VIPASSANA MEDITATION Archives - Mindful Happiness

January 9, 2017 By Admin 1 Comment

Vipassana Meditation – Journey 4 Emptiness

Vipassana Meditation – Emptiness

One of the great insights from regular, long-term vipassana practice is the experience of emptiness. The actual knowing of it by the experience of it. This is not your typical conceptual emptiness of the West; it is not total void, negative beings, or nihilistic pit, or suffering in endlessness. It is a more positive emptiness. This experience is a sense of being in ultimate
boundlessness, where nothing concrete exists – not even impermanence, not even dependent origination, not even no-self – just being in endless space (as some interpret it). This experience is without egocentric and samsaric-conditioned mind filters. No desire for positive sense-door experiences over negative experiences. Again, emptiness experiences may not be good for people suffering from serious mental health of addictions problems. Like no-self, perhaps you would be better off letting this one go. Here is our guided vipassana-like meditation on emptiness.

Begin by settling into your cushion for chair. Take a few deep, slow, calm breaths and notice the emptiness that exists at the end of the in-breath and at the end of the out-breath. There is a feeling of nothing there. Continue to breathe and noticing. Focus stronger and stronger concentration on the experience being experienced without evaluations.
Ancient, sacred people practiced approaching absolute truth, one aspect of which is emptiness. This comes after you let go of self and conceptual perceptions. No self-narratives; no self-referencing, no self grasping. Do your best to let go of all experience-conditioned ego. Just be. If you are fortunate you may already obtain a small glimpse of emptiness. Meditate on this!
Continue to meditate with an intention to come face-to-face with
emptiness. If you reach even a glimpse of it, you may experience luminosity in the present moment. Perhaps your personal experience by now begins to enter a state of subtle boundlessness. Meditate on this! Use more mental energy to concentrate on the experience at hand.
In the mind-only school and aspects of shambhala, the experience of being in emptiness is an experience of perceiving no space, no difference between the entity that perceives and the object/experience being perceived. This is quite “heady” stuff. Meditate with an expectation to experience an ultimate holism between subjects and object, between perceiver and that being perceived (emptiness). Meditate of this! Again, strengthen your meditative energy via concentrating.
In the middle way or madyamaka view, emptiness may be understood as the dearth of isolation between events/experiences. All experience and all phenomena are totally inter-dependent in nature. Our wholesomeness affects others in a strongly karmic manner. Everything is connected to everything, thus there is no one thing that exists independently – a form of emptiness in experience. So be certain to “let go” of conceptual awareness and expectancies. Meditate deeply on this!
Remain open as much as possible and “let go” of self-cherishing and fixations of self-desires. No more craving; no more clinging; no more attachment. Just be and do not avoid emotional realities involved in your personal experience of emptiness. Avoid what Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche called “shunyata poisonng.” Do not be cognitively analytic or deeply interested in your desire for a new self-narrative or positive/negative realities in relationships. Just be with the emptiness; just be the emptiness. Meditate deeply on this!
Sit there an enjoy any glimpse of emptiness you may have within this present moment. Enjoy, but do not analyze, the bliss you may experience.
William James noted that true mystical experience via spiritual practice is beyond verbal and conceptual definition. This illuminated experience may imply a “superior power,” depending on your own views of spiritual experience. When Walt Whitman discussed the universe of souls, he along with James may have implied that such experiences come with both blessings and burdens. Now that we know a more true reality via personal experience, what good will be do with this knowledge and new being? What about the suffering of others as well as our own?
Now take a few breaths and prepare to return your experience back to this room. Prepare to rise, paying attention to the feelings in your legs and feet. Move slowly.

For more information refer to Nichtern, E. (2015). The Road Home: A Contemporary Exploration of the Buddhist Path. New York: North Point Press, pp. 138-146. See also James, W. The Varieties of Religious Experience. In William James: Writings 1902-1910. New York: Library of America, 1987, pp. 343-344.

By Anthony R. Quintiliani, PhD., LADC

From the Eleanor R. Liebman Center for Secular Meditation in Monkton, Vermont

Author of Mindful Happiness

New Edition of Mindful Happiness in Production…Coming soon!

December 19, 2016 By Admin 1 Comment

Vipassana Meditation Practice an Introductory Journey

Vipassana Meditation Practice – Introductory Journey 1

This is the first of a series of posts on vipassana-based meditation practices. The introductory journey set will not be pure vipassana; rather this set of meditations will be about practice with core principles and learning experiences in regular vipassana meditation. Rather than explain background information, I will guide a brief meditation on central principles and experiences within the vipassana framework of meditation. This process will be more difficult than simply verbally presenting information; however, it will also be far more effective relative to experiencing.

Begin by settling in on your cushion or chair. Focus on calm, deep, slow breathing practice. Notice closely the movement of air into and out of the body. Pay closer and closer attention to this experience with the breath. Become highly intimate with the experience.
Using your imagination, contemplate about insights or flashes of insight related to the reality of impermanence of all things and experiences. Go to that reality now and meditate on it with close attention. This is a difficult process, but approach it with a strong intention.
Now move your attention to misperception of relative reality. Focus on the necessary knowledge required to understand via meditative experience that things are really NOT as they appear to our minds. Liberating mind and natural mind may allow you to be in true experience with a more true reality of being human. Our happiness in life will depend on how we learn to use our mind to understand at deeper levels the true nature of things and impermanent reality.
Now shift gently to the topic of greed, and how our sense-pleasure desires (attachments, cravings) provide us with short-term pleasure but NO long-term happiness. Such happiness based on grasping at sense-pleasures cannot last long. Impermanence is at work once again. Thus a general dissatisfaction is the outcome.
Meditate on your own reality of holding on to and clinging to sense-pleasures as a key source of your own suffering. Grasping happiness cannot last long. Be with that reality now.
Buddhist psychology, especially specific Abhidhamma teachings, allow us to better understand HOW the mind work, and HOW all experience is broken down into smaller and smaller irreducible components all the way to atoms and beyond. In the end of this analysis, we experience emptiness of independent arising of things/experiences and the dearth of concrete separation among all things and experiences. This is a difficult reality to grasp, intellectually, let alone experientially.
The endless search for sense-pleasures to make us happier, as well as the endless effort to avoid pain and suffering, end in the same place – more suffering. Conditioned life in samsara, where we spend most of our “awake” time trying to gain satisfaction via experiencing sense-pleasures and avoiding pain and suffering, fails all the time. So WHAT, then, is the path to joy and happiness – or at least a sense of personal satisfaction in life? Contemplate this for yourself.
Vipassana may begin with deep meditation on the breath, sensations, thoughts, and the letting go of the same. However, it certainly does not end there. As we learn to let go of concepts and mind in deep vipassana meditation, we begin to see glimpses of a more ultimate reality. This insightful experienced knowledge leads us to true impermanence, emptiness (non-voided emptiness), dependent origination, and ultimately to no-self as the experiencer. There is no space between the object of attention the the experiencer of it.
Now very slowly bring your attention and concentration back to the here and now – in this room. Take a few deep, slow, calm breaths. Prepare to end this meditation.

For more information refer to Catherine, S. (2011). Wisdom Wide and Deep: A Practical Handbook for Mastering Jhana and Vipassana. Boston: Wisdom Publications, pp. 253-431.

By Anthony R. Quintiliani, PhD., LADC

From the Eleanor R. Liebman Center for Secular Meditation in Monkton, Vermont

Author of Mindful Happiness

New Edition of Mindful Happiness in Production…Coming soon!

October 17, 2016 By Admin 2 Comments

Introduction to Vipassana Meditation

Vipassana Meditation and Introduction

Vipassana meditation, as taught by S. N. Goenka, has been practiced in India, Europe, the United States and in many other parts of the world. There are various claims for effectiveness when used as a form of meditative treatment with various populations (often correctional and substance using populations); however, there is generally a dearth of research with strong empirical controls and designs. Since Vipassana is a very old form of meditation, there must be something helpful about practicing it. A key principle in Vipassana is that as people learn to refine perception of awareness – in this case usually of bodily sensations – they also begin to realize a key tenet of meditative theory. That tenet is: all experiences and phenomena of the human mind and body are impermanent. Awareness and the experience itself simply arise and fall away. Mindful attention and refined concentration on personal experiences (including joy and suffering) augment understandings that all human experience (including human life) is impermanent. Readers are advised to read Goenka on your own. In that way you will obtain a well-informed cognitive explanation of the process. Here I will provide a few Vipassana guidelines and training suggestions. I hope you will try them.

Reported Outcomes of Vipassana Meditation

There may be greater insight into the reality of experienced phenomena via impermanence.
There may be enhanced awareness of immediate experience.
There may be a calm or nervous experiential process.
There may be non-judgmental observation of WHAT you are experiencing NOW.
Over time, you may learn how to become liberated from negative emotions and cravings.
If you experience personal liberation, you may reduce attachment and aversion.
You may develop wise-mind skills to radically accept whatever you are experiencing now without evaluation or reactions.
Ultimately, you may become personally aware of your own transformation.

Some Basic Rules in Vipassana

Quietly maintain a prolonged, non-evaluative focus on the feeling of your breath.
Be open and let go – expect nothing specific.
Do your best to stay in the middle way – not attaching or avoiding whatever comes into your awareness.
Expand pure awareness, attention and concentration on what you are experiencing now – especially sensations.
Do not problem-solve, that is do not analyze, associate, chase/avoid your thoughts and emotions – simply continue to refocus your non-evaluative attention on your sensations.
Stay out of your past and future; just be here now with a focus on sensation.
If you become distracted, simply return a strong focus on your immediate experience and the sensation of it.
Although various postures have been used in Vipassana, a basic sitting meditation posture may be best for you.

A Sample of Vipassana Mind Training

In sitting position simply notice your breath as you are now breathing. Do not control your breathing, just notice it. With your eyes opened or closed, relax your jaw, bodily muscles, and move into a slower, deeper breathing pattern. Refine your attention so you can become aware bio-perceptually of the feeling of your breath in your body. Many thoughts will come into awareness; simply allow them to pass and return stronger attention to the feeling of your breath as you breathe in and out. As you sit quietly paying strong attention to the feeling of your breath, notice gently what you are seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, and smelling. Just pay close attention without judging, associating, following, expanding, or responding to whatever arises in awareness. Starting at the very top of your head, pay close attention to any sensation that arises. You may even notice that the attention by itself may cause some form of feeling. Slowly move to the tip of your nose, then to the center front of your throat. Just noticing sensations in a more concentrative manner. Move onto another part of your body and just pay attention to the sensations as they arise and fall away. Practice pure awareness without evaluation, seeking, dreading, etc. As you also notice thoughts and emotions arising, simply label them “thought” and “emotions.” Do nothing with them; simply continue to pay strong attention to the sensations you notice in various parts of your body. To extend this practice, select one part of your body to pay strong attention to it for 15 minutes or more.

Refer to Hart. W. (1987). The Art of Living: Vipassana as Taught by S. N. Goenka. SanFranscisco, CA: Harper Collins. Gunaratana, B. H. (2002). Mindfulness in Plain English. Boston: Wisdom Publications, pp 39-67. Marlatat, G. A. et al. (2004). Vipassana meditation as a treatment for alcohol and drug use disorders. In S. C. Hayes, V. M. Follett, and M. M. Lineman (Eds.). Mindfulness and Acceptance: Expanding the Cognitive-Behavioral Tradition. New York: Guilford Press, pp. 261-287.

By Anthony R. Quintiliani, PhD., LADC

From the Eleanor R. Liebman Center for Secular Meditation in Monkton, Vermont

Author of Mindful Happiness

New Edition of Mindful Happiness in Production…Coming soon!

May 19, 2015 By Admin

Benefits of Regular Meditation Practice

Many Benefits of Mindfulness and Vipassana Meditation

The Dalai Lama (Gyatso, Tenzin), the world leader of Tibetan Buddhism, and Paul Ekman, the world famous Psychologist of human emotions, have teamed up to discuss how to use mindful emotional awareness skills to become more emotionally balanced and compassionate. These two highly skilled practitioners have listed 21 potential benefits of regular meditation practice. These will be listed below.

1) Attention and concentration mind training expand the gap in time and space between stimulus and impulsive emotional reactions, thus improving emotional and behavioral balance in responses to stressors.

2) Meditative focus on breath awareness helps to calm both the body and the mind, and become an alternative focus of attention when stressed.

3) The time pause that comes from meditation practice helps you to develop more adaptive responses to emotional triggers.

4) It is suggested that you maintain a mindfulness journal about regrettable emotional reactions in your life, as well as your improvement in emotional balance.

5) Using vipassana awareness of the arising of phenomena, work at catching the earliest possible arising of unhelpful emotional reactions. Stop, breathe, take executive control, and defer to a more adaptive response.

6) Regular meditation practice improves your ability to perceive and respond to the emotional reactions of others, thus improving interpersonal interactions.

7) Mindfulness-based awareness helps you to use your facial emotions to improve emotional issues both intrapsychically and interpersonally. Smile and laugh more often!

8) Regular meditation practice, especially vipassana, will improve your ability to feel emotional sensations in your body (interoception), thus giving you a small window of time to use executive functions to improve your responses.

9) Regular meditation practice enhances executive functioning and weakens limbic emotional reactivity, thus enabling you to shorten time periods of negative reactivity and shift back to your emotional baseline more quickly.

10) Meditation practice helps you to discover the behavioral implications of emotional and behavioral reactivity; you begin to understand how a stimulus situation leads to impulsive emotional reactions. Once you know your strongest triggers, you are in a better position to deal with them constructively.

11) Improved mindful awareness of increasing mind-body reactivity helps you to separate from it more quickly, and activate a more adaptive response.

12) Rather than “I am angry” regular meditation practice helps you to label emotional feelings as “I am feeling anger.” This slight change in verbal description helps to separate your mind-body system from the internal reaction to an external trigger. Anger is arising, but you are not the anger.

13) Learning meditative breathing techniques helps you to use breath as a diversion of attention away from reactive stimuli and triggers. This re-assignment of attention reduces your emotional reactivity and calms the body.

14) Meditation practice, especially vipassana, helps you to become more aware of how to attain freedom from emotional suffering. All phenomena are impermanent, so just wait it out rather than reacting emotionally. Patience is good!

15) Improved awareness in the present moment helps you to better avoid and respond better to emotional situations that may trigger unhelpful emotional reactions. Wise-mind skills help us greatly.

16) If you experience strong afflictive emotions (unhelpful, unwholesome), do your best to shift responses into the opposite directions. This mindfulness skills is much like “opposite action” in Dialectical Behavior Therapy.

17) Use present moment mindfulness skills to increase the neuronal power of happy, good, and wholesome experiences and memories in life.

18) Practice letting go of your self-cherishing, and do more to help others improve their emotional experiences in life. Compassionate acts of kindness help both parties – the giver and the receiver.

19) As within The Four Noble Truths, recognize that suffering is normal, and that meditation practice is one way to reduce personal suffering.

20) Along with the joy of meditation, do much more gratitude practices. Be aware and happy with what you do have right now – all those things you may take for granted that are actually quite special. You may want to keep a brief daily gratitude journal.

21) Remember that your thoughts, words and deed become how you impact your own emotions and the emotions of others in the world. Be wholesome and compassion – kind in your thoughts, words and actions.

For more information refer to Dalai Lama (14th, Gyatso, Tenzin) and Ekman, P. (2008). Emotional Awareness: Overcoming the Obstacles to Psychological Balance and Compassion. New York: MacMillan Audio Book, CD#6.

By Anthony R. Quintiliani, PhD., LADC

From the Eleanor R. Liebman Center for Secular Meditation in Monkton, Vermont

Author of Mindful Happiness

CLICK HERE to Order!

April 15, 2015 By Admin

Path to Vipassana Meditation:

The True Nature of Phenomena

Here I will present common steps in the process of vipassana meditation. My presentation will end with a brief discussion of nirvana (enlightenment).

1) It will be helpful not to have strong conceptual intention about your goal of attaining insight. You will know when you have entered it via your experiential insight NOT your conceptual learning. You will need to cultivate strong mindfulness so the mind can observe itself; you will also need to cultivate strong concentration so you can apply steady and sustained awareness.

2) Sit very still with internal and external quietude. After sitting for a while, and after sharing silent loving kindness with others, focus full attention on the object of attention – for now your breath. Maintain only present moment awareness while meditating on your breath. Now simply allow your breath to breathe you. On each inhalation and exhalation focus strong attention of the flow of air-sensation at the rims of the nostrils. Continue this focus; your distractions should lessen.

3) Pay close attention to the rims of the nostrils. Allowing the breath to flow, notice that there are two pauses – one on inhalation and one on exhalation. Notice that if you pause too long, tension develops. You may become lost in the cycles of inhalation, exhalation and the pauses. However you explain the pauses (i.e., at the end of exhalation, or at the beginning of inhalation), they overlap. So it is easier to simply notice the gaps without cognitive/verbal clarifications or analysis on time and place.

4) Do not verbalize (say or think) anything to yourself about your experiential process. Simply engage in the non-conceptual experience of awareness of breath at the rims of the nostrils. Let go of all impermanent distractions. Rest in the quietude of the gently flowing breath, which keep you alive and well. By now you may begin to “feel” a subtle calmness in your body. Slow it all down in inner and outer experience as you become more silence in the present moment.

5) Along with awareness of flowing air at the rims of your nostrils, you may be quiet enough to allow your mind to become the object of meditation. This is intentional mind observing reactive mind. Notice how the mind often tracks and chases anything that comes into its consciousness. As you steady your attention on the mind, notice how it active in observing the constantly changing mind-processes at hand. This is important! Reduce ego-involvement and ignore all content of what the mind becomes aware of; simply remain focused on the impermanence of everything your mind makes contact with. With stronger concentration, notice the mind-changing changes in experience. Notice that it is all impermanent. Consciousness is simply the repeating and ceaseless arising and falling away of mental phenomena – one thing after another, after another. So, who or what is watching the mind?

6) At this point in your meditation you may begin to open up insight about you attachments, desires, cravings, clinging behaviors, and emotional reactions. Your conditioned life experience has lead to a place where favoring temporary sense pleasures only leads – over and over again – to transitory joy but not authentic happiness. Once the pleasures fade away, your suffering begins again; you desire the permanent to return of those same (usually unsatisfactory) sense-pleasures. A huge insight might be that cyclical chasing of joy via short-term sense-pleasures, while at the same time working feverishly to avoid any direct contact with painful experiences, causes general unsatisfactoriness in life. This insight may scare you a bit. However, it is a doorway into wisdom about the true nature of personal suffering and happiness.

7) Depending upon your level of insight at this point, you may also notice the changing nature of the nature of change itself. You may experience subtle expansion (boundlessness) and concentration (single-exactness) of experiences – just like everything else in the universe. Everything, including you and your awareness, is arising and falling away without end. Single-exactness and sharp arrow awareness of the boundless, empty universe may shock you at first. It is all about a gentle emptiness of all presumed concrete, separate things being one unto themselves. It is all interconnected.

8) At this point in your vipassana meditation, notice that the mind observing the mind can produce limitless changes to focus on (the ten thousand things). Thoughts, emotions, behaviors, all sensory experiences, memories and even spiritual expression are all possible places of mental contact. All of it has conditioned qualitative characteristics (your attachments, desires, cravings, clinging and avoidances). And, even with all this array of “things” – all of it is impermanent in nature. It all arises and falls away. Even you own living body-mind faces the same ultimate fate.

9) In the true reality of things, we must have radical acceptance of things as they are – NOT as we would like them to be. We now “see” that there is no independent origination, things arising of themselves. There is only dependent arising, or everything (all phenomena) being under the causes and conditions of other things. Noting arises on its own. Also we encounter the reality of “inter-being,” or the understanding that all things and phenomena are interconnected in some way. Impermanence rules! Suffering is directly experiencing change – not getting what we crave for, or getting what we want to avoid. Suffering also occurs when we have sense-pleasures we like, then they end. We cannot act to prolong happiness, nor can we act to avoid suffering. So why cling? The vastness of the emptiness of phenomena allows us to be content, even happy, with whatever is right now. Self-cherishing is replaced by equanimity and compassion for ourselves as well as for others. This is the beginning of no-self, as an independent arising entity.

10) If you wish to actively pursue your vipassana practice for a long time, you may encounter nirvana/ enlightenment. It is not a destination; it is an internal state of wisdom awareness that ends all suffering (dukkha). As equanimity expands, we give up the eight vicissitudes of pleasure vs pain, gain vs loss, praise vs blame, and fame vs disrepute. The four brahma vihares become norms – loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity. We let go of ego and the power of sense-door experiences; the mind is now the MIND, and we have much more control over it. It has been tamed! We gently detach from and experience dispassion for all energetic emotional reactions. We are living in the wisdom of so-self. There is cessation of all disturbing emotional reactions. Best of all, we experience this with no nihilistic foundation whatsoever. In fact we are full, more complete and happier now.

May you be highly successful on your wisdom path to ecstasy.

For more information refer to Hart, W. (1987). The Art of Living: Vipassana Meditation as Taught by S. N. Goenka. SanFrancisco, CA: Harper Collins Publishers; Catherine, S. (2011). Wisdom Wide and Deep: A Practical Handbook for Mastering Jhana and Vipassana. Boston: Wisdom Publications; Salzburg, S. and Goldstein, J. (2001). Insight Meditation Workbook. Boulder, CO: Sounds True; Gunaratana, H. (1991, 2011). Mindfulness in Plain English. Boston: Wisdom Publications.

By Anthony R. Quintiliani, PhD., LADC

From the Eleanor R. Liebman Center for Secular Meditation in Monkton, Vermont

Author of Mindful Happiness

CLICK HERE to Order!