108days

Day 33

Meditation Makes Us Ready

Today, I'd like to share a quote from my first teacher, P'arang Geri Larkin. She is a wonderfully light and generous woman with an incredible sense of humor and a laugh for the ages. In her book, Stumbling Toward Enlightenment, she says:

I learned that the core tool of Buddhism is meditation, with its focus on the breath. We are taught to follow our breath, in and out, in and out, watching it leave us, watching it enter us. In the watching we are calmed, and are made ready for serious spiritual work. And while there are other tools—chanting, volunteering, prostrations (bowing to the floor)—it is meditation that forms the path we stumble on and the walking stick we can grasp when the going gets unbelievably rough. Meditation is what sneaks spiritual progress into our days, finally offering the taste of bliss that is at the bottom of our yearning.

We've covered the fact that you don't have to be Buddhist to meditate, so if you aren't Buddhist you can just set that word aside. The core point in this quote for me is the fact that meditation prepares us for what happens when we're not meditating. We sit there, and we focus on our breathing and we learn to silence our wild and noisy minds (or we become better and not judging our wild and noisy minds) but in that space that we create with our practice, we are learning. For a while in the beginning, we notice that often we want to be elsewhere while we sit. We feel restlessness, impatience, judgment, even fear. When we don't settle ourselves into a workable posture, we feel that our practice in that particular sitting is ruined. But at some point, we figure out that we can live through the experience. We figure out how to be with whatever there is. That knowing goes with us into our active, sometimes turbulent days.

There are so many milestones that we take great care to prepare for in our lives. We spend months, perhaps over a year to plan a wedding. We study for a year to prepare for standardized tests, certifications and entrance exams. We spend time figuring out what to wear and how to style our hair when we are attending an important event or occasion. Meditation offers us an opportunity to prepare for every other moment of our waking lives... for the moments when our hearts are touched with sadness, when our thoughts are charged with anger, when our mouths can't contain our joy. We sit so we can be there when it counts, so we can show up for life present and aware.

Day 7

A Week Into the Journey

I'm into journaling. I was a kid who kept a diary who became a teen introduced to varied journaling practices in creative writing classes who became an adult with an occasional journal practice. At Still Point where I practice, there is a journaling tradition in the Dharma Student training program (a path to ordination). Still Point founder and previous guiding teacher Geri Larkin wrote a little about it in one of the essays published in The Still Point Dhammapada, pg. 29:

So we have journals at Still Point. And we write in them when our yearning for spiritual growth outweighs our resistance to writing. Always, watching our minds and noting our patterns, we are helped. Not happy each minute, maybe, but definitely more sane.

Keeping a journal can be a wonderful way to bring awareness to and reflect on the hills and valleys and plateaus of life. Each Saturday as we proceed through this journey, I will post a list of questions for weekly reflection. The questions are an invitation to consider where you are and to mark what you are doing and how you are doing it.

Writing makes a map, and there’s something about a journey that begs to have its passage marked

Marking passage is an ordinary process. The journey is already ongoing; it’s simply a matter of acknowledging it. And the journal is an adaptable practice that can absorb as much or as little attention as you apply to it. It will fluctuate cheerfully, without complaints. The journal takes you and your journey as you are.

- Christina Baldwin in Life’s Companion: Journal Writing as a Spiritual Quest, pg. 5

Like everything else, how you do this (or whether you do this) is an optional supplement to your daily meditation practice. You are welcome to take the questions offline for personal reflection, or to come back and share your responses (all or in part) with the group.

108 Days Weekly Reflection

1. This week, I completed a daily practice period: 

   _____ Every day
   _____ More often than I did the week before
   _____ Once or twice
   _____ Not at all

2. As I participate in this 108 day journey, I am noticing:
3. If I had to use one word to describe my feelings or my approach to practice this past week, it would be __________________. If I could say more, I would say:
4. Particular challenges this week:
5. In support of my practice next week, I will:
6. I would like to learn more about:

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