In my meditation practice this morning I found myself experiencing an unusually high volume of thoughts arising. Normally I can just let go of the thoughts without judging — without a second thought, so to speak — but today I found myself becoming absorbed in these thoughts and also becoming despondent about my distractedness.

I found a useful antidote to be saying the words “got that one!” when I realized I’d been getting caught up in my thinking. This had congratulatory effect that counteracted the tendency to be upset at the realization that I’d been distracted. Instead of it being a case of “Oh, dear, I’ve been distracted again” it was one of “Great, I’ve regained my mindfulness again.”

This isn’t an entirely new technique for me — I’ve often suggested to people that they congratulate themselves when they regain their mindfulness — but it was a new formulation of that technique.

It’s very common, even amongst experienced meditators, that we have to relearn old lessons.

An interesting article from the Cibola County Beacon in New Mexico:

Here are some extracts:

Inmates can practice various forms of meditation and courses are taught in acupressure, writer’s meditation, prayer meditation and Qigong (similar to Tai Chi). Heart Mountain volunteers visit once a month to provide guidance in meditation and yoga.

Frank Marquis, who is an inmate from Santa Fe, has been in the meditation program since its inception. “At first I thought of the program as something that would look good to the parole board, but now I don’t care about that,” he said.

Reportedly the pod resulted from a recommendation from the wife of then-Governor Gary Johnson.

The inmates’ day starts with yoga and a verbal check-in, followed sometime during the day with Tai Chi or Yoga in the pod and two hours of quiet time, when loud televisions and radios are prohibited. Occasionally there is a daylong retreat in the prison library where talking is prohibited.

“This meditation program provides us with patience and piece of mind,” [an inmate] said. “You are surrounded by negativity in the general prison population and meditation helps us deal with people we’re forced to live with,” he concluded.

Reportedly the prison authorities were dead against the idea of a meditation pod and the proposal was forced through by the state governor. In the minds of many prison officials, letting inmates gather on the basis of common interests is a recipe for trouble, and it can be hard for inmates who want to meditate together to gather.

Additionally, the idea of prison as punishment rather than rehabilitation is common amongst prison staff and administrators, and allowing inmates to improve their living circumstances can be seen as going against the punishment ethos.

However, meditation has been shown to reduce inmate aggression and promote cooperation, and hopefully prison administrators will make it easier in future for inmates to take up this valuable and transformative practice.

The other day I was being interviewed by a journalist and he asked a question about meditation that comes up very often: “So, when you’re meditating are you going into a trance?”

I said to him that it was exactly the opposite, that when you meditate you’re coming out of a trance. Actually, I could have said that when you’re meditating you’re continually coming out of trances. In normal, non-meditating life we’re constantly slipping in and out of trance states without even realizing it. You’ll recognize what I mean when I give some examples:

• You’re in a conversation with someone and you’re so busy thinking about what you’re going to say in response to something they said thirty seconds ago that you’ve entirely missed the last thirty seconds of the conversation
• You’ve found yourself lost in an imaginary conversation in which you’re really letting someone have a piece of your mind
• You’ve just arrived at the place you were driving to and you can’t remember anything about the journey there.
• You can’t remember where you put something that you had in your hand just two minutes ago.
• You spend time thinking about your failures, telling yourself how nothing ever goes right.

All of these examples are instances where we’ve been in a trance state, so caught up in our thoughts—so “en-tranced”—that we’ve been in an altered state of consciousness. Common names for these trance states are: distractedness, daydreaming, spacing out, obsessing, and wool-gathering. We don’t think of these as trances because we think that trances are connected with some kind of mystical and perhaps scary mystical states of consciousness. But actually these trance states are happening to us all the time. We slip in and out of them—and from one trance state to another—without even noticing.

In meditation, what we’re doing is noticing when we’ve been distracted—when we’ve been en-tranced and mindfully returning our awareness to some mental “anchor,” such as the breath. In other words, our meditation practice involves noticing, and letting go of, trance states. Meditation involves coming out of trance states and instead mindfully observing our experience.

The problem with trance states is that we have surrendered any sense of direction. Trance states (or distractions, in simple language) are like fast-flowing rivers. When we’re caught up in one we’re swept along by the force of the stream of thoughts. We’re so caught up in thinking that we don’t even realize that we are thinking. Mindfulness starts with realizing, “Oh, yes, there’s some unhelpful thinking going on.” We scrabble for the bank, and then, all going well, we can sit by the side of the fast-flowing water, observing it as it passes us but not getting drawn in. Although often of course we start to lose our mindfulness. A particularly compelling thought is passing by and we lean closer in, and then before we know it we’ve fallen in and we’re being swept away, without (once again) realizing what’s happened.

The Greeks had a myth of the Waters of Lethe—Lethe being Greek for forgetfulness-and this metaphor of distractedness being like a river works best if we think of the river as having this quality of inducing forgetfulness. When we fall into the river—when we become absorbed in a distracting thought—we forget our original purpose, we forget that we were meditating, we forget that we have a choice about whether to continue with the particular thought that we’re obsessed by, and we even forget that we’re thinking. Perhaps that’s why the word sati, which we translate as “mindfulness” has the root meaning of “remembering.”

A recent study by Harvard instructor Dr. Sara W. Lazar has shown that meditation can help to increase brain function, reduce the effects of aging on the brain, and improve concentration and memory, the Harvard Crimson reports.

Dr. Lazar’s work has shown that the thinning of the prefrontal cortex that normally comes with aging can be reversed through the practice of meditation. The group of 25 to 50 year olds that participated in the study meditated for an average of 40 minutes a day.

This is just one amongst many studies that demonstrate the physiological and psychological benefits of meditating. In 2003, researchers first showed that meditation changed patterns of activation in the brain, shifting the focus of activity from the stress-promoting right frontal cortex to the left side, which is associated with a sense of wellbeing and positive emotion. In the 2003 study, the participating group medittated for only 20 minutes daily.

Although the reports I’ve cited, involving periods of meditation of twenty to forty minutes, could potentially encourage some people to take up the practice of meditation, many others may find themselves deterred, being unable to imagine taking that length of time out of their busy schedules in order to “just sit there.”

So how long one should spend meditating each day, and is there any benefit to meditation if you can’t manage forty minutes?

I’ve found that some people notice distinct psychological benefits in the forms of reduced stress and greater happiness with only ten minutes of meditation daily, although most people seem to require around twenty minutes to experience benefits. Through my own experience I’ve found that any amount of meditation is better than none. One those days where, for whatever reason, I’ve only been able to meditate for five or ten minutes, I’ve found that my mental states can change perceptibly over that period of time, and that the benefits persist throughout the day.

So my advice is, just do it. If you can only manage twenty minutes a day, do twenty minutes. If you can only manage ten, do that. If three minutes is all you have, then spending three minutes is much, much better than not doing so.

The nonprofit that I set up and that I run, Wildmind, has produced an audiocassette of guided meditations that are available free of charge to inmates.

Most prisons don’t allow CD’s to be used by inmates for fear that they will be used as weapons, and often place restrictions on the kinds of cassettes that they can use. Generally, suitable cassettes have to be prerecorded (in case they contain escape instructions or the like), and the cases must be transparent (so that inmates can’t hide things in them), and free from screws (I’m not entirely sure what the problem with 1/10 inch screws is, but I’m sure that some creative inmates have managed to use them for nefarious purposes in the past). Wildmind’s cassettes meet those criteria.

As mentioned, the cassettes are available free of charge to any inmate who requests one, or to prison volunteers or chaplains. Any interested inmate, chaplain, or prison volunteer should write to:

Wildmind
177 Main Street
Newmarket NH 03857

The cassettes contain two guided meditations (led by me): the mindfulness of breathing and development of lovingkindness practices. Both of these are suitable for people of any religious persuasion.

If you want to send a cassette to an inmate, we make them available at a small charge. This is in effect a form of fundraising to help pay for some of the costs of production and shipping. The cassettes are available on Wildmind’s Meditation Supplies Store.

Tomorrow I head up to Concord, NH, to meet the group of Buddhist inmates I’ve been working with for about two years now. They really are a great bunch of guys, with a very sincere approach to their practice.

Here’s a story:

Kenny is a funny guy. Funny ha ha. He looks like Robin Williams and if you put him on a stage he’d be just as entertaining. One day he’s walking across the prison yard. It’s been raining and there are worms all over the paths.

Kenny’s taking this odd route, weaving along the path, taking long steps and short steps, and another inmate who happens to be passing says, “What the hell are you doing, man?” Kenny tells him that he’s trying to avoid stepping on worms. Now there are a lot of the inmates in this prison who like to eat worms, and that’s taken as normal behavior by many of the people in there, but trying not to step on worms really throws this inmate.

“So why the **** are you doing that?” he asks Kenny. Kenny just looks at him and says, “Well, can you make a worm?”

Over the last two years I’ve seen these guys take their practice very seriously, really trying to practice nonharm in very difficult circumstances, really coming to grips with their mental states and taking responsibility for themselves, really supporting each other. When I first went into this prison — my first time behind the walls — I expected an atmosphere of barely-restrained violence. But what I found was a bunch of intelligent, friendly, respectful, and very sincere Buddhist practitioners. This is in no small part thanks to my friend, Dave Carr, who started the group many years ago.

Of course I can’t and don’t overlook the fact that these guys have killed people, raped, and even sexually abused children. There was a time when I would have simply labeled people who had committed those kinds of crimes as “animals” and suggested throwing away the key. Now I realize that you can’t judge someone by the worst thing that he has done. Inmates are capable of change. People who have done evil things are just like you and me in many ways. Which one of us hasn’t thought of harming — really harming — another person, or of stealing, or doing some other criminal act? The difference between those inside and those outside the walls is less than you might think.

I was pleased to read in the NYT that the Ohio Board of Education voted 11 to 4 to jettison their position of singling out Evolution for “critical analysis”. In this case the phrase critical analysis means attempting to promote Intelligent Design — the Religious Right’s new and sneakier version of Creationism — by giving the impression that there are serious scientific objections to Darwinian Evolution.

The Ohio board very sensibly decided, in the face of the defeat of the Intelligent Design lobby in Dover, Pennsylvania, that they were unlikely to survive the inevitable lawsuits that would accompany their former policy. Given that the fundamentalist Christians on the Dover school board who promoted ID were voted out, I can’t help wondering to what extent a desire to hold onto office factored in their decision.

As a Buddhist, I’m very concerned about maintaining the separation of church and state in the US. Now that ID is in retreat, I hope that the pledge of allegiance will be modified to remove the reference to “under God,” which was relatively recently added, by Eisenhower in 1954.

In a few years’ time I’ll have a daughter in school, and I’m dismayed at the thought that she’ll be asked (pressured even) to recite verses that suggest that there is a creator god. In Buddhism there is no such being. The Buddha denied the existence of god and said that a belief in god was actually spiritually dangerous. When I look at the antics of fundamentalists of all types, I tend to agree, although of course not all believers in God are of the fundamentalist persuasion.

There is no appropriate reason that I can see why children in the US should be pressured to acknowledge the existence of a god. Some who promote the current form of wording in the pledge say that the reference to god is just a cultural and historical, and not a religious, one. If we accept that, then why not amend the pledge to refer to “one nation, under Buddha” or “under Allah”? Clearly, this would promote one faith at the expense of others, just as “one nation, under God” endorses theism at the expense of nontheistic traditions.

I’ve been having my meditation website translated into Chinese by Ruan Yinhua, a Mitra of the FWBO who lives in Beijing. I was curious to know how he was going to translate my name, and after a few revisions he said the following:

I now suggest that your Sanskrit name be translated as “菩提婆娑” (pronounced as “Pooti Poso”). I think, this way it is a very poetic and elegant name in Chinese. While “菩提” is a transliteration of the Sanskrit word “bodhi”, which means wisdom, it also means the “Bodhi tree (wisdom tree)”. The word “婆娑” (pronounced Poso, “Paksa”) is often used to describe the luxuriant trees swaying and dancing elegantly. I think you can visualize such a scene! “Bodhi trees swaying and dancing elegantly.”

I can see how “flapping” might connect with “swaying” which might connect with the literal sense of my name in Sanskrit (Wings of Enlightenment), which apparently doesn’t render very poetically into Chinese. But I agree with Yinhua that his translation is evocative, and I like it.

* As far as I know you won’t see the Chinese characters in the text of this post unless you have Chinese fonts installed on your computer.

After a bit of fiddling around, but not as much as I had expected, I’ve got WordPress set up on my site. It really is close to a five-minute process if you know what you’re doing, which I didn’t. WordPress’s help wasn’t very useful, but my webhost Modwest’s FAQ came up trumps and told me exactly what I had to change in order to get the blog software going. So far, so geeky.

So, what am I going to be writing about in this blog? I plan to use this as a public journal to talk about, well, practice. This is a broad term, of course. I guess I mean to discuss more than just my meditation practice, but also the application of mindfulness and compassion in daily life. If I’m feeling particularly brave I may write about politics. If I’m feeling braver still I’ll write about personal matters such as the fact that my wife and I are in the process of adopting a baby girl from China. No, politics would be scarier. Don’t ask me why. Or do! But let’s just take it one post at a time.

And happy Valentine’s Day, world!