Archives | Writing and Healing

5 Conditions for Writing and Meditation, Part One

Posted by Diane Morrow on May 25, 2014 in Blog

In the third chapter of Matthieu Ricard’s Why Meditate?, after talking about motivation, he offers 5 conditions that are conducive to a meditation practice. A bit like gathering supplies before beginning. I thought it might be helpful to write about each of these as it relates to writing—and perhaps to writing and meditation. 1. The advice of a qualified guide. This makes a lot of sense. Since I’ve been writing, I’ve been turning to teachers—both in books and face-to-face. This idea of not having to reinvent the wheel or start from scratch or wander in the dark—but to follow someone who knows more. While Ricard says that a living master is best, it can also be good to follow someone who simply knows more than us—and that the next best thing is a text. Better a reliable text, he says, than simply following a teacher who has idiosyncratic ideas. This is wonderful permission for those of us who learn well from books and texts. I think I have learned as much from books about writing as I have from face-to-face teachers, though both have been extremely valuable. Sometimes when I’m reading, and especially if I’m concentrating well, it’s as if the teacher becomes alive and present to me—almost as if they were teaching me face to face. I think this may be one of the reasons I like books so much. My guides in writing that I’ve met only through books have been Peter Elbow and Anton Chekhov and Mary Oliver and WB Yeats and Robert Frost and Natalie Goldberg and John Gardner, among others. One of my guides right now in meditation, and whom I have also not met, is Matthieu Ricard—and this text, Why Meditate? 2. A suitable place. Ricard writes: “You don’t try to learn the basics of navigation in the thick of a storm; you learn them in good weather on a calm sea.” Again, this makes perfect sense. Now, with my children moving toward grown, my daughter’s bedroom has become my office—my own calm sea. Pale gray walls. A daybed for guests (and for my daughter—it is still her room when she visits—we’re sharing it). A window that looks out on a corner of the back yard. A large white raft of a desk. When the children were young my calm sea was in the basement, or sometimes at the dining room table while they were napping or watching Sesame Street. I agree that it’s helpful to have a particular place, whether it’s a room or a table or a particular chair. The way writing or meditation or both can become a habit there—and the way the body can begin to associate a particular place with an activity. The body like a child, learning. This is where I write. Or, This is where I meditate. 3. An appropriate physical posture. This one makes sense, in theory. But for me this is still a growing edge—I’m working on it. Meditation begins by getting settled in a particular posture. There are a lot of guides for this and Ricard includes the 7 points of a good meditation posture in his chapter—what one should do with one’s legs, hands, shoulders, spine, and so forth. I’m better at remembering posture before meditation than I am before writing. But...

Meditation as the Mind’s Own Physician?

Posted by Diane Morrow on May 18, 2014 in Blog, Writing and Meditation

I’ve begun reading a second book on meditation: The Mind’s Own Physician. I chose it because it’s put out by the Mind & Life Institute, who also put out the book, Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain, an excellent book by Sharon Begley which came out of a series of conversations in October 2004 between the Dalai Lama and a small group of neuroscientists in Dharamsala on the science of neuroplasticity. The Mind’s Own Physician serves as a kind of sequel, coming out of a much larger conference in 2005 in Washington DC, jointly sponsored by the Mind-Life Institute, Georgetown University and John Hopkins. Here, scientists came together with experienced meditators and contemplatives, including the Dalai Lama, to look at “The Science and Clinical Applications of Meditation.” The book consists of a series of presentations and dialogues from the conference, and is edited by two of the presenters, John Kabat-Zinn and Richard Davidson. It was published several years after the conference, in 2011, and includes an epilogue with developments that have occurred since 2005. It’s another good book for a beginner (though it’s not only useful for beginners). It complements well my reading of Why Meditate? by looking at some early findings in the science of meditation. Interestingly, the moderator of the first session, and one of the contributors to the first chapter is Matthieu Ricard—who seems, now that I’ve learned about him, to be showing up everywhere. In his opening remarks, he offers a fairly succinct definition of meditation that I’m finding useful: Meditation is not just sitting and blissing out under a mango tree in order to have a better day, although it might help. If we look at the Eastern roots of the word for meditation, it truly means cultivation—cultivating new qualities, new ways of being. It also means familiarization: familiarization with a new way of seeing the world; for example, not grasping at permanence, and instead seeing the dynamic flow of interdependence. Meditation means familiarization with qualities that we have the potential to enhance like, like unconditional compassion, openness to others, and inner peace. It’s also familiarization with the very way the mind works. So often we are full of thoughts that ceaselessly go through our mind. We hardly notice what’s going on. What is behind the screen of thoughts? Can we relate to some kind of basic mindfulness and open presence? All of these sorts of inner exploration are considered meditation. Cultivating new qualities—like the qualities of compassion, openness, and inner peace. Familiarization with a new way of seeing the world—seeing, for instance, it’s interdependence. Familiarization with the way the mind works—looking behind the screen of thoughts. I find this definition useful, because it’s helping me, along with some of my other reading, to put aside some of the pre-conceived notions I’ve had in the past about meditation: that it’s primarily about relaxing—or relieving stress—or that it’s primarily about watching the breath. Or blissing out. As I’m beginning to understand it, watching the breath is a useful tool for concentrating, and reducing stress in the short-term is certainly a good thing, but the goal can go far beyond this. It’s as if it’s what we do with this focused and concentrated mind that matters. As I understand it, this has everything to do with...

Putting in the Seed by Robert Frost

Posted by Diane Morrow on May 11, 2014 in Uncategorized

So I’ve been thinking about Matthieu Ricard’s question: Look into the deepest part of yourself. Can you sense the presence of a potential for change there? The image that comes to mind for change is a seed—and especially the way it looks when the seed is planted and splits open and the shoot first emerges and the seed pushes up and then bends over at the top. I went looking for a poem about a seed and looked and looked and couldn’t find what I wanted and then stumbled upon this poem by Robert Frost, “Putting in the Seed,” one which I’ve never come across before. It begins: You come to fetch me from my work to-night When supper’s on the table, and we’ll see If I can leave off burying the white Soft petals fallen from the apple tree. (Soft petals, yes, but not so barren quite, Mingled with these, smooth bean and wrinkled pea;) Who would bury white soft petals? And then it occurs to me that maybe they were simply on the ground while he was planting, and got turned into the earth with the bean and pea seeds. Petals buried but not barren. Petals going back into the earth with the seeds. In any case he seems to be juxtaposing the idea of burying with that of planting. The blossoms barren—but not quite—because of the way he’s mixed in the seeds. The poem continues and finishes: the final eight lines to make fourteen, signaling a sonnet, and the rhyme scheme fits (ABAB CDCD EFEF GG). There’s such art in this—how he manages to stay within that structure and yet the rhyming doesn’t intrude in any way. There’s a sense of a voice speaking. And go along with you ere you lose sight Of what you came for and become like me, Slave to a springtime passion for the earth. How Love burns through the Putting in the Seed On through the watching for that early birth When, just as the soil tarnishes with weed, * The sturdy seedling with arched body comes Shouldering its way and shedding the earth crumbs. When I imagine Robert Frost himself as the speaker of the poem I also can’t help but think of him planting those seeds in the face of other burials. The poem, I believe, was published in Mountain Interval in 1920, which would have been well after the loss of both his parents and some sixteen years after his three-year-old son, Elliot, died of cholera, and some thirteen years after his daughter, Elinor, died at three days old. And maybe part of the reason love burns is because it’s a love that knows what can happen? I went looking for a poem about a seed and the potential for transformation and I was not at all looking for one about death and burial, but this is what I found, and now I am seeing the two mingled in a way I hadn’t before—like the white soft petals mingled with the seeds. Seeing that the one can be next to the other—the potential for transformation occurring next to loss, mingled with loss, and perhaps in the face of loss. I wonder if Mr. Frost ever thought of his poems as a kind of planting of seeds. _______________________________________________________ The poem...