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I've been reading Thomas Keating's Introduction to Centering Prayer and working with the intention to surrender to Divine Presence and enjoying adopting the Christian paradigm for spiritual practice. My partner (of a year-and-a-half now) has gotten lots of juice from that paradigm, so I've been learning the language of Christianity as applied to my actual experience as a pragmatic dharma practitioner, so that we can bond through a common language of spirituality.

The language we use, and the paradigm we adopt, can inform how the spiritual process unfolds, opens, and deepens. Anybody who has worked with overtly magickal models can attest to this. "Truth," whatever that might mean, is true regardless of the language we use to describe it, so as long as we don't mistake the finger for the moon or try and eat the menu, we can learn to be at home in many different spiritual systems, all designed to liberate all beings--although the nature of that process may be described differently depending on the tradition.

Here's how I've applied this paradigm in practice (note the language I use here, but don't get hung up on it): I've been focusing my intention to rest in Divine Presence, what some practitioners might call Awareness or Silence or Being. For me, the Divine Presence I seek to rest in and invoke is that of God, experienced as a broad Awareness infused with the unconditional love of a Father. This experience is easier given the love I feel for my own son; it's easy to imagine a Heavenly Father who always loves you, even when you don't always know what you want or get what you want or must confront challenges, hard times, and unpleasant experiences to grow as a spiritual being--a Good Father wants his child to be spiritually happy, free, and independent, and that requires allowing one's child to face spiritual challenges, sometimes feeling as if they are all alone--even if they never are. So, you accept the presence of that Heavenly Father, observing as non-judgmental Awareness, through your own eyes and sensing organs, even while experience unfolds, and you surrender to the embrace of that Father's Awareness--having Faith in its fundamental goodness and unconditional love. Doing so is a preparatory step to a deeper letting go, liberation, which cannot be achieved through direct action, but using the Christian paradigm, requires God's Grace after one has opened themselves to God and the Divine Presence. This is similar in Zen to "just sitting" in Zazen because you cannot *achieve* Enlightenment, only make yourself "accident prone," as they say.

It's a bit different than Zen, though, because you have Faith in the paradigm, accepting the model, allowing yourself to believe in the presence of this actual Divine Presence, a "real" entity that is watching over you. To go beyond concepts of "real" and "unreal"--the realm of God--you have to be able to let go fully into trusting the benevolence of this Divine Presence, surrendering completely to it. The Centering Prayer constantly reaffirms your intention to adopt this belief framework and surrender to it (again, as a preparatory step to liberating oneself from all frameworks, achievable only through God's Grace).

So far, this has been a rewarding practice.

I have, and handled it quite poorly for more than a year by just assuming that sufficient insight would make me happy and able to handle everything in the relationship. I think the resistance was pretty justified since I was really emotionally withdrawing and we weren't communicating effectively.

There have been a few different threads on this(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and this is what I've commented previously:

> If you can, I'd suggest trying as hard as you can to not fall into the dynamic of "distancing yourself while counting on meditation to make it easy to eventually bridge the gap." It's definitely true that meditation and progress in insight will eventually help you work through and untangle the issues where you feel distance in your relationships currently -- but in the meantime, that distancing can snowball into much larger issues for your relationships, and with today's goodwill being even more eroded by months of distance. We’d already been distant, and then I allowed that dynamic to go on for about a year while I pursued meditation as the sole solution, and it’s been a long hard road back for both of us. I really wish in retrospect that I'd tried hard to thoughtfully pursue more conventional fixes at the same time as working on the path -- stuff like:
>
> - Setting thoughtful and reasonable boundaries.
> - Seeing an individual therapist.
> - Reading up on attachment theory and trying to figure out how it was playing out in my relationships.
> - Working on more consistently articulating all my different feelings, and getting better at being able to communicate them to others without making those feelings their fault. This is especially important with seemingly contradictory feelings, since sometimes articulating them allows for a mutually acceptible compromise rather than one feeling having to be repressed.
> - If this includes distance in a romantic relationship, then I wish I'd read Wired For Love and Getting the Love You Want much earlier, potentially along with looking into couples therapy.
> - All the stuff around getting exercise, sleep, seeing friends, etc. can really help too.
> - Working with a meditation teacher with experience at integrating life and practice.
>
> Whether you stay or go, there’s a ton of opportunity to use relationship conflict to really grow your self-knowledge and empathy with others. You can also make a lot of progress on the path by acknowledging your conflicting feelings and needs. I’ve felt like the last year of working through stuff left me with a decreased desire for any specific thing, but with a strong commitment to making space for different parts of me to stay in dialogue.

I think the right way to handle it is definitely contextual. Sometimes significant others react like this when a partner is distancing themself, not seeing friends, dropping old activities, not communicating, not taking responsibility for household stuff, etc. The proper response to that is going to involve some degree of refocusing energy towards conventional life or deciding that you want to end the relationship and deepen your practice. On the other hand, sometimes people just become completely allergic to their partner's interest in meditation even when everything else is going right. That's where maintaining your boundaries and recognizing that you're not responsible for all your partner's emotions becomes helpful. So I'd say that it really depends on stuff like exactly how much you're practicing, what the state of the relationship was like before you started practicing, what their specific complaints are, how career/work is going, whether you're exercising and seeing friends, whether you have a good support network, etc.

Hi,

I think this is a good opportunity for you to go back to basics in your practice. You've done an excellent job in recognizing your patterns of craving/aversion. The clarity of your words in describing your situation really speaks highly of the time you've put in to your practice, regardless of whether it's regular or not at the moment. You deserve to feel good about the progress you've made, so pat yourself on the back!

Now we can get back to basics and some age-old wisdom that you're going to find helpful. The intense aversion that you're having towards your work situation, at its core, is really a form of craving. If the understanding that craving/aversion are the same phenomenon comes to you intuitively, great! If not, spend some time thinking about it and you'll have an 'a-ha' moment.

So, what do we know about craving? Well, thanks to the Buddha's teachings we can observe for ourselves that our suffering in life is caused by craving and through mindful living we can learn to relax craving and reduce our suffering. Time spent in meditation allows us to experience this process first-hand, and it gives us an opportunity to dedicate ourselves to powerful mindfulness with few distractions. However, the reality of life for most of us is that we don't spend most of our time each day on a meditation cushion. We have jobs, obligations, and relationships that require the majority of our time and attention. For this reason it's extremely beneficial to develop daily, moment-to-moment mindfulness.

In my opinion, the term mindfulness is often poorly understood. Really it's just the process of being aware of your moment-to-moment experience. Imagine for a moment the experience of watching a movie. You're sitting in a chair, or on your couch, with the television in front of you. As you settle in to the movie, you effortlessly become absorbed in the sights and sounds on the screen. As you become more engrossed in the film, your awareness of your physical sensations and immediate surroundings fade away. Only when we hear a noise, or perhaps like always happens to me when I go to the movies and I've gotten the extra large soda and get the sudden urge to pee, only then do the entirety of our surroundings and immediate experience come into view and we see the movie for what it is: images of light projected on a screen.

Just like a good movie can sweep our attention away, our own thoughts, emotions, and reactions can have just as strong of a pull on our attention. Mindfulness is the process of learning to continually pop back out of this dream-like state and simply observe our present moment experience.

The suffering you have described is partly because you are losing mindfulness throughout the day and being pulled into an illusory world of negative thoughts and emotions that, in that moment of being pulled away, you identify with and believe to be your own. These negative thoughts and emotions color your perception of reality and shape your experience. With mindfulness you can begin to break this pattern and see that those moments are just as fabricated as the images projected onto a movie screen. Seductive, of course, but when viewed objectively the magnetic-like pull vanishes.

There are a variety of methods you can use to help develop strong mindfulness off the cushion. You can use your breathing as an anchor to the present moment, this is a very good anchor. It brings you back to your physical senses and it's a process that's always there as long as you're alive. The breath becomes a constant reminder to come back to the present moment. Another method is to use self-inquiry to check-in from moment to moment with your experience: "What is this?" "How mindful am I right now?". By getting in the habit of checking-in, we become more aware of our moment-to-moment experience and we can more quickly recognize when we are pulled away.

You asked about a guide to help you with mindfulness in daily life and there are some great books. I'm going to just recommend one right now because it's short, affordable and focused exactly on what you're working on right now:

Mindfulness in Plain English
https://www.amazon.com/Mindfulness-English-Bhante-Henepola-Gunaratana/dp/0861719069

Last, I'd like to just take a moment to share a few thoughts on the bi-polar discussion in this thread. I'm not a mental health professional, so it would be irresponsible of me to try and diagnose you over the internet or give you mental health advice. If looking at your own situation as objectively as possible, you think it will benefit you to seek professional guidance I would encourage you to do so. There's really no downside to a professional opinion. I would avoid coming to any conclusions on the matter until you've done that though.

I wish you all the best!

>Dhammarato's message seems to be that most forms of therapy are like going into the garden and taking a long, hard look at the weeds, while correct practice of the dhamma is like rooting up the weeds and throwing them over the wall.

I think that's one helpful way of looking at it, if it's assumed that one is primarily relying on therapy without practice. Perhaps there are areas of the garden one doesn't know of or doesn't care to look, and then the scope of dharma practice is limited to what one is comfortable with. With my own experience of counseling, I found that it helped bear the weight of all the stress in my life, freeing up energy and space for practice (rather than relying on practice to take care of everything). In an understanding the mind sense, I saw how defensive I'd get when I talked about practice and worrying that my counselor would think I was crazy, which was awesome insight practice. Plus, there is a lot to be said for the sacredness of someone holding space for all you are, given that it isn't easy to truly speak our truths to those close to us given karmic ties.

Some other considerations include the fact that there are buddhist counselors / therapists, and that there a variety of therapeutic modalities beside talk therapy, which is what I see comes under criticism mostly.

>I can absolutely see the potential to overlook/bypass what I'm experiencing, and yet here I am, engaging with this stuff fully and investigating.

​I didn't mean to suggest you weren't, but that sometimes aspects of our psyche lurk at the edges of the unknown, and a therapist can help one walk towards and through that out our tease out blindspots.

>Yes. I'm always grateful to have access to more resources, especially on recommendation from others here in this community.

Focusing is a practice borne from Eugene Gendlin observing what made therapy effective: the capacity of patients to feel into their bodies and acknowledge their feelings in a conversational way. Judith Blackstone, a psychotherapist with experience in Zen, Dzogchen, and Mahamudra, created a system that emphasizes integrated non-duality from a somatic perspective. Finally, Feeding Your Demons is fantastic as well. If you're left wanting other recommendations do get in touch.

One final note: I don't disagree with your comment that dharma could potentially take care of this matter all on its own. However, it's useful to consider the variety of modalities that can remove obscurations from another angle, of having a variety of tools so to speak.

Wishing you success in your journey – take care.

I think this is the first week in a long time that I have done formal sitting meditation every single day. Usually I do formal meditation 5 or 6 days a week and generally try to keep my daily life mindfulness up all the time.

A couple of weeks ago I realized that though my root meditation practice is Vietnamese zen, I have been listening to and reading a lot of Theravada teachers the last four or five years. There is nothing wrong with this, and I have benefited from it greatly, but I realized I have been neglecting getting more acquainted and diving deeper in to the zen tradition as a whole. So I have been listening to talks from The Empty Gate Zen Center in Berkely CA (Korean Zen) as well as relistening to Breath Sweeps Mind by Jakusho Kwong-roshi in my car (Japanese Zen) and slowly working my way through What More Do You Want? by Albert Low who was a student of Philip Kapleau and teacher at the Monteral Zen Center. It has been very gratifying to really start to get a sense of how large and alive the zen community is and how much of the variety in the tradition as a whole is cultural and fairly surface. It has given me a feeling of support from the zen sangha as a whole in my practice and that I am not crazy or totally off in how I understand what my teacher is trying to transmit this tradition and it's fruits to me.

My sits have become more open and easeful and I am feeling some more spaciousness in my daily life the last week or two. I also held my first mindfulness class at my library. I had only one person show up, and she really enjoyed it, so next month I am going to have it at lunch time every Friday and promote it more. I have been a librarian at this library for five years as of yesterday, but have been reluctant to hold mediation classes/session for a number of professional and personal reasons but the director requested I go a head and give them so I am. Which is really want I have been wanting to do anyways to tell the truth despite aforesaid reasons. Sometimes we all just need a little push.

In trying to better understand this question, I have found it useful to study how Buddhism evolved over the last 2500 years. To get a better sense of what the historical Buddha may have said and taught, I have found Bhikku Boddhi's translations of the Pali canon and the Theravada tradition useful and it does not seem to emphasize inherent buddha nature.

https://www.amazon.com/Buddhas-Words-Anthology-Discourses-Canon/dp/1536614688

However, later Mahayana schools of thought seem to have emphasized the inherent buddhahood or buddha nature or Tathāgatagarbha nature. I have found Gethin and Williams books useful to understand these later evolutions of the theory and practice of buddhism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tath%C4%81gatagarbha_S%C5%ABtra

https://www.amazon.com/Mahayana-Buddhism-Doctrinal-Foundations-Religious/dp/0415356539

I actually do have a recommendation. The method that worked the best for me in resolving my own anxiety and depression was something called Core Transformation (see the book by Connirae Andreas. (Full disclosure: I work for the author.) I found that practicing this method a few hundred times completely resolved my anxiety, and 90% resolved my depression, which is more than any method I tried previously. It's a very experiential method, not so much cognitive, and aligned with meditation practices. I consider CT to be metta on steroids.

If you prefer a more cognitive method, Feeling Good by David Burns is the classic text. I definitely recommend that one too, as it will give you insight into how you are participating in creating your anxiety and depression by how you think about things. Learned Optimism by Seligman is another good choice for cognitive work.

Regular exercise can also be useful. See Spark for the science of how that works.

My practice had become more intermittent in terms of sitting time bc of changes in scheduling. When I do sit, my awareness just immediately drops into this weird place. Bliss-like, no sense of center. My awareness just seems like this ambient fog rolling through my body. I have no idea what's happening though. I feel a bit lost, but I'm content to just sit when I can and roll with it. Still listening various dharma podcasts when I can and reading a bit. Have lately been enjoying Ken McLeod's A Trackless Path (dzogchen).

A useful warning: Be cautious about making Radical Life Changes when you're in the early stages of the path, especially if you're newly full of intense passion, vigour, and excitement for the path, or recently started to feel like you've finally started experiencing the fruits of practice, or recently had a Major Spiritual (or just cool) Experience, all of which could be signs of the Arising & Passing Away. It's possible, if that's the case, and you're practicing in some way that would lead someone down the Progress of Insight (nod here to controversy about whether or not those stages are applicable to people practicing anything other than vipassana), you could be in the dukkha nanas, even if it doesn't seem as dramatic as the worst-case descriptions in MCTB.

It's very common after the A&P to want to renounce the world, or be disgusted or unhappy with your life, and think that changing your life will fix the disgust or unhappiness. It might not! And then you might be stuck without a job, or in a career you hate more or are less suited for. Or, you could find your Dharma and lose a huge source of stress and worry. Or somewhere in between. No one else can say what would happen or what might be right for you.

​

--

​

Now, I have, in fact, changed careers since starting practice, and the change is at least partially attributable to the insights gained from the practice. But, on the other hand, I might have changed careers anyway, so who can say.

​

I went to theatre school, with plans on being a big shot stage manager/writer. Partially because of the new sensitivity to my emotional state that I gained from practice, I found that I didn't actually like doing the work. I *very* much liked the feeling of having worked on a really, really great show... But when I worked on shows that were just okay, or were awful, I suffered terribly.

​

I hated the work I had to do, I hated the egos and people, I hated the hours, I hated sitting and listening or watching these plays that I thought were really bad. I thought that was all just normal stress. Nope - I wasn't doing it for the sake of the work (which could have made it possible for me to bear all those other shitty things). I was doing it because I loved the thought of myself as this big important theatre person, because it gave me this image and identity that made me feel good about myself. Working on Bad Theatre broke that identity and image, which was painful.

​

A friend had just left the industry to be a web developer, and got a great paying job after just under two years of teaching himself how to code. He encouraged me to try, and I thought, "That'd be great. That'd give me a lot of money, so I can pay off my debt, and then I can spend lots of time on retreat and become a dharma teacher, which is the only thing I'm really excited about right now and must be my True Calling."

​

Turns out, I actually really, really love coding. I've been doing it professionally for a year now, and my days tend to fly by. What I make almost doesn't matter (as long as it doesn't conflict with my values) - I just like the work for the work's sake.

​

The tech industry suffers from some similar things you pointed to in the advertising industry - excess, Dark Design patterns, manipulation, unethical behaviour, a rabid pursuit of wealth at any cost... But it's very possible to make a living with these skills I've developed, without doing harm. I'm very happy to turn down work that I think is unethical, even if it means I make less money (so far, that hasn't proven to be the case, but it's only been a year). If the actual day to day, moment to moment work that you do brings you joy, and feels Right, then I'm sure there's a way you can use those skills and knowledge you've developed to do work that doesn't make involved diving into the culture of excess, manipulate people, or take you away from your family.

https://www.amazon.ca/Great-Work-Your-Life-Journey/dp/055380751X

This book was a game changer for me. Stephen Cope draws on the Bhaghavad Gita to basically try to answer the question, "What am I supposed to do with my life?"

Mindfulness with breathing is a different, improved edition of the same book.

Reading Jeffery Martin's "Finders" which came out March 31. Keeping an open mind having seen a few of the controversial posts around here. The information seems on point to me so far, and it's relevant to our common project here.

Agreed.

For Christians who are looking for something similar to the "popular" modern secularized presentations of Buddhist meditation (i.e. "mindfulness" stuff) and just want to get their feet wet with one easy book, I recommend Christian Meditation (James Finley) https://www.amazon.com/dp/0060750642 - he learned from Merton, left the monastery after a few years, also investigated Zen but the book is not overtly Zen enough to scare anyone away (the fingerprints are there if you know what you're looking for.)

What kind of meditation are you doing now? You may or may not be doing it wrong :D So we'll need some details to figure that out. What do you do when you meditate, and whose instructions do you follow, if any?


I want to be careful not to be discouraging here, because many people do see pain relief from meditation, and just because you haven't yet doesn't mean you won't be one of them. Trying different techniques might be a good idea, and we can make suggestions with more info.


Just to throw it out there in case people don't know: the term “tension headache” can insinuate that the person suffering from them is actively involved in creating the pain [note to advanced meditators: I mean this in a non-meditative way, I'm not talking about mental fabrication ;)], but that's not always true. Tension headaches can be caused by tension in the neck and shoulders, but that tension can also be triggered neurologically like a migraine headache – indeed, with some patients, there's so much overlap between the two that what is migraine and what is tension can hardly be sorted out. A tension headache can begin with stress and simply never stop even once the stress is gone. If your tension headache is caused by current stress, you probably already know that because of the way the pain behaves. Meditation and mindfulness are very useful for that, as well as therapy and biofeedback. If your tension headache is caused by a neurological condition that also causes your muscles to tense up, you probably already know that, too, because you have pain regardless of how you feel or how relaxed you are. Relaxation might help to the extent that you're able to release the muscles, but it can't fully resolve the pain or tension. If your problem is neurological, I don't think anyone can say definitively whether meditation is going to make a difference or not. Again, some people have astounding relief from pain with meditation, and others don't.


There are a lot of ways meditation can help you, I think, besides actually relieving the pain/curing the condition. And I understand at this time, stopping the pain is the most important thing, and the desire to get away from it can be overwhelming. But there is more you can do. For me, meditation has made no difference in my constant pain. But mindfulness and meditation have had profound effects on how I cope with with the pain, including a drastic lowering of stress, aversion, anxiety, and other mental suffering. As you've no doubt experienced in the last two years, one of the challenges of being sick is the way others treat you – doctors are not always so friendly (to put it very mildly) when they can't fix you, friendships can be strained or broken, and you've got to learn to deal with various and often nutty treatment suggestions from anyone who hears about your pain. Using meditation to develop some equanimity and even metta/benevolence about this can help you respond in more positive ways to these problems. So if it turns out meditation doesn't help the pain directly, that doesn't mean it's useless. And if you are able to develop solid concentration skills, there's the possibility of spending some time in meditation where you're at least unaware that the pain is there. To do that, you have to work with aversion. Lessening and eliminating aversion to pain during meditation is a very doable exercise and will carry over to life off the cushion. (Folks here will be great at expanding on how to do this once we know more details about your practice).


It's important psychologically, especially with a somewhat unusual condition like a constant headache, to recognize there are many other people with the same problem. Bhikkhu Bodhi, for example, has had increasingly bad headaches for most of his adult life. As you can see, it doesn't seem to have impeded his spiritual progress, but rather has propelled it. Also, if you haven't already read Paula Kamen's book All in My Head, I would strongly recommend it. It's not meditation-related, but normalizing your experience will go a long way to being able to accept the pain for what it is rather than building a story around it, and that leads to a great deal of mental freedom.