Mindfulness and Meditation for Grounding and Insight
Mindfulness and Meditation for Grounding and Insight (I)
‘Perceiving your true nature, the experience of enlightenment, is not the end of practice, but the beginning. It is the expression of your true nature throughout your life that will enable you to truly make a difference in the world for your own benefit and for the benefit of others’
Zen Master Julian Daizan Skinner
Almost everyone can meditate. In particular meditation is not recommended for people suffering from schizophrenia, paranoia or someone diagnosed with any serious psychiatric condition. If you suffer or suspect you might have any of these conditions, it is strongly recommended you contact your GP before enrolling in this practice. But if this is not the case, you are as capable for meditation as any of the great masters of the past, present, and future.
Many people often say: ‘I can’t meditate because I can’t empty my mind’. If you are one of these people there is good news for you: the Zen approach to mindfulness and mediation is not about ‘emptying’ your mind but more about giving the space for whatever that needs to arise, to arise, stay and go on its own, without us getting involved in any of the thoughts/feelings/sensations that arise neither pushing them away. That’s all. Give the space for things to come and go. Furthermore the mind is designed to think and it will keep doing it until we die. There is nothing wrong with that. And there is nothing wrong with feeling emotions either! This is just part of our human experience and we will keep experiencing all the different emotions (fear, sadness, grief, happiness, sorrow, etc.) until we die. What we can reach with this practice though is a state in which we don’t get identified with any of these thoughts, feelings or sensations, we can go beyond them. We will still feel them but we will not get caught up on them which brings a deep sense of liberation and relieve as our actions stop being ruled by them. It sounds appealing, isn’t it?
To begin with, the first step in this path is to build a habit. This is the first milestone in meditation practice and not an easy one. Nevertheless, everyone can do it. In order to pass thought this barrier you just need one thing: commitment. Make a commitment to sit 25 minutes every day for 8 weeks. Hundreds and hundreds of people have built a habit of meditation in 8 weeks following this structure, and you can do it too. Many find very useful to sit at the same time every day. Other tips people find helpful are having a specific space at home for the practice, building an altar, having fresh flowers and calming lights or wearing specific clothes for meditation and of course sitting with fellow meditators! All worth exploring.
Once you get started, it is important to acknowledge an important fact: it is possible you start to feel worse (instead of better!) when you start to meditate. But this is just a signal that the practice is working! This is actually true not just at the beginning when you start to meditate but also along the way. These obstacles can manifest in different ways:
On one hand we may encounter physical pain which is very common during the first stages of practice or when we go to long retreats. The body is not used to sit in stillness for long periods of time and so it starts to complain. When we encounter pain in meditation we stay still and observe the pain with curiosity and detachment. If we know that the pain will NOT lead to injury we don’t move. If it might lead to injury we mindfully move and adjust our position as best as we can. With time the relationship we have with pain changes. We stop being afraid of pain and, which is more, we might even see pain as our ally: our body telling us to pay attention. In fact, there are studies that show the bad effects of lacking pain in the body. Dr. Paul Brand in his book Pain: The Gift Nobody Wants explores the value and purpose of physical pain. Dr. Brand spent years working in India with leprosy patients and made a remarkable discovery: ‘He found that the ravages of leprosy and the horrible disfigurements were not due to the disease organism directly causing the rooting of the flesh, but rather it was because the disease caused loss of pain sensation in the limbs. Without the protection of pain, the leprosy patients lacked the system to warm then of tissue damage.’ (From the book ‘The Art of Happiness’ The Dalai Lama & Howard C. Cutler). Many times though we observe in meditation that the pain we experience is not leading to injury and by staying still we realize the changing nature of pain until very often the pain just vanishes. Coupled with this we have now plenty of scientific studies backing up the positive effects of meditation in dealing with pain.
On the other hand it is also very common to encounter emotional pain. And again the Zen mindfulness and meditation approach to deal with emotional pain is the same than with physical pain: we allow it to arise and pass doing our best not to get caught up in the emotions. As we get to understand how emotional pain and emotional stress work through practice, we start to see more clearly what we are going through. We recognize the stressor that is triggering our reactions and we stop reacting to it and start responding to it. And this is the key, as stated by John Kabat Zin. We stop identifying ourselves with the stressors we encounter and little by little we stop reacting to them or/and we recover much more quickly from a reaction we couldn’t help having. This has a tremendous positive impact in our health as science has been proving in the last few decades. However, there is a kind of stress that can only be healed with a shift in our perception, with a direct insight into reality or, sometimes called, enlightenment, and that is the stress of separation. That is why the Mindfulness and Meditation for insight approach is so important.
To be continued…
Join me for my next Mindfulness and Meditation for Grounding and Insight 8 Week Course. We start on 12th January at In the Moment Studio, Glasgow.