Stillness- Medicine for the Mind by Ajahn Brahm

Despite the rain, my mood was still rather high throughout the day, expecting what I will be learning from Ajahn Brahm tonight!! Now that wasn't the right mood for the topic of the evening haha! His talk was ever so relevant and simple enough to grasp, yet full of flavor and substance from his jokes and stories. Here is what I can remember;

His first question of the night to the floor is "Are you busy" and "Are you lazy". According to him, being lazy is good but his laziness means doing really nothing and not even allowing our mind to wander around. His daily responsibility as a monk includes running temples, being spiritual advisers of various society as well as flying around giving talks. And his advice to busy people is to do our best when we need to and do nothing when we have nothing to do.

Once he was invited to an IT Technology conference in the States. He demonstrated that holding on a cup for long will bring pain and sore to the arms. The right way of holding should be knowing to put down the cups when our arms get tired and picked up once the arms are rested. Doing so, the arms won't get as tired.

We are too used to and very proficient in doing our best but we are poor in doing nothing. In our home, even if its a mansion, its hard to find a blank wall. And if there is a blank wall, we would put paintings and flower to decorate it. We just have to put something on it. Our mind is as so. Being stillness is to not be affected by the two winds, the past and the future.

Often than not, we are very attached to what has happened in the past, the mistakes we do and all the guilt. He shared with us a useful yet candid method. Write our sorrows and guilt on the toilet paper! Write it as detailed as possible. Then flush it down the toilet. Toilet paper is used to remind us that the thoughts are filthy and the details are to remind us of the problems. Only then can we faced the problem and go on with life. He jokes that no wonder there are more issues with toilet bowl choked in Perth :P

And on the future, he made a bet with his temples as stake that 2012 is not End of the World!! He was puzzled at how we like to worry. With our own sufferings in mind, yet we indulged in stories of others, rumors and watching horror movies.

He mentioned that Samadhi was translated in english since long time ago as concentration and was very wrong. He likes the chinese way of calling meditation as 止观. Simply ceasing the over-proliferating mental process and be in the present moment. He shared a common meditation trick by talking a phrase very gently and slowly making pauses. And when he makes the pauses, that was the moment of stillness, when there are no thoughts. This method could also be applied to chanting of the mantra by reciting OM~~MANI~~PADME~~ HUM with brakes of about 3 to 4 secs in between the words. I tried it and the feeling is nice. Anyone can do it with their own words or religious prayer too.

When we are in an argument, we always shout at each other. When one stops another starts his round of shouting. Situation gets worst. Instead, after one has started shouting or scolding us, we pause for 5mins or so and then speak our thoughts. These little 5mins pause allow the person scolding us to do self reflection on how ill-mannered and uncouth to use such words on another human.

His temple is situated on a hill top and he has been there for 9 long years. One day, he decided to walk up the hill and was astonished by how the landscape was so different. The environment was very much more beautiful and interesting. The colors were much brighter too. Its actually very scientific. The eyes see image by having the light of the image reaching the eyes and stimulating the nerve fibers behind the retinal causing chemicals to interact and form images in our mind. When he is in a car, the image of the scenery just flashed past too quickly and thus the chemicals were not allowed to react totally. The image of the scenery was not perfectly formed. Stillness comes clarity.

At the end of his sharing, he lead a 10mins meditation. He led by asking us to visualise having two heavy shopping bags and both our arms causing so much pain. And later putting them down, feeling the pain going away from our arms.

For the Q&A part, I didn't managed to get the questions but here are his explanations. Concentrating needs effort and when we try to concentrate, we are expending effort to force ourselves to concentrate. These make people getting all tense up doing meditation. Meditation should be fun and feel relaxed after doing it. When we hold up a cup with increasing concentration, the arm shakes and the water inside is not still. Only by putting the cup down does the water gets still. Also, when we are doing our meditation, we should not keep assessing how well we have done. This will just disturb the water. Just let the process run.

He shared an Ajahn Chah story of just stretching out his hand and a mango will drop on his hand. Its a similes of the idea of stillness. One need not shake the tree and the mango just drop. Sometimes we just need not do anything and things will come to us. His similes of the donkey mentioned that its hard to make a donkey move by whipping it. Donkey are famous to be stubborn. To make it move, just hung a carrot in front of it with the stick tied to its neck. When the donkey starts to move forward for a bite of the carrot, it can't as the carrot is moving forward with him. A "buddhist" donkey would stop. This stopping makes the carrot swing further away initially but will swing back forcefully and donkey gets to bite it.

From Ajahn Chah, he also learnt how fun it is to be completely still. In the forest, if one can be completely still, he will not disturb the environment and he will see animals and sometimes even rare forest dwellers coming out of hiding. This can only be achieve in great stillness until not even having the excitement of seeing these animals.

I suppose this is how little I can stored in my outdated hard disk :P Will revise this post when I recalled more of his teachings or will post it on a separate post if its better.

A realization I got apart from the topic itself. A crop can grow when the seasons are right, the water irrigation is done properly, the sun is up and many more other conditions. Any of such conditions were to be missing, the farmer would not expect a harvest. Isn't this so for our practice. How rare isn't it to be in a country free from religion oppression, peace enough to pursue our spiritual progress, a temple to hear the Dharma and a compassionate teacher to share it with us. Let us strive to walk our life with the Dharma :P