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.

This is an idea that has been in my mind for quite some time.  Compassion or to use the Pali term, Karunā, is a core part of our Buddhist practise.  By having compassion for all living beings, we ourselves are moved into a much better place mentally.  This makes perfect sense, contrast this approach to walking round with nothing but hate in your mind.  Ask yourself, where would you rather live?  It also place us in a far better position for our Buddhist practise.  It sounds a little selfish, but it’s a wise kind of selfish that can benefit others as well.

To have all this compassion for others, does not mean we have to neglect ourselves though.  We must tend to our own needs, because as with all things, compassion starts with ourselves.  Again, this sounds extremely selfish, but I don’t believe it is.  If we can’t show compassion to ourselves, how to we expect to show it to others?  If we only try to show it to others, and neglect ourselves, then this will cause us pain and suffering; this means that we eventually fail in showing compassion to others through not being properly placed to do so!

“You can explore the universe, looking for somebody who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and you will not find that person anywhere.” – The Buddha

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 had an interesting moment the other day, interesting and somewhat unsettling.  I realised that the way I was being seen by someone wasn’t the way I’d thought.  This lead me to a train of thought.

We all put a lot of effort into how we come across, we care how we’re seen by others.  This goes to various degrees, depending on the situation and the individual.  But at what point does this behaviour become unethical?  Is it, in spite of our best efforts, ultimately futile?

No matter how carefully we craft our public faces, how carefully we choose our words, they will be seen through someone else’s lens.  The persons you and I are, are the result of our lifelong Karma; choice after choice, event after event.  This is as true of the person you project to the world as it is of the person I am, as I watch your actions and hear your words.  We see each other through the lenses of our Karma.

Ultimately I cannot control how you see me, too much depends on the lens through which you view me.  For me to try and try, ultimately results in me taking (or trying to take) too much control over your perceptions.  Thus taking what is not freely given and violating a precept.

For example, I support and have written Free Software.  I do this because I wish have more control of the software that runs my computer; I wrote SitQuietly for the Linux platform because I wanted to give something back to the community, however small, for all the good their software had done me.

But, through someone else’s eyes, am I the enemy?  No matter how compassionate my motives and aims?  Think not? Look again….

When using open source makes you an enemy of the state.

Should Open Source Be An Enemy Of The State?

My entire Karma led me to this point, if you are an intellectual property lobbyist or an advocate of certain proprietary software companies then you will quite possibly see me as the enemy.  Whether I want you to or not.  But drawing on my point above, for me to go too far in trying to change your mind isn’t just unethical, it’s unskilful.  At what point does it cause suffering for us both?  I’ll also wager the attempt will fail.  So it would seem easier for me to present myself as you find me, and simply allow you the room to make your mind up then live and let live.  No, not just better, more ethical, more skilful.

Interesting train of thought, isn’t it?

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.

After Tai Chi tonight I was driving home mulling on things.  Once again that feeling of sort of “forgetting the self” had come very very briefly and it seemed to work.  Last time I trained I must’ve been having a bad week as nothing went right for me, but this week it seemed to work.

I was considering the habit of Procrastination in light of my Tai Chi practise.  You don’t think about the things in Tai Chi, you just let them happen, so why doesn’t this happen outside the class so much?  I am wondering if the trick is to realise that the Tai Chi form never in fact stops, when we’re walking down the street or washing our hands, we’re still doing Tai Chi!

I’m thinking of how it feels to do the form and the best analogy I can think of is that it’s like a railway journey.  At first, each position in the form is like a station, the train stops at each one and changes onto a new section of track.  Later on, as you practise more, the position changes become more like signal boxes.  What I mean by this is, they’re still there but you don’t stop for them, the train shifts fluidly onto its new track.

So what I’m driving at, is the idea of bringing that feeling from Tai Chi into everyday use.  We procrastinate when we stop at the station, maybe it would be better to realise that they’re only signal boxes.  We don’t in fact stop, we just flow from place to place, from event to event, from task to task.  Perhaps, I wonder, when we come to forget the self would it be true that the separation of tasks and events is only in our minds?

Am I making sense?

I’m away this weekend, and for a change I got the train.  I’m writing this on my phone while waiting for trains and while travelling, so if it seems a little disjointed then I apologise as I’m unused to writing on this device.

I love driving my car and the freedom it brings and would normally use it for a journey like this.  I decided to use the train as I think that this is the way things will go in terms of long distance travel, with walkable cities and metro services among the local options.  Besides, it’s different and trying something new is good.  I’d like to muse further on this as the English countryside whizzes by.

I was thinking of my visit to the Buddhist temple in Birmingham the other week and between that and this, plus an encounter with a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses earlier this week, it started me mulling faith and the way we live.

We tend, in my opinion, to live and believe in the groove of our habits.  These habits don’t change much and we will defend them vigorously.  For an example, consider the future of the car.  Everything that can be done to assure the future of happy motoring is being done.  For my part, I think that in the long term there is nothing else to do but prepare for a carless future, but we will see.  There are always unexpected surprises.

So it is with our mental habits, not just of faith but of thought and behavior.  We defend these habits from the things that would change them without considering that the change might be just what’s needed!  Unless we allow our habits of thought and behavior to change and to evolve, then we will be defending them to their stagnation and the death of our hopes for future personal growth.