Cat and Just Sitting
In a recent newsletter from Bodhipaksa, WildMind, he talks about meditation and the mind being 'like a cat'. He talks about the mind's natural tendency to wander, just as it's in a cat's nature to wander. But that our mind also comes home, just as a cat comes home.
It was our discussion and topic of this morning's conversation in Vipassana, and I had to laugh because my cat wandered off about 5 years ago, and it took her 4 years to wander home. We're still not sure where she was all that time! So don't be dispirited if it takes your mind a little while to settle :) eventually all things come home.
We already know a little bit about Just Sitting meditation, as it is referred to in the newsletter, from using the Shikantaza Zazen technique. Just sitting. Shikantaza means we don't focus on anything specific. We're not watching the breath. We're not being mindful. We're not meditating on metta, not on anything. We only sit. We don't add anything to it.
It might seem pointless just to sit there and watch your mind be distracted, and you may wonder what happens if we don't make an effort to be mindful during our meditation. We all know how much the mind wanders and how much effort it takes to bring it back - especially when we are beginner practitioners.
But having practiced Shikantaza, and sitting with the group this morning, we recognised that our mind wanders by itself. The slight shift in emphasis this morning was based on the sentence in the newsletter that set it all on its head for me:
"but when you are just sitting there are times when mindfulness is just absent and the mind wanders. But the interesting thing is that the mind always finds its own way home". Wonderful! Of course when we contemplate this for a moment, we realise we know this. But we often focus on our mind wandering off, and we don't always place the emphasis on the specific awareness that our mind wanders back by itself too. So when we meditate we tend to focus on the outgoing and not so much on the coming back. It's a little bit like breathing: we tend to pay attention to the inhale much more than the exhale. Very subtle shift, but it can make a huge difference to your practice. Try it.
We don't need to instruct our mind not to be mindful. It just wanders off by itself. Even more interesting was the recognition that our mind also wanders back home by itself! It just happens. With no effort. When we just sit - in Shikantaza - and we observe our mind - it moves of its own accord. It needs no help. Not to move away from awareness, nor to move back to awareness. By the time we realise our minds are no longer aware, we have already become aware again of our unmindfulness. And at this junction it's important to remember that cat!
When our mind has come home again, often we feel disappointed that it has wandered away, and we feel a slight reaction of either impatience, frustration, disappointment, or such like. As Bodhipaksa writes: "If your cat was to walk through the door after an absence and you were to yell at it or try to force it to sit in one place, it would probably head straight out of the door again."
But if we were to welcome it home warmly and with patience and loving-kindness, it's more likely to find a quiet place to curl up.
At first you might be tempted to think that welcoming the mind home again is an action. Something we do. But it isn't. We become aware of it. And then add nothing to it, except perhaps shift our attention to a warmth and acceptance. For me this meditation has a lot to do with 'radical acceptance'.
So this morning's meditation showed us that welcoming home our mind, concentrating on the return of the mind with gratitude, warmth and non-judgment, results in an appreciation of our mind's natural tendency to wander off and to wander back again. It takes away a very subtle level of tension. It makes for a very peaceful and relaxed meditation. And since there is less stress, and less for us to concentrate on when sitting, our meditation seems much less like working, and much more as if the entire process is unfolding without any interference from us.
Shortly after that you will begin to wonder who is doing the sitting, who is doing the meditation ....
_/\_
