This meditation is on the subject of refuge,
Where our mind turns to in times of fear,
Pain,
Desire,
Or aspiration,
Especially when we're alone.
Some of the greatest challenges each of us face occur when we're alone,
So we first look at where we actually go for refuge,
And then where we might want to go for refuge.
The goal of this meditation isn't any kind of self-criticism,
But the opposite,
To come to a deep place of self-acceptance and positive growth.
So start out by focusing on the breath for a minute.
Bring your body into a meditation posture.
Relax your body.
Close your eyes and bring your mind to your nostrils with the air coming in and out or your abdomen rising and falling.
If your mind strays away,
Just bring it back gently.
Focus on your breath just for a minute.
Now,
Think about what you do when you're alone.
When you're scared,
When you're anxious,
Wound up,
Or afraid,
When you feel strong craving or when you feel overwhelmed,
What do you turn to?
You don't have to tell anyone your answer.
They say what you do when you're alone reveals your character in a deep and profound way.
In Buddhism,
The term for the place we go when we're challenged is refuge,
Taking refuge.
So another way of asking this question is,
What's your refuge?
One place people find refuge is their work because you love it,
Because it's meaningful,
Because you have to do it,
Or it could be because it's an escape or an addiction or a source of prestige or power.
Think for a minute about whether you take refuge in work,
And if you do,
Why?
Of course,
There's nothing inherently harmful or beneficial about taking refuge in work,
As Buddhism says about any activity.
The motivation is what counts most.
When your motivation goes beyond yourself,
Beyond your ego,
To the greater good of all,
Is when you're generally most at peace with your work,
When your work forms a seamless continuity with your better nature.
Another form of refuge,
Maybe the dominant one in our culture today,
Is entertainment.
Music,
Social media,
Netflix,
YouTube,
Kindle,
Or the New York Times,
Fox News.
These can be ways of educating and expanding our minds,
Or just filling up our minds with external stimulation or even agitation.
There's nothing wrong with entertainment,
But think for a moment about the habit of lurching to the phone or computer when there's a free moment,
To fill that space with something interesting or funny,
And what it might deprive us of sometimes,
The pleasure of getting to know ourselves,
Getting to know our own minds,
Becoming aware of what's immediately around us for that moment,
And seeing what's within ourselves as we experience unfiltered reality,
Unmediated relationships,
To experience the joy of simply being alive and present to the world inside and around us.
So think about what draws you to entertainment for a moment,
Whether that's your refuge and how it satisfies you.
Another powerful refuge is sex.
Do we move towards sex out of genuine closeness and connection,
Or feelings of incompleteness,
Insecurity,
Escape,
Or addiction?
Think about the role of sex in your life,
Pornography,
Intimacy,
And see what place it has in your sense of refuge.
We all have substances we take refuge in,
Coffee,
Chocolate,
Alcohol,
Marijuana.
None of these are intrinsically helpful or harmful,
Of course,
But it's worth observing our mind as we crave them,
As we enjoy them.
They can be sources of pleasure and rituals of connection,
But our brain can also trick us into thinking that more and more of these substances will bring us more and more pleasure.
Yet when you test out this hypothesis,
It doesn't turn out to be true.
When we're able to wield self-control around substances,
We feel good about ourselves.
It's nice to have the feeling of having a choice about what to do in life,
That I'm not mindlessly driven by my urges.
A teacher once shared with me the view that true freedom isn't the freedom to do whatever you like,
But it's the freedom from doing things,
Freedom from compulsive desire,
Not the freedom to infinitely indulge.
Exercise,
Adventure,
And creative pursuits are refuges that have a lot in common with meditation.
They're ritualized activities that connect the body and mind,
Where you lose track of your worries and plans and become completely engrossed in whatever you're doing.
When you combine them with mindfulness,
A motivation to come closer to your good nature or to others,
Exercise,
Adventure,
Creativity can become full-fledged forms of meditation.
The Buddhist perspective that it's not the activity itself,
But the motivation comes into play.
Exercise art and adventure can be competitive,
Ego-driven,
Like anything else,
Or forms of a spiritual practice.
What role do these play in your life?
For most of us,
Friends and family are a key source of refuge.
But it's also possible just to waste time with people,
And it's possible to have people close to you who don't have your best interests in mind.
What's the role of friends and family in your life?
When do you turn to them for refuge?
What effect does it have in your mind?
Friends and family can be a great source of compassion and love,
And the greatest field there is for demonstrating our best qualities and expanding our hearts.
They say you become like the people you spend time with,
Your friends,
Your family,
Your bosses and teachers.
So who gets our highest respect?
There's some people in the world more highly realized than us,
People like the Dalai Lama,
Pope Francis,
Wangari Maati,
Desmond Tutu,
Anne Frank,
Nelson Mandela,
Maybe even Mackenzie Scott,
Edward Snowden,
Greta Thunberg.
In your immediate life,
They may be mothers or artists,
Teachers or inventors,
Nurses or caretakers,
Or spiritual teachers.
Think about this for a minute,
Whether it's someone famous,
Not well known,
Or someone from your everyday life.
Who would you admire?
This brings us to the point of looking inward for refuge,
Looking inside ourselves for an always available source of respect,
Meaning,
Joy and comfort,
Rejoicing in all the good we do in the world,
And more deeply in our innate capacity for good,
The healthiest roots of self-respect and well-being.
These good qualities are natural and adaptive to a human race that mostly lives in harmony,
Despite the way it looks on newspapers and TV.
Living a wholesome,
Connected life comes naturally to us and it's natural to our minds.
The mind's deepest qualities are ease and openness and joy.
The only reason we stray from our good nature is out of bad habits,
Thoughtlessness,
External conditioning.
The fundamental goodness of our minds is an ever-present source of refuge that requires no elaborate preparations,
That's free,
That's always available.
The mind presents an inner refuge in its natural clarity and awareness,
Its openness,
Its plasticity,
Its changeability.
Our mind is always changing,
Malleable,
Flexible,
Open to any possibility.
So we can take refuge in the fact that we're constantly changing,
Always capable of change.
By being mindful and aware and purposeful in what we mentally cultivate and what we let go,
We can harness that changeability to mold our minds to become a source of joy and meaning and purpose and good for ourselves and for others.
Try that for a minute now,
Just watching the mind.
In How to Love,
Thich Nhat Hanh says that happiness comes from what he calls a home inside.
That's found by accepting yourself,
Learning to love and heal yourself,
Learning how to practice mindfulness that creates moments of happiness and joy for your own nourishment by simply being present and aware.
Let's take a moment now to get to know ourselves that way.
Doesn't mean pushing away our pain and suffering,
It's not denial.
When we come to know and accept and understand our own pain,
Paradoxically through this process we can find a calm and a stillness and a joy that underlies all mental experience,
Even loneliness,
Anxiety and fear.
So try now and steer your mind inward without wishing to change your mind in any way.
Allow thoughts to appear but find some distance from these thoughts.
Notice how you can observe your thoughts,
You can watch them arise,
Watch them take center stage in your consciousness and then watch them fade away.
Simply watch your thoughts,
Whatever they are,
Accept your feelings.
There's no need to push away any fear and the loneliness.
Just accept it,
Observe it.
And as you do,
See that your heart can open,
That observing your thoughts almost as if they're someone else's.
You come to understand them better,
You see the cause and effect that brought them to your consciousness and you come to feel love and compassion for yourself,
To understand your own joys and pains better.
With careful observation you see that your mental states are impermanent,
Changeable,
That your mind has a constant capacity to transform and that this is a natural source of strength.
So let's meditate like this for a minute.
Observe and accept our thoughts and feelings without judgment.
See them intertwined within an endless web of cause and effect.
See how your feelings don't last,
How they appear and change and disappear and how the changeability itself is a comfort,
That even as you hurt the most those feelings are already fading away or your excitement or desire fades back to contentment.
Do this now for a minute.
Just observe your thoughts and watch them change.
And now with this distance from your thoughts and feelings,
See that there is a deeper part of yourself that's always there beneath the thoughts,
That's hard to put into words.
Steer your mind away from those grosser thoughts and feelings craving fear,
Loneliness,
Desire and see that there's a deeper ever-present part of yourself that has a different quality,
The qualities of clarity,
Of being unobscured,
That allows anything,
Thoughts,
Feelings,
Perceptions to arise within it without itself being disturbed.
Just as science shows that unobstructed space itself underlies everything that sits within it,
So is there also an open unobstructed aspect of our mind underlying all mental experience.
That deeper part of your mind is like a mirror and like a mirror there's a certain beauty to it regardless of what it reflects at any moment.
It's impossible to see a mirror directly,
You only see it through what it reflects,
But the mirror has this capacity to reflect,
It's a quality of the mirror and your mind has this capacity to,
This quality of clarity and reflection.
There's also a sense of knowing in that deeper,
Subtler part of the mind of directly experiencing one that goes beyond words and even beyond concepts and that knowing that experiencing has a quality to it,
A kind of wisdom that if you probe it,
It can feel joyful.
It embraces even your most difficult thoughts and feelings.
Those difficult thoughts and feelings are made of the same awareness,
That same profound quality of clarity and knowing that underlies all mental phenomena.
So try now for a minute to connect with that deeper part of yourself,
The part of yourself that you can usually find only when you're quiet and alone.
It may take some time and it may take more than one session.
Feel free to pause this meditation if you want to explore more than one minute or 10 or 20 or even 30 minutes.
The time you spend may reward you with experiences that you've never had before.
And now you may feel or at least you may feel the possibility of a comfort in being alone,
An inner joy.
You might have felt this at other times alone when you were reading or cooking or listening to music or creating something out for a walk or working quietly alone.
But the point in meditation is to distill that happiness and joy and stability in being alone,
In being your own best friend,
Away from any activity at all,
That it's a joy to be with yourself,
To know yourself at that deepest level.
The particular activity isn't what makes you happy.
The activity is a pathway to finding an inner happiness that's always there within you.
Meditation becomes a path to consistently find this happiness of connecting with yourself in ways that food and music and even friends and family don't always stably bring about.
Try and see how the joy and comfort you find in others is really a reflection of your own capacity to be present and aware,
A capacity that's always with you,
Always accessible.
They say the greatest gift you can give another person is your attention and that's the greatest gift you can give yourself as well.
Being alone isn't a lonely way station between meetings with others or a stopgap before you get to the next busy project.
Being alone in meditation is enough in itself.
The more you meditate like this,
The more you realize that you need nothing else to be happy than a little space and time and peace and solitude.
The point of these meditations is getting to know yourself better,
Accepting yourself and learning to stay with whatever's arising in your mind,
Diving deeper into your psyche to understand who you are beneath your thoughts,
Feelings and perceptions,
Coming to know yourself better,
To love yourself,
To be your own best friend.
Coming out of these phases of self-reflection,
You then find more energy for others.
With deep consistent practice,
You're happy when you're alone,
You're happy when you're with others,
You're happy when life brings you good news,
And you're happy when problems arise.
Happiness comes from deep inside us and meditation's a path to consistently find a stable calm and joy that's not dependent on other people,
On possessions,
On TV or social media,
Or anything else outside ourselves.
