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　　So whenever we wander off, we gently encourage ourselves to "stay" and settle down. Are we experiencing restlessness

　　 Stay! Discursive mind

　　 Stay! Are fear and loathing out of control

　　 Stay! Aching knees and throbbing back

　　 Stay! What”s for lunch

　　 Stay! What am I doing here

　　 Stay! I can”t stand this another minute! Stay! That is how to cultivate steadfastness.

　　Clear Seeing

　　After we”ve been meditating for a while, it”s common to feel that we are regressing rather then waking up. "Until I started meditating, I was quite settled; now it feels like I”m always restless." "I never used to feel anger; now it comes up all the time." We might complain that meditation is ruining our life, but in fact such experiences are a sign that we”re starting to see more clearly. Through the process of practicing the technique day in and out, year after year, we begin to be very honest with ourselves. Clear seeing is another way of saying that we have less self-deception.

　　The Beat poet Jack Kerouac, feeling primed for a spiritual breakthrough, wrote to a friend before he retreated into the wilderness, "If I don”t get a vision on Desolation Peak, then my name ain”t William Blake." But later he wrote that he found it hard to face the naked truth. "I”d thought, in June when I get to the top-and everybody leaves-I will come face to face with God or Tathagata (Buddha) and find out once and for all what is the meaning of all this existence and suffering-but instead I”d come face to face with myself, no liquor, no drugs, no chance of faking it, but face to face with ole Hateful . . . Me."

　　Meditation requires patience and maitri. If this process of clear seeing isn”t based on self-compassion it will become a process of self-aggression. We need self-compassion to stabilize our minds. We need it to work with our emotions. We need it in order to stay.

　　When we learn to meditate, we are instructed to sit in a certain position on a cushion or chair. We”re instructed to just be in the present moment, aware of our breath as it goes out. We”re instructed that when our mind has wandered off, without any harshness or judgmental quality, we should acknowledge that as ”thinking" and return to the outbreath. We train in coming back to this moment of being here. In the process of doing this, our fogginess, our bewilderment, our ignorance begin to transform into clear seeing. "Thinking" becomes a code word for seeing "just what is"—both our clarity and our confusion. We are not trying to get rid of thoughts. Rather we are clearly seeing our defense mechanisms, our negative beliefs about ourselves, our desires and our expectations. We also see our kindness, our bravery, our wisdom.

　　Through the process of practicing the mindfulness-awareness technique on a regular basis, we can no longer hide from ourselves. We clearly see the barriers we set up to shield us from naked experience. Although we still associate the walls we”ve erected with safety and comfort, we also begin to feel them as a restriction. This claustrophobic situation is important for a warrior. It marks the beginning of longing for an alternative to our small, familiar world. We begin to look for ventilation. We want to dissolve the barriers between ourselves and others.

　　Experiencing our Emotional Distress

　　Many people, including long-time practitioners, use meditation as a means of escaping difficult emotions. It is possible to misuse the label "thinking" as a way of pushing negativity away. No matter how many times we”ve been instructed to stay open to whatever arises, we still can use meditation as repression. Transformation occurs only when we remember, breath by breath, year after year, to move toward our emotional distress without condemning or justifying our experience.

　　Trungpa Rinpoche descri…

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