Frosty - The Snowman and The 5 Hindrances Attack

I have just come back from a very inspiring and insightful 5-day silent meditation retreat taught by Bob Stahl, a senior teacher at the Center For Mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and the world-famous Spirit Rock Meditation Center near-by San Francisco. Bob also lived in a Buddhist Monastery in Burma for over eight years.

Retreats are great to deepen our practice of meditation and mindfulness and allow some very profound work within ourselves. As all external factors get eliminated through silence, minimal eye contact, no Internet, telephone or TV, and a remote setting, we are pretty much confronted with ourselves. What we would think to be a relaxing and peaceful retreat turns out to be (quoting Bob) a "shit accelerator". The setting seems so beautiful and calm but inside ourselves it's just the opposite. All that stuff that we successfully ignore in our busy lives is suddenly flying high. Our likes, our dislikes, our pain, our restlessness, our fears and our doubts, they are all there, all at ones! And on top of that we are realising how tired we actually are. So try to deal with that!! :)

Bob put on his big smile and looked like a sassy little boy when he started talking about "shit is flying high" and explaining that this is the best stuff to work with. The shit-accelerator gets us away from our daily routine, our rat race, our auto pilote. It shows us where we have work to do.

Bob's easy-goingness and humour made us laugh and so we started our "work" at the retreat: meditating and being mindful of what is coming up. Just sitting and observing.

Bob calls this the "Frosty - the Snowman" approach: When the snow globe is shaken and the snow churns up, no matter how bad the snow storm gets, Frosty sits. So referring to us, whatever churns up within or around us, we stay grounded.

I love this sweet metaphor because it really describes what meditation is about and adds a sense of humour. Often we take our likes and dislikes and our fears and doubts so serious that we find it difficult to get over them. When we understand that "shit is happening" but it is impermanent, and that as we remain seated we can literally see it coming and going, we have developed a powerful tool to regain control over our mind and can start using it properly.

There is more to come on this retreat.

Meditation Teacher Training with David Nichtern in New York

Last week I started a great teacher training program with David Nichtern in New York, senior teacher in the Shambhala Buddhist lineage of Chogyam Trungpa and Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche. It was a course with great spirit and the goal to teach meditation in a straight forward, secular way and to share the benefits of meditation with others. David is a knowledgable and kind teacher who does bring some good humor into his teachings.

We were able to deepen our knowledge of mindfulness and meditation techniques as well as the Buddhist dharma, and discussed the bridge between the traditional Buddhist approach and a more westernized, secular way of teaching meditation to people in Western societies to become more mindful, balanced and peaceful. This discussion was highly interesting and fruitful. David seems to be the perfect partner in this conversation being a Buddhist in New York. His view is very open, sincere but humorous. He believes all humans encounter problems and pain in their lives and need to deal with what is. Understanding that everything is impermanent and that we can strengthen our mind power through mindfulness, concentration and contemplation allows us to develop more acceptance of what is, a better friendship with ourselves and all beings and a certain easiness as things come and go.

David is a great inspiration to me and I m looking forward to continue my training with him this fall.

If You Walk, Just Walk, If You Sit, Just Sit...

"If you walk, just walk, if you sit, just, whatever you do, don't wobble." This famous saying by zen master Unmon explains the idea of mindfulness. It is about being present and fully aware of what we are doing in this very moment. Mindfulness is the opposite of multi-tasking. It puts our focus on the one activity we are carrying out at that very moment, and thus bundles our energy. Instead of being distracted by a multiple of thoughts, tasks and emotions, we are able to fully concentrate on each activity.

Stress arises when we or others expect us to achieve more than we can actually perform. Stress is aggrevated when we try to juggle all those different tasks having even less time and energy to accomplish each one of them.

Think about it like this: how good are your results when you try to cook, phone, email and watch the news at the same time as supposed to carry out each task separately and mindfully?

But it is not only about results it is also about the intensity with which we experience our lives. We live more fully when we use all our senses. So when you cook do you feel the fresh ingredients, smell their flavour and see their shape, colour and texture?

Mindfulness isn't some complicated, mystic practice it is rather a way of life that is more focussed, more rich in experiences and more truthful. It helps us to stay grounded, balanced and awake.

Our breath is a great tool to bring us back to that mindfulness. So we can use our formal and informal breathing practice to generate a greater awareness and alertness to what is happening in this very moment.