i've done a lot of puttering, a lot of putzing, to avoid writing this post, once i decided to write it. i'll get to that at the end. heh. in recent weeks i've been having trouble "getting to the cushion," i.e. making up my mind to meditate and actually doing it.
when life was shittier i rushed to meditate, taking refuge when there was no ground.
but now that life returns to varying degrees of normal, i convince myself that there is ground and that i'm happy standing on it, and so i don't feel the need to meditate ... (emphasis on "feel").
somehow as a ... well not a substitute but... an urge to do something, i've been reading some of the teachings, and recently have become interested in the "four preliminaries."
the "four preliminaries" are four ideas that one should contemplate to put oneself in the frame of mind to do meditation. we are permitted to use whatever expression of them seems most helpful to us. here is mine, based about 90% on Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche's version:
- This short, free life is so precious.
- Death is certain: this body will be a corpse.
- We cannot escape karma: cause and effect.
- Samsara is unendurable, unbearably intense; all beings suffer.
this morning, as a substitute for any contemplation or calm, i went into some kind of hyperactive four preliminaries tasmanian devil thing... i decided to make them my phone's wallpaper, wrote them a bunch of times, took pix... yeah.
at the end i felt, well, going hyper over something intensely contemplative still has a few shreds of benefit, but let's take more time with these. i came up with the idea (inspired by an iPhone app :-P ) of doing a week's contemplation of/attention to each one in turn. yes! what a great idea!
oh.
fuck.
the first one is on gratitude.
can i just skip it and go for a nice morbid juicy one, like the corpse thing or karma?
nope.
gratitude.
start with fucking gratitude.
dammit.
ok.
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