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Welcome!

Little fuzzballs are roaming the Potomac. I’ve seen baby geese and mergansers and am waiting for the Great Blue Herons chicks to start exploring the riverbanks. The fox has come by more often, no doubt looking for more protein for her little ones and soon the baby owls in the woods will start testing their vocal chords. Snakes are on the move and the fish are jumping. As Tarzan said to Jane, "It’s a jungle out there!" I hope this spring and summer season brings you a new sense of aliveness and delight.

Effortless Awareness

"I’m really confused," a woman said in a class a few years back. "When we meditate, are we supposed to concentrate or are we supposed to relax?" I paused and took a breath. I never heard the question put that way. After a few moments I had the answer and smiled. "Yes." Meditation instruction can be quite confusing. Jason Siff, in his book "Unlearning Meditation," http://www.tricycle.com/community/unlearning-meditation-what-do-when-instructions-get-way put it well when he said that any tradition you train in, you can find another tradition that gives you the opposite instruction. * Eyes closed? Eyes open? * Palms up? Palms down? * Breath at the nostrils? Breath at the belly? I find it helpful to think of meditation in stages. The first stage is about arriving. This has a willful quality. You guide your attention back to your ‘anchor,’ whether that be breath, sound, feeling, mantra, compassion. The second stage is about noticing. As the observer, you notice what is flowing. You notice your relationship to the cascade of sensations, thoughts, emotions and states of consciousness that arrive and fall away. The third state is about being. You inquire into what it means to simply let it all be, just as it is. You rest in awareness itself. Meditation training spans this vast terrain, from techniques that help you focus and drill into the here-and-now, to methods that help cultivate a sense of the witness to specialized instructions for opening into presence. I have found that as my practice develops and I become more aware of what is here and how and I’m holding it, there is a profound question that helps me determine the quality of attention I might cultivate. That question? "How does this moment want me to be with it - right now?" I find that if I’m wound up and tight, I find balance by relaxing and softening. If I’m scattered or reactive, a concentration practice helps me gather my attention again. Oftentimes we think of meditation as concentration. In this culture, learning how to sustain attention on one object is an important aspect of training the mind. But perhaps it’s more about seeking balance. Sometimes that calls on us to cease effort and explore what it means to simply rest in presence itself. You might enjoy this talk I gave at the Spring IMCW Vipassana Retreat entitled "Effortless Awareness." This talk explores what can happen when you turn your attention to rest in awareness itself. You’ll learn about the practices that help you arrive in the here and now, how to set optimal conditions for your practice, techniques for turning your attention to awareness itself and how awakened awareness cultivates an awakened heart.