Meditation on the Skeleton

In meditation we often do a body scan, bringing awareness of sensation and opening to the possibility of relaxing and letting go of tension.
This meditation has the same thing, but the attention goes to the bones.
Starting with the skull, just being aware of the smooth surface, appreciating the protective nature of the skull as it encases the brains.
Then the jawbone or mandible, moving it around, letting it relax and loosen.
Then the top vertebrae, that point where the neck supports the head – so crucial in meditation to keep the head upright.
Then the clavicle extending out to the shoulder joints. The shoulder blades or scapula, making subtle movements around to loosen and free any tension held there.
Then bring awareness to the bones in the arms, the humerus, the ulna, sensing how relaxed they are hanging from the shoulder joints. Then bring awareness to all the bones in the hands, the carpals, and down into the phalanges of the fingers –the network of bones that make it possible for us to do the most intricate task.
The ribs, protective, supportive, flexible. And in the back following the vertebrae down, making subtle movements to remind ourselves of the amazing complexity and flexibility of the spine. Coming low down to the sacrum and that last vestige of tailbone the coccyx, a little reminder of our deep connection to the rest of our mammal family.
Then bring awareness to the pelvis, the hipbone. The pubic bone. Checking to see that the whole area is relaxed and balanced.
Then bringing awareness to the leg bones: the femur in the thigh, the patella that protects the joint, the tibia in the front of the calf and the fibula behind, working in concert to support us. On down to the ankle, the metatarsal, and on to all the tiny bones in our feet that enable us to walk and run and balance.
Then expanding our awareness to take in the whole skeleton, imagining it solid, strong but spacious and open.
How rich an experience to spend some time getting to know our own bones, the longest lasting part of our very temporal physical being.
What feelings arise out of this close attention? Do you feel gratitude for these bones that support you? Concern for their well being if they are no longer as solid as they once were? Stay with whatever arises. Send metta/loving kindness to your skeleton.
In the rest of the meditation, keep bringing awareness back to the breath, of course, but the breath as it rises from the pelvis up through the rib cage, following the course of the spine, up into the skull and out the nasal cavity and back again.
Let each inhale be as precious and awe inspiring as if it were your very first. And each exhale savored as if it were your very last.
Happy Halloween!

POEM: Clinging

Sometimes life feels like
sitting in an over-air-conditioned theater
on a sweltering summer day
having forgotten to bring a sweater
watching a horror movie
that raises my hairs on end
and my shoulders, neck and jaw
are whipped to a frigid froth of tension
more caffeinated than a frozen frappe,
but remaining seated
caught up in the plot
and dreading the heat outside,
even though the warmth
would soften the tight chill
and the trees would give
a sweet dappled light
above me as I would lie on the grass
and let myself melt into the earth
and listen to the birds, the creek,
people talking as they stroll by,
settling into the lull
until the cool of the evening
would wake me.
- Stephanie Noble

The Second Noble Truth & Coming into Skillful Relationship with Desire

In previous posts we explored the First Noble Truth: That there is suffering in life. The Second Noble Truth says there is a cause of this suffering, and that cause is our grasping, clinging and pushing away of the objects, ideas, experiences and people that we either want or don’t want in our lives.

Wanting. We all know about wanting! Given a blank page we could each sit down and write a comprehensive list of desires, those things we want more of, those ways we want to change ourselves, our situation and the world.

Desire is a naturally arising phenomenon. Getting rid of it is not the goal. That would just be a desire to be free of desire. Instead we want to develop a skillful relationship with our desires. For many of us our current relationship is that our desires control us, dictating our behavior. That’s suffering!

The first step to come into skillful relationship with our desires is to notice a desire as it arises. And then, before we rush to fulfill the desire, we pause. We pause and just experience the desire fully. (See the exercise below.)

Pausing to just be with a desire can be challenging when instant gratification is so easy. With credit cards, stores open around the clock and overnight shipping from anywhere in the world, if our desire is for a particular taste or a particular possession, we can almost skip over the whole experience of wanting and go right to fulfillment.

Do you remember wanting something as a child? The waiting, the longing? We became intimate with our desire. We lived with it for long periods (that seemed even longer!) We could describe the experience of desire as a bodily burden that was almost insupportable. Many of these desires passed. Some didn’t. Some were fulfilled. Some weren’t. Some were given as gifts, treats or rewards. Some we were told to save for. Some we were told weren’t good for us and we wouldn’t be allowed to have ever. Some were for things that couldn’t be purchased.

While none of us want to return the power to our parents to decide whether our desires will be fulfilled, we can recreate a bit of that state of delayed gratification. Not as torture but as a way to come into relationship with our desires and to be more skillful in our response to them.
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Exercise
Stop for a moment now and see what comes up when you say, “I want…..” Whatever desire arises is fine. It doesn’t have to be anything special for you to work with it.

Now, close your eyes and sense in to your body, saying the statement again. Does the statement bring on any physical sensation? Does it bring up any emotion? Does it bring up any images beyond the visualization of the desire itself, perhaps a memory?

This is an interesting self-exploration that you can do with many different desire statements (both “I want….” and “I don’t want…”). For it to be most useful, write down the statements and any accompanying sensations, emotions or images.
When the desire arises of its own accord (not from the prompting in this exercise) you can also notice what, if any, thoughts preceded it and see if there is a causal relationship. You can notice what thoughts accompany the desire that energize or enable the wanting. And you can notice what thoughts follow the desire -- judging yourself for the desire perhaps?

It is also interesting to notice any external causes and conditions that may have brought on the desire. For example, you’re walking down the street, perfectly content, when you see a luxury car driving down the street or something in a shop window and suddenly you feel wanting.
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Look at the last sentense of that exercise: “…and suddenly you feel wanting.” Wanting as in lacking in something. As if you are somehow incomplete. Suddenly you are not enough because you don’t have (fill in the blank). Amazing, isn’t it? What an opportunity to notice how we so readily attach our identity to objects of desire, and often even to the desire itself.

By pausing before fulfilling our desire, we give ourselves the opportunity to be fully present with it, to recognize it as a recurring pattern, and to come into awareness – through bodily sensation and evoked emotions and memories that flit through like faint traces of dream.

We may notice that many of our desires, if not instantly fulfilled, simply pass away. An itch that doesn’t get scratched often subsides.

By paying attention to what else arises with the desire, we may recognize that the thing we think we desire is just a mask for some deeper desire that we were not willing to look at, but can now.

These unmasked desires may be for things that can never be fulfilled, like a return to a seemingly safer time, the return of a loved one who has died, or a chance to undo past mistakes. But by allowing ourselves to be fully present with them in a compassionate and spacious way, these desires benefit by being given a voice. Once acknowledged they may shift, but even if they don’t, they enrich our understanding, thus reducing our sense of suffering.

In this compassionate non-judgmental spaciousness, we can also allow ourselves to acknowledge an addictive desire, when we realize that the desire is controlling our behavior and that no matter how often we rush to fulfill it, it never satisfies the gnawing desire that fills us. And if through this process we are not able to skillfully explore this addiction, we can finally seek the help we need to do so.

Desire is not a dictate that we must mindlessly obey, but simply a natural phenomenon coming into our experience of this moment. By pausing before rushing to fulfill desires that arise, we have a rich opportunity to fully experience this utterly human trait as something in and of itself. We can be in a spacious relationship with our desires, neither clinging, grasping or pushing them away. We simply hold them in an open embrace.

Why In Times of Crisis Meditators are Especially Grateful for the Practice

As meditators, we are grateful for our practice that helps us more skillfully navigate this current financial crisis and all situations in our lives -- not as observers untouched by the experience, but as conscious participants, fully engaged but clear seeing.

Here are some examples of the kinds of differences in our daily lives that we meditators often find between having a regular meditation practice and not having one:

Say you have a headache or stomach upset after looking at the value of your retirement fund or the daily news. As a non-meditator you might take a drug or try to distract yourself in various unskillful ways, and if it persists call the doctor in hopes of more heavy duty drugs.

As a practiced meditator you will more likely sit with the sensation of the pain, notice the emotional component and breathe into the experience. You may recognize the tension in the body and understand the cause and condition from which it arose. You may give yourself more spaciousness, be gentle with yourself right now, not take on too much during this period, and perhaps take walks in nature or meditate more frequently.

As a non-meditator you may not connect the fear you are feeling with the anger you are expressing to family or fellow drivers on the road. You may not see the connection between your anxiety and your difficulty doing your work, so you give yourself a hard time for being so stupid. And you may give coworkers, also affected by the crisis, a hard time for their suddenly less than stellar performances as well.

As a practiced meditator you will be more likely to see the connection between your emotions, thoughts and behaviors, and sense your connection to all other beings. So you will be more likely to take the fear experience, sit with it, and allow it to inform your interactions with your coworkers, family and everyone else, in the form of compassionate understanding for any unskillful displays they show in response to their own anxiety.

As a non-meditator you may compound your fear by getting caught up in incessantly imagining a dark future, rerunning images of the 1930’s in your head, thinking back over what you might have done differently in the past that would have changed this outcome or cursing the past actions of others in an endless loop of blame. This leaves you unable to be attentive to the current moment that requires your full attention.

As a practiced meditator you have trained your mind to notice when your thoughts get caught up in the future or the past and you can skillfully and gently bring your attention back to this moment, knowing that this is the only moment that is real, the one you can experience with all your senses and the only one in which you can take action. The future and the past are just plans, fantasies and memories, in other words, just thoughts.

As a non-meditator you may have your identity firmly invested in your material wealth or your position. As a practiced meditator you have a greater opportunity to begin to recognize that you are not your stuff, that your value is not composed of material wealth, prestige or how you make that wealth, that you – and all of us – are uniquely and universally valuable just the way we are.

These are some of the reasons why at times of crisis meditators turn to each other and say, “I am so grateful for the practice. I can’t imagine going through this without the practice.”

Of course there are people who don’t have a regular sitting practice who have found the same spaciousness of mind. Perhaps they do Qi Gong or some other form, or perhaps they have a naturally spacious mind. But for most of us, without a meditative practice of some kind, we fall into the habitual and unskillful patterns of mind that bring us ongoing suffering.

At a time of crisis those who don’t have a regular practice might say to themselves, “I really should start to meditate.” or “I need to meditate more regularly.” It’s never too late to start!

If you would like to learn more about getting started meditating, click on the link (right side of this page) to my website -- Stephanienoble.com. In the meditation section you will find several downloadable pages that offer ways to begin. If you need more help, contact me, or find a meditation center in your area.

The First Noble Truth, as Told by Uncle Remus

Let’s imagine there is universal energy all around that in its natural unaltered state is spacious, loving and supportive of life and a sense of joyousness.
Then lets imagine that, through our lack of attention and habitual patterns, it is possible to compress this energy so that we experience it as something dark, dense and gooey like tar.

In this compressed state the energy drags us down. We get stuck in it as we struggle against it, like Brer Rabbit in his meeting with the tar baby. This is suffering, what Buddhists call dukkha.

How did we create the sticky tar of our suffering? That certainly wasn’t our intention. Or was it? It’s hard to know what our true intentions are without really paying attention to our experience. When we really are paying attention we might see that we hold some pretty dukkha-prone intentions.

Like the idea that we have to be perfect. Perfection as an intention is laden with dukkha. The tar is very thick when we get caught up in comparing ourselves to some ideal that is unattainable, not just by us, but by anyone.

Another dukkha-prone intention is our desire to receive approval from others. This intention throws us completely off-balance as we try to imagine what someone else wants from us, then from that flawed imagining, trying to modify ourselves to suit.

Another would be the intention to achieve great wealth, fame or success, in whatever form that takes for us. Goal setting where the goal post is a bigger presence in our lives than what is happening in this moment creates dukkha -- a sticky place of disappointment, guilt over unskillful actions done in pursuit of our goal, and perpetual fantasizing.

Or the intention to prove something to the world or to someone who once told us we could not achieve something. Perhaps that person is long gone but we still are stuck in the dukkha of reactivity.

There are many more unexamined intentions that could be marketed as Deluxe Dukkha Delivery Systems because they are so effective at transporting us directly into deep sticky dense suffering.

Remember the story of Brer Rabbit, when Brer Fox tried to catch him by creating an alluring trap in the form of a tar baby? This tar baby was just some sticks covered in pitch and studded with gewgaws, all gussied up to appeal to Brer Rabbit’s sociable nature. And sure enough when Brer Rabbit came upon the tar baby, he tried to make civil conversation with her, and the tar baby didn’t say anything, which Brer Rabbit thought was very rude indeed. But he was captivated by this alluring creature, so he tried a different line. Still no response. Well, clearly this gal was stuck up and needed a little lesson. With one paw and then the other, Brer Rabbit found himself all entangled with the tar baby. The more he reacted, using first one foot and then the other, the more entangled he got, until he was truly stuck.

And this is how we are in our lives with our dukkha. Perhaps there’s a person in our lives who brings out a lot of reactivity in us, and becomes our tar baby. We react, then we struggle to get free of all the dukkha that comes up around our reaction. But it doesn’t have to be a person, this tar baby. It’s any situation, cause or condition to which we automatically respond with a set pattern of thoughts, emotions and behaviors that drag us deep into the tar of our dukkha.

How did Brer Rabbit get free of the tar baby? He tricked old Brer Fox. Because Brer Fox was not quite so clever a fellow as Brer Rabbit. After all, Brer Fox had Brer Rabbit, he had him good! And he planned to cook him up and eat him.

But Brer Rabbit begged and begged him. “Please Brer Fox, you can boil me in oil, hang me or drown me, but please don’t throw me in that there briar patch.”

Brer Fox had some dukkha issues too. Even though he had his meal in hand, his desire to make Brer Rabbit suffer was greater than his hunger. So he pulled the rabbit off the tar baby and flung him into the briar patch. Once there, Brer Rabbit laughed and called out, 'Born 'n' bred in a briar-patch, Brer Fox-- born 'n' bred in a briar-patch!' as he used some handy briars to pick off the remaining pitch from his fur and went on his merry way.

Born and bred in the briar patch. Brer Rabbit freed himself from his tar baby dukkha dilemma by returning to his source, the place where he felt most comfortable in all the world.

So what is our briar patch? It’s the place in ourselves where we feel most at home. Where we don’t have to defend ourselves or struggle. It’s ourselves fully relaxed in this moment, accepting ourselves as we are and this situation as it is in this moment, even if it is painful or challenging. This is the place where we are grounded, where the energy is spacious, joyous and supportive. It is a place of conscious awareness, of clear seeing and deep pure intention.

This is the place we come to know through sitting in meditation, through walking in nature in silence, through noticing moments of simple contentment in our lives – watching a small child at play, sitting at a dinner table with dear friends and good conversation – being fully present for the experience.

For most of us these moments are fleeting. We enjoy them but then can’t help but wish they would stay longer, or that we would make ourselves available to them more often, and suddenly we’ve created a little tar baby to tangle with.

At these times maybe we can remember Brer Rabbit and get ourselves back to our briar patch – back to noticing the rising and falling of our breath, the sensations in our body, and the light in our surroundings. Because we were born if not bred for this. We’re breeding ourselves for it now!

Exploring the First Noble Truth: Delving into Dukkha

In learning meditation, we focus heavily on direct experience. It really doesn’t matter what Buddhism is or if you’ve studied the Buddha’s teaching extensively. You can still benefit from simply sitting and paying attention to your breath.
But we would be foolish not to draw from the teachings that give us guidance through the fog of our own experience.

The core of the Buddha’s teachings are the Four Noble Truths. If you are not familiar with these, they are, first: that there is suffering; second, that there is a cause of our suffering; third, that we can end our suffering; and fourth, that the way to do this is through the Eightfold Path that helps us be more skillful in how we perceive the world and ourselves, in how we mentally process our experience, how we impact the world with our words, how to be more present with our experience, how to behave in a skillful way that does no harm to others or ourselves, how to tune ourselves like guitars -- neither too loose nor too tight, and how to make a living in a way that doesn’t cause suffering to ourselves or others.

The Friday morning class at Spirit Rock has been working with Phillip Moffitt’s book on the Four Noble Truths, called Dancing with Life, and he has made what can seem a very dry and elusive topic very juicy and insightful. Since I have been recovering from my surgery, I haven’t been able to attend class, but have been enjoying reading the book and making my own explorations into the topic.

Moffitt says that a person could just study the First Noble Truth for their whole lives and have a very rich and rewarding practice. I’ll just spend a few minutes on it here, because he also says that many of us want to skip over it. An inconvenient truth, this first one! Ugh! Suffering, who wants to think about that! But apparently if we skip over it, like missing the first vital minutes of a mystery movie, we never really understand anything else! So, let’s face it head on!

The First Noble Truth: There is suffering. Okay, we know that! We see the images of starving children in Africa with their big bellies, people stricken with horrid diseases, homeless people begging on the streets, or victims of violence.

But the Buddha said we all suffer, that it’s the human condition. Well, okay, yes, we’ve all had periods in our lives where we had great loss or physical pain or went through a tough time in our relationships, careers, etc. Sure. But in general we reserve the word ‘suffer’ for those who really have it bad. We can hardly claim it for ourselves, and don’t have any interest in doing so! Thank you very much!

But apparently, according to the Buddha, if we don’t acknowledge the truth of our own suffering, the reality of its existence in our daily lives, we cannot come into relationship with it and deal with it skillfully.

The fact that we who feel blessed in the world have a hard time acknowledging our own suffering made me wonder if that’s what Jesus meant when he said, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." Maybe he didn’t mean that a rich man doesn’t deserve to get into the kingdom, but that the gate to the kingdom is through awareness of the suffering we experience in the present moment, and he doesn’t allow himself to think he could be plagued with anything so plebian as suffering.

I’m also reminded of the song lyrics, “So high you can’t get over it, so low you can’t get under it, so wide you can’t get around it, you’ve got to go in through the door.” What is the door? To Buddhist ears, the door is ‘this moment’. Whatever our current experience is, suffering and all, that is the door to a richer life than that proverbial rich man could even imagine.

And then I realized that the Buddha’s father must have known this to be true. If you don’t know the story of the Buddha’s childhood, briefly: When he was born a soothsayer told his father that his son would either be a great warrior or a great spiritual leader. Well, the father, a wealthy man with a great palatial estate, most certainly didn’t want his son following a spiritual path. He didn’t want him following the ascetics of the day, walking on fire, lying on nails, begging for food. Not for his son! So what did he do? He created a paradise within the palace walls where there was no visible signs of suffering! No death, no illness, no aging. All this to protect his son from any awareness of suffering, instinctively knowing it to be the door to the spiritual path he didn’t want his son to pursue. Aha!

The Buddhist term for this suffering or unsatisfactoriness is dukkha. Such a great word! Great because it really sounds like what it is: An amalgam of doo-doo and ca-ca. Dukkha. How totally appropriate! Because when we are aware of our suffering we’re very likely to name what we are experiencing with some more adult version of those baby words for bowel movements. Sorry for any crudeness, but it’s a great mnemonic device. If we think, “This is doo doo, ca, ca,” or words to that effect, we might remember, “Ah, dukkha! suffering, the human condition. Yes, here it is. Let me sit with it.”

According to Moffitt, the Buddha taught that there are three kinds of suffering: The first is physical and mental pain. The second is the dukkha of constant change – we paint our house, knowing that in time we will need to do it again; the end of summer comes too soon for us; our body ages; our loved ones die; our children grow up and move out; every day we are assaulted with news of the world in constant flux. And the third kind of suffering is the feeling that life itself is a little overwhelming, a little too much to bear. Even in the best of times, it’s exhausting.

These three kinds of suffering are part of our very nature. It is the human experience to have pain, to wish for some stability in our lives, and to feel at times overwhelmed by the experience of living. There is nothing we can do to avoid them. And that is not what the Buddha advocated.

Instead we are told to accept our suffering. When a pain arises, we accept that pain is part of our human experience in this moment. “This is how this feels,” we might tell ourselves. “This is how things are in this moment.”

This level of deep acceptance may sound defeatist. It’s part of our make up that we want to rush in and make things better. We want to avoid pain at all costs. We want to limit the damages. We don’t want to wallow. We are not victims. We are not losers. This is not us.

But through this habitual pattern of struggling to avoid the stinking dukkha, we just dig ourselves deeper into it, adding more suffering to the unavoidable pain we are experiencing.

Seven weeks ago during my hospital stay, there was a patient in the next bed who was deep in the dukkha of physical pain. But she was compounding her suffering immeasurably by struggling against it. She made up stories in her head about the doctors and nurses and how they were in league to keep her in pain. She tried to distract herself by watching television long into the night. She dragged the past pain into the present moment by constantly noting how many hours she had been experiencing it. She piled on a load more suffering by imagining this pain going on far into the future. She did everything BUT stay present with the actual sensations she was experiencing.

And we all do this! We make up stories to fix, explain or work around the pain. Our stories may be different: We may tell ourselves to bucker up, to put on a happy face. We may tell ourselves if we were better people we’d know how to get ourselves out of this. We distract ourselves with all manner of busyness and addictive patterns of behavior. We drag in the past and the future to compound the pain. This is our habitual way of dealing with suffering.

Amazingly, by being fully present with the dukkha, accepting it as our experience in the present moment, we and the moment are transformed. Slowly, and with full mindfulness, we begin to soften into our experience. Because we are no longer struggling against it, we are no longer adding more suffering to it. We aren’t projecting it into the future or dragging old suffering in from the past. We are simply being present with our experience.

Last Friday I finally was able to return to my beloved class at Spirit Rock. That day our teacher was Wendy Palmer who took this concept one step further. She says that by being full present and opening to the dukkha experience, the dukkha itself will support us, will be as nourishing as compost.

So I have this image now, of the doo-doo ca-ca of dukkha as manure, becoming a rich nourishing compost that – if I can stay present and aware – can deeply inform my experience so that I am not just surviving the experience but growing in my experiential understanding of myself and life.

And I realized that this poem that I wrote several years ago illustrates dealing with dukkha.

A Hole is to Fall Into

It’s so hard to remember that
every hole I fall into holds a buried treasure

because I am too busy clawing my way out
and cursing my fate to remember to:

let go!

fall deep!

and, upon reaching bottom : sit still!

Here in this quiet darkness of non-doing,
the steady rising and falling of the breath
slowly unearths the buried treasure.

-- Stephanie Noble