Tag: meditation

Dream Like Nature

Looks like anxiety was a timely discussion last week. We received very good feedback about the topic. So today let’s discuss something totally different! Let’s discuss the dreamlike nature of the phenomenon. What does that even mean you are wondering? Well, let’s dig into it.

Have you ever had a vivid dream? I sometimes get these lucid dreams where I am aware of everything that is happening and am actively participating it, making decisions, having fun, feeling sorry whatever the case may be. I wake up and distinctly remember what happened in that dream. It felt so real while it was in the dream state. Where did it go? If it was real, it should not just disappear just like that. But it does.

Buddha gave the example of an elephant in the dream – in ancient India, elephants were commonplace. Say someone dreams of an elephant.  It is a big elephant. It has big ears he is flapping around; you could see wrinkles on his skin, a nice long trunk, and so on.  All this is real in your dreams. When we wake up, we realize that there is no elephant. Where did it go? How did it come about in the first place? How can it vanish in thin air? It felt very real so what happened? It felt like it would in waking life and existed on its own side. We realize that it was just a dream. We made it up – there was no elephant. A total and complete fabrication of our mind. And when our subtle mind (subtle mind is the one that allows us to dream as we discussed in types of mind session) disappeared, the elephant disappeared with it.

As venerable Geshe Kelsang puts it, when we dream, we may have extremely vivid experiences. We may travel to colorful lands, meet beautiful or terrifying people, engage in various activities, and as a result experience great pleasure or suffering and pain. In our dream a whole world appears to us, functioning in its own way. This world may be similar to the world of our waking state or it may be quite bizarre, but in either case, while we are dreaming it appears to be utterly real. If we check carefully we shall realize that our waking world exists in a way that is similar to the way in which our dream world exists. Like the dream world, our waking world appears vividly to us and seems to have its own existence independent of our mind. Just as in the dream, we believe this appearance to be true and respond with desire, anger, fear, and so on.

Let’s unpack the profoundness of this statement. Let’s get back to our elephant example. We know that elephant is not our mind. I think it is fair to say that all of you will agree it is not independent of our mind. If our mind does not perceive the elephant it will not show up in our dream. And lastly, an elephant ceases to exist when the mind dreaming about it ceases to exist. Hopefully, we all agree on these three points.

But you say in the waking world, I can touch and feel things like my car, my TV, my anger, and so forth. Even in our dreams, we could feel and touch the elephant. We even get angry or happy and physically react sometimes in our dream. So in that regard, it is no different. If we apply the same three tests we used for our dream, maybe it makes sense. Let’s take our car. We know our car is not our mind. We also know that it is not independent of our mind. If it is not in our perception, we will not know there is a car. And we know that when the mind perceiving the car ceases, it will cease as well. Here is some more from Geshe Kelsang: The only difference between them is that the dream world is an appearance to our subtle dreaming mind while the waking world is an appearance to our gross waking mind. The dream world exists only for as long as the dream awareness to which it appears exists, and the waking world exists only for as long as the waking awareness to which it appears exists. Buddha said:

“You should know that all phenomena are like dreams.”

When we die, our gross waking minds dissolve into our very subtle minds, and the world we experienced when we were alive simply disappears. The world as others perceive it will continue, but our personal world will disappear as completely and irrevocably as the world of last night’s dream. And we covered some of this in our three types of mind session earlier.

If we grasp this even at a smaller level, a lot of our delusions such as anger, attachment, jealousy, and so forth will begin to disappear.

Conquering Anxiety

I have been reading a lot of news articles about how our entire population is suffering from anxiety due to COVID. Everyone is talking about how Anxiety is disproportionately affecting our young adults. It is a real problem. So let’s try and tackle this problem in today’s meditation session.

Let’s start with what causes anxiety. We live in a fast pace world. People have way too many balls in the air so stress, in general, is at an elevated level in our society. When COVID came about, additional stressors came into our lives. A lot of people lost their jobs. People who were displaced from employment were the people who were least likely to have a financial safety net of their own. They for the most part became dependent upon the social safety net. That had its own added challenge. A lot of the systems we have in place as a safety net were not designed to intake everyone at once (unemployment reporting systems in most states went down in the initial days of COVID). Then came the social distancing and shutdown of societies. Human beings are social animals. We are not programmed to be confined – and let’s face it; no matter what we call it, it was confinement. No social interaction, even when you can go out for necessities, no looking at someone’s face – I mean how do you judge facial expressions with a mask on?

The lack of social interactions especially hit the younger generation hard. Their go-to source for stress reduction was hanging out with friends and that was taken away abruptly without any notice. So-called health experts did not realize what negative effects their action would have on this group of the population that was least affected by COVID but is most affected by mental health crisis resulting from COVID lockdowns. A recent National Institute of Health concluded that almost 20% of young adults are suffering from anxiety. That is a very high number.

Now that we have figured out what it is that causing this epidemic of the mental health crisis, I think it may be a blessing in disguise. Two things are happening; 1) mental health is no longer a taboo subject – even Michelle Obama is openly talking about the mild depression she is going through; 2) people are taking actions to take their mental health in order and these actions will hopefully have long term positive outcome.

So how do we address the anxiety that flares up any time of the day with no warning? Anxiety comes because we provide inappropriate attention to a subject. What is inappropriate attention you might ask? It simply means we are exaggerating a problem we may be facing or blowing out of proportion the negative impacts of that problem and so forth. This actually happened recently. A friend’s son called me in panic. He had recently received a full-time job and his employer asked for a drug test. He went for the drug test and they took his social security number and date of birth. When he was leaving the facility, he noticed that they had a piece of paper with all his personal information in plain sight for everyone to see. He could not say anything but as soon as he went home he told his parents he was worried about his personal information being out there. They asked him to call me. Anyway, we started to talk and his anxiety was flaring up. So we went about breaking it down. And this is very important to get rid of anxiety. People who are going through anxiety episodes tend to talk about generality and how everything is going to be bad or worse. After talking it through, I asked him what the worst-case scenario? Another useful technic is when you know the worst-case scenario, it defines the problem and you can begin to address the problem. So he said the worst case is someone can steal his identity. So I asked him to put a freeze on his credit report with all three credit bureau.  As soon as he completed this step, his anxiety disappeared because now he knew his problem was solved. The point here is that if we break down the problem and begin to work on it, it reduces or eliminates anxiety.

This is what I call short term solution. Longer-term, we must learn how not to let our outer problems disturb our inner peace. This is where meditation comes in. If we have a meditation practice that allows us to find our peaceful selves, it can become our go-to solution.

Renunciation

When someone says renunciation, people have all kinds of ideas. They think it is about leaving your family or getting away from it all and going to some cave to meditate. That cannot be further from the truth. So let’s demystify renunciation today.

Renunciation means a spontaneous wish to attain liberation (Mukti, Mox) from Samsara. This requires a careful look at the definition of Samsara. For a lot of people who are of Indian origin, Samsara typically means day-to-day life. That is not Samsara at all. Samsara is this endless cycle of birth and death. If you think about it, we have been going through this cyclical process of birth, death, birth for eons. Idea is to get out of that wheel.

Why would we want to get out of this circle you may ask? If you look at it, Samsara is full of suffering. We go through the suffering of birth, aging, sickness, delusions, death, and then rinse and repeat! Let’s look at each of these individually.

Any woman who has given birth will tell you it is no joke. If the full-grown adult is having so much pain, can you imagine what a baby goes through during the birthing process? Even before the birth, in the mother’s womb, the baby goes through suffering. When a mom drinks something cold, the baby feels like she is taking a cold shower, and exactly the opposite when mom drinks something hot.

Once we are born, for initial weeks and months, we don’t know how to convey our wants and needs. The only thing we know is to cry and to move our limbs around to get attention. That has to be a frustrating experience. Not being able to communicate you are hungry or you are in pain.

As we grow, the suffering of sickness is one of those things that can sneak up on you at any time.  When sickness strikes even the most healthy amongst us can get knocked out. It can take away our daily joys and make us feel unpleasant. When we feel ill, it is like a soaring bird that gets shot and comes straight down to the earth. We have no strength. We get frustrated and sometimes are dependent on others for our day-to-day activities. Our medical team may or may not be able to help us. If our sickness is incurable and if we are not exposed to spirituality, we may feel anxious, fear and regret.

No one can escape from this next suffering called aging. All of us age and with age comes age-related issues. The simple task of getting up and down becomes a chore and is painful. When we are young, we can travel around the world, however in old age, just getting out of the house is very difficult sometimes. We lose our eyesight and ability to hear as we age. Our memory fades and we tend to repeat ourselves – I feel like I am already experiencing this one😊Things we used to enjoy when we were young, no longer appeals to us and we are not able to enjoy those same things anymore.

At the time of our death, we don’t want to let go of the possessions we have accumulated throughout this lifetime We feel sorry about leaving our loved ones behind. We have to leave everything and everyone we are attached to and that creates sadness for many people.

There are other sufferings beyond the four basic sufferings of birth, sickness, aging, and death that we discussed here. We all suffer from our delusions. These delusions bring us anger, attachment, hatred, confusion, jealousy, and so on. When we get angry for example, sometimes, we can feel physical pain. It also creates tremendous mental suffering. It affects our health. These sufferings prevent us from enjoying life. We suffer from environmental factors such as recent weather extremities in Texas. That causes people to lose their shelter, temporary displacements, and so on. We suffer from not having our desires fulfilled. Even when our desires are fulfilled, they may not get fulfilled in the way we want them to be fulfilled. With wealth comes its issues and that could be temporary as well.

So as you can see the cycle of birth and death tends to bring suffering. The only way out of this is to strive for liberation. We should make a spontaneous wish to get out of this endless cycle and make a determination to attain supreme inner peace of liberation.

Generosity

Have you ever seen when you do a good deed something good happens to you? That is the benefit of generosity. Today I want to focus on this unique quality of generosity. There are actually three kinds of generosities. The beggarly kind, the friendly kind, and the princely kind. Let’s look at each one of them individually. The beggarly kind generosity is when one gives away the things that they do not need anyway. This is similar to when we give away old clothes to Goodwill. Nothing wrong with it but not really generous per se.

The friendly kind generosity is when we share the bounty that is given to us. We share it with people who we come across we share it with people who we see are in need. We keep some and give some away. This is what most people practice.

The princely kind is a rare breed. It is when we give away more than we keep. We keep less than what we need.

There are many benefits of generosity. When we give away material things, it reduces our attachment to the material world. According to a Canadian research study, generosity can reduce blood pressure, reduce depression, reduces stress, decreases anxiety, and more. Generosity also improves our relationship with the people around us. When we give, we are creating positive momentum and hope it catches on and other people carry on with that torch.

I saw an interesting research piece from the John Templeton Foundation on generosity. They found that people who give on their own accord, tend to be happier. Happy people tend to be more generous so it creates its own ecosystem. They also found that donating money releases the same neural pathways in our brain that are activated by other pleasure activities such as food, sex, etc. People tend to be more generous when they see other people giving. As Americans we are the most generous nation on earth. We donate more than $500 billion per year. That is a staggering amount.

Giving also needs to have the right motivation. For example, if we give something expecting something in return it is not really giving. It is just bartering. Giving also should be without pride. If we give with pride that washes away the benefits of giving. Buddha said that having pride for our giving is like eating a feast of a meal with poison sprinkled on it. It does you no good.

Giving for the sake of giving is what we need to learn to practice. When we begin to that, we do it out of contentment, and as a result, happiness follows.

And we have touched on this before but giving does not mean giving material things only. One can give our time, our skillsets, our compassion and care, our attention, and so forth. Giving away one’s skill and abilities without any thought of return is giving out of compassion. That is what true generosity looks like.

There is a lot of aid by governmental and quasi-governmental agencies nowadays. That is not really giving because people who are doling out the aid are not doing it out of compassion for the most part but they are just doing a job they are getting paid to do.

Why is generosity important you might ponder? Generosity by definition diminishes one’s ego. If we cultivate generosity, we will slowly take a stab at reducing our ego. Reducing ego is the first step towards experiencing emptiness – it is a very deep topic we will cover in a few months.

Gratitude

Every week we practice our gratitude attitude at the beginning of the meditation session. So today, I thought we would actually discuss the benefits of gratitude. Believe it or not, the guy who started the gratitude rock movement was my coach and is a personal friend. Lee Brower based in Utah and all around an amazing guy. Lee Brower tells about gratitude rock in the movie ‘The Secret’. He took a little rock and decided that every time he touched it he would think of something he was grateful for. So when he puts the gratitude stone in his pocket in the morning he goes through what he is thankful for, and when he empties his pocket in the night and finds the rock he goes again through what he’s thankful for.

Lee started every meeting we had with a gratitude attitude and he kind of rubbed off on me so about 15 years ago, I started conducting every meeting with a gratitude attitude.

Let’s look at why creating a gratitude mindset is important. Gratitude creates a mindset of abundance. If you look at life from a scarcity point of view, life will eventually become measurable. An abundance mindset allows you to not chase things for the sake of chasing them. Oprah Winfrey once said: “If you look at what you have in life, you will always have more. If you look at what you don’t have in life, you will never have enough.”

Do you notice some people have this victim mindset? If something bad happens, they always ask why me? They blame everyone and their siblings for their problems including their co-workers, the government, family members, and so forth. People with a victim mindset are never happy no matter how much material wealth they accumulate.

On the flip side, people with a gratitude mindset focus on abundant opportunities available to them. It’s like a classic saying “why didn’t I think of that?” When we are grateful, we tend to focus on the positivity around us. That in turn brings abundance. People who are successful know there are enough resources in the world and stay away from competing for the same resources. A gratitude mindset allows us to leverage the resources we have as opposed to competing for them. It also creates awareness for the resources around us – develop an eye out if you will.

We have talked about this in the previous sessions I believe. But if we think about where we are in life, we are extremely lucky. If you have food, shelter, and clothing (roti, kapada or makan) and you are in good health, you are luckier than most people on this planet. Once you realize how lucky you are and begin to appreciate that, you will start noticing the opportunities around you. Because as they say; when a perspective changes, everything changes.  

So how do we develop a gratitude mindset? The first thing to do is to develop a daily practice. Every morning when you wake up or before you go to bed or at a dinner table, spend five minutes thinking about what you are grateful for and why. Why is as important as what here. Why allows us to dig deep and create a meaningful experience.

Another way to develop gratitude is to major our success. No matter how small, be thankful for it. Some people live in what I call a “gap” – the distance between where they are and where they want to be. I used to be one of those people. Once I started developing gratitude practice, I began to appreciate the abundance that I already had. So it is very important to not live in the gap.

And the most important way to develop a gratitude mindset is with intention. Be sure to make it a habit to appreciate everyone who you come across from your family members, coworkers, essential workers you come across in your daily routine, and so forth.

They say it takes 21 days to make a habit. So for the next 21 days, give your best to develop a gratitude mindset. You will see changes in your life for the better.