a center for
personal and planetary
awakening

Mystic River Yoga
196 Boston Avenue
Suite 3900
Medford, MA 02155

781 396 0808
info@MysticRiverYoga.com

Introduction

Yoga/Yoga Teaching

Collective Awakening

                   Meditation Training:

                            Developing

     Concentration and Mindfulness and Insight

   The word meditation refers to an "intentional cultivation of mindful awareness and pure attention-- an alert, wakeful presence of mind."(Lama Surya Das) Meditation deepens the capacity to remain mindful during our daily lives and helps keep open our hearts in all situations that arise. It helps to steadily erode the momentum of the egoic states that obscure the brilliance of our Primordial Awareness. It brings clarity, energy and compassion into our lives.

  There are many schools of meditation currently being taught around the planet, including Vipassana, Zen and Dzogchen from the Buddhist tradition, and Advaita and Shakti based meditation from India. All are excellent and although some details and terminology may vary from school to school, all share a common vision of wholeness and awakening. We will explore these in this section. The challenge presented in all of them is to discover that the source of our dysfunctionality, our suffering, is in our own minds, to develop skills to counteract its karmic momentum, and to realize that the truth of who we are is, always was, and always will be, wholeness, fullness and love.

 Meditation is essentially the 'training in' and 'maturing of' the capacity to pay attention. In "Thoughts without a Thinker", Buddhist practitioner and psychotherapist Mark Epstein outlines three general approaches to formal meditation practice using the terms: Concentration, Mindfulness, and Insight. They are usually sequential in development, require the capacity to remain in the present moment and reflect an increasing reigning in of distracting mental activity and a decreasing unconscious false-self.

Concentration (dharana-dhyana in Sanskrit) requires the continual returning of the mind's attention to a specific, central object or process, reining in the undisciplined mind . Focusing on the breath, a mantra or prayer, sensations in the body, a koan (mind-puzzle), or a visual image, and returning the attention there again and again when it wanders away, cultivates a one-point focus to the mind, quieting the mental noise that often dominates the mind field. The one-pointedness that arises dissolves the self-sense into a vast open spaciousness and prepares the student for deeper enquiry into the nature of the self.

Mindfulness is essentially the reverse of concentration. It is an expansion of attention, in the present, to all that is arising, the thoughts, feelings, sensations and insights. Buddha talks about "The Four Foundations of Mindfulness", body, sensations, thoughts, and impermanence.

Although mindfulness is most often associated with Buddhism, it is essentially a human practice. Being fully present and accepting, to whatever arises, and intelligently acting from this presence, is not necessarily easy, and often unpleasant, but something that can be cultivated and nurtured by anyone at any time throughout their lives. Mindfulness is not something is acquired over time but is always available Now, in the timeless.

 Jon Kabat-Zinn describes this in his book "Coming to Our Senses" as the core of the curriculum for the world reknowned Stress Reduction Clinic he co-founded at the UMass Medical Center in Worcester MA, a program that is now used in hospitals around the world. "Coming to Our Senses" is poetic, scientific, personal and profound, and is an excellent introduction-invitation to mindfulness.

"I am not speaking of some distant future in which, after years of striving, you would finally attain something, taste the timeless beauty of meditative awareness and all it offers, and ultimately lead a more effective, and satisfying and peaceful life. I am speaking of accessing the timeless in this very moment--because it is always right under our noses, so to speak---and in doing so, to gain access to those dimensions of possibility that are presently hidden from us because we refuse to be present, because we are seduced, entrained, mesmerized, or frightened into the future and the past, carried along in the stream of events and the weather patterns of our own reactions and numbness, attending to, if not obsessing about what we unthinkingly dub 'urgent', while losing touch at the same time with what is actually important, supremely important, in fact vital for our own well-being, for our sanity, and for our very survival. We have made absorption in the future and in the past such an overriding habit that, much of the time, we have no awareness of the present moment at all. As a consequence, we may feel we have very little, if any, control over the ups and downs of our own lives."

In 'thoughts Without a Thinker" Mark Epstein refers to mindfulness as "the distinctive attentional strategy of Buddhism... in which moment-to-moment awareness of changing objects of perception is cultivated."

 Insight (vipassana) is the critical enquiry into the question 'Who am I"? What is the true nature of the "I am" ness we all experience. It leads to the realization of the non-dual (Advaita) awareness that is the source of mind activity as well as the entire cosmos. From this enquiry into the origins of the"I" thoughts and "I" feelings that arise, awakens the realization that our true nature is not the body-mind but limitless awareness and joy. "To understand that we are not a psycho-physical entity in the process of becoming is a necessary first step, but this understanding is not sufficient. The fact that we are not the body must become our actual experience that penetrates and liberates our muscles, our internal organs and even our cells. An intellectual understanding that corresponds to a sudden, fleeting recognition of our true nature brings us a flash of pure joy, but when we have full knowledge that we are not the body, we are that joy." (Francis Lucille)

I have listed below several other books by various authors that both personalize and give a spectrum of perspectives on meditation practice. The tendency for beginning yoga students and teachers is to focus on the physical dimension of the poses, but for yoga practice to be truly meaningful, mindfulness to the fullness of the moment must come first. Then mindfulness of posture, alignment, breath evolve naturally.

Other helpful books include:

1. "Coming To Our Senses" by John Kabat Zinn

2. "The Wonder of Presence" by Toni Packer

3. "Don't Just Do Something, Sit There" by Sylvia Boorstein

4. "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind" by Suzuki Roshi

5. "Nothing Special" by Charlotte Joko Beck

6. "Start Where You Are"  by Pema Chodron

7. Awakening the Buddha Within"  by Lama Surya Das