Top Ten Reasons to Start Meditating Today

by Jerry Kolberg

"Meditate Daily" has been hovering on my to-do, someday, or maybe lists for more than ten years, since the late 1990's. Two years ago the universe conspired to deliver me to the doorstep of the Interdependence Project, where the clarity of instruction and friendliness of the community led nearly immediately to my committing to a daily meditation practice. Though I miss a day here and there, the positive effects of the practice are so profound that when I don't make it to the cushion I feel it in my bones.

Sometimes people ask me why I meditate, or have specific questions or misunderstandings about meditation, and my answer seems to vary depending on what I've experienced that day or how that morning's session went. But I have noticed that I offer some of the same answers over and over, and so here are my top ten reasons anyone should start a meditation practice today.

1. Meditation makes you calmer. By offering you tools to deal with stress and stressful thought-patterns, meditation helps you develop the option of remaining calm if you so choose.

2. Daily meditation offers you a sense of connection to all things by helping you notice that there is an observer beyond your usual understanding of the term "observer".

3. Meditating helps you deal better with anger, desire, lust and other potentially intoxicating emotions.

4. Being a regular meditator does NOT mean you no longer experience emotion; your experience of emotion just becomes keener and more subject to choice rather than habit.

5. Meditating regularly leads to an increased sense of empathy and compassion, towards others and towards yourself.

6. Becoming a regular meditator will increase your creativity, creating more space for new ideas to arise and to be noticed, and lowering any resistance you may have to new concepts and ways of thinking.

7. Meditating makes you healthier. Not only does it help you become aware of how to handle pain and illness better, but scientific studies show that "Meditating slows breathing rate, heart rate, and blood pressure and heart rate. Some evidence suggests that meditation may also aid treatment of anxiety, depression, high blood pressure and a range of other ailments." (Mayo Clinic) Anecdotally and personally I can concur that all of this is true.

8. Daily meditation will make you smarter by growing your brain. A 2005 Harvard Medical School study showed that "Brain regions associated with attention, sensory awareness and emotional processing -- the cortex -- were thicker in meditators. In fact, meditators' brains grew thicker in direct correlation with how much they meditated".

9. Meditation is a great to deal with your psychological "junk", offering a great option on its own or in combination with any form of therapy. By noticing your thoughts arise, and recognizing that they are just thoughts, you slowly peel away the layers that cover your true self.

10. Meditation is an excellent adjunct to any spiritual or religious practice, and can be a gateway to deeper spiritual revelations and the essential meaning of interdependence. Combined with my study of Buddhist philosophy, my experience of daily sitting practice is that it offers a complete spiritual path that integrates seamlessly with my daily life.

Bonus benefits: Meditating makes you sexier, brings you new spiritually aware and cool friends if you join a group (or visit the IDP podcasts online), and can save you money through the side effect of reduced consumption.

All this and more for just ten to twenty minutes a day. I can honestly say that beginning a daily meditation practice has been one of the most positively life-effecting decisions I've ever made. If my ten reasons for why you should start a daily practice gets you meditating even for one, two, or five minutes today, I will be deeply grateful for the opportunity to have been a part of your decision. (Written by Jerry Kolberg and posted by him July 29, 2009, on beliefnet.com.)

True Customer Service Based on Emptiness

Buddhist Cartoon by Mark Stivers from Art of Dharma.

Dalai Lama: The Purpose of Life is Happiness

(Photo Credit: Associated Press/Ashwini Bhatia)

The Doctor is Within
by Pico Iyer
New York Times, July 22, 2009

“Dream — nothing!” is one of the many things I’ve heard the 14th Dalai Lama say to large audiences that seem to startle the unprepared. Just before I began an onstage conversation with him at New York Town’s Hall this spring, he told me, “If I had magical powers, I’d never need an operation!” and broke into guffaws as he thought of the three-hour gallbladder operation he’d been through last October, weeks after being in hospital for another ailment. For a Buddhist, after all, our power lies nowhere but ourselves.

We can’t change the world except insofar as we change the way we look at the world — and, in fact, any one of us can make that change, in any direction, at any moment. The point of life, in the view of the Dalai Lama, is happiness, and that lies within our grasp, our untapped potential, with every breath.

Easy for him to say, you might scoff. He’s a monk, he meditates for four hours as soon as he wakes up and he’s believed by his flock to be an incarnation of a god. Yet when you think back on his circumstances, you recall that he was made ruler of a large and fractious nation when he was only 4 years old. He was facing a civil war of sorts in Lhasa when he was just 11, and when he was 15, he was made full political leader and had to start protecting his country against Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, leaders of the world’s largest and sometimes least tractable nation. (.....continued - to read the rest of this New York Times article, click here.)

Thanks to Del Nett for emailing me this article.

Now I get it!

Thanks to: Comics and Editorial Cartoons: Reality Check on Yahoo! News

And thanks to Gordon Gaippe for sending this cartoon.

A Buddhist Perspective on Health Care Reform

Charles Day
www.desmoinesmeditation.com

A Talk Presented to an Interfaith Gathering on Health Care Reform in Des Moines, IA, July 9, 2009

I want to thank the sponsors for organizing this Interfaith Gathering and for inviting me to provide a Buddhist perspective on health care.

Buddha lived 2600 years ago in northern India and for 45 years he taught others how to live in order to overcome suffering. His teachings, which continue to spread throughout the world today, can be summarized in three ways:

Do No Harm,
Do Good, and
Meditate.

Meditation is emphasized because it is a powerful practice for developing insight into the critical realization that we are not the separate, independent, autonomous individuals that we think we are. We are, in fact, part of an interconnected and interdependent web of reality or unified whole. And when we realize this, we will naturally do good and avoid harming.

From the perspective of this realization, I’d like to comment on three classical Biblical teachings that are especially relevant to supporting health care for all: “You are your brother’s keeper” - not because you are separate beings but because you are your brother and he is you. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” - because you are not different, you are the other and the other is you. And, to paraphrase Jesus, “Whatsoever you do unto others, even unto the least of your brethren, you do unto yourself.”

We are all one, appearing as separate, individuated manifestations of a continuously unfolding, unified interdependent whole. God looks through six billion pairs of eyes.

This realization of interconnectedness leads to the spontaneous expression of what Buddhism considers our innate virtues of compassion, generosity, lovingkindness, appreciative and altruistic joy, and the peace that surpasses understanding. How could one feel and act otherwise toward another being after deeply appreciating that oneself and the other are not two, but one? This was Buddha’s message.

In terms of our shared humanity, that we are all one, we are all in this together, and we all possess the same virtues, health care reform is really a no-brainer. Everyone should be entitled to the same care, regardless of differences in economic status, employment, age, health, or any other factor, and regardless of whether they are a citizen or a resident, temporary or permanent, documented or undocumented. Ideally in some distant future we will adopt this view toward all beings everywhere. Let us begin by striving to achieve in the U.S. what other industrialized nations have already achieved.

We should not be side tracked by considerations of personal wealth entitling some to better care than others, by who is being taxed to pay the bills, by political rhetoric regarding encroaching socialism or nationalism, or by the arguments of corporations and the insurance industry regarding market competition, profit margins, shareholder returns, and trillion dollar price tags.

Granted that the realities of cost, resources, and other complex factors are legitimate considerations that need to be dealt with, the bottom line remains that any health care plan should benefit everyone equally, and/or everyone should be willing to suffer equally. Like education and justice, receiving health care should be everyone’s right, and providing it should be everyone’s responsibility. And, of course, we need to educate and encourage everyone to assume responsibility for maintaining their own health and the health of their dependents.

Ours is a government formed by the common consent of the governed to meet our common needs and solve our common problems for our common benefit. Sounds Buddhist to me. So let our lovingkindness, compassion, and generosity prevail, and let us joyfully provide health care for all our brothers and sisters, as well as for the health of the earth that we inhabit. Thank you.

Click here to download and/or print this essay.)

Marcel Proust on the Joy of Present Moment Mindfulness

Mindfulness, the accompanying joy of living in the eternal now, and the difficulty of communicating the transcendent experience in words, are exquisitely reflected in a passage from Marcel Proust's classic novel "The Remembrance of Things Past:"

"I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory — this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I sensed that it was connected with the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could, no, indeed, be of the same nature. Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it?"

The quote is from The Writer's Almanac, July 10, 2009.

Dharma Pops by Jack Kerouac

Kerouac was a novelist and poet of the Beat Generation in the 1950's and 1960's. He was not a Buddhist, but he studied and appreciated Buddhism most of his adult life. He described his Dharma Pops as American haiku, short, three-line poems telling of his little samadis. Here are some of my favorities.

Take a cup of water
from the ocean
and there I am

Samsara in the morning
--puppy yipping,
Hot motor steaming

Haiku, shmaiku, I cant
understand the intention
Of reality

There's no Buddha
because
There's no me

The dog yawned
and almost swallowed
My Dharma

For more Dharma Pops, and hundreds more of Kerouac's haiku, read Book of Haikus by Jack Kerouac, edited by Regin Weinreich, Penguin Books, first published in 2003.

Hermann Hesse In Search of the Self

In Hermann Hesse's classic book based on the life of Buddha, "Siddhartha," the protagonist discovers that "It was the self, the purpose and essence of which I sought to learn. It was the self, I wanted to free myself from, which I sought to overcome. But I was not able to overcome it, could only deceive it, could only flee from it, only hide from it. Truly, no thing in this world has kept my thoughts thus busy, as this my very own self, this mystery of me being alive, of me being one and being separated and isolated from all others, of me being Siddhartha! And there is no thing in this world I know less about than about me, about Siddhartha!"

Hermann Hesse said: "There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself."

These quotes are from The Writer's Almanac, July 2, 2009.