Are We Really Practicing

　　byElizabeth Mattis Namgyel

　　Are We Really Meditating

　　 What is meditation practice

　　 When are we genuinely practicing and when are we just going through the motions, caught in unexamined assumptions about practice

　　 I often ask myself these questions so I don”t succumb to spiritual vagueness and because I want my practice to continue to grow.

　　The purpose of meditation is to develop a sane relationship to experience. The struggles we have in life—shutting down, pushing away, feeling overwhelmed, and all the neurotic attachment—arise from the confusion we harbor about how to relate to the rich energy of the mind. When eating, we ingest, process, and eliminate food. But how do we digest our experience

　　 It”s not so clear.

　　As meditators we look at the mind and its activity. When we begin to practice, we often feel surprised: “I didn”t realize my mind was so wild and unruly!” Even experienced practitioners will complain, “I have been practicing for thirty years, but my mind is still crazy!” We often view experience as a problem. So how do we work with it

　　 Is there a way to enjoy the activity of mind

　　 How does practice bring us into a healthy relationship with our world

　　 Meditation puts these questions front and center.

　　Methods alone are not the practice

　　We think of meditation as the act of sitting in the lotus position, reciting a mantra, visualizing, or focusing on the breath. These skillful methods help us navigate our world. They keep our bodies upright and our energy flowing, and more important, they can help guide us away from habitual tendencies.

　　Sometimes, just following the meditation technique will lead to a moment of clarity, when we experience a sense of liberation. I don”t mean “LIBERATION!!!” in some highfalutin kind of way. I just mean that we may enjoy a moment in which the mind stops trying to fix or push at things, allowing us to open into a larger way of being.

　　And yet we know that we can sometimes apply practice techniques without really “practicing” at all. In those moments, such methods don”t touch our habitual tendencies and we find our- selves defaulting to our usual ways of relating to the mind, such as getting lost in the momentum of thoughts and emotions or in rejecting them. We may spend a lot of time wishing we were someone else, somewhere else having a different experience. We may find ourselves wanting or not wanting, grasping or rejecting, even as we sit on the cushion.

　　The various tools of meditation practice can put us into a purposeful stronghold. When we place our body in a meditation posture, recite a mantra, or follow the breath, we provide our- selves with a supportive structure in which to view the mind and its distractions. We often forget that this “seeing” is a powerful and necessary realization in and of itself. In fact, it is the starting point for our path.

　　Sometimes, however, rather than appreciating our discoveries along the path, we brace against them and our experience. When this happens we miss the genius of the practice methods, which are designed to bring us into a sane relationship with our experience. As the great Tibetan Buddhist master Tilopa said to his disciple Naropa, “Son, it is not experiences themselves that bind you, but the way you cling to and reject them.”

　　We may be reciting prayers, sitting erect, or watching the breath, but are we actually working with our minds

　　 Is our practice touching and transforming our habitual tendencies of grasping and rejection

　　 These questions about how we apply the practice moment to moment are deeply personal. We need to continually ask them, because if we think meditating means just applying a technique, we may never experience the liberation that genuine practice can bring. Eventually we may conclude that …

《Are We Really Practicing

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