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Reflections by Members of the UUCPA Meditation Group
July 17, 2002
The Four Horses by Susan Owicki
A Tool for Living by Dave Milne
A Different Reality Speaker by Josie Stultz
The Four Horses by Susan Owicki
For many years, I considered myself an agnostic. Then I encountered Karen Armstrong's view that it is impossible to be an atheist or agnostic in the abstract: there is always some particular notion of God whose existence is doubted or denied. I realized that the God I was agnostic about was an old man with a white beard, the God I knew in childhood. I definitely didn't believe in that God any more. But Armstrong's words made me realize that there were other alternatives.
I had always been confused by the suggestion that God existed within each person. Now I recognized that this was because I couldn't imagine that old man inside me. But perhaps there could be a God that I could imagine there. This is a fascinating idea that I'm still exploring.
About this time, I got interested in meditation and Buddhism through Ken Collier's sermons, and later the Saturday meditation group. Like Josie, I have found that studying and practicing meditation have helped me live my life in ways that I prefer.
In particular, meditation has helped me with a long-standing problem: the longing to be excellent. Now this is a longing that seems pretty normal in our culture. To excel, to be everything you can, seems like a worthy goal. If everyone strove to excel, then surely the world would be a better place. Or so it seems.
For me, though, this turns out to be a bad idea. First, in the search for excellence, there is ultimately no place to rest. I can never feel at peace for long. Some accomplishment or success may elate me, but it doesn't last. There is always another hurdle ahead, another chance to be less than excellent.
Second, when my focus is on doing my best, I would like to think that the goal is about the work. But it isn't really - it's about looking good, if only to myself. And that's a hollow kind of reward.
How does meditating help? In meditation, the emphasis is on just doing the practice, not on doing it well. In fact, you are encouraged not to ask, “How am I doing?” One of the first things my meditation teacher told us is that meditation isn't about reaching some special state of mind. It's about being present for whatever state you happen to be in. He encouraged us to accept all the ups and downs and ins and outs of our experience without clinging or aversion.
The Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki tells a story that illustrates this point.
It is said that there are four kinds of horses. The best horse will run slow and fast, right and left, at the driver's will, before it sees the shadow of the whip; the second best will run as well as the first one does, just before the whip reaches its skin; the third one will run when it feels pain on its body; the fourth will run after the pain penetrates to the marrow of its bones. You can imagine how difficult it is the fourth one to learn how to run!
. . . You may think that when you sit zazen you will find out whether you are one of the best horses or one of the worst ones. Here, however, there is a misunderstanding of Zen.
If you think the aim of Zen practice is to train you to become one of the best horses, you will have a big problem. This is not the right understanding. If you practice Zen in the right way it does not matter whether you are the best horse or the worst one.
Those who can sit perfectly physically usually take more time to obtain the true way of Zen. But those who find great difficulties in practicing Zen will find more meaning in it.
These days, I find it's a bit easier not to worry about whether I'm the best horse or the worst one. That's true in meditation and in life in general. At best I can focus on doing what needs to be done, rather than how well I'm doing. Sometimes I even manage to go ahead and do something even though I'm not very good at it.
When I can do this, I'm much happier.
Incidentally, meditation hasn't yet answered the question I started with: whether there is some notion of God I can believe in. But it does seem to help me get to places where such a God might be found.
A Tool for Living by Dave Milne
I'd like to tell you about my experience with the Saturday Morning Meditation Group -- the events and decisions that brought me there, and what I get out of it.
Personal tragedy motivated me in this direction
I was just living life, doing what I was told at school, and at work
I felt a vague sense of dissatisfaction, even emotional pain. Not as important as the immediate trappings of life: school and work, girlfriend and family. I even doubted it was real. I never had the opportunity to talk about it. I expressed it only in my journal. I thought I shouldn't feel it.
My brother, at 24, outwardly had everything going for him. He graduated from Harvard, of all places. He was starting a career. He was an accomplished pianist. He had a great girlfriend.
There were clues that all was not as it seemed, but they were not recognizable to me at the time. He was losing weight. He was beginning to have problems with his girlfriend. [She thought the songs he played on his piano sounded like dirges.] Eventually she left.
And he killed himself.
This was a shock to me and to my family. It was as if a limb had been suddenly torn from my body. We were understandably in grief.
However, along with that grief came an understanding. He felt so much pain that he took his own life. This was a kind of backward validation. The pain was real. And if such pain could cause someone to take their life, it was also very important. Of all the elements of my life at that time, maybe most important.
This was a seed, and maybe it germinated at this point. Nevertheless, after a proscribed 2 weeks of grieving, I went back to work, back to a new relationship, back to running 10ks and planning for a marathon. Exercising … enduring … ignoring pain.
After six more years, entering my 30's, I found my relationship falling apart. Work seemed meaningless. My body seemed to be falling apart with knee and other joint injuries that wouldn't heal.
I was confused. I was angry. I wanted to know why.
So, in a kind of angry desperation, I took time off from work to sort this all out.
Looking for resources, I found an orthopedic surgeon for my knee, and a therapist for my angst. I started reading: first, about career development, and running a marathon.
The Orthopedic surgeon eventually, escalated the treatment to surgery. This fixed one thing, and broke another, unfortunately. I was still in pain.
The Therapist pointed out that my brother's suicide WAS a profound event in my life, and that I had yet to fully digest it. She hooked me up with a local grief group - Kara. Between the two, I clarified the effects my delayed grief was having on my life -- my relationship, work, everything.
Reading got more serious, more focused. I read books about suicide, survivors of suicide, and depression. And, since my knee still hurt, books about martial arts, taiji, yoga, stretching, and massage.
I was finding resources, but this was all getting overwhelming. While in the martial arts section of the library, I plucked a book off the shelf called The Way of the Peaceful Warrior and read it through. It describes a gymnast's encounter with a martial arts master, and though somewhat fanciful, it introduced me to the concept of meditation and the assistance it apparently could provide for dealing with life's difficulties.
I looked at several meditation groups in this area. I settled on a Zen meditation center in Mountain View called Kannon Do, and learned and practiced meditation with them for a year. This was a most wonderful and immediately gratifying discovery. Finally, a practical way to get at those tough questions. It wasn't exactly like a question and answer session, but during this period answers did form. They were absolutely relevant to what I was going through. I no longer had to rely only on the well meaning but often contradictory advice of others, nor on the voluminous but also often contradictory, or less than relevant writings in everything from self-help books to the bible. The answers came slowly, but every tidbit I discovered in meditation was wholly mine. Every tidbit made total sense.
Kannon Do was suffused with Japanese Zen culture and ritual. I found this exotically interesting at first. But I began to feel that all this ritual was no more meaningful to me than the Christian church stuff I grew up with.
Eventually, it dawned on me that at least the Christian church stuff was mine. Specifically, the UU tradition that I grew up with - a conservative version - I was bred of it. Whether I like it or not, I am made of it, and it forever colors my attitude towards all things. It's my worldview. It's my culture
Years later, I happened upon the UU Spiritual Practice Group description in the UUCPA newsletter. It jumped out at me when I read it. This was it - the relevant stuff from Kannon Do combined with the seat of my upbringing. The first meeting I attended confirmed the fit.
The UU Spiritual Practice Group has evolved into the Saturday Morning Meditation Group. We start with a reading, then we sit quietly for 20 minutes, followed by another reading, a 2nd 20 minute sit, and a third reading. For the following forty minutes we talk - sharing our experience of the meditation, our week, or whatever comes to mind. East meets West here, with meditation group and support group juxtaposed.
The readings the designated leader brings are invariably interesting, eclectic. They stretch my understanding of my own meditation.
During the two 20 minute meditation periods, I continue to explore the thoughts that arise, familiar sensations, and, often, new sensations that appear. I practice letting all this flow through me. I avoid sticking to any one thing. I watch my mind and body evolve as they do. It's like I'm studying my experience of this life.
During the talking period, we talk about everything under the sun. When someone new joins the group, we tend to focus more on the practice itself.
I feel supported and motivated to stay with this practice.
My faith grows as I watch my mind/body chunk away on life. It just keeps going no matter what crisis occurs. Even when I don't know what to do next, and begin to feel anxious -- that I'll cease to exist or something, if I don't find something - anything to occupy me! Even then, I can see that my mind/body is still chunking away. It never stops. My heart continues to beat, my lungs continue to breathe, my mind continues to process. They always seem to know approximately what to do next, or if there's a mistake, they self-correct. This gives me enormous peace. With this faith, I'm more willing to open up to experience - to pain, to let myself grieve, deal, whatever's appropriate. In fact, my latest realization is that what I fear more than pain, now, is good feeling and too much success. I wonder, what's up with that? I trust - actually, I have faith, that I'll chunk away on that one, bit by bit, as well.
I've found a lot of tools to help me through life. But the one that holds them all together, and gives me space to find new ones, is the awareness I've developed through meditation.
My health has improved. My knee is now 100% pain free. Joint pains and clicks are going away. I ended a coercive relationship. While I don't have a partner, just now, I'm comfortable with my bachelorhood. I have enormous freedom, and that's gratifying. I'm learning how to live without a job - and that's a good thing. And, I think, coming down the pike is more appropriate work for me. I'm working the threads now. And it's kind of exciting!
I have an increasing appreciation for spirituality, and even religion as a kind of cultural vessel for my spirituality. A sense of faith has appeared within me. It deepens.
I wonder is it just me? Or is God in there somewhere?
A Different Reality Speaker by Josie Stultz
Good morning. My name is Josie Stultz. I am a member of this church and the Saturday morning meditation group. Thank you very much for joining us today.
Rev. McLennan suggests in his book that to find one's religion, it is helpful to pick one of the established religions and start walking up the trail on the mountain of spiritual development. This phrase "start walking" means trying out a spiritual practice of some kind to see if it has meaning and benefit for you. McLennan also observes that most of the major religions have developed contemplation practice. He suggests that part of finding a religion is finding a comfortable way to engage in some kind of personal contemplative discipline.
As I read McLennan's book, I realized that this is what has happened to me in recent years. Simply put, I joined a religious community and established a contemplative practice. And I wasn't looking for either one. I checked out UUCPA only because my son was attending some youth activities and I wanted to know what he might be getting involved with. Inadvertently, I found my own spiritual home and community. I read a book about meditation only because both of my children were reading books about meditation, and I wanted to know what they were thinking. I did not expect that the book would be powerful enough to cause me to get up off the couch that day and begin to establish a spiritual practice. But it's a great combination - UUism and sitting meditation, and I'm so glad it happened. It feels good to have both--a set of principles I believe in and something to practice daily.
Many of you were probably here last Sunday to hear Fred Luskin's message about forgiveness. He said that it matters what we practice. If we aren't practicing something, like forgiveness, for example, then we are at risk of letting our hearts cloud over with resentments, complaints, and thoughts of how much other people need to improve their behavior. He said it takes lots of practice to develop a connection with the part of the self that is always there, enduring, "already healed" as he put it, and full of positive capacity - for compassion, for example.
What seems important to me is to practice something rather than vaguely think about things. Conventional mind, without a discipline to practice, is wild, filling itself up with what to do, how things or people should have been in the past or should be in the future.
Pema Chodron, a Buddhist nun of the Tibetan tradition, has a way of describing our day-to-day state of mind in her book The Places That Scare You:
" . . . We expect that what is always changing should be graspable and predictable. We are born with a craving for resolution and security that governs our thoughts, words, and actions. We are like people in a boat that is falling apart, trying to hold on to the water. The dynamic, energetic, and natural flow of the universe is not acceptable to conventional mind. Our prejudices and addictions are patterns that arise from the fear of a fluid world. Because we mistakenly take what is always changing to be permanent, we suffer."
Sitting meditation feels like a way of facing the reality of this wild mind - sitting with it, watching it, having compassion for all of us in this human predicament. At the same time, sitting meditation locates the ground underneath the wild mind - a different reality that is not driven by fear and anxiety, but is spacious, open-hearted, with a great capacity for good.
In a way, sitting is like a little death; a part of the self steps aside and gives up its habitual ways for a few minutes. It's a little death that reveals the possibility that one's real nature is not what one had thought. It's a little death that somehow or other allows a vibrant connection to the whole of life.
Sitting meditation is satisfying to me partly because it feels like a methodical, spiritual experiment. Every day is an opportunity to experience non-attachment and letting go, and see if overtime it makes a difference. So far, I'd say that it does.
I'd like to end by reading two quotations from Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind by Shunryu Suzuki. (This is the book that got me off of the couch.) The first quotation is about non-attachment and its relation to creativity.
"When we sit in the cross-legged posture, we resume our fundamental activity of creation. . . . When we sit we are nothing, we do not even realize what we are; we just sit. But when we stand up, we are there! That is the first step in creation. When you are there, everything else is there; everything is created all at once. When we emerge from nothing, when everything emerges from nothing, we see it all as a fresh new creation. This is non-attachment."
In the second quotation, Shunryu Suzuki talks about our true nature.
"Our true nature is beyond our conscious experience. . . . But whether or not we have experience of our true nature, what exists there, beyond consciousness, actually exists, and it is there that we have to establish the foundation of our practice."
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