Meditation in Times of Chaos

When he was fleeing his home country of Vietnam, the Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh had a direct revelation of the real power of meditation practice.

“When the crowded Vietnamese refugee boats met with storms or pirates, if everyone panicked all would be lost,” he said. “But if even one person on the boat remained calm and centered, it was enough. It showed the way for everyone to survive.”

Showing the way for everyone to survive. It’s a rather dire way of painting the picture, but it feels timely. Because the times feel rather dire and chaotic. Do they not?

A lot of people approach meditation as a self-improvement project. Meditation’s going to make me feel better, make me more focused, make me more productive, make me more happy, make me less crazy, make me more chill. Me, me, me.

But look around you. The world is on fire. People are hurting. They are freaking out. Have you noticed? Maybe you see it from a distance: things that are happening in the news, rifts that are opening up in the fabric of society. Maybe you feel it closer to home, in your circle of friends and loved ones: the ways they are being challenged, and the ways they are falling down and getting back up again. Maybe you feel it in yourself: the growing sense of malaise that gnaws from the inside, and occasionally erupts into full-blown panic.

“As individuals, we feel helpless, despairing,” Thich Nhat Hanh wrote. “The situation is so dangerous, injustice is so widespread, the danger is close. In this kind of a situation, if we panic, things will only become worse. We need to remain calm, to see clearly. Meditation is to be aware, and to try to help.”

That puts your personal meditation practice in a rather different light, doesn’t it? It’s not really about you. It’s about your whole world, and all the people in it, and the way your presence helps them. Sure, maybe it helps you become more chill, more focused, more productive, more blissful, more calm and centered. But what do you do with all that calmness and centeredness? What is it for?

It’s to be aware, and to try to help. The real benefits of your meditation practice will only become apparent to you when you find yourself in the role of offering them to others.

A few weeks ago one of my friends went through brain surgery to remove a large tumor. Before his diagnosis, he was never really into things like meditation, but being diagnosed with a brain tumor and undergoing radical surgery has a way of shifting your perspective on a lot of things in life. My friend began to ask for guided meditations and breathing techniques to help calm his fear. I don’t mean garden-variety anxiety, I mean real existential fear: the bone-chilling, “Will I survive?” kind of fear. But he knew that if he panicked, it would only make the situation worse.

And so he began to meditate, and at the hospital he restricted his visitors to friends who could bring that kind of calm and centered energy into the room—people who could help him find his way calmly through the most difficult situation he had ever faced, one challenging moment at a time. We were there when he woke up from the surgery, doing what we could to hold the space around him.

My friend is now back on his feet, and I’m happy to report that he’s still meditating regularly. And we are closer now than before, as people tend to be after they’ve gone through something very difficult together.

And that feels like where we all are right now. I don’t mean my friend, but you, me, all of us. We are all going through something very difficult together. And let’s acknowledge, to be fair, that it’s more difficult for some than for others; some need help more urgently than others. And there are no credible reasons to believe that it’s all magically going to get easier any time soon. It might get even more difficult before it gets easier. Those of us who are in a position to help, whatever that means in our particular case, should do what we can.

What I’m describing is in no way theoretical. I’m talking about matters of life and death, and how the effects of meditation play a very concrete role in helping us navigate through the most challenging situations.

“Humankind has become a very dangerous species,” says Thich Nhat Hanh. “We need people who can sit still and be able to smile, who can walk peacefully. We need people like that in order to save us. Mahayana Buddhism says that you are that person, that each of you is that person.”

It would be easy for someone to come along and say, “All this Buddhist crap about sitting still and smiling and being peaceful! It’s like fiddling while Rome burns. We need everyone to panic, and scream, and freak out! We need action!” But that would be a misreading of Thich Nhat Hanh’s words. If you know anything about his history of peace activism, you know that Thich Nhat Hanh has been no stranger to action throughout his life. His practice was never disengaged from the world. Quite the opposite.

Action is necessary. Storms need to be navigated safely. Pirates need to be dealt with. Injustices need to be addressed. Brain tumors need to be removed through surgery. Meditation by itself will never fix any of these problems. But all these things become so much more challenging when we freak out. Action can be taken more skillfully when it comes from a place of clear seeing. And I know from personal experience that it’s much harder for me to see clearly when I’m in panic mode.

As I look towards 2017, I’m recommitting to my own daily meditation practice—not because of what I think I’m going to get from it, or how it’s going to help me feel better, or even how I think it’s going to help me become spiritually liberated (whatever that really means). No, I’m recommitting to it because I know there are more storms brewing, and more pirates gathering, and more difficult situations ahead for all of us, and it will be more necessary than ever for me to keep showing up and helping people see the way to survive.

I hope you will join me in recommitting to your own practice, and know that its benefits will extend far beyond your little yoga mat or meditation cushion. The world is on fire. We need people like you to save us.

"Chips and Salsa" Meditation

In a recent Facebook post, my friend and fellow writer and meditation teacher Ethan Nichtern pointed out a popular trend these days depicting meditation as being all about relaxing. He even noted an ad that popped up in his feed calling meditation “like a super-charged power nap.” A meditation studio in my area often describes meditation as a form of “chilling.”

I encounter this idea often in my own work as a meditation teacher. Students come to classes very high-strung, their bodies full of chronic tension and their minds racing with thoughts, and they want to learn to relax. I applaud their efforts, and I help them as best I can. This work is important and beneficial for a variety of reasons. Relaxing generally makes people happier, and happier people on principle make for a better world. Relaxation down-regulates the nervous system and helps people better manage stress; it supports better decision-making, and even helps people cope better with painful situations in life, like job stress or being ill or going through a divorce or losing a loved one.

So relaxing, in and of itself, is fantastic. But it’s fantastic in the same way that chips and salsa are fantastic at the beginning of a nice Mexican meal. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not knocking chips and salsa—they are amazing! But chips and salsa are an appetizer, not a main course. If you keep showing up to the restaurant and you always order chips and salsa and then you dash, your experience of Mexican food is rather limited.

Relaxation is awesome and useful, even essential to meditation, but it's not the whole enchilada. In my experience, relaxation is like a key that unlocks the practice of meditation; what you do with that practice once you've unlocked it is the important thing. Eventually, once you’ve practiced using it enough, you might become less curious about the key, and more curious about what’s on the other side of the door it unlocks.

A Tibetan teacher once said: "Little relaxation, little meditation. Middling relaxation, middling meditation. Great relaxation, great meditation." So the more you can relax, the deeper into your meditation practice you can go. And the deeper into your practice you go, the more you can wake up to your true nature and to the reality of the world around you and all the ways the world needs your help. That’s where I think the real value of meditation reveals itself.

In extended workshops, where I’m able to offer more explanation and guide students to a deeper meditative experience than is possible in a typical meditation class, I often speak about “three levels” of meditation. What I call Level One is what Tibetan Buddhist students refer to as shamatha meditation, with some specific relaxation-inducing breathing techniques borrowed from my training as a yoga teacher. Level One has two main components: relaxation and attention.

So it all starts with relaxation—it really does. Just like a Mexican meal might start with chips and salsa. But once you learn to relax, that’s when meditation gets really interesting. If chips and salsa are all you’re interested in, no problem. No judgments here. I’m a big fan of chips and salsa, and relaxation is the bomb. (But before you go, I just want to mention that there’s also a whole buffet of enchiladas, tacos, burritos, empanadas, and tostadas available....)

For the student who is committed to waking up, there are other levels of meditation waiting to be explored. But you have to have the appetite for them, and it helps to have someone to guide you through them. The menu in this restaurant is a strange one, with specials that change daily; it requires some interpretation and perhaps recommendations that are tailored for you.

It’s also possible to go to the other extreme, and turn your pursuit of meditation into a tasting menu. A small plate of this technique, a few bites of that one—and before you know it, you’ve got meditative indigestion. In culinary pursuits and in meditative ones, it’s helpful to have a solid grounding in one tradition, to know which practices lend themselves to a type of “fusion cuisine” and which ones don’t—when to mix it up, and when to stick with chips and salsa.

These are lessons that only come with time, and patience, and proper guidance, and getting your hands dirty in the kitchen of your own practice.

__________

Dennis Hunter is a meditation teacher and author of You Are Buddha (2014) and the forthcoming The Four Reminders (2017). Follow him on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.

"Moonlight" Is the Year's Most Human Film

I don't write film reviews very often. A film has to be strong enough to haunt my imagination, and compel me to speak about it. The last time I reviewed a film was over two years ago, for Richard Linklater's Boyhood. Ironically, that film has certain themes in common with the film I reviewed today at The Huffington Post. Here's an excerpt from my review:

"Moonlight" is a contemplative masterpiece of filmmaking, and a profound and subtle meditation on the fragile construction of masculinity. It’s a shattering tour through the aching vulnerability of boyhood, and the glowing embers of boyhood that continue to smolder inside the cooler pretensions of manhood. It explores how we piece together a makeshift identity for ourselves from the alternating threads of trauma and tenderness with which adults and other children pierce our hearts as we grow. And it turns a fierce, compassionate light on the ways that we boys and men armor ourselves against the emotional and physical violence of homophobia, and how the armor we grow to protect ourselves becomes a hardened shell in which we live out the rest of our lives, seemingly protected but actually trapped inside our protection.

Click here to read the rest of my review at HuffPo.

Go see "Moonlight." It's in limited release this week, and opens nationwide next week. And while you're at it, come follow me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Pinterest. See you around!

The Trance of Negativity

The Buddha taught that our thoughts create our reality. When we get trapped in the trance of negativity, it can destroy personal relationships, careers, companies, even entire societies.

This talk looks at how we get stuck in the trance of negativity and how we can break free, and how shifting our thought patterns can improve emotional intelligence in everyday life, relationships, work, and even political discourse. Recorded on Facebook Live, October 27, 2016.

If you subscribe to One Human Journey by email, you may not see the video preview in your email client. Click here to watch.

Emotional Intelligence and the U.S. Election

Just two hours before the third Presidential debate, I published this article at The Huffington Post. My article looks at the important role played by emotional intelligence (and the lack thereof) in our national political discourse.

After all, as a nation, we are all sort of married to each other in this great social experiment we call the United States. And our marriage is not going well at the moment. Many of the problems we see in our current state of the union can be attributed to a shocking lack of emotional intelligence and maturity.

Click here to read the article at HuffPo. Comments are welcome.

Intuition: Navigating Life and the Spiritual Path by Trusting Your Innate Wisdom

Intuition is one of our most powerful ways of knowing, but it remains mysterious and somewhat devalued in our culture, and many of us are out of touch with this innate form of wisdom. What to do?

This talk was recorded on Facebook Live on October 13, 2016.

If you're on Facebook, you can also watch the video and follow my new page there.

Slouching Towards Human Dystopia

The other day I saw a news segment about pressure-sensitive devices that detect the presence of a small child in a car's child seat and alert you if you might accidentally be locking your baby in the back seat of a hot car.

BEEEEP!!! "Oh, I forgot! I have a baby, and she's sitting right behind me! I'd better bring her with me!"

Hey, saving babies is a good thing. I understand that the intentions of the people who invented these devices, and the people who buy them, are good. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

A while back, I started seeing ads in my Facebook feed for a wearable device, sort of a FitBit for emotions, that alerts you when you are experiencing signs of anger or stress, and tells you to pause and take a few deep breaths. Again, good intentions. I’m happy if this device helps someone who actually needs it. But it saddens me that there might be anyone who actually needs it.

I feel a gnawing sense of despair about the increasing dependence of human beings on electronic devices to perform for us the most basic functions of survival and caring for ourselves and our loved ones — functions that used to be performed by common sense. Soon there will be no aspect of our lives that is not mediated by machines and managed by algorithms and big data.

People don’t own, or know how to read, traditional maps anymore, and map-makers have stopped printing them due to lack of demand. Who needs 15th-century navigation technology when you’ve got Google Earth at your fingertips? And people don’t remember phone numbers anymore, either; just tell Siri who you want to call. “Okay. I have eight phone numbers for Doug Sanchez. Which number would you like to call? You can say things like, ‘Mobile, Home, Office, Other’.”

I still remember the phone number of the house I grew up in, 40 years ago. Back then, I could have made a call from that phone even if Russians hacked the power grid and took down all the cell phone networks and Google Maps and Facebook and the whole damned Internet went dark, because it was a copper phone line that didn’t require a separate power source or any data towers. Well, okay, back then we didn’t have cell phones or the Internet or data towers — cable TV was still a new invention — but you get my point. Actually, allow me to date myself still further: I remember when the Powers That Be finally required that all telephones be upgraded from rotary dial (look it up, kids) to touch tone phones, to facilitate wordless, touch-tone communication between human fingers and the machines on the other end of the line. Perhaps THAT was the defining moment, the start of all this. And look at us now.

INCOMING TEXT: "Hi, this is your GE Smart Refrigerator. You’re running low on milk. Based on your location settings, you're at Wal-Mart now. Perhaps you could pick up a carton while you're there. The milk is in aisle 12. Reply ‘1’ for walking directions to aisle 12. Reply ‘2’ for brand recommendations. Reply ‘3’ for easy 5-minute recipes using dairy products"

ALERT: "Hi, this is your Range Rover. It looks like you left a human child weighing 14.3 lbs in the back seat of the vehicle. I've started the engine and turned on the AC as a cautionary measure. Press 'OK' to dismiss or 'PANIC' to activate the vehicle’s alarm system."

REMINDER: "At Facebook we cherish your significant moments. Today’s your 10th wedding anniversary! Why don’t you post something about your spouse to let your friends know how much he/she/they mean(s) to you?"

Another new technology called Magic Leap is being cooked up for you right now, behind a veil of corporate secrecy so thick that it rivals anything the military might be working on. Magic Leap, from what we are told, will project virtual reality images not onto a screen in front of you (like all previous VR technologies) but directly into your eyeball, tricking your brain so you will find it difficult to distinguish what’s real from what’s unreal. But why would you want to? Magic Leap is pretty damn cool, to be honest. The new reality that’s being created for you is so much more comfortable, so much more convenient, so much prettier. There’s less to think about, and more to enjoy.

Slowly, one device, one technology at a time, we are becoming the humans depicted in the film Wall-E, who float like blobs through shopping malls on their self-driving hover-chairs, no longer able to walk on their own legs, hooked into VR screens and automatically fed snacks and sodas, video-chatting with the person next to them because it’s too much effort — and frankly it would just look weird — to turn their heads away from the screen and engage in actual conversation with another human.

Busted! Three Myths About Meditation, Debunked

MYTH #1: “I CAN’T MEDITATE BECAUSE __________.”

FALSE.

You know this one. Fill in the blank with your favorite excuse:

“I can’t meditate because…”

• “…it’s hard for me to sit still.”
• “…I have a lot of thoughts.”
• “…I get sleepy.”
• “…I’ve had a difficult life.” 
• “…I don't have time.”
• “…Yadda yadda yadda.”

I literally hear some version of this, from at least one student, almost every time I teach meditation. The funny thing is, the people who say this always seem to actually believe that they are different from other people, uniquely challenged in the practice of meditation because __________.

Here’s the thing. You are not different. Your challenges are not unique. Everyone has had a difficult life. Everyone finds it hard to sit still. Everyone is busy. Everyone has a lot of thoughts. Everyone gets sleepy. Everyone in the history of the world who has ever meditated finds it challenging in one way or another. If it wasn’t challenging, it wouldn’t be a practice.

Imagine going to a cycling class, and telling the instructor, “I can’t cycle because my heart rate increases.” “I can’t cycle because I get sweaty.” “I can’t cycle because I’m not in shape.”

The real reason you think you can’t meditate is because you’re not used to meditating.

 

MYTH #2: “MEDITATION IS ABOUT GETTING RID OF THOUGHTS. RIGHT?”

WRONG.

This myth is closely related to the first one, and it’s usually the main reason people think they are so bad at meditation. Chances are, you plopped down for your very first meditation session and you were surprised to discover how wild and untamed your mind really is. You have thoughts! A lot of them! Perhaps you spent the majority of the meditation session thinking, and realizing you were thinking, and beating yourself up for thinking, and thinking about your thinking.

My standard reply to this is: “Welcome to the human race.”

Here’s the thing. You can’t actually stop thoughts. A Tibetan aphorism says, “Trying to meditate without thoughts is like trying to have tea without leaves.” What you can do, over time, with practice, is learn to stop taking your thoughts quite so seriously. You can learn to stop being hooked by every thought that comes along, and simply observe thoughts as they come and go. Meditation creates a larger sense of space in the mind, so there’s more room to accommodate everything. When thoughts are allowed to come and go – that is, when you neither follow them nor try to suppress them – they lose their power to define you or control you.

Thoughts are like stray animals: if you stop feeding them, they don’t come around as much.


MYTH #3: “MEDITATION IS A RELIGIOUS/SPIRITUAL THING. ISN’T IT?”

NO, IT ISN’T.

You’d be surprised at how many people stay away from meditation because they believe this myth.

At the beginning of a meditation class, I usually check to see who’s brand new to meditation. If I’m feeling mischievous, I say something like, “Okay, we’re going to chant ‘Hare Krishna’ for 30 minutes.” I watch their faces go pale for a few seconds before telling them, “Just kidding!”

Sure, plenty of people meditate in a religious way – following gurus, wearing special clothing, burning incense, chanting in foreign languages. Most meditation practices originated from religious traditions like Buddhism, if you trace them back to their historical roots. And you certainly won’t find any shortage of New Agey teachers and spiritual woo-woo when you look around at the meditation scene.

However, the same could be said of yoga. If you want to make meditation or yoga religious or self-consciously spiritual, you certainly can. But at heart, the practice is really very simple and ordinary. Meditation lets you relate more openly, more honestly, and more compassionately with your mind, your body, and your life. Step One in that process is slowing down enough to actually *see* what’s going on in your mind, your body and your life. And that begins with putting your butt down on the cushion, chair, or floor and engaging in a simple practice that grounds you in presence. Then you can let those qualities of presence, openness, and compassion transform your life, your relationships, and your actions.

If you find that to be a spiritual experience, then you have grokked the true meaning of spirituality, which has nothing to do with gurus, special clothing, incense, crystals, or mystical experiences. But that’s a topic for another time.

Enjoy your practice.

Capote's Law

“Remember that sometimes not getting what you want is a wonderful stroke of luck,” says the Dalai Lama.

Of course it doesn’t feel that way when it happens. I can’t count the number of times in life that I’ve cried and wailed with disappointment when something I wanted failed to materialize, or slipped out of my grasp.

But with time and perspective, I see that in many cases it would have been disastrous for me if things had gone “my way.”

I’m thinking of the college lover whose dream was for us to move to Lagos, Nigeria to teach English. This seemed like a perfectly reasonable life plan when I was a sophomore. I even spent time in the university library teaching myself basic phrases from an Igbo language primer, preparing for life in Nigeria. But it wasn’t meant to be. That relationship soon dissolved, and with it went the dream of moving to Lagos.

“More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones,” wrote Truman Capote. It isn’t difficult to imagine how Capote’s law could apply here. Just look at the kidnapping and murder rates in Lagos, and Nigeria’s attitudes towards gay men, and you start to get a sense of the myriad ways our plans might have gone wrong.

This perspective only came later. At the time, I mourned the loss of that relationship, put away the Igbo language primer, and scrambled to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. Not having things work out the way I wanted was a slap in the face, and it stung. But in hindsight, I’m grateful for it. That wasn’t the right relationship for me to be in, and moving to Nigeria to teach English was not in my star chart. Sometimes we need life to give us a compassionate slap in the face to wake us up.

There’s a famous story about an old man who lived on a small farm with his son and a horse. One day the horse ran away and the neighbors came to express their sympathy, telling the farmer, “Oh, that’s so terrible.” The farmer replied, “Maybe.” A couple of days later the horse came back, bringing another wild horse with it. This time the neighbors exclaimed the farmer’s great good luck at getting a new horse. “Maybe,” the farmer replied. The next day, the farmer’s son fell and broke his leg while trying to tame the new horse. The neighbors came again to express their sympathy, but the farmer brushed it off with another “Maybe.” A couple of weeks later, the army came through the village, looking to conscript any able-bodied young men for a new war. The farmer’s son was passed over because of his broken leg, which prompted the neighbors to exclaim the farmer’s great good fortune. “Maybe.”

You get the point. We never really know. What looks at first like good fortune may be setting us up for a disaster, and what looks like bad fortune may be saving us from something even worse. Life brings us to a fork in the road and then forces us down a path we didn’t choose. We shed tears over the road not taken, but later come to see that the path we wanted to take would have led us off a cliff. We can appreciate this lesson because hindsight is 20/20, and time heals old wounds — but in the moment, when we don’t get what we want, we are blinded by disappointment.

Every now and then, it’s good to look back at our disappointments, our misplaced hopes, the dreams that didn’t pan out, and consider the possibility that life was actually trying to bring us something better than what we wanted. “Maybe we even find redemptive value in our apparent lapses,” says philosopher Rob Brezsny. “We come to see that they saved us from some painful experience or helped us avoid getting a supposed treasure that would have turned out to be a booby prize.”

Here’s to booby prizes, to disappointments, to the dashing of misplaced hopes, to the roads not taken, and to the eventual triumphs that come to us only through failure.

Infographic: 3 Levels of Meditation

Mindfulness meditation is trending these days, and is practiced everywhere from the yoga studio to the board room. But the great meditative traditions tell us that mindfulness is only a starting point. Once the mind has been tamed and trained through mindfulness, only then can true meditation and self-inquiry actually begin.

What does meditation look like beyond mindfulness? I created this infographic to provide a quick overview of what I refer to as the three levels of meditation: Presence, Stillness, and Inquiry. Feel free to share the graphic if you like it.