Session Eleven – Meditation

This is a series created from the book “Be Love: A Book About Awakening” authored by Ned Burwell. This series is a guide for people who are seeking a life of purpose and peace told through the life experiences of Ned Burwell. The material is told through a variety of concepts, practices, anecdotes, and experiences. Hosted by Seamus Evely

The Awakening Podcast series was created to give you the tools to live a more purposeful and peaceful life through the teachings of Ned Burwell, author of the book “Be Love: A Book About Awakening”.

Session Eleven – Meditation: Is it a practice or a study? How do we meditate? What are the benefits to it? Can anyone do it? Is it even real? These are all very valid questions that I know I had about meditation, mainly because I have heard so much about it and never spent much time with it. Ned has a great deal of experience with mediation and gives us some great tools to begin practicing meditation and he also dispels many things that are misunderstood with the practice.

Tools for Session 11

1. Practice 20 mins of meditation 1- 3 times a day.

2. Practice meditation in a busy place, like a food court at the mall or an airport etcetera.

3. Do as much eyes open meditation as you can.

4. Practice a moving meditation, go for a walk, bike ride or anything that gets you moving while doing your meditation practice.

Transcript

session 11: Meditation

Positive Affirmation: I have the power to choose to set my mind down.

Seamus: We have talked a lot about the silence and about being in touch with our soul. A proponent of these must involve meditation. We need to start off by defining meditation.

Ned: First, I’m going to back it up one notch and talk about my involvement with meditation and why I’m qualified to talk about this subject. I was with the Ishaya monks for eight years, I eventually took vows and became a monk for a period of one year. I’ve dedicated my life to my meditation practice. What I bring to the table when I talk about meditation is more experience than knowledge about it.

Meditation is simply the practice of turning inward to the silence. It’s a practice more than it’s a teaching or something to know about. Our meditation practice never stays the same; at times it goes deep, while other times it appears to be flat. The key is to keep practising, keep diving inward.

It is an accumulative experience; there is a momentum that’s built through your experiences with meditation. We like to think of life as always being a fair exchange. If we put fifty cents into life, we want to take out fifty cents’ to a dollar’s worth of experience. With meditation, it’s a practice where you don’t always see the reward of what you’re putting in; it’s a slow, accumulative process that builds on itself over time.

Seamus: What are some of the benefits to meditation?

Ned: The benefits show up in different ways. On the surface of meditation, we find relaxation. When you go a little bit deeper into meditation, it helps alleviate stress in the body and clear out our nervous system. When we take meditation to a deeper level, we get to know the soul.

Another benefit to meditation is that it changes our relationship with our mind. My relationship with my mind before I learned to meditate was that my thoughts and emotions were true, real and mine. Every thought was important to me. Meditation is a practice where you learn how to step back from your thoughts. We learn how to put space between us and the thoughts dropping into our mind.

The depth of your soul is an endless journey of great wonder.

Seamus: I didn’t have a lot of experience with meditation until recently. There must be a lot of misconceptions about meditation. What would you say are some of the common ones?

Ned: When you talk about meditation, some people glaze over. They look at you like, “Oh, yeah.” They have this idea that meditation is something that monks or “funny yoga people” do. There are still a lot of people who really don’t know what it is. When I first got into meditation twenty years ago, it was looked at in a much different light. I think it’s getting to be more mainstream now, and the paradigm around it is slowly changing.

There are many different aspects to meditation. One, there are an endless number of experiences we have through meditation. It can be an energetic experience; at times, interesting concepts fall into us during meditation, and so much more. Meditation can be experienced through various means such as mantra meditation, guided meditation, drumming meditation. We can practice meditation with our eyes closed or with our eyes open.

One of the misconceptions is that you must stop your thoughts. Often people say to me, “I can’t do meditation because I can’t stop thinking.” I dispel that myth by saying, “You can’t stop having thoughts, but you can stop thinking anytime you choose.” For example, if I told you had to think about something, would you?

Seamus: No.

Ned: No, you wouldn’t have to do that at all. Just because a thought comes into your mind, does that mean you have to think about the words dropping into you? Stopping our thoughts would be like trying to stop a freight train with a toothpick. It’s not going to happen.

Meditation isn’t about stopping your thoughts; it’s about changing your relationship to them as they drop into you. Ironically enough, that’s one of the benefits of meditation. It changes your relationship with the thoughts that are dropping into you.

Seamus: Are there other benefits? For instance, can it soothe your mind?

Ned: Yes, there are physical benefits to meditation. There have been some interesting studies that have popped up in the last few years around the benefits of meditation. Meditation affects the brain; it changes the amygdala. Your amygdala helps regulate your emotions. A study conducted by Harvard indicated that an eight-week practice of meditation increases the grey matter density in the hippocampus, the part of the brain associated with self-awareness, compassion, and introspection. See the selected bibliography to find the web address for this study.

This area of meditation doesn’t really interest me. I’m content knowing that meditation takes me into the silence and helps me build a relationship with God. That’s good enough for me. I don’t need the science. However, the science is helping meditation become more widely accepted. Recently, I was asked to go and teach mindfulness at the Aylmer Police College here in Ontario. That’s something that would never have happened ten years ago—there’s no way I would have been asked to bring meditation into a police college. They would have laughed me out the door if I’d offered it.

Seamus: How was it received?

Ned: They were a very kind group of officers. It was a senior officer course, so there were no new recruits; it was a group of seasoned officers. At the beginning there was a lot of skepticism in the room; they were a tough crowd. However, they were interested. Their heads had started nodding by the end of the session. I was able to convince them of some of the benefits. 

I opened up the dialogue and maybe got them a little bit interested in meditation.

Seamus: What is the objective of meditation?

Ned: It is multilayered, but for me the objective is about my relationship with God and discovering the silence in me. I’ve also used my meditation to help me during difficult times. A while back, I was out in Western Canada interviewing tattoo artists for a project I was working on, and I got news that my mom had had a heart attack. That’s devastating news to get when you’re halfway across the country.

My father said, “Just hang in there. Don’t come home yet. Just hang in there for a little bit.” After I got off the phone with him, my heart was racing, I was a wreck. I sat in my car and I closed my eyes and meditated to regroup myself. It helped me calm down and bring things back into perspective. My thoughts were, “Okay, she has not passed. It’s a heart attack. Many people have them nowadays.”

One of my objectives in meditation is to maintain a constant awareness of the stillness in me. I try to keep my practice going all day with my eyes open. This practice has become very important to me.

Seamus: If you are in a dark place in your mind, can meditation amplify your thoughts? Maybe this would make some people cautious about meditating. Is meditation still a good idea for those people?

Once you discover who you are, your desire to leave this moment loses its spark. For only in the presence of this moment can we know ourselves.

Ned: It depends on the person. For some, if their mind is going into a dark place and they are not able to detach themselves from their thoughts and rest deeper within, then meditation can be a practice where they become hyper-aware of their problems. If we are closing our eyes and then fixating on problems, we are not meditating; we are talking to ourselves. I have a relationship with the practice of meditation that deeply draws me into a place of great peace and silence. However, I’ve cultivated that over a long period of time with practice.

If you’re new to meditation and you haven’t had a lot of experience with it, and you’re in a dark place, I recommend that you communicate that to another person. Pick up the phone or get in your car and go visit a friend.

Seamus: There might be people who feel that meditation is not possible for them. Is meditation something that anyone can do and achieve results with?

Ned: Absolutely. When you look at meditation, its history and origins go way back. When you look at the different mystical traditions and the different religions of the world, at the centre of them you find meditation. You find meditation in the eastern traditions, and some of those traditions are seven thousand years old. We have been doing meditation for thousands of years. In other words, it is completely possible for anyone to embrace meditation and find benefit with it. The only thing that’s a barrier to your meditation is your unwillingness to practice.

Seamus: I think you may not understand the value of what it can do for you until you remove the judgments that you may have about meditation.

Ned: I wouldn’t try to tell anyone what meditation is going to do for them. Obviously, it’s better to have your own experience rather than hold an opinion without having any experience. Experience doesn’t happen through a two-minute-trial period.

The thing with meditation is that it is a practice. Anything that is a practice requires time and energy put into it. You did not become an amazing drummer without practice; you needed to put in your dirt time.

Seamus: How do we begin to meditate?

Ned: We begin to meditate simply by trying it. It’s very simple. The only thing that makes it complex is the mind. The ideas we’ve projected onto meditation are what makes it more difficult than it is. My old teacher used to tell a story about two different types of spiritual seekers. For the first type of person, if God were chocolate, then they would put chocolate on a pedestal and study it, praise it and even spread the word of chocolate. They would know everything about it. The second type of person would be those who ate the chocolate and experienced it and didn’t care about the properties of it; they would be more interested in having the internal experience of it. That’s the difference between a meditation practice and a study of meditation. In a study of meditation, you are only pacifying your mind, you would know about it, without having the experience.

Seamus: Right, absolutely. In the book, you mentioned some different meditation techniques. Could you explain what those are?

Ned: There is open-eyed meditation, where you are surrendering yourself to the task at hand. That’s one that has happened to me many times while I’m tattooing my clients. It is what got me on my spiritual path.

When I was younger, I used to go to my grandma’s house a lot. Because she was deaf, the volume on the TV would always be off. I used to sit and watch TV with her without turning up the volume. I remember getting really comfortable with the silence during my visits with her. We also used to play cards. When we were playing, we would pass notes back and forth. But there were many times when we would stop passing notes and just enter the silence. I carried those experiences forward and, years later while I was tattooing, that started happening to me. The experience of the peacefulness I had with my grandma as a little boy was coming up while I was tattooing; I was going into open-eyed meditation. By narrowing the mind into single pointedness—that’s when we focus only on one thing without talking to our thoughts—we can slip into meditation.

I would fall into meditation so deeply that I would start losing control of my facial muscles. I’d always know when I was really getting in the pocket with tattooing because I’d start drooling. I’d feel drool running down my chin. The interesting thing is that the deeper I went into these meditative states while I was working, the better the work was getting.

What I didn’t know at that point was that I was letting go of the mind; creativity was flowing through me and using me as a vehicle. That’s one form of meditation—whatever you’re doing, let yourself go in the process. Get lost in the act of doing, whether it’s playing an instrument, going for a walk or a run, gardening, et cetera.

Another way is to listen to a guided meditation, where somebody walks you through it. There are lots of them on YouTube. You can use music, where it’s just abstract background music and you’re just letting go.

There’s also mantra meditation. Here is a five-step mantra meditation.

Five-Step Mantra Meditation

1.      Make yourself comfortable.

2.      Start breathing slowly in and out. Breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth. Then, once you feel your body is starting to relax…

3.      …introduce your mantra. Once you feel you are in a rhythm with your breathing, begin to say/repeat your mantra. You can say your mantra aloud or silently. Your mantra could be anything. You can even make up a mantra on the spot. For example, you could say, “I love my life,” or “I love my child.” My favorite is, “Be Love.” You can also use Buddhist mantras such as “Om Mani Padme Hum,” which means, “The jewel is in the lotus,” or whatever mantra you want. Choose something that makes you feel good.

4.      Keep resting your attention on the quietest space you can find in you. Slowly introduce your mantra. Do not force it into your experience— just slowly let it come out.

5.      When you notice yourself thinking, very gently introduce your mantra again.

One of the things to remember when you’re doing a mantra meditation is that when you start thinking (and you will), you just very gently reintroduce your mantra. It’s not a time to beat yourself up. Do not make your meditation time about being mean to yourself. If you get frustrated, resist the urge to start talking to yourself.

Seamus: You had mentioned a couple of obstacles that people experience. I know that any time that I’ve tried to meditate, I find myself having more thoughts because everything is so quiet. I find it hard not to focus on my thoughts. Are there any other types of obstacles that someone might experience when they try meditating for the first time?

Ned: Yes, there are some typical experiences that people have. There are common thoughts that come to us when we begin a meditation practice. There may be a commentary like, “It’s not working.” Another one is, “I need to know more about this.” That’s a big one because the mind likes to gather information. Another commentary of the mind is, “This is a waste of time. I could make better use of this time doing chores that I’ve been putting off.” Random things for you to do may also come to you. There is a myriad of different dialogues that will pop into your mind that will just say, “Don’t sit there and do nothing.” There is a program in us to keep moving. If we don’t do anything, we often view ourselves as lazy. At times we extract our worth from “doing.”

We are constantly on the move. Meditation is the opposite of moving; it is you slowing down and not moving.

Sometimes, there is resistance to the practice of meditation. One of the obstacles is committing yourself to spending some time doing it. I recommend practising two or three times a day or at least twenty minutes a day; an hour is best if you can work yourself up to that.

Another one of the obstacles is that, when we have a peaceful meditation, we try to recreate the same experience each time we sit down to do meditation. That is a trap. If you are trying to recreate the same scenario as you did in your last meditation, it takes away from the experience that is unfolding. It is important to come to each meditation with innocence. Every one’s going to be different.

Seamus: Is there a specific environment required to be effective with your meditation?

Ned: No. One of the things that my teacher used to say is, “Go meditate in an airport.” You do not need to create a specific room in your house. The idea is that you practice meditation in all different spaces, and in different circumstances—loud environments, quiet environments. Do not put anything in front of your meditation practice. We can create a lot of false ideas around meditation, and then find ourselves needing certain requirements in order to practice meditation, which eventually keeps us from doing it.

There’s nothing keeping you from that silent space within yourself, and it doesn’t require anything but your attention being turned inward to the silence, to the quietest part of you. It doesn’t have requirements. We have requirements, or rather, the mind has requirements.

Seamus: We’ve been circling around this a little bit, but is there any final advice that you can offer to people on how best to create a lifestyle around meditation?

Sit quietly until the silence becomes a love song in you.

Ned: Bring your meditation practice into moments when you have your eyes open. Find time to do open-eyed meditation, whether it be at work or at home. Get used to moving around but staying anchored in that silent, still place in you.

When you finish your closed-eyes meditation, always end by opening your eyes and staying in the space that you’re in. That helps to build your open-eyed meditation practice.

Think the mind as a movie screen. This is something that I teach people in my meditation classes. I’ll say to them, “When you go to a movie theatre, the screen is blank before the movie starts. At the end of the movie, the lights come on and the screen is blank again. But is that screen shot full of bullet holes from a cops-and-robbers scene? Or is the screen full of lust from a love story? Is it suspenseful from a thriller, or is it afraid?” The screen is completely unaffected.

When you sit down to do meditation, think of your mind as a movie screen that your thoughts are projecting onto. Our job is to be the watcher. We just watch the mind. That is another style of meditation. You just watch your mind; you don’t talk back to the thoughts. Think of your thoughts as a movie and your mind is the screen. They are not real. At the end of the movie, much like the screen, we don’t have to be affected by any of the thoughts that are being projected onto our mind.

Seamus: You also say in the book that meditations are like snowflakes. I think I know what that means: every snowflake is different. Is that where you’re going with that?

Ned: Yes, they’re unique. Do not build up expectations on how you think your meditations are going to unfold. I’ve had meditations that are deep, where I felt so expanded and alive, and then I’ve had other ones that felt flat. Be innocent in your practice of meditation. Come to it without any predetermined outcomes in your mind.

Seamus: To wrap this up, what is the silence?

Ned: The silence is as close as the next breath. It’s not a difficult or unattainable thing to go into. In the silence, we discover the totality of who and what we are, a capacity that the mind could never understand or come close to, consuming the vastness of the silence. The silence is you; it’s everything.

My heart speaks the loudest when my mind is the quietest.