Category: Uncategorized

On this, World Meditation Day, a few random thoughts on practice:

  • You can’t do meditation wrong. There’s no success or failure.
  • In practicing meditation, we’re not trying to live up to some kind of ideal— quite the opposite. We’re just being with our experience, whatever it is…
  • Ordinary everyday life is meditation enough if we attend to it in the moment with simplicity, an open curious mind and without taking ownership of any of it.
  • The only way one really gets any of the most important benefits of meditation practice is by giving up on the notion that there are any benefits to meditation practice.
  • The heart of meditation is simply being interested in what is here now – being more interested in what is… rather than in what was, what will be, or what should be.

And finally…

What we’re really in the business of doing is helping people stay with the thoughts and feelings they are coming to meditation to escape.

— Ordinary Mind Zen teacher Barry Magid

Apparently it’s World Meditation Day today. Who knew? Not me for one!

If I had any advice for anyone embarking on any meditative/ contemplative self inquiry I recommend letting go of any notions of improvement, solving problems, betterment, attaining or gaining anything. Open ended curiosity is all you need. Doing it simply for the sake of doing it, just to see what happens instead of hoping for something. There is no path towards a goal, only the present moment eternally unfolding.

Don’t expect too much from therapy.

— James Low

When I first heard James say this on his podcast it stopped me in my tracks. James is not only a Tibetan Buddhism Dzogchen teacher but he also spent many years as a psychotherapist, so he knows a thing or two about therapy.

I underwent a few years of psychotherapy myself and look back on that time as one of the most profound and transformative periods of my life. So much so that I even considered training to become a therapist myself.

For me the benefits of therapy were demonstratively positive. So to hear a therapist warn not to expect too much was startling. As I listened on keenly what James went on to explain made enormous sense to me.

In therapy, broadly speaking, we bring with us stories about our life. How it was, how it is and how we think it’s going to go. These stories are heard and honoured. In most cases the process of therapy affords us the space to rewrite those narratives with new stories.

What James meant by not expecting too much from therapy was to recognise that what we are essentially doing is swapping one set of negative stories for a bunch of new positive ones.

In the end they are all just stories about our life, but not actually our life, not the actuality of our lived experience.

Of course stories have utility but only up to a point. We don’t live the stories of our lives, we live our lives, and the stories come after.

As Alan Watts so eloquently said about Zen:

Zen is feeling life not feeling something about life.

Now ask yourself this: which matters most when it comes to human dignity,  value  or importance? Methinks the answer here is crystal clear: importance, of course, is more central to human dignity. Value is merely a matter of changing market dynamics, while importance constitutes the very foundation of human civilisation. A trash collector is more important than me, quite literally, and this should be obvious to everyone, including the trash collector.

But we live in a culture that mistakes value for importance and, therefore, pooh-poohs the trash collector, the farmer, the carpenter, the sewer worker, the roofer, and all those people whose activity constitutes the indispensable foundation of human civilisation, even if they don’t command high market value. Such a skewed and incredibly dangerous cultural dynamics, created and maintained by the psychology of urban elites, robs important people of their own sense of dignity. This, in turn, is what feeds a natural but equally skewed and dangerous reaction in the form of populism. For populist politicians pray on the justifiable sense of anger that reigns among those who have been robbed of their dignity by urban elites.

— On human dignity: The difference between value and importance

It’s now clear that Christmas this year will be minimal but good enough. For a million differing and tiny reasons (money being only one) our family will be going through the bare minimum of motions to celebrate capitalism this winter.

We are feeling very much more relaxed and joyous not succumbing to the seasonal mania that normally infects us like unwitting victims in some sparkly zombie movie.

For the first time in what seems like forever we have no decorations, no tree, no cards and presents (yet). Once  the initial twinge of guilt subsides I relax and breathe a sigh of relief and relax into the simplicity of the deep and quiet company of friends and family.