Meditation
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CM332 or on Zoom!
https://vccs.zoom.us/j/84169786651
Meeting ID: 841 6978 6651
What is Meditation?
What images come to mind when you think of the word, “meditation”? One only has to do a quick Google image search to see where some common ideas come from! Perhaps you imagine people with limber knees sitting in peaceful bliss nestled in beautiful environments? That seems to be the dominant motif. As much as we would like to count ourselves among those who fit this appearance and idea, we, very simply, do not! Meditation, in our experience, is a bit more messy. It’s a bit more ad hoc. It’s a bit more… real.
Jack Kornfield has provided a definition of meditation which works very well for us. He has defined meditation as, “a deliberate training of attention that awakens us beyond the conditioned mind and habitual thinking, and reveals the nature of reality.” With this broad definition, the many different forms or types of meditation have room to occupy a place. They meet different needs and preferences! Diverse ways of knowing and being are welcome within the meditation landscape.
All of the varied types of mediation have one thing in common, which is mentioned in Kornfield’s definition – deliberate training. Meditation is deliberate. As we say, it is a practice. In this practice, we are not trying to become better meditators. Rather, we are practicing at becoming better humans! We do this by seeing the ways in which our histories and environments have conditioned us and our responses, including in ways that further contribute to our pain and suffering, and to the pain and suffering to those around us. Through this insight, we might gain wisdom. Through this wisdom, as we then see our interconnectedness, compassion naturally arises.
The practice of meditation generally comes in two varieties: 1) open awareness, or insight, practices, and 2) concentration / focused attention practices. In the open awareness practices, we dedicate time and attention in a way that let’s us see the arising and passing away of all phenomena, and we can more clearly see the ephemeral nature of all sensations in, around, and among us. The other practice, concentration, focuses awareness on an object, most commonly the breath, where we can see that the mind and the thoughts that arise also are in this constant state of arising and passing away. Through time, practice, and grace, we sometimes discover that we can let go of our thinking mind, and find peace where it is most often hardest to find, right here, between our own two ears.