In love with the world - 20. Naked and clothed

 

Contributors

Summary of the chapter 

Question

Meditation

In love with the world - 21. No picking, no choosing

Contributors

Laura and Ann

Summary 

• In this chapter MR starts his homeless life. He has no money left and he starts begging for food.
• He will have to accept any offer without picking or choosing.
• In his own words “the moment that I would skewer my pride, test my humility and measure my resolve”.
• Start asking for food is a big step for him and he finds it difficult. When his request is rejected by the corn vendor, in the beginning he takes it personally, with feelings of vulnerability, shyness, rejection, self-pity. But he realised that the hurt received was self-inflicted, being our essential nature just emptiness. 
• He compares open awareness to a guest house, where any kind of traveller passes through.  Sensations, emotions, thoughts. Sometimes they are nice, sometimes they create troubles. Now the visitor was called embarrassment and he was asking for attention. 
• He starts to meditate on emotions, looking at how this embarrassment impacted on his body, in particular his chest looked caved in, the shoulders forward, the body looking smaller, the eyelids lowered, the head pushed down.
• The intention when meditating with emotions is to stay steady with every sensation, same as we do with sound meditation.
• So, he starts working with these sensations in his body being aware of them and letting go of the resistance. He rests in these feelings of being small, unloved, unworthy bringing them to the bigger space of awareness where they became smaller. He meditates for several hours, and he ends up with a physical feeling of contentment from the acceptance.
• In the evening he receives some rice and dal that had been left on people’s plates and scraped into his bowl. The rest would be fed to dogs. 
• There was no choice to be made and he eats standing at the door a meal more delicious than any he had eaten at 5 stars hotels.
• When the night came, laying on the grass, he realises how much his previous life had been protected by others.
• With their care they had provided a circular shield around him.
• Now he feels stripped of his own skin, lonely, undefended, disoriented and marvelled. Throughout the sleepless night he vacillated between distress and delight.

The guest house by Rumi (poem) 

Questions

• Have you ever been in a situation where your request was rejected and you felt unworthy?How would you go about it now?
• Have you ever accepted just what you were given and eventually discover that it could not have been better?

Meditation

Meditation on emotions

In love with the world - 19. A chance encounter

Contributors

Laura and Chloe

Summary

In this chapter MR meets an Asian man and helps in his meditation practice.

Meditating on thoughts

• MR explains that it is not a matter of stopping the thoughts but to become aware of them. In the beginning of the practice, when we observe the thoughts, they seem to multiply. This is just because we become more familiar with our mind. We all have a monkey mind and when we put our mind under the magnifying glass, it appears more active than ever.

Acceptance vs passivity

• The businessman feared that becoming more accepting would make him passive.
• MR explained that acceptance and passivity are different.
• True acceptance requires an open and fresh mind to investigate the world around. It requires trust in uncertainty and allows for discernment to arise from wisdom.
• Everything we want is already within us and we just need to relax and allow our inner wisdom to come forth.

 Productivity vs creativity

• Buddhism has more to do with creativity than productivity. Productivity is an obstacle to innovation. Creativity means stay open and flexible to change and risking failure. With reference to meditation, if we take the focus off the goal does not mean that you are giving up. You are just more receptive to the present and allow for a fresh response to arise.
• We need to develop some confidence and train our mind to peal off our masks, that is to let go of old behaviors and beliefs.

Luminous mind

• The businessman told MR that while watching his thoughts, his mind went blank.
• MR explained that blank or gap is actually open awareness. Awareness is aware of itself, it recognizes the spacious, knowing qualities of the mind that are always present. 
• You are connecting to the qualities of the empty mind and it that moment there is clarity.
• When you recognize awareness this blank, or gap becomes spaciousness.

Meditation on thoughts instructions: In love with the world, pag. 164

Questions

• Think about a difficult situation in your life when you were not sure how to react. Have you ever wondered if just accepting, would make you passive?
• During a practice, have you ever tried to connect your breath with acceptance? (Using breath as a support). How did it feel?

Meditation

Meditation on thoughts guided by MR

In love with the world - 18. Coming thru darkness

Contributors

Christophe, Carles?

Summary of the chapter 

The previous chapter and this one are an exploration of the bardos. For memory, the 6 bardos are:

1. the bardo of this life,
2. the bardo of dream,
3. the bardo of meditation,
4. the bardo of the moment of death,
5. the bardo of dharmata,
6. the bardo of becoming.

In the previous chapter, YMR uses the bardo of dream to introduces us to emptiness, to the fact that objects are not as solid as they seem, yet are not nothing.

In this chapter, YMR shows that the last 3 bardos are actually stages to every new endeavour that we make. “The point of making these parallels […] is to recognize the continual process of our own dying and rebirth.” Familiarising ourselves with this process helps us to live a joyful life.

The last 3 bardos apply to any situation as follows.

• First, we enter the new situation. And “to be completely open and available to what it offers, we must let go of our cherished ideas of how things are supposed to work” (e.g., comparison with the past, expectations about the future). Often we idealize how the new situation will unfold, or we are weighted down by past issues, or we carry on perfectionist fantasies,… If we let our habitual patterns dominate, we cannot really flourish in this new situation. We can choose to let go of our attachments. This parallels the bardo of dying where we have to let go of our bodies… bu we choose to let go of our attachments or hold on to them.
• In stage two, the new situation is still in flux and this is an opportunity for creative incentives. This parallels the bardo of dharmata where we experience dreamlike appearances.
• In the third stage, the bardo of becoming, “translucent dream forms begin to resemble our previous flesh-and-blood bodies, and the old tendencies strengthen”. In this stage, as YMR says,

we become resigned to repetition,

we may normalize argumentation in our partnership,

we feel trapped,

we loose access to the imaginative resolves that might liberate us.

However, an important point is that, though it's harder than in the previous two stages, change is definitely possible. In fact, “change is always happening” and YMR goes on to even say “feeling trapped, stuck, immobile — these are self-fabricated stories”.

In the rest of the chapter, YMR gives a perspective on this from an experiential point of view and how everything can be a support for meditation, how everything can be a tool for transformation. Within the recognition of awareness,

• he acknowledged the sound of rain, the bad smells,
• not reaching out towards sensations,
• not withdrawing,
• not getting lost,
• he diminished his picking and choosing, especially when related to avoidance,
• he accepted his “own essential emptiness, and the emptiness of all phenomena” which in turn helps to diminish the “impulses to hold tight things that cannot really be held.”

Question

Could you remember a situation where you felt stuck (studies, relationship, job). How would have been if you remembered that change happens all the time?

Meditation

Dying and newborn

---