bit more clearly. Really honor this very deep impulse, which is in all of us. It’s a deep calling that we’ve had the good fortune to connect with and now we’re able to respond to. Just take that in—the fact that you can do this.

Begin by connecting with your body—feel your weight on the cushion, on the chair. This piece of earth, this piece of planet that we call our body is in constant exchange with the biosphere. Feel the gravity of the earth element pulling you toward the ground, offering you stability and a place to be and practice. 

As you spend time with your body, be aware of the heart area as well and the emotions that you feel there. Notice what is present for you right now. If you’re not quite clear, that’s OK. Just notice the confusion or the numbness, the resistance to connect with what you’re feeling. Whatever it is, that is what’s happening, at least for now. Practice is not about changing our experience. Rather, practice increases our ability to be with what is. To accept and allow, to make space by creating a bigger container for our thoughts and feelings, to cultivate qualities that will help us work with our experience.

Next, be aware of the mind. Is it open or contracted? Is there a sense of hurry or stress? Just notice what’s there, and as you do this, be aware of your breathing. Allow your awareness to rest on the body breathing. If you notice the mind wandering off into thinking, just come back to the simplicity of the body breathing in and breathing out. With the in-breath be aware of the body and what’s happening inside you. Then relax into boundless space and silence with the out-breath. Listen to the space, listen to the silence, and allow the mind to open. Whenever you notice that the mind wants to contract around a thought, gently let go of the impulse and come back to listening. Gently lean into spaciousness and silence while allowing movement and change—giving room to it all.

If you become conscious of a feeling or some sort of response to what’s happening, just gently hold it in your heart and allow it to spread through the body—the form of your being. Let it deeply in-form you, so that through that knowing you’ll be able to sense what you need to do next. By inviting that seeing to ripple out through your body and mind, you stretch and grow and integrate a little more world and life into your being. How does that feel for you? Can you sense the raw energy that comes from releasing old feelings or tensions? Or do you need to honor that which still needs more time to release? Each decision is individual, and you’ll become more fluent as your practice unfolds.

Through repeated practice, we begin to see the futility of holding onto that which is constantly changing.

Now drop the perception of spaciousness and silence and just be aware of that which knows about the spaciousness and silence—what we call the knower, or conscious awareness. Be the knowing. Rest as knowing, like a mirror with the capacity to reflect without doing anything but simply knowing that something is happening. Just be the knowing without interfering with what is known. 

Practicing in this way allows identification with our personality and our experiences to wash away, like removing a stain from a cloth. Through repeated practice, we begin to see the futility of holding onto that which is constantly changing. We see that all phenomena have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and then letting go occurs as a natural response of a mind that understands the way things really are. 

Now come back to your body and the seat, becoming aware again of the gravity of the earth element pulling you toward the planet. We belong here and we have what it takes to respond to our situation. Starting with ourselves—by investigating our body, heart, and mind and what we bring to our experience—is the first step. From there we train to open and receive what is emerging so that we can respond more appropriately and skillfully.

Times are urgent, we need to slow down. We are vessels standing on the shoulders of all who came before us, and we also form part of the foundation for what comes next. Wisdom and compassion arise from physical and mental activities conjoined. Our daily lives and our meditation practice need to inform each other—that’s how we shed ballast and arrive at a greater perspective, enabling us to respond in a balanced manner and then let go. Being human is an experiment and always has been. The Buddha’s teachings show us how we might live that experiment in the clearest and most compassionate way.

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Many of my earliest childhood memories take place in nature. Sitting at the banks of a creek in rapt silence, marveling at the tenacity of crocuses blooming in late winter, and singing, drumming, and dancing surrounded by forests and fields. In my relationship to the earth, I found wisdom, enchantment, and magic. Truly, nature was my first dharma teacher. While I did not have the language for this at the time, my fingers can now trace the shamanic undercurrent present in these earliest experiences of the sacred.

It is this undercurrent that has become a transformative part of my dharma practice and my life. And, it appears I’m not alone in this. Whether through books like Zenju Earthlyn Manuel’s The Shamanic Bones of Zen, the rising popularity of wilderness meditation retreats, or even the growth of psychedelic-assisted therapies, we are now waking up to many of the shamanic foundations of meditation, dharma, and healing. 

It was only after many years of Buddhist practice that I found myself reconnecting with the powerful experiences of my childhood and training as a shamanic counselor. I now use shamanic journey work and other practices for spiritual inquiry, personal growth, and healing. While at times this kind of practice contrasted with my Theravada Buddhist background, it has also brought me back to the magic and wonder of some of my most meaningful meditation retreats, and given me new tools to strengthen my own practice and support others in theirs. 

At the heart of things, Buddhism and shamanism both share some essential traits: they seek to explore consciousness and to bring forth a type of liberation, balance, or healing. The word “shaman” even has etymological ties to the spiritual seekers of the Buddha’s day. Stemming from the term “saman,” meaning “one who knows,” in the Tungusic language family of Eastern Siberia, this root word is strikingly similar to the Pali “samana” and the Sanskrit “sramana”—a contemplative, wandering ascetic or monastic, much like the Buddha himself. The concept of shamanism is not specific to one culture or lineage, but rather refers to earth-based spiritual practices that can be found in the history of nearly every indigenous culture, from Tibet to Ireland to Senegal, and beyond. Wherever humans have connected in a sacred way with the earth, it appears that some form of shamanic practice has sprung forth.

One of the most common practices found across numerous cultures is the shamanic journey, a meditative form typically accessed through a process of visualization, accompanied by repetitive, rhythmic drumming, with the drum’s beat serving as an auditory driver that entrains the practitioner into a trancelike state. The practitioner enters into this altered state of consciousness and connects with a guide—a source of inner wisdom that can take the form of a light, a deity like Kuan Yin, an animal, an aspect of the earth itself, or something else entirely—for the purpose of healing and spiritual inquiry. Through this connection, a person may have visionary experiences and come away with insights that could not be accessed by our everyday, thinking mind. In fact, recent findings from the University of Michigan’s Center for Consciousness Science indicate that shamanic journey work can lead to experiences of unity, ego dissolution, and insightfulness at levels similar to or greater than a range of psychedelics.

In this practice, wisdom and healing are revealed through imagery, messages from a guide, and the intuitive sense of the person embarking on the journey. I have worked with clients who experienced collapse or harm in their sangha to gain, through the journey, a sense of closure where none was realistically possible in ordinary life. In the altered state of the journey, they received wisdom and support from their guides, spoke their mind to a teacher they were no longer in contact with, and reclaimed their own power and a newfound sense of peace. In other situations, those I work with have been pointed toward deeper truths: a young woman struggling with trauma was offered the safety and mirroring from her guide that she never received as a child and was able to glimpse her inherent worthiness. A man grappling with a profoundly painful inner critic was able to see the critical voice as empty of self and ready to be released.

I have seen this kind of journey support clients in deeply understanding the inner workings of their own suffering, building a deeper sense of trust in themselves and their practice, and bringing peace to places where confusion, craving, or aversion previously ran rampant. It is an incredibly powerful contemplative and therapeutic form, and I love to share it with longtime meditators for this reason.

But long before I came to the shamanic journey, I fell in love with the dharma. In my early days of dharma practice, I voraciously attended as many silent retreats as I could. I found in the silence a profound joy and a sense of reconnection to the states of awe and mystery I experienced as a young child. In my first retreats, long-forgotten memories rushed back: bringing chocolates and other offerings to a nearby stream and leaving them for the unseen beings I imagined lived there, closing my eyes and sitting alone in my bedroom as a 6-year-old, watching thoughts appear like bubbles from the bottom of a deep lake. Retreat practice brought me back to those formative experiences of the sacred.

As modern practitioners of an ancient mystic tradition, how do we make space for its inherent magic in the 21st century?

Over the years, I listened as elder teachers shared their experiences in India with iconic figures like Dipa Ma, who was known to have precise recall of past lives, among many other miraculous abilities. Dipa Ma became a beacon for me—not just as a mystic, but also as a woman practitioner and a householder. But while my teachers’ voices were filled with awe, their stories often left me feeling as though that possibility of powerful, mystic experience was relegated to another era. Where was the space for encounters with the sacred within our hectic, technology-driven lives? 

While communities around me rode the cresting waves of secular mindfulness, this question lingered. Beginning around 2010, as smartphone meditation apps gained prominence and many Western convert Buddhist communities embraced the scientific study of mindfulness, I began to encounter a dharma that was increasingly touched by the influences of capitalism; productivity culture; the erasure of earth-based, Asian, and indigenous practices; and a patriarchal mistrust of the numinous. This modern dharma was in an accessible, secular language that even spiritual skeptics could trust, and research had shown over and over that these ancient practices were effective and evidence-based. But I wondered, how much of the mystic, intuitive side of practice were we sacrificing in exchange for scientific gravitas?

Throughout this time, I also encountered several teachers who could embrace and lead from this place of mysticism. One teacher, in a tone that seemed half reverent and half mischievous, smiled and exclaimed, “The Buddha was a shaman!” during her dharma talk on a two-month retreat. Even without shamanic training, something in those words rang with truth for me, and I held them close.

As I began to encounter the shamanic journey, this teacher’s words resonated even more, and it felt clear that the mystic aspect of my practice had found a welcoming home. Quickly, I saw that journey work and meditation complemented each other beautifully. Through the journey, I could more easily access many of the transcendent experiences and insights that occurred for me in periods of intensive silent retreat, and together, shamanic and Buddhist practices offered new avenues to explore my understanding of the dharma.

This shifted my relationship to practice. Instead of “just noting,” as so many teachers would encourage during more visceral or visionary experiences in meditation, I found that I could call on my journey practice for support on the cushion, listen to my own intuitive knowing, and be open to the experience itself as a teacher in a deeper way. With this approach, practice became more vibrant, more creative, and more connected to the natural world. The path began to have a greater sense of wholeness because no parts of myself or my experience were left out. 

Today, when I guide others in shamanic journey work, we often explore these territories of exclusion. What has been left out in our practice that longs to be integrated and included? What messages has our culture given us about spirituality, and how does that influence our experience of the sacred? Can we trust intuitive awareness, or are we gripped with doubt and skepticism? All of this is part of our practice and part of the path. 

Like most shamanic practitioners, the Buddha spent time in nature in a deep meditative state, connecting with seen and unseen aspects of reality, and bringing back wisdom that could ease suffering. While times have changed, and we may not be wandering ascetics or samanas anymore, this continues to be our task. As modern practitioners of an ancient mystic tradition, how do we make space for its inherent magic in the 21st century?

Perhaps it first begins with opening our minds and imaginations to new possibilities. So many Buddhist stories are shared through the more animistic or shamanic lenses of the Buddha’s time but today are seen only as metaphors. The devas appear at the birth of the Buddha, a group of monastics bring metta practice to a haunted forest, or the earth herself rises up on the eve of the Buddha’s awakening. In the shamanic context, these encounters might be seen as visionary messages emanating from an extraordinary field of wisdom and compassion, but in our modern culture they easily shrink down to a fiction. 

Of course, these stories are incredibly useful as simple allegories, but I wonder, has our history of mystic experience turned into myth because our modern imagination cannot contain the possibility of something more magical, more wild? Is it possible for us to reclaim mysticism as a vital foundation of our path? What would the historical Buddha advise—the one who sat at the foot of the Bodhi tree in a profoundly altered state of consciousness? I imagine he might smile gently and say, “Ehipassiko”—come see for yourself. 

The post How the Shamanic Journey Transformed My Meditation Practice appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Most people come to meditation with some pretty clear ideas of what it is and what it isn’t. Most meditation instructions are designed to create or generate what is deemed to be the “right” experience. Even when it’s said lightly or implied, the underlying message is to put aside or ban experiences that don’t fit within a particular kind of meditation.

But there can be value in many kinds of experience. They have different benefits, and some benefits can’t be perceived until much later, if at all. One benefit may be time out from the demands of life, or even the demand to have a fruitful meditation.

In meditation we’re letting go of a major desire we all have: to take action. When we sit down for a period of meditation we do our best not to get up and answer the phone, respond to emails, watch movies, make phone calls, eat or drink. And if we do any of these things while meditating (which is possible online), we try to be more mindful in doing it, though we still have a goal to eventually, at some point, be relatively still.

When we’re gentle with whatever shows up in meditation, we can see more about how our experience changes. Seeing more is a kind of wisdom. It doesn’t always happen in the moment, and doesn’t happen with everything, but we are able to embrace much more than we had been able to before.

In 2020, at the height of the pandemic, we held an online retreat. Our motto for the retreat was a call for gentleness: Things happen. Take it easy. Take care. Do your best. We will do ours. We couldn’t ask more from participants, or ourselves. And we aren’t asking more from you.

Things change, we change, and that is difficult at times, and at other times it leads to new and innovative perspectives.

New and innovative perspectives are the fruit of reflective meditation, in which we record the content of our meditation sessions. In our practice we’ve also called it creative meditation, or free-range meditation; we let things go on. We give our experience a big field to roam in. Unexpected experiences pop up, the stuff of creativity. Our inner worlds are messy like a zoo, but the animals aren’t in separate cages, neatly compartmentalized. Learn to love these wild animals! Learn to give our experiences the respect they deserve.

Our experience is complex; we can’t process one aspect in isolation from everything else. Creative meditation requires the capacity to tolerate this complexity. Rather than segregating thoughts, feelings, sensations, reactions, and contemplations, let them all roam around in your inner experience. Get to know them, even if they seem foreign and confusing. Don’t neatly tie up experience with colored ribbons too soon. It’s not that simple! If we can’t tolerate complexity, we could find ourselves living in a black and white world, holding to black and white views and opinions. That’s what gets us into trouble.

When we let in the disturbing, the terrifying, the annoying, we also let in the unknown and the creative. Our lives become vivid and colorful.

The Buddha advocated using speech wisely, “skilfully”, and he spoke in creative, conversational ways. His insistence on skillful speech points us in the direction of being more honest, more truthful, and more direct whenever possible. Reviewing emails in meditation, for example, something typically seen as a waste of time, can provide the raw ingredients for speaking from our values. We’re referring to an important development in Buddhism, wise and kind speech, which appears both as one of the ‘folds’ on the eightfold path of awakening, and as one of the five basic ethical precepts.

Is it surprising that ethics and creativity come together? It can seem as if we should simply be more disciplined to be ethical. More disciplined to meditate. More disciplined to be creative. More disciplined to awaken. Can’t we just memorize the Buddhist teachings and use them as they have been taught to us?

Creativity also relates to a process in meditation practice where the raw ingredients get blended, melded, intermixed with some mystery, like an abstract painting. We lose touch with our familiar inner world. Maybe our senses operate in odd ways. Unexpected things happen. Increasing our capacity to mix colors. Not just the black and white, but so many other shades and colors. Our inner and outer landscapes become more colorful, multi-dimensional, and vivid.

New views, new understandings, new developments, new ways of regarding the same contents of our meditation—all this feels and is creative. It can be insightful, transforming, and awakening. And, it changes the landscape of the dharma teachings themselves.

Greater awareness develops in three phases in reflective meditation. First we meditate, allowing whatever to transpire. Then we take a step back and reflect upon it, finding words often in writing, for what happened. Then we speak it aloud to a teacher and/ or to peers. Each of these phases shines the light of awareness, each a bit differently and from a different perspective.

We use writing as a means to gain greater awareness. In some approaches to Buddhist meditation, writing is explicitly forbidden on retreat. I used to “sneak” writing during meditation retreats, because I needed to bring my thoughts and experiences out in order to process them.

There are two ways we structure writing. After meditating, we leave about ten minutes to reflect back and take notes about what happened in the meditation, with the caveat that it’s impossible to remember all or even most of what happened. Our inner worlds are multidimensional collages, with so much unfolding, and sometimes so quickly. Other times things become slow, deep, spacious that it’s hard to recall because we’d become so immersed. There’s no need to write things down in chronological order, though sometimes this might be easier. Make lists, draw pictures, write paragraphs. Search for words that approach what actually happened.

Sometimes we set aside periods of free-form writing, usually to address a prompt or an open-ended question or exploration. I tell students to “let it rip”, to not be concerned with grammar or punctuation. We suggest you meditate in the same way. Surprising things come out.

Some people swear by the old-fashioned way of writing with pen on paper. This supposedly creates more mind-body connections. Others find that they can keep up with what happened more easily by typing it. Like so much else we suggest, you should find your own way.

What about the insights that come from meditation? We don’t want to lose track of them. Writing them down preserves them so we can refer back to them later. After all, these insights can be elusive, floating barely above conscious awareness. Insights may arise within the meditation, in reflection and writing or when speaking with a teacher. Insights might be overlooked, discounted or be too subtle to be perceived.

Reflective Meditation Instructions

In an open, unstructured meditation approach there are many ways to meditate. You’ll find your own way, and over time it will change. By reflecting on your meditative process, you become aware of how you’re meditating and how meditation supports and informs you. Here are some initial suggestions to get started.

These basic meditation instructions can be helpful for beginning meditators. If you already have a meditation practice, you can try these instructions, or you can meditate in the ways that you’re accustomed to. Consider this approach as another kind of meditation with different benefits.

1.  Finding structure

• Choose a comfortable position, maybe with the support of a chair or cushion. It’s easier to settle when you are comfortable.
• Find a quiet place where you’re not likely to be disturbed.
• Choose a length of time to meditate. Consider starting with between ten and thirty minutes. Don’t stress yourself trying to meditate for too long. Using a timer can help.

2.  Moving around

• Let your thoughts, feelings, emotions and attention move around. Whatever arises in meditation is okay: nothing is inherently taboo. Let your attention go where it is drawn. This might not feel like conventional notions of meditation.
• Try to keep your body still. If you become uncomfortable, move slowly and carefully into a more comfortable posture. Stillness in meditation develops with practice over time.

3. Settling in

• At times you may want to ground your attention, especially if things become chaotic or overwhelming. You need not stay for long with a fixed object, though sometimes you will settle for a while.
• You can experiment with perching on the still point where your body touches the earth; where the feet touch the ground, or the body touches the chair, couch or cushion.
• If you have a meditation practice, use a focus object that comes easily to you such as the breath, awareness of the body, or a mantra.
• There’s no need to fly back to a perch when something else is calling for your attention.

4. After Meditation

• Take time to reflect on your meditative experiences; this is how you’ll develop more meditative insight.
• Journaling can support awareness and memory.
• Write down what is easiest to remember first. Then fill in more as you remember it.
• Describe your experience in your own words.
• Try to stick with what happened in the meditation. If you add interpretation or associations, put these thoughts in parenthesis or some other notation. This helps discern what happened in the meditation from what followed from it.
• Consider the content of your thoughts, the tone of your emotions, your relationship to your experience. Did you hear sounds, feel sensations, hear thoughts, see visuals? How did you relate to what happened?
• Whatever you remember will be enough. Don’t be concerned with remembering all of it: it’s not necessary or possible.

⧫

Reprinted here by permission from Reflective Meditation: Cultivating kindness and curiosity in the Buddha’s company by Linda Modaro and Nelly Kaufer, published by Tuwhiri (2023), Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand.

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Have you ever had a sublime idea pop into your head while doing chores? If so, you are not so different from the Zen student Hsiang-yen, who, struggling with a koan, retreated to the shrine of the 6th patriarch Huineng (regarded as the founder of the “Sudden Enlightenment” school of Zen), in order to diligently maintain it. One day while sweeping, a pebble shot out from his broom and struck a piece of bamboo and—aha!—the sound resulted in Hsiang-yen’s instant awakening.

Aha moments, in which understanding arrives suddenly and with shocking clarity, are the holy grail for creatives, intellectuals, and Buddhists alike. As we struggle with a koan, math problem, or work of art, understanding can feel distant and obscure, like a destination to which we’d like to arrive though we lack directions or even a sense of what the terrain looks like. Desperate for a breakthrough, we grasp at solutions to no avail, bang our heads against the wall, grapple with writer’s block, and cast about desperately for answers. Then, having exhausted our capacity for contemplation and while engaging in a seemingly unrelated task, wisdom benevolently strikes. 

In his seminal work The Gift, the scholar Lewis Hyde examined the seemingly random nature of inspiration. “An essential portion of any artist’s labor is not creation so much as invocation. Part of the work cannot be made, it must be received,” wrote Hyde. He offered numerous examples of artists citing this receptive rather than productive quality. For example, the Nobel Prize-winning poet Czeslaw Milosz, who stated, “I felt very strongly that nothing depended on my will, that everything I might accomplish in life would be not won by my own efforts but given as a gift.” 

Interestingly, modern neuroscience has shown that the experiences of Hsiang-yen and Czeslaw Milosz are consistently borne out by others. Jonathan Schooler, a professor in the University of California’s Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, researches this nexus of mindfulness, creativity, and the brain. In a couple of studies involving almost two hundred professional writers and physicists, he found that twenty percent of their ideas occurred when engaging in “spontaneous task-independent mind wandering.”

When I connected with Schooler he made sure to clarify that the writers and physicists weren’t more creative when mind wandering versus when they were on task. “The ideas that they had in the shower were as good as the ideas that they had while they were actively trying to solve the problem,” he noted. But the shower ideas often had more of a breakthrough quality to them. “We found that the ideas that they had in this context, that is when they’re not actively pursuing the problem, and when they’re not at work, are more likely to involve overcoming impasses,” explained Schooler. “So it seems like mind wandering may be particularly useful for the kind of problem that you need to sleep on, where you’re sort of stuck, and you need a different kind of approach or solution.”

In a 2015 paper, aptly titled “Mind Wandering ‘Ahas’ Versus Mindful Reasoning: Alternative Routes to Creative Solutions,” Schooler’s team actually found a negative relationship between mindfulness and problem-solving. Mind wandering, noted Schooler, involves a perceptual decoupling, in which attention to external stimuli is dampened. Mindfulness involves greater attention to such stimuli. “But a big part of meditation ends up being mind wandering,” said Schooler. “Mindfulness is really the practice of learning to notice your self mind wandering, and then releasing that mind wandering.” 

When the research was further parsed, there was actually a positive relationship between mindfulness and problem-solving that required analytic strategy. Other research by Schooler’s team has shown that when people are not just ruminating but curiously and playfully questioning they tend to be more creative and happier, a type of mind wandering that Schooler labels “mind wondering.” Professional writers are more likely to engage in this type of thinking than the general public. One might posit that Zen students pondering a koan are as well, even when they are sweeping pebbles.

Schooler has a favorite analogy that he believes works well for explaining the phenomenon of spontaneous insight. “If you look out at the sky and notice a faint star, and then stare right at it, that star will disappear,” he explained. “That’s because the cones in the center of your retina are less light-sensitive than the rods on the periphery. When you think, ‘I’ve got to be creative right now’—when you stare right at it—it disappears. If you keep an eye out in the periphery for those ideas to pop up, that might be the best opportunity to catch them.”

Perhaps this is what is meant when practice is referred to as “the long gradual path to sudden enlightenment.” It would be much easier if we could one-two-skip-a-few our way to wisdom and spend less time struggling. All that consternation can feel like a pretty frustrating and useless part of the process. And yet there is something about it that may be integral. It orients us in the right direction, though we may spend too much time attempting to stare right at the star rather than explore the periphery. 

The Developmental Psychologist Alison Gopnik, also of the University of California, has shown how children can sometimes outwit adults at certain problem-solving tasks that involve creative thinking because they tend to be more open-minded about potential solutions. When we grapple with a problem it is often the very framework in which we’re working that entraps us. Yet sublime ideas don’t strike the populace completely at random. Someone watching Friends reruns rarely has earth-shattering insights. One has to be playing in the insight sandbox, so to speak, and become captivated by the sun glinting off a shovel, when, aha! 

“Without the imagination we can do no more than spin the future out of the logic of the present; we will never be led into new life because we can work only from the known,” wrote Lewis Hyde. When it comes to aha moments, perhaps the best course of action is to abandon any action whatsoever, and to foster the playful, questioning spirit of the wonderer. After all, the periphery between the known and the unknown, the visible and the invisible, is precisely where the mystery abides.

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“Is this a satisfying thought?”

This line caught my attention when reading an article in the Wall Street Journal about “part-time optimism” (since, the writer claimed, full-time hope and cheerfulness are just too hard). What a wonderful question to ask yourself, I thought. What a quintessentially Buddhist question. The article was essentially describing different ways to “dial into” positivity, and while it didn’t go far beyond the usual pop psychology advice, it reminded me of the Vitakkasanthana Sutta (The Relaxation of Thoughts), in which the Buddha offers five different ways to work with unskillful thoughts or signs. These tools can be taken up sequentially, or they can be applied to specific problematic thoughts according to the antidote that will best help us to work with them. The result is not only part- or even full-time optimism, but the establishment of a quiet, concentrated mind. 

Appreciating how thorough the Buddha was in both identifying and freeing himself of thoughts that can range from merely pesky to downright harmful, I created an acronym that would help me remember what to do when I got snagged by my own mind. It’s SWITCH: switch, warn, ignore, trace, and chop.

The first technique, switch, entails replacing an unskillful sign with a skillful one. According to the Buddhist definition, an unskillful sign is a thought that falls under the category of the three poisons of greed, anger, or ignorance. We can also think of it more generally as any kind of thought that creates a bump, a crack, a sharp corner in the mind that we can’t see around. It’s an uncomfortable thought, for example, irritating like a piece of hair in our collar. “I’m not good enough.” Or it’s awkward and self-conscious, like a toilet paper tail stuck to the back of our pants. “Wow, why did I do that?” Or it’s downright painful, like glass in our eye. “No one loves me,” or “I hate you.” 

Noticing an unwholesome thought rearing its head in our mind, we switch it with a wholesome one, just like a carpenter “might knock out, remove, and extract a coarse peg by means of a fine one,” the sutra says. When we think, “I’m not good enough,” we counter it by saying to ourselves, “I am enough,” or “I’m perfect just as I am.” We don’t stop to wonder why we always think so negatively or try to identify the source of this thought. We simply replace it, like hitting a pool ball with another, sending it careening out of the way and into a pocket, where it’ll be out of sight.

The second tool is to warn ourselves of the danger of this type of unwholesome thought. In the Wall Street Journal article, one person scheduled prompts on his phone like “Is this a satisfying thought?” to stop himself from ruminating. When a thought appears, we should ask ourselves, “Is it helping me? Will it liberate me or will it keep me bound?” Going further, we reflect on the danger of letting a harmful thought run unchecked in our mind. “I hate so-and-so. I’d like to hurt them. I’d like to hurt them like they’ve hurt me. I’ll make them pay…” Thoughts that objectify, divide, instill hatred, encourage revenge, or feed addiction—they’re all candidates for this second tool. Examining the danger of harboring these thoughts, we quietly let them go. 

The Buddha offers an unforgettable image for this tool, saying that it’s like suddenly noticing we have the corpse of a snake, or a dog, or a person dangling from our neck. We’d be horrified if this happened, he says. We’d be humiliated (and disgusted!) and would do anything to get rid of this weight. Just so, by warning ourselves of the danger of our thoughts, we remind ourselves that they’re not innocuous. The thought that vilifies or rejects self or other is poisonous. The Buddha’s image isn’t gratuitous. It’s meant to evoke a visceral horror so it will deter us from the type of thoughts we should avoid at all costs. 

The third technique after switch and warn is to ignore the unskillful thought. Just as we’d cover our eyes to not see something we don’t want to see, we should forget or ignore our unskillful thoughts and not pay them any attention. But the Buddha isn’t encouraging us to repress or deny our experience. He’s simply saying we shouldn’t give these signs any airtime. “If only,” is a good example of this kind of thought. “If only I’d said/did/had, then…” This is a dead-end thought. What’s done is done, and although it’s certainly helpful to reflect on our actions and their results, berating ourselves or spending time imagining alternatives that are no longer possible doesn’t help us and doesn’t change our actions. The quintessential meditation instruction to “see the thought, let it go, and return to the breath” (or awareness, or our mantra, or koan), is exactly the right tool here. We don’t pretend we’re not feeling what we’re feeling. We don’t avoid taking responsibility for our actions. Rather, we stop feeding the unhelpful thought with our attention.

“Am I not supposed to let go of thoughts?” students sometimes ask when I describe this sequence. “It sounds like I’m talking to myself during meditation.” My answer is that sometimes it takes reasoning, cajoling, and encouraging ourselves so we won’t fall back on familiar patterns of mind. These tools require that we be willing to carefully observe our mind and patiently work with the meditation methods. Wanting to be focused isn’t enough. Telling ourselves to let go isn’t enough. Sometimes we have to use diplomacy or deflection to work with our wily mind. Sometimes we have to be our own cheerleaders, other times tough taskmasters. The most important thing is to watch and respond. 

The Buddha’s fourth teaching is to trace the path of the thought to its root. The sutra gives this process a rather technical term: to “still the thought-formation” of these thoughts. The Buddha describes a person who, when walking fast, thinks to themselves, “Why am I walking fast? Why don’t I walk slowly?” Then, walking slowly, they ask themselves, “Why don’t I stand?” “Why don’t I sit?” “Why don’t I lie down?” By substituting a gross posture with a subtler one, they arrive at complete stillness of body and mind. The image that comes up for me is that of diving into the ocean. At the border between water and sky, thunder booms, ships piled high with cargo heave and roll, and seagulls squawk. But the deeper we dive, the darker and calmer the water becomes. There’s life there, but it’s more silent and still. Again, we’re not trying to understand where the unskillful thought comes from—that’s not what tracing means here. It means getting to the still place from where the thought arose, so we can liberate it.

Finally, if the previous four techniques didn’t work, or if the thought has a power and momentum that require more force, then we chop it at the root. The sutra says, “With teeth clenched and tongue pressed against the roof of the mouth, [a practitioner] should beat down, constrain, and crush mind with mind.” Not what we usually think of when we think of meditation. But at this point, we’re dealing with the type of thought that will not yield to reason or re-direction. It’s the type of thought that requires the Read-Yourself-The-Riot-Act antidote because you cannot afford to mess with it. Like, “I’ll just have one drink.” Or even, “No one loves me,” said one too many times. Enough! You think to yourself, like the bodhisattva Manjushri swinging the sword of wisdom to cut delusion at the root. 

Crushing mind with mind is like the ninth-century monk and scholar Shantideva saying in The Way of the Bodhisattva: 

Those who seize and crush their anger down
Will find their joy in this and future lives… 

Therefore I will utterly destroy
The sustenance of this my enemy,
My foe, whose sole intention is
To bring me injury and sorrow. 

It’s a mind that is fierce and undaunted and will not back down, no matter what the stubborn self says.

SWITCH: switch, warn, ignore, trace, and chop an unskillful sign the moment it arises. If we can do this, the Buddha said, we’ll have agency over our thoughts. We’ll sever craving and put an end to suffering. Not an easy task, by any measure. But having a human body and a human mind, we have all the tools we need to awaken. Look at all the options you have, the Buddha was saying in this sutra. Explore just a few of the tools you can use to free your mind. He didn’t say it in these words, but when I read this teaching, I hear him whispering in my ear: Never give up.

The post Switching Off Unskillful Thoughts appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

For a year, I took upon myself an intention to stop hurrying. This didn’t mean that I couldn’t move quickly, but I discovered how much hurrying is a state of mind.

Do we find ourselves in that state of mind where we’re leaning forward into the next moment, into the next thing we need to do? Can we, instead, move as needed, slowly or quickly, without being hostage to that state of mind? Can we begin to notice the beginnings and endings in our day, rather than accumulating too much unfinished business? 

Things do have endings, but it doesn’t mean that they’re completed or finished. When we end a telephone call, an activity, a conversation, or something that we’re doing, we tend to then turn our attention towards something else. Can we pause in those moments to know those endings, rather than carrying one activity into the next moment where it is not needed? 

Whatever we practice, we get better at, whether it’s the skillful or the unskillful.

Try to give yourself moments in the day to connect with spaciousness. To step outside, to see the space around the trees, to look at the sky at night, to calm the body, to feel your feet touch the ground. Can you attend wholeheartedly to the meal that needs to be cooked? To the activity of walking? 

We are always practicing something in our lives. If we’re not practicing calm abiding, it is highly possible that we are practicing agitation, restlessness, craving, or ill will. It is clear in the development of this path that we need to be aware of what we are practicing in any moment. Because whatever we practice, we get better at, whether it’s the skillful or the unskillful. 

Can we be comfortable with non-doing? 

We can, at times, find refuge or a sense of meaning, identity, and purpose in always being engaged in doing. But there may be moments in our day when we simply are resting in non-doing and connected to the mind body of this moment, still and present without any agenda or any plan.

Can we appreciate the taste of collectedness, of samadhi, in our bodies and minds? The taste of calmness and stillness? Can we make peace with the unarguables: that change is part of all of our lives? It’s not emotionally neutral. At times we welcome it and at times we fear it. 

Can we make peace with the reality that we will never arrange the conditions of our lives where there is none of the difficult or unpleasant? This is woven into our being as a human: We will have losses and gains, we will age, we will sicken and we will die, and we will lose things. Can we make peace with this? Can we make peace with stepping out of the agenda of becoming a perfect self? When we can make peace with the unarguables, much as the agitation of our lives begins to calm. 

Samadhi may be a choice. Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor, said, “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. And in that space lies our power to choose our response. In our power to choose, lies our growth and our freedom.” 

The well-collected heart knows how to make that space and knows how to make wise choices about what we practice and what we cultivate in any moment. 

It’s also about what we don’t practice and what we don’t cultivate. This is a journey, as the  Buddha described it, of swimming against the tide—swimming against the tide of the norms in our culture that lead to unskillfulness, over-busyness, or delusion. It is very often swimming against the tide of many of our own habit patterns of agitation. Then we find the coolness and the stillness of the waters. We discover a mind and heart that delights in calm abiding, stillness, and collectedness. We meet and develop a mind that is a friend. 

⧫

Excerpted from Christina Feldman’s Tricycle Meditation Month Video “Samadhi as a Life Practice”. Watch the full video here and learn more about Meditation Month here.

The post Hurrying Is a State of Mind appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.