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Meditation practice
Jan. 22nd, 2025 07:46 amDay 3 reading Pema Chodron, The Places that Scare You . Today I read the chapters on compassion, tonglen practice and rejoicing.
A quote from the compassion chapter that struck me was the following: "It can be difficult to even think about beings in torment, let alone to act on their behalf. Recognizing this, we begin with a practice that is fairly easy. We cultivate bravery through making aspirations. We make the wish that all beings, including ourselves and those we dislike, be free of suffering and the root of suffering....Without justifying or condemning ourselves, we do the courageous work of opening to suffering....We learn as much about doing this from our failures as we do from our successes. In cultivating compassion we draw from the wholeness of our experience--our suffering, our empathy, as well as our cruelty and terror. It has to be this way. Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It's a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity."
I think the acknowledgment of how hard this is is important to me right now. There just seems to be so much suffering in the world and I get overwhelmed at the possibility of doing anything meaningful, given the power structures--the situation of the Palestinians in Gaza being a big example. I've given some money and written some letters to politicians, but generally I find it so overwhelming I avoid thinking about it. The acknowledgement that practicing compassion requires confronting one's own fears is helpful, as is small starting steps.
I am familiar with the practice of tonglen--basically a meditation where you breathe in someone's suffering and breathe out healing--from Sogyal Rinpoche's work, though some of the specific steps Chodron talks about, like beginning with a meditation on bodhicitta/open mind/the vastness of the universe was helpful.
In the chapter on finding the ability to rejoice, this is the passage that stood out to me: "How do we cultivate the conditions for joy to expand? We train ins staying present. In sitting meditation, we train in mindfulness and maitri: in being steadfast with our bodies, our emotions our thoughts. We stay with our own little plot of earth and trust that it can be cultivated, that cultivation will bring it to its full potential. Even though it's full of rocks and the soil is dry, we begin to plow the plot with patience. We let the process evolve naturally."
Since I've been avoiding social media for my mental health, I've been watching a lot of youtube channels. One is the primitive skills channel where an Australian man living in the bush in NE Australia builds things--stone axes, thatched shelters, mud bricks and then structures--using only the tools and materials that would have been available to Stone Age ancestors (mostly sticks, his hands, and fire). It is absolutely mesmerizing to watch, and inspiring in the way it shows that nature has the resources we need to survive*, if we have ingenuity and contribute a lot of labor. And it is a lot of labor--watching him make the clay bricks from mud and water, then fire them and make bricks to make a shelter in time lapse is fun, but he pointed out it took about a month. Seeing him refine clay just using two hand-dug ponds at different levels was also fascinating but also time consuming and laborious. It made me greatly respect human inventiveness and what we can build with just our hands, but also gave me a lot of respect for our primitive ancestors, and gratitude that I don't have to do that kind of labor in my everyday life.
But it's also a great metaphor for meditation practice: slow, daily, laborious but important and potentially leading to amazing results.
* Assuming we don't destroy nature via climate change, unfortunately!
A quote from the compassion chapter that struck me was the following: "It can be difficult to even think about beings in torment, let alone to act on their behalf. Recognizing this, we begin with a practice that is fairly easy. We cultivate bravery through making aspirations. We make the wish that all beings, including ourselves and those we dislike, be free of suffering and the root of suffering....Without justifying or condemning ourselves, we do the courageous work of opening to suffering....We learn as much about doing this from our failures as we do from our successes. In cultivating compassion we draw from the wholeness of our experience--our suffering, our empathy, as well as our cruelty and terror. It has to be this way. Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It's a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity."
I think the acknowledgment of how hard this is is important to me right now. There just seems to be so much suffering in the world and I get overwhelmed at the possibility of doing anything meaningful, given the power structures--the situation of the Palestinians in Gaza being a big example. I've given some money and written some letters to politicians, but generally I find it so overwhelming I avoid thinking about it. The acknowledgement that practicing compassion requires confronting one's own fears is helpful, as is small starting steps.
I am familiar with the practice of tonglen--basically a meditation where you breathe in someone's suffering and breathe out healing--from Sogyal Rinpoche's work, though some of the specific steps Chodron talks about, like beginning with a meditation on bodhicitta/open mind/the vastness of the universe was helpful.
In the chapter on finding the ability to rejoice, this is the passage that stood out to me: "How do we cultivate the conditions for joy to expand? We train ins staying present. In sitting meditation, we train in mindfulness and maitri: in being steadfast with our bodies, our emotions our thoughts. We stay with our own little plot of earth and trust that it can be cultivated, that cultivation will bring it to its full potential. Even though it's full of rocks and the soil is dry, we begin to plow the plot with patience. We let the process evolve naturally."
Since I've been avoiding social media for my mental health, I've been watching a lot of youtube channels. One is the primitive skills channel where an Australian man living in the bush in NE Australia builds things--stone axes, thatched shelters, mud bricks and then structures--using only the tools and materials that would have been available to Stone Age ancestors (mostly sticks, his hands, and fire). It is absolutely mesmerizing to watch, and inspiring in the way it shows that nature has the resources we need to survive*, if we have ingenuity and contribute a lot of labor. And it is a lot of labor--watching him make the clay bricks from mud and water, then fire them and make bricks to make a shelter in time lapse is fun, but he pointed out it took about a month. Seeing him refine clay just using two hand-dug ponds at different levels was also fascinating but also time consuming and laborious. It made me greatly respect human inventiveness and what we can build with just our hands, but also gave me a lot of respect for our primitive ancestors, and gratitude that I don't have to do that kind of labor in my everyday life.
But it's also a great metaphor for meditation practice: slow, daily, laborious but important and potentially leading to amazing results.
* Assuming we don't destroy nature via climate change, unfortunately!
