Dr. Nancy Kaufman is a special education teacher, professor, and university administrator. Since her retirement, she has been teaching and practicing meditation and yoga. She writes in response to my blog post "Response to a friend".
I'm coming in on the middle of a conversation, so I may not be in the flow. But about my meditation, I try to focus on my breath. I usually have a candle lit, but my eyes open and close, sometimes without my realizing it. When I realize I am in my thoughts I gently, usually, go back to my breath. I do different breathing techniques to help keep me focused. Sometimes I keep my inhalation and exhalation balanced or I will make my inhalation a little longer than exhalation. Sometimes I pause at the end and beginning of each breath. For a while I was using a mala and breathing or counting on each bead to help me focus, but I have moved away from that lately. I meditate 95% of the time for 20 minutes just before bedtime. Sometimes I wonder if my breathing techniques require too much thought, but other times I feel that they keep me in the present moment. My injured shoulder keeps me in the present moment, too. It is easy for my shoulder to get into a mildly painful place, so then I have to decide if I ignore the discomfort or try a slight move away from the pain.
I answered:
Very nice statement, Dr. Kaufman. Thank you. Your practice sounds excellent to me. It is difficult for some action types to accept that they are "doing it right" but you are. To me, the key is returning to your breath or whatever focus you use. As far as I am concerned, the moment you realize you are "in thoughts", to use your fine phrase, is the golden moment.
Somebody compared the training of awareness of attention to training a puppy to stand on a piece of newspaper to urinate. He does it somewhere else but you move him to the paper. He does it somewhere else again and you move him to the paper. Eventually, he gets both the idea and the ability to get to the paper beforehand. That is what we are doing with training our attention. And the reason we keep doing it, very similar to the reason we keep stretching and lifting weights and walking, is to keep our awareness of our own mental states in shape.
It seems to me that stripped of some of the tradition and ceremony and accumulated weight and history, what you and I are talking about is quite close to the Japanese (and maybe Chinese) Zen ('Chan' in Chinese but I am not sure how it is pronounced by the Chinese) approach. Judaism, Western Christianity, Middle Eastern Islam, Indian Hinduism and the Chinese/Japanese Confucianism, Daoism, and the primal and local religions of non-developed peoples around the world get various attempts to know and harmonize with larger, superhuman powers tangled up with some meditative practices.
I suspect that as I age, I may come to a point where I am desperate, confused and in pain and want any help I can get from the Powers That Be. However, right now, I am concentrating on just what meditation can do for awareness of the mind. Your statement, as a focused practitioner, helps me do just that.
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Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
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