Polly Young-Eisendrath
“My current teacher, Shinzen Young, first trained in Rinzai Zen but then decided that Vipassana was the best way to teach Americans. Vipassana teaches us the awareness of ever-present expansion and contraction, and having no preference between them. There are good feelings and bad feelings, good days and bad days, expansion and contraction. This is the way it is for all of us. Nobody gets anything better than that.
But we so often make a steady state our ideal, especially in relationships. When you pick someone, you think you’re going to escape suffering, get out of the expansion and contraction. Your ideals for relationship might be so high that you never get into one, because every time you put your toe in, you say, “Ahh! This doesn’t work. This is falling short.” You never even get on the path of love, because you’re holding on to your ideal.
Or perhaps you get on the path of love, and then you are looking for those highs within the ups and downs of life. You put great store in them. Occasionally you have a really good day, or even a peak experience, and there is this wonderful opening. You recognize that you and the other person are absolutely in tune, totally accepting of each other. You think to yourself, “OK, now I’ve got it. In the future I will do exactly this, and I’ll get these results again.” But of course, it doesn’t work, because the waves go up and down, up and down.
Here’s the secret: get a surfboard. As the waves go up and down, the surfboard allows you to maintain your balance. When things are going well, you maintain your balance and don’t go whole hog into it. And when things are going badly, you can see that painful as it is, it’s interesting and even fascinating to observe. By surfing the waves and maintaining your balance, it starts to feel less like bouncing up and down all the time.
Meditation practice, mindfulness, psychotherapy, clear observation of your experience—all these will give you this capacity to surf. However, everybody falls off the surfboard at some point, so you need one of those little ankle bracelets that keeps you and the surfboard together. Whether it’s psychotherapy or meditation, you need to stay with it long enough to get the bracelet that connects you. If you don’t, then one day you will fall off hard and you might say, “I worked hard on that surfboard and it didn’t work, so screw it. I won’t work on one of those again.” That is the worst outcome. The things that could help you have been tossed away.
When the shit hits the fan in your life―and it will―you will need your surfboard and the bracelet that ties you to it. You will need your training and you will need a bigger view of love, one that encompasses and accepts a broken heart. You will need something that reminds you of your vow to “take the training” to love.”

Polly Young-Eisendrath, Ph.D., is a Jungian psychoanalyst and clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Vermont. A longtime practitioner of Zen and Vipassana meditation, she is author of fourteen books, including her most recent, The Self-Esteem Trap: Raising Confident and Compassionate Kids in an Age of Self-Importance.

John Tarrant
“A while ago my mother was dying. I traveled home, went to the hospital, held her hand, and sat with her. The next morning she was still alive, so I did the same thing. Meanwhile, my sisters were negotiating with the nurses about oxygen levels, my father was trying to encourage mom to stay in this world, to eat for him (“May I tempt you with just a spoonful of this custard, Allison?”), and my mom was holding off my dad with garlic and crosses. But I didn’t have anything to do, no special role, and I began to think that was probably good. I noticed that when I wanted anybody in that room to be different, it became rather painful. “Dad, ease up. I mean, she’s dying. She doesn’t want to eat.” Or, “Mom, he just loves you and he’s trying to be helpful and it probably would help if you ate.” Or, “Girls, you could relax; the oxygen is not going to help her now.” I had all those let’s-improve-the-world thoughts, but I noticed that when I didn’t go with those, everything was completely at peace. People were doing what they were doing because they needed to. Who am I to know what they should be doing? It was beautiful appreciating how much they cared about each other.
The koan for that situation is, “Not knowing is most intimate.” What if someone shouldn’t be improved? Maybe if they gave up smoking, they’d turn out to be a serial killer. How about not wanting to change others? How about not wanting to change yourself?
We spend a lot of time whipping the donkey. If we stopped doing that, we might find we change in unexpected ways, and others do as well. Most projects to change other people or ourselves are really projects about interior decoration for the prison. A spiritual practice is really about jail breaking. When you show up for your life, what kind of ride do you want to take? Do you want to spend your time telling other people they should be different?
Love means bearing people’s differences without trying to change them—not just bearing, but valuing and appreciating and loving people’s uniqueness. That’s a path all by itself. What if the fact that you’re different from me is a gateway rather than an obstacle?”

John Tarrant, Ph.D., is a Zen teacher who for many years had a practice in Jungian psychoanalysis. Author of Bring Me the Rhinoceros and The Light Inside the Dark, he teaches physicians and executives at Duke Integrative Medicine and directs the Pacific Zen Institute.

212 Results for “meditation”
1 – 10 of 212
A Meditation Technique That Changes the Brain
Technique That Changes the Brain. Science says the ancient practice has benefits beyond reducing stress, lowering blood pressure. by: Michael Haederle | from: AARP Bulletin | August 6, 2010. En español | As a ce…

Meditation Might Cut Risk of Heart Attack, Stroke in Blacks
ability to lower…

Mindful Meditation Might Ease Irritable Bowel Syndrome
technique can help ease the torment suffered by people with a chronic bowel disease, a new study has found. The research, done at the University of North Carolina…
Meditation Goes Mainstream
practices—including deep breathing, walking, tai chi and yoga—to elicit the relaxation. Shortly after that, Kabat-Zinn became interested in the connection between mind and body, and in particular how stress aff…

Meditation Soothes MS Patients
known as mindfulness may help patients with multiple sclerosis. Patients with MS — a nervous system disease that typically surfaces in early adulthood and can cause muscle……

Meditation May Help Women Cope With Hot Flashes
technique can help ease the hot flashes, night sweats and insomnia of menopause, a new study says. The University of Massachusetts research showed that…

‘Mindful’ Meditation Tied to Healthy Brain Changes: Study
training may change your brain for the better, a small, new study suggests. Researchers using imaging technology have found that people develop measurable changes in the white…

Meditation Method a Matter of Taste
should select a method that makes them feel comfortable, rather than choose a technique just because it’s popular, a new study indicates. Researchers from San Francisco…

The Benefits of Meditation
showed greater skill at choosing what to focus on among competing stimu…

Meditation May Help Put Primary Insomnia to Bed

The Parts:
Group 1: head-hairs, body-hairs, nails, teeth, skin,
Group 2: flesh, sinews, bones, bone-marrow, kidneys,
Group 3: heart, liver, diaphragm, spleen, lungs,
Group 4: intestines, mesentery, contents of the stomach (gore), excrement, brain,
Group 5: bile, phlegm, pus, blood, sweat, fat,
Group 6: tears, grease, saliva, snot, fluid of the joints (sonovial fluid), and urine.

Suggested Steps for the practice:
Memorize in forward and reverse order.
Visualize/see each part in terms of color, shape, location, and surrounding matter.
Contemplate one group at a time, then combine groups until you can easily review the 32 parts forward and backward.
Contemplate these parts as they occur within your body. Also contemplate them in other people’s bodies.
See the world of bodies as collections of parts, not-self, not so personal, not so appealing, nothing to become enthralled with or attached to.
Then review the body parts seeing their repulsive characteristics. Let the repulsive perception support dispassion toward the body.

And, Larry added this quote from Einstein:
“A human being is part of a whole, called by us the universe, a part limited in space and time. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest-a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.
This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affectation for a few people
near us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our understanding of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”