The fourth annual BuddhaFest will be here soon! We hope you’ll join us June 20-23 for another wonderful four days of films, talks, meditation and music. This year you’ll be treated to some favorite teachers, and introduced to a few you may not know. The festival will be held at Artisphere in the Rosslyn section of Arlington, VA.

We have a diverse group of speakers who will be teaching the dharma from various perspectives. You will hear from a Toltec teacher, a Unitarian minister, and a young Indian yogi and guru, among others. We are pleased to welcome for the first time renowned Tibetan scholar Bob Thurman, who will be appearing with Sharon Salzberg. They will discuss, "Buddhism: The Joyous Science of Wisdom and Kindness."

What could be better than sitting with a teacher you love? How about sitting with two of them? In addition to the lively duo of Sharon and Bob, we have decided to mix things up and match other speakers in dynamic pairings that are certain to inspire. Ruth King was a favorite with BuddhaFest audiences in 2011, and last year, the Ven. Pannavati Bhikkhuni was electrifying. Both women teach with a humor, grace and power that is delightful -- so we’ve put them together. They are excited to sit with you as dharma sisters to talk about fierce compassion and daring hearts.

Speaking of daring hearts, we're so pleased to be presenting a talk by writer, human rights advocate and Zen peacekeeper Marianne Elliott. Marianne is from New Zealand, and just wrote Zen Under Fire, a memoir about her life and work as a United Nations peacekeeper in Afghanistan. Sharon Salzberg calls her book "a poignant and uplifting story about finding resilience in the midst of intense suffering."

A film for children, parents and educators 

"Planting Seeds" is a film that can truly help to transform our relationships and ourselves in a deeply meaningful way. Children, parents, couples and educators can use the techniques and practices in the film and on the Bonus DVD (Songs, Lesson Plans, Practical Exercises) to build more harmony, love and appreciation within themselves, their families and within the classroom. The film is the fruit of Plum Village's thirty years of sharing mindfulness and compassion with children, parents and educators. The Planting Seeds film offers meaningful, fun and engaging activities that children and parents can do at home, in school settings, and in their local communities, either self-guided or led by an adult.

This campaign offers the opportunity to offer any amount to support the completion of the film.

Benefit for the Am Kolel Retreat Center
with Hugh Byrne and Candace Pert
Sunday, April 28, 3-6 p.m.
River Road Unitarian Church, Bethesda, MD

At Takoma Village Cohousing with Ann Zabaldo

• New Format: Instead of 10-monthly theme, we’ll be going through the material over a 5-month period, with a new class every other week. Maintain momentum as you strengthen habits of well-being. 
• Extraordinary Lineup of Presenters: Tara Brach, Rick Hanson, Sylva Boorstein, Meng Tan (Google’s Jolly Good Fellow) and many others. Check out the website for the full list of presenters (www.awakeningjoy.info/presenters.html).
• New App for the book and the course: Help you track your progress and stay on course. Exercises, inspiring quotes, great visuals for iPhone/iPad. Coming soon! 
• Three Live Videoconferences during the course accessible from anywhere.

• Awakening Joy is now out in paperback published by Parallax Press. You can order it from Amazon or your local bookstore. A great holiday gift. (If you like the book, I'd be grateful if you reviewed the paperback edition on Amazon. It seems to make a difference.) 
• Bill Gates gave a great review of Awakening Joy on his blog. (A software engineer who read the Gates review and loved the book developed the app.)

A true refuge is something that provides a safe haven, a place where we are at home and at peace in the midst of life’s storms. This book guides readers in finding such a place within ourselves. Many mental health professionals will be drawn to the tools and practices offered in TRUE REFUGE; but the book is ultimately for all of us who seek emotional healing and spiritual realization. Regardless of our religious or philosophical orientation, we all live with uncertainty, loss and the fear of failure. We all encounter sickness and death, disappointment and betrayal, anxiety and grief. Perhaps more than anything, we want to trust that we have within us what is needed to live our lives with wisdom and great heart. In response to this longing, TRUE REFUGE invites its readers on a path of awakening the intelligence, love and inner freedom that is our deepest potential.

What challenges have you faced in your own life? Have the practices described in TRUE REFUGE shifted your views of and your attitude toward yourself?

I decided to write TRUE REFUGE during a major dive in my own health. Diagnosed with a genetic disease that affected my mobility, I faced tremendous fear and grief about losing the fitness and physical freedom I loved. My prayer became “May I find peace…May I love this life no matter what.” I was seeking an inner refuge, an experience of presence and wholeness that could carry me through whatever losses might come. During the ensuing years, the practices of presence and self-compassion I teach in TRUE REFUGE served in carrying me home over and over to a place of openheartedness, peace and wellbeing. I gained a real confidence that the refuge I was seeking was right here within me.

Physical sickness has not been the only life challenge of course! My first book, Radical Acceptance, grew out of the suffering of feeling personally deficient and unworthy. Because most of us are so quick to turn against ourselves, the teachings and practices of radical acceptance continue as a strong current in TRUE REFUGE: nurturing a forgiving, understanding heart is a basic step on the path.

TRUE REFUGE encourages us to experience reality, even if it’s painful. What happens when we shy away from experience? Are there certain situations or conditions—post-traumatic stress disorder, for example—in which we should avoid this experience?

An equation I love to share is: Pain X Resistance = Suffering. Many people are familiar with the idea that what we resist, persists. Not only does it persist, the more we avoid our experience, the more we actually become controlled by it! This is because when we ignore or judge our cravings, loneliness or fears, we do not address the unmet needs embedded in them. Until we respond with understanding and kindness, these unmet needs will continue to express themselves through unwanted emotions.

I often teach that pain is inevitable but suffering is optional. We don’t have to be imprisoned by unwanted emotions, caught inside the sense of a victimized self. Meditation teaches us to say “Yes” to our experience of pain, and rather than resist, gently open to emotions that are contracting our life flow. It is this non-resisting embodied presence that allows old wounds to untangle and be healed in the light of awareness. Although we are conditioned to say “No” and pull away, with practice, we gain increasing confidence that we can be with our inner life, and hold our own being with self-compassion. In time, we shift from the identity of the victimized self, to inhabiting a vast, wise heart.

Yet a challenge arises if we have been traumatized: in moments of difficulty we may be cut off from the inner resources—the mindfulness and kindness—that comprise a healing attention. In the effort to open to our feelings, we may even run the risk of re-traumatizing ourselves. The question, then, is how do those of us living with intense fear, with post traumatic stress, use these practices of presence for healing? In TRUE REFUGE, through compelling stories of people who have been traumatized, readers will learn how different meditation practices can help us access the inner safety and love that make a full and healing attention possible. While the process is gradual, no matter how deep the wounding, we each have the capacity to reconnect with a wholeness of heart and being.

What are the three gateways of presence, and how do they lead us to happiness—or as you put it, “being happy for no reason”?

The three gateways of presence are archetypal domains of healing and realization found in many spiritual and religious traditions. In their entirety they can give each of us a comprehensive and coherent way of understanding our own path.

The first gateway is mindfulness of this moment’s experience. I call this the “gateway of truth,” because we are directly connecting with what is actually happening—the ever changing flow of images, sounds, feelings and sensations perceived in the here and now. As we open fully to the truth of the moment, we connect with a natural sense of space and aliveness. This gives us an inner freedom that can simply celebrate the waves of experience. We are “happy for no reason.”

The second gateway, the “gateway of love,” opens as we directly awaken our heart. In the moments that we reflect on the goodness and beauty of life, loving kindness arises. As we allow ourselves to be touched by suffering—our own, others—compassion arises. The more we contact the felt sense of loving presence, the more we discover that our heart is boundless, and capable of genuine joy.

The third gateway, the “gateway of awareness,” opens in the moments that we remember the great stillness that is always here, behind this changing world of form. It arises in moments that we rest in silence, in moments when we sense the wakeful openness that includes all of life. As we become familiar with awareness as our formless home, we come to rest in a great and natural peace.

Each gateway has an outer expression that can make it more accessible—we can study wise teachings (truth); we interact with others to open our heart (love); we find inspiration in realized beings who point us toward our own awakened nature (awareness). Because we have different temperaments, we are often drawn to one or another of the gateways; but ultimately, they are entirely interdependent. For example, as we open to love, we spontaneously become more awake in the present moment, and more in touch with the vastness and purity of awareness itself.

TRUE REFUGE highlights the importance of meditation as a key practice that can heighten self-awareness, strengthen our relationships and make us better global citizens. Could the practices in this book lead to social change?

Ghandhi was known to take a day off each week for prayer and meditation so that his actions could arise from the deepest part of his being. His famous phrase “be the change you seek,” is a call to meditate. It reminds us that for there to be genuine social transformation, we must transform our own consciousness.

In one chapter we look at how, through compassionate listening, a group of Palestinian and Israeli teens move towards bridging the gap of misunderstandings that have been solidified over violent decades in their respective homelands. This same chapter also focuses on the relationship between a Caucasian woman and the African American male who married her daughter. Through these stories we recognize the power of meditation to help us see beyond what I call the “unreal other,” people who are different from ourselves, and become “less than” in our eyes. Meditation enables us to step out of the beliefs that create separation, and discover our belonging to one another. It leads to compassion-in-action: speaking our truths and living and serving from an awake, caring heart.

Evolutionary psychologists have identified cooperation as the primary feature that allows a species like humans to be extraordinarily successful. Meditation training is key to nourishing the parts of our brain that serve empathy, compassion and non-violence. It is the evolutionary tool that gives us hope for social justice, for peace, for the healing of our earth. And hope is warranted: in the time of writing TRUE REFUGE, just in Washington DC, meditation classes are now offered in a number of prisons and universities, in addiction facilities and government agencies, at the Washington Post and in parts of the military. We are on the path of becoming the change we seek!

Not all of us feel comfortable with meditation—we may have trouble finding the time amidst our busy lives, or we may not think of ourselves as spiritual people. You have worked with clients from all walks of life; how have you introduced newcomers to meditation and helped them work it into their daily routines?

The strategy that works best for newcomers is to commit to at least a short (few minutes) period of practice a day. The key is to drop all judgment about “quality,” and just approach that time period with a sincere heart. As a friend of mine says, “You put your tush on the cush and take what you get!” Really, even a few minutes of coming into stillness and intending to be present significantly shifts our state of mind. It doesn’t matter whether we practice at the beginning or end of the day, or in the middle. If in addition to formal practice, if we learn to take some mindful pauses, then we’ll begin to bring presence into all of our activities. And that is the possibility and gift—to engage in work and play, talking and recreating, helping others and taking care of ourselves, with an openhearted, clear-minded presence. As this unfolds, our life becomes real life, and we discover genuine happiness and peace.

What do you hope readers take away from TRUE REFUGE?

My prayer is that those who read TRUE REFUGE will have a deepened trust in their own heart and wisdom to navigate whatever arises in life. In the East, this confidence in our basic goodness is called “the lions roar;” we have “a heart that is ready for everything.” Rather than tense against the future, our trust allows us to touch the beauty and mystery of what is right here and now. Rather than being at war with ourselves, we can engage intimately and creatively with the life within and around us. Trusting ourselves enables us to savour our moments and serve this precious world.

In September IMCW opened the Center for Mindful Living, a space in the Washington metro area dedicated to Buddhist teachings, the practice of meditation, and the exploration of the many ways we can bring deeper presence and awareness into our lives.

The space has been beautifully developed and provides a sanctuary for stillness and inner exploration in the heart of our metropolitan area. The Center is located at 4708 Wisconsin Avenue, NW, three blocks north of Tenleytown Metro station, and is easily accessible by Metro, bus, or car from many parts of Maryland, northern Virginia, and the District.

• Daily meditation—currently offered in the mornings but soon to include evenings and weekends
• Classes for experienced students
• Introduction to meditation 
• Deepening dharma study and practice
• Weekly meditation
• Sutta study

If you are interested in offering a class—or would like to see a particular class or workshop at the new Center—two spaces are available: one room holds 35-40 people, the other 15-20. There is also a smaller office available for rent on a daily or hourly basis.

We look forward to seeing you there. For more information, please contact Gene Kijowski.

IMCW congratulates these teachers a is pleased to announce that Mary Aubry, Alicia Bazan-Jimenez and Larissa Kitenko have accepted IMCW's invitation to become full teachers. Mary has been co-teaching classes in Vienna, Capitol Hill and Columbia Heights for some time now and leads daylongs in Northern Virginia; Alicia is a guest teacher at IMCW's Takoma Park class, led a class for Spanish speakers in 2009 and co-teaches class series in Bethesda. Larissa Kitenko leads the Easton Meditation Sangha, teaches at the Salisbury Buddhist Community as well as teaches classes and daylong retreats on the Eastern Shore and Mid-Atlantic region. Trudy and La have been full IMCW teachers since the fall of 2008.

In addition to taking a growing and active role in teaching dharma, each has stepped forward in significant ways in serving our larger sangha. A welcoming bow to these people who are devoted to the dharma, and dedicated to the awakening of all beings.

~ Stephen Levine [1]

Fear is a primal response to death. Fear of death often obstructs our longing to be who we are. Many people long to provide compassionate care at the bedside of the dying; each of these individuals has the capacity to cultivate this art of compassion. The pathway to an open heart is through mindfulness and presence: by coming face-to-face with our own suffering and fear of death and the suffering and death of others, we let go of our fear and open our hearts. 

Since the natural lifespan for a majority of people includes both a time of wellness and a time of sickness that precede dying and death, each one of us will most likely face the dying of those we hold dear. Some may become caregivers for family or friends. Others, such as professional care providers, will offer care and service to the terminally ill in their work. In each of these situations, the dying process may be short or it may be extended over many years. However long or short the dying process may be it is common for all caregivers to long to serve others with a compassionate heart.

As a hospice nurse for many years, I have cared for countless patients and families at the end of life. I am not a special person because I am a hospice nurse. However, I do approach my work with a compassionate and open heart.

There can be much physical, emotional and spiritual pain at the bedside of the ill and the dying. I recall the time the young friend of one of my patients said to me “you must be tough as nails to do this work”. I paused and knew I was not tough.  In the presence of this suffering and great loss, my own sadness had emerged.  “No,” I responded, ”it breaks my heart.” Opening my heart to my vulnerability has softened and opened my heart to the suffering of all.

How do we begin to open our hearts? The heart of compassion calls for embracing the skillful means of mindfulness and presence -- attention, awareness, investigation and acceptance.

Compassion is our natural relationship with what is. We practice compassion by being present with whatever is arising in each moment. The Dalai Lama states: “If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.” [2] We each have the capacity to nurture our compassion through skillful means. Attention and awareness are discerning ways in recognition of the moment.

We can pause in any moment and pay attention to what is happening within us and what is happening around us. For instance, I cared for a young woman dying of cancer.  Her fear and anxiety created distance from her family and friends. My own anxiety escalated in her presence. Each time I visited, I would pause and silently ask myself: “What’s happening?” My attention to the moment brought awareness to everything that was happening in that bedroom. In that open space I stayed. In staying with the raw feelings, my compassion arose. This perceptiveness to what’s happening in each moment strengthens our practice of compassion. 

Through our conscious choice to practice skillful inquiry, we notice everything, investigate whatever arises without judgment, and allow things to be as they are.  We notice our grasping for what is pleasant and our avoidance of what is painful and difficult. Our perception of our conditioned responses to suffering becomes more sensitive. In discovering this truth, we open our hearts with acceptance of the pain and suffering inherent in life and in death. Through my own conscious choice my open heart of compassion has been revealed. I have been a compassionate caregiver in the presence of the grief of a patient whose anger softens as she tells the story about the love of her life; a father who allows his dying teenage son to maintain his independence even as he calls him his baby; and a young husband and father who finds joy in the midst of great sorrow by the simple embrace of his wife.

We can overcome our fear of death and embrace the longing to be who we are through mindfulness and compassionate presence. Many people will be called to the bedside of the dying and each of these individuals has the potential to cultivate genuine compassion. This pathway to an open heart is through the skillful means of awareness, attention, investigation and acceptance.

As we embrace our own vulnerabilities our hearts soften and open in the face of the inherent suffering in life. This deep wisdom opens our hearts to the pain and suffering of all. Thus, we become who we have always been--- compassionate caregivers of the dying.

“Service rests on the premise that the nature of life is sacred, that life is a holy mystery which has an unknown purpose. When we serve, we know that we belong to life and to that purpose. From the perspective of service, we are all connected: All suffering is like my suffering and all joy is like my joy. The impulse to serve emerges naturally and inevitably from this way of seeing.” [3]

If you are an Active Duty, National Guard or Reserve member of the military, a veteran, family member, or identify with the military in some way we are offering a “home base” for you in the newly forming military interest/KM groups. (Please see the IMCW KM webpage for more details.)

Considering the diverse nature of military backgrounds (combat, different services and ranks, wounded, family, etc.) and varying interests and levels of being ready to come forward we would like to offer support to all and hopefully hear from you. You are also needed to help other military connected people in our community.

We invite you to share your story and explore the benefits of mindfulness and meditation. We may form separate groups according to interest. If you want to share “war stories” or you do not want to that is okay; we can develop a group for you too.

If you are interested in connecting with this community and/or able to offer your experience please email Steve.

If you are a professional helper and know someone that will fit this group please pass this information along. Once our interest level and availability is determined we will set an initial meeting and move forward. If you want to help please contact Steve as well.

And even if you are not interested in a KM or support group you are welcome and encouraged to “check out” IMCW mindfulness offerings.

In the Takoma Park sangha, five long-term yogis took the Eight Lifetime Precepts on Sunday evening, September 23. In a simple but powerful ceremony, lead by Venerable Dhammasiri, abbot of the Washington Buddhist Vihara, the yogis made a public declaration of intention to follow the path of Buddhist practice in life.What are the Eight Lifetime Precepts? They are different from the Eight Precepts yogis often take on retreat.

The Eight Lifetime Precepts were created in the 1990's by Bhante Gunaratana, abbot of the Bhavana Society Forest Monastery. Among long-term practitioners there was a growing desire for a simple ritual allowing them to express their deep commitment to Buddhist practice in the whole of their life: ethical living, mental development, and insight. Seeing this, Bhante G took the traditional Five Precepts for the laity and expanded the speech acts, added livelihood, and called them the Eight Lifetime Precepts. They are:

1. I undertake the training rule to abstain from taking life.
2. I undertake the training rule to abstain from taking what is not given.
3. I undertake the training rule to abstain from sensual misconduct. 
4. I undertake the training rule to abstain from false speech.
5. I undertake the training rule to abstain from malicious speech. 
6. I undertake the training rule to abstain from harsh speech.
7. I undertake the training rule to abstain from useless speech.
8. I undertake the training rule to abstain from wrong livelihood and from intoxicating drinks and drugs causing heedlessness.

• As a reminder of anicca, the teaching on impermanence, they received a wrist string, which stays on until it wears out and falls away, just like all phenomena.
• As a reminder of dukkha, the teaching on dissatisfaction, they dressed in neutral colors, instead of clothing chosen to "look good."
• As a reminder of anatta, the teaching on not-self, they received a Pali name, stretching the confines of one’s usual identity and the notion of who “I am.”

Our theme for the class was true refuge. After the opening guided meditation, we had fun with a jar full of water and dirt! Sometimes, when things aren't going our way -- or when they are going sooo our way and we don't want it to end -- our minds get like the jar when we shake it up. Our minds go from being clear and calm to being murky and full of craving and aversion. In this class, we learn to meditate, meaning we learn how to calm, watch, and guide our minds away from suffering (murky mind) and toward lasting happiness (clear mind). We shook up the jar. Very murky! We continued to check in on the jar throughout class and watched as the dirt slowly settled out and the water began to clear.

We all shared what the word refuge means to us. We defined it as a "person, place or thing that keeps you safe" and everyone took turns sharing their personal refuges. Writing everything up on the blackboard, we soon saw that our beds, pets, friends, and loved ones were favorites. Then we talked about what can sometimes feel like a difficult truth. What about when we lose these sources of refuge? What if our friend moves away, or we can't be with our pet, or a loved one dies? These refuges are beautiful and important parts of our lives, but they do change. As the Buddha taught, they are impermanent. The class shared their personal experiences with loss. We talked about what our true, lasting refuges are -- those refuges that are always here with us. Our mind, heart, and body. Buddha referred to the 3 true refuges as the Buddha (our true nature, Buddha-mind), the Dharma (wisdom, the teachings; we could equate this to our heart or speech), and the Sangha (the community, each other; we could also equate this to our own body). Meditation helps us to know and understand our mind, heart, and body -- our true refuge.

Next we talked about rainbows. Jennifer shared how she saw a beautiful rainbow last night over the Potomac River, and she didn't want the moment to end! The class talked about what the many conditions that go into creating a rainbow: the rain, sun, an eye that is positioned in just the right spot -- all sorts of conditions are required to see a rainbow. A rainbow is a beautiful thing. Does the rainbow stay a long time? No! The conditions keep changing and the rainbow disappears. Often quite quickly! Everything in this world is just like the rainbow - impermanent. If you are a human being (you are, we hope!), you know what it is like to have frustration over things not going the way you want them to. Many of us experience this many times each day -- when we're told to stop playing with our favorite toy, or when our parents make us eat those brussell sprouts, or a child says something mean to us. The Buddha taught that our unhappiness, our suffering, comes from us wanting to control things -- clinging to how things are or wanting things to be different. Buddha taught that the nature of life is that it is always changing. Since we are not so much in control of the flow of life.s one meditation teacher once said, trying to hold on will only cause us rope burn! So we meditate to help us learn to calm, watch, and guide our minds toward true refuge, toward lasting inner happiness. We learn to become friends with our own mind, heart, and body.

During snack time, we read a book called Tenzin's Deer, by Barbara Soros. It is a beautiful story about a Tibetan boy, true friendship and love, and how great kindness means knowing when we must let go. In the letting go, we learn important lessons and gain the gift of wisdom and inner strength. Since this was the last class of the summer, everyone was given a piece of rainbow-colored yarn. We made Our theme for the class was true refuge.  After the opening guided meditation, we had fun with a jar full of water and dirt!  Sometimes, when things aren't going our way -- or when they are going sooo our way and we don't want it to end --  our minds get like the jar when we shake it up. Our minds go from being clear and calm to being murky and full of craving and aversion. In this class, we learn to meditate, meaning we learn how to calm, watch, and guide our minds away from suffering (murky mind) and toward lasting happiness (clear mind). We shook up the jar. Very murky! We continued to check in on the jar throughout class and watched as the dirt slowly settled out and the water began to clear.

After the closing meditation, Ofosu led us in the song "The Winds Of Change", taken from this summer's IMS Family Retreat:

The Winds Of Change

The winds of change are gonna blow you away
Find the center of the storm each day
The winds of change are gonna tear you apart
Seek the shelter of the peaceful heart.

Jesse’s response—his story about finding unconditional love in the face of his own mortality—is one of many videotaped stories that are now available through an online video project called Finding True Refuge. Other participants include Buddhist teacher Tsoknyi Rinpoche, devotional musician Krishna Das, leaders such as congressman Tim Ryan, experienced meditation students and those new to practice. The stories will be told by increasingly diverse peoples as we bring our camera to youth and the elderly, to schools, prisons, places of work and worship, hospitals and community centers.

In the stories we have recorded, people tell us how their meditation practice has served them in challenging circumstances. We’ve been awed and inspired by the ways that training in presence has opened them to compassion, resiliency and great wisdom. Lin talks about meditation deepening her connection with her young son after her husband left her for another woman. Steve has found meditation helps him deal with the stress accumulated from 27 years in the army. Terry shares how meditation eases the trauma of being an incest survivor. Laura has been able to find freedom from an eating disorder and alcohol addiction. For each, the discovery of true refuge has allowed them to live and love more fully.

“All religions and spiritual traditions begin with the cry ‘Help!’” wrote nineteenth century American psychologist and philosopher William James. Our lives are fundamentally insecure, and when we contact that vulnerability, we naturally cry out for help: “How do I handle this clutching fear… this sense of failure, of unworthiness… this anguish of loss?”

We are each seeking refuge, a sense of safety, love, peace. Our misguided attempts to soothe or fill ourselves with substitutes—false refuges—further distance us from the peace we long for. A true refuge is always here in the sanctuary of our own awakened hearts. And as Jesse discovered in opening to loving presence, a true refuge can hold whatever is going on in our life, no matter how difficult. This is what we witness through the intimate stories shared in this videotaped series.

The Finding True Refuge project is now live online. I hope you will visit it on our website, view the videos, and if you feel drawn, subscribe to the ongoing series.

The mindfulness revolution is quietly sweeping through our culture. In this new CD, Tara has compiled a set of meditations that bring alive the key elements of mindfulness and heartfulness.

These practices, while simple, have the power to remind us of our essentially loving, awake nature. They give us a way to live our lives aligned with heart and spirit. Enjoy!

Tara's new CD, Mindfulness Meditation: Nine Guided Practices to Awaken Presence and Open Your Heart, is available at the Tara Brach website.

Mindfulness Revolution in the Spotlight

by Eric Forbis and Gabriel Riera

The only film festival in the country that also features spiritual talks, meditation and live music returns to Arlington, VA on June 14-17. This year’s BuddhaFest looks at how we are all interdependent, and explores the profound effects that mindfulness and meditation are having on society. Tickets and passes are now on sale.

Speakers this year include Rick Hanson, author of Buddha’s Brain, and one of the world’s leading authorities on the neuroscience of mindfulness, and Congressman Tim Ryan, whose new book, A Mindful Nation, explores the growing presence of mindfulness in many areas of American life -- including education, health care and the military. Some people have begun referring to these changes in our culture as the mindfulness revolution. 

BuddhaFest teachers include Tara Brach, Tsoknyi Rinpoche, Sharon Salzberg, Jonathan Foust and Venerable Pannavati Bhikkhuni. Krishna Das, the best-selling kirtan artist of all time, performs in concert on Saturday, June 16. He returns for the festival’s closing session on Sunday, where he teaches prior to a screening of the film, Ram Dass: Fierce Grace, and afterwards he closes out the festival with a special musical performance.

BuddhaFest is presenting six films, along with four of the directors who will share their experiences and take questions from the audience. Films include the world premiere of When the Iron Bird Flies, which traces the astounding path of one of the world’s great spiritual traditions -- from the caves of Tibet to the mainstream of western culture. The film asks the question: In these modern, increasingly chaotic times, can these age-old Buddhist teachings help us find genuine happiness and help create a saner, more compassionate 21st century world?

The third annual BuddhaFest is held at the Spectrum Theatre at Artisphere in the Rosslyn section of Arlington, VA. The venue is minutes from DC and Maryland, near the Key Bridge and Route 66. There is free parking, and the Rosslyn Metro is two blocks away.

BuddhaFest is sponsored by the Insight Meditation Community of Washington and Tricycle.com.

You can check out the schedule and purchase tickets and passes at the BuddhaFest website.

Over the past decade, training in mindfulness — the intentional cultivation of moment-by-moment non-judgmental focused attention and awareness — has spread from its initial western applications in medicine to other fields, including education. This paper reviews research and curricula pertaining to the integration of mindfulness training into K-12 education, both indirectly by training teachers and through direct teaching of students. Research on the neurobiology of mindfulness in adults suggests that sustained mindfulness practice can enhance attentional and emotional self-regulation and promote flexibility, pointing toward significant potential benefits for both teachers and students. Early research results on three illustrative mindfulness-based teacher training initiatives suggest that personal training in mindfulness skills can increase teachers’ sense of well-being and teaching self-efficacy, as well as their ability to manage classroom behavior and establish and maintain supportive relationships with students....

Read the complete article, Integrating Mindfulness Training into K-12 Education: Fostering the Resilience of Teachers and Students.

This article has recently been published in the new Mindfulness magazine, by Springer Press and can be ordered or read online.

Congressman Ryan received a standing ovation at Wednesday's Bethesda class when he spoke of building a nation based on mindfulness and kindness.  Ryan spoke of the work he has started to bring mindfulness to schools in Ohio and how effective it is in helping students deal with stress. He also spoke of his hope of creating mindfulness programs for the increasing numbers of veterans returning to the U.S.

The audio of Congressman Ryan's talk can be found on IMCW's Talk pages.

Tim Ryan talks about the effectiveness of mindfulness in this YouTube video.

And for those of you who would like to watch the C-Span video that was taped during the class, you will be able to see it the first weekend of May (as currently scheduled). Please check the C-Span schedule after April 30 for the exact date and time.

... And Its Effect on Intention and Effort

Like other spiritual traditions Buddhism has debated over the course of its history whether human nature is basically good or basically flawed.  Buddhism today, through its myriad forms, presents to us two very different models of human nature: one of inherent goodness and purity, and one of plasticity, of malleability, of no-essence.  Where we come down in this issue – consciously or unconsciously – determines what we see as our existential starting point and necessarily leads to two very different frameworks of intention and effort.  It has a profound effect on what we think our Dharma practice should be about.

It has been said, “The mind is luminous by nature and inherently pure…aggression, hatred and greed are based in delusion and [cover] over our innate goodness…When you reawaken to your original nature [aggression, hatred and greed] fall away.”  [1]  

To me, the words “inherent,” “innate” and “original” are significant.  I believe this view, which is not uncommon, contributes to the ambivalence we in the West feel about the role of effort in our practice.  When I read Dharma publications and listen to other practitioners speak I sense many are conflicted about effort and others downright opposed to what is pejoratively termed “efforting.”  What typically follows these views is the notion of getting out of our own way and letting our innate purity blossom forth.  The emphasis is on relaxing, watching and opening to the inherent goodness in our nature.

Personally, when I am just relaxing, watching and opening, in a highly charged interpersonal interaction, for example, what I often see are reruns of the same old movie with the same tragic end.  The first impulses I experience are like flood waters rushing down an ancient ravine of habit and pattern, and it takes no effort for me to become aggressive or defensive.  On the other hand, I have to use great effort to reset my intention, restrain my speech and action, redirect my attention away from painful external circumstances and towards my internal reactions to those circumstances, and thereby cut a new channel so that thoughts, words and actions go in a new, helpful direction.  And as my partner once said about her own tendencies to create suffering for herself: “It’s one thing to see something and another thing to change it.”

As you may know, many recent discoveries in neuroscience complement Dharma teachings.  For example, mirror neurons make us “naturally” caring and compassionate – we are hard-wired for empathy.  At the same time, there are parts of our neural makeup – again, wholly natural – that only incline towards sense pleasure, reproduction and survival, making us hard-wired for aggression, fear, blindness and cruelty.  My concern is that if we emphasize or call “true” only the positive aspects of human nature, then we inappropriately search for or try to rely on some “golden” essence we believe rests at our core underneath a false veneer of defilement.

Scientists have found that “the evolutionary primacy of the brain’s fear circuitry makes it more powerful than the brain’s reasoning faculties.  The amygdala…sprouts a profusion of connections to the higher brain regions – neurons that carry one-way traffic from amygdala to neocortex.  Few connections run from the cortex to the amygdala, however.  That allows the amygdala to override the products of the logical, thoughtful cortex, but not vise versa.  So although it is sometimes possible to think yourself out of fear…it takes great effort and persistence [italics added].  Instead, fear tends to overrule reason, as the amygdala hobbles our logic and reasoning circuits.  That makes fear far, far more powerful than reason.”  [2]

Science is telling us two things: first, the dukkha (suffering)-producing aspects of our nature are every bit as “original” as the positive aspects – more so, in fact – and, second, survival mode tends to override “freedom mode.”

More broadly, science tells us that this mind is the product of three billion years of random mutation, and natural selection.  Species, and the aspects of species, are not fixed.  At no point in our evolution could we have taken on any innate, inherent or immutable characteristics, an essence of any sort – luminous and loving or deluded and fearful.

Other Dharma sources note, “…the crux of the Buddha’s insight was that there are no essences…The middle path between intrinsic goodness and intrinsic evil is the insight that human nature is a product of interdependently arising factors…”  [italics added] [3]

These insights point away from the idea that the mind is a Garden of Eden that somehow became tainted along the way.  If anything, the mind evolved as an untamed wilderness, or, put into Buddhist parlance, a vast field of dependent co-arising.  Within this field there are capacities, potentialities and tendencies that lead to harm or benefit rather than core attributes of good and bad.  Our minds are more like clay – with nothing inherent.  If the clay has any “suchness” about it, any characteristic, it is that of plasticity, malleability.  Thus, the mind can be molded and shaped into whatever you want to make of it, whatever intention and effort repeatedly incline it towards.

This “clay” model points us back to the balanced and comprehensive approach to Right Effort classically described in the Eightfold Path: guard against unarisen, harmful states; abandon arisen, harmful states; develop unarisen, skillful states; and maintain arisen, skillful states.

In addition to redirecting ourselves out of the ancient patterns of fear and aggression, Right Effort takes the form of positive practices like metta, in which we incline the mind toward something beneficial and keep it in that beneficial state, make it strong and reliable, make it a habit, an inclination.  In metta practice, we are not just watching and allowing, we are evoking and cultivating a positive state and making it strong where it might not otherwise be.

The good news of the Buddha, and what the neurological sciences are now confirming, does not stem from humanity being innately good.  Instead, it is based on our capacity to become aware of and intervene in our own evolution.  It is based on there being the potential for freedom alongside the imperative for survival.  This is from an article on empathy in the Health section of the Washington Post: “…research shows that as you refocus your thoughts, feelings and behaviors in the direction you desire, the brain regions associated with them are reinforced.  What’s more, changing your brain activity reinforces the changes you are making in your thinking.  The result is a self-reinforcing loop….” [4]  The Buddha pointed to this fact 2,500 years ago when he elegantly stated, “Whatever you reflect and dwell upon, that will be the inclination of the mind.”

Science points to the naturalness of both our baser and higher tendencies.  History provides ample evidence of the human capacity to act on both extremes.  To me, the question is not how to rid our practice of “efforting,” or uncover an original, innate purity.  It is whether the intentions underlying our efforts are based on craving and delusion, or wisdom and compassion and the corresponding sensitivity to what is beneficial and appropriate.  The question is which tendencies we let become our habits and inclinations.  Or as it is said in the often-told story of the Cherokee grandfather speaking to his grandson about the good and evil “wolves” he senses inside him: the wolf that wins is the one you feed.

Here is how I think of it: Whenever we do, think or say something, we are giving ourselves practice at doing that thing.  If we do, think or say something a lot, it becomes a habit, an inclination.  One way to practice is, in any given moment, to reflect: “What am I giving myself practice at doing right now?  Which capacity am I making strong right now?” 

[4] Douglas LaBier, Washington Post, Health section, (25 December 2007).

The Four "Divine Abodes" or "Immeasurable" States

The Brahma Viharas, deepening practice class series, February 27-April 2, 2012.

The audio of the talks given for this class series is available under "DSPP Spring 2012: The Brahma Viharas," on our Talks series page.

The Buddha taught that "whatever one frequently thinks and ponders upon will be the inclination of one’s mind."  If we sow thoughts of anger and hatred, those will become the qualities of our mind; if we sow thoughts of love and generosity, those will become the qualities of our mind.

As a mother watches over her child … so with a boundless heart should one cherish all living beings. 

~ Metta Sutta

He also provided a path of training that helps us to see the thoughts, words, and actions that lead us to continued suffering and those that lead to freedom from suffering.

A key teaching and practice was to “abandon what is unskillful” and “cultivate the good.”

We abandon the unskillful—afflictive states of heart/mind, such as greed, cruelty, anger, and jealousy—by opening fully to our experience with mindfulness, compassion, and love. In opening fully—radically accepting our experience just as it is—we come to see the essential "emptiness' of these states—that they only have power over us if we cling to or resist them.

We cultivate the good by nurturing and developing states of heart and mind that lead to happiness and freedom. The Buddha taught that four qualities of an awakened heart—that naturally arise in a heart that is free of clinging, aversion and ignorance—can also be developed and cultivated and can bring beauty and kindness to the world. These qualities are known as the Brahma (divine) Viharas (abodes).

These four qualities—loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic (or appreciative) joy, and equanimity—are called divine abodes because they can become the natural dwelling-place of the heart—the place we feel most at home.

These qualities are also called the "four immeasurables" because they have the capacity to purify the heart and generate positive energy beyond measure—and because they extend immeasurably to all beings in all realms of existence. They are unbounded, measureless.

The first of the divine abodes is loving kindness (metta), a quality of heart that is boundless, pure, and open—a love that extends to all beings without attachments or exclusion. Compassion (karuna) is the expression of an open, loving heart meeting the suffering of others—the quivering of the heart in the face of suffering. Sympathetic joy (mudita) is the quality of an open, loving heart meeting the happiness and well-being of others. And equanimity (uppekkha) is the expression of an unshakeable composure of heart—a love that embraces all beings with wisdom, balance, and serenity.

If you would like to deepen your study and practice of the Brahma Viharas, join IMCW senior teacher Hugh Byrne for a six-week course beginning Monday, February 27. Each class will include guided meditations on the Brahma Viharas, a talk, and a period for discussion and questions. For information and to register see the Brahma Vihara class series webpage. 

May all beings have happiness and the causes of happiness

May all beings be free from suffering and the causes of suffering

May all beings never be separated from the joy that is beyond all sorrow

May all beings abide in equanimity

The State of the Sangha/Board report for 2010-11 discusses the continued growth of the IMCW community as we continue to spread the dharma throughout the Washington, DC area through classes and retreats, and throughout the world with audio and video dharma.

We appreciate the part that all of the sangha has played in making this growth possible. We welcome your comments and questions regarding the report. Please email them to IMCW.

Read the State of the Sangha 2010-11.

Access to Insight: Readings in Theravada Buddhism.

BuddhaNet: Dharma education

Buddhist Peace Fellowship: Cultivating compassionate action

Dharma Voices for Animals: Bringing Awareness to the Suffering of Animals

DharmaNet: Study, practice & action

DharmaSeed: Vipassana audio dharma

Inquiring Mind: Buddhist journal/national listing of retreats and sitting groups

Insight Meditation Society: Audio dharma

Mind & Life Institute: collaboration and research partnership between modern science and Buddhism

Mid-America Insight Meditation: Retreat list

Shambhala Sun: Online magazine about Buddhist life and culture.

Sutta Readings: Read aloud by Theravadan Buddhist teachers

The Four Dharmas of Gampopa: by Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche

Tricycle: Tricycle magazine, online retreats, blog, community, online

The Washington D.C. Buddhist Studies Group, meets twice/month to study the Buddhist Pali Canon

Peace and Justice Groups

Joanna Macy: an eco-philosopher, a scholar of Buddhism, and a leading voice in movements for peace, justice, and a safe environment.

The Sarvoday Shramadana Movement of Sri Lanka: Build the road and the road builds us. (Sarvoday Shramadana means everyone wakes up by working together.)

Friends of Gaviotas, A Village to Reinvent the World: Humanity's search for solutions to the greatest environmental and social problems threatening the world today.

Poets Against the War: A cry against impending war and a celebration of the long and rich tradition of moral opposition and dissent by American writers and artists. Over 13,000 poems were submitted.

California Buddhist Peace Fellowship: Working for peace through contemplation and social action.

Washington Buddhist Peace Fellowship: Engaged Buddhism

We have to face the pain we have been running from. In fact, we need to learn to rest in it and let its searing power transform us. 

~ Joko Beck

I often find my anxiety sticking to whatever is going on immediately in my life—getting to the airport on time, the early symptoms of a cold, helping my son with a project. But when I ask what is really bothering me and then look deeply enough, the ultimate issue is death. On some level I always feel as though I am always facing death. My parents are getting older and someday there will be a phone call that lets me know the end is near. My son, the center of my universe, will graduate from high school and leave home in a few short years. My body is noticeably aging. Many dear people in my life are feeling physically handicapped. This life is fragile, and loss is all around me.

While the separation of death is the ultimate loss, any loss of connection is a part of dying. I fear the loss of love if I let down a friend. The loss of connection if I don’t spend time with my son. The loss of feeling at home with myself if I don’t take the time to meditate. Everything I’m afraid of has to do with the pain of separation—from loved ones, from my inner life, from life itself.

Although fearing the pain of loss is biological and universal, because it is so compelling, fear profoundly shapes our sense of identity. When fear arises, we pull into ourselves, clinging to whatever we perceive as our core, the way a sea anemone does when it is poked. We feel ourselves to be a self, protecting our life. Even when we have no conscious thoughts about threats to our existence, our fundamental sense that “something is wrong” keeps us on edge and prevents us from resting in the openness and freedom of our essential nature. We are in the trance of fear—our identity confined by fear, our perceptions distorted by fear.

Awakening from the Trance of Fear

In a popular teaching story, a man being chased by a tiger leaps off a cliff in his attempt to get away. Fortunately, a tree growing out of the side of the cliff breaks his fall. As he dangles precariously—tiger pacing above, jutting rocks hundreds of feet below—desperately he yells out, “Help!” A voice responds, “Yes?” The man screams, “God, God, is that you?” Again, “Yes.” Terrified, the man says, “God, I’ll do anything, just please, please, help me.” God responds, “Okay then, just let go.” The man pauses for a moment and then calls out, “Is anyone else there?”

Letting go of what seems to be our lifeline is the last thing we want to do in the face of fear. We find temporary security in accumulating possessions, in mental obsessing, in drinking three glasses of wine each evening. Why let go? The tiger’s mouth and the jutting rocks are the last places we want to be. But to truly awaken we must let go of the tree limb and fall into the fear, opening to the sensations and the wild play of feelings in our body. We have to agree to feel what our mind tells us is “too much.” We have to agree to the pain of dying, the inevitable loss of all we hold dear.

Ronald was sitting a ten-day retreat that I was leading. About five days into the retreat, he told me that he’d been thinking of his mother who had recently survived a stroke, but might never again be able to walk or talk. He thought about his wife who was struggling with chronic depression. He’d been telling himself that he was powerless to help. The people he loved were suffering and he couldn’t change that.

Although he could feel the rising tide of anxiety in his chest, Ronald felt removed from its real force. This numbness was familiar. At home, Ronald felt distant and detached when his wife described her feelings of hopelessness. Intellectually he cared but, as he put it, “I wasn’t able to be in the trenches with her. I couldn’t really relate.” At these times, he felt as though his body was dead and his heart was hard. Now a similar thing was happening. He knew that a huge well of pain was there, but he wasn’t going near it and his mind was racing a million miles an hour.

The key to awakening from the bind of fear is moving from our mental stories into contact with our immediate felt experience. The story, if we remain aware and do not get stuck inside it, can be an opening into the raw fear itself. Without dismissing the story, we can drop under it to connect with the feelings that live in our body. We directly sense the center of the body— the throat, heart and stomach. These are the physical zones where emotions most fully manifest themselves. Here we can feel squeezing, pressing, burning, trembling, quaking, jittering life. We awaken from the trance of fear by experiencing this energy where it is most immediate and alive.

Because Ronald felt so blocked from the immediacy of his fear, he moved toward the fear by inquiring “How big are you?” In answer he could sense a feeling of terror that would fill the entire universe. He thought, “If I accept this, I’ll be annihilated and die. The bigness and pain will kill me.” Ronald realized he was saying yes and fighting at the same time. His heart was pounding, and in his stomach he felt cramping and nausea. He could feel how his tensing against the fear compounded its intensity, so much so that he felt like his heart would explode. His every animal instinct was clutching, but he wanted to stop the war. As he put it, “I wanted to surrender my fearful self into something bigger than fear. I wanted to give up trying to control life.”

His conscious longing to let go empowered him to fully say “yes” to the immensity of his fear. He imagined himself lying down and letting go into it. “I was dying. I felt like my body was breaking apart, that I was lost in a storm of burning winds and my ashes were being dispersed in all directions.” He was letting go into fear, and the fear was surrendered into the endless space of awareness.

Leaning into fear in this way might feel to us, as Joko Beck puts it, like “lying down on an icy couch.” It can be extraordinarily difficult to let ourselves relax into it—we want to hold back for fear of even more wrenching pain. Still, we can settle down into discomfort. We can let the hard edges press into us, the sharpness stab us, the violence pull us apart. We keep softening into what’s there, letting go of resistance. It’s clearly not the most comfortable place, but it suits our needs in a crucial way. When we lie down on the icy couch of our fear, we begin to unlearn our tendency to hold back from life.

Our True Refuge From Fear

As long as we’re alive, we feel fear. It’s an intrinsic part of our make-up, as natural as a cold winter day or the winds that rip branches off trees. If we resist it, we become solidified as a small, endangered self and miss a powerful opportunity for awakening. Our willingness to face the darkness frees us from our identity with the trance of fear. As we offer the forces of the night a devoted presence, we become that presence. The intensity of fear compels us to inhabit the fullness of our Being—loving, open awareness. This is our Buddha nature, our true refuge, our only refuge in the face of fear. We become the vast sea cradling the passing waves of fear, anger and grief that sweep across its surface.

But there may be times when the fear feels like “too much,” times that it has been sustained or intense, times when we’re worn down. The art of spiritual practice is to sense what’s needed. Our intention is full and kind presence, and sometimes we need help in restoring our balance and relaxing our heart. We may need to remember our belonging by talking to someone we trust, by walking among the birds and trees. Sometimes the most compassionate approach is to take a break, drink some tea, rest. We may need to stop and pray and call on our awakened Being.

With practice, we find we can handle fear. We can even handle our deepest fear, the inevitable death of our impermanent self. We cultivate this capacity daily by letting go into less acute fears. With more intense fear, we lean in as best we can. We practice dying as we let go of resisting pain, mental preoccupation, having to be right, trying to be in control. As we let go and face fear, we naturally call on the radiant and changeless awareness that has room for living and dying. We open to the awareness that, as Rilke put it, “can contain death, the whole of death...can hold it in one’s heart gentle, and not... refuse to go on living.” We awaken into the awareness that is our true refuge, our true home.

Adapted from the book Radical Self-Acceptance (Bantam). 

This article was originally published in the Awakening Mind, Spring 2002.

Watch talks by Tara Brach, Sylvia Boorstein, Hugh Byrne and Ruth King in this video series from the "9.11 Weekend of Peace, Compassion and Forgiveness," held on September 10-11 in Washington, D.C.  Talks include "The Transformative Power of Forgiveness," "A Path Towards Peace," "Holding On and Letting Go," and "Experience How Mindfulness Cultivates Equanimity, Wisdom and Compassion."

The dharma talk by Lama Surya Das from the 9.11 weekend will be posted to this series as soon as it's available.*

* Lama Surya Das' talk is now posted. (10/4)

Practicing the Dharma in the Jungles of the Home life

By Ofosu Jones-Quartey, IMCW Teacher

Early last night, while sitting our altar room/library/dining room/laundry room, I had the wonderful pleasure of being sandwiched between my two kids, Sundara and Samadhi aged five and three, as I read aloud the life story of Siddhartha from Demi’s wonderful children’s book, Buddha. With my stomach growling after having read page after page, I let the kids know that we were going to bring our reading to a close soon. “Ok, Daddy, two more pages!” quipped Sundara. And so I obliged, reflecting on how remarkable it was that my five year old, who just a year ago wouldn’t have anything to do with Daddy’s “Buddha stuff” or the books I bought for her, was suddenly soaking up all the kid’s Dharma books we owned. My son, enjoying the pictures and his time with his dad, needed no coaxing in things-Dharma. He loved the bells, the bowls, the statues, the prostrations, everything. All hunger aside, my heart was joyful. 

In reading the obligatory “two more pages,” I arrived at the last sentences for the night. One of which contained the word “Karma.” “Daddy, what’s Karma?” asked Sundara. I shot a glancing half-smile to my fiancée, Ayanna. “Well, Sweetness, Karma is….” I paused. All my lofty studies, all the many definitions of Karma and its workings, the principle of cause and effect expounded by the Great Sage, had to be condensed so that my five and three year olds could get it. And it had to be done quickly or the opportunity would be lost to play time, dessert time or bedtime! I dropped everything and went for it.

“Ok, when you clean up your room, right? When your room is nice and clean, do you feel bad or good afterwards?” “Good.” “Well, that good feeling is Karma. Karma is what happens after we do something, whether it’s good or bad. When you guys don’t listen or don’t share and you get in trouble or go to “time out,” how do you feel?” “Bad,” they chimed in unison. “Right! That bad feeling is also Karma.”

I went on to explain further, amazed at how easily they had grasped the concept. Soon, the words “good karma” and “bad karma” and examples of each were being tossed around. Ayanna and I looked at each other again, with faces of peculiar satisfaction. When it was time to go to bed, I brought the subject up once more and asked them to give me examples of good and bad things they could do and what kind of karma would result. From their responses, I could tell they had clearly understood.Ayanna and I kissed them good night, taking turns on each bunk of their bed. With the atmosphere infused with love, we turned the lights off and I stood facing their bed to softly sing what has become something of a night-time lullaby in Pali:

Iti Pi So Bhagavan Araham Samma Sambuddho
Vijja Carana Sampanno Sugato Lokavidu
Anuttarro Purisa-damma Sarathi
Sattha Deva-Manussanam, Buddho Bhagavati.

With the kids asleep, it was time for Mom to run a quick errand and for Dad to enjoy a glass of wine while I listened to new mixes of the album I’ve been recording with my group, Shambhala for over a year. This recording process had resulted in the best music I’ve ever been a part of, but also kept me away from home more than I cared for. Tonight was an off night. It was a time for me to put on the white clothes of an Upasaka and ignore the rest of the world for a while. It was a time to impart what I could of the Dharma to my family through a mix of tenderness, discipline, and attentiveness, not to mention great kid’s books.

It certainly didn’t start out this way. Initially, my children were, and to a lesser degree, still are, a major source of anxiety for me. In the very beginning of my journey as a father, just being around my daughter, our first child, would arouse a great deal of mental and physical tightness and a fear that bordered on terror. I was quickly falling headlong into despair -- until I experienced this same type of gripping anxiety in another environment -- my first visit to Bhavana Society monastery.

When I discovered that these episodes of anxiety, manifesting themselves as headaches, fearful thoughts, stomach pangs, etc., were not exclusive to my relationship with my new family, I felt oddly relieved that such distress was applicable elsewhere! But what was the source? Where did this debilitating anxiety come from? Had it always been there? What awakened it? And most importantly, how do I get rid of it?! Thus began my full immersion in the Dharma. I had been practicing various types of meditation three years prior to the birth of our daughter. Though my mother’s brief conversion to Buddhism seventeen years earlier and my visits to the temple she attended had led me (naively) to always regard myself as a “Buddhist,” with the advent of my first child, I made a formal decision to become a “real” Dharma practitioner. It would also be the same year my friend Jabar and I would form our music group, Shambhala. I had just graduated from American University; Ayanna and I had recently moved into a new apartment.

Only in retrospect can I appreciate the magnitude and perhaps the stupidity of delving into these major undertakings all at once. I had jumped into the lion’s den. It occurred to me, however, that all of it was essentially one thing: Dharma practice. Like the Forest Ajahns of Thailand, who ventured into the jungles to test themselves and develop their practice under harsh conditions, I had entered the layman’s jungle – real life, real responsibilities, and above all else – fatherhood.

My first trip to Bhavana monastery led me to my teacher, then relatively unknown, the Ven. Bhante Buddharakkhita – Uganda’s first Buddhist monk. During my three days at the temple, I was shocked by how volatile my mind was, how it clenched and twisted, how it produced all manners of unwholesome thoughts, how anxious, and how similar to its behavior at home. “Great,” I thought. “Home life – Temple life – same challenges!” It was an insight that was simultaneously encouraging and disheartening. In having a child and in becoming a Dharma practitioner, my mind was suddenly full of feelings of inadequacy, a feeling that can only be described as “the fundamental badness of ‘me’.” This sense of self and its many manifestations had developed within me unnoticed over the years. Now that I was faced with a child and a practice, both of which inspired me to reach higher, to be better, to become enlightened, what was lurking inside had emerged – and quite painfully.

A teaching by Phra Ajahn Lee Dhammadharo begins with the line: “Good things come from things that are dirty, and not at all from things that are clean.” In other words, the only type of soil that can produce and sustain a good harvest is soil that is covered in excrement! Bhante Buddharakkhita concurred: “If you are really serious in your practice, its natural to feel this way in the beginning.” With these perspectives in mind, I took to the inner and outer challenges of being a new dad and a new child of the Buddha. Meditation every morning, with weekly reports to Bhante B, became the routine. I would spend time at work reading any and everything about the Dharma from different teachers. I would try to meditate on the bus and do walking meditation from the bus stop to home. I read the Dhammapada to baby Sundara, changed diapers, slept little and bought a new pacifier every week to ensure a few hours of quiet in the evenings. Every other night was spent in the studio or performing.

In retrospect, I might have been overdoing it, but nonetheless, I threw myself headlong into my practice, my music and my family. Meditation after meditation, reflection after reflection, victories and defeats on the cushion, the birth of my second child, the completion of Shambhala’s first album, our first overseas tour, new jobs, new approaches to vipassana, new insights -- the source of my dilemma slowly became apparent: through a series of events from my childhood, unskillful personal choices in my relationships with myself and others in adolescence and young adulthood, I had created a pervasive, underlying self- image that was being superimposed on everything. This negative self image was especially powerful whenever I encountered something that I considered fundamentally “good”: my kids, my Dharma teachers, etc. I would immediately try to suppress any negative states of mind and generate positive ones – often with disastrous results. I was in a net of grasping and projecting – spinning around inside and hurting badly, trying to create a “good” mind out of a “bad” one – all based on supposed “truths” that weren’t really true at all.

Not long ago, while attending a daylong retreat at Jetavana Vihara, a remarkable thing happened. I was doing walking meditation, and my mind was caught in its habitual stories. In the months prior to the retreat, I had made some headway in my practice, but certain unwholesome mental patterns persisted rather strongly. All of a sudden, an insight arose: “the basic mind is enough.” Talk about a breakthrough. It was less like “Aha!” and more like “Ahhhhhhh.”

What I had experienced first-hand was my ability to observe my constricted mind. The constriction was taking place in the context of an open, clear and flexible awareness that required no support whatsoever – my “basic mind.” I could see the disparity between awareness itself and the fluctuating objects of awareness that, when incorrectly perceived, are the basis of our suffering. From the very beginning, there had been a part of me that was always present, always pure, worthy of love, worthy of admiration. For me it was a tremendous discovery. This basic mind was so regular, yet so profound! It felt divine. Though I still experience difficulties, I haven’t been quite the same since that day. My confidence in the Dharma and what one can achieve by putting it into practice is firmly established without doubts.

This confidence is the most important gift I can give to my kids, and to my family. We can read all the Dharma books and I can chant all the chants, they can join me in mantras, help light incense, and even sit with me in the altar room on Sundays for meditation, but none of that can amount to Daddy’s unwavering confidence in the Dharma, expressed naturally, basically, and with flexibility to meet each situation with the proper response. Wisdom and compassion are planted as seeds every time we walk mindfully to avoid squishing bugs, every time I remind myself not to let “real” anger arise when discipline is necessary. Every hug, every “I love you,” every moment of letting go, every moment of mindfulness – every step closer to meeting whatever is encountered with natural, “basic mind” – being able to tell the kids with confidence that this purity exists within them as their birthright turns the home into the temple and the family into the sangha.

(Fast forward to this morning.)

“Ok, guys. Have a great day at camp. Daddy loves you.” I hug them each and send loving-kindness (Metta) to them. I walk towards the building where I work and Ayanna prepares to pull off. Sundara rolls the window down. “I love you, Daddy!” she peeps. “I love you, Daddy!” chirps Samadhi’s little voice. “I love you guys, too. Om Mani Padme...”

“HUM!” they yell.

I smile and bow with palms pressed together as they move away into the day’s uncertainties.

Coffee time!

This article was originally published in the ENews, July 2008.

But who exactly are we praying to? I grew up Unitarian, and I remember how we used to joke about addressing our prayers "To Whom It May Concern." This same question may come up for those of us who follow the path of the Buddha. Students of Buddhist practice usually think of praying as peculiar to Christianity and other God-centered religions. Beseeching someone or something greater than our small and frightened self seems to reinforce the notion of a separate and wanting self. Yet while prayer does suggest a dualism of self and other, in my experience when we fully inhabit our longing, it can carry us to the tender and compassionate presence that is our own awakened nature.

I recalled the bodhisattva’s aspiration: "May this suffering serve to awaken compassion" and began quietly whispering it inside. As I repeated the prayer over and over, I could feel my inner voice grow less desperate, more sincere. I was praying not for relief, but for the healing and freedom that naturally unfolds as we open to the bruised and broken places inside us. The moment I prayerfully let go into that depth of suffering, the change began. 

Some years ago I was suffering from a broken heart. I had fallen in love with a man who lived 2000 miles away, on the other side of the country. Because we had very different desires about having a family and about where to live, we couldn’t weave our lives together and the relationship ended. The loss was crushing—for many weeks I was swamped in obsessing about him, sobbing, overwhelmed with grief. I stopped listening to the radio because classic rock songs often left me weeping. I avoided romantic movies. I barely talked with friends about him because even saying his name out loud would freshly reopen the wound.

I accepted my grieving process for the first month or so, but as it went on and on, I started feeling ashamed of how big and dominating my sense of desolation was. On top of that, I felt that something must be wrong with me for being such an emotional wreck. The man was moving on, dating other people. Why couldn’t I do the same? I tried to wake up out of the stories, I tried mindfully letting the pain pass through, but I remained possessed by feelings of longing and loss. I felt more excruciatingly lonely than I had ever felt in my life.

In the room where I meditate, I have a Tibetan scroll painting (called a thanka) of the bodhisattva of compassion. Known as Tara in Tibet and Kwan Yin in China, she is an embodiment of healing and compassion. It is said that Kwan Yin hears the cries of this suffering world and responds with the quivering of her heart. One morning, about a month into my meltdown, as I sat crying in front of the thanka, I found myself praying to Kwan Yin. I felt crushed and worthless. I wanted to be held in Kwan Yin’s compassionate embrace.

Off and on over my years of Buddhist practice, I had prayed to Kwan Yin, relating to her primarily as a symbol of compassion that could help me awaken my own heart. But I hadn’t reached out to her as a spiritual presence, as a Being larger than my small self. Now, in my desperation, it was different. Kwan Yin was no longer just a symbol of inspiration, she was the Beloved—a boundless and loving presence who, I hoped, could help relieve my suffering. Rilke’s words resonated deeply:

I yearn to be held
In the great hands of your heart—
Oh let them take me now.
Into them I place these fragments, my life…

For a few days I did find some comfort by reaching out to Kwan Yin. But one morning I hit a wall. What was I doing? My ongoing ritual of aching and praying and crying and hating my suffering was not really moving me towards healing. Kwan Yin suddenly seemed like an idea I had conjured up to soothe myself. Yet without having her as a refuge, I now had absolutely nowhere to turn, nothing to hold on to, no way out of the empty hole of pain. What felt most excruciating was that the suffering seemed endless and without purpose.

Even though it seemed like just another idealistic notion, I remembered that at times in my Buddhist practice, I had experienced suffering as the gateway to awakening the heart. I remembered that when I had remained present with pain in the past, something had indeed changed—I opened to a more spacious and kind awareness. Suddenly I realized that maybe this situation was about really trusting suffering as the gateway. Maybe that was the whole point—I needed to stop fighting my grief and loneliness, no matter how horrible I was feeling or for how long it continued. Only by experiencing the pain fully could I deliver “these fragments, my life” into Kwan Yin’s boundless compassion.

I recalled the bodhisattva’s aspiration: "May this suffering serve to awaken compassion" and began quietly whispering it inside. As I repeated the prayer over and over, I could feel my inner voice grow less desperate, more sincere. I was praying not for relief, but for the healing and freedom that naturally unfolds as we open to the bruised and broken places inside us. The moment I prayerfully let go into that depth of suffering, the change began.

Now I could scarcely bear the searing pain of separation. I was longing, not for a particular person but for love itself. I was longing to belong to something larger than my lonely self. The more fully I reached inward to the gnawing emptiness, instead of resisting or fighting it, the more deeply I opened to my yearning for the Beloved.

As I let go into that yearning, the sweet presence of compassion arose. I distinctly sensed Kwan Yin as a radiant field of compassion surrounding me, cherishing my hurting, vulnerable being. As I surrendered, offering my pain into her presence, my body began to fill with light. I was vibrating with a love that embraced the whole of this living world—it embraced my moving breath, the singing of birds, the wetness of tears and the endless sky. Dissolving into that warm and shining immensity, I no longer felt any distinction between my heart and the heart of Kwan Yin. All that was left was an enormous tenderness tinged with sadness. The compassionate Beloved I had been reaching for "out there" was my own awakened being.

When we are suffering and turn to prayer, no matter what the apparent reasons for our pain, the basic cause is always the same: we feel separate and alone. Our reaching out is a way of relieving ourselves of this pain of isolation. Yet the bodhisattva's aspiration radically deepens the meaning of prayer by guiding us to also turn inward. We discover the full purity and power of prayer by listening deeply to the suffering that gives rise to it. Like a great tree, such prayer sinks its roots into the dark depths in order to reach up fully to the light. This is what I call mindful prayer—opening wakefully to our suffering and allowing ourselves to reach out in our longing for connection. Irish poet and priest John O’Donohue writes: "Prayer is the voice of longing; it reaches outwards and inwards to unearth our ancient belonging." The more fully we touch our pain and longing, the more fully we are released into boundless, compassionate presence.

Mindful prayer awakens us from the imprisoning story of a suffering self. Resisting pain only serves to solidify the notion that "I" am suffering. When we perceive pain simply as pain, rather than "my pain," and hold it tenderly; we are no longer the beleaguered, suffering self. The fear, shame, grief and longing no longer feel like a mistake or an oppressive burden. We can begin to see their universal nature: this is not my grief, it is not my fear, it is not my longing. It is part of the human experience and being willing to hold it tenderly is the doorway to compassion.

A beautiful Sufi teaching shows us how our pain is not personal, it is an intrinsic part of being alive:

Overcome any bitterness that may have come
because you were not up to the magnitude of the pain
that was entrusted to you.
Like the Mother of the World,
Who carries the pain of the world in her heart,
Each one of us is part of her heart,
And therefore endowed
With a certain measure of cosmic pain.

Our sadness, fear and longing are universal expressions of suffering that are “entrusted to us,” and they can be prayerfully dedicated to the awakening and freedom of our hearts. May this suffering awaken compassion . May this suffering awaken compassion. As we meet our pain with kindness instead of bitterness or resistance, our prayer is answered. Our hearts become an edgeless sea of loving awareness with room not only for our own hurts and fears, but also for the pain of others. Like the Mother of the World, we become the compassionate presence that can hold, with tenderness, the rising and passing waves of suffering.

This article was originally published in The Awakening Mind, Spring 2005.

When I saw the request on the IMCW ENews for a host for Khenpo La, a visiting Buddhist monk, I knew it spoke to me. I answered immediately, trusting that my partner Wes would support me (he did) as we both believe in open hospitality for our friends. I did not quite have the words yet but I distinctly felt an underlying deeper calling to personal development of my spiritual path, through this form of service.

Things appeared to be falling into place smoothly especially after the coordinator shared that I had been given the Buddhist name, Shenpen Lhamo or Goddess of Helping Others, by Thrangu Rinpoche, a familiar monk to our pending house guest.

One day I had a call from someone I could not understand. I thought it must either be a possible client (I am retired) or a sales person, both common occurrences. I ultimately said, “I am very sorry but I am afraid you have the wrong number and hung up. A few minutes later I discovered it was my monk! Next time he called he said, “I thought you were the Goddess of Helping Others!” “I have much to learn,” I replied.

And Oh! did I have more to learn! If you want to come face to face with your deepest self knowledge, be in a relationship or even better, have a Buddhist monk stay for 10 days in your home.

I never drive in DC, so before Khenpo La (the Venerable Khenpo Jampa Tenphel) arrived for his time with the Dalai Llama I practiced my route to the Verizon Center. Wes and I also went over the backup plan of the Metro, writing down the directions. Wes and I both went to Reagan airport to pick him up at 10:00 p.m. so I would not drive there alone. Khenpo La needed to be at Verizon Center at 7 a.m. the next morning.

Thus began our daily ritual. Early wake up (5:30 a.m.), make and serve oatmeal, coffee or tea and set out to drive in D.C. traffic down Constitution Ave. (which was under construction), accompanied by chanting. Somehow the Metro plan was never put into effect.

The first day Khenpo La said he would call me when he wanted to return. Now remember the difficulty understanding each other on the phone? Well, when Khenpo La called, in the middle of rush hour, he said he would be at a museum, not the Verizon Center. My stomach sank but luckily the museum was on Constitution Avenue, so off I went with my trusty GPS after firmly saying, “Wait on the sidewalk out front.” When I arrived, he was nowhere in sight. He happily answered his phone “Oh you park and come inside.” I said I could not do that and I would drive around the block and return, again firmly stating, “Be on the sidewalk out front.” He hung up. I promptly got lost. One hour later in much traffic and many wrong turns, police waving me away etc, I again called as I approached the museum. “Oh, no, I walk and walk and walk, I now somewhere else.” My equanimity, which had been holding steady, vanished. “You will need to take a cab or the Metro.” He hung up.

With the help of a Buddhist friend my sense of humor and equanimity returned (sangha). I remembered I most wanted to be of service.

When we met at the Metro in Falls Church I tried to explain the reality of traffic and driving in D.C. My words appeared to be bouncing off him like bubbles with no perceivable impact, so my anxiety went into judgment. My Buddhist monk’s culture favored men, lived under a hierarchical system, which created more judgment and insecurity on my part. However, I was also aware of an energy subtly seeping through. My intention to be of service was taking precedence and a sense of peace came with it.

So our adventure entwining two cultures continued.

As we sat peacefully in my back yard one summer evening we were having some difficulty understanding each other. Khenpo La suggested we visit my Tibetan neighbors. We walked over and proceeded to spend a lovely time drinking Tibetan tea, learning of my neighbor, Karma’s, impressive practice of meditating 1-½ hours each morning before the altar in his room. He promised to tell me personally the story of Kalachakra, the Dalai Llama’s teachings. Karma is actually from the next village to Khenpo La’s family so it was a thrilling reunion. For me, learning about his daily 1-½ hour daily meditation practice, created a visceral understanding of the impact of meditation, personified in my kind, peaceful, welcoming neighbor. I made a heartfelt commitment to increase my meditation time.

As I remained engaged in my intention our lives continued to flow. I was aware of a guest requesting food at 10 p.m., picking up my camera and announcing he would take it the next day and would I charge the battery, calling during rush hour and as I approached him on the sidewalk I saw his broad smile and heard, “I wait, no walk today.”

Yes, my belongings are in disarray as one area of our small home belongs to him, including my computer. Our cat then decided there was too much change and peed in our downstairs bedroom. As I apologized for the overpowering sharp stench, he smiled and said, “s’ok, s’ok”. What an example!

As the days went on, I also became incredibly aware of the underlying sense of peace that was becoming stronger. As I would notice one of the hindrances, I could smile at it and watch it disintegrate. Sure I needed a nap in the afternoon, but I was thoroughly present, enjoying the blessings of a prayer each time we entered the house, chanting while we drove, deep bows in the morning, all with personal teachings.

While I will continue to study as my new teacher suggested: “reflect on why you meditate; it is not to relax.” I remain "Buddhish," reflecting on combining respect and honor without idolizing. I will reflect on how my meditation can benefit all beings. A huge insight to guide me will be that true service is egoless, and how that leads to deep peace.

For Wes, our new friend arrived at his business’ 25th anniversary celebration at an extremely auspicious time, placing a Kata around Wes’ neck as a “representative from the Dalai Llama.”

The richness of this experience blossomed at breakfast as he shared his vision of setting up dharma centers all over the world with small private quiet areas for devotees. We shared genuine human concerns about the vulnerability of aging alone without social security. We listened to his story of how he left Tibet after three years in meditation isolation with his father, how he misses his family but can not return, how he feels different from his family as they remain farmers in Tibet. He would like to become a U.S. citizen so he could one day return and see his elderly mother.

My heart is open to a true culture to culture human connection that was deeper than any expectations I could have had, extinguishing any anxieties and truly deepening the depth of understanding of service through “no-self” along my spiritual path. I am filled with gratitude to IMCW for leading me to this opportunity, to Sharon, the coordinator in Seattle, to Wes for his help and flexibility and most of all, to Khenpo La. 

This article was written by sangha member Judith Donovan.

What if the thing that you lovingly crafted would be destroyed as soon as it was complete and perfect—how would you not suffer from that loss?

Such are the teachings of the monks of Drepung Monastery, emissaries of the Dalai Lama’s lineage, who spent five days this past week prayerfully creating an exquisite Medicine Buddha sand mandala only to ceremonially “destroy” it when it was finished. This process mesmerized a standing-room only crowd at Baltimore Yoga Village, home of the IMCW Baltimore weekly class.

On Sunday July 17, eight monks arrived in Baltimore following the Dalai Lama’s teachings in Washington, DC. Sitting on the floor around a bright blue square of wood, the monks began with a ceremony to cleanse and heal the space and those of us in attendance. With cymbals, drums, horns, and chanting, the Tibetan monks prayed for the removal of all that was being held back from love and asked each of us to actively participate in this process by releasing anything holding on in our own hearts. Then the monks immediately got to work, bringing out mechanical tools to draw the outlines of the mandala that they would fill with the design of the Medicine Buddha mandala. Over the next five days, they prayerfully created their mandala from 11-5 p.m. each day, offering morning meditations, teachings, and cultural events in the evenings; 100% of the proceeds for the whole week went to the monks. My own heart was touched to witness eight fully committed hearts in action.

IMCW-Baltimore meets each Tuesday night and, just as we had the last time the monks were in Baltimore, they taught during our weekly sangha time. About 100 people came for this meditation session, to be in the monk’s presence and to hear the teachings of the Dalai Lama. Even more potent than their words however was the partially completed sand mandala, situated between the monks and the sangha, in full view. There it lay—seeming to transmit these teachings: Love is in the actions we take today. Be not afraid to create beautiful things. Suffering comes from holding on to outcomes. Impermanence is the natural order of things—not a cause for anticipated sadness.

Throughout the week, the monks had a few main teachings; interestingly, they didn’t speak directly about impermanence. Instead, they let the sand mandala process “speak” about this—one of the Three Characteristics—while they spoke about the other two: Suffering that comes from attachment and no-self. We were counseled to look for the “me’s, my’s and mine’s” that we hold onto that underscore most suffering. And finally, to realize that there is no permanent Self to be injured, and thus this type of suffering is illusory. For instance, if we hold onto the view that “She broke my heart” or “This sand mandala is mine”, we reinforce a view of the permanent self that doesn’t exist. Therefore, all three characteristics were being illustrated through the sand mandala process.

Finally, at noon on Thursday, the mandala was completed and it was beautiful! When it came time for the closing ceremony, part of me wanted to keep the beauty and perfection that was the mandala today. My mind protested: “But it was just finished hours ago—can’t we keep it just a little longer?” The monks looked peaceful however as they asked us to take in the healing prayers that were lovingly installed in the mandala, and meditate on love. When they swept up all of the bright blue, green, read and yellow patterns into one non-descript pile of grains with some of the sand going to fill a jar, and the rest put in small plastic bags for us to take home, a state of peace and contentment permeated the room.

Soon afterwards, the monks poured the sand into the Jones Falls River with prayers of healing for the river and for the whole planet. With a heart overflowing with love and gratitude and now strength, too, I joined in these prayers and noticed that the crowd around me, now standing outside in the 102-degree heat, also looked radiant. I knew I had been given a great teaching indeed—not only about the short-lives of sand-mandalas, but also about keeping my heart open even as I see the world and its certain losses clearly. Where had the sand mandala gone, after all? Into loving prayers, into the river, and very, very soon, into my own flower garden where it will nourish peace and love.

by Hugh Byrne & Rebecca Hines

(Editor's note: This article was originally published in the ENews, January 2008.)

In the midst of daily life there are other simple ways to take a “mini sacred pause,” bring awareness to what is alive here and now, and relax into presence.It is very easy—amidst the stress, busyness and demands of modern life—to live much of our time on autopilot, leaning into the future or ruminating on the past, dislocated from our lives in this moment.

A daily or regular formal meditation practice helps us to remember that true peace and freedom are to be found in being fully present, here and now. We can also cultivate awareness in the activities of our lives using a “sacred pause.”

To take a sacred pause, choose a time when you’re involved in a goal-oriented activity – reading, working on the computer, cleaning, eating – and experiment with pausing. Begin by discontinuing what you are doing, sitting comfortably, and allowing your eyes to close. Take a few deep breaths, and with each exhalation let go of any worries or thoughts about what you are going to do next. Let go of any tightness in the body.

Now notice what you are experiencing as you inhabit the pause. What sensations are you aware of in your body? Do you feel anxious or restless as you try to step out of your mental stories? Do you feel pulled to resume your activity? Can you allow, for this moment, whatever is happening inside?In the midst of daily life there are other simple ways to take a “mini sacred pause,” bring awareness to what is alive here and now, and relax into presence:

1. The telephone as a meditation bell: When the telephone rings, take a few seconds to use the sound to be fully in your body. Relax any muscles that may be contracted, especially in the face, mouth, and jaw. Inhale and exhale more deeply for a breath or two, and then answer the call.
2. Download a “mindfulness bell” to your computer that rings at regular or random intervals. When the bell sounds, take your hands from the keyboard, bring your attention to bodily sensations, and take three or four full breaths to come home. (Find a downloadable mindfulness bell at the Washington Mindfulness Community here.)
3. Three-Breath-Break: When you become aware that you’ve been focusing on an activity for an extended period, or are transitioning between activities, take a three-breath-break. Pause and take three deep breaths, intentionally breathing into the belly. Allow the abdomen to expand. Relax and release any places of tightness or tension in the body with each exhalation and know you are here.
4. Red Stoplight as a Pause: When driving (or walking in an area with pedestrian signals), use the occasion of each red stoplight as an opportunity to pause. Depending on the situation, you can use the moment to breathe more deeply and release places of tension or contraction in the body.
5. Mindful listening: While listening and maintaining awareness in conversation, bring your attention to the ‘felt sense’ in your body that accompanies and responds to the conversation. Let go of any tightness in the body and bring a responsive openness to what the other is saying.
6. Mindful walking: When walking from one place to another, let the walking be a sacred pause in the workday. Use the moments of walking as an opportunity to become fully present by bringing awareness to the sensations in the body and consciously letting go of the day’s to-do list.

Integrating mindful principles into daily life for just 5 minutes a day over 3 weeks resulted in significant reductions in stress and increases in life satisfaction, positive relations with others, and environmental mastery, according to a recent study.

Whenever you feel stuck or disconnected, you can begin your life fresh in the moment by pausing, relaxing, and paying attention to your immediate experience using the sacred pause.

We affirm that a key responsibility of these affinity Sanghas is to determine their own internal organization, including the makeup of their membership. Currently these Sanghas have chosen to be designated as POC-only and LGBTQ-only. The purpose is to allow a circle of belonging that feels safe to its members and to create a refuge where they can relax into the intimacy of spiritual exploration. In the midst of a larger environment, wherein people who identify as POC and/or LGBTQ may experience a sense of being targeted — even by people with wholesome intentions — these Sanghas provide a harbor of mutual respect and understanding that is anchored in safety.

Close your eyes and awareness naturally flows inward and to the other senses. Our daylong retreat on Saturday explored what it means to “be” with nature as a backdrop.

Much of our day was on a knoll over the Potomac River at River Bend Park. Though it was in the high 80′s, every small breeze added to the cocktail of sensations: bird songs, the rush of the river over rocks, the rich humid air, the occasional plane overhead and the irregular drumbeat of Piliated woodpeckers working over dead trees nearby.

Meditation in nature provides so many doorways to paying attention. One technique is to narrow your awareness to one square foot of forest floor and to notice all the details … from the diversity of plant life to the movement of bugs.

A more expansive meditation is to cloud gaze and feel the space in which everything forms, changes and disappears.

Meditating in nature in a group provides a rich sense of camaraderie, a sense of ‘being alone together.’ The photo above is from a trust walk. One partner is blindfolded, doing walking meditation with the senses open. The other partner is providing caring support. It’s a wonderful dance of vulnerability, openness and receiving.

I’m inspired to do more of these retreats. Stay tuned if you’d like to join in the future. We end at 3:30, providing you time and space to practice the meditation technique, put so eloquently by friend and teacher Eric Kolvig, ‘to wander like a happy dog.’

More articles by Jonathan Foust can be found on his blog.

You will notice our new calendar, which here is set to classes.  This calendar will sort out retreats, sitting groups, deepening practice classes & retreats, and senior teacher events, when you use the Category drop down menu under the "IMCW Events Calendar" title.

Notice that you can switch from calendar view to list view, depending on which you prefer, using the blue and white icons next to the RSS feed icon. And once you log in, the calendar will store your retreats and other registrations so you'll always have the information on hand--see "My Events", next to the RSS feed button once you've logged in. 

You can also search for a particular teacher using the Calendar Search button, or for whatever's happening in a certain location.  Look up what we offer in Bethesda, or in Arlington.  It will sort and show you a list with just what you're looking for:

Explore the new website: www.imcw.org! We look forward to hearing your feedback.

Reviewed by Carl Skooglund

What we experience today in the West as Buddhism – the fact that we experience it at all – is the result of its favorable interaction with what David McMahan calls the “discourses of Modernity”: the European Enlightenment, Romanticism, Transcendentalism, Protestantism/theism, democracy, feminism, scientific rationalism and psychology. The Making of Buddhist Modernism explains how these frameworks, which form the basis of the Western worldview, influenced what interpretations of Buddhism became possible for us – and impossible. It shows how Buddhism entered existing philosophical systems, was influenced by them and, in turn, influenced them. McMahan sheds light on how portions of Buddhist doctrine and practice were emphasized, augmented, ignored or suppressed allowing Buddhism to gain a foothold in Western culture.

For anyone who wants to deconstruct, disentangle and parse the divergent – sometimes contradictory – notions that fall under the umbrella term “Buddhism” this book is invaluable. It is not a Dharma book per se, but it is a critical one for today’s practitioners: it explains how what Westerners now know as Dharma came to be.

For example, in the late 1800’s, Buddhism’s proponents equated its use of direct experience as a basis of inner knowledge with the scientific method’s reliance on rationality and direct observation. By some, it was contrasted with Christianity’s emphasis on faith. To avoid being viewed as life-negating and “mechanical,” labels that burdened science, the following elements of Chinese Buddhism were highlighted and then linked with their counterparts in Western Romanticism and Transcendentalism: an appreciation of beauty, the elevation of intuition over the intellect, feeling over thought, and nature over civilization.

Western psychology played a crucial role in translating Buddhism for Americans and Europeans. For example, Carl Jung’s theories of the collective unconscious became a lens through which to comprehend the Mahayana school’s idea of universal Buddha Nature. The pantheon of Tibetan deities was perceived literally by its original adherents (and still is largely). However, its meeting with the West in the early 1900s provided psychological interpretations of the deities, transforming them from “primitive superstitions” into sophisticated portrayals of human mind states.

“Many paths, one mountain” is an expression of the centuries-old Perennial philosophy, which has held that truth is universal and all the great religions reflect some aspect of it, albeit partially. In addition, Romanticism established the notion of the individual search for truth and the freedom to devise one’s own spiritual identity. Together, these ideas laid the groundwork for eclectic approaches to spirituality in the 1900’s. They provided the license to pick and choose, as one saw fit, distinct components from among the entire range of religious traditions, as well as from distinct schools within specific traditions. In practice, this allows a Buddhist practitioner to mix Vipassana and Tibetan teachings, attend a Native American sweat lodge on Saturday, and appreciate a church service with her Christian husband on Sunday.

In one wonderful chapter McMahan charts the course of a key theme in Buddhism: interdependence. The earliest Pali scriptures established a framework of cause-and-effect, of “conditionality” that was narrowly focused – quite intentionally –on the cycle of human suffering and rebirth. The Mahayana school greatly expanded the realm of Dharma with visions of a cosmos populated by innumerable Buddhas, yet asserted the essential “sameness” of ultimate reality. These concepts met and mixed with, among other things, the Romantic notions of wholeness and inseparability, of an “interlocking order”, and the ecological musings of John Muir. What resulted was the hybrid we now know as “interdependence,” with all its connotations of existential oneness, and its activist orientation regarding social and ecological justice.

The book also explores some of influences currently impacting Buddhism: popularization, commercialization, secularization, and homogenization. For example, what happens when an ancient tradition, based on renunciation and conceived to free the human mind from craving, meets the juggernaut of consumerism?

In terms of style, McMahan’s writing is fluid, crisp and witty. The degree to which he uses philosophic terminology and esoteric concepts can be challenging (it took me three trips to the dictionary to finally remember what “hermeneutical” means). He is obviously a scholar, but he gives the layperson a good chance of understanding a very complex subject, and the insights he provides are well worth it. Again, this is not a book that teaches Dharma – but one that helps you better understand the Dharma that is currently being taught.

Carl Skooglund has been practicing Buddhist Vipassana meditation with IMCW since 1993, taught the Family Meditation class for ten years, been an IMCW mentor, sat on the IMCW board and Teachers Council, and participated in IMCW sutta study and Kalyana Mitta. In 2008 he completed the Community Dharma Leader (CDL) program of Spirit Rock Meditation Center.

by Barbara & Doug Levine

Book Review by Carolyn Stachowski

Update the Buddha file! Cultivate oxytocin, prevent the amygdala arising! Finally Western science is catching up to the teachings of the Buddha!

Kristen Neff, PhD, brings some fresh perspective about suffering and has concluded that Self-Compassion is, as Cheri Huber once said, the magic ingredient. Her findings are palatable to Westerners, because of her use of the controlled study.

Research has shown that fully 85 percent of students think that they’re above average…. 94 percent of college faculty members think they’re better teachers then their colleagues….

To keep this illusory ball in the air, we must maintain a steady practice of inner verbal self-flagellation. Self-criticism is simply our internalized version of that which we learned from our parents and teachers and playmates (you stupid!). In meditation, noticing the tone of our interior monologue can be appalling at first. We are so caught up that “If we are in a difficult or stressful situation, we rarely take the time to step back and recognize how hard it is for us in the moment.” Our response is to move away from failure, irritation, angst, and fast, but we only compound our suffering as we scramble to escape it.

Neff’s four-part antidote begins with pausing, then reminding ourselves: This is suffering. The first Noble Truth bears repeating. We don’t pause because we are addicted to escape and solutions.

Second is to remember that suffering is a part of life, and that other people feel this too.

About half way through reading Self-Compassion I took Neff’s self-assessment test at her website, www.self-compassion.org. I could feel how badly I was doing on the questions pertaining to “Common Humanity” before I hit the ‘calculate’ button. “Oh,” I said, “I have work to do.” It is extremely helpful to remember, in the midst of any difficulty, that other people feel this too.

The third and fourth steps are to inwardly offer kindness and compassion.

Self-compassion is a way of relating to the mystery of who we are. Rather than managing our self-image so that it is always palatable, self-compassion honors the fact that all human beings have both strengths and weaknesses…. Our successes and failures come and go--they neither define us nor do they determine our worthiness. They are merely a part of the process of being alive. Our minds (our conditioning) may try to convince us otherwise, but our hearts know that our true value lies in the core experience of being a conscious being who feels and perceives…. In fact self-compassion steps in precisely where self-esteem lets us down--whenever we fail or feel inadequate.

Neff is an Associate Professor of Human Development and Culture and clearly has seen our culture’s misguided campaign of self-esteem, a.k.a. indiscriminate praise, not work. She makes a nice balloon dog out of it, distinguishing self-esteem from self-compassion, taking it apart and reassembling it to demonstrate its foolishness.

The book is filled with exercises--journaling and visualization and juicy facts. For example, now there is proof of what we learn from meditating: that humans have no ability to suppress unwanted negative emotions. But it is also peppered with anecdotes of no relevance and a certain amount of jokey jargon.

Still it is worth reading. Neff ‘s First Noble Truth through the Western lens is a fresh view we can hope will find broad audience.

by Catherine Brousseau

(Editor's note: This article was originally published in the August ENews 2008.)

“Such a dire meditation,” I thought to myself, when joining the monastics in their daily chant. I was visiting the Bhavana Society for a few days. There was no retreat going on at the monastery, so visitors joined the monastics in their daily morning and evening chant. One of the selections is called the “Dhammas (Dharma) to Be Reflected upon Always” or, more popularly, the Five Daily Recollections [or Remembrances]. They are:

1. I am of the nature to decay. I have not gone beyond decay.

2. I am of the nature to be diseased. I have not gone beyond disease.

3. I am of the nature to die. I have not gone beyond death.

4. All that is mine, beloved and pleasing, will change and vanish.

5. I am the owner of my kamma (kharma),
heir to my kamma,
born of my kamma,
related to my kamma,
abide supported by my kamma.
Whatever kamma I shall do, whether good or evil, of that I shall be the heir.

Yep. Pretty grim. These are definitely circumstances we shy away from, determined to keep them at bay.

This recollection invites us to stare directly into the law of cause and effect, the law of kamma, in our own being. It strips us bare of every thing and every person we cannot control, to see the naked reality of what we can control: our own thoughts, words, and actions. These are our true and only assets. And their results are our true and only legacy.

We may find ourselves in glorious or heinous circumstances in life. In these situations, it is how we conduct ourselves in thought, word, and deed that matters; that take us from, or keep us on, the path of peace. We cannot escape our kamma, simply because it is ours…it flows from our own thoughts, words, and deeds. We are responsible for our wholesome or unwholesome actions and their favorable or unfavorable consequences. The happy news is that the fifth recollection, the law of kamma, also opens up the opportunity for change in us and for compassion toward others.

In the Numerical Discourses of the Buddha, or the Anguttara Nikaya, the Buddha offers these five recollections (or meditations) to everyone, women and men, monastic and laity because we are all subject to conditions giving rise to aging, illness, death, and loss. They are, he teaches, antidotes to pride: the pride of the young, the healthy, the living, and the possessive.

What is interesting about our human situation is the sheer absurdity that we crave beings, objects, even events that, by their very nature, cannot satisfy or fulfill…because they are unstable–-they will change and vanish. We reach out to grab what cannot be held. This delusion is the cause of our suffering.

How can we tap the riches of meditating of these Five Daily Recollections? In a way they are a map, directing us from fear, through gratitude, to equanimity.

Initially, the conditions the Five Recollections describe generate fear because we experience them as unpleasant and therefore to be avoided. But they are irrevocably unavoidable. That generates more fear! So we find ways to abide in the denial of aging, illness, death, and loss. Whole industries exist and thrive to sustain this denial. Buy this cream, take this pill, watch this movie, insure this person and you’ll feel better. With fear one thinks, “Woe is me,” and lives in the mood of uncertainty.

With mindfulness and an open heart, however, we can see these conditions from a perspective of gratitude. This is a very different frame of reference. When I experience age, I give thanks for a full life. When I experience illness, I take care of the body that has served me well. When I face death, I understand it is the dissolution of the conditions sustaining this form…it’s not personal…it’s not about me. When I lose a treasure, I hope someone else will enjoy it. When I live wholesomely, I sleep with ease. With gratitude, one thinks, “I have a lot to be thankful for,” and lives in the mood of bounty.

Over time, meditation and mindful living teach us from the inside out, the futility of denying and fighting impermanence. We come to acceptance sooner. We see the flux and flow of events, the wispy allure of pleasure-makers or painkillers, the wearing out of things, the vast wasteland called expectations. Seeing reality as it is, moment-to-moment, becomes a refuge and a deep well of love and compassion. With equanimity one thinks, “It is what it is,” and lives in the mood of peace.

These five meditations are not designed to turn us from happiness. Holding the conditions of aging, illness, death, and loss a bit more lightly loosens the grip of fear and expands the space for joy. Happiness – the deepest kind – is one of the fruits of this practice.

I found this observation by a man named Laurens van Aarle in the Internet social networking site, Gaia Community:

Reading this [the Five Remembrances] never fails to wake me up to what an incredible gift and miracle each moment of relative good health and sanity truly is.

The Five Daily Recollections are easy to learn and memorize. Use them at the end of your meditation. Or before going to sleep. Or when you have a few moments to pause and give thanks.

They are a powerful set of tools for moving from denial to wisdom, from turmoil to peace. They are that map I mentioned, taking us from fear through gratitude to equanimity. And that is why we are on this path.

May you be well, happy, and peaceful.

May you be free from suffering and safe from harm.

May you be filled with loving kindness and compassion.

May you live content, joyful, and free.

So too may all beings be.

by Holly Selzer

Ofosu teaches IMCW’s Family Meditation class and is an accomplished musical artist known as Born. He talks to IMCW ENews about his life, his goals, and how his Buddhist practice and music intersect.

How were you first introduced to Buddhism, insight meditation and IMCW?

I guess the cliché Buddhist answer would be that everything is intertwined [laughs]. I first learned of Buddhism from my mother when I was very young. I remember going to her to yoga classes and to temples with monks in brightly colored robes. Those moments were informative and always stuck with me. As I came into my own, I began exploring different philosophies and religions. One day as a college senior, I walked into a class showing Martin Scorsese’s movie “Kundun” — the story of the current Dalai Lama. It took me back to my Buddhist roots. I started reading about religions of the East and threw myself back into practice. From college, I studied at the Bhahavana Society monastery in West Virginia, where I met an African monk named Bhante Buddharakkhita. He held the rare distinction of being the first Theravadin Buddhist monk from Uganda. We immediately connected, both of us being African and practicing Buddhist meditation. He offered to teach me Vipassana and that was where it really started. He remains my teacher to this day.

My introduction to IMCW came a few years later. I was just riding the bus in DC one day and noticed someone reading a Buddhist magazine and — being a bit of a Dharma-junkie at the time and excited by anything Buddhist — I struck up a conversation with him. It was Carl Skooglund, the founder and teacher of the Family Meditation class at IMCW. We kept running into each other and developed a deep friendship. Over time, he invited me to help to teach the FM classes and he eventually nominated me to become part of the teacher’s council (on the teachers training track) at IMCW, which was a great honor. I co-taught for two or three years and when Carl retired as primary teacher, he asked me to take the helm this year.

What do you hope to accomplish in the family classes you teach at IMCW?

At this age — the kids in my classes are about 5-14 years old — I find that children are most impressed by sights and sounds. So what I want to do is create the kind of experiences we can all remember having as kids, those moments that gave you a serious jolt of happiness and that you come back to later to help define what you want out of life. I’m trying to distill some heady teachings into something simple and basic that the kids can wrap their minds around and have fun with. Part of the way I teach is to act out the things that hinder us by trying to personify our moods — our grumpiness or greediness or whatever — and show how they can pose a problem. I want to really connect the idea of paying attention to yourself and to your life with joy and with a sense of exploration and fun. Part of the Buddha's point is that even though the things inside our minds pose problems, the real problem is investing too much energy and belief in them. So, I try to show how outrageous and incongruent our thoughts and emotions can sometimes be in relation to people and situations in a way that is humorous.

If I can get the kids to laugh at the things that normally hinder us, it hopefully it helps them to deal with these things with some ease as they come up. I think when Buddhist practice initially came to the West, the general idea was that it had to be little bit of drag, because as adults we have a lot to work through after years of psychological and habitual buildup and it can make the practice more difficult. So I also want to make the impression early on that it doesn’t have to be hard if you start early. And I try and make it engaging for parents and young kids. Some things are just universally appealing.

Do you bring your music into the classroom?

Not exactly. I bring a musical element into classroom, but not my own professional music. I do plan to make some Buddhist-themed songs for kids in the near future. For now, I have a few chants and some songs I like to sing in class, but it’s not my music per se, although I have written some of the chants. I make somewhat of a distinction between what I think is acceptable for an older, more mature audience and what is good for younger kids. Most of my music is definitely for people 16 or older and up.

How do your beliefs and spiritual practice affect your music?

I was in a group before working as solo artist called Shambhala. The music we made was very Buddhist-centric, very heady rap and hip hop. The lyrical content was quite intellectual, which was great, but the people who were most receptive to it already had that kind of bent. So we weren’t really reaching new people. What I really want as a solo artist is to encourage people to take a look at their lives in a critical enough way to clear the things that make them unhappy and embrace what makes them happy: like compassion, love for one another, wisdom, seeing reality for what it is. When I went solo, I spoke with Bhante Buddharakkhita about whether I should keep a heavy Buddhist theme or distill it down to entice the listener into its deeper meaning, however slowly, and he agreed with that approach. The idea is to attract the wider audience and bring us to a deeper place overall. That way I’m not hitting anyone over the head with a spiritual message, but I think it’s easy to detect a deep spiritual drive that moves my music. If the Dharma is a jewel, than the jewel is tremendously valuable even if it’s very small.

What might listeners take away from the spiritual themes currently in your music?

I’m looking at it as upaya, or skillful means. Thanissaro Bhikkhu said once that in Buddhism, it’s not necessarily about what’s right or wrong, it’s about what is skillful. I really believe that Buddhist teachings are transcendent and can be applied to any situation. But there is so much embedded materialism here in the West that I don’t think a model of Buddhist practice that asks people to get rid of their possessions and materialist impulses is going to work in a wide enough way to affect change culturally. But through music, I can tell people OK, you can have your things and your money, but if you really want to be happy, share it with the community around you. We don’t need to hold on to everything with such a tight fist. We can apply universal concepts of wisdom and compassion within the context of a materialistic society. It’s not realistic to think we’re going to have a revolution where people give away their cell phones and big houses. But if these are impulses embedded in culture, it is realistic to ask: How can we share our good fortunes with our fellow community and act in a responsible way as we try to satisfy our basic desires for comfort? By moving slowly, we might see some dramatic changes over time. My hope is that this community will be patient with my vision to create a gradual awakening.

Given the generally low numbers of people of color involved in Buddhism, do you hope your music will broaden awareness among that community?

Yes, I hope my work helps gives some confidence to African Americans and practitioners of color who are solitary practitioners like I was for a long time. There’s a huge champion of that cause at IMCW, La Sarmiento. She does so much valuable work to make our community more diverse and to make people of diverse backgrounds feel at home within it. For me, it’s a little scary to be a representative for the African or African American community on a wide scale, because I tend to be more unorthodox in my presentation of Buddhist thought and philosophy. I don’t want people to see what I’m doing, disagree with it and then make assumptions about all people of color who are Buddhists. I’m committed to my unorthodox approach but sensitive that others may prefer a different one. Yet I do see the importance of somebody like me being active in this community. The idea that it’s possible for a young black male to be a teacher of predominantly young white kids is beautiful. There are so many cross-cultural barriers and stereotypes that are shattered in being a young black, Buddhist and teacher and rap artist. So even with my apprehensions I feel very fortunate to be in this position because I really would like to see the Western Buddhist community — including IMCW, which is pretty diverse compared to similar communities — to be more diverse.

Hopefully I can encourage people to be brave enough to take on what I believe to be the most worthwhile practice there is, the Dharma, if that’s what they choose. From a traditional African American standpoint, holding religious belief systems outside Christianity or even Islam is generally viewed as taboo. If there’s one thing that a family can agree on, it’s supposed to be their spiritual tradition, and Christianity has been such a big part of African American experience for so long. So if you’re stepping away from that, it’s a serious thing. And I’m sure there are parallels in other races and religions. But I don’t think you have to apply Buddhist practice to the exclusion of the faith you were born into. For me, I went headlong into it but the remnants from various religions I’ve studied are still a part of my spiritual fiber.

What are you working on musically now?

I just released a single — that’s kid-friendly — called “Number One.” It’s a response to what I saw happening in the Middle East. It’s about solidarity and taking control of your destiny, being strong in the face of adversity. Each time someone purchases it, a portion of the proceeds goes to Human Rights Watch. I also put together a video showing footage of revolution in the Middle East as well as revolutionary moments in history like the March on Washington and the first Independence Day in Ghana. It visually depicts that there’s a universal drive for us as humans to have control over our own destiny. From a Buddhist standpoint, we’re exhorted to make ourselves free from emotions and activities that oppress us. That translates politically as well. In January, I released an album I’m really excited about called “Tomorrow Is Today,” which is for grown-ups — at least 16 and up. I’ll be releasing more singles from my album in the coming months.

Where can people hear you play locally?

I’ll be performing at Live nightclub on March 23. On April 2, I’ll be performing at the Warehouse Loft as part of a big electronic music event called the Forward Festival. More dates are in the pipeline, management is just working out the "deets" as we say. Also, people might see me walking around with t-shirt that says “Kill Your Genre." It's my new clothing line. I love it because I work in so many musical genres — which isn’t always the case in this industry — rap, hip hop, electronic, world music and several others. This stems from my spiritual outlook that we shouldn’t make unnecessary distinctions that cause separation among people. My goal in life, in my spiritual practice and with my music is to bring people together and to put aside all of the ways in which we divide ourselves. So yes, there can be a young hip hop guy who teaches Buddhism. Someone can do rap and electronic music. All these different expressions of society have the same basic vibe underneath: Pretty much everyone wants to be happy and they don’t want to suffer. And my mission is to highlight that.

To view Ofosu’s latest video, and to hear and purchase his latest single “Number One” and other music, visit www.bornimusic.bandcamp.com

Holly Seltzer is a DC-based writer and volunteers for IMCW ENews.

In college, Tara Brach was criticized harshly. She can tell you what it felt like to be thought of badly and to be held accountable to demanding standards. Reading her book, you learn that her critic was "merciless, relentless, nit-picking, driving."

The thing is, Brach was both victim and offender. She was the one being taunted; and she was the one who did the taunting — to herself.

Then one day, on a college outing, she suddenly felt overwhelmed by the crushing weight of the self-criticism she applied to just about everything in life — her relationships, academic performance and social activism. "A huge wave of sadness came over me, and I broke down sobbing," Brach writes in her book. "I was the furthest thing from my own best friend."

Recently, I spoke with Brach in a telephone interview about what it takes to transcend our negativity about ourselves and how to replace that with love.

I asked Brach why we are so strongly set against ourselves. While she notes that "all people experience a sense of separateness and vulnerability," Brach believes that feeling "fundamentally flawed" and apart from each other is especially common in Western society.

"In our culture, there are all these standards you have to meet, like ... be attractive, be bright, be successful, be athletic, be even-tempered, be rich," she says. "So our basic sense of well-being gets hitched [to] meeting these standards, and ... if you don't meet the standards, you can be rejected and isolated, and your whole life goes down the tubes. So we have a lot of pressure on us."

It is uncomfortable reading parts of Brach's book, especially the sections where she profiles the suffering of people she's helped. They are all portrayed anonymously, of course, yet it feels like we know these folks. Perhaps it's because their stories are all our stories, too. You're actually reading about yourself.

Yet the book is hope-filled. Her essential message is that we can stop torturing ourselves with stories of shame and fear ... start living in belonging rather than perceived separateness ... be with each moment purely for what it brings ... tap into our natural source of compassion.

The courage to stay

Brach refers to chronic self-denigration as living in a kind of "trance of unworthiness." And the consequences are visible all around us: addictive behaviors, chronic anxiety, obsessive thinking. Back in college, trapped in her own trance, Brach realized that she'd never "be able to be happy or enjoy my moments or be intimate with others if I didn't — in a very deep way — embrace my own life with love and respect."

Now she guides others who are suffering. While she offers multiple levels of therapy, Brach says her basic practice is to help people "learn how to cultivate a very kind presence," but that often requires "opening to the pain of feeling unworthy." It means summoning up the courage to stay and observe the rawness and difficulty churning inside.

The challenge is that staying is "exactly what we are absolutely rigged to not do; we're just completely designed to pull away from the pain," Brach says. Classic exit strategies include busying our minds, staying imprisoned in our stories, proving ourselves, or numbing with drugs and other addictions.

But practicing staying builds confidence; people come to realize it's possible to be with their stress or fear or anger, Brach says.

So how does a person manage being with their turmoil? Brach practices and teaches Vipassana. She's been doing it for 30 years, and has learned from many, including Jack Kornfield, the author and psychotherapist and founding teacher at both Spirit Rock and the Insight Meditation Society. Kornfield wrote the foreword in "Radical Acceptance."

Vipassana originated in India more than 2,000 years ago and is said to have been practiced by the Buddha himself. In Vipassana, the practitioner focuses on breathing or sounds or sensations — with the intention of quieting the mind. Inevitable mental distractions arise — for example, planning tomorrow's errands or rehashing a spat with the boss. But the practitioner is encouraged to acknowledge them compassionately, and then let them fall away. Breath focus resumes.

Brach says Vipassana is a powerful wisdom tool, helping us to "really see life as it is in the moment" and to see the true nature of things. She notes that being present and awake illuminates the nature of suffering, "how any attempt to control or grasp or resist experience creates suffering."

In the breath-by-breath existence of a Vipassana session, as the subtleties of each in- and out-take evolve, it's possible to see how each moment brings a new reality. Notes Brach: When you see clearly, you also see "the truth of impermanence," that reality changes constantly.

Becoming compassion itself

While staying and observing our difficulties might seem unnatural to someone consumed in fear, the discipline produces rich fruit. Brach says a natural compassion, inherent in us all, arises. And then there's a transformation of self, of our perceived identity.

"The bottom line in the Buddhist teachings is that, in the moments that you stay, instead of replaying your old routines ... your whole sense of who you are shifts," notes Brach. She adds that "rather than being the fearful self or the anxious self or the self trying to get away from feeling afraid, you become the awareness that is simply being present and holding."

The sufferer becomes the space of compassion, adds Brach. To stay present and then become that presence is "the only way to wake up out of the trance of unworthiness."

Nurturing needed

There are times, however, when being present and observing isn't enough. We need extra help drawing upon that natural well of compassion. "Sometimes you can say, well I'm simply going to notice ... but if the fear is very, very strong or the pain's very strong, our heart has to be really soft and open to stay," Brach says.

The good news is that we can also find that assistance in ourselves. In her book, Brach offers instruction on softening the heart. For example, in one guided meditation, she advises to focus on where the emotional stress or hurt resides in the body and then to place a hand on the cheek or heart in caring.

Along with this physical demonstration of compassion, Brach teaches clients to give themselves messages of support. "It's almost like you're offering a message from the wisest, kindest part of your being," she says. "It could be just as simple as: I care about this suffering."

Such self-support "creates the warmth and the space that allows you to stay present, and it allows the fear to transform," says Brach.

Awareness for all

Brach considers Vipassana an important spiritual practice for her Buddhist faith. Meditation isn't owned by the Buddhists, however. It benefits people who walk all spiritual paths.

According to Brach, many people of different faiths who attend her weekly insight meditation class in Washington, D.C., say that meditation practices "actually deepen their faith in a very direct way — in whatever tradition they're in." Vipassana is basically training in "how to pay attention, how to be aware, and how to open your heart," she says.

Our conditioning to live many of our moments in emotional reactivity, chasing what's pleasant and running from what's unpleasant, "is very, very strong," says Brach. "So practice helps to cut through that conditioning, and really inclines us towards presence."

This is encouraging news for holders of suffering — all of us.

If Vipassana and teachers like Brach can help us who suffer to become the observers of our distress — rather than attaching our identities to our pain — then perhaps we can dip into our internal pools of compassion. We can be kind to ourselves.

And then, who knows? Perhaps it'll be easier for us to see the suffering of others. And knowing first-hand the sweet cool of compassion, perhaps we can share it.

— — —

Don Munro is a free-lance writer who feels most at peace in the hills of New England. He explores spiritual realities and possibilities — especially the beauty of fusing together different traditions — on his blog Awareness 101. He also writes poetry at Poetry & prose from this breath of mine, often spiritually themed. His email address is Munrodh@gmail.com. 

© copyright 2007 by Don Munro 

How to Meditate

Introduction

What is Meditation?

You are traveling a path that has led to clarity, peace and deep realization for many people over thousands of years. May their awakening support and inspire you. And may the sincerity of your practice heal and free your spirit. 

~ Tara Brach ~ 

Meditation is commonly described as a training of mental attention that awakens us beyond the conditioned mind and habitual thinking, and reveals the nature of reality. In this guide, the process and the fruit of meditation practice is understood as Natural Presence. Presence is a mindful, clear recognition of what is happening—here, now—and the open, allowing space that includes all experience. There are many supportive strategies (called “skillful means”) that create a conducive atmosphere for the deepening of presence. The art of practice is employing these strategies with curiosity, kindness and a light touch. The wisdom of practice is remembering that Natural Presence is always and already here. It is the loving awareness that is our essence.

About the Author and IMCW

Tara Brach, Ph. D., is the founder and senior teacher of the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, and teaches Buddhist meditation at centers in the United States and Canada. A clinical psychologist and author of Radical Acceptance- Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha, and the upcoming True Refuge- Finding Peace and Freedom in Your own Awakened Heart (Bantam, 2012), she has taught extensively on the application of Buddhist teachings to emotional healing.

The Insight Meditation Community of Washington (IMCW) is dedicated to offering the teachings of the Buddha, instruction in Vipassana (Buddhist Insight Meditation) and other related spiritual practices that awaken our natural wisdom and compassion.

Part I: How to Establish a Daily Sitting Practice

Approaching meditation practice:

Attitude is everything. While there are many meditative strategies, what makes the difference in terms of spiritual awakening is your quality of earnestness, or sincerity. Rather than adding another “should” to your list, choose to practice because you care about connecting with your innate capacity for love, clarity and inner peace. Let this sincerity be the atmosphere that nurtures whatever form your practice takes.

A primary aspect of attitude is unconditional friendliness toward the whole meditative process. When we are friendly towards another person, there is a quality of acceptance. Yet we often enter meditation with some idea of the kind of inner experience we should be having and judgment about not “doing it right.” Truly- there is no “right” meditation and striving to get it right reinforces the sense of an imperfect, striving self. Rather, give permission for the meditation experience to be whatever it is. Trust that if you are sincere in your intention toward being awake and openhearted, that in time your practice will carry you home to a sense of wholeness and freedom.

Friendliness also includes an interest in what arises- be it pleasant sensations or fear, peacefulness or confusion. And the heart expression of friendliness is kindness — regarding the life within and around us with care.

Creating a container for practice:

It helps to have a regular time and space for cultivating a meditation practice.

Setting a time - Morning is often preferred because the mind may be calmer than it is later in the day. However, the best time is the time that you can realistically commit to on a regular basis. Some people choose to do two or more short sits, perhaps one at the beginning and one at the end of the day.

Deciding in advance the duration of your sit will help support your practice. For many, the chosen time is between 15-45 minutes. If you sit each day, you may experience noticeable benefits (e.g., less reactivity, more calm) and be able to increase your sitting time.

Finding a space - If possible, dedicate a space exclusively to your daily sitting. Choose a relatively protected and quiet space where you can leave your cushion (or chair) so that it is always there to return to. You may want to create an altar with a candle, inspiring photos, statues, flowers, stones, shells and/or whatever arouses a sense of beauty, wonder and the sacred. These are not necessary, but are beneficial if they help create a mood and remind you of what you love.

Set your intention:

There is a Zen teaching that says “The most important thing is remembering the most important thing.” It is helpful to recall at the start of each sitting what matters to you, what draws you to meditate. Take a few moments to connect in a sincere way with your heart’s aspiration. You might sense this as a prayer that in some way dedicates your practice to your own spiritual freedom, and that of all beings.

Set your posture:

Alertness is one of the two essential ingredients in every meditation. Sit on a chair, cushion, or kneeling bench as upright, tall and balanced as possible. A sense of openness and receptivity is the second essential ingredient in every meditation, and it is supported by intentionally relaxing obvious and habitual areas of tension. Around an erect posture, let the rest of your skeleton and muscles hang freely. Let the hands rest comfortably on your knees or lap. Let the eyes close, or if you prefer, leave the eyes open, the gaze soft and receptive.

Please don’t skip the step of relaxing/letting go! You might take several full deep breaths, and with each exhale, consciously let go, relaxing the face, shoulders, hands, and stomach area. Or, you may want to begin with a body scan: start at the scalp and move your attention slowly downward, methodically relaxing and softening each part of the body. Consciously releasing body tension will help you open to whatever arises during your meditation.

The Basic Practice:

Natural Presence

Presence has two interdependent qualities of recognizing, or noticing what is happening, and allowing whatever is experienced without any judgment, resistance or grasping. Presence is our deepest nature, and the essence of meditation is to realize and inhabit this whole and lucid awareness.

We practice meditation by receiving all the domains of experience with a mindful, open attention. These domains include breath and sensations; feelings (pleasant, unpleasant and neutral); sense perceptions, thoughts and emotions; and awareness itself.

In the essential practice of meditation there is no attempt to manipulate or control experience. Natural Presence simply recognizes what is arising (thoughts, feelings, sounds, emotions) and allows life to unfold, just as it is. As long as there is a sense of a self making an effort and doing a practice, there is identification with a separate and limited self. The open receptivity of Natural Presence dissolves this sense of a self “doing” the meditation.

Knowing the difference between Natural Presence and “skillful means” or supports for practice:

Because our minds are often so busy and reactive, it is helpful to develop skillful means that quiet the mind and allow us to come home to the fullness of Natural Presence. These supports for practice help us to notice and relax thoughts and physical tension. They involve a wise effort that un-does our efforting! 

You might consider yourself as a contemplative artist, with a palette of colors (supportive strategies) with which to work in creating the inner mood that is most conducive for the clarity and openness of presence. These colors can be applied with a light touch. Experiment and see what works best for you, and don’t confuse these methods (such as following the breath) with the radical and liberating presence that frees and awakens our spirit. Regardless of what skillful means you employ, create some time during each sitting when you let go of all “doings” and simply rest in Natural Presence. Discover what happens when there is no controlling or efforting at all, when you simply let life be just as it is. Discover who you are, when there is no managing of the meditation.

Skillful Means: Our supports for practice

Presence is supported by a calm and collected mind, a mindful awareness and an open heart. The following strategies cultivate these capacities:

Establish an embodied presence—senses awake!

You might take a few minutes at the beginning of the sitting (or anytime during the sitting or day) to intentionally awaken all the senses. Scan through the body with your attention, softening and becoming aware of sensations from the inside out. Listen to sounds and also include the scent and the feel of the space around you in and outside of the room. While the eyes may be closed, still include the experience of light and dark, and imagine and sense the space around you. Explore listening to and feeling the entire moment–to-moment experience, with your senses totally open.

Choose a home base—a primary anchor or subject of meditation.

It is helpful to select a home base (or several anchors) that allow you to quiet and collect the mind, and to deepen embodied presence. Useful anchors are:

• The breath as it enters and leaves the nostrils.
• Other physical changes during breathing, e.g., the rise and fall of the chest.
• Other physical sensations as they arise, e.g. the sensations in the hands, or through the whole body.
• Sounds as they are experienced within or around you.
• Listening to and feeling one’s entire experience, (i.e., receiving sounds and sensations in awareness).

Remindfulness—"coming back" and "being here"

Mindfulness is the awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose and non-judgmentally to the unfolding of moment to moment experience. We train in mindfulness by establishing an embodied presence and learning to see clearly and feel fully the changing flow of sensations, feelings (pleasantness and unpleasantness), emotions and sounds.

A metaphor offered by psychiatrist and author, Dan Siegel, is helpful. Imagine your awareness as a great wheel. At the hub of the wheel is mindful presence, and from this hub, an infinite number of spokes extend out to the rim. Your attention is conditioned to leave presence, move out along the spokes and affix itself to one part of the rim after another. Plans for dinner segue into a disturbing conversation, a self-judgment, a song of the radio, a backache, the feeling of fear. Or your attention gets lost in obsessive thinking circling endlessly around stories and feelings about what is wrong. If you are not connected to the hub, if your attention is trapped out on the rim, you are cut off from your wholeness and living in trance.

Training in mindfulness allows us to return to the hub and live our moments with full awareness. Through the practice of "coming back" we notice when we have drifted and become lost in thought, and we recall our attention back to a sensory based presence. This important capacity is developed through the following steps:

• Set your intention to awaken from thoughts—mental commentary, memories, plans, evaluations, stories—and rest in non-conceptual presence. 
• Gently bring attention to your primary anchor, letting it be in the foreground while still including in the background the whole domain of sensory experience. For instance you might be resting in the inflow and outflow of the breath as your home base, and also be mindful of the sounds in the room, a feeling of sleepiness, an itch, heat. 
• When you notice you have been lost in thought, pause and gently re-arrive in your anchor, mindful of the changing moment-to-moment experience of your senses.

It can be helpful to remember that getting distracted is totally natural- just as the body secretes enzymes, the mind generates thoughts! No need to make thoughts the enemy; just realize that you have a capacity to awaken from the trance of thinking. When you recognize that you have been lost in thought, take your time as you open out of the thought and relax back into the actual experience of being Here. You might listen to sounds, re-relax your shoulder, hands and belly, relax your heart. This will allow you to arrive again in mindful presence at the hub, senses wide open, letting your home base be in the foreground. Notice the difference between any thought and the vividness of this Here-ness!

As the mind settles, you will have more moments of “being here,”’ of resting in the hub and simply recognizing and allowing the changing flow of experience. Naturally the mind will still sometimes lose itself on the rim, and at these times, when you notice, you again gently return to the hub—“coming back,” and “being here” are fluid facets of practice.

The more you inhabit the alert stillness at the center of the wheel and include in mindfulness whatever is happening, the more the hub of presence becomes edgeless, warm and bright. In the moments when there is no controlling of experience—when there is effortless mindfulness— you enter the purity of presence. This is “Natural Presence.” The hub, spokes and rim are all floating in your luminous open awareness.

Practice metta to soften and open the heart.

Metta practice, also called lovingkindness meditation, cultivates both a loving heart and a collected, settled mind. The practice uses specific phrases to send loving and kind wishes to yourself, loved ones, neutral persons, difficult people and to all beings everywhere, without exception. You might choose three or four of the below, or create whatever phrases resonate for you:

May I be filled with lovingkindness.
May I feel safe from harm.
May I accept myself just as I am.
May I be peaceful and at ease.
May I be happy.

Spend a few minutes or more offering the phrases to yourself, taking the time to imagine and directly feel the experience the phrases invoke. Then do the same as you offer it to the others mentioned above. You can bring in the metta practice at the beginning, end or during any part of the meditation. For some people, it can be beneficial to emphasize metta as a primary practice—especially when there has been trauma or great self-aversion. This skillful means is a beautiful way to awaken the heart.

Developing concentration

Bringing attention to a primary subject or anchor can lead to a concentrated focus that naturally calms and collects the mind. This concentration can be deepened by intentionally aiming and sustaining a focused attention with your chosen anchor. When cultivating concentration, the anchor should be one that has a pleasant or at least neutral feeling tone.

Concentration supports mindfulness and requires a relaxed attention. There is often a subtle (or overt) sense of making an effort to sustain concentration, of striving to control the mind and make something happen. It is important to not become caught in a striving effort. It is easy to be seduced into trying to achieve something, such as staying with the breath for much of the sitting, and then evaluating what is happening as a “good” or “not good” meditation. Mistaking a focus on the breath for meditation is like fixating on the quality of your hiking boots, and not really being awake of the natural world you are inhabiting!

Concentration helps quiet the mind and without some quieting, mindfulness is difficult to sustain. It also can lead to states of rapture and deep peace. Yet without a mindful presence, concentration bears no fruit. The key to concentration is remembering your intention towards presence, and then focusing on your chosen subject for meditation with a soft, clear and relaxed attention.

RAIN—healing emotional suffering

The mindful presence that helps release emotional suffering is summarized by the acronym RAIN.

• R-Recognize - notice what is arising (fear, hurt, etc.) 
• A-Allow - agree to “be with it,” to “let it be.” 
• I-Investigate - in a non-analytic way, get to know how the body, heart and mind experiences these energies. You might inquire by asking yourself one or more of the following questions: “What is happening?” “Where am I feeling this in my body?” “What wants attention?” “What wants acceptance?” The “I” is also Intimacy: experiencing difficult sensations and emotions with a direct, gentle, kind attention; and offering compassion to the place of vulnerability. 
• N-Non-identification, or not having your sense of Being defined by, possessed by or linked to any emotion. In other words, not taking it personally! The “N” is also Natural Presence, a homecoming to the loving awareness that is our essence. 

Practice Self-Inquiry

Inquiry (questions like “What is happening?”) can bring attention in a direct way to the changing flow of experience and reveal the truth of impermanence and the empty (self-less) nature of sights, sounds, thoughts, emotions and feelings. Self- inquiry extends this process by turning awareness back on itself. Classical questions include: “Who am I?” “What am I?” “Who or what is aware?” “Who or what is listening to sound” “Who or what is looking out through these eyes?”

Self-Inquiry is best done when the mind is relatively quiet and senses awake. Ask a question and look back towards awareness, towards that which is aware. After asking, relax with an embodied presence, open, not in any way pursuing an answer with your intellect. By enrolling the natural interest, energy and receptive attention of inquiry, the very nature of awareness is revealed.

Part 2: Common Issues for Meditators

Getting lost in thought

At first, you may be surprised at how active and uncontrolled your mind is. Don’t worry - you are discovering the truth about the state of most minds! Accept and patiently “sit with” whatever comes up. There is no need to get rid of thoughts; this is not the purpose of meditation. Rather, we are learning to recognize when thinking is happening so we are not lost in a trance—believing thoughts to be reality, becoming identified with thoughts.

Because we are so often in a thinking trance, it is helpful to quiet down some. Just like a body of water stirred up by the winds, after being physically still for a while, your mind will gradually calm down. To support that quieting, at the beginning of a sitting it can be helpful to relax and practice Remindfulness—gently bringing your attention back again and again to your home base in the senses.

It takes practice to distinguish the trance of thinking - fantasy, planning, commentary, dreamy states - from the presence that directly receives the changing experience of this moment. Establishing an embodied awareness and letting your anchor be in the foreground is a good way to become familiar with the alive, vibrant mystery of Here-ness, of presence.

The Five Classic Challenges (called “hindrances” in Buddhist texts):

• Grasping: wanting more (or something different) from what’s present right now.
• Aversion: fear, anger, any form of pushing away.
• Restlessness: jumpy energy, agitation.
• Sloth and torpor: sleepy, sinking states of mind and body.
• Doubt: a mind-trap that says, “it’s no use, this will never work, maybe there’s an easier way”.

These are universal body-mind energies experienced by all humans. It is important to recognize that they are not a “problem.” The energies become “hindrances” because our conditioned habit is to ignore, resist, judge or otherwise try to control them. And yet when met with mindfulness and care, these same energies become a gateway to increased aliveness and spiritual awakening.

During sitting practice, if you encounter one of these challenging energies, it may be useful to name it silently to yourself, e.g., “grasping, grasping” or “fear, fear.” If it is strong, rather than pulling away, let your intention be to bring your full attention to what is arising. Feel what is happening as sensations in your body, neither getting lost in the experience nor pushing it away. As indicated through the RAIN acronym, investigate what is arising and meet the experience with an intimate, compassionate attention. When it dissipates, return to the primary anchor of your meditation, or rest in Natural Presence.

Sometimes the energy is too strong, and it is not wise or compassionate to try to stay present with it. This is particularly true if you have been traumatized and are experiencing deep fear or anger. If it feels like “too much,” shift the attention to something that brings a sense of balance, safety and/or love. You might open your eyes, remind yourself of where you are, listen to sounds, relax again through your body. You might bring to mind someone who loves and understands you, and sense their care surrounding you. You might reflect on the Buddha or the bodhisattva of compassion, Jesus, Great Spirit, your grandmother, your dog or a favorite tree. You might offer phrases of lovingkindness to places of vulnerability. Meditate on any expression of loving presence that helps you feel less separate or afraid.

If you encounter these kinds of difficult emotional energies regularly you might ask a teacher or therapist familiar with meditation to accompany you as you learn to navigate what feels most intense.

Physical pain

In addition to mental busyness and emotional challenges, it is inevitable that we all experience a certain amount of unpleasant physical sensations. If you are not used to the posture, there may be some discomfort in simply sitting still. In addition, as your attention deepens, you might become aware of tensions in the body that were ignored because of being preoccupied by thought. Or, you might be injured or sick, and become more directly aware of the natural unpleasant sensations accompanying that condition.

Meditating with physical discomfort is the same as the process of presence with emotional difficulty. Let your intention be to meet the unpleasantness with a gentle attention, noticing how it is experienced in the body and how it changes. Allow the unpleasantness to float in awareness, to be surrounded by soft presence. To establish that openness you might include in your attention sounds, and/or other parts of the body that are free from pain. Breathe with the experience, offering a spacious and kind attention. Be aware of not only the physical sensations, but how you are relating to them. Is there resistance? Fear? If so, let these energies be included with a forgiving and mindful attention.

If the physical unpleasantness is intense and wearing you out, direct your attention for a while to something else. It is fine to mindfully shift your posture, or to use a skillful means like phrases of lovingkindness or listening to sounds as a way to discover some space and resilience. You don’t need to “tough it out.” That is just another ego posture that solidifies the sense of separate self. In a similar vein, you don’t have to “give up.” Instead, discover what allows you to find a sense of balance and spaciousness, and when you are able, again allow the immediate sensations to be received with presence.

Part 3: Sustaining a Meditation Practice

Here are a few helpful hints for sustaining your sitting practice:

• Sit every day, even if it's for a short period. Intentionally dedicate this time of quieting—it is a gift to the soul!
• A few times during each day, pause. Establish contact with your body and breath, feeling the aliveness that is Here.
• Pause more and more—the space of a pause will allow you to come home to your heart and awareness.
• Reflect regularly on your aspiration for spiritual awakening and freedom—your own and that of all beings.
• Remember that, like yourself, everyone wants to be happy and nobody wants to suffer.
• Practice regularly with a group or a friend.
• Use inspiring resources such as books, CD’s or web-accessed dharma talks.
• Study the Buddhist teachings (e.g., the 4 Noble Truths, the Noble 8-Fold Path).
• Sign up for a retreat—one day, a weekend, or longer. The experience will deepen your practice and nourish spiritual awakening.
• If you miss practice for a day, a week, or a month, simply begin again.
• If you need guidance, ask for help from an experienced meditator or teacher.
• Don’t judge your practice -- rather, accept what unfolds and trust your capacity to awaken and be free!
• Live with a reverence for life—committed to non-harming, to seeing, honoring and serving the sacred in all beings.

Resources

Recommended books

• Tara Brach: Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha, 2003. 
• Ven. Henepola Gunaratana: Mindfulness in Plain English, Updated and Expanded Edition, 2002. 
• Jack Kornfield: The Wise Heart: A Guide to the Universal Teachings of Buddhist Psychology, 2008. 
• Sharon Salzberg: Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness, 1995.

Recommended Meditation CD: 

• • Tara Brach: Radical Acceptance- Guided Meditations, 2007. 

Web resources:

• Insight Meditation Community of Washington
• Access to Insight
• Bhavana Society, Forest Monastery and Retreat Center
• Cambridge Insight Meditation Community
• New York Insight
• Spirit Rock Meditation Center
• Insight Meditation Society

Updated 9/29/11.

Here’s the quandary: You’re in the middle of what you hope will be a long meditation. About ten minutes in you feel an itch appearing on your nose that really, really, really wants to be scratched. You decide to remain still and not scratch it.

You watch the sensations grow. The sensations get more intense but somehow you manage to stay present to it. Minutes later you notice there is nothing else going on in your universe other than this insanely active irritation screaming for you to oh-so-simply-and-quickly give it a quick scritch-scritch-scritch and make it go away.

But you’re meditating and you’re supposed be still, right? Is it legal to scratch this itch? Your mind is racing. You decide to hang on and watch the sensations a little bit longer.

Pretty soon the thought occurs to you that you might die if you don’t scratch this. In fact, now that you are really paying attention, you’re pretty sure that right here, sitting quietly, unless you scratch Right Now, you will blow a fuse and gallop out of the room screaming and wildly rub your nose on the concrete steps out in front of the building.

What should we do when we have an itch? What should we do when the body really wants to move or a leg falls asleep in meditation and we become convinced we will never walk again?

I have met a handful of long-term meditators who have chronic knee problems because their teachers directed them to sit through their pain. I have also met a number of meditators whose pain threshold is so low they never move beyond constantly shifting, fidgeting fussing and trying to find the “perfect” position.

The answer, I think, lies somewhere in between stoically sitting through the unpleasantness and reacting to every flicker of discomfort. At least this is what I try to do in my practice when I have the presence of mind. If I am meditating and I feel pain arise I try to bring awareness to the sensation itself rather than indulging into the commentary from my over-eager mind which is usually more than willing to offer an opinion.

Joseph Goldstein once said, “There are only three things that can happen with pain. It will either get worse, stay the same or get better.” When the sensation gets so strong it becomes intolerable, here is what I have found to be the key: Slow the process down.

Sometimes just recognizing and naming the sensation of discomfort is enough. Noting internally, “throbbing, throbbing” or “tingly, tingly” keeps my attention present. I may be able to stay a neutral observer and the feelings might move on relatively quickly. If the sensations get more intense I might let the whole process become a point of mindful attention.

Sensation falls into three categories. There are sensations which are unpleasant, those which are pleasant and those which are neutral. I find it quite fascinating to bring my attention as intimately as I can into this play in any particular point in the body where I feel discomfort. When I have the presence of mind to stay with pain it’s quite amazing to see just how close a unpleasant sensation can reside next to one which feels OK.

As well, it’s incredibly rich to watch my relationship to what’s happening. How I react in meditation just happens to exactly mirror how I react to pain in the rest of my life. Generally what underlies these reactions is fear - and from fear comes a proliferation of thoughts and responses. Sometimes I’m curious. Sometimes I want to nuke it or numb myself out. Sometimes I get angry. Sometimes I’ll find myself analyzing it and trying to figure it all out. Sometimes I just want to give up and lose energy and confidence. Sometimes I drift into fantasy or planning - anything to not experience what is really going on.

Slowing down and pausing, I might notice how the sensations are constantly in motion. Even the most intense discomfort, if I stay with it long enough, will reveal itself to be a lively spot of shifting energy. This is the realization of impermanence - that everything, even what feels like intractable pain, changes.

We have two choices then. We can stay with that urge to scratch - with awareness, or we can move - with awareness. Any time in meditation you want to scratch an itch, move your leg or adjust your body, notice if you can make your response a choice rather than a reaction.

So go ahead and scratch that itch on your nose. Feel your hand lifting. Stay awake to the action of scratching, the shifting sensations in the skin and around the area. Feel the lowering of your hand again to your lap. These are moments of wakefulness.

A meditation teacher once told me that each time we wake up in a story or in a reaction we have a choice. We can either beat ourselves up for forgetting what we were concentrating on or we can celebrate the fact that we remembered.

Just as in the practice of vipassana there is no condemnation of thinking, there is no condemnation of strong sensation and the desire to get rid of it. The freedom comes when we stay awake, when we ride those moments of discomfort and when we stay present to the flow of life moving through us.

by Barbara and Doug Levine

(Editor's note: This article was originally published in the ENews, August 2008)

What are most Insight Meditation (Vipassana) retreats really like here in the States? Here’s what you can count on: You will be assigned a room with or without a roommate you might or might not know. There will be a daily schedule starting early in the morning of sitting and walking mediation that will be signaled by the ringing of bells and you could find yourself the bell ringer. There might be a period of yoga and a time for teachers to answer questions scheduled into the day. 

To keep the costs down you will probably be given a daily job to help with food preparation or cleaning. It is called a “yogi job” and you will be referred to as a “yogi.” You will love or hate your job but you will probably look forward to it as something to do. You will probably be told some rules at the beginning of the retreat called “precepts,” that everyone is expected to agree to follow. Over time you will find yourself leaving your room unlocked with relative ease (it has no lock on it anyway) and nothing will be taken. “Taking the precepts” means you agree to not take anything that isn’t yours, to not kill any living being (and you can expect to be challenged by a noisy fly in your room crawling up your arm) and to be truthful in speech and actions.

One of the amazing things is that it will be done in complete silence, as everyone will take a vow on the first night of arrival to maintain “noble silence.” This is a practice of stilling not only the voice but body language as well. This silence allows one be alone in the midst of a group while supported by the silence of others. On the other hand, the teachers talk and you might notice they talk a lot among themselves. In the evening you will hear a “Dharma talk” on the teachings of the Buddha. This will be your entertainment, not popcorn. Gradually, without even noticing it happen, you will begin to feel unusually safe and appreciative of little things you don’t usually notice and nothing will seem to have caused this to happen.

After you get used to the rules and settle in to the craziness of nothing apparently happening because almost all of the usual stimulation of your life at home has been eliminated, things get really, really interesting…. You are instructed to pay attention to your breath and then, everything else, such as: the moment you wake up in the morning, the sensations of getting into bed at night, waiting in line for food, the anticipation of putting food in your mouth, the explosion of taste, going to the toilet, brushing your teeth, showering, thinking about when you will shower, standing up, sitting down, walking from here to there, sounds…you get the idea. Even with when it feels like nothing is happening, the mind is a busy beaver. Meanwhile the food tastes better than ever, the trees, grass and flowers have a new vibrant energy, and little creatures are spectacular and fascinating. What can begin as a very negative experience can change without effort and break your heart open.

One such transformational experience occurred on a recent retreat. It was the sixth day of doing my yogi vacuuming job when I went to the closet and the vacuum wasn’t there. I was in shock. I stood there for seconds, maybe minutes. “Am I seeing wrong?” I thought to myself. It really wasn’t there. So, I went looking for my vacuum and the person who had taken it. I found her. I stared. She acknowledged me and broke silence, “I still have the stairs and the upper hall to do. The other person (with another vacuum) will be done in two minutes.” All I could manage was, “Oh,” but not a regular “oh,” more like “Ohhh,” but I still wanted an explanation.

You really don’t know what will happen on a meditation retreat. If you watch our reactions to events, you see they move like a rollercoaster and bounce around with no predictability. The most mundane of activity can turn into a heart opening experience, a chance to care and love someone who once was a stranger.So here is how my mind worked: I sat in a chair, waiting, watching, still in shock, thinking, “This will mess up my whole morning!” Watching more reactivity, shock, and bewilderment. Then I felt the blood, the way it can pump in your head - awake to the sensation of anger. Thought, “This is way longer than two minutes!” Pump, throb. I heard the other vacuum go off. Taking it, it had a different plug on it. It didn’t fit the outlet. Oh great. Looked for another plug nearby. Found one. Will it reach? Probably not. (I recognized the irritable thinking.) I would have to vacuum the room in a different pattern because of this new position of the plug. Heresy! Wait, I can be flexible. Vacuuming now, just vacuuming. This one works better. Wow. Sweating. Wrapping the cord, this one works differently; interesting and restful.

One little incident: so many reactions. In our daily lives, how often does something like this happen?

Somewhere into vacuuming the next day, I noticed how much less I had to vacuum than the other yogi. I had finished and she was still going. I can do more. (It was just a thought.) I started vacuuming the coatroom I had found her in the day before. It was really satisfying to vacuum because I could hear noise of the gravel and sand being sucked up into the vacuum around the shoes. Sweating again now and moving shoes to get under them, I noticed I was happy to be doing this. Just as I was finishing up, my friend, the yogi vacuumer, walked into the room and I bowed to her. Bowing is a customary practice in the Buddhist tradition that can communicate respect, appreciation, reverence, acknowledgment and a simple, “hello.” Now we were bowing back and forth, she was saying, “thank you.” I put my arms around her, she began to cry and there we were, hugging in the coatroom around our respective vacuums.

You really don’t know what will happen on a meditation retreat. If you watch our reactions to events, you see they move like a rollercoaster and bounce around with no predictability. The most mundane of activities can turn into a heart opening experience, a chance to care and love someone who once was a stranger. If you really pay attention, everything can serve to awaken the heartmind.

Vicki Goodman says, "My first couple of retreats were, at times, torturous. It's really hard to just sit and be with. It's also wonderful, peaceful, joyful and heartful."

by Barbara & Doug Levine

• Both sanghas have been in existence since the spring of 2005.
• The LGBTQ listserve has over 350 members; the POC listserve over 250.
• Both sanghas meet monthly. Through the generosity of Unity Woods Yoga, we meet at their beautiful studio in Woodley Park which is wheelchair and metro accessible. LGBTQ meetings attract up to 25-32 members/meeting; POC meetings up to 20–30.
• Monthly meetings are 2.5 hours in duration and include a 30-minute sit, 10-minute walking meditation, introductions/check-in, a short dharma talk into a mindful discussion.
• Tara co-taught the IMCW spring and fall retreats with Larry Yang, a Chinese-American gay dharma teacher from San Francisco and with Eric Kolvig, a gay dharma teacher from New Mexico, respectively.
• Lesbian dharma teacher Cheri Maples led a workshop entitled “Transcending Internalized Notions” last April for a mixed sangha. Of the 43 participants, 23% were POC, 33% were LGBTQ, 19% were both POC & LGBTQ. In 2011, Cheri will be leading two diversity trainings for the IMCW leadership in 2011.
• Sri-Lankan-American dharma teacher Anushka Fernandopulle led a daylong entitled “Being Real” for 37 People of Color and a daylong entitled “Waking Up Fabulous” for 33 LGBTQ last June.
• Japanese-American dharma teacher Mushim Ikeda-Nash and lesbian dharma teacher Arinna Weisman taught the summer women’s retreat last August. Of the 62 participants, 16% were POC and 24% were LBTQ. Also age diversity was notable on this retreat – many more younger yogis.
• Tara Brach led a special “Radical Acceptance” Daylong for POC & LGBTQ last August. Of the 67 participants, 30% were POC.
• The 2011 winter women’s retreat will be led by Tara Brach and lesbian dharma teacher Cheri with gender-queer teacher of color La Sarmiento. The retreat filled in a month and of the 95 participants, 5% are POC, 22% are LBTQ, and 4% are both POC & LGBTQ.
• In 2011, Mushim Ikeda-Nash and La Sarmiento will be co-leading a POC, non-residential weekend retreat, and Mushim and Arinna Weisman will again be leading the summer women’s retreat in June. Larry Yang will be co-teaching with Tara and Jonathan at the fall weeklong retreat.
• Two LGBTQ KM groups continue to meet in DC and VA and meet bi-weekly.
• Three POC KM groups and a POC Book Club meet in DC.
• I was accepted into the Community Dharma Leader Program IV at Spirit Rock that began this past September.
• I co-lead a morning sitting group at Studio Serenity in Adams Morgan that attracts many POC & LGBTQ.
• Several members of the POC & LGBTQ sanghas participated in “Respectful Confrontation” workshops, a powerful, embodied practice of wise speech offered by Joe Weston.
• Giving back to the greater DC community: Five members from the diversity sanghas and allies participated in the Fannie Mae “Help the Homeless” Walk-a-thon in November and raised a total of $1275 to benefit Miriam’s Kitchen.
• We maintain an active presence on IMCW's website that is updated regularly: Affinity Groups.

(Editor's note: This article was originally published in the ENews, November 2010.)

By Kristin Barker



Our earth is suffering and most of us are suffering right along with it. Recent events, such as the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and the failure in Congress to pass climate change legislation, highlight both increasing violence to our environment a painful lack of response. On Wednesday, September 29 at Tara Brach’s Wednesday class in Bethesda, we examined how we have held this in our hearts and minds.

We then broke up into smaller groups of 8 to 10 people, each with a facilitator and explored with each other what happens internally when we touch into this destruction. We shared skillful responses to what arises within us as individuals, the steps we are taking with others and in our communities, and what happens internally when we take action. Members also discussed ways that we might take action together as part of the IMCW community.


One person said of the meeting, “both Tara’s talk and the small group sharing deepened my awareness and commitment.” Another shared, “it is always affirming to speak with like-minded people and it helps me feel less alone in my efforts.” In addition, from a third, “the small group discussion was truly healing for me I came away feeling more optimistic and motivated.” Members responded favorably to the idea of taking collective action as IMCW. By acting as a community, we can share ideas, encourage and support each other, affirm the truth of interconnectedness and make a bigger difference. Here are some specific ideas that arose: 


• We might develop a "Middle Way List" that lists specific ways to reduce emissions and other waste and consume less. We can then invite all IMCW practitioners to commit to three items on the list and track our overall contribution. 
• 
We might identify restoration projects organized by the (very local!) Earth Sangha, which we can attend as a group to help restore distressed ecosystems. 
• 
We might examine IMCW's carbon footprint, set goals for reduction and then go about reducing it. For instance, with a little work and promotion, we might substantially increase the ride-sharing to IMCW classes and, in doing so, the diversity of those classes. Get on the Buddha Bus!

• We might invite the community to commit to reducing our collective ecological footprint through steps like converting to renewable energy sources, purchasing carbon offsets, conducting home energy audits, and reducing energy consumption. Ideally, we can track our collective savings and impact.

• We can share ideas for reducing material consumption, especially with the holidays fast approaching!

We’re just getting started. If you would like to get involved in IMCW’s ongoing “Loving the Earth Project” (or “Green Team”--we still need a good name), please contact Kristen.