The Dead-end Up Here

Meta bhavana or loving kindness meditation is ascribed to Buddha. There are many versions of this practice, all leading to awakening within the body mind with pleasant peaceful after effects, sometimes lasting for long and with practice, even longer. You need to make this practice your own for it to work not simply rote repeat of a mantra or prayer although those are essential starting points to let your body mind get curious and follow through. My practice begins with first recalling  loving people, things, events in my life not as a daydream but a body scan practice. More recent the event, easier it is to feel the sensations. One way to do this is when you feel loving towards something like my cat for example, scan your body immidiately and look for points of bliss in your body, heart, stomach, tingling in your limbs and all leading to a peaceful stillness in your head. Try to lock in this memeory and recall it when on the cushion. And make that sensation the object of your ...

It almost seems like you have to be already in a neutral mood, not too happy not too sad before you can follow the simple mindfulness meditation tips and tchniques, like paying attention to your breath, finding a comfortable seat, peaceful corner, on and on. Well that's not much help. If I am already calm and neutral or happy, who cares. Why mediate? It has to work when all you can see is doom and gloom, bleak future and painful present. And when you sit to meditate when you're upto your navel in alligators, all your mind tries to do is solve the problems you have and protect you from the impending disaster. But you really need to meditate when life sucks. How? What I have found is a simple two step process works quite nicely. One, bring the suffering in front of you instead of hiding from it and then resist trying to solve the problem right now. Say to your self, first I must calm myself now becuase then I will be better prepared to find the best solution. Do ...

Past regrets and future worries are the main ingredients in a soup called suffering. Masters recommend seeing through the dream like quality of these in many words such as time is in the mind, only the now is real all else imaginary thoughts and that history is just a story. The difficulty in truly accepting and understanding these arguments lies in the fact that the present or now seems so real. And that past events were at one time felt just as real as the present does now. So how can we possibly say that the presence is real but not the past? Or that the future will not be similar to the real now. The answer lies not looking at just the past or future as dream states but deconstructing the present as being unreal. This is impossible as long as we use our senses which report a very real direct experience of the now. But there are two components of this now. There is the sensory experience including the sensation of thought. And overlaid on them is a fog like story that ke...