Writing and Meditation

I’m one of those people who’s been interested in meditation for a long time. But I’ve been mostly interested from a distance–because I also find it really, really hard. I find it hard to hold a thought—or my breath—in my mind, to concentrate on that thought, or to try and work with it. I’m one of those people who finds it easier to focus on a thought—and hold it—work with it—if my fingers are moving on a keyboard, or across a page.

I suspect this has everything to do with practice. If I were to graph the hours I’ve logged writing in my life—starting with the alphabet—and compare it to a graph of the minutes I’ve logged meditating, the meditation minutes would be powerfully dwarfed—they would literally disappear.

I’ve been interested for a while now in how writing can become a kind of meditation—perhaps a bridge to meditation—or a boat—for those of us who have trouble diving into the deep pool of meditation.

In 2014, I had the idea to explore connections between writing and meditation and I feel like I only began to scratch the surface. I also made a decision late in the year to let this thread go for a while. I may pick it up again at some point. I continue to think there may be something fruitful in this connection between writing and meditation . . . Maybe . . .

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Photo is of a painting by Leon Wyczotkowski, a Polish realist, from Wikimedia Commons

The Art of Meditation by Matthieu Ricard, Part 3

Posted by Diane Morrow on April 6, 2014 in Blog, Happiness, Writing and Meditation

After Matthieu Ricard talks about his own deep goal and motivation for meditation and after he compares it to the kind of training we’re already familiar with for athletes and musicians, he begins to set up an argument for why meditation might be beneficial. To set up this argument, he poses a question which is also the first question in his book, Why Meditate? Is change desirable? I like how fundamental this question is—how he starts with something very basic. And I find two of his arguments in response to this question especially persuasive. The first is that nearly all of us have something in our lives that could be more optimal. To put this another way, not every day is a perfect day—or as good as we would like it to be—even if our rather stressful day seems rather normal and that’s how we make our peace with it. Oh well, that’s just the way some days are. “Normal,” he argues, “doesn’t mean optimal.” Optimal simply means best or most favorable. He’s suggesting that meditation could eventually lead us to some kind of best possible state. That sounds desirable to me. His second argument has to do with considering inner and outer conditions. He says: We aspire to be free from suffering and to find some happiness. There are outer and inner conditions to that. The outer conditions—we ought to improve them as much as possible. But if we know that the way our mind experiences that, the way our mind translates the outer condition as happiness or misery [then] we know the fact that our state of mind can very easily eclipse the outer condition. We can be miserable in a seemingly perfect paradise. We can have strength of mind, joy of being alive, even [when] the conditions seem to be difficult. We know all that. We know the fact that our state of mind can very easily eclipse the outer condition. Hmmm. I think this does happen sometimes. Both the negative and the positive eclipse. The positive eclipse is more interesting—the possibility of having joy of being alive even when conditions are difficult. But I wonder if this isn’t a bit easier for Ricard than it is for many of the rest of us. I’m thinking of the interview he did for The Independent. His interviewer, Robert Chalmers, suggested that perhaps Ricard’s living conditions might have something to do with his happiness. “How hard is it to be happy when you live on a mountainside with breathtaking views of the Himalayas, where your only concern is polishing your wind chimes?” Ricard responds: Ah, I understand what you’re saying. I believe that, if I had to live where you live, I could. By choice, I would not move there. But if you allow exterior circumstances to determine your state of mind, then of course you will suffer; you become like a sponge, or like a chameleon. I have lived in difficult areas. I lived in Old Delhi for almost a year. That really is a miserable place. And yet sometimes I felt so light there. It was like—how can I put this—different weather. That could be a poem: A miserable place And yet sometimes I felt so light there It was like—how can I put this—different weather....

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...

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...

Writing and Meditation: Writing Down the Bones: First Questions

Posted by Diane Morrow on February 23, 2014 in Blog, Writing and Meditation

When I think about writing and meditation, the very first moment that comes to mind—the moment when I first thought of these two concepts as linked—is a moment in my late twenties, coming across Natalie Goldberg’s book, Writing Down the Bones, and finding this: In 1974 I began to do sitting meditation. From 1978 to 1984 I studied Zen formally with Dainin Katagiri Roshi (Roshi is a title for a Zen master) at the Minnesota Zen Center in Minneapolis. Whenever I went to see him and asked him a question about Buddhism, I had trouble understanding the answer until he said, ‘You know, like in writing when you . . .’ When he referred to writing, I understood. About three years ago, he said to me, ‘Why do you come to sit meditation? Why don’t you make writing your practice? If you go deep enough in writing, it will take you everyplace?’ This, for me, was like coming across fresh water—or a compass, a map, the right food at the right time. Yes, maybe that’s how it can be. A part of me had begun to suspect this—a faint voice telling me that writing could take me where I needed to go. But reading that passage—that sense of permission—it strengthened that voice in me, nurtured it, encouraged it. Now it’s been more than twenty-five years. I can say with full confidence that my life is far richer and better because I have written through so much of it. But lately I’ve been thinking that I want to be even more intentional in the ways that I use writing as a practice. To look at it more closely. Is writing, potentially, a form of meditation itself? (That’s what Katagiri Roshi seemed to be suggesting above.) Can writing be a bridge to meditation? Or a scaffold? A kind of way station? For those, like me, who find meditation hard? Or, perhaps, can the two work together well–say, a person going back and forth from one to the other? How might writing and meditation be fruitfully connected? And how might all the information that has begun to accumulate about meditation, including meditation and neuroscience, inform that connection? These are questions I’m starting with. ______________________________________________________________________________ See also Writing Down the Bones Photo is mine. A way station?...

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