talk for the Leukemia Foundation

Good evening

I am quite flabbergasted that I stand before you tonight, representing YogaWay Studio, to talk about my meditation and mindfulness training there.

Three years ago this would not have been possible. I was a mess! I had been the victim of quite a horrendous series of crimes and suffered from Complex-PTSD (Post Trauma Stress Disorder), a Beast of a condition. Even the sound of a bicycle bell ringing would send my body into an ever increasing spiral of stress reactions. I felt I had lost all control. This depressed me deeply.

In the eighties I spent 10 years in and out Zen Monasteries in Japan. I practiced Zazen, sitting meditation, and mindfulness through calligraphy. I drifted away from this lifestyle after I had left Japan, but I kept practicing Zazen (20 minutes a day) and calligraphy. I also practiced yoga off and on.

When I found myself confronted with Complex-PTSD, hospitalized twice, on heavy medication, in intensive psycho-therapy, bankrupt, unemployed, divorced...these are the things that the Beast can do to one... I had lost all sense of meaning in my life.

In my search of meaning I went to the Yogaway studio and started practicing with Marilyn O’Keeffe. This was very beneficial. It gave me the strength to search even further. I went back to my old practices of Zazen and bamboo painting, but felt I could not get back into them on my own. I decided to live in a monastery once again and went to a Theravada nunnery in Melbourne. There I was appointed a teacher and I lived with the nuns and monks for 7 months, of which 5 in silence. We meditated minimum 4 hours a day and the rest of the day was spent in mindful silent activity. In the last two months I wrote and fascilitated a You Can Stop Smoking course, based on mindfulness. 5 people attended, 4 are still off the smokes now, a year later.

Last week my psycho-therapist wrote in my thick file: “total recovery from Complex-PTSD.”

A combination of medication, meditation, mindfulness and narrative therapy had done it's work!

Halleluiah!

There are many misunderstandings surrounding meditation and mindfulness. Also the difference between the two is often not clearly explained. So let me try to bring some clarity in the matter.

First of all: meditation and mindfulness do not require a guru. I myself am very wary of guru's, I do not believe in 'special people'. I think we are all special.

I also believe that gurus enhance the danger of groups becoming cults.

So what is the difference between meditation and mindfulness?

Lets first look at the definitions of both practices:

The term meditation refers to a broad variety of practices (much like the term sports) that includes techniques designed to promote relaxation, build internal energy or life force (ki or chi) and develop compassion, love, patience, generosity and forgiveness. A particularly ambitious form of meditation aims at effortlessly sustained single-pointed concentration meant to enable its practitioner to enjoy an indestructible sense of well-being while engaging in any life activity.

We can say that meditation is a journey to within.

Mindfulness is the intentionall, accepting and non-judgmental focus of one's attention on the emotions, thoughts and sensations occurring in the present moment. It has been popularized in the west by Jon Kabat-Zinn with his Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program. We can say that mindfulness is an acute awareness of all that comes in (from the outside).
Let me give you a simple example of both:
Let's meditate together for a couple of minutes.
A myth about meditation is that one should sit in the lotus position on the floor. This is absolute nonsense, one can meditate anywhere, in any position, even on the toilet with one's pants down on one's shoes.
The reason we sit and not lay down is that we easily fall asleep when we lay down. The reason why we do not stand is that that would become too tiring quickly. Sitting with a straight back is the best position, but walking can also be very helpful.
So, let's begin: close your eyes, sit straight but relaxed, hands in your lap, and become aware of your body, the shape, that blub that is sitting there in the chair..... Feel the weight of your body on the chair..... Now focus your attention on your hands and raise your hands up a bit, palms up, without looking at them. Can you feel your hands without looking at them?..... Can you feel their shape....., their volume?..... If not never mind, keep trying......
If you can feel your hands, can you also feel the aliveness in your hands?..... A slight tingling,.....throbbing, a slight vibration,..... a warmth.....it is different for different people.....Try to feel the aliveness in your hands...... Direct all your attention to trying to feel the aliveness in your hands.....
This little feeling, the aliveness, is the most mysterious thing in the world. This little thing, called aliveness is the spark that fuels you.... and me,..... the spark that animates us.
Concentrating on the feeling of aliveness, first in parts of the body, but later in the whole body is one way of building core strength (ki or chi) and well-being. It is unbelievably beneficial......



You can open your eyes now.



While you were trying to feel the aliveness in your hands chances are that you had no thoughts for just a little while. You were not thinking about the past or the future, you were in the Now.
The Now, believe it or not, has enormous power. Someone even wrote a book about the Now. It's called the Power of Now and the author is Eckhart Tolle.



Let's do some mindfulness practice.
Sit straight again,.... hands back in your lap,..... eyes closed and feel your body;..... its' outline, …...its' volume,..... its' weight......the inner body. Now focus your attention on your hearing....... Listen very carefully to all the sounds around you....... Try to have no opinion about the sounds, let them just stream into your ears and be aware of them........
When your thoughts interfere with your listening, just refocus........ Listen as if you are listening to a very faint whispering,....... with that much concentration....
Explore the entire soundscape around you; …...close sounds and distant sounds,......... loud sounds and hardly audible ones...., soothing sounds and irritating sounds....



(Make sounds...... with several instruments, bells, falling water etc).



When the mind wanders just pull it back gently and refocus on the sounds.



You can open your eyes now.
Do you feel slightly refreshed?



If you were able to concentrate on the sounds around you you were without thoughts for a little while. Thoughts are only concerned with the future or the past, in the Now thoughts collapse. The inner monologue stops. I cannot stress enough how beneficial it is to stop the inner monologue, that constant chatter, that radio without an off-button that is in our heads...... Interrupting the stream of thoughts in our head is like taking a bath on the inside. It is mental hygiene.
In meditation we take this being without thought to the limit.



We are trained to take extremely good care of our body's hygiene; we wash our skin and bits, we brush our teeth, we wash our hair, we train our muscles....
We use no brushes or cloths or towels or exercise gear for the mind..... to train the mind we use mindfulness and meditation....
A clearer mind is the result.
A rested mind.
A relaxed mind.
An excepting mind.
A mind at ease and at peace in even the most volatile circumstances, in sickness and in health.
These are very simple examples. Meditation and mindfulness can be taken all the way to very mysterious concepts, like the concept of Anatta; non-self.






I will finish now with a quote from neuro-scientist and meditation enthusiast Sam Harris's new book Waking Up:
It’s certainly true that our minds largely determine the quality of our lives. I’m not saying that outward circumstances don’t matter—you and I can both be very grateful that we aren’t living in Syria at this moment—but once a person has his basic needs met, how he uses his attention in every moment will spell the difference between happiness and misery. In particular, the habit of spending nearly every waking moment lost in thought leaves us at the mercy of whatever our thoughts happen to be. Meditation is a way of breaking this spell. Focus is one aspect of this: One discovers that being concentrated—on anything—is intrinsically pleasurable. But there is more to meditation that just being focused.
My friend Joseph Goldstein, one of the finest vipassana teachers I know, likens this shift in awareness to the experience of being fully immersed in a film and then suddenly realizing that you are sitting in a theater watching a mere play of light on a wall. Your perception is unchanged, but the spell is broken. Most of us spend every waking moment lost in the movie of our lives. Until we see that an alternative to this enchantment exists, we are entirely at the mercy of appearances. Again, the difference I am describing is not a matter of achieving a new conceptual understanding or of adopting new beliefs about the nature of reality. The change comes when we experience the present moment prior to the arising of thought.


Thank you all for listening.
Be well!