#12 IDAHO!

BACK IN BOISE, well virtually anyhow.  The last time I was there in person was in 1983 for a raucous Grateful Dead concert.   I was looking for adventure, the last stop of which is always spiritual.  And so I return, this time to Heart of the Dharma meditation center, with a Sunday service led by Dana Marsh.   She is a longtime student of Anam Thubten, a well known and inspiring Tibetan buddhist meditation teacher.  Check out some of his talks here; try for instance the 5 minute morning meditation instructions and pretend you are beginning a meditation retreat. OH WAIT, you are.   Really, we are either building this sorrowful schedule or letting go into retreat, right?   Jesus has the wheel (sorry it's Sunday).  

Dana was equally inspiring, with 20 minutes of guided meditation and 40 following minutes of Dharma talk.  Interestingly, the 45 or so attendees were instructed to have our camera and audio off.  However, you could email for 10 minutes of 1:1 time with Dana following the session, which is great. 

"Now I am going to meditate,"  was the first instruction, and then to relax body, speech and mind, and bring awareness to the breath.  I loved the following point:  "Let the mind calm itself, "  which I did.  I spend so much time in the fantasy of my mind that I can't distinguish awareness, and so to consider the mind as a thing which can actually mellow out, and therefore allow for an increase in awareness, is awesome.   She also advised:  "Be aware of what is going on in consciousness, don't reject anything, rest in the natural state of mind, notice what is arising and ceasing, not anticipating the future or reliving the past," and so on.   One begins to make friends with a new awareness. 

Her Dharma talk was entitled 'Moving Things Around in Samsara.'    Dana noted that she had moved her background (paintings, books) around while rearranging her room.   She wondered aloud if instead of leaving samsara (the wheel of suffering) behind, we try and make it look better.   We live, she said, in a world we take for granted, the world of hope and fear, thinking "If I could just hone in on some trick of personality, I could be a good meditator, or (fill in the blank)."

Grasping at the self, she said, we believe we have control over the universe and it's expression.  I would argue that for many, that's not particularly 'selfish', it's also taking on too much responsibility.   First and foremost, our responsibility is to see ourselves and our reality clearly.   

As Dana said,  "Letting go is less than we think."