Meditation

Today's Holidailies prompt:

Today is Bodhi Day, a Buddhist holiday that commemorates the day that Buddha experienced enlightenment. Tell us about a time when you felt truly enlightened.

Um, I can't say that I've "felt truly enlightened." At least, not in a way that made a lasting change in my life, which it seems to me like "enlightenment" would have to do in order to qualify. So instead, I'll talk about my experience with a practice associated both with Buddhism and with his experience of enlightenment: meditation.

I think I first encountered meditation from two directions in high school: there was sophomore year world history, where we talked about Buddhism and the Buddha, and then there was... the International Thespian Conference, in the early summer after that year. One of the sessions they had was on using yoga for relaxation, to improve theater performance. Intrigued, I came back to small-town Ohio and checked out every book our library had on yoga, which I'm pretty sure was two.

It's probably fair to say that you can't learn physical skills through reading, but that didn't stop me with yoga (or tennis). Ironically, I've gone on to teach both of them in one way or another. But I digress.

I've been more and less into yoga over the years, but as anyone who's ever done yoga would probably attest, the best part of the whole thing is "corpse pose," the last thing you do, which as the name implies is basically laying there like you're dead. It's meant, of course, for meditation, not for falling into an exhausted sleep.

Aside from that meditation, I've also had an interest in other forms of meditation, gravitating most toward the sort where you observe and/or control your breath. I did this even before I connected it to music, but there's a natural fit. Breath control is an important technique for singing and for playing a wind instrument, and I've done both in my time. I suppose music is a meditation in and of itself.

Although I've been acquainted with meditation for over 20 years, I'm afraid I can't say that I've built a really consistent practice in that time, though I've done enough to have moments of--oh yeah--enlightenment in which I realize that life would be better if I did have that kind of practice.

I've become in some ways reacquainted with meditation through the health and fitness communities that I've participated in, which have moved beyond nutrition and exercise into broader areas of one's lifestyle, including sleep and stress management, particularly meditation. I skimmed through 8 Minute Meditation in roughly 8 minutes (spoiler alert: the book is too long to actually read in 8 minutes), and mostly what I got out of it was nothing new, just the idea of setting a timer for eight minutes and, you know, meditating.

I've had a few times in the last few months where I've hit a wall in the middle of the afternoon, where I felt tired and unfocused and just generally unlikely to get any productive work done. Sometimes I go get coffee. Sometimes I end up wasting time. But sometimes, I set the timer and meditate. I turn off the light, close the blinds, lock my door, lie down and meditate. And two things seem to happen: first, I hit my 8 minutes and it's so good that I just set the timer to do another 8--but then almost exactly 4 minutes in someone knocks on my door. It's uncanny, like 12 minutes is how long the universe decrees that I should meditate. The second thing that happens is that I feel fantastic and have no problem getting to work and being super productive.

Seriously, why don't I do that every day? I guess that's what I meant at the beginning of the post when I said I hadn't really found enlightenment.

You down with OCD?

A colleague and I were talking about how she can tell when our students have used the vacuum, because they don't wind the cord up the same way, and this got us talking about things around the house that have to be done a certain way.

In her house, it's towels and shirts. Towels have to be folded--and shelved--a very particular way (which her young adult son still doesn't seem to get), and shirt are always hung up so that they are facing the same way.

I suppose it's similar in our house: when we got married, Lauren let me know that there were certain laundry-related tasks that I was doing wrong--folding towels and folding shirts. I think I used to fold towels over once, then fold the other way, and then the other way (so it was basically folded in eighths). Now I am to fold it over once, then fold it into thirds, and I do. And, all right, it does look nicer. I don't even remember the old way of folding shirts, though I'm also pretty sure that Lauren is not entirely satisfied with my version of her way of folding shirts. It's unlikely to lead to divorce, so we both let it slide.

I remember growing up, my father was very particular about the way the lawn was to be mowed: diagonally across the main body of the front yard, alternating which diagonal from week to week.

For me, I'm particular about where my folded laundry gets put away, because I have a system so that I can find what I want in the near-pitch-black of our bedroom in the morning. But the time that I really turn OCD--although I've gotten better--is in the weight room.

It annoys me when I see that the dumbbells have not been racked in order from smallest to largest. I twitch a little when I see someone actually putting them out of order. Likewise, every power rack, every bench rack, has a particular peg on which particular weights go. They're even labeled. And it can't take that much more effort to put things back on the right one as it does to put them on the wrong one, but people still do it. Probably just to drive me nuts.

Ideally, if a fellow denizen of the weight room wanted to keep me happy, he or she would not only put the weights where they belong, but this theoretical happiness-provider would also make sure the racks are balanced: if there are four 45-lb plates, they'd better be two and two, not three and one. For that matter, if somehow there are only three plates for a given size... go get another one!

Unfortunately, not everyone shares my sense of weight room feng shui, so I've had to learn how to cope. Then again, a little rage in the weight room just might be a good thing....

Bells of Mindfulness

In Peace is Every Step, Thich Nhat Hahn talks about literal and metaphorical "Bells of Mindfulness," and says

In my tradition, we use the temple bells to remind us to come back to the present moment. Every time we hear the bell, we stop talking, stop our thinking, and return to ourselves, breathing in and out, and smiling. Whatever we are doing, we pause for a moment and just enjoy our breathing. Sometimes we also recite this verse:

Listen, listen.
This wonderful sound brings me back to my true self.

 He goes on to discuss the idea that just about anything can serve as a "bell of mindfulness," particularly here in America where church bells are less common. I was thinking of this last weekend when I was at my college choir's reunion, because one of the many distinctive features of our campus is the set of bells in the bell tower, which not only toll out the hours and the quarter-hour increments between them, but are also pealed by students for an hour each Friday after classes have ended.

While I was there, I used my iPod to record the bells on Sunday morning as they struck the 9 o'clock hour, and after I returned home, I edited the file so that it could toll any of the hours during the work day, as well as the quarter hours. Then I scheduled my computer to play those files at the appropriate time and--voila!--bells of mindfulness.

Of course, the campus on which I live and work actually has its own bell tower with an even more impressive set of bells. However, I never seem to hear them in my office. This way, I will hear bells. It's also nice that each sound clip starts with the gentle sound of the breeze and the chirping of birds and fades out into the same. Lovely, really.

But there's more to it than that, because the bells also take me out of the present moment, somewhat, and take me to the past and to another place, to Kenyon College. It's the place I spent four nostalgia-burnished years of my life, some of my favorite to recall. It's the place where I proposed to my wife four years ago (very close, in fact, to where I stood to record the bells) and where we married three years ago (pretty close to the same site). I've returned there over and over. Lauren and I both love the place so much that she was jealous of the fact that I got to return last weekend and she couldn't. We decided that we would take a vacation to just hang out there when we have a long weekend in the fall. That's how much we love it.

More than that, it's a place that helped form "my true self," my best self. I think of it all rather like the way that Wordsworth thinks of his spot of wild country written about in "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey":

                                These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye;
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration: --feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure; such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened: --that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on --
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul;
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.

 My bells from Kenyon are not exactly what the Buddhist monk had in mind, nor are they quite what Wordsworth was getting at, but hearing them is a way of bringing into the present moment peace and joy and perhaps a sort of recollection of my best self.

Happiness: commitments, chasing dreams

Recently, I  blogged about the "pursuit" of happiness and the problematic nature of that pursuit. And now, it's graduation season.

If you sample some of the commencement addresses being broadcast on C-Span these days, you see that many graduates are told to: Follow your passion, chart your own course, march to the beat of your own drummer, follow your dreams and find yourself. This is the litany of expressive individualism, which is still the dominant note in American culture.

But, of course, this mantra misleads on nearly every front. -- David Brooks, "It's Not About You

Brooks is considering a different problem, but I think he has some interesting things to say on the same subject that I was writing about some days ago. He continues:

College grads are often sent out into the world amid rapturous talk of limitless possibilities. But this talk is of no help to the central business of adulthood, finding serious things to tie yourself down to. The successful young adult is beginning to make sacred commitments — to a spouse, a community and calling — yet mostly hears about freedom and autonomy.

 I was struck by this formulation of what adulthood is really about and it struck a chord in me. Perhaps because of "expressive individualism" we are resistant to this, to being "tied down," yet historically speaking that has been precisely the way that humans have constructed meaning for their lives--through the webs of their interpersonal relationships, through their relations to a community, as well as through their achievements. 

All of this, however, is not necessarily and either/or prospect. The point of life is not simply to tie ourselves to commitments and, mule-like, slog them through our three score years and ten, whether we like it or not. There is an art to choosing our commitments, not to mention revising our commitments, de-committing, moving on. 

Nonetheless, I do think that if we buy into the ideas of expressive individualism too uncritically, it leads us to unhappiness. We chafe too easily at our commitments, we desire freedom and change for their own sake, rather than because our situation really needs them. We are, to go back to the way I put it in my other post, chasing happiness instead of chasing the other ends that offer significance to our lives. 

There is a balance to be struck here, and it is not the same balance for everyone. Some people really do need to march to the beat of their own drummer, chase their dreams, etc. I suspect that's been the case with most of our great artists, musicians, writers, our innovators, our movers and shakers. And it's not just them, of course: all of us need that at times, and some more than others. The important thing, I think, is that we have to spend some time thinking about these matters to find what works for us, the balance between freedom and commitment, between self and others, and whatever other poles we could define these issues around. If we don't give it serious thought, we are likely to follow too slavishly a path not of our own choosing or to be pulled from the path on which we could find happiness by the voices whispering to us of some other way of living that we dimly believe even if we shouldn't.

Happiness; or, what shall we pursue?

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Has another phrase so shaped the psyche of our nation? As usual, though, the most difficult words are some of the most common: what is happiness? What does it mean to pursue it?

I recently listened to a podcast (Philosophy Bites) with a guest talking about happiness and how it's been seen at various times in history.

Historically, he noted, for medieval man happiness was a sort of accident--it might happen, but it wasn't the expected, normal state. Instead, salvation was where it was at, because life was lousy (for most people, most of the time). From the Renaissance through the Enlightenment, that changed, to the point where we were seen to have a "right" to "pursue" happiness, though the podcast's guest noted that in modern times, this "right" has become something more like a "duty" to the point where we need to be constantly questioning whether or not we're happy.




We have this idea that we should be happy, so we're constantly questioning whether or not we are and, I suspect, losing what peace we might have if we appreciated what we have.

Pascal Bruckner, the interviewee on the podcast, took something of an ancient Greek perspective on the matter. For the ancient Greeks, happiness was a judgment that could only be made at the end of a life: has one lived a good life, has one achieved excellence in the things one aimed at? In other words, it was something different from momentary contentment, momentary pleasure--a good reminder of how words change their meanings and/or have ambiguity thanks to multiple meanings.

In any case, two insights he offered that I particularly liked were these: first, the idea that "happiness is being pointed in the right direction." Second, he suggests that "happiness is a secondary goal. Other feelings and goals are more important." In other words, happiness isn't something we pursue as such. We pursue other ends--"engaging in activities which both enhance life for yourself and others and which bring you a sense of meaning"--and the fact that we're doing so, that's where happiness is. We're pointed in the right direction with regards to the meaning in our lives, the goals in our lives, the values that we hold.
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The preceding grew out of a comment made on a friend's blog, linked to where I quoted her in the final paragraph. Thanks, Sarah, for getting me to write about something I meant to write about.