On meditation

A post over at Zen Under the Skin got me thinking about meditation.

I actually haven’t meditated for quite a long time. Now that I’m not so busy, I should make the effort to get started again. Chalip’s comments about Insight Meditation, though, made me realise that once you get started on the course of meditation, it doesn’t leave you.

I went in at the deep end with meditation, which was probably the best way I could have done it: I went on one of S. N. Goenka’s 10-day Vipassana meditation retreats in Thailand, with no previous meditation experience. I can honestly say that it was a completely transformative experience: at the end of the 10 days – which were hard work, make no mistake – I felt completely renewed, with all of the negative emotion and tension that had built up over the past few years not washed away, but deprived of their power. The calm and general ‘glow’ of happiness that came from that course lasted for almost a year.

After I started my MBA, I did try to carry on practising, but it wasn’t enough, and tension and anger started to accumulate again. Before coming to China, I went on another retreat, which wasn’t as effective as the first – I think largely because I’d badly hurt my ankle just before going, and the pain from that was too much of a distraction.

Since I arrived in Beijing, I’ve only meditated a few times, but even so, the sense of awareness, of being present that came from the first course is now almost constant. That’s not to say that I don’t get angry, become emotional or do stupid things – I still do, too often! But the awareness of “this will change” is pretty strong these days. I need to real make an effort now to start a regular practice routine. I almost added “in order to get back to the state of calm I experienced after the first retreat”, but I guess that would itself be craving… I should just practice and see what happens…

Back to Beijing (sort of)

For the first time in a month, I actually made it to a bagua class tonight. It wasn’t easy getting there: the train waited a long time at each of the stations on the way down to Xizhimen.

Anyway, once I got there, it was great. The classes are held at the YWCA, just off Wangfujing. It’s a terrific, traditional Beijing courtyard complex, with three main yards and several smaller ones. The school has moved from the back courtyard to the slightly smaller one in the middle. This means that the Bagua and Shaolin students practice in the yard itself, while the Taiji students are in a room to one side, and the Sanda students in a room on the other side. The yard itself has a couple of trees growing in it and tonight, with moonlight, and the white lights from the rooms, was at that low level of brightness where color vision starts to go into black and white. it had a strange, otherworldy feel to it. I still can’t get over the fact that I live in Beijing. I’m rubbish at the bagua now, though. With being so ridiculously busy recently, I haven’t had time to practise, and my level has dropped a lot. It looks like we won’t be working on the sword for some time, which is a big pity: I’ll have to have some private lessons for that.

Afterwards, I got a cab to Houhai, and grabbed a taco at Hutong Pizza. The hutongs are all really empty; only the main streets around the lakes are busy and even then there aren’t many people. This is the real Beijing, as far as I’m concerned, and I haven’t had time to go there since early September. I grabbed a Tsingtao in Huxleys’. The change in season means a new way of experiencing Beijing – no more rooftop bars, it’s inside next to the stoves now – much more ‘European’!

Two timely quotes

As life gets a bit stressful, two great quotes have appeared in my aggregator.

James, ‘The Buddhist Blogger’ quotes Dainin Katagiri Roshi: The important point of spiritual practice is not to try to escape your life,but to face it — exactly and completely. .

Sujatin passes on this quote:

‘This is not me
This is not mine
This is not myself’

She cites ‘the Non-Self teaching’ as the source, but I’m not yet well-versed enough to know exactly what this is. It sounds related to the Heart Sutra, which I found on a CD in a TIbetan Buddhist shop just outside Tsinghua University’s East Gate. The CD has the Heart Sutra chanted twice – first in what could be Tibetan, Sanskrit or Pali, (I think Sanskrit; it sounds more ‘Indian’ than Tibetan) and then in Mandarin. I tend to play it in the mornings as I’m getting ready for the day, and it’s very calming!