Mountain Meditation

Picture in your mind’s eye, as best you can, the most beautiful mountain you know or have seen, or can imagine, just holding the image and feeling of this mountain in your mind’s eye, letting it gradually come into greater focus… 

Observing its overall shape, lofty peak high in the sky, the large base rooted in the rock of the earth’s crust, it’s steep or gently sloping sides… 

Noticing how massive it is, how solid, how unmoving, how beautiful, both from afar and up close… 

Perhaps your mountain has snow at the top and trees on the lower slopes. Perhaps it has one prominent peak, perhaps a series of peaks, or a high plateau… 

Observing it, noting its qualities and when you feel ready to, seeing if you can bring the mountain into your own body so that your body sitting here and the mountain in your mind’s eye become one so that as you sit here, you share in the massiveness and the stillness and majesty of the mountain, you become the mountain.

Rooted in the sitting posture, your head becomes the lofty peak, supported by the rest of the body and affording a panoramic vista. Your shoulders and arms the sides of the mountain. Your buttocks and legs the solid base, rooted to your cushion or your chair, experiencing in your body a sense of uplift from deep within your pelvis and spine. 

With each breath, as you continue sitting, becoming a little more a breathing mountain, unwavering in your stillness, completely what you are, beyond words and thought, a centered, unmoving, rooted presence… 

As you sit here, becoming aware of the fact that as the sun travels across the sky, the light and shadows and colors are changing virtually moment by moment in the mountain’s granite stillness. 

Night follows day and day follows night. The canopy of stars, the moon, then the sun. Through it all, the mountain just sits, experiencing change in each moment, constantly changing, yet always just being itself. It remains still as the seasons flow into one another and as the weather changes moment by moment and day by day, calmness abiding all change… 

In summer, there is no snow on the mountain except perhaps for the very peaks or in crags shielded from direct sunlight. 

In the fall, the mountain may wear a coat of brilliant fire colors. 

In winter, a blanket of snow and ice.

In any season, it may find itself at times enshrouded in clouds or fog or pelted by freezing rain. 

People may come to see the mountain and comment on how beautiful it is or how it’s not a good day to see the mountain, that it’s too cloudy or rainy or foggy or dark. None of this matters to the mountain, which remains at all times its essential self. Clouds may come and clouds may go, tourists may like it or not. The mountain’s magnificence and beauty are not changed one bit by whether people see it or not, seen or unseen, in sun or clouds, broiling or frigid, day or night. 

It just sits, being itself. 

At times visited by violent storms, buffeted by snow and rain and winds of unspeakable magnitude. 

Through it all, the mountain sits. 

Spring comes, the birds sing in the trees once again. Leaves return, flowers boom in the high meadows and on the slopes. Streams overflow with the waters of melting snow. Through it all, the mountain continues to sit, unmoved by the weather, what happens on the surface, by the world of appearances… 

In the same way, as we sit in meditation, we can learn to experience the mountain, we can embody the same unwavering stillness and rootedness in the face of everything that changes in our own lives, over seconds, over hours, over years. 

In our lives and in our meditation practice, we experience constantly the changing nature of mind and body and of the outer world, we have our own periods of light and darkness, our moments of color and our moments of drabness. 

Certainly, we experience storms of varying intensity and violence in the outer world and in our own minds and bodies, buffeted by high winds, by cold and rain, we endure periods of darkness and pain, as well as the moments of joy and uplift, even our appearance changes constantly, experiencing a weather of it’s own… 

By becoming the mountain in our meditation practice, we can link up with its strength and stability and adopt them for our own. We can use its energies to support our energy to encounter each moment with mindfulness and equanimity and clarity. 

It may help us to see that our thoughts and feelings, our preoccupations, our emotional storms and cries, even the things that happen to us are very much like the weather on the mountain, we tend to take it all personally, but its strongest characteristic is impersonal. 

The weather of our own lives is not be ignored or denied, it is to be encountered, honored, felt, known for what it is, and held in awareness… 

And in holding it in this way, we come to know a deeper silence and stillness and wisdom. 

The Hole

On the first day a man walks down a street...
Suddenly the world goes dark. He thinks he is lost.
Then he realises he is in a deep hole. He tries to find his way out, and it takes a very long time. Once he is out the day is gone so he walks back home.

On the second day the man walks down the same street.
The world goes dark again. He is in the hole again.
He takes a while to recognise where he is.
Eventually he finds his way out and so again he walks back home.

On the third day the man again walks down the street.
He knows the hole is there and pretends not to see the hole and closes his eyes. Once again he falls into the hole, and climbs out and walks back home, the day lost once again.

On the fourth day the man walks cautiously down the street.
He sees the hole and this time walks around it. He is pleased.
But the world goes dark again. He has fallen into another hole.
He climbs out of the second hole, walks home and alas falls into the first hole. He gets out of the first hole and walks back home to think.

On the fifth day the man walks confidently down the street.
He sees the first hole and recognises it.
He walks around it but forgets the second hole, which he walks directly into.
He gets out immediately and walks straight back home - to weep and hope.

On the sixth day the man walks nervously down the street...
The hole is there and he thinks "I won't fall into the hole again" and walks around the hole. He sees the second hole, avoids the second hole but as he passes, he loses his balance and falls in. Climbing out he walks back home taking the time to carefully avoid all the holes.

On the seventh day the same man goes for a walk....

... and chooses to walk down a different street.

The Inexhaustible Well

"Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless".

Excerpt from The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles

Saving one starfish at a time.

Based on the story by Loren Eisley.

I awoke early, as I often did, just before sunrise to walk by the ocean's edge and greet the new day. As I moved through the misty dawn, I focused on a faint, far away motion. I saw a youth, bending and reaching and flailing arms, dancing on the beach, no doubt in celebration of the perfect day soon to begin.
As I approached, I sadly realized that the youth was not dancing to the bay, but rather bending to sift through the debris left by the night's tide, stopping now and then to pick up a starfish and then standing, to heave it back into the sea. I asked the youth the purpose of the effort. "The tide has washed the starfish onto the beach and they cannot return to the sea by themselves," the youth replied. "When the sun rises, they will die, unless I throw them back to the sea."
As the youth explained, I surveyed the vast expanse of beach, strectching in both directions beyond my sight. Starfish littered the shore in numbers beyond calculation. The hopelessness of the youth's plan became clear to me and I countered, "But there are more starfish on this beach than you can ever save before the sun is up. Surely you cannot expect to make a difference."
The youth paused briefly to consider my words, bent to pick up a starfish and threw it as far as possible. Turning to me he simply said, "I made a difference to that one."
I left the boy and went home, deep in thought of what the boy had said. I returned to the beach and spent the rest of the day helping the boy throw starfish in to the sea.

Failure is part of learning

As a man was passing the elephants, he suddenly stopped, confused by the fact that these huge creatures were being held by only a small rope tied to their front leg. No chains, no cages. It was obvious that the elephants could, at anytime, break away from their bonds but for some reason, they did not.

He saw a trainer nearby and asked why these animals just stood there and made no attempt to get away. “Well,” trainer said, “when they are very young and much smaller we use the same size rope to tie them and, at that age, it’s enough to hold them. As they grow up, they are conditioned to believe they cannot break away. They believe the rope can still hold them, so they never try to break free.”

The man was amazed. These animals could at any time break free from their bonds but because they believed they couldn’t, they were stuck right where they were.

Like the elephants, how many of us go through life hanging onto a belief that we cannot do something, simply because we failed at it once before?

Failure is part of learning; we should never give up the struggle in life.

Author Unknown

The Story of the Butterfly

A man found a cocoon of a butterfly.
One day a small opening appeared.
He sat and watched the butterfly for several hours
as it struggled to squeeze its body through the tiny hole.
Then it stopped, as if it couldn't go further.

So the man decided to help the butterfly.
He took a pair of scissors and
snipped off the remaining bits of cocoon.
The butterfly emerged easily but
it had a swollen body and shriveled wings.

The man continued to watch it,
expecting that any minute the wings would enlarge
and expand enough to support the body,
Neither happened!
In fact the butterfly spent the rest of its life
crawling around.
It was never able to fly.

What the man in his kindness
and haste did not understand:
The restricting cocoon and the struggle
required by the butterfly to get through the opening
was a way of forcing the fluid from the body
into the wings so that it would be ready
for flight once that was achieved.

Sometimes struggles are exactly
what we need in our lives.
Going through life with no obstacles would cripple us.
We will not be as strong as we could have been
and we would never fly.