How to Meditate when you just can't

Today I found myself feeling sorry about a woman who left my meditation group years ago because she just couldn't stand that monkey mind. She was in a sobriety program, which she also dropped later. I don't doubt that mind was whispering or shouting things about her life, present and past, that were hard for her to hear, and she didn't have the skills to work with that. Now I wish I had told her, You don't have to sit still in this group and meditate for twenty minutes at a time. You can meditate standing up for five minutes. You can meditate walking alone outside. Or flat on your back, as I was doing this morning when this thought train pulled out.

I was very tired this morning. It's not much good guessing why; I just easily go into this exhaustion. So this morning Tom and I did one of my favorite things, running around doing Saturday morning errands, him driving the Odyssey (nice metaphor), me enjoying the saturated colors of this hazy day following a day of rain. First, to White Castle for breakfast sandwiches and coffee, then to the farmer's market to pick up some unpasteurized cider and our CSA vegetables (more squash!), then to the post office to mail CD's of our teacher's talks to people who had ordered them, then to the local gourmet market to buy a pot roast for tonight. It is hard to imagine a more luxurious life, and my part was pretty easy, but I started our tired and got tireder.

So when we got home I took off my shoes, unrolled my yoga mat, got the timer, put the sign on my study door, and lay down for twenty measured minutes. Right away I found myself thinking, of course, and it went like this: Am I meditating or resting? I recalled how Daniel once mentioned something called "resting in the breath." Sort of like resting in emptiness, I supposed. I tried to let go small mind, the individual Wun that started thinking about blogging on this subject, but that wasn't very successful. I thought, Maybe I'm too tired to meditate.

So I did rest. I don't even do that well, for like many people in whom the element of Air is dominant, I wiggle my toes, rearrange my hands, move my neck into better alignment. No use trying to do it well, no need, no teacher watching over me. I thought about Issan Dorsey, the monk whose death in the hospice he started is recorded in a book about him. Toward the end, he stopped going down to the Zendo to meditate, I gather stopped meditating altogether. It's too hard, he is reported to have said.

Meditation is work. That's why it usually goes better first thing in the morning, when you're fresh. And I had the time last year when infections and low hemoglobin had me too tired to meditate. I thought of Issan then, too, with gratitude.

Maybe he was too hard on himself. Maybe there are ways to meditate lightly, to do what you can, still maintaining the essentials. What are those? The intention, I think. It has to move from being the hope to feel peaceful or to rest to being something more, like the hope to be fully human, to be entirely with it for this moment.

Then what? Everyone would like you to have a nice straight spine uniting sky and earth in your body - but if you can't sit up, you can meditate lying flat on your back. It's just easier to fall asleep. The same goes for the general advice (in the school I've trained in) to have the eyes half-open, the gaze down, soft, unseeing. That, too, helps keep you from drifting away in dreams. And from having restless eyes, always looking for stimulation. Try it, I'd say.

How long to meditate? Everyone's got ideas on that, too - who is this Everyone, anyway? Some people recommend an hour, some several hours a day. You can bounce from one teacher to another and always feel incapable of living up to the thing. I recommend not doing that. Really. The answer is not out there.

An interesting point is that teachers almost never descrube their own practice. Why? Because what's good for them is not good for you. And you should not be imitating anyone, no matter how you admire them, but finding your own way. Maybe that's meditating on the bus on the way to work. And here's a link to someone who describes doing exactly that. p.s. More on getting organized to come. I'm still processing how it has worked for me.
[image: Foliage from poet Karin Gottshall's blog]

Love the monkey

I was sorry recently when our minister said in a sermon that he had tried meditation for six months, but "I couldn't stand that monkey mind." I was afraid this statement, backed by a minister's authority, might have the unhappy effect of assuring people that an unpleasant experience is enough reason to give up practice.

"Monkey mind" is a common metaphor in Buddhism - the mind as a nervous monkey, jumping from branch to branch, chattering and shrieking. No peace and quiet, not the bliss we are all hoping to find.

But the fact is, this is not just about mental activity. In itself, an active mind can be delightful. Sometimes we seek it out in scholarship and debate. Some people enjoy flashy movies with car chases and explosions and confusing plot twists, or concerts with smoke and mirrors and surprises in the aisles. The monkey mind people can't stand is something more than just excitement and sparking thoughts. And it is not Creative Monkey, brimming with ideas now that he has a little space to think, or Planning Monkey, who won't let go of the to-do list. It's worse. I'm talking about Obsessive Monkey. It's this one people can't stand. I know it intimately.

It got me right away on my first weekend retreat. Everything was wrong. The basement space we ended up in was ugly and crowded, not anyone's idea of a spiritual space, and smelled of mold. I am allergic to mold. It was hot, very hot and humid in that airless room, a thunderstorm in the offing. I was sweating. I hate to sweat. The chair I sat on was vinyl, and I was wearing shorts. Whenever I peeled my sticky, burning thighs off the chair and readjusted myself, the noise was loud. The leader cautioned me to stop doing that. I burned with embarrassment.

In a lengthy lecture on Zen etiquette, all new to me, we had been told we had to come to every sit, had to walk in a line to the dining hall holding our hands in a certain posture and looking down, and they were going to wake us up at 5:00 in the morning. I was too shy to ask if it could possibly be true there wasn't going to even be any coffee before the first sits. (Yes, it was true, proving to me that I could live through even the most extreme hardship.)

It was insane. I felt somewhat like I had been dropped into a really bad high school play written by someone with issues. And my body was giving me fits. I have fibromyalgia, and trying to sit up straight in that stupid vinyl kitchen chair made my back hurt all the way up to my neck. My head ached, my jaws ached, my shoulders seized up with pain. You weren't supposed to move, not that moving helped for very long.

I had been meditating for about two years at this time, but my method failed me now. I could only think of how incredibly miserable I was. Quickly these thoughts became an obsessive anxiety: I can't stand this heat I don't tolerate heat well Tom knows that could I get him to leave he won't leave tonight, he's like that, he always sticks things out maybe I can get him to see how much I'm suffering he could get a ride home with someone else maybe he would leave tomorrow, maybe at noon maybe we could compromise marriage is supposed to be about compromise. . . . Hot, it must be a hundred degrees in here, when is it going to storm, I can't stand this I can't stand another

Suddenly the teacher at the far end of the room shouted into the quiet, Sink into the heat! Everything in my mind crumbled and fell to the floor, as at the same time my stiff, suffering body relaxed and I exhaled. I felt -- well, there. Relaxed. I was just sitting in a chair, no longer resisting the discomfort with all my heart and soul. The monkey fell quiet.

From there on the retreat became a memorable experience, and I will always be grateful to that teacher, Daniel Terragno, for his kindness to a novice. By 9:00 Saturday night, the end of a full day of sitting, I felt clarity and peace. I recall going into our room and turning on the big floor fan, looking out the window at a field of golden grain gently waving in the twilight, and thinking I had never seen anything so beautiful. I was perfectly happy. When I told the teacher that the next morning, he smiled and said, "This too shall pass."

Thinking about this experience reminds me of the importance of having teachers whose job it is to help you cut through your stuff, to surprise you out of your obsession, to assure you your experience is normal and encourage you to stick with the ups and downs.

Lay people, even those who have teachers, meditate at home most of the time, where Obsession Monkey can catch us off guard. His chatter may be about some problem with another person, someone who hurt you, a painful memory, an anxiety, a symptom you're not attending to - in short, something you'd rather not think about. My experience is that I have to turn the volume down on the chatter and sit for just a moment with whatever feeling it is arousing. And then return to my breath. And return to my breath again. That doesn't mean I can ignore the issue.

When an obsession is loud and persistent, it's a psychological or life problem that we're being called to pay some attention to off the cushion. It isn't coming up for no reason, and it isn't irrelevant. It's coming up because meditation gives us the space, the occasion, to meet our real self. This is exactly the time not to quit practice.

In other words, love the monkey. That monkey mind is actually our friend. It is us, our own mind demanding we pay attention to our own reality. It is one of the ways a steady practice leads us toward a more peaceful and satisfying life.

The Purity Police: Special to UU Readers

I'd like to suggest you turn to minister James Ford's blog Monkey Mind (see my blog list) for his September 10 blog/essay on a proposed change to UUA bylaws.

Why?

Because the UUA on its website is running a survey, asking for our comments. This is a chance, in a disheartening election year, to really have a voice somewhere. And because James is an especially thoughtful voice, writing from the point of view of an experienced minister, who knows what the Purity Police can get us into.