(originally on the Huffington Post 3/24/10)

Boredom is an underrated experience in the modern world. The rate at which new information, new opportunities, new entertainment, new distractions are coming towards us is accelerating at a dizzying speed.

Many people come to meditation hoping to simply slow down the traffic jam in their head — to get a little space, a little clarity, a little “breather.”

We sit down to meditate in order to remember what it feels like to relate simply and directly to being present. We connect with our breathing to stabilize the feeling of being present and also take note of the activity in our mind streaming by. Our practice is to keep coming back to the to the breath and thereby to the present moment. This technique is extremely simple and can be very powerful and effective in calming our mind down and allowing us to feel more centered and balanced.

When we jump in and actually spend some time practicing meditation in this way, most of us will experience what my teacher, Trungpa Rinpoche, called “hot boredom” — actually a kind of irritation based on a contrast between the habitual speed and energy of our everyday mind and the spacious and open quality that we have now begun to cultivate.

Due to our accumulated restlessness, inertia, and hyper-active lifestyles, we have actually developed a kind of allergy to simply sitting still and being present without making that into yet another project. It is like coming out of warp drive into a more moderate speed. In musical terms it would be characterized as a decelerando!

For those of you who are beginning to explore meditation practice, I suggest that you allow yourself to actually experience this “hot boredom” and not just jump off the cushion when that kind of restlessness is experienced. If you can stick with the practice and keep working with the speedy energy of your mind without freaking out or bolting, there is a very good possibility that you will be able to pass through the experience of hot boredom and reach the next gateway in your meditation practice, which Rinpoche called “cool boredom.”

When we hang in there and taste cool boredom as no big deal, we may begin to experience more ease and relaxation in our mind and in our life. We might find that we do not need to race to fill every possible gap, every possible open space with activity, projects, and accomplishment. We might actually find ourselves at the neighborhood coffee stop, taking time to “smell the coffee” — not just gulping it down to keep the rocketship of our life racing along.

Experiencing hot and cool boredom in this way could be, in fact, just what the doctor ordered!

(see previous post — Taking Your Seat: Simple Meditation Instructions For Ordinary People)

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(originally on The Huffington Post 12/24/09)

I think it’s fair to ask ourselves early on, why are we afraid of just sitting still? Why are we terrified of that? Or irritated by it? Actually it’s for you to find out. But I would like to suggest the possibility that we are afraid of ourselves. We are quite literally afraid of ourselves.

In the teachings of Buddha, and particularly the Shambhala Buddhist teachings, one thing that’s said is that you don’t have to be afraid of yourself. You can be at ease with yourself and your mind. You don’t actually have to fill it with all kinds of activities and plans and ambitions to feel wholesome and together, and you can develop a good sense of being present and enjoying the moment and appreciating your life.

But we’re not used to that. We’re really not used to that. We’re used to projects and fulfilling them and succeeding and failing and commenting and etc. etc. etc. Our minds, as you will soon see, have become a run-on sentence — a James Joyce novel with no punctuation in sight. We’d give our right arm for a semi-colon. A period would be such a relief, a paragraph — a space between two thoughts.

The beginning point of this practice is what we call making friends with ourselves. That is obviously the ground for making friends with somebody else. You have to have some relationship with yourself to start with before you can communicate skillfully and compassionately with others. This approach is clearly presented in the example of Buddha.

There have been some wonderful moments in my studies when I got to spend time with some truly great lamas (teachers). They were so inspiring just by being who they were. My wife, Cyndi Lee, has this thing she says, “I’ll have what she’s having,” or “I’ll have what he’s having” — that’s what good teachers should feel like. You should get a direct transmission straight from who that person is. So regarding these wonderful teachers, one of their best aspects is just that you are magnetized by their sense of being. It’s royal in a way — true royalty, not based on wealth and power — just based on true nobility of spirit.

But once you’ve found such a teacher, even then they send you off to be with yourself most of the time. There’s no Buddhist teacher worth his or her salt who’s going to sit there and hold your hand. It just doesn’t happen. You get a transmission from this person and they’re saying “you can do it”. That’s one of the things my teacher, Trungpa Rinpoche, used to say repeatedly — “you can do it!” He had this little squeaky high voice, “you can do it!”. But even in the programs where he was present, maybe for eight hours a day or more, people were just doing meditation practice on their own.

So the whole notion of finding mama, who’s gonna spiritually milkfeed you, and that somehow by feeding off that person’s divinity and accomplishment you can skip the step of developing yourself, is possibly wishful thinking. We do have to go home and we have to pay the bills and we have to relate to our mind. Everything’s reminding us of our minds — it’s so annoying. We’re late for this thing or that thing, and it reminds us of our mind, and someone’s irritating us and it reminds us of our mind, and we fall in love and it reminds us of our mind.

So meditation practice is like saying, “let’s get right at it, let’s see what’s under the hood. Let’s stop driving the car around hither and yon and let’s just have a look under the hood” — a friendly look. We need to have a merciful attitude. Sometimes we’re too hard on ourselves in a non-productive way. It’s very common. And sometimes we’re too lazy, also very common. So our approach is learning to find a middle way between being too lazy and being too hard on ourselves — not too tight and not too loose.

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