The First Enlightenment Is Seeing How Crazy Your Mind Is – Judith R.

I think everybody's been here before so I don't need to do an introduction we're going to be working tonight on continuing to develop what we call a metta practice, a loving-kindness meditation practice. So we started last week, did we start? With a healing temple, going to a place and getting healed meditation that's in Jack Kornfield's book. And tonight we're going to begin learning the classic loving kindness meditation and I think we'll just do tonight loving kindness towards the self. So continuing in the healing mode but the practices as we'll see over the weeks gets extended to being able to send a loving kindness to other people and to situations in the world and to difficult people and a lot of different extensions of the practice but i think it's really good to start with yourself and if you can't send and receive this kind of kind healing attention yourself you then aren't really a transmitter you can't give it away and I also think that people that are in program need especially to have to learn and to cultivate self-love under any circumstance despite our circumstances or what we might have done in the past and then what we'll do later is, I think we're going to continue with what we started last week because we didn't get time to really work on it and it's such good material that I thought we would keep going with it. So that's my plan for tonight. Do you turn the lights down like about half way? There, that's good. That's good, so find a comfortable position. I don't have the bell. Thank you. So just beginning by getting in touch with yourself Turning your attention inside, breathing, listening, and relaxing on the exhale. else. Noticing where in the body you might be tense and inviting that part to relax and to come into the moment. noticing your emotional tone how are you feeling in the emotions and just letting them be as they are and just also noticing how your mental are you calm or agitated how is your mind and inviting the mind to relax and to come into this moment and this meditation so tonight we're going to work on metta or loving kindness and cultivating this quality in ourselves and it's a little bit different than an awareness meditation because just that the point of concentration is different the point of concentration is this quality of kindness, mercy compassion, gentleness and love. So when you notice that you've gone off, you come back to the quality and that's what we're working on as our concentration point. And the way I like to start is by having what I call a keystone memory. It could be just a moment, it could be small or big but it's a memory of feeling kindness or seeing kindness any time throughout your life. It can be past, it can be recent so just trying to find a memory where you sensed kindness or gentleness that you can use as your inspiration for what it feels like to be kind sometimes if we've had a difficult life it might be hard to find usually people can find something small that they remember or just observed between other people, or you can begin with something good that you've done or that you have seen done. Some quality of goodness in yourself and you can start from that place. And trying to sense the quality, what does it feel like in your body, in your heart, your mind this quality once you've gotten a memory or a good deed or something you're proud of about yourself anything that sparks that kindness to arise gentleness love sometimes you can do it easily sometimes it's mechanical and sometimes there's resistance so just notice what happens when you invite yourself to dwell with the sensations of kindness or love and turning that once you have a quality that you're kind of building on you can begin to direct that quality to yourself this is unconditional love it's free it's our birthright and once I'm kind of sensing it I like to ride it on the breath just sucking it in, breathing it in giving it to myself and then exhaling feeling it flowing out giving it to the world just a rhythm of giving it to myself and feeling it flooding back out into the world letting yourself relax as you get nurtured in this very deep way Sometimes I visualize it as a stream of kindness or love that is moving through my body, or wrapping itself around me. Sometimes people imagine being cradled in this very vast, unconditional, it doesn't matter if you're good or bad, this is universal kindness. sometimes you can allow a pain physical or emotional to arise or be expressed about your life something specific and you can send this love to yourself in that hurt place Let's do this. not judging how you're doing just experimenting with this quality and noticing if you can do it or if it's hard or if there's resistance and just letting go and starting over and being patient with yourself. If you get lost, you can go back to the memory. Thank you. And then there are phrases that you can use, and you repeat the phrases. Sometimes people repeat them on their breath, on the in-breath and on the out-breathe. people just say them and wait till they feel them and go on to the next. So I'm going to give you a few of the phrases and you can experiment with working with the phrase. May I be happy. May I be healed. You can say them as you take a breath in and then say another phrase as you take a breath out, or you can just contemplate the phrase. May I be happy and know the causes of happiness? May I be healed. May I feel safe and protected. Let the phrase sink in on your exhales, relaxing, feeling the quality of kindness and say the phrase. May I know the joy of my own true nature. May I live in ease. May I be happy, may I be healed. May I feel safe and protected. May I know the joy of my own true nature. May I live in ease. So you can adjust the words so that they fit you. repeating the phrases again and again and letting the quality of metta, the quality of loving kindness penetrate you. May I live in peace. Thank you. let's just do one extension just to give you an idea of how it goes so think about somebody in your life that you would like to send this energy, this quality to and just picture them in front of you and start sending them this quality of kindness and gentleness just as you sent it to yourself now you're sending it to someone else and you can wrap them in this unconditional love they don't have to succeed or they don'y have to do anything to deserve it you just send it to them and you send the phrases to them may you be happy may you be healed may you be safe and unafraid may you know the joy of your own true nature may you live in peace and with ease may you be happy Thank you. Okay, coming back out. Would you turn up the light? Would anybody like to say a statement or ask a question about that meditation? This is an old practice, right? This one, yeah. This is the classic, starting with the classic metta meditation coming from the Buddha. Were you here last week when we did the metta? Oh, that was more of a contemporary one. I used to have people I don't even know but to connect with Seemingly in the last 15 minutes I connected with myself and a lot of my family and issues and stuff and they kind of melted away and sort of felt in some ways within me there was something that could be transmitted or that could given. You know, I heard the words and I thought it was actually, but then I saw faces of people that have given me kindness and love and felt that even now at this point in time, whatever that is, I could share that or something like that. So it's a powerful thing. It's a very I have to admit, this will be my third time that I've been here on Thursdays, traveling things and personal things in my life, I haven't been able to be here, but I do appreciate that connection and learning a little bit within my addiction, my chemical dependency and stuff like that, but even beyond that, my ability to come at least to a place where I'm not judged or anything like that and I'm learning and I've connected to this work, experiencing that, it's a wonderful thing to have. I also happen to be a cancer patient, and so in this last eight, nine months, in terms of chemo and all this sort of stuff, a lot of that sort of dynamic has been happening it's sort of like I've been on receiving and I've always done gosh if it was turned around could I do this for someone else just what we just did struck a chord with me in the sense that yeah I'm capable of that if I slow myself down enough and give enough gentleness I like the words invite invite your mind to come invite something to come and then like being invited to life and suddenly felt connected. It's very beautiful, thank you. Yeah. The metta meditations are incredible and they're very strong. They can be very powerful, I have found and especially relationally. often you think of meditation as something solitary but when you do metta meditation it doesn't feel like that anymore and especially as we get into the extensions of it there are actually places where you work on I and Thou dissolving and just having this love be there so we'll work on continue to explore um working with meta and also i'm i really did a lot of handouts tonight i there's this great book uh if you're interested loving kindness the revolutionary art of happiness by sharon salzburg which gives this is almost like a text of the loving kindness progression she teaches the well the book is very easily readable but she's teaching the classic loving kindness meditations and what i did is i xeroxed a chapter from the book for everybody so you can read about this um meta and sending it to yourself that's the chapter i um xeroxed and it has the meditation in at the end of the chapter and i'm also i also gave you another one from jack cornfield but they're very similar these what we're going to be working on and what we worked with today uh these are specifically coming from the theravadan tradition in buddhism or vipassana tradition, although it's in every place and it is taken from the Metta Sutta the sutras are the written material that supposedly Buddha actually said kind of like the Bible but we call them sutras so there's one unloving kindness that this practice developed out of okay anybody else want to say anything okay so last week we worked on I'm going to put it up again maybe I'll pass it out so that you can look also on. You want to pass those about? This is the same thing that's on the Xerox. And someone told me last week that the orange is hard to read, so okay we're moving into um the more steps four five six and seven uh which are made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves admitted to god to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs we're entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character and humbly ask him to remove our shortcomings and I'm trying to and I am finding teachings in Buddhism that relate to these steps and we started working last week with Thich Nhat Hanh who is a Vietnamese Zen teacher very famous Zen teacher. He now lives in France because he's exiled from Vietnam since the war. And sometimes I think his teaching is very deep because he lived through a war on his own country And that pain of that has really fertilized his teaching. So what we were working on, so I took this from the book The Heart of the Buddhist Teaching. So the four methods that he presents is stopping, calming, resting and healing. so stopping i think stopping is the basic meditation practice is we have to learn how to stop and that's really hard in this culture we have a more is better faster is better success is really really important these values in our culture make us non-stop people and the other book that I brought tonight actually after last week one of my friends who comes said oh you really have to talk about rest you didn't talk about rest very much she said we really want to hear you talk about rest so I prepared the whole lecture for her and she's not here but we'll all benefit from her question so this is a book I read a couple years ago that really affected me and it's called Sabbath finding rest renewal and delight in our busy lives and when she brought up this idea of well what is rest I just thought about this book so much so I thought I would bring it and some of what I'm going to say is stimulated from having read this book. So in a way stopping is a prerequisite for resting and I notice it's hard to stop like even to put meditation into my daily life that's quite hard to do have you found that so yeah it's really hard to a say it's so important that I'm going to do it and to find the space to do It and I find with meditating that unless it's And I'm going to say, unless it's my top priority, I personally don't do it. But when I teach, I said, it has to be the top three. It has to been in your top three, but really it has to be pretty important for people to stop and do it, I've noticed in myself and in other people. and um and there's a lot of things we're stopping when we meditate well firstly we're stopping our bodies physically and we're stoping outside stimulation right we're saying i'm not going to answer the phone and i'm now walking around and so we're we're cutting the stimuli so that's the way of stopping then when you get inside the meditation you're stopping your mind right in Buddhism they call the mind that's out of control the monkey mind and the monkey mine is because in India where this started monkeys would be out in the trees instead of squirrels and monkeys are really really loud constantly making sounds and and it's very noisy and they call that our mind is like the monkey mind and when you when you start to meditate you start to notice your monkey mind in fact some one of the jokes i say is that the first thing you notice the first enlightenment you have when you sit down and meditate is you see how crazy your mind is how fast it's moving how it never stops how it just circles and circles and cycles and circles so we need to stop we need to interrupt that mind to rest and the other thing that we stop is and this we know as addicts because we're stopping our addiction and that is really hard and there's a force to it so this is what they call a lot about karma is that there's a force, there's a driven energy to patterning to our patterns. It has almost a life of its own. It's an energy that pushes the pattern and in a way Buddhism and 12-step are built around the idea of stopping this forceful pushing of a certain pattern and four through nine the uh what i call the the deconstruction steps like deconstructing your old personality so that some new a rebirth some new identities can come forward breaking apart your old identities there's a new book out a buddhist book called letting go of the person i used to be and i really feel that's true in buddhism and also in 12 step that there were many many times in my 12-step life where i really had to let go of certain identities of certain ways i thought about myself and who i was because if i kept those identity I would use so I had to deconstruct certain parts of myself and the way we do it in program is through inventory through sharing through prayer and and really working on having these removed so if we move down to step two the calming step we have these these are also a series of how to change our habit patterns like four five six and seven is the series of how you go about changing there's a lot of information in Buddhism about how you you change habit patterns and um the reason they're so detailed too is because of mindfulness that in buddhism they teach you to become aware of what is happening in the present moment you're aware of your physical body you're unaware of your emotional life and you're aware of your mental life and they broke it down and studied it so much that they began to see that there were certain points in the chain of thoughts where you could change and they began to make these lists of how you change and this is one of them the first step is that you have to recognize the pattern which is the inventory step that you bring it up to consciousness what it is that you're doing that is harmful or positive but right now we're mostly thinking about things we want to change um the second is thatyou totally accept that this is true about yourself that's a harder one um that you're not denying it that you accept what is present what is current currently in your life and you embrace it now the embracing i think the reason why i'm using the loving kindness meditations concurrently with four through nine is because I think in order to do those steps, you have to have a basis of compassion for yourself. Of kind of gentleness towards the suffering you've experienced, the suffering you may have created in other people's lives and to be able to be more loving about it. Loving gentle towards yourself and gentle towards other people. And the big G is the joke this is from pema children she used the word gentle be gentle with yourself so much that she began to just say the big g to her students um that i believe too with mindfulness practice and with inventory that if we don't have this loving kindness towards the self underneath, we don't have the courage to actually make a fearless inventory. It's too painful. Who wants to do it? So in order to be willing to do what we underneath have to be self-caring and gentle about it. Looking deeply for the causation and understanding. This is very similar to inventory where you look deeply also i think what's interesting in awareness practice is you um we in in 12 step mostly you write it down there's a lot of writing it down and i think that's to get it really really specific and to be very intentional like really i'm really looking at this and i'm even going to write it down and not only am i going to ride it down i'm going to tell someone else it really brings it up into your intention and the insight is after you have done this and and you start to be healed which will keep going uh when i talk about the next steps um someone said you intuitively this is from the big book you'll intuitively know what to do if you've really explored it and you've turned it over and you are allowing um the higher power you're allowing something larger than yourself to penetrate you uh you will have a sense of what you should do or what the restitution might be for what the remedy what the antidote might be so that's calming and i really feel like that is um very much about the fourth step and bringing things in up into consciousness and intention everybody looks so tired am i is it boring should we no it's okay all right when i look around the room though i'm thinking oh my god i'm just putting people to sleep it's really good material but i understand it's late at night so okay i just needed to check that out thank you i'll take a drink of water and continue okay so rest and while i was preparing for talking i thought you know i think this kind of goes with um step seven the part that we don't have control over the grace part the part where the universe actually comes to your aid and there's some grace and i felt like rest well a i think it's something addicts don't know too much about would you agree when you think about your attic life or yeah i mean we well that's a compulsive personality does not know how to rest in fact feels very uncomfortable with space or quiet i mean i'm thinking you know gosh this group started out 50 people came and each time it gets smaller and smaller. And I'm thinking, oh, it's really scary to stop, to rest, to see what comes up when you sit. It's very difficult to let there be space where you're not in control and i think in some ways buddhist practice and this meditation asks you to let go and let there be space and not to control anything i put down um this is a verse from a tibetan an ancient this is hundreds of years old tilopa from tibetin buddhism and And I've been working with this because I've been, you know, it's a shift from a doing to a being. From a doing person, of course we have to do. I'm not against doing. But there's a rhythm in life that needs to be respected which is even with the breath. You have an inhale, you have an exhale and then there's a rest. There's a space where nothing happens and then your body automatically goes space. If you look in nature, if you look in the seasons, you see the resting periods. The periods where the field is fallow. now in this book on Shabbat on the Sabbath he really says our culture has completely obliterated the Sabbath and he's not speaking from any he's like a fundamentalist Christian or an orthodox Jew or anything he's just saying I think our culture could use some rest and our ourselves he he's a person who used to go in all stratas he fundraised and he worked with the poor so he talked to rich people middle people poor people homeless people he did the whole economic strata and he said there was one common refrain that no matter what class you were in he heard the same thing. And what it was, was I'm so busy. And you know, that's true. When I call my friends and we try and make a date, you know in the 21st century to try and make a day, you have about seven Palm Pilots, you know, and I have like three calendars, my kids calendar and my calendar and three months in advance sometimes, you know. And we're so happy when it actually comes up on the calendar. Oh, you came over! So this is something that's in our society, but I think it produces our violence, our violent society. I went on a retreat, well, I often go on retreats. In fact, I'm going to start one in april where i do a lot of sitting and i did one a couple years ago where i sat quite a lot during the day i changed my whole schedule and i really got quiet and when i came back out of my retreat back into my so-called regular life i just felt like the schedule that i kept and that I thought was what I needed to do felt so violent to me. So cruel almost that you had to go so fast, you never could rest. You didn't even have time to sit down and look out the window or have a cup of tea. Like I would have a glass of tea but it would be in my silver mug, my hot mug, you know, in the car or something. And that was so, I really tried to change after that To say what is really important And in this book he talks about thinning Like you know when you plant carrots In order to get really good carrots You have to pick out the You know you plant a lot and then you pick out all that, you thin them and then the ones that are there really grow. And his recommendation was thinning our life. Just figuring out what's important and taking out the things in your calendar that aren't important so that you can find a little space. So I didn't read this from Tilopa. Now I'm back to Tilopa let go of what has passed let go of what may come let go of what is happening now that's a good one don't try to figure anything out don't trying to make anything happen relax right now and rest And somehow I have a feeling that this is humbly asking God to do for us what we can't do for ourselves. And letting go, that would be third step. So that something other than our will can come in and help us change these terrifically embedded patterns that we have. And I'm not just talking about our addictions, although I don't minimize them because my addictions like, I mean, my certain addictions have been lifted for me, but others have not. and they have a lot of power in my life so I don't minimize that I don' t minimize the first step I think that's very very important and there are many as we know from inventory work there are other emotional patterns that are destructive to ourselves or other people that need to be changed and I'm suggesting that allowing there to be rest and space in your life is part of letting things change without controlling or manipulating the change. Space to hear what to do, that's this last, space to get the insight to hear what the inner Buddha is telling you to do. That needs space to be. And to heal. One thing that Thich Nhat Hanh said in his commentary about this is he said when you look at animals and they've been wounded what an animal does is they find a place to rest and they just rest until they're restored and then they go on and I think that's very important for us to know that when you are doing inventory work when you have had a very heavy therapy session when you have just done your fifth step you need to rest you need to give yourself space to digest what occurred on a deep psychic level when you do a fifth step it's a deep thing it moves things in your interior life and I think it would be helpful and it's helpful for me A. to recognize when a healing is occurring to recognize when I'm psychically drained and to allow myself to have space and to say also I'm thinking now just step wise working the steps takes a lot of energy like you go do an amend you know sometimes I feel like I have to rest for two weeks and maybe more than that if it's with my family of origin you know it took me everything I had to go and do that and not only did it take everything I had but then I have to digest the response which may or may not have been what I wanted sometimes it is sometimes it isn't so so I'd like to encourage us to go against the cultural norm and to allow there to be more space in our life and one way to do that is by putting meditation strongly in your program then I don't know if any of you are heavy-duty Buddhists but then I'll just say in my life actually sometimes you get so ambition oriented about your meditation that it doesn't become a rest anymore it becomes I'm going to get enlightened and I'm gonna sit all day long and actually then you have to rest from meditating in fact there are some diseases the Tibetan talks about this lung disease I just read it I was going to read it to you but I think I'll just tell you this is a disease that happens to intense meditators like Western people who go to Tibet and they go on an intense meditation retreat often get this disease and it's completely wipes them out and they have to go lay on the beach for months to recover do you get what I'm saying they were so tight about their spiritual practice so intense about enlightenment I guess you could say that they they didn't have a balance they didn t have a rhythm well yeah it could be right right and drive that kind of compulsive drive right so I just thought that was funny that even the remedy can become the disease if it's not done skillfully with wisdom. And the other thing, and then I'm going to stop talking, is another thing that Thich Nhat Hanh talks about is learning how to rest right in the middle of activity. Like learning how drive the car but you're resting or it when you're in the office is you know if some of you work in an office is there a way of doing your work but your inner attitude is resting or doing the dishes but you resting this is kind of a Sabbath in the mind but you can do it it's a way of having more spaciousness in your life and I think spaciousness for me is the kind of the remedy for my compulsive driven my driven quality okay well I I think multitasking is fine. I'm not against it, although Zen is. Zen says do one thing at a time. My husband is a fabulous multitasker and it doesn't seem to get him down. But I do think that if you multitask day after day after day, you get very tired psychically. And sometimes if you get too psychically tired, then you do get physically ill. You can only take so much. And then what happens is you say, oh, I've got to go on vacation. So you do your vacation, you get a week off, you do all the preparation, you pay for it, you go to the Cayman Islands or wherever we go, and you know what happens? You get sick. The second day, you let down and this great fatigue comes up that you've been hiding from or suppressing or something. So I think rest has to be more integrated into our daily life for us to heal. That's my thought. Okay, so anybody want to make a statement or say something? I find that combining yoga with meditation tends to help the body heal quite well. Because you're consciously and deliberately making an effort to exhaust the physical body and focusing your mind, what happens is it pushes all the tension out of your body so that you can really rest. And in meditation, of course, you're making an effort to bring your mind to the center. And by doing that, you are allowing yourself to rest too. But sometimes when people take, say, the Western view of it, they're trying to do it like everything else in their lives, like trying to push the envelope or trying to get something from it, is when they get fatigued and lowers their nervous system and they get sick. Because I've experienced that myself, so I understand. Because if you try to push it, it'll push back. Right. I agree. I think yoga's a great thing. Anybody else want to say anything to the whole group? Okay, so let's split up about three people in a group or four people in a group. You can share how it's going and I'll pass the basket. Please give generously to MZMC. We're taking up their main space on one of their main nights. And anything else? and then we'll help clean up at the end. Thanks. Oh, and before you leave, let me give you that handout. Thank you.