Diane Morrow

The Art of Meditation, Part 2: Motivation

Posted by Diane Morrow on March 30, 2014 in Blog, Writing and Meditation

In order to write more about Matthieu Ricard’s video, The Art of Meditation, I decided to start watching it over from the beginning—and I realized I’d neglected an important piece of context in the preliminaries: the why of it—his deep goal and motivation. He introduces the clip by saying he’s just come from the [Diverse] Economic Forum. “Unless,” he says, “we bring a more altruistic society—this is no more a luxury—this is an absolute necessity. So how to do that? The point is to find the connection between the individual transformation and cultural change. That is really the challenge.” It occurs to me that we can end up turning to healing—to writing and healing—to writing and meditation—because we’ve discovered that the body is ill—or that the mind is ill—or perhaps because we suspect that the body and mind simply has more potential to be well. But we can also turn to healing because we recognize that someone we love is ill—that our family is ill—that the culture is ill—the globe. Most of the people I saw in my mind-body practice began with a recognition that the body was ill—but often the work began to ripple outward—the mind—the family—the workplace—the larger culture and world. Pema Chodron began to work on her mind—and eventually became a Buddhist nun—because she became aware of her own anger. She talks about this in her book, When Things Fall Apart, and also in several of her teachings. Her husband of many years had just told her, rather abruptly, that he was leaving her, and she felt, she says, annihilated. She began to imagine violence—she began to imagine hurting him and hurting his girlfriend and she could not make this kind of fantasy go away. It was out of this need that she came to an article by Chogyam Trungpa, a teacher of Tibetan Buddhism, and she began to glimpse a way of transforming the energy of anger. Her work has most certainly rippled outward. Ricard, the son of a French philosopher, who has spent many years in India and Nepal, and who now runs Keruna-Shechen, a humanitarian organization in the Himalayas, comes at the work from a global perspective: that we are in need of a cultural transformation. We can enter the work through different doorways. Continuing, from the video, Ricard says: Somehow it has to start with the individual changing. The building blocks of society are made of individuals. And then it has to expand in some way to individual contagion, to change of ideas, to cultural shift, evolution of cultures, so that it’s not just someone in his little bubble trying to become more altruistic and that’s it. In a way, that’s the heart of meditation as I understand it. Here, it’s as if the definition of meditation is growing larger and larger—with this potential to expand ever outward in ripples—and in particular if we can find a way to break this bubble of the self of which he speaks. __________________________________________________ See also: The video, The Art of Meditation The World Economic Forum, which describes itself as “an independent international organization committed to improving the state of the world by engaging business, political, academic and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas.” Keruna Shechen, the organization Ricard founded, which...

Writing and Healing Prompt: Choose a Word

Posted by Diane Morrow on March 23, 2014 in Blog, Writing and Healing Prompts

This follows from last week’s writing prompt and also from coming across a post recently by Sharon Bray. She’s an author and teacher who posts weekly writing prompts at her site, Writing Through Cancer; she wrote a lovely post in January about choosing a word for the entire year. You can consciously choose a word (or two) that you want to explore and consider and define. Here are some possible words: contentment, delight, patience, kindness, healing, recovery, grief, sorrow, peace, reprieve, time, impermanence, death, love, compassion, success, regret, guilt, meditation, happiness. But it could be any word. Periodically, I’ll ask students to choose a word for our writing catalyst for the day. The other day one student chose omnipotent. Another chose vitriolic. Another chose divulge. _____________________________________________________...

Writing and Healing Prompt: Count Key Words

Posted by Diane Morrow on March 16, 2014 in Blog, Writing and Healing Prompts

After writing last week some early thoughts about happiness, I decided to go back and see if I tend to use the word happiness much—and discovered I don’t! On this site—before last week (when I used it twenty or so times)—I’ve not used the word once, and in the entire draft of my book I’ve only used it seven times. I was interested to see then what words I do use and found, for instance, compassion was much more common: 50 times. Suffering: 42 times. Peace: 37. James Pennebaker has a program that counts words and looks for patterns—and has yielded interesting results. But one can also count particular words in a Word document by simply using the find feature. It occurs to me that the pattern of words we use can be a clue to what preoccupies us. So . . . the prompt: count key words. And you can decide what those key words might be. You can begin by looking through a few pages of your own writing and looking for patterns—what words stand out? Or you can begin by generating a list of possible candidate words and then do searches of them in your own writing. Or you can start with these four words: happiness, peace, suffering, and compassion. You can also use Wordle to get a snapshot of key words in a piece of text or a blog. I entered my own blog and got this word picture: (The word happiness jumped in frequency after last week’s post.) ____________________________________________________ Also: at analyzewords.com you can analyze Twitter feeds using James Pennebaker’s program: Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC). The site includes a link explaining the analytic program and leads to links for additional resources on his analysis. His program focuses on the use of pronouns, articles, prepositions, and other small words. He’s become interested, through his research, in these smaller, connecting words rather than key...

Happiness: Some Early Thoughts: A Collage

Posted by Diane Morrow on March 9, 2014 in Blog, Happiness, Writing and Meditation

I’m just beginning to explore meditation, but I keep running into this word: happiness. And I’m beginning to realize I have a bit of resistance to it—the word itself seems kind of, well . . . frivolous when you start to think about all the suffering in the world. When I was in my twenties (and thirties and into my forties) and my mother was suffering with severe depression the word often seemed especially frivolous. As I remember it, when I was practicing mind-body medicine, my patients rarely talked about happiness—rarely used that word. They talked about wanting to be free from pain, or fatigue, or depressing thoughts, or, sometimes, perhaps, to have peace of mind, but I don’t remember the word happiness much. As if, perhaps, there were a number line and they were trying to get out of the negative numbers and back to zero—back to some kind of baseline—and it seemed just too much to ask—even greedy—to be aiming above zero? I found this a while back, written by Gordon Parker, a psychiatrist at Black Dog Institute, and it resonated: “As a clinical psychiatrist, I have yet to have a patient present seeking ‘happiness.’ Depressed patients have a more fundamental objective—relief from the ‘psychological pain.’” My students use the word happiness much more often. In junior English because it’s a year that focuses on American Literature, we end up talking quite a bit about the American Dream—and this inevitably leads us into conversations about success—and happiness. If I were to choose one word that comes up most frequently when my students talk about happiness it would be family. They often link the words family and happiness. Many talk about happiness in terms of wanting to fall in love and have a good marriage and a good family and be able to support them—this often no matter what difficult circumstances they’ve grown up in—and sometimes especially when they’ve grown up under difficult circumstances. Sometimes my students seem very innocent. Sometimes not. Here’s a quote from one of my juniors that ended up on a poster about the American Dream: “As young children, we believe we will have the perfect lives as adults, but as we grow and mature, reality hits and we often have to settle for less.” This from a student whose father was recently diagnosed with a serious chronic illness. What is happiness in the face of reality? And how can that discussion be approached without sounding glib? I go looking for quotes from the Dalai Lama on happiness and I can’t seem to find what I’m looking for—something that can speak to these questions—and to the fragment about my student—and then I find this, from The Art of Happiness, which seems to be the right next piece: No matter what activity or practice we are pursuing, there isn’t anything that isn’t made easier through constant familiarity and training. Through training, we can change; we can transform ourselves. Within Buddhist practice there are various methods of trying to sustain a calm mind when some disturbing event happens. Through repeated practice of these methods we can get to the point where some disturbance may occur but the negative effects on our mind remain on the surface, like the waves that may ripple on the surface...

The Art of Meditation by Matthieu Ricard, Part 1

Posted by Diane Morrow on March 2, 2014 in Blog, Writing and Meditation

One has to start somewhere as a beginner, and I’ve decided to start here. I ordered Matthieu Ricard’s book, Why Meditate?, but while waiting for its arrival I found this video by him: The Art of Meditation. I realized if I’m going to try and explore connections between writing and meditating, I need to learn quite a bit more about meditation. The 29 minute video is geared toward a beginner audience, like me–someone who might be considering meditation but wants to understand more about it before diving in. Why Matthieu Ricard? His new book, Why Meditate?, showed up on a search, and everything I’ve learned about him since has given me confidence in him as a teacher. He strikes me as one of those experts who’s able to translate and explain his ideas to a beginner–but without condescension. He’s a former biologist, French, who became a Buddhist monk at the age of 30, and has, in recent years, worked with the Mind and Life Institute, a collaboration between scientists and Buddhist scholars. TED, where he’s given a talk on the habits of happiness, describes his attitude toward happiness in this way: “Achieving happiness, he has come to believe, requires the same kind of effort and mind training that any other serious pursuit involves.” I’m attracted to this notion of a mental state requiring training. I’ve always known that writing required training, and, more and more, I’ve come to think the same about healing. These are processes that require effort—they don’t just happen. Robert Chalmer, writing in The Independent in 2007, describes Ricard this way: Matthieu Ricard, French translator and right-hand man for the Dalai Lama, has been the subject of intensive clinical tests at the University of Wisconsin, as a result of which he is frequently described as the happiest man in the world. It’s a somewhat flattering title, he says, given the tiny percentage of the global population who have had their brain patterns monitored by the same state-of-the-art technology, which involves attaching 256 sensors to the skull, and three hours’ continuous MRI scanning. The fact remains that, out of hundreds of volunteers whose scores ranged from +0.3 (what you might call the Morrissey zone) to -0.3 (beatific) the Frenchman scored -0.45. He shows me the chart of volunteers’ results, on his laptop. To find Ricard, you have to keep scrolling left, away from the main curve, until you eventually find him – a remote dot at the beginning of the x-axis. I don’t know much about these happiness scans—or what his scan might have looked like, say, when he was twenty-five, before he became a monk—but certainly this is intriguing. Chalmers also writes this, one of the reasons I rather like and have a tendency to trust the article: In the foreword to Happiness, the psychologist Dr Daniel Goleman describes how a three-hour wait at an airport “sped by in minutes, due to the sheer pleasure of Matthieu’s orbit” – a phrase which had made me faintly nauseous when I first read it. Now, it seems to make perfect sense. Ricard exudes a sense of tranquillity, kindness and – surprisingly enough – humour. Skeptical journalist won over by tranquility, kindness, and humor. I like that Matthieu Ricard opens the video with a very basic question. This...

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