~ Guidance on Meditation ~
"This is my simple religion.
No need for temples. No need for complicated philosophy.
Your own mind, your own heart is the temple. Your philosophy is simple kindness."
HH The Dalai Lama
No need for temples. No need for complicated philosophy.
Your own mind, your own heart is the temple. Your philosophy is simple kindness."
HH The Dalai Lama
As a mindfulness teacher and mentor, I am often asked for guidance on meditation. So here is one response:
Meditate as an act of loving awareness, or to say it the other way around, meditate to be aware of love. In other words, meditate so your awareness is kind, caring, and capacious, and meditate so your love is discerning, insightful, and wise.
Many people meditate to fix or improve themselves in an attempt to correct their perceived inadequacies or flaws. They can believe they are damaged and deficient in some way, and so they strive to become better or even perfect meditators. For these people, meditation can be an act of self-aggression, a way of trying to get rid of feelings of unworthiness and inferiority, a way of rejecting parts of themselves. But this only leads to a greater sense of inadequacy, failure and frustration. Instead, I invite you to open your eyes and your heart, without beliefs, expectations or assumptions about yourself or about meditation. Simply embracing yourself as you are and letting meditation be an act of loving awareness of what is.
Love and awareness are both necessary in meditation. Love without awareness can be clingy, dependent, and blind. And awareness without love can be cool, detached, and conceptual. But together, they are like two wings of a bird, soaring and swooping in the boundless vastness of the sky. Free.
That said, at the deepest level love and awareness are the same experience. Whenever we are deeply aware of someone or something, we enter an intimate relationship with them and we naturally come to understand them and love them. Similarly, when we love someone or something, we naturally grow in our awareness and understanding of them. Then something magically happens. As meditation becomes an act of loving awareness, subject and object merge. The lover and the beloved become one and there is no separation. We become one, even although we are also different. We become everything and nothing at the same time. A full emptiness and an empty fullness. As Indian teacher Nisargadatta said: “Love says 'I am everything.' Wisdom says 'I am nothing.' Between the two, my life flows.”
Thank you.
Meditate as an act of loving awareness, or to say it the other way around, meditate to be aware of love. In other words, meditate so your awareness is kind, caring, and capacious, and meditate so your love is discerning, insightful, and wise.
Many people meditate to fix or improve themselves in an attempt to correct their perceived inadequacies or flaws. They can believe they are damaged and deficient in some way, and so they strive to become better or even perfect meditators. For these people, meditation can be an act of self-aggression, a way of trying to get rid of feelings of unworthiness and inferiority, a way of rejecting parts of themselves. But this only leads to a greater sense of inadequacy, failure and frustration. Instead, I invite you to open your eyes and your heart, without beliefs, expectations or assumptions about yourself or about meditation. Simply embracing yourself as you are and letting meditation be an act of loving awareness of what is.
Love and awareness are both necessary in meditation. Love without awareness can be clingy, dependent, and blind. And awareness without love can be cool, detached, and conceptual. But together, they are like two wings of a bird, soaring and swooping in the boundless vastness of the sky. Free.
That said, at the deepest level love and awareness are the same experience. Whenever we are deeply aware of someone or something, we enter an intimate relationship with them and we naturally come to understand them and love them. Similarly, when we love someone or something, we naturally grow in our awareness and understanding of them. Then something magically happens. As meditation becomes an act of loving awareness, subject and object merge. The lover and the beloved become one and there is no separation. We become one, even although we are also different. We become everything and nothing at the same time. A full emptiness and an empty fullness. As Indian teacher Nisargadatta said: “Love says 'I am everything.' Wisdom says 'I am nothing.' Between the two, my life flows.”
Thank you.