Can I just say I’m thrilled that Russell Brand is a meditator? For some reason, I take personal pride in every newcomer to the practice. I know he's been practicing because I read it in The New York Times, in an article called "Look Who's Meditating Now." The article discussed Brand's practice of Transcendental Meditation, his teacher, film director David Lynch, and Lynch's influence on the culture of meditation. In addition to his foundation that offers free TM instruction to veterans, prisoners, the homeless and others who would not otherwise have access, Lynch has also personally "counseled" (the Times' word) actors on meditation, including Mr. Brand.
The article suggests that the benefits of meditation range from the physical (it helps with obesity and hypertension), to the psychological (it promotes relaxation, makes you less angry), to mitigating artistic angst (Lynch: "Maybe suffering is a romantic idea to get girls, but it's an enemy to creativity"). Dr. Mehmet Oz, Susan Sarandon and Moby were also quoted, and each mentioned in a different way how the practice was about calming down, not freaking out.
The part I liked was how you might think that meditation could help you take on a larger perspective, which is both calming and a more creative way of being. The part I didn't like was how you might also think that meditation could make you a famous, successful celebrity or, a second choice, a smoothly competent person who lives in bliss. I'm not saying this is what TM says, only how it came off in the article -- to me.
I have nothing for or against TM, apart from being basically pro-anything that promotes synchronizaton of mind and body. From what I read, TM seems to be a very cool (as in dispassionate) path. For some people, this could be just right.
I am not one of them. What drew me to my lineage, Shambhala Buddhism, was its heat. There was no mention of calming down. It places emphasis on the value of raging emotions and on meditation as a way to meet them fully and shamelessly. This path could teach me to work with feelings as a source of intelligence rather than embarrassment. The counsel was to turn toward my feelings, open to them, appreciate them for their vividness and, the kicker: to do so without agenda, without trying to make them go away, harvest them for value or turn them into magical messages. Instead, I could trust my own experience as the perfect teacher, finally come home. I don't find mention of this in most descriptions of meditation, of what happens when you value the rich, fertile, uncomfortable, stinky, joyful brilliance of emotion.
My experience of meditation practice has nothing to do with smoothness, and everything to do with becoming basically raw. It has less to do with competence than genuineness. And when it comes to bliss, well, I am more uncertain than ever about what this word even means.
Instead, meditation opens my heart. In doing so, I discover the real reason for my practice, which is the cultivation of compassion in all its forms. I meditate first for myself to create some kind of balance and discipline, and then, in a most important evolution, to be of benefit to others -- to open my heart to this world in order to be genuinely helpful. Meditation wakes you up to your own and others' truths, and in this wakefulness you find both compassion and joy.
You don't often see these described as benefits. As mentioned, like most, this article alluded to health benefits and how it can be a stepping-stone to success or the mysterious "bliss." Meditation is not a practice of happiness, per se, but by helping you discover your own path to compassionate action (or inaction, as the case may be), it creates it anyway.
And of course the article had the requisite poo-pooer, in this case one Dr. Sara Weber, the chairwoman of the Contemplative Studies Project of New York University's postdoctoral program in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. She said, "Some people report falling apart. They can have very intense and bad emotional experiences." I thought, "Well, yes." Of course. I am one of those people. But I thought that was the good part.
Follow Susan Piver on Twitter: www.twitter.com/spiver
David Nichtern: How to Meditate Through Strong Emotions
C. Clinton Sidle: The Way of the Bodhisattva
Kevin Griffin: A Buddhist Approach To Recovery: Turning It Over
of some Avatar? I will investigate shambhala as I can no longer afford the TM prices. A TM
advanced technique would suck $1,500 from me, at the very least. The TM sidhis, $5,000!
Thank you for the lovely article. It always is very interesting to me how TM people seem to feel the need to jump into any conversation where they perceive some slight to TM. I find it best not to respond to them. The meditations at this website, http://1ness4u.wordpress.com/meditation/, seem to coincide with the Shambhala practices.
Whatever one chooses for a practice it seems to be most important that they indeed practice on a regular basis. It is certainly worth the time invested each day.
Take care.
After 15 years of Zen practice, my practice is in a similar place to what you describe. Learning to work with...while at the same time disidentifying with intense emotion. But I came to this point in my practice after first stilling the mind, then disidentifying from my thoughts. Which slowly broke down the wall of intellectualization that I had built to keep the emotions that I'm currently working with repressed.
In my own case, starting out with the sort of emotional practice you describe would likely have not be been possible...or given my own history, "overwhelming" as Dr. Weber cautions.
I think every sincere practitioner comes to the practice with an instinctive knowledge of what it is that they need in order to become whole. What practices will build upon their strengths, while not aggravating their weaknesses, and triggering their vulnerabilities before "the container" is strong enough to hold it in mindfulness. Imo, that instinctive awareness (which seems to be your primary message) should be honored.
Those who work with thought, will eventually face their emotions. Those who work with their emotions, will eventually face the thoughts that fuel them. The beauty of the practice is that its fire burns away all that is not real.
Thanks for the wonderful article. I have some friends who do a Shambala practice and they're a wild couple to put it mildly. What I find refreshing about them, and many Tibetan Buddhists adherents in general, is their lack of spiritual facade. When we get a chance to hang out, we'll start out chatting "spiritual things" for about 5 minutes, as if to get it out of the way, and then move on to the important stuff, like 1950's sci-fi movies, our Netflix queues and what we've been reading. Enjoy, but don't be attached...
How about a link to this Shamballa med? thanks
For thousands of years, great men have taught "Love thy neighbor as thyself," but few have had the ability to follow that advice. Behavior can only improve based on real changes in mind and body.
A mind-body full of stress cannot love fully.
TM washes the windows of perception AND purifies the physiology so that thoughts AND emotions are balanced and most appropriate for the moment at hand. It's not based a mind set or world view.
It's a technique that gives the same results regardless of belief, background, etc.
However, I disagree that a mind-body full of stress cannot love fully. There is no mental state that needs to be gotten rid of in order to love.
I guess it's a chicken-and-egg type situation. Mindfulness-Awareness practice teaches me how to love even when I'm stressed (which I think is very handy) and not wait for any kind of inner peace in order to do so. This, I believe, is called the ability to love unconditionally and it is the aim of my practice, NOT to rid myself of stress or any other feeling/thought whatsoever.
If I had to have inner peace in order to be creative, loving, and so on, I'd be s*#t out of luck. If I may say...
As stress is removed, love flows more naturally, with less effort. When stress is gone, love is full and automatic.
“Love thy neighbor”, and “be compassionate to the all beings” is just what you can’t do if you are stressed out, and what you spontaneously can do after TM practice. I have never known any group of people who were better able to “get down”, “get real”, and have a great time than TMers.
And yes, TM makes you more mindful, but by a different mechanism than mindfulness practices. Mindfulness practices are just that, practices. One practices non-judgmental awareness of the flow of experiences in meditation to try to gain these skills in activity. In TM, one gains a generalize reduced-stress state of global coherence. No special behavior or skill is practiced or intended. Yet, when one comes out of meditation, it has all kinds of benefits, including increased mindfulness. One is more aware of the present, less judgmental, and freer from conditioned responses because the stresses driving those behaviors are being dissolved in meditation.
Plus, the truth is that often I AM tired, grumpy, and unhappy. When I'm able to remain soft, open, and compassionate even under these circumstances (and worse), then I know that my practice has taught me a kind of unconditional equanimity that can INCLUDE being "stressed." For me, this is simply more realistic.
I’m male, and ToniQ has wrongly accused me of being chauvinist :)
I'm definitely not saying that TM supports dampening one's emotions while my practice does not. I'm just commenting on the tone of the NYT article and its emphasis on celebrity quotes about how meditation helps them chill out/calm down/get "me out of my mind" as if this was the point of practice. I guess in some way it is--when you truly relax, you see reality. But my fear (and personal experience) is that I might use meditation as a way to get away from my life rather a path of opening to this world with all its joys and sorrows in order to be of benefit. It's easy to think that meditation will help you feel LESS whereas the truth is, as you so beautifully point out, it actually helps you feel MORE. Sometimes we're not quite prepared for that.
I'm not sure about the hot/cold analogy and everyone's needs are both different and yet the same. I have tried other meditation practices I have found for me that what happens with TM - the transcendence of thought, the whole being relaxation, the expansion of perception, the release of stress (which can look like falling apart - which is I think the "good stuff" because it leaving my body) all seem to conspire to set me up for what happens when I open my eyes and just go about my day, my life. For me there's so much heart opening, more softness, more compassion, sweetness, patience...and yes more coherence, focus and creativity. Thank you for bringing the heart stuff into the conversation. For me it's the part less spoken about but it is so much apart of my practice. :)
Does anybody promote the use of more than one form of meditation (i.e., mindfulness and TM) together? I have been practicing mindfulness meditation on and (mostly) off for 8 years or so but have been dedicated to daily practice for the past year and a half or so. It's helped me in many ways, including helping me: get in touch with authenticity; differentiate what's happening from what I think about what's happening, and to see how the two often are confused or intertwined; experience things as they are, rather than as I am, and to learn to recognize and accept the difference or when the two get mixed up. In some ways, I believe that mindfulness meditation helps me get in touch with the blissed out place that practitioners of TM describe, because it's my experience that authentic human experience itself -- as opposed to a thought-based interpretation thereof -- is amazing and beautiful. In Judaism, getting the most out of reality and truly living (to me, mindfulness) is the meaning of life.
Having said that, the TM state of bliss and relaxation certainly has piqued my interest. If there weren't a $1,500+ pricetag attached, I'd definitely explore it, which suggests to me that I should explore it anyway.
But I'm wondering if anybody has gone from mindfulness practice to TM, and if so, why -- or if anybody practices both or a hybrid of the two.
My feeling is that it's important (at some point) to choose one technique and stay with it, preferably with the guidance of a meditation teacher. Our minds are just too mysterious and tricky--I find that once I start toying with the technique, I'm indulging in something that creates confusion. If you find a technique that is trustworthy (ancient, time-tested, personally resonant), I'd try to go all the way with it. But that's me.
TM taught by a non-profit educational organization, and the course fee goes to support TM courses in developing nations where there is no course fee charged, and also to support full-time peace-creating groups around the world whose profession is meditating for world peace.
The TM course includes personal instruction from a qualified TM instructor as well as a lifetime of follow-up meditation instruction at thousands of meditation centers around the US and the world. The David Lynch Foundation is providing full scholarships to students at schools, colleges and universities throughout the country. See www.DavidLynchFoundation.org
Long ago, searching for knowledge beyond what I was learning in school—I became enthralled with Buddhism, practiced it with fervor and continue to savor Buddhist writings.
True there's an element of calming down in TM, but that's exactly half the story. Transcending is a mind/body state of "restful alertness." The alertness aspect is crucial: it's what makes the transcendental field—the deepest inner core or essence of everyone and everything—dynamic and lively. TM awakens this field of pure potentiality.
This unbounded, universal awareness is beyond mental activity; beyond thinking and emotions; beyond individual mind or self; beyond philosophy, dogma, or agenda. It's pure, vibrant Being—pure existence.
It's also, as ancient texts declare, "Sat Chit Ananda." It contains non-changing truth (sat), consciousness (chit), and bliss (ananda). If one doesn't transcend and go to that field, one may live a life not knowing it exists.
This experience recharges life, thrills the emotions, sharpens the intellect, expands awareness, purifies the nervous system and changes how the brain organizes its neural networks—toward more coherent, integrated functioning.
Transcending the surface, active, or agitated levels of mind twice-daily doesn't spur one to shy away from emotions. It empowers one with the ability to function from the deepest, most energized fields of experience.
Meditation rocks. But also it rolls. Quietly.
Tom
www.MeditationAsheville.org
RE: the fee. Anything of value, costs something. TM fees keep the knowledge flowing, especially to those in dire need: homeless, prisoners, Native Americans and those in 3rd nations. And anyone in need can get financial help:
1. Scholarships for Students are offered by the David Lynch's foundation
Tel/Fax: 323-874-2467
http://www.davidlynchfoundation.org/scholarships.html
2. Low Interest Loans
Citi-Bank's CitiAssist program now offers very low interest loans to anyone learning TM, with up to 15 years time to repay.
You apply online and take the course at any TM center. Open to adults or students of any age. http://www.mum.edu/tmcourse/
3. Employee Benefit
Many companies pay for half or more of the TM fee for employees. Ask your employer. Here's a partial list for the U.S.—
US Post Office, IBM, Motorola, General Motors, Ford Motor Co., Toyota, Tower Companies, US Veterans Admin., AirTel, Bank of America, ESPN-Star Sports, Eveready Industries, GE Capital, Hero Honda, Hewlett Packard, Siemens, and Xerox.