Diane Morrow | Writing and Healing

Meditation as Housekeeping

Posted by Diane Morrow on August 3, 2014 in Blog, Writing and Meditation

In The Peaceful Stillness of the Silent Mind, in a chapter called, “Introduction to Meditation,” which I also wrote about a few weeks ago, Lama Yeshe talks about two kinds of meditation: analytical meditation and concentration meditation. He compares meditation to housekeeping and then talks about how both types are necessary. He writes: By gradually developing your meditation technique, you become more and more familiar with how your mind works, the nature of dissatisfaction and so forth and begin to be able to solve your own problems. For example, just to keep your house neat and tidy, you need to discipline your actions to a certain extent. Similarly, since the dissatisfied mind is by nature disorderly, you need a certain degree of understanding and discipline to straighten it out. This is where meditation comes in. It helps you understand your mind and put it in order. But meditation doesn’t mean just sitting in some corner doing nothing. There are two types of meditation, analytical and concentrative. The first entails psychological self-observation, the second developing single-pointed concentration. I’m a very slow learner. But I think I’m gradually beginning to get a sense of what meditation actually is—as opposed to what I used to think that it was. Meditation is not doing nothing—or trying to get the mind to do nothing. It’s more like, I think, corralling the mind to do something—and something different than having the ordinary scattered, fragmented mind that I so often have, a mind going here and there, from one thing to the next, depending on what is happening around me and that all getting mixed up with memories that are triggered and preconceptions and plans and who-knows-what-else. If I try to extend this metaphor of housekeeping it seems to me that I could begin with analysis—house observation as a metaphor for self-observation—and this could begin with questions. What needs to be done? What are the problems in the house? What room is most crying for attention? In my own case: the floors. They’re dusty in the corners and littered here and there with small pieces of who-knows-what. Ah, and the sheets need to be changed, and, in a more immediate way, the dishes need to be taken out of the dishwasher and put away and the dishes in the sink need to be put in the dishwasher and I need to do laundry because I’m going out of town in a couple of days. The list could go on. It seems that even when I just begin to do analysis—and with something as simple as housecleaning—my mind begins to move in different directions. Things begin to pile up. So . . . perhaps after preliminary analysis what I need is some focus! Some concentration. Perhaps I have to pick one thing and focus and concentrate on that. And, in order to do that, I need to prioritize. What needs my attention first? With taking care of the house—or the garden—or preparing for a new school year—or anything—I’m continually going back and forth between focusing on a task and then observing and analyzing what needs to be done and then choosing the next task and focusing. Seeing how I’m already doing this in ordinary things makes it a little easier for me to imagine applying this...

Good in the Beginning

Posted by Diane Morrow on July 28, 2014 in Blog, Writing and Meditation

I came across another piece of advice about meditation that I found useful, and thought I would share it, this from The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, by Sogyal Rinpoche, a book that was recommended to me about fifteen years ago and was one of the first books I ever read about meditation. In a chapter on meditation, called “Bringing the Mind Home,” he talks about a method for making meditation more powerful and useful. He calls it, “Good in the Beginning, Good in the Middle, and Good at the End.” Good in the beginning refers to setting a positive motivation at the beginning of the work. Good in the Middle refers to doing our best, and having as clear a mind as possible, while we’re doing the practice. And then Good at the End is remembering, when we finish, to simply dedicate the work—that it will become of benefit to ourselves, and, if this makes sense to us, that it will also, in some way, begin to benefit others. I like the symmetry of this advice and the way it can frame one’s work, and I’ve been trying to put it into practice, not just for meditation, but for writing as well: Good in the Beginning: May this writing be for the benefit of myself, for all who come across it—and for all sentient beings. Good in the Middle: Trying to stay clear and aware and focused as I work. Good at the End: Remembering to dedicate the work—may this writing be of benefit for all sentient beings. I think there could be countless ways to adapt this. What could make your own work good in the beginning, good in the middle, and good at the end? The book, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, can be found...

Writing and Healing Prompt: Ira Progoff’s Stepping Stones in Three Dimensions

Posted by Diane Morrow on July 13, 2014 in Blog, Writing and Healing Prompts

Another useful way to work with stepping stones, building from last week’s prompt, is to take a set of stones and add another layer: What did I want at each stone? What was my motivation? And why did I want that? And why did that matter? And what was beneath that? It’s like taking a two-dimensional map and adding another dimension—the dimension of depth. The dimension of why. You can begin to deepen the map in this way. You can notice threads that emerge—patterns. You can see how your motivations may have changed over time. The previous piece on stepping stones is here. The photo, Stepping Stones, River Rothay, is by Chris Heaton and can be found...

Writing and Healing Prompt: Stepping Stones as a Way to Examine Your Life

Posted by Diane Morrow on July 6, 2014 in Blog, Map, Writing and Healing Prompts

Ira Progoff, a student of Carl Jung, who developed an elaborate process of journaling for self-discovery, one that involved binders and dividers and multiple colors, used the term stepping stones to describe a way of looking back and examining one’s life. I’ve always found his term evocative. I see the stones on a path with spaces between them, the stones stretching back as well as forward. Our lives are a river of moments. The stones are those key moments—often ones we remember vividly—often ones where something of significance turned, or shifted. In his book, At a Journal Workshop, Progoff writes: They may come as memories or visual images or inner sensations of various kinds. Especially they may state themselves in the form of similes or metaphors in addition to expressing the literal facts of past experience. Let your attitude be receptive enough that the continuity of your life as a whole can present itself to you both in symbolic forms and in literal factual statements. He compares the creation of stepping stones to a running broad jump. “We go back,” he says, “into our past in order to be able to leap forward into our future.” He recommends “placing” eight or ten steppingstones. No more than twelve. Simply naming the stepping stones is a beginning—and later, if one chooses, one can come back to a single stone and explore it in more depth. The book, At a Journal Workshop, can be found here. More about Progoff’s workshop process can be found here. Photo by Chris Heaton at Geograph: a footpath over the River Rothay in Cumbria, Great Britain...

Writing and Meditation Brought Down to Earth

Posted by Diane Morrow on June 29, 2014 in Blog, Writing and Meditation

I’ve been a bit stuck this morning—trying to think about where to go next with writing and meditation—and so, after staring at the screen for forty minutes or so, thinking in circles and not-writing, I did what I sometimes do when I’m stuck—started looking around at what others think. (Often, I’d be inclined to Google around, but the internet is down here because of a storm and so I had to look around in books!) I found this paragraph and I appreciated the plain language of it—the sense of space and permission in it—and I feel like it brought me back to earth: Meditation isn’t necessarily some kind of holy activity; when you meditate you don’t have to imagine holy things up there in the sky. Simply examining your life from the time you were born up till now—looking at the kind of trip you’ve been on and what sort of psychological impulses have been propelling you—is meditation. Observing your mind is much more interesting than watching TV. Once you’ve seen your mind, you’ll find television boring. Checking in detail what you’ve been doing from the time you were born—not so much your physical actions but the psychological impulses driving you to do them—is extremely interesting and is how to become familiar with the way your internal world functions. The paragraph appears in a book, The Peaceful Stillness of the Silent Mind, by Lama Yeshe, in a chapter called, “Introduction to Meditation.” Several years ago now I got my first iPod and was looking around on iTunes for free material. I was becoming more interested in Buddhism, and I began looking for lectures on Buddhism, tried some out, and started listening to lectures by Robina Courtin, an Australian Buddhist nun who teaches internationally. When I discovered that her teacher was Lama Yeshe, I did a bit of research on him and found that several of his books were available for free. (A pattern can be discerned here—me looking for free resources!) In any case, I got several of his books and, as with Robina Courtin’s teachings, have appreciated the clear, plain, intelligent, and practical language of them. When I listen to Robina Courtin’s teachings or read books that have been transcribed from Lama Yeshe’s teachings, meditation doesn’t seem too high or far away or inaccessible. I recognize what is being asked for. When Lama Yeshe says, “Simply examining your life from the time you were born up till now is meditation,” I can wrap my head around that. Examining my life is meditation. Oh. And I can see how this clearly overlaps with the practice of writing and healing, for instance with the idea of writing about stepping stones which is a writing exercise I first learned about from Ira Progoff—and which I think I’ll post next week. For me, having meditation brought down to earth like this makes me feel as if meditation is closer to my reach. I feel a bit more open again—I experience less stuck-ness. I can begin to think again about areas of overlap between writing and meditation, what connections are possible between the two, how the process of one might nurture the other, and how exploring this might promote healing. The Peaceful Stillness of the Silent Mind can be found for free at the...

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