Category Archives: Meditation

Andrew Weil on the Power of Breathing

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Breathing: The Master Key to Self Healing by Andrew Weil, M.D. (Boulder, CO: Sounds True, 1999). Audiobook.

Would you like to access a mind-expanding, consciousness-raising, and stress-reducing treatment—one that’s simple, safe, effective, free, and always available? You can, because it’s literally right under your nose. This treatment is breathing.

In this audiobook, Weil explores the subtleties of breathing as a means to promote physical health, regulate emotional states, and directly experience our spiritual nature.

Weil directs the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona. Integrative medicine seeks to combine the best of mainstream and alternative medicine. It’s based on the idea that the body can heal itself if given a chance. Dietary change, stress reduction, and herbal remedies are some of the recommended strategies.

However, Weil says that one technique consistently generates the most positive feedback—breath work.

Four keys to better breathing

To experience the full benefits of breathing, Weil suggests that you remember these four words:

  • Deeper
  • Slower
  • Quieter
  • More regular

This makes a lot of sense. Check it out for yourself: Notice the qualities of your breathing when you’re feeling calm. Chances are that some or all of the words from above list will be accurate descriptors.

Also notice what happens when you feel angry, afraid, or otherwise upset. Your breathing is likely to marked by the opposite of the above qualities. That is, you are likely to breathe in more rapid, shallow, irregular, and noisy ways.

When to change your breathing

As Weil points out, you can’t just command yourself to stop feeling upset. But in any moment, you can change your breathing to become deeper, slower, quieter, and more regular.

Over time, you’ll find that this practice can alter your emotional states. The changes might be subtle, but they can reduce your suffering enough to make a difference.

Breath work supports behavior change, too. Say that you’ve sworn off desserts as a weight loss strategy—and you suddenly feel a strong urge to devour a pint of ice cream.

Just notice the urge and breathe into it. The urge will rise and peak before it tapers off. While it peaks, make your breathing deeper, slower, quieter, and more regular. Breathing allows you to ride out the urge until it passes away.

The simplest breathing technique

If you’ve ever taken a yoga class, you probably did some pranayama (breath exercises). Over the last couple thousand years or so, yogis have developed pranayama into a high art with dozens of complex practices.

But Weil begins with a simple technique you can use right now: Just pay attention to your breathing without seeking to change it in any way. The mere act of observing your breathing tends to make it deeper, slower, quieter, and more regular.

In Breathing, Weil explains and demonstrates other techniques as well. For a preview of them, check this link to his website.

Image by dustyknapp, Flickr Creative Commons

Spiritual Self-Help—a Heretical Viewpoint

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1.

Do you remember the short story titled “Teddy” by J. D. Salinger? It’s about a 10-year-old genius named Teddy McArdle who has a natural gift for meditation, claims to remember his past lives, and predicts the time and place of his next death.

At one point Teddy says that he spent a previous lifetime in India as man who was “making very nice spiritual advancement.” After meeting a woman, however, he stopped meditating. This, he says, led to his current incarnation as an American in a materialistic culture where “it’s very hard to meditate and lead a spiritual life. . . . People think you’re a freak if you try to.”

Perhaps a growing number of Americans no longer see meditation as a freak activity. After decades of reading self-help and meditation books, however, I still agree with Teddy.

It’s very hard to lead a spiritual life in America.

 2.

There are many reasons for this. One of them is an army of American self-help authors who claim to offer spiritual teachings from the East in their original, pure simplicity. What many of them are really offering is simplistic teaching—books that they can market to the “New Age audience.”

Books that are designed to make us more comfortable.

Books that reinforce our ego in the name of transcending it.

Books that are published to make us spend money rather than shake us to our foundations.

Let’s single out one of the primary tenets of simplistic spirituality. This is the notion that all religions have a common essence, and that all spiritual paths have a common destination.

Don’t believe it.

3.

In reality, the major religions of the world differ on fundamental points. This is ignored by many self-help authors who want to co-opt the most currently fashionable ideas about spirituality.

I could give many examples, but let’s consider just one—The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success by Deepak Chopra.

In that six-word title, Chopra equates the conversation about success with the conversation about spirituality.

But those are two different conversations.

They start from different premises.

They have different aims.

No one is telling you this.

4.

You probably know the classic, textbook approach to time management and success as well as I do:

  • Imagine your ideal life and brainstorm long lists of things that you want.
  • Then crystallize these ideas into a personal mission statement and list of your core values.
  • Next, translate your mission and values into long-term goals.
  • Divide your long-term goals into mid-term goals.
  • Then, write specific, concrete, and measurable short-term goals.
  • Translate your short-term goals into daily to-do items.
  • Finally, “prioritize” all those to-do items according to importance, urgency, or both.
  • Then move into action and accomplish all those goals, because that’s when you’ll become happy.

I used to believe all that.

I wrote a lot of lists with the intention of becoming happy someday.

But after a while the whole enterprise seemed dry as dust.

I wasn’t forging a dream.

I was dissecting a corpse.

5.

Let’s contrast that bulleted list above with some ideas from Eastern texts.

First is a Taoist saying:

Leave the muddy water alone. The dirt will settle by itself. In the same way we find contentment: Let each thing act according to its own nature. Give it time. It will come to rest in its own way.

Another is a line from Verses on the Faith-Mind by Seng-Tsan, the third Zen patriarch:

For the unified mind in accord with the Way, all self-centered striving ceases.

And another one, from the Tao te Ching (Stephen Mitchell’s translation):

Less and less do you need to force things, 

until finally you arrive at non-action.

When nothing is done,

nothing is left undone.

The great spiritual texts tell us that happiness is immediate; peace is already present; enlightenment is here, now.

In The Gospel According to St. Thomas, Jesus says that the “kingdom of the Father is spread upon the earth, and men do not see it.”

An old Zen saying makes essentially the same point: “If you can’t find enlightenment where you’re standing, where do you expect to go in search of it?”

6.

This leaves me with unanswered questions:

  • Were my endless lists of goals just “self-centered striving?”
  • How do “letting things settle” and arriving at “non-action” relate to writing to-do lists and achieving goals?
  • If we’re already standing in enlightenment, then why set goals to become happy?
  • Dare we abandon self-improvement and rest in the Self—our true nature, our present peace?

These questions point to a virgin territory.

This is where the existing maps contradict each other.

And this is the current state of that uniquely American movement—spiritual self-help.

We are confused. We think we’ve answered that list of questions. But we haven’t even started.

Teddy, I wish you were here to help us.

Image by h.koppdelaney, Flickr Creative Commons

How to Dissolve Problems

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I’ve been basking in the afterglow of this wonderful interview with Bruce Tift—psychotherapist, practitioner of Vajrayana Buddhism, and teacher at Naropa University.  It’s conducted by Tami Simon, publisher at Sounds True, who is one of the smartest interviewers around.

There are many insights to savor in this interview. My favorite is this:

At the level of physical sensations, problems dissolve.

Consider a primary fact about us—we are born into a human body. We are embodied. We are incarnated.

Obvious, right? But it’s the first thing we forget when we feel upset.

Suppose that you’re in argument with your partner. The heat is building. Criticisms are mounting. Suddenly—right when you’re about to make your killer point—she rolls her eyes and storms out of the room.

If you’re anything like me (and I know I certainly am), your first reaction is to retreat into your mind. You dive into a torrent of condemning thoughts:

  •  Crap!
  • What a jerk!
  • Do you believe that?
  • How dare she do that!
  • She can’t do that!

If you dwell here, in an agitated mind, then you are going to have a big, hairy, ugly problem.

Fortunately, there is another option. You can expand into your body. This simply means noticing whatever physical sensations arise in the present moment.

During a flash of anger, for example, you probably take more shallow and rapid breaths. Notice that.

You might also feel heat in your face and tightness in your gut. Notice that as well.

Act like a scientist and just collect data—information about specific points in your body where you feel a prominent change in physical sensation.

At this point, a miracle happens: your problem dissolves. Yes, there is experiential intensity—that is, the presence of strong sensation. But there is no problem.

A problem arises only when you add a stream of thoughts to physical sensations. You’re attached to a dogmatic belief that people should always do what you want them to do. Your partner has violated this belief, and your mind unleashes a long string of judgments.  You buy into them and mount another attack.

What if you took a minute to just sit with your physical sensations during the middle of the argument? Chances are that the simple act of noticing your breathing would allow it to deepen and slow down a bit.

Other physical sensations might also dial down as well. But even if they don’t, you’re no longer resisting them. Those sensations will arise and fade all on their own. You can merely step out the way and let that happen in its own time.

In addition, taking a moment to observe physical sensations introduces a space between stimulus and response. Instead of merely reacting to your partner’s behavior, you can slow down, take it easy, and choose what to do next. This is worlds away from losing that moment of space and instantly unleashing an aggressive behavior of your own.

By constantly creating physical sensations, our bodies grant us a great gift. At any moment we can take refuge in this reach stream of data, relax the mind, and stop suffering.

Tift develops this idea in detail during the interview with Tami, so please check it out. He also has a new audio program published by Sounds True. I’m going to give it a listen.

The Problem With Bliss

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Today we have a bundle of best-selling authors who take the sacred teachings of the East—aimed at liberation from self-centeredness—and try to marry them with Western drive for material prosperity. They talk about the “spiritual secrets of success,” “abundance,” and the “law of attraction.” They approach the treasure troves of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity like a spiritual smorgasbord. They choose ideas that reinforce our egoistic tendencies and skip over the ideas that seem unexciting and unsexy.

That’s the problem with bliss.

We have self-help books telling us that we can feel radiantly happy and live in a state of sustained bliss. Yet most of us have no direct experience of this. We feel glad sometimes, sad sometimes, mad or afraid sometimes—the usual gamut of everyday emotion. But nothing approaching the intensity of sustained bliss.

This introduces a troubling gap between the ideal and real. People see this gap and all of a sudden they start to suffer. I don’t feel blissful, they say to themselves. In fact, most of the time I feel anything but blissful.

So, they feel flawed. And they search for a way to close the gap between their everyday experience and the experience of bliss.

The Buddha said that all meditation practices converge in feeling. But by feeling, he didn’t mean emotion as we normally define that word, let alone bliss. He meant sensation.

At the level of pure sensation—seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching—there’s no suffering. There’s just pleasant sensation, unpleasant sensation, or neutral sensation.

Suffering enters only when we overlay that bare sensation with thinking. Suddenly the mind enters and takes over: This feeling is pleasant; this must be bliss; I’ve got to make it last. Or, This feeling is unpleasant; This isn’t bliss; I must avoid it.

Then we start manufacturing strategies to attract pleasant feelings and avoid unpleasant feelings. We attach to the people, places, and things that seem to deliver pleasant feelings. We develop aversions to the things that seem to deliver unpleasant feelings.

Mindfulness meditation and other authentic spiritual paths are all about entering fully into your ordinary, everyday experience. But many authors and workshop leaders will tell you that becoming spiritual means becoming something other than what you already are. According to them, there’s still something you need to add to your ordinary experience—some occult belief, some obscure spiritual practice, some secret strategy.

If you buy in to this, then they can sell you anything—any book, any workshop, any drug, any practice, any product that claims to offer you a “transcendent” experience.

How much simpler it is to give up the quest for bliss and just sit with what we get—whatever sensations arise in the moment, pleasant or unpleasant. We watch them come and go. We see that they are fickle, fleeting, and impermanent. And we see firsthand what persists in the midst of all that change—open awareness, the simple capacity to feel what arises in this moment, no matter what it is.

Image by h.koppdelaney, Flickr Creative Commons

Alan Watts Defines Zen Meditation

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In his autobiography, In My Own Way, Alan Watts offers a definition of Zen Buddhism:

It continues, in its own way, the general practice of Buddhism, which is to free the mind from its habitual confusion of words, ideas, and concepts with reality, and from all those emotional disturbances and entanglements which flow from this confusion. Thus the ego, time, the body, life, and death are all viewed as concepts having neither more nor less reality than abstract numbers or measures, such as inches or ounces. 

In practicing Zen or mindfulness meditation, we cut away words, categories, and distinctions — all forms of abstraction produced by thinking.

After this spiritual surgery, what remains is the bedrock of existence: a single and sacred essence from which all particular things spring.

This essence has been called by many names — the Tao, nirvana, the ground of being, or God.

The practice of meditation reveals this realm, whatever we wish to call it. Through meditation, we tunnel deep into the un-nameable with the searchlight of awareness. In that process, time and all other abstractions disappear.

When people first learn that meditation means releasing thinking, they often dismiss the practice as anti-intellectual. They think that meditation means taking a stance against thinking.

That’s not true. What meditation dissolves is our attachment to thinking.

Obviously, we must think in order to negotiate the details of daily life. Thinking allows us to work, read, write, speak, listen, drive, shop for groceries, and carry out other tasks needed to live in the material world.

Suffering arises only when we take thinking beyond this necessary level — when we see life as a problem to be solved instead of a process to fully experience.

Tony De Mello on the Power of Awareness

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Anthony De Mello was a Jesuit priest who lived in India and gave talks around the world.

In his wonderful book, Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality, De Mello forcefully presents many of his main themes—that happiness is not the same as pleasure, that our real nature is something beyond our thoughts and feelings, and that awareness alone produces spontaneous behavior change.

Following are selected quotes from the book.

When you renounce something, you’re tied to it. The only way to get out of this is to see through it. Don’t renounce it, see through it. Understand its true value and you won’t need to renounce it; it will just drop from your hands.

“I am delighted.” You certainly are not delighted. Delight may be in you right now, but wait around, it will change. . . . Clouds come and go: some of them are black and some white, some of them are large, others small. If we want to follow the analogy, you would be the sky, observing the clouds. You are a passive, detached observer. . . . Don’t interfere. Don’t “fix” anything. Watch! Observe!

No judgment, no commentary, no attitude: one simply observes, one studies, one watches, without the desire to change what is. . . . The day you attain a posture like that, you will experience a miracle. You will change—effortlessly, correctly. Change will happen, you will not have to bring it about. 

Am I my thoughts, the thoughts that I am thinking? No. Thoughts come and go; I am not my thoughts. Am I my body? . . . Cells arise and die. But “I” seems to persist.

“Before enlightenment, I used to be depressed: after enlightenment, I continue to be depressed.” But there’s a difference: I don’t identify with it any more. 

What you are aware of, you are in control of; what you are not aware of is in control of you. . . . When you’re aware of it, you’re free from it.

Learn what it means to experience something fully, then drop it and move on to the next moment, uninfluenced by the previous one. You’d be traveling with such little baggage that you could pass through the eye of a needle.

If you’re intrigued, I urge you to read the book. Also check out the DeMello Spirituality Center Online.

Revisiting ‘The Lazy Man’s Guide to Enlightenment’

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Okay, now I’m going to reveal my secret: The Lazy Man’s Guide to Enlightenment by Thaddeus Golas is my favorite book. That’s been true since 1972, when I first found it on the self-help shelf at a B Dalton’s store. I still have that copy—heavy underlined and highlighted; stained with coffee, cocoa and a few tears; nearly mutilated; a homely, sacred object.

I remember the bolt of realization that hit me when I read the first paragraph:

“I am a lazy man. Laziness keeps me from believing that enlightenment demands effort, discipline, strict diet, non-smoking, and other evidences of virtue. That’s about the worst heresy I could propose, but I have to be honest before I can be reverent.”

By the end of those 43 words, I was hooked.

I still am.

What a strange and wonderful book. If you pick it up, be patient. It has some opaque passages. And the language is dated, framed in the lingo of the LSD counterculture in San Francisco, circa 1970.

Just keep reading. Take it slow, and let the words sink in. They will work on you.

Golas took a lot of LSD at one time. In fact, he originally wrote the book as a guide to coming down from a “bummer trip”:

“My intention is not to pretend final truth, but to suggest certain simple attitudes that will work for anybody and stay with you in the most extreme freak-out or space-out, even when your mind is completely blown.”

What Golas—and thousands of loyal readers eventually discovered—is that his ideas can be lifesavers in the midst of any emotional disturbance, drug-induced or not.

Golas’s premise is that our basic function as human beings is to move between states of expansion and contraction.

Expansion has a lot of synonyms—enlightenment, serenity, unconditional joy, happiness, present moment awareness.

Contraction, on the other hand is suffering, pain, unhappiness, fear, anxiety, insanity—you get the idea.

In any given moment, Golas wrote, we are in a state of expansion, a state of contraction, or somewhere in between. And in any moment we can expand—instantly, and without effort.

How? By remembering two words that summarize the entire book—no resistance.

Resistance means:

  • Denying unpleasant thoughts and feelings—pretending that they don’t exist or trying to push them away.
  • Clinging to pleasant thoughts and feelings—trying to make them last, even though they are impermanent.

This is not a new teaching. “Resistance” parallels the concepts of attachment and aversion, which the Buddha pinpointed as basic causes of suffering.

And then there’s that other guy who became famous and wealthy from his teachings about dropping resistance and entering the present moment—Eckhart Tolle.

What if you’re feeling so contracted that idea of dropping resistance seems impossible?

No problem. Just notice your resistance. Just be willing to drop it. Willingness is everything.

If Golas had lived, he would have never appeared on Oprah. He refused to join the spiritual superstar circuit. He didn’t lead workshops or seminars. And for decades he had only one title in print—the Guide.

When people asked him for further teachings, he demurred. Just read the book, he said. It’s all there.

“Just read the book.” I love that.

In conclusion, consider some selected gems from the Guide:

“Enlightenment doesn’t care how you get there.

“There is nothing you need to do first in order to be enlightened.

“I wouldn’t deny this experience to the One Mind.

“What did you think it was that needed to be loved?

“All states of consciousness are available right now.

“Love as much as you can from wherever you are.

“Go beyond reason to love: it is safe. It is the only safety.”

Three Ways to Deal With Disturbing Thoughts

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Recently I saw a bumper sticker: “Don’t Believe Everything You Think.” I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

We can classify schools of psychotherapy based on their ways of dealing with the thoughts that fuel depression, anxiety, and other mental health challenges.

Some major options are the “three D’s”—dispute, defuse, and distract.

1. DISPUTE

Albert Ellis—godfather of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT)—was the first to champion this option. He prodded clients to bare their unconscious irrational beliefs and rigorously dispute them.

According to Ellis, the three beliefs responsible for most human suffering are:

  • I must always be perfectly competent.
  • Other people must always behave exactly the way that I expect.
  • Events must always turn out exactly the way I expect.

Since these statements all include the word must, Ellis also referred to them as examples of musterbating.

2. DEFUSE

REBT was an early form of cognitive therapy. More recent forms put much less emphasis on disputing irrational thoughts. The rationale is that “what we resist, persists.” That is, arguing with such thoughts focuses our attention on them and might actually reinforce them in a perverse way.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Dialectical Behavior Therapy, and similar approaches recommend that we defuse instead. This is the opposite of fusing with thoughts—identifying with them and assuming that they are true.

Defusion means stepping back from our stream of thoughts and simply observing them. We see them as spontaneous mental events that occur without conscious intention.

Thoughts arise and pass, like clouds drifting across the sky. We watch them float by, focus on those serve us, and let go of the rest. This approach draws heavily on mindfulness meditation.

3. DISTRACT

Years ago I wrote a book about caregiving (alas, now out of print) with two other men. One of them was living with AIDS. He and his partner spent so much time dealing with the disease that they literally wore the topic out.

At one point they chose to basically stop talking about it.

“Is that denial?” I asked.

“No,” they said. “We’re 100 percent honest about AIDS. It’s impossible to ignore. We’re doing everything that we can to treat it. Beyond that, why dwell on it? We prefer conscious distraction.”

Well said.

Image by h.koppdelaney, Flickr Creative Commons

Jill Bolte Taylor Contrasts “Meditation Mind” With “Self-Help Mind”

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Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard scientist specializing in neuroanatomy, woke up one morning to an altered reality.  She felt a mysterious sense of wonder and serenity. She floated into observer consciousness, simply witnessing events without judging them. She saw herself as a pure energy being with no boundaries in space.

It was beautiful.

It was a stroke.

In this amazing TED talk, Taylor describes the experience:

And I’m asking myself, “What is wrong with me? What is going on?” And in that moment, my brain chatter —my left hemisphere brain chatter—went totally silent. Just like someone took a remote control and pushed the mute button. Total silence. And at first I was shocked to find myself inside of a silent mind. But then I was immediately captivated by the magnificence of the energy around me. And because I could no longer identify the boundaries of my body, I felt enormous and expansive. I felt at one with all the energy that was, and it was beautiful there.

Taylor’s stroke effectively shut down the side of her brain that processes language, thinks logically, solves problems, sets goals, makes plans, and motivates action. This is the left hemisphere—the part of the brain that distinguishes past from future and self from other. I call it self-help mind (my term, not hers).

In its place was undiluted right-hemisphere experience. She focused on the present moment, perceiving images rather than words, seeing wholes rather than parts and inherent perfection beyond apparent problems. Call this meditation mind.

We can bring either of these minds to our reading. If you pick up The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, you’re going to dwell in self-help mind. If you choose The Power of Now, then prepare for meditation mind instead.

Many people forget about this when they recommend books, as in this example.

The key is to remember that the two kind of books are really about different ways of seeing the world. They start from different experiences, and they have different aims.

(For more about Taylor’s stroke of insight, see her book about it.)

Self-Help and Spirituality Are Always Not the Same

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Western culture is based on the idea of the self.

We speak of self-esteem and self-fulfillment.

We talk about self-responsibility and self-confidence and self-actualization.

We quote Polonius, one of Shakespeare’s characters, who uttered the line, “To thine own self be true.”

But the deeper issue is whether “thine own self” is true.

Assumptions About the Self

We tend to assume the existence of a self that:

  • Exists separately from all others, housed in an isolated body, that takes action to meet goals
  • Achieves some goals and misses others
  • Gains and loses and ultimately dies

Our whole idea of success is based on these ideas. There has to be some one who succeeds.

Yet the great meditation teachers point to this notion of the separate self as the source of our suffering. The concept of “I,” they say, is the problem—not the solution.

According to many spiritual teachings of the East, we already are what we seek. Our essential nature is wisdom and compassion. We lack nothing because we are separate from nothing.

The sacred literature is full of images to convey this point—the thirsty man who cries out for something to drink even though he stands in a lake full of fresh water. The homeless beggar who does not realize that a precious jewel has been sewn into one of her pockets.

The Crucial Distinction

Meditation practices, psychotherapy, and self-help techniques can be combined in useful ways to reduce human suffering. For examples, check out the growing literature on Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.

However, there is one distiction to remember:

  • Western self-help literature starts from the question: What do I want?
  • Eastern meditation literature starts from the question: Who am I?

Even though there are many points of overlap, these are ultimately different conversations, starting from different premises, with different goals.

If we forget this distinction, we fail to understand either tradition at its roots.

Photo by zedworks, Flickr Creative Commons