January 22 – Your meditation is always successful

Dear Friends,

As we enter into the fourth week of our daily emails, our focus now moves to the fourth way of establishing mindfulness, mindfulness of dhammas, which can be translated as mindfulness of phenomena or “stuff”.

As Mark Coleman explains in a lecture from Essential Buddhist Teachings,

The other three [ways of establishing mindfulness] – we were cultivating mindfulness of the body, awareness of the body in the body; awareness of the feeling tone – the qualitative tone of our experience; and … cultivating awareness of mind, mind states, things that are coloring our mind.

Mindfulness of dhammas is more of a wisdom element, and a reflective element in the practice. This doesn’t mean thinking about our experience. We’re in particular paying attention to the causal nature of our experience. How things arise and how things cease to be. … Understanding that, we understand a lot about our experience, and we understand about the causes that bring well-being or peace or happiness, and the causes that allow pain, difficulty, stress to pass away.

So while the first three ways to establish mindfulness are mostly interested in recognizing the state of body, feelings, mind, this fourth way has an aspect of conditionality. This is where we start noticing for ourselves how things work. We don’t have to believe a particular doctrine – we can investigate and see what is true in our direct experience.

One of the things we’ll notice in this section is that there are a lot of lists: five hindrances, five aggregates, seven factors of awakening, four noble truths, eightfold path… One analogy I heard from Jill Shepherd was that these lists are like camping food. Camping food is condensed, so you can take it anywhere. It has all the nutrition you need, but it’s not very digestible as it is – you have to add water and cook, and then eat it in order to take in the nutrients. So too with these lists – you’ll need to “cook” and chew them for a while for them to be meaningful.

One of the first things we’ll likely notice arising in our experience is how difficult it can be to stay mindful! There is a classic list of five categories of distractions, called the hindrances. They are:

• desire
• ill will
• sloth and torpor (sleepiness or laziness)
• restlessness and worry
• doubt

For any of these five, we are instructed to:

• recognize when the hindrance is present
• know when the hindrance is absent
• know what conditions underlie the arising of a hindrance
• know what conditions underlie the removal of a hindrance
• know how to avoid future arising of a hindrance

I’ll step through an example… On a Sunday afternoon, I’m sitting in meditation, and there’s suddenly a desire to have ice cream. If I don’t recognize this desire arising, my meditation can suddenly veer off into a myriad of thoughts, like what flavor of ice cream, where is it on sale, should I have it in a bowl or a cone, … Even if the thoughts run away, I can come back at anytime and recognize – “oh, desire is present.”

Then there is an opportunity to notice what caused that to arise… was it hunger or boredom or the sound of the freezer kicking in… The hunger or boredom might be in response to some aversion that is present. The sound of the freezer might trigger some old pleasant memories of eating ice cream with friends. There might be a hint of “if only I had some ice cream, I would be happy.”

So how can this desire for ice cream be removed? Sometimes, just the noticing is enough. Joseph Goldstein says, “In the moment of being mindful of sensual desire when it has already arisen, we are no longer lost in it, feeding it, or identified with it. When we’re mindful of desire in the mind, we begin to see desire’s impermanent, impersonal nature.” We can also disentangle from the desire in many ways too. Perhaps reflecting on the extra fat and calories in ice cream will make it seem less desirable. Or realizing how quickly the pleasure from ice cream will disappear. Or remembering the positive effects that meditation has.

In terms of preventing a desire for ice cream from arising again, I can recommit to my intention to meditate, to my intention to eat better. I can stop looking at sales flyers and watching advertising, which can help quite the “should” stories. I can make sure I have been eating healthy foods and getting enough sleep…

In this way, when a hindrance arises during meditation, it doesn’t mean we have “failed” at meditating – instead, we now have this hindrance as an object of our meditation.

Norman Fischer writes:

When you practice meditation, you are assured of success. But by “success” I don’t mean that things will go as you hope they will.
When you meditate, you soon forget about whether things go as you hope they will. You are happy to be surprised by what happens, knowing you can make use of anything for your practice. In that way, your meditation is always successful, no matter what arises. All you have to do is do it.

He continues:

Intention is everything. If your mind is always aligned with your intention to practice, you are always practicing. Practice is the spirit of practice, more than any specific activity. The mind of practice is practice. And that’s intention.

So you can recommit to your intention to practice, and use that to help you navigate any hindrances that arise.

As an exercise, you can be on the look-out for the presence of any of these hindrances, either in formal meditation or in daily life. Try to identify the internal and external conditions that contribute to it arising. Notice too, when the hindrance goes away. Did it just naturally subside, or were there things you did to help it release? How did it feel in the body, heart, and mind, when the hindrance was no longer present? What inner and outer circumstances could you change, to help prevent it from arising again in the future?

If you’d like to meditate with a focus on the hindrances, check out this guided meditation from Sharon Salzberg:
http://www.diydharma.org/meditation-hindrances-sharon-salzberg

With warm wishes,
Andrea