Stoking the fire

… how can you find a way through the distractions of conventional society? I would suggest you ask yourself, “What is my purpose?” Everything follows from your response to this question.

Aitken Roshi

 A friend who is having difficulty sitting down to meditate at home asked, how do I meditate when there is no one around to encourage me? He enjoys meditation when we sit together as a group, has direct experience of its value, yet is having a hard time drinking from this well in between our sessions. This question has come up often throughout the years I’ve been sharing meditation with people. It’s a question I return to over and over again, both in my own life and in the lives of my students. In an attempt to address this issue of meditation at home I created a class on setting up a home practice and wrote a book to support home practice. Yet, even after those who sit with me experience considerable positive outcomes from their meditation, once the class has ended, or they are through with an inspiring book, or even finished a retreat, their practice wanes. How to keep the fire alive?

Some people are better at parking their keisters down on the pillow than others.  These are often the same people who go to the gym whether it’s hot or cold, whether they’re sad or happy. They may live an orderly life with routines that remain consistent for years. But what about those of us who continually lose our struggle with consistent practice? It takes a degree of self-discipline to get up and practice each morning, and the process is not always pleasurable. Sitting in a consistent way is like being an athlete or professional musician or dancer. Some days your muscles ache, or you have a hangover, or you’re tired or depressed. You don’t want to stretch or practice the tricky parts of a song or go to the gym. But, if your serious about your craft, you drag yourself out of bed and just do it. You do it because the rewards are so engrained in your consciousness they outweigh the resistance.  You love your sport or music or art so much you are able to overcome the voices in your head that say, “Just today. You can sleep in. One day won’t hurt. I have too much to do this week.” Yadda, yadda, yadda (you fill in the blanks, if you’re one of us I’m sure you have your own litany). The mind co- ops the part of us that knows what is best for our well-being and uses it to make a case for the opposite. And we believe this ruse even though we know better! The smarter we are the better we are at convincing ourselves that what is actually best for us is not worth doing.

Whatever training we’re going to engage in, we must first have a strong motivation to continue the training through the many challenges we will encounter. The athlete may be motivated by a competition they want to win, a dancer may be motivated by a dream of joining a professional dance troupe. In order to circumvent resistance we need to take an honest look at the question, why do we meditate? The seductive call of the senses is strong. If we do not have a burning desire for awakening, or a desperate need to make it through challenging circumstances, it’s difficult to keep walking the path when we’d rather stay in bed or talk with a friend or just start our day.

Being a successful meditator requires a strong desire for freedom from suffering or a deep longing for awakening. If the motivation is not there naturally, and we want to set up a daily meditation practice, we need to stoke the fires of our own zeal. When our only motivation is a desire for peace of mind, sitting down to practice can be a struggle and eventually wane because meditation is not always a blissful activity. Some days we struggle, like St. John of the Cross wrestling with demons. Sometimes our mind is completely out of control and we feel like we are wasting our time. Sometimes it’s just boring. In order to keep coming back to our meditation cushion, even through the challenging times, we need to have a bigger purpose than immediate peace of mind. We need enough drive to hang in there through the struggle until clarity arises. It requires zeal to keep going even when it all seems senseless. Those of us who have relatively pleasant lives need to make an extra effort to establish our sense of zeal.

Buddhist meditation teachers are aware of the need for zeal. It is the fourth paramita in Zen, Virya, and it is brilliantly dealt with in the first point of the Tibetan Lojong teachings. In the 11th century Atisha knew that the practice needs to start by stirring up purpose that will fuel the fire for the task ahead. To that end, the first point in the Lojong teachings is contemplating the four preliminaries. This first point goes right to the heart of our hopes and fears so that we remember the need for practice. The four preliminaries are:

1.     life is beautiful, fleeting and precious,

2.    We’re going to die someday-that’s a guarantee,

3.    We don’t have control over the karma we receive, it just keeps coming at us. But we do have control over how we respond to whatever life is dishing out,

4.    Suffering is a natural part of life. We need to be prepared to meet it.

Really let your thoughts marinate in each of the four aspects. In order for this process to work it needs to be personal, to be in your own language and address your own concerns. Find a way to remind yourself why you practice before each sitting. By making them personal and taking them into your heart a natural sense of urgency and zeal for meditation might arise. We only have a short time to experience this precious, beautiful life, how do we want to use it? If we want to know, really know, happiness and ease the suffering of ourselves and our fellow living beings, how do we develop the strength and love to follow through? Each moment answers that question differently. In order to hear what our next step is we need to get quiet and listen. So we drag ourselves out of bed, get situated on our meditation seat, set the timer and meditate. Some days we feel light and free during and after meditation, some days we feel confused and can’t seem to quite break through, some days we feel nothing. We just keep on day after day. Everything unfolds from there.