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Meditation as Housekeeping

Posted by Diane Morrow on August 3, 2014 in Blog, Writing and Meditation

In The Peaceful Stillness of the Silent Mind, in a chapter called, “Introduction to Meditation,” which I also wrote about a few weeks ago, Lama Yeshe talks about two kinds of meditation: analytical meditation and concentration meditation. He compares meditation to housekeeping and then talks about how both types are necessary. He writes: By gradually developing your meditation technique, you become more and more familiar with how your mind works, the nature of dissatisfaction and so forth and begin to be able to solve your own problems. For example, just to keep your house neat and tidy, you need to discipline your actions to a certain extent. Similarly, since the dissatisfied mind is by nature disorderly, you need a certain degree of understanding and discipline to straighten it out. This is where meditation comes in. It helps you understand your mind and put it in order. But meditation doesn’t mean just sitting in some corner doing nothing. There are two types of meditation, analytical and concentrative. The first entails psychological self-observation, the second developing single-pointed concentration. I’m a very slow learner. But I think I’m gradually beginning to get a sense of what meditation actually is—as opposed to what I used to think that it was. Meditation is not doing nothing—or trying to get the mind to do nothing. It’s more like, I think, corralling the mind to do something—and something different than having the ordinary scattered, fragmented mind that I so often have, a mind going here and there, from one thing to the next, depending on what is happening around me and that all getting mixed up with memories that are triggered and preconceptions and plans and who-knows-what-else. If I try to extend this metaphor of housekeeping it seems to me that I could begin with analysis—house observation as a metaphor for self-observation—and this could begin with questions. What needs to be done? What are the problems in the house? What room is most crying for attention? In my own case: the floors. They’re dusty in the corners and littered here and there with small pieces of who-knows-what. Ah, and the sheets need to be changed, and, in a more immediate way, the dishes need to be taken out of the dishwasher and put away and the dishes in the sink need to be put in the dishwasher and I need to do laundry because I’m going out of town in a couple of days. The list could go on. It seems that even when I just begin to do analysis—and with something as simple as housecleaning—my mind begins to move in different directions. Things begin to pile up. So . . . perhaps after preliminary analysis what I need is some focus! Some concentration. Perhaps I have to pick one thing and focus and concentrate on that. And, in order to do that, I need to prioritize. What needs my attention first? With taking care of the house—or the garden—or preparing for a new school year—or anything—I’m continually going back and forth between focusing on a task and then observing and analyzing what needs to be done and then choosing the next task and focusing. Seeing how I’m already doing this in ordinary things makes it a little easier for me to imagine applying this...

Good in the Beginning

Posted by Diane Morrow on July 28, 2014 in Blog, Writing and Meditation

I came across another piece of advice about meditation that I found useful, and thought I would share it, this from The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, by Sogyal Rinpoche, a book that was recommended to me about fifteen years ago and was one of the first books I ever read about meditation. In a chapter on meditation, called “Bringing the Mind Home,” he talks about a method for making meditation more powerful and useful. He calls it, “Good in the Beginning, Good in the Middle, and Good at the End.” Good in the beginning refers to setting a positive motivation at the beginning of the work. Good in the Middle refers to doing our best, and having as clear a mind as possible, while we’re doing the practice. And then Good at the End is remembering, when we finish, to simply dedicate the work—that it will become of benefit to ourselves, and, if this makes sense to us, that it will also, in some way, begin to benefit others. I like the symmetry of this advice and the way it can frame one’s work, and I’ve been trying to put it into practice, not just for meditation, but for writing as well: Good in the Beginning: May this writing be for the benefit of myself, for all who come across it—and for all sentient beings. Good in the Middle: Trying to stay clear and aware and focused as I work. Good at the End: Remembering to dedicate the work—may this writing be of benefit for all sentient beings. I think there could be countless ways to adapt this. What could make your own work good in the beginning, good in the middle, and good at the end? The book, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, can be found...

Writing and Healing Prompt: Ira Progoff’s Stepping Stones in Three Dimensions

Posted by Diane Morrow on July 13, 2014 in Blog, Writing and Healing Prompts

Another useful way to work with stepping stones, building from last week’s prompt, is to take a set of stones and add another layer: What did I want at each stone? What was my motivation? And why did I want that? And why did that matter? And what was beneath that? It’s like taking a two-dimensional map and adding another dimension—the dimension of depth. The dimension of why. You can begin to deepen the map in this way. You can notice threads that emerge—patterns. You can see how your motivations may have changed over time. The previous piece on stepping stones is here. The photo, Stepping Stones, River Rothay, is by Chris Heaton and can be found...

Steppingstones as a Way to Examine Your Life

Posted by Diane Morrow on July 6, 2014 in Blog, Map, Writing and Healing Prompts

Ira Progoff, a student of Carl Jung, who developed an elaborate process of journaling for self-discovery, one that involved binders and dividers and multiple colors, used the term stepping stones to describe a way of looking back and examining one’s life. I’ve always found his term evocative. I see the stones on a path with spaces between them, the stones stretching back as well as forward. Our lives are a river of moments. The stones are those key moments—often ones we remember vividly—often ones where something of significance turned, or shifted. In his book, At a Journal Workshop, Progoff writes: They may come as memories or visual images or inner sensations of various kinds. Especially they may state themselves in the form of similes or metaphors in addition to expressing the literal facts of past experience. Let your attitude be receptive enough that the continuity of your life as a whole can present itself to you both in symbolic forms and in literal factual statements. He compares the creation of stepping stones to a running broad jump. “We go back,” he says, “into our past in order to be able to leap forward into our future.” He recommends “placing” eight or ten steppingstones. No more than twelve. Simply naming the stepping stones is a beginning—and later, if one chooses, one can come back to a single stone and explore it in more depth. The book, At a Journal Workshop, can be found here. More about Progoff’s workshop process can be found here. Photo by Chris Heaton at Geograph: a footpath over the River Rothay in Cumbria, Great Britain...

Writing and Meditation Prompt: On “In Silence” by Thomas Merton

Posted by Diane Morrow on June 22, 2014 in Blog, Writing and Healing Prompts, Writing and Meditation

Be still. Listen to the stones of the wall. Be silent, they try to speak your name. Listen to the living walls. Who are you? Who are you? Whose silence are you? from “In Silence” by Thomas Merton One way of thinking about meditation, it occurs to me, is to think of it as listening to thoughts in the silence—either one’s own thoughts or the thoughts of someone else, or some combination of the two. And one way of thinking about writing and meditation would be to combine this kind of thinking in the silence with writing about it afterwards. The meditation and the writing complementing each other. This is something I’ve been trying out lately, and playing with, in my quest to explore and practice meditation. I seem to have settled on three steps. These steps could be thought of as meditation for those (like me) who find meditation a challenge. Or these could be thought of as writing and meditation for the beginner. Relaxing and settling in The meditation itself Writing about it The steps, of course, could be adapted as needed. Here are the three steps as they might apply to meditating and writing on this excerpt from Thomas Merton’s poem. The process as outlined here would take about twenty minutes. Probably best if one can find twenty minutes of quiet, uninterrupted time to try this out, but this too could be adapted. First, settle in and begin to relax. Take 5 minutes or so. If you’re already a meditator, you can sit in the posture you use for meditation. (If you’re already a meditator, you probably don’t need these instructions!) Or you can sit in a chair. Whether sitting on the floor or a chair, best if possible if your spine can be straight—and then your muscles relaxed or beginning to relax. I’m including here brief instructions for relaxing and settling in, instructions I’ve adapted from instructions I learned when I was doing imagery training (a kind of hypnosis training), fairly basic instructions that I often used with patients when I had my mind-body medicine practice. Sometimes, when working alone, it can be helpful to record a script like this and listen to it while you relax, but you can also simply read it and go back and forth between reading it and settling in. Begin with a cleansing breath—a deep inhalation, a pause—and then a long breath out. Do this twice. And then begin, very gradually, to bring your attention to your body. Beginning with your feet. The soles of your feet. Your toes. Noticing that, and then, if you like, inviting your feet to relax. And noticing what that feels like . . . Now your calves. Noticing what you feel there. Your thighs. Your hips. Inviting the muscles to relax. All the time noticing, paying attention. As you do so, you might begin to feel a flow of relaxation moving from your feet up into your legs, your hips, your belly, your chest. If you do, just notice it. Notice what happens as you bring your attention gradually up the body, imagining the relaxation flowing into your neck and shoulders, and down into your arms, and past your elbows. Then down into your hands—the tips of...

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