Day #7

Today’s favourite poses: Pigeon, Warrior III, some crouching tiger laughing dragon thing??

Minutes with a relatively quiet mind: 10(ish)

Today’s interesting/thought provoking reading: (Taken from At Home in Muddy Waters by Ezra Bayda)

The Freeway of Practice. At times practice can seem very confusing. Sitting on the meditation cushion, we may wonder, "What exactly am I doing here?" am I supposed to be staying with my breathing? What about labeling thoughts - how does that tie in? And what about just residing in the stillness?? How do my emotions and beliefs fit in with all the other stuff? Where do I incorporate a forgiveness practice or a loving-kindness practice?

A useful analogy is to see the path of practice as a freeway with several different lanes. All the lanes are going in the same direction, but we choose the lane we need depending on conditions. Let's call the first lane the concentration aspect of practice, such as following or counting the breath. Such a practice is often useful at the beginning of a sitting, to settle our speedy mind. The strength of this practice is that it narrows our range; it helps us develop focus and stability. But this strength is also its limitation. Practice isn't about shutting life out; it's about opening to life, letting life in. Nevertheless, this limited practice is sometimes necessary and useful.

As we settle down in our sitting, we can then move into the second lane, which could be called wide-open awareness. This practice is to hear our thoughts, experience our bodily sensations, and be aware of our perceptions of the environment. Here we might practice dual awareness where we bring around a third of our attention to the sensations of breath and to the perceptions of sound. Within all the other sensations and perceptions that arise. Then we gradually widen the container of awareness to include a sense of our own presence, or own Being. In this place, we become more still and allow our experience to just be.

Lane three is our emotional reactivity, based on believed thoughts. Unbenownst to us, cars from lane three are often utting us off in lane two. The reactivity creeps up on us so that we don't even know it's there. When we sense this fuzziness, we may wonder, "What's the practice here?" The practice in lane three is to work directly with our emotional reactivity. Through thought labeling, we see how our reactivity comes from our endlessly twarted requirements that lfe be the way we want it to be. We then reside in the physical experience of distress, until after some time we may catch glimpses of the deeply conditioned beliefs that keep activating it. This isn't an intellectual exercise, we have to see and experience how these deep-seated core beliefs reside in the body itself. This is riding in lane three, the fast lane, the lane of transformation.

All of these lanes are interconnected. To ride in lane three - practicing with our thoughts and reactions - we need the wider container of awarness of the second lane. In the second lane, we can experience the stillness within which the energy of our emotions - the thoughts and sensations- can move across the screen of awarness without activating our blind belief in them.

To reside in the wide-open awareness of the second lane, we often need the focus and stability of the first lane. In addition we may have to clarify the deep-seated belief systems of lane three; otherwise, these would subtly or not so subtly cover the whole freeway with fog.

The practices of forgiveness and loving-kindness belong to the car-pool lane, because they almost always require taking the ride of practice with another person. Even though this lane is a separate lane with its own particular rules of the road, all of the lanes are going in the same direction - toward waking up. They're all based in the physical reality of the present moment. The point is to take into account where we are as we try to see how to proceed most effectively.

Rarely does practice in a sitting period just flow smoothly along. Intelligent practice requires that we use the intellect to know how to practice. We have to use the discriminating mind to ask two questions: "What's going on right now?" and "What's practice in this situation?" Without such an approach, we'll just ride our own roller coaster-from being totally speedy, to focused, to calm and imperturbable, then back to square one, where we're knee-deep in all of our emitional stuff. And we'll continue to believe that each passing state is our only reality.