Thailand Meditation Retreat News

This is an excerpt from a talk given by Genla Michael Gregory on some practice points.
“So in every practice session you should begin with refuge, and bodhicitta.  After that, you should ask yourself, “what is the purpose?  Why am I sitting here?”  The chances of you wandering mentally go up dramatically, if you don’t know why you’re sitting down.  That’s the purpose of this step.
“Some people have the attitude that, ‘each session is a mystery and we’re here to discover that mystery.’  What they actually ‘discover’ is only a bunch of story lines.  Every single time, even for 20, 30, 40 years, a bunch of dramas is what’s going to come up.  They might call it meditation, but they’d be better off getting out pen and paper and doing what’s called free association, just writing down thoughts.  That’s what happens without a clear-cut purpose of why you’re sitting.
You can talk to anybody who’s done it 20 or 30 years the wrong way, and they’ll pretty much tell you that that’s exactly right.  They maybe considered it meditation, but it’s not; not any Buddhist form.  There’s no Buddhist practice where you sit there and let thoughts roll around.  No text ever mentions that that’s a good thing to do for the rest of your life, just spending an hour a day letting thoughts roll.  So, know the purpose in each session before you sit.
“Then, what’s the method for the achievement of that purpose?  What method?  What do I do exactly?  That should also be a known quantity before you sit.  This is the purpose, and if you don’t set the method, what can happen?  A lot of confusion, frankly; there’s nuts and bolts to every practice.  You should know what they are before you sit down.  What are the nuts and bolts of all this?  All right?
“Then, intention.  Intention of this practice:  setting the intention before you begin, ‘This is what I’m going to do.  I am most likely going to waver.  I know my mind:  I’m most likely going to waver,’ that seems pretty obvious.  So I set the intention that when I do waver, I’m going to come back rapidly.  I want to check in with myself a few times during the session, [to] make sure I’m still on target in terms of purpose and method.
“If you’re going through lethargy or periods of what’s called dullness, subtle or gross, that finally leads to lethargy, one of the clearest ways to defeat that is to reinstate the purpose and method of the practice, right there in the middle, halfway through.  Reinstate it mentally, a mental recitation to yourself:  what is the purpose and method of this practice.  It’s actually recommended by the Buddha and teachers for the last couple thousand years.  You just go back.  If that doesn’t work, you can recite prayers and aspirations, sutras, the points of certain sutras.  And then try to return back to the method and purpose of the practice.  Re-set the intention.  If you have to re-set it four or five times in a session, it’s okay.
“The point is, it’s a lot better than sitting here in session just wondering about what you have to do tomorrow, or what you’re going to do when the bell rings.
“When sensations arise during the practice, sit still.  Sit perfectly still, and label the sensations:  pleasant, unpleasant or neutral.  Or if the sensation is just pain:  pain, pain, pain.  The point in doing this is that it’s got nothing to do with any sense of “I”, sense of self.  It’s an arising; it’s an experience.  There’s absolutely no self or subject involvement whatsoever.  No involvement.  That is the point of labeling these things.
“These things are typically treated as important because when there’s sensation, there’s attachment, aversion, or indifference, and there’s a sense of self that’s normally built in with these things.  So here, you’re breaking that down.  You’re actually getting down to the experience.  Just the experience.
“The final part of this checking in with yourself is the review at the end, to see if you’ve actually worked with the purpose and the method.  What I mean by, “worked with,” is that you don’t have a sense of grading yourself.  Review doesn’t mean what it might have meant in school to you, that you achieved the result of the practice.  It does not mean that.  It just means that you worked with the purpose, the method, and the intention.  That’s all.  And that if there were problems in there, like lethargy, dullness, agitation, proliferation of thoughts, that you saw that in the practice, during the review.  Or, if there was a misunderstanding, that you actually set the purpose and intention and then when you went to practice, it wasn’t what you thought.  This happens all the time, so in the review, that’s what you’re looking for, these factors.
“And then, ‘what can I do about it?’  You say, ‘Oh, I had dullness but for some reason, it didn’t occur to me to use an antidote.  For some reason, I just thought the story line was so interesting that I just didn’t even bother applying the antidote.  I had proliferation of thoughts, and I know what to do, but I just didn’t even apply the antidote.  I don’t know why, but that’s what happened.  So I need to work on this.’
“But when you say this, it’s not a matter of self-criticism.  It is a critique, of course.  But it’s not a sense of judgment.  The idea behind review is, again, a sense of friendliness about your practice.  You see it like, ‘Hmm, this is actually a habit!  I just sit here all the time and this is what I do.  And I’ve got to stop doing this.  I’m putting all this effort and attention into my practice, but I’m wasting my time here.  I need to stop this.  This is a recurring theme.  You know, I’m actually starting to wonder, when I do this, am I purposeful?  Is there some part of me subconsciously that’s trying to evade this practice?  Is that why I let myself go through this, session after session?  I like it, you know, when we have dharma talks, and we read books and stuff like that.  But I that find that the rest of the time it’s just really a lot of work to sit here and I really don’t like it.  And what’s that about, when I like to intellectualize but I don’t like to actually do the practice?’
“And everyone goes through phases of that.  Everybody.  ‘What’s that about, that I want to keep this compartmentalized in my mind, but I don’t actually want to experience what’s being talked about?  Is there some fear there that I’m going to break into a habit pattern?  A reaction that this is actually uncomfortable?  What’s that about?’
“The review sessions help break through a lot of misconceptions about our own practices.”