The holidays are here at last.

While some live their lives according to the shopping calendar (9 shopping days left before Christmas!), my life has been ruled by the academic calendar for as long as I can remember. Just a few minutes ago 60 students in my organic chemistry class were sitting in a room down the hall from me, hunched over their final exams, sweating bullets and scribbling formulas, hoping to make a lighthearted getaway from campus.

The holidays are finally here.

Holidays promise and holidays beckon, but what if they fail to deliver? Will your plane be late? Did you ask for concert tickets only to get placed in the upper deck behind the band? Will Uncle Rick and Aunt Alice, having sandwiched themselves on both sides of you at the Christmas dinner table, never tire of telling you about the week you spent at their house when you were three years old? Must you bite your tongue until it bleeds when Cousin Roger starts his annual post-dinner tirade about the Direction this Country is Headed In?

Zen practitioner and sometime Santa’s helper, Shozan Jack Haubner (a pen name), knows all about holiday angst. As he puts it (video link), the universe is not what any of us would have designed, and yet it is the universe we live in. Perhaps his ideas on opening yourself to the inevitability of giving and receiving will help steer you towards a family reunion that is happier and less anxious.

Wishing everyone the experience of peace, love, and kindness, this holiday season. -Alan

Sitting in silence, my world is far from silent.

Ears hum. Stomach gurgles.
Joints – my knees? the chapel? – creak.
Bird calls, the wind in the trees,
The rattling of the rain,
Cars sweeping past,
The warning horn of a distant train.
Tell me to remember … we are here.
In you.
As you are in us.
The thoughts that I sat down with
Are still chattering in my head.

(time passes … attention shifts)

Breathing in, I know I’m breathing in.
Breathing out, I know I’m breathing out.
(In. Out.)

Breathing in, my breath grows deep.
Breathing out, my breath grows slow.
(Deep. Slow.)

Breathing in, I’m aware of my body.
Breathing out, I calm my body.
(Aware of body. Calming.)

Breathing in, I smile.
Breathing out, I release.
(Smile. Release.)

Breathing in, I dwell in the present moment.
Breathing out, I enjoy the present moment.
(Present moment. Enjoy.)

The meditation instructions in italics were written by Vietnamese monk, teacher, author, and peace activist, Thich Nhat Hanh. You can read his instructions together with a short excerpt from his book, Silence: The Power of Quiet in a World Full of Noise (HarperOne, 2014) at Fear of Silence (Tricycle blog).

Why do I get angry? What am I paying attention to? Where did I leave my car keys?

Mental phenomena like these pass through my mind a hundred, a thousand, times every hour. I usually find them so intoxicating that I rarely see the need to answer the question as being separate from the thought that expresses the question.

Bringing awareness to our mental life, seeing how thoughts and emotions rise and fall, is a valuable meditation practice and one that I am making slow, steady progress on. However, other meditation practices await anyone willing to explore. Robin sent me this link to a recent NY Times article (“A Master of Memory in India Credits Meditation for His Brainy Feats”) about the astounding memory of a Jain monk in India. The monk describes his powers of concentration as nothing special, “I have sacrificed everything, and that is why I can do this,” he said. “Anyone can do this, it is not a miracle. My message is this: When you know your own capacity, when you get rid of your distractions, the power of your mind is immense.”

One way or another, meditation can help you, but I can’t tell you exactly how. So here are four possibilities based on stories that friends and family have sent me in the past week:

• Get a grip on heart disease. Researchers at Brown U. have found an association between mindfulness and cardio health. Read more at https://news.brown.edu/articles/2014/10/mindful
• Heal the Red-Blue divide. Washington DC powerbrokers are sitting down together for a little shared quiet time. Who knows what will come next? http://pagesix.com/2014/10/25/meditation-sessions-become-a-hit-in-dysfunctional-congress/
• Keep brain scientists in their labs (and off the streets). Scientific American reveals what neuroscientists are learning about the effects of meditation. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1114-38 (paywall)
• Prevent the Robot Revolution. Famed Zen Buddhist D.T. Suzuki once wrote, “We must realize that modern civilization is thoroughly oriented towards dehumanizing humanity in every possible way; that is to say, we are fast turning into robots or statues with no human souls. Our task is to get humanized once more.” Meditation could be part of how we recover our humanity. http://www.tricycle.com/parting-words/humanized-once-more (paywall)

“… it is a similarly strange experience when something you have practiced for many years and highly value, but that used to be very much a minority interest, emerges into mainstream culture and begins to “go viral”. It almost seems as if everyone is doing it, apparently including Bill Clinton, Russell Brand, Google employees, and even the US Marines. …” – Jenny Wilks, 2013 (reprinted from the BCBS Insight Journal, October 8, 2014)

If you have sat in the chapel with us, even briefly, you know this: except for some bells to mark the passage of time, it is very quiet. No one is chanting or wearing robes. There aren’t any statues or burning incense. We are just sitting.

What we are doing may seem very strange. Committed Buddhists, who see meditation as part of an Eight-Fold Path that has been practiced for over 2000 years, wonder how meditation can be separated from its ethical, ritual, and devotional contexts. 21st century Americans of no particular religious persuasion likewise wonder how it is possible for busy, multi-tasking, internet-savvy people to just stop and sit. They wonder if religion is being smuggled into modern culture.

So what’s going on? Sit. Find out for yourself.

Robin sent me a link to a lovely article: The Simplest Secret to Happiness You’ll Ever Find by Eric Barker. What is Barker’s secret? Stopping to notice (savor) happiness when it comes your way. Happiness is often right there for the taking so why not enjoy it? You can always take the photo (and tweet about it) afterwards.

A related article that I stumbled into over at the Shambhala Sun magazine website: You Can’t Fail at Meditation. This article, which will appear in the November 2014 issue of the magazine, consists of an interview of two meditation teachers (Sharon Salzberg, Joseph Goldstein) and a psychiatrist (Mark Epstein) by journalist-author Dan Harris (10% Happier). The wise words of these teachers should reassure anyone who has ever asked the big question, “Can I sit still for 3 minutes without checking my phone?” that this is indeed possible for everyone. As for why you might want to do this, the answer is simple: you might begin to see that happy moment that is currently sliding by for what it is. And you might become a happier person in the process.

“Attention deficit treated with meditation,” “meditation relieves depression, pain,” “meditation reduces chocolate cravings” – these are just some of the medical claims for the benefits of meditation that I have written about in this blog. And these are just a small sample of the kinds of claims that have been made for meditation in the news media, in books, in blogs (most notably The Huffington Post) over the past couple of years. These stories provide hope and they get people to try meditation. But what if they are too good to be true? If meditation fails to make me more attentive, fails to make me happier, and fails to help me confront the chocolate stack in the Bookstore, should I give up on meditation?

These are precisely the concerns of neuroscientist, Assistant Professor of Medicine and Family Medicine, and director of the mind-in-body lab, at Brown University, Catherine Kerr. She is a practitioner of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and she has personally conducted scientific studies on the effects of MBSR on other practitioners. She is well acquainted with the benefits of meditation, as well as the so-called ‘scientifically proven benefits of meditation’ and she wants people to understand just how little (as well as how much) scientists know. Tricycle magazine editor, Linda Heuman recently interviewed Dr. Kerr for the Tricycle magazine blog and their conversation provides a counterweight for anyone who is thinking, “Wow, this news article makes meditation sound really impressive. I should give it a try.” You can find the interview at “Don’t Believe the Hype,” (Tricycle, Oct 1, 2014).

A Tricycle magazine article caught my eye today. The article, “The Gift of Gratitude,” is by Ajahn Sumedho, a Buddhist monk. He has this to say about the connection between gratitude and joy:

A life without gratitude is a joyless life. If life is just a continuous complaint about the injustices and unfairness we have received and we don’t remember anything good ever done to us, we fall into depression – not an uncommon problem these days. It is impossible to imagine ever being happy again: we think this misery is forever.

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I came across the phrase “sleepwalking through life” in a recent magazine article by Ezra Bayda (Tricycle, Fall 2014). It spoke to me right away. First, the image it conjured up (no doubt enhanced by a zombie fad that just won’t go away) of vast populations shuffling along, lost in thought, moving in a dream world, never seeing their thoughts for what they were, week after week and year after year, was extraordinarily powerful. And then I mulled it over. I realized that “sleepwalking” has even deeper roots. “Buddha” means something like Awakened, and not Enlightened. So, if you aren’t Buddha, you’re sleepwalking, right?

An intriguing line of reasoning, but one that can quickly set my mind spinning up more daydreams. “Waking up sounds good. I should get started right away.” If I catch myself sleepwalking, I might feel like a failure. More thoughts, “I should deepen my resolve, make a note in my diary to try harder, try to be more like someone who I think is more awake.” And on and on.

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