This page offers some reflections on practice from various teachers who have recently taught at The Mountain Hermitage.
From Marcia Rose:
Compassion –
“My continuing passion is to part a curtain — that invisible veil of indifference that falls between us and that blinds us to each other’s presence, each other’s wonder, each other’s human plight.”
– Eudora Welty, American author and photographer
“If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion
– Dalai Lama
“There is an image in Tibetan Buddhism that represents the awakened energy of unconditional, boundless compassion. It is an image of a Bodhisatta often depicted as having 1,000 arms outstretched and 1,000 eyes — an eye painted in the palm of each outstretched hand, 1,000 eyes to see all the suffering in the world, and 1,000 arms reaching out to help.
Compassion is the heart beat of the Buddha’s teaching. It may be experienced as the trembling or the quivering of the heart in response to pain -one’s own pain or another’s. Compassion is a very tender, open state and at the same time a place within us of great strength — tenderness, openness and strength — enabling us to stay present with whatever is happening within our own bodies and minds and with what is going on around us without becoming overwhelmed.
The practice and the unfolding of compassion are challenging, which means that we take to heart the Buddha’s words, “I teach one thing and one thing only – suffering and the end of suffering.” The practice of compassion asks us to gently maintain our awareness of suffering. Most of us are strongly habituated to sweep discomfort away, to sweep dis-ease “under the rug”, to hide it away in a metaphoric closet. Or, we hide ourselves away by shutting off, going to sleep or distracting ourselves. We might ignore or trivialize suffering so we don’t see the pain of others in the world — or experience our own pain and suffering.
Through the purification of the heart and mind that practice brings, we gradually turn our developing capacity for heart-full, unconditional acceptance towards suffering. We are then able to open to it with understanding and courage and move towards its alleviation. Unconditional compassion, our heartfelt connection to beings and our way of being in this world, arises out of a clear, deep seeing and understanding of suffering, its root cause and the way of its end.
Unconditional, boundless compassion is one of the wings of awakening with which we fly free.”
Equanimity –
“Equanimity – Upekkha in the Pali spiritual language (the language that the Buddha’s original teachings were first transcribed into) is a powerful force in our practice, a powerful force in the whole of our life. It manifests as the equipoise, the balance or equilibrium between the opposing forces in the mind of the desired and the undesired. The equipoise of equanimity offsets the weightiness of greed and aversion. It’s that point of balance in the middle of the see-saw of life.
As Equanimity blossoms it shows up in our practice and our lives as fearlessness, great strength, and ease within the mind and heart, keeping us balanced and impartial in the midst of it all.
As awakening beings, one way you can practice this essential quality of mind/heart is as one of the Brahma Viharas/Divine Abidings. The classical Theravada phrase used in this form of Equanimity practice is this:
‘I am/you are the heir or owner of my/your karma (my/your ‘deeds’ of thought, speech, and bodily actions). My/your happiness or suffering depends upon my/your actions (of thought, speech, and body), not upon my wishes.’
As it is done in the Brahma Vihara practice, one silently repeats this phrase over and over to oneself, staying very present and mindfully aware, but not getting caught or seduced into the stories that may show up. After directing the phrase to yourself for a few days, you can then slowly over time begin to bring in other individuals, such as someone who has been of benefit to you in your life, a dear friend, a family member, and even a difficult person. As we go on with this practice a very natural reflection and understanding will begin to blossom, not through discursive thought but simply through the process of the practice itself and your growing trust in its power.
You might consider trying this practice for 10 or 15 minutes each day keeping an open mind and heart towards the process and its fruits.”
Attitude Toward Practice–
“A good question to ask yourself now and then is: How am I holding my practice? What is my attitude, my frame of mind in relation to my practice?
It is essential to be relaxed and in the right frame of mind in relation to your practice. Everything else blossoms out of this. Holding your practice with the ‘right attitude’ means that you acknowledge, accept, observe, and bring mindfulness to whatever is happening, whether pleasant or unpleasant, in a relaxed and alert way. It’s vital to check in with yourself to see whether you are in the right frame of mind or not, which is even more important than experiencing peaceful states or having a ‘good sit’. The particular object of attention in your meditation is not really the most important aspect of your practice. Of prime importance is the observing mind working in the background to be mindful of whatever the experience is in the moment. If observation and mindfulnesss are done with the right attitude, any object is the right object. It’s important to know when you have the right frame of mind– but it’s equally important to recognize and mindfully investigate your wrong attitudes to see how they affect your practice and how you feel in the midst of these attitudes.”
From Joseph Goldstein:
“It was an amazing first five minutes. For the first time I saw there was a way to look at the mind, instead of looking out at the world through it. When people first get a taste of watching their minds, the discovery is tremendously compelling.”
“Calm is a state that is the opposite of restlessness. Equanimity is the quality of mind of impartiality… the equanimous mind holds everything, and in that impartiality is the chance to learn.”
“When you realize the empty or selfless nature of consciousness, the energy to bring about the good of others dawns uncontrived and effortless. When we take ourselves out of the way, what is left is love and compassion.”
“Real spiritual maturity happens when the relative and ultimate levels of truth are known as expressions of each other. When we understand truth on the ultimate level, we can engage in the world with much greater freedom.”
From Sayadaw Vivekananda:
Inner Happiness–
“As a non-meditator, we think that for our happiness and well-being we have to rely on external gadgets such as having the latest computer game, or spending holidays in the Caribbean renting a yacht. When we meditate, we gradually come to realize that more and more joy and happiness is arising within. This leads to the arising of contentment with whatever we have, with whatever social position we find ourselves in. We realize that for true inner joy, happiness, peace, and balance of mind, we don’t really need those external gadgets. And this, in a sense, is a form of inner liberation.”
Wisdom and Faith –
“There is a very simple connection between wisdom and faith.
Wisdom is bound to arise as we keep being mindful from moment to moment, exerting effort with concentration building.
At first, wisdom arises in simple ways: just knowing the nature of one rising movement, knowing the nature of a falling movement; knowing the specific nature of some pain, some ache, some hardness, some softness; gradually getting to know the different mental states; discerning the specifics of mind and matter and their relationship to each other, and other insight knowledges.
Every time a meditator intuitively (not just intellectually) realizes a new insight knowledge the meditator understands “Wow, I’m seeing something that I’ve never seen before. There really seems to be something to this path. Something is really happening.” One begins to find that their experience is in accord with what has been said in Dhamma talks or written in the texts. As a result of this, one’s faith increases.
And as our wisdom increases stage by stage, the wholesome mental state of faith is strengthened.”
Patience –
“Patience is a blessing to human beings and is the best moral practice.”
–The Buddha (Mangala Sutta; Dhp. v. 184)“Patience leads to Nibbana”
– Burmese saying“Patience is required in performing acts of generosity, in observing precepts, and in the field of mental development (bhavana). In meditation when we observe a pain that is gradually intensifying we tend to get annoyed. This annoyance may easily turn into irritation and restlessness. We start fidgeting, we change our posture. We might even ask ourselves: Why do we have to sit still in meditation and observe this pain? This seems like a futile exercise. With this we have just missed a wonderful opportunity to gain intuitive wisdom. If we were to observe that same pain with some patience we could learn many things from it, such as seeing its inherent quality, its fascinating changes, and even its eventual dissolution. When we are remembering some undesirable event of the past we may want to push it away and rather not observe it. Once again, wisdom cannot arise. Here, too, patience will make a big difference. When we accept and observe the undesirable event of the past as an object of observation we get to know it, what it feels like in the mind, and eventually we might even come to terms with it.
Satipatthana mediation could be described as a process of developing ever greater levels of patience. At the outset of our meditation journey we easily get impatient with undesirable, and times even desirable objects. As the meditation practice is full of challenges this will give us ample opportunity to grow more and more patient. After being very diligent for quite some time, on occasion our meditation practice may collapse. At such a point again we need patience with the situation and just accept what has happened and start all over again. Sooner or later, in the presence of mindfulness and patience, we are bound to succeed and gain nibbana. Hence , the Burmese saying “Patience leads to Nibbana” very much applies to the meditation practice.
The patience gained from intensive or regular meditation at home will come in good stead in our daily life when we have to deal with the imperfections of ourselves and others. Others’ speech may be timely or untimely, true or untrue, gentle or harsh, connected with good or with harm, spoken with a mind of loving-kindness or with inner hate. Whatever others might be saying, we need to abide in patience, compassion, and loving-kindness.
In the context of the Abhidhamma patience and other positive mental qualities like loving-kindness, gentleness, and amity are various aspects of the mental state of non-hatred (adosa). The commentary to the Cariyapitaka defines patience as follows: It has the characteristic of acceptance; its function is to endure the desirable and the undesirable; its manifestation is tolerance or non-opposition; seeing things as they really are is its proximate cause. In the texts patience is much extolled as a blessing to human beings and as the best moral practice (Mangala Sutta; Dhp. v.184).”
From Annie Nugent:
The Dharma In A Few Words –
“We might think that the Dharma is only to be found in long hours of sitting on our meditation cushion…but not so. It incorporates all areas of our lives if we are prepared to look at life with eyes of wisdom – and what better place to begin than with our speech?
The Buddha spoke about the importance of speaking wisely. It is one of the steps of the 8fold path and an immediately rich area of practice for us in the busy, interactive world we live in. Each time we open our mouth to speak we have the opportunity to cultivate either wholesome or unwholesome qualities: we can perpetuate the habitual responses borne out of delusion that we have blindly acted out for many lifetimes or we can learn to pause momentarily before we speak, take note of what is happening in the mind – and then speak from a place of growing awareness of what our motivation is in our choice of words, because motivation or attitude of mind, is the key to wholesome speech. Are our words motivated by kindness or anger, greed or generosity?
For example, take the simple sentence: “Hello, how are you today?” What is our motivation in saying these words that are used so often in our daily lives? We might say them to our neighbors, the check-out clerk at the supermarket, our friends, our children, partners and people in the street. But are we aware of all of the qualities that might be present within the heart/mind as we are speaking them?
In just these few words we can find the dharma: when the heart is open and connected to the other person – we can touch our common bond, our humanity. We are not threatening the other person or wanting anything from them, rather we are giving in a very simple, aware way. We are letting go of thoughts about ourselves and what we want, and including someone else into our world with kind awareness, transforming what might have been a mere formality, a polite, empty sentence if said without awareness, into a small gesture of kindness and inclusion borne out of awareness. In these moments we are also not trying to make any special feeling arise, instead, through being genuinely open and truly present, we can feel a quiet connectedness come to life within the heart, free of expectation of any particular result.
It takes so little of our time, yet has far reaching consequences in terms of our practice because each drop of wholesome motivation in our speech, coming from a place of generosity and kindness of heart, rather than from a place of grasping or unkindness is a step in the direction of letting go of our deeply ingrained habitual tendency of unawareness in the world.
If we are sincerely interested in developing in our practice, then we can resolve to pay attention when we speak. As we begin to include speech into our practice we will notice how difficult it is because our habits run so deep. Don’t let this dishearten you…and watch the judging mind…. we are all working towards purifying our unskillful habits….and of course, it is going to take time. The important thing to remember is to be patient with ourselves and never to give up… each moment we are willing to make the effort towards strengthening awareness in our speech brings wholesome results….a drop at a time.”
