What Meditation Does

Many people begin a meditation practice in order to become more calm and relaxed. But there is much more to it than that.

A common misconception is that meditation involves shutting out all thoughts. The thoughts will come. We neither attach to them nor dispel them. In fact, I have come to assume that whenever I sit in meditation, there is a ticker tape of thoughts scrolling across my awareness. Some may be mundane thoughts of chores that await us, while others might be deeply challenging. Either way, we notice them and allow them to continue to pass through.

This ability to notice thoughts and experiences with neither attraction nor aversion is called equanimity. In short, it means being nonjudgmental in our perceptions. This gives us the ability to stay present with our own difficult emotions. Meditation does not instill magical powers to make you feel good. It does not push away sadness or anxiety or anger. To the contrary, it allows these feelings to be present.

In that space where thoughts and feelings are allowed to be present, without judgement, they may be transformed over time. At the very least, they no longer have the ability to define us or have power over us. If we say, “anger is bad,” and push it aside for the duration of our practice, it will still be there at the end of our meditation. If we simply notice the anger and allow it to be present in our practice without obsessing about what made us angry, we have the opportunity to care for our anger and for ourselves.

Mindfulness is my basic meditation practice. Mindfulness means dwelling in the present moment and becoming aware of everything—both the positive and negative elements that are there both within us and around us. We learn to nourish the positive and to recognize, embrace, and transform the negative
— Thich Nhat Hanh

When we practice equanimity in our practice and in our lives, we are not permitted to take refuge in preconceptions and labels that we are inclined to apply to people and situations around us. We have to remain open, to stay in the middle, as Pema Chodron describes it. We stay in the middle between attraction and aversion. We allow our thoughts to be present without making value judgements about them. This is a challenging and sometimes frightening place to be, without the security of our preconceptions and opinions. Meditation builds our courage to stay in this position of groundlessness. It builds our strength from the inside out. That is why some Buddhists refer to the spiritual practice as “training to be a warrior.”

When thoughts are allowed to come and go with neither attachment nor aversion, the thinking mind quiets down. There are spaces between the thoughts, and with continued practice, these intervals become longer. The state in which there is no thought, but only awareness, is called shuniya. There may be one moment of shuniya during a meditation session, or there may be several. As a musician, I often have experienced shuniya while playing or listening to music, perhaps even more often than during meditation.

As we become aware of the spaces between our thoughts, our awareness arises from beyond our thinking mind. We become aware of the authentic self which is “watching” our own mind. I have had this experience both during meditation and during yoga, rather intensely at times. It is as though an ancient soul steps back and watches this human incarnation struggling with its body of clay, its angst, and the struggles of this life time. This soul without birth, without death, watches the thinking self, knowing that everything will be okay.

The most decisive event in your life is when you discover you are not your thoughts or emotions. Instead, you can be present as the awareness behind the thoughts and emotions. – Eckhart Tolle

If I had to describe the benefits of meditation to just one word, it would be “awake.” I feel more awake than ever, not in the sense of sleeplessness, but in the sense of being acutely aware of everything around me and within me. I am aware of my own thoughts and feelings without being submersed in them. I am aware of my authentic self beyond my thoughts. I am aware of the beings around me. I remember with compassion the beings who have been near me throughout time. I am learning to form fewer attachments and make fewer judgements. I have more courage to stay in the middle. I am training to be a warrior.

Leaving Things to Chants

Two summers ago, the yoga studio where I took Kundalini yoga classes held a special program to commemorate Yogi Bhajan’s birthday. Yogi Bhajan brought Kundalini yoga to North America in 1968. Part of the observance was to begin an 11-day cycle of chanting “Guru, Guru, Wahe Guru, Guru Ram Das Guru” for 31 minutes each day. For some reason, I never was able to settle into the mantra. I tried chanting with the support of one musical arrangement, then another. But it just never resonated with me.

In the course of doing that, I came across another mantra, “Wahe Guru, Wahe Jio.” I immediately took to this mantra, began working with it, and have been working with it ever since. Although I was not successful in carrying out the intention that had been set for me, my mantra meditation practice began with this “failure.” More importantly, my practice did not end 11 days after Yogi Bhajan’s birthday. Not only did I continue to work with this particular mantra, I have learned other mantras and deepened my practice over the past year.

“Japa (chanting) is when you sit and meditate on a mantra and you spend days and days and days in constant repetition of God’s name and God progressively calms the ego. The more mild the ego is, the more your finite Infinity starts seeing the Infinite Infinity. First you do things to be secure on Earth. Then you start seeing things beyond Earth, and what is beyond Earth is called higher consciousness… “

–Yogi Bhajan

There is a process to learning new mantras, particularly wordy ones like the gurmukhi Mul Mantra or the sanskrit Gayatri Mantra.  The first step is to memorize the words. You need to get to the point where they just roll out of your brain without too much effort. At the same time, you need to stay focused on the words and not recite them mindlessly.

The next step is to translate the words, so that you are thinking of the translation of each word as you say it. However, there is seldom any one “right” English translation for any one word or phrase in any ancient language. So you need to move beyond translation. By studying different translations and interpretations of the text, you can begin to grasp the concepts of the ancient words with all their nuances. So as you are chanting the ancient words, you are no longer translating, but understanding their meaning. Only then can you reach the ultimate goal of chanting the mantra: that the words speak to you, perhaps in a slightly different way each time you sit with them.

So that is how I began my mantra meditation practice. Something that I was trying to do broke apart, and this is what hatched. Had I been attached to the expected outcome, I simply would have attached to that failure instead of embracing a wonderful new beginning.

Come As You Are

Come to your mat with serenity, lovingkindness, compassion, and gratitude. But don’t forget your anger, libido, anxiety, and fear. If you bring only your “good” side to the mat, you arrive incomplete.  It is only when you embrace all of your emotions that you arrive on your mat as the whole, authentic you, and only then are you ready to begin your practice. If you leave all the negative emotions behind when you arrive in your practice, they will be there waiting for you when you leave your mat. Arrive angry. Arrive horny. Just arrive.

“If you see elements of garbage in you, such as fear, despair, and hatred, don’t panic. As a good organic gardener, a good practitioner, you can face this: ‘I recognize that there is garbage in me. I am going to transform this garbage into nourishing compost that can make love reappear.’”  –Thich Nhat Hanh

One evening, I was in a kundalini yoga class with about eight people. At the end of the class, we chanted “ra ma da sa sa say so hung” as a kirtan musician played the harmonium. I had chanted this mantra many times on my own, but here I was supported by a loving community, and the music was live. The once familiar mantra had a new sense of immediacy and intimacy about it.

As I wrote in a previous blog entry, this is a healing mantra, and the intention may be directed towards healing for oneself or for other people. Even if the intention is directed towards others, one can’t help but feel the effects of the mantra on oneself. We chanted together for several minutes. As the meditation came to a conclusion, one young woman began to weep, not with quiet sobs, but with an unrestrained wail.

We continued to sit in a circle, silently holding space for the young woman. There was no need to know what was “wrong.” To the contrary, everything was right as she touched her own suffering and her heart broke open in this sacred space. We breathed in her suffering and breathed out lovingkindness. No one tried to make her feel “better.” We just continued to be present with her and with ourselves.

Was it rude of the young woman to release such powerful emotions in a yoga class, or was it precisely the collective meditation that made such a release possible? How many stories are there of people preparing for the end of life and “waiting” until they see all their loved ones before they pass? When the heart knows that there is a community of yogis prepared to “catch” us at such an intense moment, perhaps it gives us permission to take that critical step.

I sincerely hope that most yoga sessions culminate in the blissful abandon of body and mind into the deep rest of savasana. It is my hope that every meditation session helps us to touch the thoughts and feelings that need our attention at that moment and gently release what we no longer need. But for those times when deeply held sadness must be cleared away to make room for joy, my wish is for a long, hearty wail.