Rev.

John Giunta, MA Vienna Woods Studios 117 Moore Avenue, SW 22180-5968

(703) 281-5498 web address: http://SpecialMind.com email address: jpgiunta1211@aol.com

Instructions for Meditation Copyright2003,John Giunta This article will take you through the steps of preparing the body and mind for meditation. The requirements of a meditation practice are simple: patience, consistency without attachment, a relatively quiet space and a comfortable, still and strong sitting posture. A sound and healthy body is the starting point and is the best vehicle for the practice of meditation. Hatha yoga was designed by ancient sages who knew that in order to be feel closer to the Divine, they had to be in optimal health. If you are reading these instructions without being enrolled in a yoga class, then you may use any warm-up exercises you know from a sensible aerobics class, provided that you do not work up too much aggressive energy. Remember that yoga is a system of exercise for relaxing the body while strengthening it and making it more flexible. There is a meditation technique for every person in every philosophic or religious persuasion, to include secular humanists, agnostics and atheists. The simple Buddhist practice of Vipassana meditation, or Mindfulness Meditation is a wonderful way of feeling clarity of mind and inner peace and is suitable for everyone. There is no conflict in Buddhism with any religion. You may be a Catholic, a Jew or a Muslim and still practice some aspects of Buddhism. For people who have a belief system with a deity (God, Brahma, Allah, Ahura Mazda, Factor X, etc.) you may use prayer or a mantra to facilitate spiritual transcendence, or Samadhi. 1. Decide on a time of day that you will use when you can sit quietly, undisturbed for at least five minutes, ten minutes, or a maximum of twenty minutes. Regularity is the most important aspect of success in meditation. 2. It is very important that you plan for time alone, with a door to close and the phone turned off. It is not necessary to have complete silence, but you must be undisturbed. 3. Do some warming up, such as rotations of all of the joints of the body. Follow a sequence recommended by your teacher, or follow your own intuition. The best preparation you can make is to have a complete yoga class.

4. Use a sitting position that is comfortable and not extreme. If you cannot sit on the floor, you may also sit in a comfortable chair that does not allow you to slouch. The spine must be straight and the breathing must be steady, deep, relaxed and must primarily use the abdomen and diaphragm. 5. If you feel particularly stressed, use a breathing exercise such as Nadi Shodanam Alternate Nostril Breathing for about 3 to 5 minutes in order to get the breathing apparatus into a regular and quiet rhythm of movement and to balance the emotions. 6. For every meditation technique, the mindfulness phase comes first. Allow yourself to observe the inner peace of the mind. Go to a place within yourself that is free from judgment and free from evaluation. Simply appreciate each breath quietly. You may say in your mind, Now I breathe in, And, Now I breathe out. Any stray thoughts are simply allowed to move on without elaborate consideration. It is very important not to become impatient with yourself with unwanted thoughts. It is common for beginners to have to deal with unwanted thoughts many times per minute until the proper technique for releasing thoughts is established. 7. You may feel that you can follow this mindfulness phase for long minutes at a time. If you feel that you are falling asleep, it is a sign that you need more sleep at night, so plan your day accordingly. (see the article, Your day of yoga ) 8. If you have troublesome thoughts and determine that you need assistance with your technique, contact a teacher in the technique you have chosen to help you process this material. 9. This combination of Hatha yoga, breathing and mindfulness meditation can be practiced regularly for long periods of time. The simpler your practice, the easier it will be to sustain it. A total of even just a half hour in the morning can make a big difference. N.B.: If you are interested only in the Mindfulness practice of meditation, skip down to steps numbered 13, 14 and then 16. 10. If you feel ready for the use of a mantra, there are several approaches you may use. If you know of a tradition in which you would like to be initiated, it is recommended that you see a teacher who is able to give you an initiation into that tradition. Some people choose their own mantra, a sound that is used to achieve transcendence, or Samadhi. There are meditation techniques in Judaism, Islam (Sufism) and Christianity as well as in yoga, Hinduism and Buddhism. 11. When you use the mantra, sit quietly and LISTEN for the mantra, rather than SAYING the mantra. This is very important. We want to be receptive to the mantra. It must come down to us from the higher mind, which has received the mantra from God. Allow the mantra to come into the mind at its own volume and at its own speed. Do not try to change the tempo of the mantra or change the sound of it. Try not to move the tongue or lips, but let the mantra roll forward on its own. 12. There are four possibilities of though-and-mantra combinations in the mind while you are sitting in meditation: 1) thoughts without mantra, 2) mantra without thoughts, 3) mantra and thoughts together, 4) neither thoughts nor mantra.

13. Whatever happens during the meditation, we want to remember that all of it is beneficial. There may be times of stress during which you may sit for a long period, perhaps completely absorbing your time with restless thoughts and release of stress. At the end of such a period, simply remember to express some simple thought of gratitude. Treat every period of meditation with gentle appreciation, because the opportunity to meditate is very precious. 14. Let all thoughts drift through the mind without giving them any importance. Simply say in your mind, When I am finished with this thought, I will return to meditation. 15. At the end of your meditation, allow the mantra to go back to its source, back through your higher mind, back to God. Sit quietly and use the next one or two minutes to slowly come back to activity. Watch the mind come back as though it is someone else s mind. Resist the temptation to cut this period short. This is the most important part of the meditation. If you cannot give your meditation this patient and slow period of return, it is better not to meditate. 16. When you are genuinely ready for activity, then and only then leave your meditation space to continue your day of contentment and tranquility.

Remember to be regular in your personal practice of meditation. It takes persistence in the beginning to make sure you are scheduling the quality time that is necessary. Meditation is not something that we should feel guilty about not doing. If we are feeling the benefits, then we will always look forward to our meditation sessions. This is a set of instructions that will last a lifetime. If you desire personal instruction or have doubts, please contact me to arrange some personal attention.

http://www.buddhanet.net/psymed1.htm

Even the Best Meditators Have Old Wounds to Heal

Jack Kornfield For most people meditation practice doesn t "do it all." At best, it s one important piece of a complex path of opening and awakening.
In spiritual life I see great importance in bringing attention to our shadow side, those aspects of ourselves and our practice where we have remained unconscious. As a teacher of the Buddhist mindfulness practice known as vipassana, I naturally have a firm belief in the value of meditation. Intensive retreats can help us dissolve our illusion of separateness and can bring about compelling insights and certain kinds of deep healing. Yet intensive mediation practice has its limitations. In talking about these limitations, I want to speak not theoretically, but directly from my own experience, and from my heart. Some people have come to meditation after working with traditional psychotherapy. Although they found therapy to be of value, its limitations led them to seek a spiritual practice. For me it was the opposite. While I benefited enormously from the training offered in the Thai and Burmese monasteries where I practised, I noticed two striking things. First, there were major areas of difficulty in my life, such as loneliness, intimate relationships, work, childhood wounds, and patterns of fear, that even very deep meditation didn t touch. Second, among the several dozen Western monks (and lots of Asian meditators) I met during my time in Asia, with a few notable exceptions, most were not helped by meditation in big areas of their lives. Many were deeply wounded, neurotic, frightened, grieving, and often used spiritual practice to hide and avoid problematic parts of themselves. When I returned to the West to study clinical psychology and then began to teach meditation, I observed a similar phenomenon. At least half the students who came to three-month retreats couldn t do the simple "bare attention" practices because they were holding a great deal of unresolved grief, fear, woundedness, and unfinished business from the past. I also had an opportunity to observe the most successful group of meditators - including experienced students of Zen and Tibetan Buddhism - who had developed strong samadhi and deep insight into impermanence and selflessness. Even after many intensive retreats, most of the meditators continued to experience great difficulties and significant areas of attachment and unconsciousness in their lives, including fear, difficulty with work, relationships wounds, and closed hearts. They kept asking how to live the Dharma and kept returning to meditation retreats looking for help and healing. But the sitting practice itself, with its emphasis on concentration and detachment, often provided a way to hide, a way to actually separate the mind from difficult areas of heart and body. These problems exist for most vipassana teachers as well. Many of us have led very unintegrated lives, and even after deep practice and initial "enlightenment experiences," our sitting practice has left major areas of our beings unconscious, fearful, or disconnected. Many American vipassana teachers are now, or have recently been, in psychotherapy in order to deal with these issues. It should also be noted that a majority of the 20 or more largest centers of Zen, Tibetan, Hindu, and vipassana practice in America have witnessed major upheavals, centering on the teachers themselves (both Asian and Western), related to issues of power, sex, honesty, and intoxication.

Something is asking to be noticed here. If we want to find true liberation and compassion what can we learn? Some Helpful Conclusions for Our Practice 1. For most people, meditation practice doesn t "do it all". At best, it s one important piece of a complex path of opening and awakening. I used to believe that meditation led to the higher, more universal truths, and that psychology, personality, and our own "little dramas" were a separate, lower realm. I wish it worked that way, but experience and the nondual nature of reality don t bear it out. If we are to end suffering and final freedom, we can t keep these two levels of our lives separate. 2. The various compartments of our minds and bodies are only semi-permeable to awareness. Awareness of certain aspects does not automatically carry over to the other aspect, especially when our fear and woundedness are deep. This is true for all of us, teachers as well as students. Thus, we frequently find meditators who are deeply aware of breath or body but are almost totally unaware of feelings and others who understand the mind but have no wise relation to the body. Mindfulness works only when we are willing to direct attention to every area of our suffering. This doesn t mean getting caught in our personal histories, as many people fear, but learning how to address them so that we can actually free ourselves from the big and painful "blocks" of our past. Such healing work is often best done in a therapeutic relationship with another person. 3. Meditation and spiritual practice can easily be used to suppress and avoid feeling or to escape from difficult areas of our lives. Our sorrows are hard to touch. Many people resist the personal and psychological roots of their suffering; there is so much pain in truly experiencing our bodies, our personal histories, our limitations. It can even be harder than facing the universal suffering that surfaces in sitting. We fear the personal and its sorrow because we have not learned how it can serve as our practice and open our hearts. We need to look at our whole life and ask ourselves. "Where am I awake, and what am I avoiding ? Do I use my practice to hide ? In what areas am I conscious, and where am I fearful, caught, or unfree?" 4. There are many areas of growth (grief and other unfinished business, communication and maturing of relationships, sexuality and intimacy, career and work issues, certain fears and phobias, early wounds, and more) where good Western therapy is on the whole much quicker and more successful than meditation. These crucial aspects of our being can t just be written off as "personality stuff." Freud said he wanted to help people to love and work. If we can t love well and give meaningful work to the Earth, then what is our spiritual practice for ? Meditation can help in these areas. But if, after sitting for a while, you discover that you still have work to do, find a good therapist or some other way to effectively address these issues. Of course, there are many mediocre therapists and many limited kinds of therapy. Just as in meditation, you should look for the best. Beyond the traditional psychotherapies of the 40s and 50s, many new therapists have been developed with a strong spiritual basis such as psychosynthesis. Reichian breath work, sand play, and whole array of transpersonal psychologies. The best therapy, like the best meditation practice, uses awareness to heal the heart and is concerned not so much with our stories, as with fear and attachment and their release, and with bringing mindfulness to areas of delusion, grasping and unnecessary suffering. One can, at times, find the deepest realizations of selflessness and non-attachment through some of the methods of transpersonal psychology.

5. Does this mean we should trade meditation for psychotherapy? Not at all. Therapy isn t the solution either. Consciousness is! And consciousness grows in spirals. If you seek freedom, the most important thing I can tell you is that spiritual practice always develops in cycles. There are inner times when silence is necessary, followed by outer times for living and integrating the silent realizations, as well as times to get help from a deep and therapeutic relationship with another person. These are equally important phases of practice. It is not a question of first developing a self and then letting go of it. Both go on all the time. Any period of practice may include samadhi and stillness, followed by new levels of experiencing wounds and family history, followed by great letting go, followed by more personal problems. It is possible to work with all of these levels in the context of a spiritual practice. What is required is the courage to face the totality of what arises. Only then can we find the deep healing we seek - for ourselves and for our planet. In short, we have to expand our notion of practice to include all of life. Like the Zen ox-herding pictures, the spiritual journey takes us deep into the forest and leads us back to the market place again and again, until we are able to find compassion and the sure heart s release in every realm.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/26/opinion/26LAMA.html?ex=1052534501&ei=1&en=c28f2107b 7b6b131 The Monk in the Lab April 26, 2003 By TENZIN GYATSO

DHARAMSALA, India These are times when destructive emotions like anger, fear and hatred are giving rise to devastating problems throughout the world. While the daily news offers grim reminders of the destructive power of such emotions, the question we must ask is this: What can we do, person by person, to overcome them? Of course such disturbing emotions have always been part of the human condition. Some - those who tend to believe nothing will "cure" our impulses to hate or oppress one another - might say that this is simply the price of being human. But this view can create apathy in the face of destructive emotions, leading us to conclude that destructiveness is beyond our control. I believe that there are practical ways for us as individuals to curb our dangerous impulses impulses that collectively can lead to war and mass violence. As evidence I have not only my spiritual practice and the understanding of human existence based on Buddhist teachings, but now also the work of scientists. For the last 15 years I have engaged in a series of conversations with Western scientists. We have exchanged views on topics ranging from quantum physics and cosmology to compassion and destructive emotions. I have found that while scientific findings offer a deeper understanding of such fields as cosmology, it seems that Buddhist explanations - particularly in the cognitive, biological and brain sciences - can sometimes give Western-trained scientists a new way to look at their own fields. It may seem odd that a religious leader is so involved with science, but Buddhist teachings stress the importance of understanding reality, and so we should pay attention to what scientists have learned about our world through experimentation and measurement. Similarly, Buddhists have a 2,500-year history of investigating the workings of the mind. Over the millenniums, many practitioners have carried out what we might call "experiments" in how to overcome our tendencies toward destructive emotions. I have been encouraging scientists to examine advanced Tibetan spiritual practitioners, to see what benefits these practices might have for others, outside the religious context. The goal here is to increase our understanding of the world of the mind, of consciousness, and of our emotions. It is for this reason that I visited the neuroscience laboratory of Dr. Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin. Using imaging devices that show what occurs in the brain during meditation, Dr. Davidson has been able to study the effects of Buddhist practices for cultivating compassion, equanimity or mindfulness. For centuries Buddhists have believed that pursuing such practices seems to make people calmer, happier and more loving. At the same time they are less and less prone to destructive emotions. According to Dr. Davidson, there is now science to underscore this belief. Dr. Davidson tells me that the emergence of positive emotions may be due to this: Mindfulness meditation strengthens the neurological circuits that calm a part of the brain that acts as a trigger for fear and anger. This raises the possibility that we have a way to create a kind of buffer between the brain's violent impulses and our actions.

Experiments have already been carried out that show some practitioners can achieve a state of inner peace, even when facing extremely disturbing circumstances. Dr. Paul Ekman of the University of California at San Francisco told me that jarring noises (one as loud as a gunshot) failed to startle the Buddhist monk he was testing. Dr. Ekman said he had never seen anyone stay so calm in the presence of such a disturbance. Another monk, the abbot of one of our monasteries in India, was tested by Dr. Davidson using electroencephalographs to measure brain waves. According to Dr. Davidson, the abbot had the highest amount of activity in the brain centers associated with positive emotions that had ever been measured by his laboratory. Of course, the benefits of these practices are not just for monks who spend months at a time in meditation retreat. Dr. Davidson told me about his research with people working in highly stressful jobs. These people - non-Buddhists were taught mindfulness, a state of alertness in which the mind does not get caught up in thoughts or sensations, but lets them come and go, much like watching a river flow by. After eight weeks, Dr. Davidson found that in these people, the parts of their brains that help to form positive emotions became increasingly active. The implications of all this are clear: the world today needs citizens and leaders who can work toward ensuring stability and engage in dialogue with the "enemy" no matter what kind of aggression or assault they may have endured. It's worth noting that these methods are not just useful but inexpensive. You don't need a drug or an injection. You don't have to become a Buddhist, or adopt any particular religious faith. Everybody has the potential to lead a peaceful, meaningful life. We must explore as far as we can how that can be brought about. I try to put these methods into effect in my own life. When I hear bad news, especially the tragic stories I often hear from my fellow Tibetans, naturally my own response is sadness. However, by placing it in context, I find I can cope reasonably well. And feelings of helpless anger, which simply poison the mind and embitter the heart, seldom arise, even following the worst news. But reflection shows that in our lives much of our suffering is caused not by external causes but by such internal events as the arising of disturbing emotions. The best antidote to this disruption is enhancing our ability to handle these emotions. If humanity is to survive, happiness and inner balance are crucial. Otherwise the lives of our children and their children are more likely to be unhappy, desperate and short. Material development certainly contributes to happiness - to some extent - and a comfortable way of life. But this is not sufficient. To achieve a deeper level of happiness we cannot neglect our inner development. The calamity of 9/11 demonstrated that modern technology and human intelligence guided by hatred can lead to immense destruction. Such terrible acts are a violent symptom of an afflicted mental state. To respond wisely and effectively, we need to be guided by more healthy states of mind, not just to avoid feeding the flames of hatred, but to respond skillfully. We would do well to remember that the war against hatred and terror can be waged on this, the internal front, too. Tenzin Gyatso is the 14th Dalai Lama.