by Joan Gattuso
At those times of life where there has been just too much on my plate and my meditation has suffered, I have suffered. I have learned I simply cannot let “life” press in on my time of solitude of which I require a lot. Without Right Concentration life simply does not work well for me. It is reported that Gandhi would rise between 3 and 4 A.M. and silently meditate to prepare for his full schedule. He considered this his most important act of the day, since it gave him the energy to do whatever would come before him. Charles Fillmore, cofounder of the Unity movement, would arise in the middle of the night and spend extended times in meditation. There is something quite sacred about the stillness of the predawn hours. Interference from the fast-paced, frenetic world with all of its bombardment from disruptive waves of ego has not yet begun, and one can more easily relax into the quiet.
In reflecting on the eight points of the Eight-fold Path, it is clear that I began my practice of them with Right Concentration. This is not the norm. Usually one starts with Right View or Right Thought, the preliminary aspects that are essential. These two are followed by Right Speech, Right Action and Right Livelihood. These three align the living and expression of one’s life with the ideal. The final three—Right Effort, Right Mindfulness and Right Concentration—are developmentally advancing one toward the goal of spiritual understanding and awakening.
Right Concentration is not to be used as an escape mechanism. That would be wrong concentration. Rather, Right Concentration builds the consciousness for us to live deeply with clear awareness each moment of our lives.
Following are several concentration practices that I have used and taught through the years.
Falling Leaves
This exercise will take you twenty to thirty minutes.• First, in a quiet place sit either on the floor in a yoga posture or in a chair with your spine straight, feet flat on the floor, hands in a relaxed, open, palms-up position.
• Then still your mind by breathing in and out slowly with awareness. Do this for several minutes until you feel yourself becoming inwardly quiet.
• Next imagine ten leaves gathered in the region of your third eye (the center of your forehead). They are your leaves. Choose whatever kind you wish. One student of mine actually gathered leaves in the autumn and placed ten of them on a tray in front of her. She would look at the leaves, close her eyes, visualize the leaves, once again open her eyes, look at the actual leaves, close her eyes again and begin the concentration practice. She reported that this technique was very beneficial for her. Awaken your creative imagination and find a way that would inspire and be beneficial to you.
• Now with each breath imagine a single leaf floating from your forehead to your solar plexus. Stay very centered and focused in your concentration. Do this until all ten leaves are resting in the solar plexus without experiencing distracting thoughts.
This takes a great deal of concentration, so do not get discouraged. Do not judge your efforts. Be kind and gentle to yourself, as if you were training a new puppy. Keep the practice joyful and light-spirited. Do not stress or strain. Refrain from getting exasperated. Allow this to be a pleasurable experience. After several weeks of practice, Right Concentration combined with Right Effort will create the ability in you to do a complete set of ten without distraction. The Buddhists say that, when one can do ten sets of ten, then that person is beginning to master Right Concentration. I personally used this technique daily for a very long time while training my “beginner’s mind.”
I encourage you to practice daily the leaf meditation, and when you feel a degree of mastery, then move on to more complex mindfulness techniques such as the ones at the end of this book. You do the work, and it will work for you. Faithfully continue in your practice and in time you will reap the priceless benefits to your inner being. Remember to be certain you are not sitting quietly with your eyes closed thinking about anything—no to-do list, no balancing the checkbook, no worrying about anything. If you are, refocus your attention on your breathing:
In and out, rising, falling, peace within, peace without, calm within, calm without.
If you need more practice with concentration, then revisit those ten leaves. You are worth the time and effort. Your soul is worth the time and effort. The time spent developing Right Concentration will return to you blessed many times over.
Walking Meditation
This exercise can take thirty minutes to an hour or more. My husband and I became somewhat skilled in walking meditation while on retreat at Plum Village in France with Thich Nhat Hanh.
In the French countryside Thich Nhat Hanh would very mindfully and most slowly walk with his eyes looking neither right nor left, cast slightly downward. Imagine the scene with this diminutive monk leading seventy-five adults and a few children single file in the slow, nearly motionless walk with French farmers driving by in their tractors or horse-drawn carts gaping at the unusual spectacle in their bucolic land. A mischievous, impetuous little boy, who was the son of parents in our group, would run in front of Thich Nhat Hanh flailing his arms in an attempt to distract the teacher. The child never succeeded. Thich Nhat Hanh remained composed, mindful and centered in spite of the child’s antics.
This is a lovely practice that aligns the physical body and its motion through centering, purposeful movement. It also has the benefit of stilling the mind. Try it on a quiet beach or park or forest. It is very beneficial. David and I always lead this walking meditation when we lead group retreats in Hawaii, and we silently walk mindfully single file through a pristine ironwood forest. The ironwoods sway and creak in the breeze. It is as if the gentle sounds of their vibrations are communicating peace to us. The single-file line of retreatants slowly moving through the forest is gradually enveloped by the oscillations of the trees. It has always been a very meaningful experience for all.
Sitting on the Car Meditation
This is another meditation that focuses on Right Concentration that I learned and practiced at Plum Village. We signed up for “Sitting on the Car Meditation,” which, when I read the title, made me burst out laughing as I visualized many Buddhists using Right Concentration mindfully sitting all over the cars in the small parking lot. It was quite a comical mental image.
As it turned out, something was lost in translation, for it was supposed to read “Sitting in the Car Meditation.” But the correct translation hardly helped, for what it really meant was piling sixteen to seventeen people like sardines into an old van, where we were to be silent as the Vietnamese driver wove us through the French countryside, transporting us to our intended destination. It was an attempt to remain centered while wrapped around the gearshift! I would silently practice mindful breathing or count my Tibetan mala beads to remain focused, centered and calm.
Riding so squeezed into a vehicle with others I do not recommend, but we can always bring mindful concentration to our driving, whether alone or with passengers. What happens to drivers in stressful situations is quite revealing as to what lurks in “store consciousness” (the Buddhist term for the subconscious mind). It must be one of my soul lessons, because on several occasions I have been the passenger of drivers who are spiritual practitioners, but who—when they encounter a hostile driver on the road—quickly match negative energies, cursing and swearing and making rude gestures. Such behavior is not worth it.
Calm in, calm out, peace in, peace out.
The highways of life will always be filled with unskilled drivers. Another’s driving skills need to have nothing to do with our maintaining calm at our spiritual center. A helpful technique to remind you to remain in your center is to print cards with calming phrases such as “Sitting in the car meditation,” “Breathe,” or “Calm in, calm out,” and tape them to your dashboard. Some place a picture of a much-loved saint or teacher, or they hang mala beads over the rearview mirror. If you find you can easily lose your spiritual equilibrium while driving, why not incorporate one or more of these ideas?
Practicing Right Concentration in one’s car can be
both a safety and a centering device for drivers and passengers alike. If all drivers practiced an outer-directed Right Concentration while behind the wheel, what an impact it would have for us all as road rage and accidents began to disappear.
RIGHT CONCENTRATION in its higher state is to become absorbed in one’s meditative practice from moment upon moment without disturbances or distractions. As with the other seven points on the wheel, Right Concentration must be combined with all the others, especially Right View and Right Effort. It is reported that there are those who have sat in meditation for years, or so they thought, but their practice truly was not Right Concentration or Right Effort. Although they sat, they were always distracted or worried or planning their day. Therefore they were never actually meditating. This is where, in the early stages of my practice, working with biofeedback proved to be so beneficial. The reading from the monitorto which I was hooked up gave continual feedback as to whether I was actually in a meditative state or simply sitting quietly with my eyes closed and making out a shopping list.
Right Concentration takes years of spiritual practice to begin to gain any degree of mastery. The years of effort are so worthwhile because of the peace, compassion and insight into the nature of mind that it brings.
Practice these simple Right Concentration techniques faithfully by incorporating one or more into your daily practice, and you will begin to notice the transformation of your mind and a great inflow of peace.
Don’t let yourself be slack, but don’t stretch yourself to break either. The middle course, living between too much and too little is the way of the Eight-fold Path.
—THE BUDDHA
THE MIDDLE WAY
THE MIDDLE WAY is achieved when one reaches that point of cosmic balance between austerity and the creature comforts of the world. The ascetics who were with the Buddha were critical of him because he was no longer living an austere lifestyle. They considered his life too “cushy.” He was eating beautiful food and wearing a fine robe, while they existed on a few grains of rice and slept uncovered on a bed of nails.
The ascetics asked the Buddha, “What kind of teacher and yogi are you? You are soft, weak, indulgent.”
To which the Buddha replied, “I, too, have slept on nails; I’ve stood with my eyes open to the sun in the hot sands beside the Ganges. I’ve eaten so little food that you couldn’t fill one fingernail with the amount I ate each day. Whatever ascetic practices under the sun human beings have done, I, too, have done. Through them all I have learned that fighting against oneself through such practices is not the way.”
Through the years I have known a few ascetic type personalities who forever deny the body, its needs and its care. One young man I knew was so physically beautiful and so unhappy and grim. His eating habits were very austere and unpleasant. He always seemed to be miserable in the pursuit of his spiritual awareness. He munched on raw garlic cloves like they were peanuts and insisted they left no pungent odor on his breath. The rest of the world did not agree. I recall one acquaintance saying to this fellow that he would probably throw himself under a train rather than eat a Frito. His response was, “What’s a Frito?” If misery, self-denial and self-imposed suffering were the way to get “it,” we would all have gotten “it” a long time ago.
The Buddha emphasized the Middle Way, which he likened to the successful playing of the lute, the strings being not too taut, not too loose, but with just the right amount of pressure. We all need to seek a way to bring forth such balance in our own lives.
I deeply believe that it is vital to our spiritual practice that we become spiritually disciplined. Without spiritual discipline we are never going to wake up or advance on our soul’s journey through this life. But our discipline must be wedded to joy, and we must find pleasure in the myriad wonders that this life offers.
I smile when I recall taking Buddhist friends, Tibetan and American, to the airport. A young monk asked the American Buddhist if he could wheel her carry-on through the airport, because it was maroon and better matched his robes than his own tan one. We all laughed, the woman complied, and the monk was color coordinated. He may have given up much of this world’s offerings, but within him remained an artistic sense of color—balance.
For every ascetic I have known, I have known legends of overindulgent, spoiled consumers who live their lives as “hungry ghosts,” never getting enough. The truth is that we can never fill ourselves up sufficiently with things to ever feel satisfied. There is no amount of beautiful stuff that can ever fill the empty soul and make us whole, loved and liberated.
It isn’t that we can’t enjoy the finer things in life, we just need to know they are not our life. Those practicing Middle Way know this. They can take in what is offered and available without being consumed by it. Their eyes discern beauty, even from the mundane. Their ears discern harmony from discordant notes. Their taste discerns pleasure from bland food. Their noses discern subtle notes of pleasant fragrance from the rancid.
We would have to be a bit off to choose the mundane, discordant, foul and putrid to believe these will lead to spiritual awakening. So we choose the pleasant and do not allow it to possess us. When we don’t get what we would prefer, we don’t allow ourselves to become unbalanced and miserable—adding to our own suffering. We see it for what it is, and we are able to remain detached and move on.
A good example and a recurring theme in my life is around eating and my food preferences. For most of my life I have not eaten meat. It was not something I forced upon myself. It was not a “should.” One weekend meat simply gave me up. As a young child, I realized the steak, hot dog, pork chop and chicken thigh came from the body of an animal. I can still remember being shocked and thinking that it was so odd and gross that my mother and father, who were excellent cooks, were serving me meat and I was eating it. Being a dutiful child, I continued to eat meat to please my parents and others, unlike my friend Roger, who at age four told his mother he no longer wanted to eat any meat. She was aware enough to comply, and he has never had meat since.
So I don’t eat meat. Many people do not really understand what that means. I love the scene from My Big Fat Greek Wedding where the heroine is introducing her fiancé to her aunt and mentions that for their forthcoming dinner together he does not eat meat. “What do you mean he don’t eat meat? No meat?” She is so puzzled, and then the light dawns, as she cries out, “Good! I’ll make lamb!” That line still makes me laugh.
There have been many a dinner party, a gathering where I have had to eat only the rice and peas and maybe an egg, and it is truly okay for me. I prefer more than that, but if that’s what needs to be for me to remain true to my choice, then so be it. I realize that, since I am the one who has chosen to eat differently, I am more than willing to adapt to any situation.
An important and recurring theme in my life is balance. So many times this important lesson is driven home to me, and the irony of it is that often it is very humorous.
David and I went to France to celebrate my birthday. In Paris for five days, we stayed in a luxurious hotel providing every imaginable creature comfort down to the walls of our suite being padded and covered with soft peach silk. One could fall asleep in luxury just by leaning again the wall. It was a pleasure to the senses. By contrast, we next spent a week in a concrete, windowless cell at Thich Nhat Hanh’s monastery, Plum Village. It was devoid of creature comforts but ripe with the purity of deep and engaged spiritual practices.• Padded silk to concrete walls—balance.
• Lavish meals to organic, simple fare—balance.
• Late nights walking down the Champs-Élysée to 4 A.M. bell in the meditation hall—balance.
• Walking the halls of the Louvre to sitting in rapt attention to Thich Nhat Hanh’s teachings—balance.
The strings of the lute of my life are not too lax, not too tight. There is a balance between the two—the Middle Way.
When we take the Middle Way we still have preferences, but we are not driven by them. We
have sought for and found the balance. I have long thought that one of the most beautiful songs to come out of the seventies was from The Moody Blues, “The Balance.” The lyrics, to paraphrase, are: Just open your eyes, just open your mind, and open your heart, and realize the way it’s always been.
The Buddha realized the self-destructiveness of totally denying our desires, and the ultimate unhappiness of succumbing to all of them. Thus was born the concept of the Middle Way—having a balance that was not too rigid, not too slack, just like the strings of the lute.
To practice achieving the Middle Way in one’s own life, first there must be the desire to live a balanced life. One must be awake enough to care about such things. It must be meaningful. Second, it is necessary to recognize when life has gotten out of balance and begin to bring in either more discipline or more pleasure. Seek to live as a conscious being, neither totally hedonistic nor totally ascetic.
A physician I met out of a personal medical need has over time become one of my nearest and dearest friends. She truly, sincerely cares about her patients. Not only does she tend to their medical needs in an extraordinary manner, she is brilliant in diagnostic work and the necessary follow-through. She also adds a spiritual dimension and prays for her very ill patients, sometimes even in the hospital setting. She is always willing to serve, to give a call to a medical colleague across the country to admit and attend to an unknown patient.
She is awesome in so many ways, but her life is not in balance. The scales are tipped way to one side with medical responsibilities, caring for her family, often flying around the country for speaking engagements. Sixteen- to twenty-hour days are all too commonplace, leaving her no time and little energy. We discuss how overwhelming her schedule is, and she says she’ll do less, but it has not yet happened.
