I’ve seen it here and there: people who make online notes of their meditation practice. Excellent idea! “I should do it too!”, I once thought. But it turns out I’m too lazy. Now I just use a paper diary as you can see below. It helps a lot.

In a recent post I talked about why I meditate but I left out an important reason: FEAR. I used to go through life feeling quite fearless, until I suffered from debilitating RSI symptoms plus chronic knee pain for about two years. Most of the things I enjoyed were suddenly impossible. I could hardly use my arms and hands or go for a walk without having to pay for days. All my ambitions went down the drain…

I still haven’t figured out why exactly, but one day the pain started to leave (reading the books of Dr. Sarno seems to have helped). I was lucky cause I had heard of people who suffered from RSI (or TMS as Sarno calls it) for decades without hope for a solution. However, the fear of a relapse stayed with me, which led me to find a way to deal with my thoughts and emotions. So far seeing a psychologist and practicing meditation are what helps me most.

Here are two related comments I made on the blog of Sandy, who is learning to deal with whole other problems (psi events resulting from near death experiences):

What follows is what comes to mind when reading your posts. Not sure if it makes sense: it’s as if you’re in a transition between your old self and a new self you haven’t quite figured out yet.

The experts don’t even seem to have decent strategies to deal with ‘normal’ fears like my phobia.

One of the things meditation does for me is learning to feel more comfortable with what the zen guys call “don’t know mind”. The mind of most people (me for one) is constantly looking for answers and solutions. It won’t rest until it has found them. This is of course very frustrating when the solution can’t be found (yet).

In the meanwhile all we can do is learn to deal with the resulting thoughts and emotions. See them for what they are, not taking them too seriously. It’s a slow process, with ups and downs but mindfulness seems to help.

Whether our problems are seeing ghosts, worrying about health, or whatever… fear of the unknown (supernatural or banal) seems to be at the basis of them all.

For a year I followed a yoga instructors training program where I got immersed in Hindu culture. There was a lot of devotional singing involved (which is not my kind of thing) and lots of talk about ‘enlightenment’. Once I asked one of the teachers to define ‘enlightenment’ and got a reply roughly like this: “We cannot talk about this, because our human minds cannot encompass it.” But they’d use the word all the time implying we should strive for it, never saying what they meant by it. They could as well used the word ‘ooblyboogly’. But why strive for ooblyboogly?

I guess the first person I heard say something meaningful about enlightenment was Shinzen. Here are two definitions by him:

To be enlightened means to be happy independent of conditions

Enlightened means that your identification process is elastic

Apart from attending an 8-week mindfulness training I’ve been meditating on my own the past couple of years. My first encounter with zen was reading the books of Charlotte Joko Beck five years ago, but it wasn’t until yesterday that I actually went to a zendo (zen meditation hall) to meditate. I had thought about doing this for a while, but always put it off, mainly because the ritualistic nature didn’t appeal to me.

(Un)fortunately the sensei (teacher) was on a sesshin (meditation retreat) and the rituals were kept to a minimum. A couple of times I had to hide my smirk when doing kinhin (walking meditation) and hearing the seniors recite boddhisatva vows with a funny voice, but I remembered what Shinzen Young tells about rituals being a form of ’simplified reality’ to help you focus, and that helped me contain myself. The session consisted of three 30 minutes sits of shikantaza style meditation (just sitting without intently focussing) and about 5 minutes of kinhin between each sit.

I don’t know why, but for some reason I wasn’t sleepy at all. Was it the new environment? The presence of other people? I meditated about three times as long as I usually do at home, and didn’t have to struggle with sleepiness for even a second. For me this is new. Maybe when the novelty wears off, the sleepiness will follow me to the zendo? Maybe not? Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised and it’s one of the reasons I’ll visit the zendo again. That and the fact that I want to learn from people with more experience.

Also reactions to meditation can vary termendously depending on what else is happening in your life and what is going on with your biochemistry at the moment. I think this confuses a lot of meditation students: what happens one day doesn’t happen the next – but it is because of factors that have nothing to do with meditation.

Source: Response to “Is My Meditation Experience Normal?”

This is what I’m experiencing lately. One day I’ll have a meditation with a very calm mind, almost no sleepiness, a lot of fulfillment … to have the complete opposite the next day. The time of meditation makes a lot of difference, and whether it’s before or after a meal.

According to this philosophy, if you’re not constantly generating positive brain waves, you’re dooming yourself to a life half-lived, and you deserve whatever hardships may come your way (obviously, as you’re the one who psychically invited them in).

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I’m blessed with an employer who gives me birthday presents in the form of great books. The past years he introduced me to the wonderfully surreal fiction of Haruki Murakami and now he got me a very readable Dutch translation of the first essays ever written: “Michel de Montaigne, de essays”. On the train I started reading right away and as a mindfulness guy, the quote below got my attention. I first have to add what my employer often jokingly says about buddhists : “If they have known the path for thousands of years already, why aren’t we all enlightened yet?”

THAT OUR AFFECTIONS CARRY THEMSELVES BEYOND US

Such as accuse mankind of the folly of gaping after future things, and
advise us to make our benefit of those which are present, and to set up
our rest upon them, as having no grasp upon that which is to come, even
less than that which we have upon what is past, have hit upon the most
universal of human errors, if that may be called an error to which nature
herself has disposed us, in order to the continuation of her own work,
prepossessing us, amongst several others, with this deceiving
imagination, as being more jealous of our action than afraid of our
knowledge.

We are never present with, but always beyond ourselves: fear, desire,
hope, still push us on towards the future, depriving us, in the meantime,
of the sense and consideration of that which is to amuse us with the
thought of what shall be, even when we shall be no more.–[Rousseau,
Emile, livre ii.]

“Calamitosus est animus futuri auxius.”

["The mind anxious about the future is unhappy."
--Seneca, Epist., 98.]

Source: The Essays of Montaigne (plain text version @ project Gutenberg)

Although I’ve seen her name pop up here and there, I’m not familiar with Pema Chodron. Nevertheless, I think the metaphor in this movie is excellent and amusing.

I recently read a blogpost by Charles Tart which made a lot of sense to me. In short he says it’s a good idea to remind yourself of your intention at the start of a formal meditation and to dedicate the merit of the practice at the end. So far I came up with a sentence to start with, which I’ll probably change a couple of times in the future, but it got me thinking about why I started meditating in the first place (mainly curiosity) and what I’m still doing it for (learn how to better respond to situations, people, myself).

The past years I’ve come in contact with things like new-age, buddhism, hinduism, yoga and I heard a lot of talk about enlightenment, non-dualism, unconditional love, manifesting, psychic this and that. While all this is interesting and entertaining, I can’t say that the spectacular stories, high goals, myths and whatnot are the things that keep me motivated. However, this whole mindfulness thing has shed light on little unseen things that were going on and made me unhappy a tiny little bit at a time. Silly trivial things like secretly dreading to vacuum the house, cleaning up after cooking, mowing the lawn, … over the years I’ve grown into avoiding this stuff as long as possible, in the meanwhile creating an undercurrent of dissatisfaction in the form of unconscious thoughts like “I’d rather make some music than waste time on chores”. This caused (small but significant) friction with myself and the people around me.

By learning to see things more clearly, I notice these “avoiding thoughts” but I don’t let them control me as much anymore. In short I’m more doing what I’m supposed to, instead of looking for happiness in some near or distant future. Not sure if I expressed all this clearly in this post, cause I’m finding writing in English still a bit hard.

20091201 Update >> Just saw this relevant YouTube movie by my fave meditation teacher:

The ultimate goal of meditation is twofold:
1. It allows us to have a happiness independent of conditions and circumstances
2. It gives us a perspective from which we can optimally respond, take care of conditions and circumstances

Source: The science of enlightenment audiobook (Shinzen Young)

Sounds nice, maybe it’s even true that it’s possible to achieve this? I don’t know. I’ll let you know when I get there.