How To Meditate: Tips From Lama

Surya Das, The Buddha

FromBrooklyn
(RNS) Lama Surya Das, the Buddha from Brooklyn,
is one of the handful of Westerners who have been
teaching meditation for decades. And yet, he says
were doing it wrong.
So many people seem to be moving narcissistically
conditioned by our culture, doubtless into selfcentered happiness-seeking and quietism, not to
mention the use of mindfulness for mere
effectiveness, he said. True meditation, he said,

Born Jeffrey Miller, Surya Das has had a spiritual

journey that is remarkable in its breadth. He was
given the name Surya Das by the Indian guru
Neem Karoli Baba, made famous by Ram Dass more
than 40 years ago. But Surya Das shifted gears in the
early 1970s to Tibetan Buddhism, subsequently
completing two three-year silent meditation retreats
and becoming one of the first Westerners to be
authorized as a Tibetan lama.
At the time, meditation was still considered pretty
weird: foreign, exotic, hippie-ish. Now its
everywhere. Meditation especially mindfulness,
which trains the mind to observe nonjudgmentally
and attentively has gone mainstream. In secular
forms, its now widespread in health care, education,
the corporate world, even the military. Each year, 1

Moreover, he said, because of the way

meditation is taught, many people think they
cant do it. Quiet your mind or calm and
clear your mind are instructions I hear way
too much. Some teachers actually encourage
people to try to stop thinking, when in fact
meditative awareness means being mindful of
thoughts and feelings, not simply trying to
reduce, alter or white them out and achieve
some kind of oblivion.
Whats missing? In his new book,
Make Me One With Everything (the answer to
a well-worn Buddhist joke: What did the Zen
monk say to the hot dog vendor?), Surya Das

All the parts is a crucial ingredient. In Make Me

One, he proposes what he calls co-meditation
not trying to find a quiet moment of Zen apart
from the messy, noisy world of work, family and
children, but inviting all of the noise into
meditation.
That is indeed unorthodox in a contemporary
context. But it is also part of the ancient Tibetan
tradition known as Lojong, which often features
elaborate visualizations not quieting down and
following the breath. Indeed, many of the books
unusual meditation practices sky-gazing,
gardening, meditation for couples, and wild
neologisms including Presencing, Convergitation
and Momitation are based on Surya Das years of
studying and translating esoteric Tibetan teaching

The anti-intellectual meditators, thought-swatters

and imagination-suppressors have long ruled
meditation-oriented circles in the West. But
authentic meditative practices can enhance and
even unleash the creativity and imagination.
Still, bringing more noise into ones meditation
practice is diametrically opposed to the popular
conception of meditation as calming and quieting.
Surya Das calls that the old New Age, self-growth,
self-development, self-improvement emphasis
trying to use meditation to get away from it all.
We need to erode the Grand Canyon-like gulf we
see today between self and other, us and them,
inner and outer, and even body and mind, body

You may have already noticed that Surya Das

speaks in long, often hilarious sentences, filled with
puns and jokes. This rhetorical style is of a piece
with his conceptual point that awakening isnt
some calm, blissed-out state but is being at home
with every state of mind, including the rapid-fire
speech of a born-and-bred New Yorker.
For example, heres how he summarizes the key
teaching of the book, complete with 13 adjectives,
10 nouns and 11 verbs: Can I say that this book
presents, elucidates, rationalizes and instructs, in
the extraordinary American-Buddhisms fresh and
newly minted, jargon-free, straight talkin, practical
and flexible, adaptable, personal and integratable,
nonsectarian organic ways for a whole new way of
meditating, with tips and pointers to find your own

Theres a refreshing honesty in this iconoclastic

approach. Whatever awakening is, surely it has
something to do with authenticity. And for some of
us, authenticity is fast-talking, free-associating and
full of sound and fury.
Or as Surya Das himself put it, It can become
obnoxious, I know, but Im a folksy, campy,
backyard bodhisattva-from-Brooklyn kinda guy,
what can I say?
Article Source
https://lamasuryadivorce.wordpress.com/2015/06/0
8/how-to-meditate-tips-from-lama-surya-das-the-b
uddha-from-brooklyn/