Beyond Heroics

Resting in the Waves-Epilogue (Beyond Heroics): Recognizing our own habits of mind, moving beyond the home base, reminders for how to engage with the practice. Dōgen wrote: To study the way is to study the self. To study the self is to lose the self. To lose the self is to be enlightened by all things. To be enlightened by all things is to remove the barrier between self and other.

Transcript

This is Amanda Kimball reading from Resting in the Waves by Doug Kraft.

Epilogue Beyond Heroics The gray sky hinted at the coming dawn as I awoke early one morning.

I could have used more sleep,

But I was wide awake,

So I sat up to meditate.

Leela,

Our cat,

Mewed and purred as she hopped onto my lap and curled up.

I closed my eyes,

Recited the refuges,

And began mentally composing this epilogue.

It was a few minutes before I realized I was explaining rather than meditating.

I six-arred and returned to sending well-being into the world.

For forty-five minutes,

My mind drifted back and forth between ruminating,

Six-arring,

And meditating.

As I became more aware,

The stories and thoughts slipped into the background and the processes of thinking and musing came into the foreground.

Suddenly,

The mind dropped into deep silence.

One moment it had been chatting,

The next it was empty.

There had been too much energy in the mind.

Noticing the processes allowed the chatting to burn off excess energy.

The six-ars also helped.

When energy was released and relaxed,

Awareness dropped into stillness all by itself.

After a while,

Familiar images arose again in the mind.

I didn't hold onto them or push them away.

I just noticed the processes,

Thinking,

Imagining,

Explaining,

And six-arred.

The pictures faded.

Other images arose and faded.

It was not a great sitting by conventional standards,

But as I got up to engage the day,

I realized I was smiling quietly.

My mind felt ordinary,

Yet slightly luminous.

Habits We all have mental habits that are so familiar that we overlook them even when they're right under our noses.

These are ways that the mind dulls or yearns or turns away.

Rather than see these habits clearly,

We quietly assume,

That's no big deal,

It's just the way I am,

And turn attention elsewhere.

We identify with these habits and move on.

Bringing more awareness to habitual tendencies does not feel glorious or heroic,

Yet we can't imagine and suffer when they ramble around unchaperoned.

One of my mental habits is explaining things,

Like I did in that early morning sitting.

Suggested exercise What are some of your habits?

When your mind assumes,

That's just who I am,

What is actually going on?

Can you bring more kindness and clarity to those mental patterns?

We used to think that the most important parts of the Buddha's meditation were,

Oh wow,

Moments of deep insight or exalted states.

They do provide inspiration and motivation,

But for every inspiring or heroic moment,

There are 10 or 20 moments like that morning when my mind plodded along in its old familiar habits.

Bringing these patterns out of the background and into the foreground may be the most helpful thing we can do to free ourselves from unnecessary inner disturbances.

This way of practice is neither flashy nor heroic.

Rather than try to fix ourselves or transcend mundane awareness,

We let the patterns play out as we bring more mindfulness and heartfulness to them.

As awareness penetrates them,

We see them more clearly.

As we see them more clearly,

We identify with them less.

As we identify less,

They fade into the background and dissolve.

How we treat the everyday mind is more important than how flashy the inspirations are.

The deeper the awareness goes into our ordinary consciousness,

The clearer and simpler it becomes and the freer we become.

Beyond the plateau.

In the early years of my practice,

Diligently staying with the sensations of the breath was helpful because sensations are always in the present.

Some of the mind's speculating,

Imagining,

And rehashing subsided as awareness stayed more in the moment.

When I became familiar with the jhanas,

Staying with the qualities in the mind helped it to quiet even more.

These practices were heroic in the sense of me trying to overcome the mind's errant tendencies to roam hither and yon.

But they only took me so far.

Eventually,

My meditation plateaued.

I thought one way to improve my practice was to sit longer,

Perhaps four hours.

Ironically,

This ambitious plan quickly showed me the limitations of heroics.

It revealed how much I'd been subtly holding my attention on the breath or uplifted states.

I could do it for a few hours,

But four hours?

Even the most genteel striving was too tiring over long stretches.

I couldn't pull it off.

My choice was either to sit for no more than an hour or two,

Or to let the mind do what it was going to do and to relax more deeply.

I decided to give the longer sittings another try,

Even if it meant drifting more.

It still required some effort to remember to be aware and present.

But I didn't try to hold attention on an object.

I let it roam where it would,

And did my best to simply and heartfully notice what it did.

I became more interested in how the awareness moved than in forcing it onto a predetermined object.

This allowed me to sit longer without getting antsy.

I was surprised that in time the mind calmed itself,

Or more precisely,

It just slipped naturally into deeper and deeper stillness,

Like on that morning meditating with Leela.

Simply paying attention to what the mind was doing,

Thinking,

Explaining,

Complaining,

Ruminating,

Created an environment in which it became calmer and clearer.

I realized that when the mind wandered,

It wasn't because it was bad.

It just had too much energy.

Wandering awareness allowed that excitement to run out without stimulating more of it.

Attending to the stories,

Ideas,

Plans,

And concepts just triggered more energy.

But if I let all those stories drift into the background as I patiently watched the processes in the mind,

It settled down and eventually dropped into a deep stillness.

Reminders To be sure,

This didn't always work.

Sometimes the daydreams went on and on.

Sometimes the mind dropped into stillness.

Sometimes it dropped into an epic tale.

The shift from controlled to uncontrolled awareness is deceptively simple and deceptively difficult.

Here are a few reminders of techniques that support this shift.

You won't need all of these,

So pick a few.

Notice how your mind is behaving rather than what it is focused on.

Notice the processes in the mind,

Thinking,

Explaining,

Ruminating,

Complaining,

Daydreaming,

Etc.

Let them be in the foreground.

Meanwhile,

Let the content,

The storylines,

Ideas,

To-do lists,

Etc.

Drift into the background.

Don't push the content away.

That just creates aversion and tension.

Another way to think of this is to let awareness be in the present here and now.

Stories and plans are always in the past or future or someplace other than right here.

Be here now,

Gently and clearly.

Shift away from controlling awareness to simply observing it.

If the qualities of your mind seem elusive or hard to recognize,

Notice the processes instead.

Once the processes are clear,

The qualities will be easier to see.

If there are any thoughts or images floating through your mind,

Relax into them.

If your mind feels sticky,

Slightly edgy or thick,

Relax into these qualities.

Balance your mind.

If it tends to try too hard,

Balance it by allowing awareness to relax enough to seem a bit lazy.

If it tends to relax into dullness,

Balance it by bringing in enough energy to seem a little edgy.

If your mind doesn't feel slightly glowing,

Invite luminosity to reveal itself.

Patience.

You don't have to fix the mind or take care of it.

It's enough to relate to it with kindness and clarity.

Then it will take care of you.

Enjoy.

Getting to where we are.

To awaken to what's already here,

We don't change ourselves into something new.

We don't even vanquish old habits.

We just let clearer and clearer awareness of them until they recede and evaporate.

Freedom is not getting to where we are.

In little getting,

T.

S.

Eliot put it this way,

We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

When we arrive where we are,

We don't find our true self,

We realize there never was a self apart from everything.

This feels simple and ordinary,

Less of an oh wow and more of an of course.

If there is no self,

There is nothing to suffer.

That doesn't free the self,

It dissolves it.

There's nothing left.

No past,

No future,

No there apart from here.

Dogen wrote,

To study the way is to study the self.

To study the self is to lose the self.

To lose the self is to be enlightened by all things.

To be enlightened by all things is to remove the barrier between self and other.

Beyond heroics.

Heroic meditation techniques and flashy results are good for Hollywood movies.

Watching the mundane habits of the mind with kind,

Clear awareness can be humbling and it is freeing.

Rather than aspire to spiritual heroics,

We can aspire to be like the little duck.

He can rest while the Atlantic heaves because he rests in the Atlantic.

If you have a hint of absolute truth,

Don't hold it tightly.

If you see relative truth,

Hold it lightly.

Practice moving back and forth between them.

He reposes in the immediate as if it were infinity,

Which it is.

He has made himself part of the boundless by easing himself into it just where it touches him.

Right now,

In this simple,

Ordinary moment.

Reviews

Excellent talk
Thank you