WELCOMING YOUR BRAIN TO THE NEW YEAR!
I am offering free new year’s meditation and life coaching sessions to those who need support for sanity and a gentle voice defining and orienting toward your vision.
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WAKING UP TO A NEW DAY
Back in the 70′, meditation master Chogyam Trungpa would begin his talks with a rousing “Good Morning!” – although his talks usually started later than scheduled. Sometimes much later. With the 70’s being the 70’s, and considering his commitment to meet his western students as they were, some talks began so late students had to be roused from sleep to attend. In those wee hours, his usual greeting of “good morning” was not entirely ironic.
“Good Morning” seemed an appropriate greeting for a talk on meditation, any time of day. In particular, Trungpa felt that meditation represented a new beginning and a fresh start everytime we come back to the present. Rather than admonish his students when their minds wandered, he encouraged them to see coming back to the breath as an opportunity to wake up. Trungpa famously said that the only problem we have is believing we have a problem. When our mind is distracted and we notice that distraction, it is not a problem. In fact, it’s an opportunity to wake up.
But how did we know we were distracted?
That moment of remembering comes so quickly we hardly regard it – except to berate ourselves for being distracted. The moment of complaint appears to be our first thought, as though the Buddha’s were saying, “wake up you asshole!” And instead of waking up, we’ll further occlude ourselves with obsessive recrimination. For some of us, this happens first thing every morning. But, this first complaint we acknowledge is not our first thought. Our first thought is simply a message from the universe reminding us to come back. It’s a sharp razor cut to our web of distraction. Only that. There is no need for discussion or elaboration. And why do we assume we’ve done something wrong, anyway? In fact, that moment of noticing our distraction IS waking up. Each time we notice we’re not awake is an opportunity to wake up. And each time we notice, and have the courage to come back to the present, we are doing good work. Very good work. We are training our mind to be awake.
Trungpa pointed to this moment of noticing we are lost in thought as a profound moment of awakening. He called it the “jerk of awareness.” And then he told his students to consider him their jerk of awareness. Helping students learn to awaken was his primary role. From the moment he came to the west, Trungpa understood that it was his mission to be of service to this new world. He understood that being an exalted Lama made him a commodity in this materialistic culture. In western society we are trained toward materialism and tend toward theism in relation to spiritual teachers. We believe they are above us and should perhaps save us from ourselves. In this way, by deifying the teacher, and elevating our perception of meditation practice, we were safely separated from the process. We could collect teachers and teachings as though they were artifacts. The more we collect, the greater our material sense of self worth. We post pretty slogans to our wall, but do any of the teachings actually change us? Trungpa felt he needed to de-elevate himself in order to be of the people. He wanted to express the teachings so they might actually penetrate our conditioned materialistic superficial layer. He wanted to speak directly to a basic goodness that lies below materialism so the teachings might actually have an effect.
To this end, Rinpoche began to open the doors to his home and met with students as friends. He removed the robes that he felt served to elevate him. He wore cowboy shirts and jeans, smoked cigarettes and drank Colt 45. He wasn’t there to save anyone or change anything. He was there to learn from this new world and to become the jerk of awareness in his students’ lives. Each time we were brave enough to come back to the present, he was there reminding us that we can do it. We can live full and complete lives. Good Morning. The choice is ours in every moment. We can separate ourselves from our lives by making ourselves a big deal, or we can keep coming back to simply waking up. Good Morning.
And each moment we are awake, we can begin to see more clearly. And as we see more clearly, we learn to drop the robes of our habit mindedness and see past superficial materialism into the truth of each moment. I am here. I am awake. How can I reduce the pretensions in my life and learn to be here honestly, simply and directly? Just me without the robes. Just me as I am.
Good Morning. How can help?
A contemporary of Trungpa’s was the Soto Zen Master Suzuki, Roshi. His book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind is a classic manual of meditation in which he teaches that we can adopt the mind of a beginner, which is already there. This means remembering our awakened state, which has been there all along. Enlightenment is not an achievable state. Rather it is a place of no achievement. It is a place of allowing ourselves to be just so without artifice. This is sometimes called “Naked Mind.” Naken Mind cannot be achieved, it has to be remembered. Enter the “jerk of awareness.”
But how do we achieve the unachievable? We can train our minds to see beyond the “thingness” into the wholeness of experience, by recognizing when we are distracted and then building the neural networking to return to the present without clinging to a mask or a concept. In time, we see past the seemingly solid facades of our mental constructs and begin to see the vibrancy of life around us. We train ourselves to be wide eyed, like an awakening child. That moment we realize we are distracted is a sacred moment. It is a crack in the armour of solid mind. These cracks, or gaps in our reasoning, allow the sunlight of a new day to shine into our shadowed life. Each moment we notice we are off course, instead of berating ourselves, or creating a complicated story, we can come back to the naked present, just now and just so. Each time we return is an opportunity to experience the joy of waking up.
In time, we learn to see life with new eyes as a perpetual discovery of the present. Instead of hiding behind all we’ve done and become, we can see through the eyes of a child and just be. Like a child, discovering its own toes, we can be amazed at everything we see. When was the last time we laughed for no reason? Smiled at the barista? Noticed birds outside our window? Or just felt the tenderness of our own heart for no reason at all. When was the last morning we awoke with a smile, instead of the well cultivated cynicism we hide behind. And if we do dae to wake up smiling, how soon is is before we douse ourselves in anxious misery to meet the day?
This year can be a time of change, if we want it. We can turn our mind away from the usual guilt, compulsion and complaint, toward the possibility of openness. Instead of living the same old shit, we can look out the window and see what’s out there. Good morning.