Training Puppies
I was in my late teens when I went to my first meditation classes. I'd been meditating at home for years before I first stepped through the doors of the town's community center where the classes were held. But life had gotten hard, and the mind monkey was no longer just restive but actively screaming rebellion.
So I'd gone to the local classes. You see similar classes advertised all over England - usually with roadside signs saying 'Meditate now!' and a phone number. I'd seen these classes in the local newspaper, but the number told me they were the same as the ones on the signs plastered around town.
Knowing what I do now about the group that puts on those classes, I wouldn't have gone. Some entanglements (no matter how benign they initially seem) are simply not worth the trouble down the line.
But that's not the point of this post today, and so I return to that community center room with its wooden floors and chairs pulled from a waiting room.
Our teacher was a Buddhist monk, shaven-headed and dressed in mostly yellow robes. I remember thinking that he wasn't what I was expecting when I saw the advert in the newspaper, but who better to learn meditation from than a Buddhist monk?
My classmates were elder ladies, the kind you might otherwise expect to gossip over tea and cake in the church hall after service. I was the only person under forty in the class. These ladies were kind and perhaps a little...dippy. Had they been born a decade later, I could have easily seen them as hippies in their younger years. All tie-dye and bell bottoms in a VW, eating up the miles in the back roads and partying around a fire as the sun goes down.
The class itself was standard fare (or so I'd imagine). The monk, would speak to us of lovingkindness and other Buddhist teachings that I'd just sort of sit through because it wasn't my thing, and then we'd meditate. Looking back, I remember thinking that this man was strangely detached from the class and what he was doing - robotic almost. But at that time, with my out-of-control anger, his detachment looked like goals.
After a few months life stabilized, and with it my practice. Had I known what I know now, I would have fed the demons that rode me, and made allies of them instead of trying to suppress them. But there always things we'd do differently or better had we the chance to repeat those choices with the benefit of hindsight.
I moved on in life. But meditation has remained a touchstone throughout.
It's the one spiritual practice you can do regardless of circumstance. Whether you're dirt poor and homeless in a tent, sick and unable to sit, or in the richest of settings and best of health, you only ever need your own mind to meditate. Sure, you can buy a lot of accessories to help aid your practice - like cushions and blankets. You can even deck out a whole room of your house to turn it into a meditation room.
But none of that is necessary, or even matters if the things replace the practice. None of it will make you a better meditator.
I think meditation is undervalued by modern Pagans and Heathens. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen some 'more Pagan/Heathen than thou' individual declare that they don't meditate because that's "Eastern" and not what the (insert Pagan period European cultural group) did.
And I find that incredibly sad. Because as with silence, meditation has allowed me to piece myself back together more times than I can count. It has allowed me to easily discern what is of "me" in my mind and what is not, and it has helped me build the will power to do something about it when the "not me" has invaded. It has created a place in which spontaneous visions could arise, a place of connection with memory and the web of which we are all a part. It has enriched my dreams. At times, it has even given me what I can only describe as a wondrously expansive luminous bliss in which I simply exist.
It is both the easiest thing in the world and the hardest, to sit there with only your mind and 'string that bow'. And I am still, and likely will always be a beginner.
I still have days when it is hard to enter that state.
I still have days when my practice is more frustrating than helpful and in which I'm hoping for the timer to go off.
I still have times when I convince myself I "need" something to help me meditate better (then eventually return to the conclusion that the only thing that can ever do that is hours on the cushion).
A lot of people don't meditate because they say it's hard and they can't do it. But all of those struggles I've just mentioned are part and parcel of it. There is no can't here.
There is just a "puppy" to train, and that is always best done with gentleness, compassion, and a sense of humor.
So I'd gone to the local classes. You see similar classes advertised all over England - usually with roadside signs saying 'Meditate now!' and a phone number. I'd seen these classes in the local newspaper, but the number told me they were the same as the ones on the signs plastered around town.
Knowing what I do now about the group that puts on those classes, I wouldn't have gone. Some entanglements (no matter how benign they initially seem) are simply not worth the trouble down the line.
But that's not the point of this post today, and so I return to that community center room with its wooden floors and chairs pulled from a waiting room.
Our teacher was a Buddhist monk, shaven-headed and dressed in mostly yellow robes. I remember thinking that he wasn't what I was expecting when I saw the advert in the newspaper, but who better to learn meditation from than a Buddhist monk?
My classmates were elder ladies, the kind you might otherwise expect to gossip over tea and cake in the church hall after service. I was the only person under forty in the class. These ladies were kind and perhaps a little...dippy. Had they been born a decade later, I could have easily seen them as hippies in their younger years. All tie-dye and bell bottoms in a VW, eating up the miles in the back roads and partying around a fire as the sun goes down.
The class itself was standard fare (or so I'd imagine). The monk, would speak to us of lovingkindness and other Buddhist teachings that I'd just sort of sit through because it wasn't my thing, and then we'd meditate. Looking back, I remember thinking that this man was strangely detached from the class and what he was doing - robotic almost. But at that time, with my out-of-control anger, his detachment looked like goals.
After a few months life stabilized, and with it my practice. Had I known what I know now, I would have fed the demons that rode me, and made allies of them instead of trying to suppress them. But there always things we'd do differently or better had we the chance to repeat those choices with the benefit of hindsight.
I moved on in life. But meditation has remained a touchstone throughout.
It's the one spiritual practice you can do regardless of circumstance. Whether you're dirt poor and homeless in a tent, sick and unable to sit, or in the richest of settings and best of health, you only ever need your own mind to meditate. Sure, you can buy a lot of accessories to help aid your practice - like cushions and blankets. You can even deck out a whole room of your house to turn it into a meditation room.
But none of that is necessary, or even matters if the things replace the practice. None of it will make you a better meditator.
I think meditation is undervalued by modern Pagans and Heathens. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen some 'more Pagan/Heathen than thou' individual declare that they don't meditate because that's "Eastern" and not what the (insert Pagan period European cultural group) did.
And I find that incredibly sad. Because as with silence, meditation has allowed me to piece myself back together more times than I can count. It has allowed me to easily discern what is of "me" in my mind and what is not, and it has helped me build the will power to do something about it when the "not me" has invaded. It has created a place in which spontaneous visions could arise, a place of connection with memory and the web of which we are all a part. It has enriched my dreams. At times, it has even given me what I can only describe as a wondrously expansive luminous bliss in which I simply exist.
It is both the easiest thing in the world and the hardest, to sit there with only your mind and 'string that bow'. And I am still, and likely will always be a beginner.
I still have days when it is hard to enter that state.
I still have days when my practice is more frustrating than helpful and in which I'm hoping for the timer to go off.
I still have times when I convince myself I "need" something to help me meditate better (then eventually return to the conclusion that the only thing that can ever do that is hours on the cushion).
A lot of people don't meditate because they say it's hard and they can't do it. But all of those struggles I've just mentioned are part and parcel of it. There is no can't here.
There is just a "puppy" to train, and that is always best done with gentleness, compassion, and a sense of humor.
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