Meditation As Self Care

As we move through the world doing our good work, tending relationships, being in service to our communities, and developing our purpose and skills, for many of us exhaustion and overwhelm are close companions. The concept of "self care" began in activist communities and spread to the general culture as the need deepened for real ways to restore wellbeing amid everything we're managing. This Buddhist talk explores the practice of meditation in stillness as an important form of self care, both for ourselves and to support social engagement.

Transcript

So So we started in the beginning of the year with an investigation that I've been calling Dharma Life Reset.

We've been looking at some of the basic and building blocks of a good life in the Dharma,

Strong practice on the path,

From,

You know,

Basic basics of well-being like sleep and food and,

You know,

Basic nourishment,

How we use our attention,

How we gather and protect our attention in this time and age.

And that,

You know,

Expanded a little broadly quickly because of the political crisis in this country.

And we spent a couple of weeks talking about engaging social engagement practice,

Political action practice,

How it relates to the internal practices that are the,

You know,

The heart of the meditative tradition.

And so I'm going to use tonight a bit as a bridge between those two things,

Between this conversation about the socially engaged and the activist response to global crises,

To the climate crisis,

To political crises,

And the internal and meditative practices that are the heart of the inward side of the tradition.

And the way that I want to bridge this is to talk a bit tonight about meditation as self-care.

And so meditation itself,

The practices of sitting in stillness or bringing the body to stillness and gathering the attention as not just the heart of inquiry or the heart of dharma practice directly,

But very much as a medicine or an intervention supporting well-being through the rest of our day.

For a lot of folks,

And this may be you all the time or at different times in your practice,

This way of thinking about meditation,

That meditation helps the rest of my day go well and helps me engage better in my relationships in my community.

For some folks,

This is how they always think about meditation,

That that's what meditation is for,

That it's a kind of medicine for stress,

Right?

This is the origin of like mindfulness-based stress reduction and all of these ways that mindfulness turns out to be supportive for psychological health,

For energetic health,

Even for endocrine and nervous system health,

The physiological types of health are impacted by the calming and focusing aspects of meditation and mindfulness.

So for some folks,

This is already central,

But those of you who hang out with me a lot will have heard me push against this idea that meditation is primarily an instrumental good,

Like it's good because it does something useful for us.

Often,

I'll emphasize meditation and the kind of inquiry that's at the heart of dharma practice as pointing toward different ends than well-being and ends that are valuable by themselves,

Separate from whatever well-being or reduction of stress they also bring about.

So tonight,

I want to turn toward the reduction of stress,

Prevention of burnout aspects of meditation.

And so to do this,

I want to start with just almost like a definition of the formal practice of meditation.

Often when we say meditation,

What we are meaning is some practice where either,

And usually it's the body is in some kind of stillness,

Or some aspect of our process process is focused in a kind of stillness.

So like there's sitting meditation or lying down meditation,

Let's say,

Or standing meditation,

The three static postures or still postures,

Where what we are doing is we're bringing the body to stillness,

Which is already a change from most of our activity.

With the body in stillness,

The senses wake up because we're doing less.

And so then the perceiving gets brighter over the doing.

Often we bring attention to the processes of sensing and what's happening in the present,

Not always,

But some often.

So we might bring attention to the breathing or to the little swaying of the body.

If we're standing or sitting upright,

We might bring attention to the process of sounds arising and passing,

Or of the sensations of the posture of the body kind of vibrating or making a field.

All of these are placements of attention that connect with what's happening here and now.

There are other objects of meditation or placements of attention that happen in stillness.

So there's the traditional practices of the casino,

Where you would focus on a color field,

Like white or blue,

Or the sense of space,

Or water or earth as a consistent field of focus.

There are practices,

Of course,

The practices like the Brahma-Viharas,

Where you're focusing on an emotional or energetic quality like loving-kindness or compassion,

Joy or equanimity.

Filling the body with that quality,

Maybe directing it at individuals or classes of beings,

Or maybe just radiating it around.

But in all of those cases,

We are bringing attention to one stream of experience and stabilizing it there.

Then in some forms of vipassana,

Body quite still,

Senses awake.

We're just noting where the attention goes without letting it latch onto anything,

But really understanding the way that perception flows through the body and mind.

That now there's hearing,

Now there's seeing,

Now there's a taste,

Now there's a sensation,

Now there's breathing,

Now there's knowing.

This is just how attention works.

So in all these kinds of meditation,

There's something that's being brought to stability,

Whether it's the body or it's the quality of attention.

In that stability,

Some qualities become more available to us.

So calm and tranquility become more available.

Often focus can become more available.

Sometimes feeling can become more available.

So in all of these ways,

We're coming out of doing,

And we're coming into perceiving in these various ways.

We use meditation also to refer to some things we might do in movement,

Particularly in this tradition,

Walking meditation,

Where the body isn't still,

And maybe walking back and forth or slow walking down a path.

But attention or awareness is brought to stability.

So I'm staying with the sensation in the soles of the feet,

Or I'm staying with the sense of the whole body walking,

And I'm not letting attention move.

Or I'm staying with the breath,

The same as I would in sitting,

Even though the body's walking.

So formal meditation is when we put the body into one of these structured postures or activities,

And we direct the attention in such a way that we're emphasizing stability,

Clarity,

And continuity of attention.

Then there's informal meditation or non-meditation,

What we're doing when we're not sitting or doing walking meditation or something.

This is where we are endeavoring to practice throughout the various activities that fill our day.

So to stay mindful or present when we are doing the chores around the house,

Or we're in conversation with somebody,

Or we're doing our work.

In all of these activities,

There are background qualities that our practice supports,

Like being aware of what's happening,

Remembering our intention to be kind.

A lot of it has to do with remembering our intentions as we go through the day,

Remembering to be kind,

To be generous,

To be warm with ourselves and others,

To not judge,

To not get lost in thought,

Especially unskillful thought.

And so with these as our formal practices,

This is often what we teach,

Is do a formal practice for some period each day,

And then in the informal times,

Bring mindfulness and loving kindness with you the whole time,

Bring your intention with you the whole time.

We can do this with a variety of overarching intentions,

Or we can bring different focuses to our practice of doing this.

One traditional focus would be to emphasize stability and continuity of attention.

So in formal meditation,

I might be doing concentration practices,

Really working to relax,

Bring tranquility in,

Not become distracted,

Maintain a very steady focus.

And then through the day,

I'm doing a softer version of the same thing.

I'm really watching the tendency of the mind to wander,

The tendency to move away from steadiness,

And I'm keeping the attention on a very short leash,

Ideally in a very relaxed way,

But without letting it wander.

So that's one intention,

Because there's a recognition in this tradition,

In the understanding of the Buddha,

That this kind of tranquility of mind is powerful,

Pleasurable,

Nourishing,

And conducive to insight and deep well-being and understanding.

There's another kind of intention we might bring,

Which is sometimes a kind of vipassana or inquiry sort of attention.

And sometimes it's more of an emotional intelligence kind of intention,

Where I'm not so much trying to get calm and stay calm,

Or get deeply stabilized in the mind,

Which is always helpful.

Sometimes my intention is different.

Sometimes,

And this is very common,

I think,

For us who have to really figure out who we are and what we're doing in relationship a lot,

In community and in family,

Etc.

,

Is to be present with what's happening with an aim to understanding it.

And that's particularly through the emotional and relational.

So when there's some anxiety in my system,

I'm not trying to just get it to diminish and come back to concentration,

But I really want to understand it.

I want to understand what's pulling my attention in this habitual way.

What am I getting caught in or lost in?

Is there a way that I can understand these states so that I can move through them more quickly,

Feel more grounded in relation to them,

Cultivate states such that they don't arise as much?

Can I resolve some of the underlying traumas or stresses or tensions?

Sometimes this kind of practice brings me toward directing mindfulness to understand something that's going on in a relationship,

Where I might really be thinking about like,

Oh,

Here's what's happening between me and this friend or me and my child or partner or whatever,

And really feeling it.

This is what they're doing,

Saying,

Being.

This is how I'm feeling,

Doing,

Saying.

Is there a feeling here that I'm missing?

Do I need to open some aspect of this relationship or this relational experience to understand it more?

So this is an intention that I can bring in.

I want to understand,

Become more clear,

Become less confused.

It's a kind of therapeutic sort of direction.

These two basically parallel the core divisions or aspects of the practice of cultivation for the Buddha,

Samatha and Vipassana.

Samatha,

The tranquility and gathering,

And Vipassana,

The inquiry and understanding parts.

If I have the intention then to bring my meditation practice into service of well-being,

Particularly in relation to wanting it to support states of well-being through my whole day,

I want my meditation to be nourishing,

To help prevent burnout,

To help me deal with overwhelm.

I want it to be supportive of my other activities.

I think this is a particular kind of intention where the meditation is really a kind of medicine,

A kind of training,

But not for insight for its own sake and not just for tranquility,

But how can the meditation be really productive of more ease and also help protect me?

Because there can be this recognition,

And this is really coming partly from activist discourse,

Social engagement discourse,

That essentially the ills of the world are so huge,

There's so much to do,

There's so much wrong,

That if I become ungrounded in my attempt to attend to the ills of the world,

I can very easily get overwhelmed or burn out,

Because there's far more than I can do alone.

There's far more than I can do in the span of a lifetime.

There's far more in a certain way than can be done by all of us working together,

Although that's the best possible scenario.

Everyone works together to make things better.

Let's do that.

Even when we do that,

There will always be more to do because of the nature of the world,

Because of the nature of greed,

Hatred,

And delusion in all of our hearts.

There will always be challenges in the communal field to attend to.

If I'm not wise in my own understanding and actions around this infinite well of challenge,

There's also an infinite well of beauty,

But it doesn't break my heart in the same way.

The infinite well of beauty doesn't become overwhelming to the nervous system in the same way that the infinite well of need and challenge does,

Because our nervous systems are oriented toward protection more than they are toward appreciation.

Or maybe I'll say protection comes first and then appreciation builds on that.

If you don't feel safe,

It's hard to drop into beauty.

If you do feel safe,

Then you can add on to that the appreciation of beauty and awe and wonder.

But it's very hard when there's acute danger to have easy access to beauty,

Awe,

And wonder.

Some amount of protection has to come first.

It's our nervous system's habit to perceive the infinite well of need and challenge in the world.

If there's not wisdom and some amount of equanimity,

Perceiving that the vastness of need can very commonly lead to disorganization in the heart,

Disorganization through the nervous system,

Overwhelm,

Collapse,

Despair,

Burnout.

There's no way I can fix it,

But I care.

And so some part of me wants to try,

Or I'm not even trying to fix it all.

It's not even like that.

I completely understand that I can only attend to some tiny amount of it,

But there's still so much of it.

And the causes and conditions of ordinary material life are already crushing,

Like just keeping a roof over my family's head and feeding everybody is already enough to be overwhelmed and burned out trying to accomplish,

Much less anything I might add on to that.

So there can be that as well,

That the systemic conditions are conducive of so much too muchness.

So then we might say,

Okay,

Before my meditation practice can provide me the deep,

Deep home for my soul almost,

That stillness and tranquility can be,

Or provide the extraordinary opening to the truth of subtle change and selflessness,

Before I can do any of that,

I actually need my practice to help me survive my life,

To actually help me just get by in the world as it is.

And particularly if my work is in any kind of service,

Which could be parenting,

Which could be activist work,

Could be any way that I'm trying to help anyone other than myself be well in this world and be safer and more cared for.

Okay,

So that's all the preamble to say that formal meditation can be a beautiful practice of self-care and nourishment and prevention of these too muchnesses,

The symptoms of too much,

Burnout,

Overwhelm,

Collapse,

Despair.

So how does it do that?

How can our practice be helpful in that way?

Each of the formal aspects of practice can help.

So one of them,

This core ground is tranquility,

Pasadhi in Pali.

The quality cultivated when we set down distraction,

Bring the attention to some amount of gatheredness and relax through the whole body.

What we're going for when we are cultivating tranquility,

When we're doing this kind of relaxing,

Is not just those first couple layers of just relax at the end of the day,

Set down the work,

Set down all the things,

Just drop it.

There's that,

That's the doorway.

But beyond that,

When we say relax,

We've talked about this in the context of the fourth step in anapanasati,

Calming the bodily formation.

It doesn't just mean relax,

Like soften the musculature.

I think it more deeply means find deactivation or down regulation through the nervous system.

So it's not just that I'm not relaxed,

It's that some part of my protective mechanism has not released its task of trying to keep me and those I love safe.

There's an amount of activation through the nervous system that says,

I'm startled.

I am angry or afraid or both.

I am overwhelmed.

I am some amount of trying to protect myself and those I care about from harm.

That activation in the system will prevent deepening in meditation.

It'll prevent tranquility as we've talked about a lot,

But it also just prevents basic wellbeing.

We don't sleep well.

We don't feel nourished.

We can't actually come back to our work refreshed if there are layers of activation through the nervous system,

Through the subtle body that have a hard time deactivating.

This is the core of trauma work is to find those activations that are bound in the body.

They may have been bound in the body for most of our life from the harms of childhood and from the systemic harms that surround us.

So one of the things meditation does then in the pathway toward meditative tranquility is we come into contact with every layer of our non-tranquil self.

I sit down and there's my wild mind.

That's an expression of not tranquility.

I find the breath.

I practice setting down the thoughts.

I come back to sensation and maybe I drop some layers and I drop into a layer that's mostly feeling like,

Oh,

I'm just,

I'm angry.

I'm grieving.

It all hurts.

My heart is broken.

There's a pulsing energy through my whole system.

There's the activation that manifests as feeling and energy.

I stay with that and that moves through and it resolves and it happens in waves over and over,

Over time.

Past that or as those waves resolve and deactivate,

There can often be a very still layer.

Like the still layer that's there after you've been really angry and it has just passed through.

You got to express it or talk it or do something about it or just let it wash through you and you're stripped clean.

There's that clear air after a fierce storm feeling and the air is so clean and you're so clean after that passes through.

In meditation,

After we pass through a layer of intense feeling,

Very often there can just be this wide open space.

It's really just the space of the absence of intense energy,

But it feels incredible because the absence of intensity can be startlingly pleasurable.

It has its own kind of intensity.

This just keeps happening.

There keep being layers.

Sometimes after a few of those,

There's a layer that's super joyful and there's a layer that I call the creative layer that comes where you resolve a few layers of old stuck stuff and suddenly there's a book that you could write and five songs and there's a dance to make and you could do so much.

The creative layer,

Lots of distraction in the creative layer,

But it's really cool.

If you get through that,

It's really quiet on the other side of that and that just keeps going.

It more or less goes in oscillations of layer of activity,

Which is also activation and then a layer of stillness,

Layer of activation,

Layer of stillness and it swings.

As we are doing this,

And this is a lot of what happens on retreat,

But it happens day-to-day in our meditation as well.

It happens just in the course of our life when mindfulness is steady.

We'll have these waves of contacting something deeper,

Finding our way through it and then finding a reprieve on the other side.

The reprieve moments,

So the processing moments,

They're intense.

They don't always feel nourishing when we're in them,

But as we come through,

First of all,

It's healthy to just do them.

You have to just process your stuff.

Meditation is a structure in which basically you get still,

Your stuff comes up and you stay with it until it moves through to a tranquil layer.

Maybe that takes days,

Seasons,

Whatever,

Or just a few minutes.

Of course,

It does all those things in fractals,

Always oscillating between activity and settling.

But the settling is a very particular nourishment.

I think the settling and the deactivation is one of the primary medicines that makes meditation a kind of self-care.

It is a kind of self-care to process your stuff,

But that's also work in a certain way.

The thing that's radical about meditation is that it's not therapy where you're processing in conversation,

Which has its own activation.

It's not work,

It's not collaboration,

It's not artistic creation,

All of which are beautiful and are primarily engagements with that which is outside ourself.

But something happens in meditation where we are thrown back onto our,

I'm going to sound like a mid-20th century existentialist here,

Our fundamental aloneness in the world.

When you really just land,

It's just you.

It's just you,

No matter how interwoven you are with others.

In meditation,

We finally land in the just me and the cosmos,

Me and what is space.

Then when there's deactivation,

When I come through some content,

Which is usually relational in some way,

That content,

I spin through my relationship with others in this way or that way.

Then there's this moment of tranquility or calm.

It could be a short moment,

It could be quite extended.

But in that,

There's a wildly different kind of presence than we often notice in the flow of everyday life.

That kind of presence for sure happens in ordinary life.

It happens when you go walking alone in the woods or wherever is your beautiful place,

At the edge of the ocean or with somebody,

But there is something about the aloneness in it where it's different if you're just alone.

You enter that kind of space and solitude is not comfortable for everyone.

Sometimes it has its own,

It triggers trauma symptoms of its own,

Depending on where we've come from,

What our experience has been.

But the nourishment of meditation often comes when we get some glimpse of the simple and cleansing and profound kind of beauty of just this aloneness,

Just you.

Your life is something all the content can be passed through and there are these resting moments.

The resting moment,

I think,

Is so nourishing partly because the thing that becomes overwhelmed or burnout or collapse or despair is really a sense that there's too much stimulus to be really processed.

There's too much going on that I'm taking in from the world,

Information,

Activity,

Conversation,

News,

Reality,

People.

It takes a while for me to process intensity and the world is so intense and people are intense.

Then there becomes this backlog and the backlog manifests as a kind of like,

I get frozen because there's so much to process,

To understand,

To be with,

To feel.

Part of what happens in meditation is that I actually feel through some of it without adding new stuff.

It's one thing to read the news,

Process it,

Be like,

And then just jump up and run to work and have to be processing something else at work.

Then I jump out and I'm parenting and it's just like,

There's so much.

Even if it's beautiful,

Like,

Oh,

Oh,

Oh.

If I never stop,

I'm never really catching up with these waves of energy that are passing through the body as I interact with the world.

In meditation,

I stop and you know when you stop after you've been running hard,

But there's a energetic sway.

It's like you stop in meditation and you get hit with the first five waves of things that were right behind you.

A whole bunch of thoughts.

Sometimes I don't even get through those.

It's time to get up,

But if you can stay with it or day after day or little glimpses,

Oh,

A bunch of thoughts,

A bunch of feelings,

A bunch of impulses,

A bunch of stuff.

Then there's these pauses where I'm actually caught up with myself a little bit.

I could pause.

I could let myself feel the intensity of what's going on politically,

The elephant in the room.

I could let myself feel what's going on in my country or in the world or with the climate.

If I try to feel the whole thing,

It's way too much,

But I could stop and get really still.

Maybe just one piece of it comes forward,

Just one little piece.

You don't even have to choose it.

It comes forward by itself.

I could feel just that.

Often it's a photograph for me,

A photograph of a person pulled from a wrecked building or just somebody I know doing something real there in the world,

Standing in the prairie with trucks all around,

Whatever it is.

You see or you feel or you hear that one thing and you let it actually process through your tissues and come to the end of it.

How often do we get to slow down with one piece of information,

Actually let it rock us and feel it and then come to the other side of it and come back to ourself and not add something new?

I think one of the core medicines of meditation,

It's not just the training in stillness or the training in seeing clearly,

But is how meditation can interrupt the flood that's pouring over us.

All right,

Here's a poem to end.

This is a translation by Susan Murcott of a poem from the Terigata.

This is the verses of the elder nuns from the early tradition in her book,

First Buddhist Women.

This is her version of the poem of the elder,

Dantika,

Who joined the community of Bhikkhunis under Pajapati.

She says this,

As I left my daytime resting place on Vulture Peak,

I saw an elephant come up on the riverbank after its bath.

A man took a hook and said to the elephant,

Give me your foot.

The elephant stretched out its foot.

The man mounted.

Seeing what was wild before gone tame under human hands,

I went into the forest and concentrated my mind.

Seeing what was wild before gone tame under human hands,

I went into the forest and concentrated my mind.

She comes out of meditation and sees this being,

This elephant,

Be captured and then ridden away by a human.

She understands what it means for something that was wild to be chained or enclosed.

And she understands that a response to this is to go into the forest and concentrate the mind.

And I think she understands what we're speaking of here,

Where first of all,

It has to be processed,

Seeing an elephant captured and ridden away.

Maybe that's heartbreaking.

Maybe it's just a reminder that nothing is safe from capture.

Maybe it's a reminder that her own mind is not safe from being captured until she finds freedom.

And she hasn't found freedom yet.

She has to go into the forest and concentrate the mind.

This is a path poem.

Seeing the world,

Recognizing it for what it is,

Seeing the suffering,

The dukkha that's there,

I went into the forest and concentrated my mind.

She's not running away.

She's already been meditating.

She was on Vulture Peak meditating.

She came out,

She saw the elephant,

She went back.

Presumably she does this all the time.

This is not a tradition of leaving the world for a kind of ideal hermitage.

The monks and nuns have to come down into the village and beg for food every single day.

They don't store food overnight.

They don't make cheese so that they can be economically independent.

They beg every day.

So they come into contact every day with the city.

And then they go back into the forest and concentrate the mind.

And so I think whatever is in our daily life,

Where we come out,

We go into our work,

Into the social,

The political field,

And we see a man capturing an elephant,

Riding it away.

Feeling all of what's there in that moment of seeing that,

Of knowing the world for what it is.

And then we go back to the forest.

Each morning or evening before bed or whenever your moment is to come into stillness.

Concentrate the mind.

Because the next day you're going to go back out and you're going to see the elephant again and the man capturing.

That's what men do.

And you go back in the forest and you concentrate the mind.

So may our meditation be deeply nourishing.

May it protect the mind.

May it protect the heart from capture.

May it be a place where we can come back to ourselves,

Become,

Get more caught up with our self,

With our heart in this moment,

With everything that's flooding in.

So every day a little touching in to stillness.

As medicine,

As a deep home and refuge.

And then we go back out,

Down to the river,

With the men and the elephants and all the rest.

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A reminder of why we practice
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