Heart of Meditation Retreat

Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, a Tibetan meditation teacher, presented a wonderful meditation retreat this weekend. Rinpoche, as everyone called him, was delightfully funny ("I go to comedy school; no not really!"), with most of that humor self-directed about his life and English. Much laughter on the third day when we and Rinpoche realized simultaneously that a phrase he had frequently used: 'balah, balah, balah', meaning mental jabber or monkey mind, was his interpretation of the American 'blah, blah, blah'. How we all missed, and got it, together.

The essence of the teaching was how one can turn distractions from hinderances to meditation to help for meditation. So, we learned how background noise can be turned from an annoyance to an object of focus for meditation. Similarly with pain, sleepiness, runaway toughts, and emotions. Thus, just as we can meditate on a lovely object, we can meditate on noise, pain sensation, monkey mind, and so on. Rinpoche recounted his own discovery of this in his use of meditation to overcome panic attacks, as seen in this video:


As as I learned to meditate, I suffered through such distractions, and they made the practice difficult. I have also watched many fail to take up a practice because the distractions overwhelmed them. Not surprisingly, I fell in love with this teaching. I continue my own passage meditation practice, but plan to use these techniques when I'm distracted, and plan to use them when I teach others. And I've started to do that, with a brief teaching of meditation basics to the outpatient psych group at the hospital. Being able to give learners choices allowed us to move past the "I tried it before - it didn't work" or "That will never work for me" objections to some fruitful exploration of mindfulness.

Image from http://www.wisdom-books.com/, video originally from http://www.mingyur.org/

Blue Mountain Meditation Retreat

In late August, I attended a regional retreat of the Blue Mountain Center for Meditation at Cabrini Shrine outside of Denver. I've been practicing passage meditation and following the Eight Point Program of Eknath Easwaran for nearly ten years now. (Slowing Down is the third of these Eight Points.) This retreat was as much an excuse to see old friends in the Golden meditation group as it was to refresh and deepen my practice.

The theme of the retreat was renewal, and much of the focus was on getting out of 'doldrums', periods in which our meditation (or any spiritual practice, for that matter) seems flat and unfulfilling. We explored ways to rejuvenate our practice, such as identifying and eliminating bad habits (I notice that I unconsciously shift my feet during meditation, for example), ways to choose and deepen our relationship with the passages we use for meditation, and strategies for using time set aside for specifically for renewal. I found this to be an appealing concept - periodically, I do need to reflect on my practice, and more often than at an annual retreat.

I thought the idea of renewal also spoke to changes with the Blue Mountain Center. Easwaran died before I began this practice, so I never met him. My sense is that his unexpected death meant that the organization struggled for some time, first just to survive, then sort out leadership and direction. Easwaran did not want to create a religious organization in the eastern tradition, so he did not formally ordain other teachers. The organization is now affirming its identity under the leadership of Easwaran's wife Christine, and moving on an expanded mission, a time of renewal, with specific programming for youth and for elders and those confronting death. Even though I'm just an ordinary practitioner and occasional retreatant, I'm excited and hopeful about this new phase. The Eight Point Program has been valuable for me, and I want to see these teachings continue to be kept fresh and offered to others.

Making Retreat with the Jesuits

This last weekend, I 'made' a silent retreat with some sixty men, almost all Catholic, at a the Demontreville Jesuit retreat center near St. Paul. Most of the folks in this crowd were spiritually intentional laypeople, some served as deacons in their parishes, many had attended this retreat once a year for more than twenty years. It was silent: other than a conversation with the retreat leader, I was silent from after dinner Thursday night to dinner Sunday night.

The retreat leader, Father Jim Flaherty, teaches philosophy at Marquette University. He's a grad of JSTB, the Jesuit school that's part of the Graduate Theological Union (which includes Starr King School); we connected in remembering our times in Berkeley.

For a person who grew up with little contact with Catholic rituals and traditions, the learning curve for me was quite steep! And I had to work overtime to translate theology, language and narrative into something that I could work with in my own UU context. These Jesuits know how to pray! Like many UU's, prayer has been an issue for me, and I've struggled to find its utility in my process-based theology. I want to see prayer as more than just 'talking to God', certainly more than 'telling God what to do' (I saw a lot of that in the south). The retreat offered a number of methods for introspection and contemplation, for getting out of the head and into the heart. I hope to explore how these connect with other practices I've encountered (Buddhist, Islamic) and my own passage meditation practice.