Zen to remember

Mediation is an important part of Zen practice. You don’t have to be a Buddhist, or even a spiritual person to meditate, you only have to be a person with a mind. Meditation is one way to work with your mind. The act of sitting meditation is a simple and bold act of recognizing that you have a mind, that you have awareness, and that awareness of the mind changes the mind.

The mind changes whether you change it with awareness or it changes itself without your awareness. Compassionate awareness recognizes the suffering that comes from the activity of the mind and seeks to make it better. Awareness without compassion also affects the experience of suffering, but  it may intensify the suffering by habitually scrambling away from the suffering.

Mediation is the act of sitting and engaging with what comes up. If you have been avoiding some sort of suffering that suffering will come up, again and again until you deal with it. That is why starting a meditation practice is so hard. It takes great courage to face your pain. Avoiding suffering makes the suffering bigger. Facing suffering makes it manageable. Simply sitting and facing your mind, with courage, compassion and kindness, changes the habits of your mind. When your mind habits change, your life changes. Just like that.

Here are some posts I’ve written on Mediation:

The Basics of Meditation

Meditation To Build Focus

Meditation Practice

Meditation and Mindfulness

To practice this guided meditation, sit in a comfortable position, with your back straight and your head level and breathe in with the breathing in lines and breathe out with the breathing out lines.

Breathing in, I am aware of my breath going in

Breathing out, I am aware of my breath going out

Breathing in, I am present in my body

Breathing out, I am present in time and space

Breathing in, I invite a new perspective on anxiety

Breathing out, I empty my mind

Breathing in, I give myself the gift of fresh air

Breathing out, I give back to the world

Breathing in, I recognize that I suffer from anxiety

Breathing out, I wish to change that habit

Breathing in, I know that I am human

Breathing out, I know that people get anxious

Breathing In, I feel the pain and worry

Breathing out, I give that to the world

Breathing in, I feel the world’s anxiety

Breathing out, I send the world peace

Breathing in, I am connected to all people

Breathing out, I wish people to be free of suffering

Breathing in, I am connected to myself

Breathing out, I wish to be free of suffering

Breathing in, I invite peace into my life

Breathing out, I share peace with the world

Breathing in, I see my anxiety is a reaction

Breathing out, I can work with that reaction

Breathing in, my anxiety reminds me to be aware

Breathing out, I am aware of my anxiety

Breathing in, my anxiety compels me toward action

Breathing out, I act with my anxiety

Breathing in, I locate my anxiety in time and space

Breathing out, I locate myself in the present

Breathing in, I locate my anxiety in my mind

Breathing out, I calm that activity in my brain

Breathing in, I worry that this won’t work

Breathing out, I see that as an anxious thought

Breathing in, I know anxious thoughts unsettle me

Breathing out, I let my thoughts go.

Breathing in, I am present in my body

Breathing out, I am present in time and space

Breathing in, I am aware of my breath going in

There is a popular myth that we can choose to be happy. If that were true, there would be no problems in the world. Everybody, in every circumstance, would choose to be happy and peace and love would prevail. Asking somebody who is depressed to choose to be happy is like asking a drowning person to choose to swim. It is not an available choice.

When you are drowning you don’t have the capacity to breathe deeply, relax and let your body float. You’re lucky if you can use what air you have in your lungs to scream for help. When you are depressed, you are drowning in time. You are drowning in yourself. You don’t have the capacity to access happiness. You do have the ability to work toward happiness. That is what you can choose to do.

When you are depressed your most important job is addressing your mood. That is your full time job, regardless of what other jobs you have. When you choose to work toward happiness, you hire yourself as the only qualified project manager to deal with your emotional state. Then you go to work, day and night, until forever. When you choose to take on this task, you may need to bring in outside help. Friends, family and people in the community can all work with you on the very important task at hand. As project manager, your main job is to be especially kind to yourself and pay attention to your moods. You can see what thoughts are associated with which moods. You can see what time your moods like to come and go. You can see how activity, inactivity, people, sleep, foods, drugs, medications, and the weather interact with your moods. The information you gather will help you and those around you to assist you in your project. It will probably also assist your assistants in their secret (or not so secret) projects to live with their own moods.

To practice mindfulness be present and compassionate whenever you can.

Being present, means being where you are mentally. If where you are is painful, being present means feeling pain. If where you are is delightful, being present means feeling joy.

Being compassionate, means responding to suffering in a way that makes it better in the long run. Whenever you encounter pain and suffering as you are present, you have the opportunity to respond with compassion.

The physical mechanism of being mindful is focusing your attention on your thoughts and feelings. It can begin with focusing your attention on your breath, then checking in with what is happening in the present. Taking a conscious breath, helps you step back from the immediacy of a situation, engage your executive control and access your capacity for wisdom.

Practicing meditation, where you sit for a period of time and focus your attention on focusing your attention helps build skills of mindfulness.

The most important thing in driving mindfully is to ignore your cellphone. When you are looking at your phone instead of the road you are in a dangerous situation.

Driving is a great time to practice mindfulness. It is a time where you are sitting down and have the most important task before you of getting safely to where you are going. When you get in the car, take a breath, make yourself aware that you are seated, and appreciate that you have the opportunity to practice mindfulness. As you drive, focus on the road. Try not to think about time, which is especially important if you are running late. Know that you will get there when you get there. If there are consequences to being late, you will face them when you arrive.

Pay attention to anger, which is common in driving situations. If another driver makes a wrong move, even a dangerous one, pay attention to your reaction. See how appropriate your level of anger is to what happened. Breathe and remind yourself to be present. Notice how others get angry in their car. If they are angry at you, realize that they are suffering from an anger problem that is bigger than whatever you did. Driving and observing road rage in yourself and others is a great time to study anger.

Driving is also a good time to practice patience. If you notice yourself getting impatient, breathe and check in with where you are and where you want to be.

Practice obeying traffic rules. Signal turns. Keep a safe distance behind the car in front of you. Be polite. Practice gratitude and wave when somebody is polite to you.

“In [meditation] leave your front door and back door open. Let thoughts come and go. Just don’t serve them tea.”

You are on a path towards awakening. Wake up in every moment.

Waking up is coming back to your body, and feeling the quiet joy or less quiet pain of being alive. When you see how your thoughts about how things are carry you away from how things are, take a breath, listen to the sounds around you, feel the temperature on you skin, see what you are looking at, smell the aroma in the air and you are awake.

When you practice mindfulness and mediation regularly, awakening again and again, at some point you realize that you are not separate from everything else, at that moment you have another awakening. That is the path.

I wish you great peace and happiness as you pass in and out of slumber and wake up to each moment. Wake up NOW!

Here are some posts I’ve written on awakening,

Awakening and Enlightenment

Awakening Compassion With Pain

Zen and Mindfulness