Excerpts of talk given by Ven.
Thanissaro at a conference on AIDS, HIV and other immuno-deficiency
disorders
The role that meditation can play in facing issues of
pain, illness and death is not a pleasant topic, but an
important one. Sadly, it’s only when people are faced
with a fatal illness that they think about these issues,
and often by that point it’s too late to get fully
prepared.
Although what medicine can do for AIDS, we shouldn’t be
complacent. Even if AIDS or its adventitious infections
don’t get you, something else will, so it’s best to get
prepared, to practise the skills you’ll need when
medicine Chinese, Western or whatever can no longer help
you, and you’re on your own. As far as I’ve been able to
understand the only way to develop these skills is to
train the mind. At the same time, if you are caring for
someone with a fatal disease, meditation offers you one
of the best ways to restore your own spiritual and
emotional batteries so that you can keep going even when
things are tough.
A lot has appeared in the media books, newspapers,
magazines, TV about the role of meditation in treating
illness and emotional burn-out. usually when the media
gets hold of a topic, they tended to over or
under-estimate what meditation is and what it can do for
you. This is typical of the media. Listening to them is
like listening to a car salesman. He doesn’t have to
know how to drive the car or care for it. His only
responsibility is to point out its selling points, what
he think is he can get you to believe and sell out your
money for. But if you are actually going to drive the
car, you hav`e to study the owner’s manual. Meditation
is a user’s manual to help you when the chips are down.
The breath meditation is a good topic no matter what
your religious background. As my teacher once said, the
breath doesn’t belong to Buddhism or Christianity or
anyone at all. It’s common property that anyone can
meditate on. At the same time, of all the meditation
topics there are, it’s probably the most beneficial to
the body, for when we’re dealing with the breath, we’re
dealing not only with the air coming in and out of the
lungs, but also with all the feelings of energy that
course throughout the body with each breath. If you can
learn to become sensitive to these feelings, and let
them flow smoothly and unobstructed, you can help the
body function more easily, and give the mind a handle
for dealing with pain.
Sit comfortably erect, in a balanced position. You don’t
have to be ramrod straight like a soldier. Just try not
to lean forward or back, to the left or the right. Close
your eyes and say to yourself, ‘May I be truly happy and
free from suffering.’ This may sound like a strange,
even selfish, way to start meditating, but there are
good reasons for it.
First is, if you can’t wish for your own happiness,
there is no way that you can honestly wish for the
happiness of another. Some people need to remind
themselves constantly that they deserve happiness, we
all deserve it, but if we don’t believe it, we will
constantly find ways to punish ourselves, and we will
end up punishing others in subtle or blatant ways as
well.
Second is, It is important to reflect on what true
happiness is and where it can be found. A moment’s
reflection will show that you can’t find it in the past
or the future. The past is gone and your memory of it is
undependable. The future is a blank uncertainty. So the
only place we can really find happiness is in the
present. But even here you have to know where to look.
If you try to base your happiness on things that change
sights, sounds, sensations in general, people and things
outside you are setting yourself up for disappointment,
like building your house on a cliff where there have
been repeated landslides in the past. So true happiness
has to be sought within. Meditation is thus like a
treasure hunt: to find what has solid and unchanging
worth in the mind, something that even death cannot
touch.
Now, bring your attention to the sensation of breathing.
Breathe in long and out long for a couple of times,
focusing on any spot in the body where the breathing is
easy to notice, and your mind feels comfortable
focusing. This could be at the nose, at the chest, at
the abdomen, or any spot at all. Stay with that spot,
noticing how it feels as you breathe in and out. Don’t
force the breath, or bear down too heavily with your
focus.
Let the breath flow naturally, and simply keep track of
how it feels. Savor it, as if it were an exquisite
sensation you wanted to prolong. If your mind wanders
off, simply bring it back. Don’t get discouraged. If it
wanders 100 times, bring it back 100 times. Show it that
you mean business, and eventually it will listen to you.
If you want, you can experiment with different kinds of
breathing. If long breathing feels comfortable, stick
with it. If it doesn’t, change it to whatever rhythm
feels soothing to the body. You can try short breathing,
fast breathing, slow breathing, deep breathing, shallow
breathing whatever feels most comfortable to you right
now... Once you have the breath comfortable at your
chosen spot, move your attention to notice how the
breathing feels in other parts of the body.
Start by focusing on the area just below your navel.
Breathe in and out, and notice how that area feels. If
you don’t feel any motion there, just be aware of the
fact that there’s no motion. If you do feel motion,
notice the quality of the motion, to see if the
breathing feels uneven there, or if there’s any tension
or tightness . If there’s tension, think of relaxing it.
If the breathing feels jagged or uneven, think of
smoothing it out... Now move your attention over to the
right of that spot to the lower right-hand corner of the
abdomen and repeat the same process... Then over to the
lower left-hand corner of the abdomen... Then up to the
navel... right... left... to the solar plexus...
right... left... the middle of the chest... right...
left... to the base of the throat... right... left... to
the middle of the head... [take several minutes for each
spot] If you were meditating at home, you could continue
this process through your entire body — over the head,
down the back, out the arms and legs to the tips of your
finger and toes but since our time is limited, I’ll ask
you to return your focus now to anyone of the spots
we’ve already covered.
Let your attention settle comfortably there, and then
let your conscious awareness spread to fill the entire
body, from the head down to the toes, so that you’re
like a spider sitting in the middle of a web: It’s
sitting in one spot, but it’s sensitive to the entire
web. Keep your awareness expanded like this you have to
work at this, for its tendency will be to shrink to a
single spot and think of the breath coming in and out of
your entire body, through every pore. Let your awareness
simply stay right there for a while there’s nowhere else
you have to go, nothing else you have to think about...
And then gently come out of meditation.
Right now I’d like to return to a point I made earlier:
the ways meditation and its role in dealing with illness
and death tend to be under and over-estimated, for only
when you have a proper estimation of your tools you can
put them to use in a precise and beneficial way. I’ll
divide my remarks into two areas: what meditation is,
and what it can do for you.
First, what meditation is: This is an area where popular
conceptions tend to under-estimate it. Books that deal
with meditation in treating illness tend to focus on
only two aspects of meditation as if that were all it
had to offer. Those two aspects are relaxation and
visualization. It’s true that these two processes form
the beginning stages of meditation you probably found
our session just now very relaxing, and may have done
some visualization when you thought of the breath
coursing through the body but there’s more to meditation
than just that.
The great meditators in human history did more than
simply master the relaxation response. Meditation as a
complete process involves three steps. The first is
mindful relaxation, making the mind comfortable in the
present for only when it feels comfortable in the
present can it settle down and stay there. The important
word in this description, though, is mindful. You have
to be fully aware of what you’re doing, of whether or
not the mind is staying with its object, and of whether
or not it’s drifting off to sleep. If you simply relax
and drift off, that’s not meditation, and there’s
nothing you can build on it. If, however, you can remain
fully aware as the mind settles comfortably into the
present, that develops into the next step.
අව
අටවක
අමාවක
පුර අටවක
පසෙලාස්වක