After settling in, and before meditation, we heard part of
an essay by Zen teacher and author Karen Maezen Miller titled “The First
Noble Misunderstanding”
We might be drawn to meditation because we want more out of
life and ourselves. We might want to be more centered, for example. More
peaceful. More focused. More balanced. More patient. More mellow. More wise.
More like my ex-boyfriend who liked to meditate.
These may be all the reasons we are drawn to meditation, but they are not the reasons we meditate. We meditate because there is a six-foot flame dancing on top of our heads. It has made us mighty uncomfortable for quite some time up there. We try to pretend otherwise, but have you noticed? We have a fire on our heads! It keeps crossing the containment lines! The temperature shoots up and we prance about, panicked, frantic, holding our breath lest we stoke the inferno, but it rages anyway. About the time our eyebrows singe, we might heed the call of rescue. ...
… (In meditation) what you begin to see is that the place where you thought your life occurred — the cave of rumination and memory, the cauldron of anxiety and fear — isn’t where your life takes place at all. Those mental recesses are where pain occurs, but life occurs elsewhere, in a place we are usually too preoccupied to notice, too distracted to see: right in front of our eyes. The point of meditation is to stop making things up and see things as they are.
These may be all the reasons we are drawn to meditation, but they are not the reasons we meditate. We meditate because there is a six-foot flame dancing on top of our heads. It has made us mighty uncomfortable for quite some time up there. We try to pretend otherwise, but have you noticed? We have a fire on our heads! It keeps crossing the containment lines! The temperature shoots up and we prance about, panicked, frantic, holding our breath lest we stoke the inferno, but it rages anyway. About the time our eyebrows singe, we might heed the call of rescue. ...
… (In meditation) what you begin to see is that the place where you thought your life occurred — the cave of rumination and memory, the cauldron of anxiety and fear — isn’t where your life takes place at all. Those mental recesses are where pain occurs, but life occurs elsewhere, in a place we are usually too preoccupied to notice, too distracted to see: right in front of our eyes. The point of meditation is to stop making things up and see things as they are.
At the conclusion of our meditation period, we heard this
quote from Thich Nhat Hanh:
The mind can go in a thousand directions,
But on this beautiful path, I walk in peace.
With each step, a gentle wind blows.
With each step, a flower blooms.
For the
Dharma talk/reading, we read from Thich Nhat Hanh’s seminal book “Peace is
Every Step” (p. 77 in The Thich Nhat Hanh Collection)
During announcements, we shared
that our next meeting is 7 p.m. Tuesday, June 21, in ICPL Room A.
In closing, we read two quotes, the first from Kozan Ichikyo:
Empty-handed
I entered
the world,
Barefoot I leave it.
My coming, my going--
Two simple happenings
That got entangled.
The second was a poem from Rumi:
Lord, the air smells good today,
straight from the mysteries
within the inner courts of God.
A grace like new clothes thrown
across the garden, free medicine for everybody.
The trees in their prayer, the birds in praise,
the first blue violets kneeling.
Whatever came from Being is caught up in being, drunkenly
forgetting the way back.
straight from the mysteries
within the inner courts of God.
A grace like new clothes thrown
across the garden, free medicine for everybody.
The trees in their prayer, the birds in praise,
the first blue violets kneeling.
Whatever came from Being is caught up in being, drunkenly
forgetting the way back.
Bowing,
Stephen
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