After a long time of being a solo practitioner and participating in in virtual Sanghas, I restarted my investigation into local Buddhist centres recently.  I’ve tried a couple previously, the Birmingham Buddhist Vihara and the Jangchub Ling centre in Cradley Heath.  Both brought interesting conversations, very friendly faces and a welcome affirmation that I was not alone.

My most recent trip was to the Dr BR Ambedkar Memorial Centre Buddha Vihara in Wolverhampton, literally a stones throw from the Mercedes dealer on the ring road.  This brought more smiling faces, a warm welcome and a much needed reminder about the physical difficulties of meditation.  If you meditate in a chair, as I tend to, you never realise just how challenging meditating on a cushion can be.  The aches in the leg muscles, the aches in the back and the constant distraction from this can make you quite glad that your sitting is over!

This took me back to something I learned many years ago from a wonderful book that started me on my somewhat intermittent journey as a meditator.  The book is called “Moon Over Water“, by a lady called Jessica MacBeth and it really is like having a patient friend walking beside you on the path.  Jessica recommended that we shouldn’t rely on always meditating on one place, or having certain incenses or clothes or an altar to hand.  The idea was that we would be able to meditate wherever we needed to (e.g. a hotel room).  The sitting I did on Sunday proved the value of her advice and I would like to add that we should also not get overly used to sitting in one position.  If used to a chair, if you can do so, try the stool or the cushion and vice versa.

The lesson I learned here is that we do need to challenge ourselves as meditators from time to time.

My previous two posts have continued a short theme I wished to explore.  They’ve hopefully explained why I consider Buddhism to be Secular and provided a very quick overview of how Buddhism came to the West.  So here we are, Buddhism is in the western world and according to some sources is the fastest growing religion (I use the term as a shorthand) in many countries, maybe even the whole western world. [1] [2] [3] [4]

I think Buddhism has come to fit the western world very well.  Buddhism is finding that in many places it fits very well with modern science.  Indeed the attitude of questioning and verifying things for yourself that the Buddha speaks of to the people of Kesaputta in the Kalama Sutra is not at all antagonistic to the scientific endeavour.  I’ve posted verses 4 and 10 from the above link in order to bring them directly to your attention.

4. “It is proper for you, Kalamas, to doubt, to be uncertain; uncertainty has arisen in you about what is doubtful. Come, Kalamas. Do not go upon what has been acquired by repeated hearing; nor upon tradition; nor upon rumor; nor upon what is in a scripture; nor upon surmise; nor upon an axiom; nor upon specious reasoning; nor upon a bias towards a notion that has been pondered over; nor upon another’s seeming ability; nor upon the consideration, ‘The monk is our teacher.’ Kalamas, when you yourselves know: ‘These things are bad; these things are blameable; these things are censured by the wise; undertaken and observed, these things lead to harm and ill,’ abandon them.

10. “Come, Kalamas. Do not go upon what has been acquired by repeated hearing; nor upon tradition; nor upon rumour; nor upon what is in a scripture; nor upon surmise; nor upon an axiom; nor upon specious reasoning; nor upon a bias towards a notion that has been pondered over; nor upon another’s seeming ability; nor upon the consideration, ‘The monk is our teacher.’ Kalamas, when you yourselves know: ‘These things are good; these things are not blameable; these things are praised by the wise; undertaken and observed, these things lead to benefit and happiness,’ enter on and abide in them.

The above isn’t the only thing Buddhism has to offer that fits it with an increasingly secular west, you will find Buddhist meditation centres in many western cities.  Theravada centres, Zen centres and New Kadampa centres among just a few.  The teachings of Buddhism offer a powerful potential antidote to the stresses, strains and challenges of modern life.  They allow a person to find a sense of peace in our high-tech materialist society without making you feel inherently sinful or unworthy.  For me, as for many others here in the west, this is a huge part of the appeal.

References

There’s an old saying “When life gives you Lemons, make Lemonade”.  It’s good advice and I’ve had time to reflect on it, given that life has indeed chosen to give me Lemons of late.  I’m going to post my thoughts on this with the hope that they will be beneficial for someone.

I found it very beneficial to take the view that these things can serve as a valuable lesson, if one decides to make the effort to learn from them.  It’s very easy to point out the faults of others, to deride them and place oneself above them.  To my disquiet, I became more aware of myself doing that and resolved to stop doing it.  As the situation I was in drew further on, I found that I was being moved to meditate on humility and finding compassion for others, whereas before I might not have been so understanding or compassionate.

Of course, my own faults were there too and their karma came into play, which taught me the importance of honestly acknowledging one’s own faults and resolving to address them.  This process of acknowledging your own faults builds humility, I found that it helped me in my efforts to view others and their faults and shortcomings in a more compassionate way.  It’s always worth remembering that while someone may not have your experience or skillset and seem helpless to you, the same is true from their perspective if the roles are reversed.  Remember what it was like for you when you were starting out.

Now the challenge is to apply all of this!

I’ve found a new friend during my meditation practise, his name is “Percy”, or “Persistence” to give him his full title.  It’s a tempting vision, the idea of the meditator sat there, at effortless inner peace.  It’s also wrong. When meditating it’s often a terrible struggle, as any meditator will tell you, you’re assailed by the “Monkey Mind” bringing mental noise and distractions.  This is quite normal and can be quite discouraging.

The only real solution is to persist with your meditation in a firm, non-judgemental and gentle manner.  The constant distractions and re-finding of your focus; the days that you really don’t want to sit but do so anyway; the days that you do miss your sitting but return to your practise the next day, knowing the it’s the right thing to do; these times are where you really learn about meditation.

It’s not effortless success that teaches us to meditate,  it’s that moment of re-finding our focus that teaches us mindfulness and doing so without comment or harsh judgement that begins to teach us compassion.  For both mindfulness and compassion begin with ourselves, so it seems to me that in meditation to fail is really to sow the seeds of success.  As long as we remember Percy, of course.

I’d love to hear from other people about this.

Well, I’ve got a little work done over the last week or two and I’ve just update my SitQuietly web-based meditation timer to version 1.3.  I’m still working on getting it going on tablets and phones, but my spare time is quite limited so this may take a while.

Changes are:

• Added tool tips to sidebar items.
• Centre the timer window.
• Highlight the Acknowledgements section.
• Slight wording change to the meditation instructions. Added two more resources to the resources section and amended the format.
• Number input boxes allow multiple lines, fixed this issue.

As ever, I hope you find it a useful tool and should you find a bug or have any suggestions please let me know!

I’ve revisited the idea of slowness recently and touched again on Wu-Wei when I thought about accepting our limitations. I saw this article in the New York Times a week or two ago and remembered it as tying in with the things I was talking about quite nicely. The article makes the case very well that Yoga is not as safe as we’d all like to believe. My opinion is that this is true of anything; which is why, in my SitQuietly instructions, I give a warning to consult your medical practitioner before taking up a meditation practise. But this article makes specific mention of people who seem to be treating Yoga as if it were a performance sport, specifically one man who threw himself into a spine twist and had three ribs give way.

The article says a lot of things that ring true for me, that echo my own gym and Tai Chi experiences. I realised a long time ago that it was up to me to make things easy on myself, that I had to do this by realising and respecting my limits. Apply Wu-Wei, don’t do things at an inappropriate speed, don’t force yourself into exercises that are inappropriate for your body type or mental state. When growth in our abilities occurs it should be unforced and as a result of the “70 percent rule”, which I’ve talked about before. This says that you work to 70 percent of your potential, with the other 30 percent held back for growth and improvement. Eventually, your 70 percent is equal to what used to be your 100 percent, and you’re still only giving 70 percent!

My other observation is that practises like Yoga, meditation and Tai Chi are not performance sports. The wisdom of Wu-Wei and the Slow Movement comes back again to the fore, these things are healing arts without a doubt; but only when used appropriately and at the right pace! They can heal your body and mind, but will do so in their own time, to try to hurry things seems to me to be a mistake. One that can only end badly as well. We in the West seem to be bringing our own neurotic hurried flavour to these things, but in doing so I worry that we lose a lot of their essence and bring ourselves further pain.

I’ve been a busy bee over the last couple of weeks in my spare time.  The result of my work was uploaded just a few minutes ago and I hope you’ll like it.

After a long hiatus for various reasons, the web browser based SitQuietly meditation timer has received an update.  This new version removes the dependency on Adobe Flash, replacing that code with HTML 5 sound code instead.  I added a short section on meditation, with basic instructions and the site also sports a new format and has a few fixed bugs.

I’ve tested it in Firefox, Chromium, Opera, Internet Explorer, Safari and Konqueror.  I also know it renders fine on IOS and Android but the sound is not yet working on those platforms.  I have a handle on what needs to be done, but I had no way of finishing the work before my deadline of 1st Jan.

Anyway, you can find it here, please let me know what you think!

Well, it’s been an interesting week.  We’ve had the ongoing story of the occupy protests, which are being very well covered in alternative media.  I recommend monitoring Twitter for this sort of news, you tend to get things that the mainstream media either omit or are simply slow with.

In addition to this we’ve had the drama in Greece and Italy, it could be said that both countries have had their democratic governments undermined by EU interference and I can’t see that ending well.  President Sarkozky was challenged on this by a reporter from the BBC and didn’t give anything like a satisfactory answer.  I think that there is a definite moral hazard involved here, never mind the fact that the Euro is probably beyond saving in its current form.  It’s taken the political class till now to realise what the markets have known all along, as Mark Twain famously said “Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt”.

So in light of all of the above it’s easy to get very bearish in sentiment.  The easiest way to counter this sentiment is not to take it too seriously, I have a running joke with a friend that I’m “putting on my bear suit” whenever I read that sort of content.  But too much of it really does taint the mind and as a Buddhist I have to be mindful and observe my own thought processes.

This is where our mindfulness meditation comes in, I’ve found that the effect of this practise spills over into everyday life.  You become more able to observe your thought processes and to catch yourself thinking things, or taking a partial view.  Through this, I’ve come to realise that things aren’t as bad as they might seem at first glance.

Yes, we face challenges, but there are no doubt opportunities in these times.  I hold the hope that the coming threats to the banking system will see the rise of a new culture of mutuals and credit unions, something to return some of the financial power to our communities.  I see the threats to the notion of globalism as an opportunity to localise, to use our local shops and services.  So this isn’t a disaster, just another chapter in our story, and depending on your point of view it might not be that much of a disaster after all.

I may even have to pack away my bear suit!

I invested in an Amazon Kindle a few weeks ago, it’s certainly been a good choice and I have rediscovered the pleasure of reading through it.  It allows me to carry a large library of books with me, and the screen is every bit as good as they claim it to be.  I can recommend the Free Software ebook manager called “Calibre” for use with it, as it allows easy conversion of ebooks between all sorts of formats.  It also allows the downloading of RSS feeds and will collate these feeds into a book for you.  I consider this to be a killer feature, absolutely brilliant!

I’ve started reading my feeds on the Kindle and have discovered that it makes reading them much easier than on a computer screen.  I pondered why, aside from the better Kindle screen, this should be.  Then I realised that it’s the fact that the Kindle does one thing, and one thing only, it reads books.  As someone who owns a smartphone with various communications options on it and has numerous little programs that can chime in and demand attention on his PC, I have been finding it very difficult to focus.  Not only to read but to write and to create.

This chimed in with something that the tutor said at the Buddhist Vihara last week; the necessity of withdrawal, of shutting out the world and getting some time and space to focus.  We withdraw to create a place that is sacred and spiritual and that is peaceful, that is not of the everyday world.  Yet, what is the place we go when we read; when we really engage with a good book, is that place entirely of this world?  I realised that this is why Kindle makes it easier to read, there are no interruptions and no possibility of such things.  If I read on my phone, I can be texted, IMed, Facebook messaged, emailed, or (looks shocked) …. phoned!  Throw in all the little toy apps that you can get and what chance is there of any peace?

It seems to me that these things take the control of our time away from us, it seems that we are interrupted at a whim and a response is demanded there and then.  But where is the control in that?  There are our devices, our tools, yet we seem to jump to their tune.  This makes time away even more vital than it ever has been and it it makes me question whether all of the advances in our communications abilities are necessarily for the better.

As a self confessed geek, this is a strange place to be it seems.  Am I taking an anti technology stance here?  No.  I am advocating a measure of moderation and also a realization that we don’t need to be plugged in all the time.  I started reading my news and my blogs on a daily ebook rather than as they come in, and if anything it improved matters.  By taking these things and making a specific time and place for them, it seems to unchoke everything else.

I heard this remark tonight from my instructor regarding the practise of mindfulness, the class was talking about it in relation to Taijiquan.

“We’re Human Beings, not Human Doings”

This is actually a very good quote, and I’d like to say a little more about this subject.  I’ve said before and I will always maintain, that it’s very difficult to penetrate Taoist philosophy deeply without at least some Tai Chi practise.  The (often) not so simple act of playing with the principles physically enables an intuitive view, not an intellectual one, that is a great help.  This also helps a lot with Buddhism.

As we attempted to move each other around, it became more apparent that the act of attempting to do something blocks mindfulness.  In fact in attempting to influence, force, or otherwise get at a result from our actions, we can lose our grasp on the thread of things and we fail.  Even the intent seemed to cause me to lose the thread of what I was doing, all very strange and quite unnerving.

It became clear to me tonight that a large part of mindfulness involves getting your mind out of the way.  So, mindlessness?  No…

The trick seemed to be to be present, but unattached to an outcome in a relaxed way, don’t try to force it.  It reminded me of some of my best meditation sittings, I didn’t focus, I just got out of my own way and let it happen.

There, I can’t explain it very well.  But hey I’ll let it be, and who knows, maybe this can be used as a start?