The other night I went to Sunday night meditation with my brother Eli who is visiting to help out. If I feel up to it (and not in my super low immunity phase) I’ve been trying to go. It’s held at a Unitarian church near the tenderloin in SF. It’s not the nicest area but I do find it to be a comfortable spot despite the smooth concrete architecture (which I happen to like) and background thoughts that my car might get broken into. Regardless, this Sunday it was led by a German monk and we did something different than the usual sit. We actually paired up and did some exercises meant to bring us into the moment.
These are simple (but not easy) exercises: paired listening, long pauses/silence and 3-5 minute intervals of ‘mindful’ speaking on various topics. It’s interesting to practice ‘applied’ meditation in that it more easily transfers to daily living.
For example one exercise had us pair off and sit opposite one another, just making eye contact. All kinds of stuff tends to come up when you’re staring into someone else’s eyes for minutes without a break.
Try and do that while at the same time remain centered, present and mindful. It’s hard at the start and it gets to feel normal quite quickly. Being at ease when doing this is an awesome mindfulness exercise because it’s real – it’s not artificially sitting with eyes closed pretending to be centered. You really need to work at it when someone is staring in your eyes.
I paired up with Eugene, the founder and leader of the Sunday group (a tremendous mindfulness teacher by the way). At one point we were asked to take turns speaking for 5 minutes on the topic of generosity. Specifically we were asked to talk about how we’ve shown generosity in our lives. In the allotted time between bells, when it was my turn to speak I told him: I was recently diagnosed with cancer; that I have 3 kids under 6 that I try to spend more time with and teach what I might; to focus on them right now while I go through this experience; that I don’t know how much time I have despite that I’m hopeful for a positive outcome; but nobody knows how much time they have; this experience is a gift in helping me face mortality so I might live more fully for my days ahead…and that my recent experience with generosity was actually being on the receiving end of it; that any generosity I’ve shown lately has been utterly overwhelmed by the disproportionality of how much I’ve been receiving: food on my doorstep most nights / daily calls / emails / blog comments / texts / visits… that getting comfortable with being the recipient of so much generosity from others is hard for me (still); that I have no idea how I could ever be able to pay it back; that figuring out how I might pay it back to those in my community, family, social circle, colleagues, humanity at large is a constant topic of thought; I started gushing about how grateful I am for my situation; how much worse it could have been/it could be; that in the end all of it – everything – is upside; we are owed nothing; all of life is generosity, a gift; AND that I notice a shift in my values toward contribution as the highest good.
I now believe that that defining what meaningful contribution looks like is one of the most important questions in my life.