Why We Don't Quiet Our Minds in Meditation

David Nichtern was my first meditation teacher, and he is really special and awesome.

He is now writing for The Huffington Post and has some wonderfully helpful essays posted there.  

I especially love this one How to Meditate Through Strong Emotions.  He points out that the instruction to just sit there and quiet your mind is an oversimplification of what we do in meditation.  And then he sets forth what we are to do:

1. Place our awareness on our breath.
2. Recognize what arises in our minds -- without trying to manipulate, judge or suppress anything.
3. Simply see what arises in our mind as it comes up. Just notice it.
4. Then let go of the thoughts and return our awareness to the breath thereby coming back to the present moment.

He concludes,

Our emotions, rather than feeding stale and repetitive mental habits, can manifest as the very expressions of being alive and living fully in an authentic way. From that point of view we do not utilize our meditation practice to suppress our feelings and emotions but to liberate them, by becoming more familiar with how they arise, what they actually feel like beyond acting out or repressing them, and therefore working with them in a more constructive way.

Please go and check out this and his other essays.

Escaping the Cult of the Average

Another great TED Talk.  Descriptive and prescriptive.  Really funny too




Here are his five tips at the end on how to create lasting positive change:

• 3 gratitudes - for 21 days, start to scan first for positive things in your world
• journaling - about one positive in past 24 hours lets brain relive it
• exercise - body learns that actions has consequences.  behavior matters. 
• meditation - helps brain get over the cultural ADHD, allow brain to focus at a single task.  
• Random Acts of Kindness - conscious acts of kindness, one positive email to someone in your social support network/circle

Want to start implementing these into your daily life?  Here is a free app, I Journal, to help you with that.

Here is an article Positive Intelligence he wrote featured in the Harvard Business Review earlier this year (January/February 2012 issues)  

Happy Birthday Insight Meditation Center!

Today is also the birthday of The Insight Meditation Center in Barre, MA.

That is Sharon Salzberg's base and she and others founded it today 36th years ago.

I am not absolutely sure about this but I think that's where one of my favorite political writers Robert Wright did a meditation retreat, which he hilariously wrote up for the New York Times in 2009 (it's really funny), and which I highlighted here.  He recently landed a blog at The Atlantic.  He hasn't written about meditation there.  Yet.

"The Buddha Walks into a Bar...."

I just find this effort and book terrific.  The Daily Beast headlines Meditation Teacher Lodro Rinzler Rebrands Buddhism to Deal with Drinking and Sex.  I'm not sure how much rebranding is going on here, but it's interesting nonetheless.  I read Rinzler column occasionally over at the Huffingtonpost.com because the title alone is funny - What Would Sid Do


The take on how to mindfully drink alcohol is worth the click over alone.  Well, alright, I will highlight it here, 

Rinzler gave me a crash-course in “right drinking” over a pot of Chrysanthemum tea. The first step is to know your intention: Is the drinking celebratory or to eliminate sorrow? Next, he says, taste the thing. You’ll drink better, he says, shirking the inferior sauce. As in silent meditation, he recommends observing your mind while consuming the beverage and labeling ideas or feelings that come up. And lastly, he advises knowing your limits, qualifying that he drinks less than he used to. “I try not to get to that point where I would say things that cause harm.”

but click over anyway for some more enlightenment or buy the book - The Buddha Walks into a Bar...

Ethan Nichtern is mentioned in the piece and he is the founder of the Interdependence Project, which is also worth the click.  I've never met Ethan, but I know his father David (whose Tuesday night Facebook Dharma Talks have been fantastic) and a dear friend of mine, Kim Stetz, teaches yoga there.    And here is a podcast where Lodro and Ethan talk about Lodro's book.  It's on my list to read now.

Meditation and Dogs

From Oprah's OWN -----

OWN Original Shorts: Dogs/Meditation

Award-winning photographer Robin Layton brings her eye for beauty and serenity to OWN with a short meant to inspire peace and calm.

Affectionate Awareness

Sounds True is not only a great publisher but Tami Simon does these unbelievable great and meaty interviews with some of her authors and thinkers and writers.

The other week she interview Jon Kabat-Zinn, which you can listen to here or download from iTunes.

Here are some of my favorite passages....

I love this way of looking at "failure"

you can't imitate anybody else. You have to find your own way, and life being the teacher will show you every time you get caught, every time you get hung up, every time you get attached. All of the things that we most think might be failures are actually just lessons—just the way, I think, Thomas Edison said, after his thousandth try resulted in the light bulb, but [he had] 999 failures, he said, "Those weren't failures at all. I had 999 ways of knowing how not to make a light bulb." And so, in that sense, that again is a kind of generous way of looking at it.

Regarding brain research on the effects of meditation: 

 all this brain research that's coming out that's showing not only changes in the activity of the very important regions of the brain that have to do with learning, that have to do with memory, that have to do with executive function and decision-making and emotion regulation. [They're] not only finding changes in activation of various regions of the brain and the direction of what you might call great cognitive control or greater executive functioning and great emotional intelligence, but they are actually now seeing structural changes in many of these regions of both the neo-cortex and limbic system—the emotional domain of the brain.
So in eight weeks, in MBSR, they're seeing thickening in various regions of the hippocampus and certain regions of the insula and the neocortex, and then the thinning of the amygdala. If these results turn out to be true, it is really demonstrating (and the irony is that it's through meditation research) that the human brain is really an organ of experience and it responds to experience by changing its own structure. And its structure is the most complex structure in the known universe, and consists of over a hundred billion neurons, and neurons are only half the population of the human brain. [Those] hundred billion neurons [have] so many connections that, for our purposes, the number of synaptic connections is infinite.

And another, regarding "affectionate attention":

Mindfulness is—you know, the way I define it operationally, is "the awareness that arises by paying attention on purpose in the present moment and non-judgmentally." And the "non-judgmentally" is the real kicker, because we have judgments and ideas and opinion about just about everything. But that's where the affectionate attending comes in. It's not some kind of cold clinical perspective [where] we're taking on things as you would if you were just thinking about things. It's actually experiencing a sense of being in relationship to everything that is being experienced because the reality is all relational.
I mean, you can't touch without being touched, and by extension, all the senses are in some way relational. If you don't think that when you see that you're being seen by the world—well, you may not feel that way if you're living in New York City where everybody averts eye contact. But if you tried to spend the night in the rainforest in the Amazon, say, you'll have the feeling that you're being seen, not just that you're seeing. That you're being heard, that you're not just hearing. And you're being smelled and it's not just you smelling. And you could very well be being tasted, too, by small creatures, as well as potentially [be] lunch for big creatures.

David Nichtern's Mindfulness Meditation Instruction

David Nichtern is the one who introduced me to meditation in April 2002. The practice has helped me immeasurably. It's so simple yet so powerful. Here - in only six minutes - David provides his instructions on mindfulness meditation. Check it out, do it and enjoy!

Here is his web site to learn more: www.davidnichtern.com

"Change In An Instant" The New Field of Energy Psychology

Insights from the Edge is a free podcast sponsored by the publisher SoundsTrue.  It’s one of my favorites and always interesting.  I always learn a lot.  

The one from the other day, the 29th, the anniversary of my mother’s death, is about energy psychology which is a new area of psychology, trying to help people live better and happier lives. 

Dr. Henry Grayson, the guest who is a psychologist and a physicist, defines energy psychology this way:

the field of energy psychology is just one that recognizes that everything is comprised of cell energies and that consciousness plays a role in it. And so the field of energy psychology recognizes both the dealing with the energy meridians that we're talking about; dealing with the field of energy that surrounds a body; dealing with the "non-local mind" that it has been called in physics—that our mind is not contained in the brain and the skull but in fact reaches out to countless others around us because it's all a part of "one mind," as physicist Erwin Schrödinger put it. Whether it's the subtle energies of the Eastern tradition of energy—not just meridians but the chakras. And so the broad field of energy psychology has people that work with various ones of these dimensions or all of them. Or just how consciousness seems to affect it without using any specific focus on any of those. That would be the broader field of energy psychology, I would say.

Here is the description of the podcast which you can listen to here or read or print out the transcript.  Or you can download from iTunes.   All free.  And I highly recommend.  

 Tami Simon speaks with Dr. Henry Grayson, a leading psychologist who has spent decades exploring the connections between psychology, physics, and the spiritual traditions of the world. Dr. Grayson founded and served as chairman emeritus at the National Institute for Psychotherapies in New York. With Sounds True, he has created the nine-hour audio training course The New Physics of Love: The Power of Mind and Spirit in Relationships. In this episode, Tami speaks with Dr. Grayson about the role of thoughts in our relationships, how the non-local nature of the universe impacts our consciousness, and the possibility of “deleting undesirable and obsolete core beliefs in the twinkling of an eye.” (60 minutes) 

SoundsTrue has published a CD, which is a 9 hour course, called The New Physics of Love.  Dr Grayson also has a book called Mindful Loving.

In the podcast, Dr. Grayson describes a process he went through on himself to release the disturbance caused by a childhood trauma.  He said it takes about 45 minutes.  I’m not sure what you do for the unconscious traumas..., but here is his process: 

• Place the fingers on the forehead - to focus.  Through the centuries people often did that.  Even Rodin knew that in his portrayal of his statue the thinker.  We learn that it stimulates the frontal lobes of the brain, subtle energies, helps us focus.   Focus on the trauma, memory,  who was in that scene, the scene, how i felt, where i feel it in the body.  Breathe.   
• Place the fingers on the eyebrow I release all fear related to this trauma.  Take a deep breath and exhale.  
• Place the fingers on the outer edge of the eyebrow.  And i release all anger and rage related to trauma.  Take a deep breath or two or three.
• Place the Fingers underneath the eye I release all anxieties related to this trauma 
• Place the fingers on under the nose I release all embarassment related to this trauma
• Place the fingers on under the lip I release all shame and guilt related to this trauma.  And a deep breath.  
• Place the fingers on under the arm - I release all worry and excessive concern related to this trauma.  Deep breathing again.  
• Place the fingers on under the rib cage in front.  I release all hurt and sadness related to this trauma
• Place the fingers on over the heart - I release fear.  breath in love and exhale fear.  6,8 or 10 slow breaths.  
• Place the fingers on the collar bone (one either side).  Has to do with fear again.  I release all fear related to this trauma 

I would assess what came up, how much disturbance remained for me on a scale of one to ten.  Was a 10 when I started.  On the first round I got it down to a 6, second time it came down to a 3, third down to 0.

Then he addressed, for me a key question, the obvious question:  

TS: I think of all of the people who have physical challenges and who have wanted so much for there to be a healing. They have brought all of their intent, all of their openness and capacity into the situation and it hasn't changed for them. They've remained ill. And so when I hear your story about the fingers burning and your belief, I think, well … how do we understand all of the people who aren't healing?
HG: I think that's a wonderful question, Tami. It's one that inspired the book I just finished writing, actually.
What I discovered—I was giving a seminar in Boston a couple of years ago, maybe three years ago and I had the inspiration to start it off by saying, "How many people here want to have a totally happy and healthy life?" Of course everybody's hand went up. And of course my asking this question was inspired by what I experienced clinically and with myself in other dimensions but I thought I'd ask this larger audience. Everybody's hand went up and I said, "With your permission, I'd like to come around and do this muscle testing on everybody very quickly and to see if you believe you deserve to have a totally healthy and happy life or if it's safe for you to have a totally healthy and happy life." I thought that maybe 25-30 percent would have some of those.
The results blew my mind, literally. Everybody agreed to participate in it. And in this workshop there were probably 75 people who were there and I quickly went around and did this. Eighty-two percent of the people had both of those barriers as beliefs. They don't deserve it and it's not safe to have a totally healthy and happy life. The other 18 percent had one or the other. And these are only two of many barriers we could have.
I thought, "Well, let's check this out further. Is it just New Englanders?" I was doing a seminar in New York a few weeks later and got the same results. Raleigh, North Carolina? Same results. Chicago—same results. San Francisco, Austin, Texas, all across the country, I got the same results. Almost identical. There was just a point or two off. And these were only two, as I say, of many different barriers that could be beliefs or traumas or world views or secondary gains or whatever it might be. Most of those are not conscious to us. And all of these people in all of these audiences were mostly people who had done a lot of work in different kinds of self reflection—spiritually or psychologically—and still were not conscious of it.
We can't blame ourselves for it because that's what the ego mind always wants us to do: to blame ourselves for making ourselves sick or whatever. No, we can't blame ourselves. We've just had those downloads. We had those conclusions from childhood. It is part of the human condition that we carry that. You can't sail a boat if we've got anchors holding it back. And maybe the anchors aren't visible to us. We've taken sailing lessons. We've learned how to hoist the sails, how to set the rudder, how to set the sail. The wind is there but the boat's not moving. We've not been taught how to look for all of those anchors. It might be hidden, holding the boat back.
And I think the same thing is true for us, that when we don't get the results that we want there are other hidden anchors. If 90-95 percent of all of our behaviors are not conscious, it's very likely that we have a bunch there that are just not conscious to us. One reason I do the muscle testing is because it helps us access that quite quickly as to what they are and where they are and what it would take to cut loose those anchors.
So I think that that is a role that keeps a lot of things from working. And then the other thing is that sometimes we just have a need, for some reason, whether it's conscious or unconscious, but we have some strong gains for keeping or having the sickness. We haven't dealt with it otherwise. And if we've not dealt with it, whether it's in a relationship or in the body, or whatever it is, we're not ready to let it go. And so we have to be ready to do that. And that's why I like these other methods too because it helps open up that dimension. That's when I say that whether you want to have a healthy and happy relationship or whether you want to have a healthy and happy body or mind, or business success, or money, or whatever it might be, the same thing applies.

How to Transform Suffering

Great dharma talk online with David Nichtern last night the six paramitas, which are teachings of Mahayana Buddhism.  David offers these every Tuesday at 7 pm, ET.  He was my first and is my foremost buddhist teacher.

Paramita means perfection or perfect relationship.   I also read that the Chinese character for this word means "crossing over to the other shore," which according to Thich Nhat Hanh means the shore of peace, non-fear, and liberation.

There are six:
1) Generosity (dana)
2) Discipline, precepts, mindfulness training (shila)
3) Patience, inclusiveness, capacity to receive, bear, transform pain inflicted on you (kshanti)
4) Exertion, energy, perseverance (virya)
5) Meditation (dhyana)
6) Discernment, wisdom, insight, understanding (prajna)

I was reading up on these concepts in Thich Nhat Hanh's The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching (p. 195-196) regarding generosity, what can we give?, he asks.  He answers - our stability (or solidity), our freedom (freedom from craving, anger, jealousy, despair, fair, and wrong perceptions), our freshness, peace (and lucidity), space.

The person we love needs space in order to be happy.  In a flower arrangement, each flower needs space around it in oder to radiate its true beauty.  A person is like a flower.  Without space within and around her, she cannot be happy....And the more we offer, the more we have.  When the person we love is happy, happiness comes back to use right away.  We give to her, but we are giving to ourselves at the same time. 

Giving is a wonderful practice.  The Buddha said what when you are angry at someone, if you have tried everything and still feel angry, practice dana paramita.  When we are angry our tendency is to punish the other person.  But when we do, there is only an escalation of the suffering.  The Buddha proposed that instead, you send her a gift.  When you feel angry, you won't want to go out and buy a gift, so take the opportunity now to prepare the gift when you are not angry.   Then, when all else fails, go and mail that gift to her, and amazingly, you'll feel better right away...You get what you offer.  Instead of trying to punish the other person, offer him exactly what he needs.  The practice of giving can bring you to the shore of well-being very quickly. 

When another person makes you suffer, it is because he suffers deeply within himself, and his suffering is spilling over.  He does not need punishment; he needs help.  That is the message he is sending.  If you are able to see that, offer him what he needs - relief.  Happiness and safety are not an individual matter.  His happiness and safety are crucial for your happiness and safety.  Wholeheartedly wish him happiness and safety, and you will be happy and safe also.   

What else can we offer?  Understanding.  Understanding is the flower of practice...when you offer others your understanding they will stop suffering right away.   

The first petal of the flower of the paramitas is dana paramita, the practice of giving.  What you give is what you receive, more quickly than the signals sent by satellite.  Whether you give your presence, your stability, your freshness, your solidity, your freedom, or your understanding, your gift can work a miracle.  Dana paramita is the practice of love.
When another person makes you suffer, it is because he suffers deeply within himself, and his suffering is spilling over.  He does not need punishment; he needs help.  That is the message he is sending  if you are able to see that, offer him what he needs - relief.  Happiness and safety are not an individual matter.  His happiness and safety are crucial for your happiness and safety.  Wholeheartedly wish him happiness and safety, and you will be happy and safe also.  

I also really loved what Thich Nhat Hanh says about patience.  He notes,

Kshanti is often translated as patience or forbearance, but I believe "inclusiveness" better conveys the Buddha's teaching.  When we practice inclusiveness, we don't have to suffer or forebear, even when we have to embrace suffering and injustice.  The other person says or does something that makes us angry.  he inflicts on us some kind of injustice.  But if our heart is large enough, we don't suffer. 

The Buddha offered this wonderful image.  If you take a handful of salt and pour it into a small bowl of water, the water in the bowl will be too salty to drink.  But if you pour the same amount of salt into a large river, people will still be able to drink the river's water.  (Remember, this teaching was offered 2,600 years ago, when it was still possible to drink from rivers!)  Because of its immensity, the river has the capacity to receive and transform.  The river doesn't suffer at all because of a handful of salt.  If your heart is small, one unjust word or act will make you suffer.  But if your heart is large, if you have understanding and compassion, that word or deed will not have the power to make you suffer.  You will be able to receive, embrace, and transform it in an instant.  What counts is your capacity.  To transform your suffering, your heart has to be as big as the ocean. 

I just love that.

Elisabeth Lesser on Spirituality, Grief and Loss

I am a fan of Oprah's.  And I am even a bigger fan of Elizabeth Lesser because her book Broken Open really helped me deal with the emotional turmoil in dealing with a painful and chronic untreatable illness.

They sat down and talked about the nature of spirituality, how to make pain useful, how to deal with grief and loss -  on Sunday morning, November 13th for Oprah's Super Soul Sunday on Oprah's OWN channel.   I took some notes:

Lesser - When you say a spiritual path what you're talking about it - it's already there inside us, this instinct that we are more than our mind and our body.  The path is just getting the obstacles out of the way so we can wake up and fully know our full aliveness, and know that's who we are.  

Oprah -  Most times people think that spirituality is, well, people have their own definitions of it but a lot of people think it's a lot of woo-woo talk.  When it is really quite the opposite.  It's the most grounding awakening path you can ever pursue in your life. 

Lesser - I'm not a very woo-woo person.  

Oprah -  Yeah, it's not out there, its always right here (gestures towards herself)

Lesser - I came to the title - Broken Open - through an image - the image of a rose tightly wound around itself, the bud, like we all feel so much every day tightly wound, anxious, shut down.  And in order for that bud to open and blossom into the flower we love so much, it has to break its shell, it has to break open.  And it's an irony of this human life, strangely enough it is our most difficult,  broken times - loss of a job, loss of a marriage, illness, loss of a child - those are the times when we are brought to our knees and we open.  Our hearts can open during those times.  And if we fight those times and fight the bud opening, we sort of a half of a life.  But when we open into our brokenness, that's when we blossom....And fighting life, as I'm sure we can all relate to that feeling of life is happening to us, we are in this stream of life and instead of relaxing into it, we are swimming as hard as we can against the current.  That's sort of the opposite of the spiritual instinct.  The spiritual instinct is to relax into the mystery of life as it's happening.  

Oprah - And the spiritual instinct allows you to move through life no matter what is going on in your life, when you are on the spiritual path - it means no matter what happens to you and difficulties will come and challenges will come because that's all part of the human experience.  But the spiritual connection allows you to know that no matter what - you are going to be all right

Lesser - Everything that is happening in our life is a spiritual moment

Oprah - I like what you said on page 105 - "Nothing has awakened my heart as much as the pain of a broken family; nothing has given me as much strength as the time I spent alone in the ruined aftermath of a marriage."   How is that a spiritual path?  I think when you have the most devastating things happen to you, that those are your holiest moments.  That's when you get to see who you really are.

Lesser - Yes, because we spend so much of our life trying to be what we think we are supposed to be...what society wants us to be, what our parents thinks we should be, our husband, our wife, our image....just our image of what a spiritual or a good person should look like....so through that experience of divorce and becoming a single mother, I lost everything - my financial security, my self-image, my home, my support.  I was really a single mom and everything changed for me.  And in the depths of that loss, I found out who I really was.  I began to trust who I was.  I began to find a genuine me who could withstand anything.  

Oprah - how do you do that

Lesser - Well, you can either break down, stay broken down and shut down or you can break open.  It's a decision you make.  A commitment.  I am going through a very hard time, I'm not going to waste this precious experience, this opportunity to become the best me.  

Oprah - I also ask the experience, the crisis, the experience in the moment, what are you here to teach me?  What did your divorce teach you?

Lesser - The first thing that it taught me is that i couldn't blame anyone for what had gone wrong in the marriage.  I had spent a lot of time blaming my ex-husband.  But I had to take responsibility myself.  I had to say - what does this have to teach me about me, not about him, not about how unfair life is.  It wasn't about that.  It was what did I do to make this happen.  And if I could really sit in the pain of that.  The pain is really looking at yourself and what you did to create the mess you're in and if you can look at it head on fearlessly and say teach me.  Teach me about myself so I can grow.  

Oprah - Most people search for closure after the loss of a loved one, but Elizabeth says its one of her least favorite words.  Why?

Lesser - Because if you don't take the time to grieve and to let yourself feel what happens, you just put a scar over it and it doesn't go away.  In fact, it festers.  And it becomes something else.  Perhaps it turns into bitterness or anger or blame and you never get over it.  So letting yourself descend into grief...and letting it do what it will with you for as long as it takes, it a much more intelligent response to loss than cleaning up real fast, going back to work, you get your three days of grief days and then you go back to work. That's not a very wise way to handle it.  

Glenn (another guest discussing the grief of losing his young adult son) - And you never get over it.  It's always there.  You always live with it.  

Lesser -  You wear it as a badge of how well you loved.  Grief is an expression that you loved well.  

Marianne Williamson Defines Spirituality

Also part of the November 13th Super Soul Sunday, Marianne Williamson defined spirituality, which I like very much:

the practice of spirituality is when you get very still and very humble.  There are forces inside you, forces of fear and limitation and chaos and they live inside us saying you can't do that.  Spirituality is where you lay claim to a ground of being within yourself, where you say I want to be that, I really do. I want to be that person that I am capable of being.  We think we are not happy because of what we are not getting but really we are not happy because of what we are not giving.  The most important thing is that we learn how to forgive each other, that we learn how to love each other, how to live in the spirit of blessing and not blame.  What matters is when you are standing in front of a person, is your heart open or is your heart closed?  Are you thinking a judgmental thought or are you trying to see the best in them?  Are you showing the mercy towards other people that you would wish that they would show toward you?  The spiritual path doesn't mean always an easier path.  But it means a choice, a choice that we are making to try our best to be as loving as we can be.

How to be Mindful

5 specific exercises to promote mindfullness in your every day life.  Very helpful summary and over view for those new to mindfulness and a great review for those already familiar.   

Thich Nhat Hanh on the Practice of Mindfulness

Pema Chrodron on Unconditional Friendship with Oneself

Maitri means unconditional friendship with oneself, how to be at relaxed with yourself, or feeling at home in your mind and your body. She discusses how our relationship to pain affects this.

Strong Emotions and How Meditation Can Help

David Nichtern was my first meditation teacher and he is really special and awesome. Check out his latest post at the Huffington Post.

Meditation Can Help Heart Disease, Medical Study Finds

A medical study suggests that meditation provides physiological benefits - at least with people with coronary artery disease. The New York Times time reported the news in a brief blurb, Regimens: Meditation, for the Mind and the Heart.

Money quote:

The participants found transcendental meditation easy to learn and practice, Dr. Schneider said. He suggested that the stress reduction produced by the meditation could cause changes in the brain that cut stress hormones like cortisol and dampen the inflammatory processes associated with atherosclerosis.

What Trying to Meditate is Really Like

Robert Wright is one of my favorite writers and thinkers.  He just published his third book, The Evolution of God earlier this summer.  In hearing him promote his book, I'd heard him speak of his attraction to Buddhism and meditation, so I was delighted to come across this rendition of time he spent on a meditation retreat on the New York Times Opinionator Blog: Self, Meditating.

As usual, he's brutally honest about the experience of meditation - the frustration, the imperfection, the confusion. And he's funny.  And smart. 

Here's a taste:

This retreat is coming at a good time for me. In June I published a book that I’ve been feverishly promoting. Publishing and promoting a book can bring out the non-Buddhist in a person. For example, when book reviewers make judgments about your book, you may make judgments about the reviewers — ungenerous judgments, even.
Also, you’re inclined to pursue the fruits of your activity — like book sales — rather than just experience the activity. Checking your Amazon ranking every 7 minutes would qualify as what Buddhists call “attachment.” And attachment is bad. (Oops: I just made a judgment about attachment.)

The Perils of All That Mindfulness

Judith Warner of the New York Times penned a witty, perceptive essay, Being and Mindfulness, on the perils of trendy "mindfulness."

Mindfulness is supposed to bring people together. By embracing your essential humanness, getting in touch with and accepting your body, sensations, emotions and thoughts, you are supposed to join with, and empathetically connect to, all humanity.

This, I think, is true and sort of defeats the purpose:

in real-life encounters, I’ve come lately to wonder whether meaningful bonds are well forged by the extreme solipsism that mindfulness practice often turns out to be. For one thing, there’s the seemingly unavoidable problem that people who are embarked on this particular “journey of self-exploration,” as Pipher has called it, tend to want to talk, or write, about it. A lot.

And one of the problems with this tendency is that everyone's experience with the practice is unique.

And those who talk, write, share it tend to hold out their experiences as ideal, which in turn leaves those who've never felt the "kundalini rising" feeling left out, inadequate and perhaps quit. This difficulty was one of my problems with Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love, as I discussed in my review.

It also bring to mind the passage from Matthew's gospel which tells Christians to pray in secret and not to blab or brag out it (Matthew 6:6-8).

One of Warner's concluding insights:

Some of us experience our emotions always in capital letters and exclamation points. This isn’t always pleasant but, to go all mindful for a moment, it is what it is, and if you are one of these people then probably one of the great pleasures of your life is finding others like you and settling in with them for a good rant. A world devoid of such souls can be cold and forbidding, and above all terribly, terribly dull.

True. But for me, it's still worth while to try and smooth out the edges. To me, the practice is like a calculus curve - always approaching. I'll never get there, but that doesn't mean I stop trying.

Thanks to student Sara for the link.

Setting Intention

“You are what your deepest desire is.
As your desire is, so is your intention.
As your intention is, so is your will.
As your will is, so is your deed.
As your deed is, so is your destiny.”
 ~ Upanishads

I got that from Chopra's newsletter.  The Chopra Center's newsletter also includes a guided meditation for setting intention that you can listen to here.    

Meditation Alleviates Medical Symptoms

Natural News headlines - Meditation Benefits for Those with Chronic Fatigue and Fibromyalgia
I knew this already. Guided meditation can be especially helpful when the symptoms are persistent. I've experienced remarkable improvement after listening and following the instructions of a 15 to 20 minute guided meditation (Shiva Rea's is a favorite).

The article outlines the mental/emotional benefits of meditation:

• More even moods, fewer mood swings.
• Releasing Depression
• Less anxiety
• Increased energy and vitality
• Improved memory and cognitive function
• A sense of peace and calm
• Less Stress

Physical benefits of meditation:

• Lowered blood pressure
• Reduced heart rate
• More balanced nervous system
• Better Sleep
• May help balance the immune system to help the body resist disease and heal
• Less physical stress and a more balanced the autonomic nervous system (which is what governs the stress response in the body.)

Specially in regard to FM and CFS, the article outlines this:

Stress exacerbates CFS and FM, as well as causing more of it, creating a vicious circle. Lowering stress in some way is important for sufferers...Meditation has also been shown to improve sleep patterns and increase energy. Furthermore, research has continually shown that it reduces pain levels. It can enhance the body’s ability to heal itself, and improve overall quality of life. Physically, it can lower the level of cortisol in the body, which is a stress hormone. Mentally, it helps you to get your mind off of worries, pain, stress, and illness. It allows you to cultivate a focus on something completely unrelated to your life, your pain, or your illness.

America's 2 Most Prominent Buddhist Teachers in DC

Well, aren't we lucky?

Thanks to the National Cathedral, Robert Thurman and Sharon Salzberg are returning to the DC for a seminar on Working with Our Enemies: Finding Freedom from Hostility and Fear. What an appropriate subject for this age of fear and hostility.

Here's an excerpt describing the subject:

Enemies—habitual, painful mind-states and people toward whom we steadily feel antipathy or fear—consume tremendous energy that we can liberate for powerful, healing change.

These pioneers in bringing Buddhist practices to the West guide us to explore our inner and outer enemies, and the stuck mode of “us” and “them” that constricts our lives. Through lecture, dialogue, and meditation practice, they show us the way toward the potential boundlessness of lovingkindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity—the four sublime states of mind known as the Brahma Viharas.

Format: both lecture and workshop.
Date & Time: Friday June 27th at 7:30 pm.
Saturday, June 26th from 9:30 am to 4:30 pm
Sponsor: Cathedral College
Location: the Kay Spiritual Life Center at American University (at Massachusetts and
Nebraska Avenues).

It's sure to fill up fast so register at the link above. It is possible to attend either Friday or Saturday or both. Special senior, student or limited income fees are available.

These are two great teachers. Salzberg books are well loved. I feature one on my web site: Loving Kindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness. Some find her writing too personal, too confessional. But I find her writing on Buddhist precepts to be practical, when other writers on the same subjects can be abstract or elliptical. As one intelligent friend remarked, it seems the counsel is simply: be truthful. Well, Salzberg provides further helpful guidelines.

I've never heard Thurman speak, but he is well-reputed as well. He teaches at Columbia University. He did have some recent notoriety in testifying against his daughter's stalker and evidence some self-deprication, as reported in the New York Times back in April:

In spite of the stressful subject, their testimony was sort of a star turn for the Thurman parents, who gave a strikingly poised, sometimes compassionate and even humorous accounting of grappling with Mr. Jordan.

“I’m known as the father of Uma,” Dr. Thurman testified, with whimsical pride. “It’s my major accomplishment in life.”

Reading excerpts from 19 e-mail messages he received from Mr. Jordan, Dr. Thurman described his growing sense “not as a psychiatrist, but as a literary critic,” that Mr. Jordan was delusional. “I imagined us in a cave a long time ago, Shiva Parvati carved or mummified in that stone temple with the elephant outside of it,” Mr. Jordan wrote in one e-mail message, referring to a Hindu god and goddess that he equated with himself and Ms. Thurman.

“By this time I’m trying to remember the telephone number of the F.B.I., frankly,” Dr. Thurman testified.

In one e-mail message, Mr. Jordan addressed Dr. Thurman as “Ten zen Thor man.” Mr. Jordan’s lawyer, on cross-examination, asked whether that might be a typographical error, derived from Dr. Thurman’s nickname, Tenzin, given to him when he was a Buddhist monk.

“Not likely,” Dr. Thurman said, adding that it seemed to him that “there was a mythic thing going on.”

If any of you register to go, please let me know!