Vipassanā
I am taking a 5-week (2-hours) long meditation class every Friday evening. I felt it was a constructive way to spend Friday nights until it becomes warm enough to just sit on the steps at Union Square with a friend or a stranger and life-watch.
I am also going on a 10-day silent meditation retreat (in middle-of-nowhere MA) later in the year, right after my birthday, actually.
This seems to be the year of Insight and Reality-awareness. This is good.
In class tonight, I had a hard time finding brightness before the actual mediation. (Brightness being a thought/reminder of how one has been generous and has practiced harmlessness in one's life recently. Meditation is a way to end suffering and one cannot end pain from a place of pain; thus, one has to find some brightness before one can meditate.) As I was thinking of acts of generosity and harmlessness that I have performed recently, my mind kept trying to insinuate that perhaps they weren't so generous and/or the harmlessness was more my weakness and inability to be a powerful being rather than the self actively not harming. It was upsetting to see how much one's own mind tries to turn on her.
The three pillars needed to overcome the three marks of existence* are: virtue, concentration, and insight. The second is the hardest, as I was told tonight- and have been told numerous times before, and with each passing year, it seems truer. Virtue is easy, I think, or so it feels. I am not a bad person, I try my utmost to treat others as I wish to be treated and not as I am treated. But concentration? Especially when one's own mind mutinies against her? It is indeed the hardest pillar to surpass. Insight can only come after the first two are achieved.
I am going to try and meditate each day for at least 5 minutes: goal for 2011.
*impermanence (anicca); suffering or unsatisfactoriness (dukkha); non-self (anattā).
I am also going on a 10-day silent meditation retreat (in middle-of-nowhere MA) later in the year, right after my birthday, actually.
This seems to be the year of Insight and Reality-awareness. This is good.
In class tonight, I had a hard time finding brightness before the actual mediation. (Brightness being a thought/reminder of how one has been generous and has practiced harmlessness in one's life recently. Meditation is a way to end suffering and one cannot end pain from a place of pain; thus, one has to find some brightness before one can meditate.) As I was thinking of acts of generosity and harmlessness that I have performed recently, my mind kept trying to insinuate that perhaps they weren't so generous and/or the harmlessness was more my weakness and inability to be a powerful being rather than the self actively not harming. It was upsetting to see how much one's own mind tries to turn on her.
The three pillars needed to overcome the three marks of existence* are: virtue, concentration, and insight. The second is the hardest, as I was told tonight- and have been told numerous times before, and with each passing year, it seems truer. Virtue is easy, I think, or so it feels. I am not a bad person, I try my utmost to treat others as I wish to be treated and not as I am treated. But concentration? Especially when one's own mind mutinies against her? It is indeed the hardest pillar to surpass. Insight can only come after the first two are achieved.
I am going to try and meditate each day for at least 5 minutes: goal for 2011.
*impermanence (anicca); suffering or unsatisfactoriness (dukkha); non-self (anattā).