Enlightening Meditation – Realising Essential Wholeness Now
Spiritual seekers, such as those practising Vajrayana or Tantrayana Buddhism use the tendencies of the seeking mind to bring what is being sought into the here and now. Like other seekers they do the same thing of putting their realization of enlightenment or of their essential qualities in the future. In meditation it is common to use colored lights to experience these qualities. The meditator will visualise an image of a highly realized lama or a Buddha image shining light into their body.
Within many spiritual traditions, the name Buddha is synonymous with one’s unconditioned fully realized mind. Archetypical images of various Buddhas referred to as yidams — symbolic representations of aspects of our essential wholeness or Buddha-nature — are invoked as a way of experiencing different essential qualities. With some meditations, the meditator becomes the Buddha-image. Lama Yeshe referring to meditating with the deity (yidam) Heruuka states, “Tantra says essentially every human being is divine and pure. This is why it is important to identify yourself so strongly as being a deity, to regard yourself as perfectly developed. Instead of seeing yourself as something miserable, transform it into a radiant blue light-body.”[i] However he suggests we identify with the deity we resonate most with and: “The more strongly you identify with the deity, the more transformation you achieve and the more fear and uncontrolled emotion you eliminate”.[ii]
Bless Yourself
In therapy, it can be very powerful for a client to invoke these qualities from a third person perspective. For example, a client is having difficulties with his boss. I’ll ask them to imagine a dialogue with their boss (often done in Gestalt Therapy two-chair work). Instead of just staying in their own first person perspective or taking the second person perspective, it can be useful to step out of the dyad into the perspective of a third person. It’s what I like to refer to as the co-therapist position. From this perspective the therapist can ask the client/co-therapist what essential quality or state of mind the client would need to be in touch with in order to handle that situation better.
Let’s say the client says confidence and inner strength, the therapist can then ask the client to dive into the inquiry: if inner strength and confidence had a color what color would it be? Then, the client would be encouraged to imagine that light shining down from above filling them with inner strength and confidence and ask them to see that affecting their posture, facial expression and voice tone. Once they have an empowered image of themselves, you can ask them how they could see themselves handling the interaction with their boss. If it isn’t quite enough to alleviate the problem they are having, you may need to access other essential qualities in the same way. Once their image of themselves handling the situation is robust and effective, you then have the person step into their empowered self — they will have the first person embodied experience of that way of being.
Then, I suggest that whenever they need to tap into those qualities of being they can feel the light filling them up and radiating out to everyone around them. It can be helpful to have the image of carrying that into a number of contexts.
Essential Qualities and the Meditative Mind
Meditation is a context in which we use methods that help us experience our essential wholeness at all three levels of human: body, soul and spirit. Meditation reawakens our awareness of the infinitely changing nature of experience, or what Buddhists call impermanence. In meditation, as we let our awareness open we realize the thing we call “I”, our personal identity, is not really a thing at all, but rather a network of processes that are constantly evolving and changing. In meditation we learn to rest as the still silent presence of being.
As Sogyal Rinpoche says:
To meditate is to make a complete break with how we normally operate, for it is a state free of all cares and concerns, in which there is no competition, no desire to possess or grasp at anything, no intense and anxious struggle, and no hunger to achieve: an ambitionless state where there is neither acceptance nor rejection, neither hope nor fear, a state in which we slowly begin to release all those emotions and concepts that have imprisoned us, into the space of natural simplicity. [iii]
This experience of resting in the natural simplicity of essential wholeness paradoxically is not so easy for most of us to come to. Recognizing and opening to the essential qualities of the different stages of meditation can help with this realization. The goal of meditation isn’t to make it necessary to formally meditate for the rest of our lives in order to experience the simplicity our true nature, rather it is to live in the simplicity of a meditative mind in which we can be aware of emotions and concepts and appreciate and/or use them when appropriate, rather than letting them unconsciously shape our perception and define who we are. The Enneagram provides us with a useful map of the essential qualities of meditation.
Trust and Permission
Meditation and psychotherapy are contexts in which we learn to access and trust in our essential qualities of being. Giving our selves permission to trust and experience these qualities is often the first step to harmonious living; often, these qualities have gone unacknowledged.
A therapist can ask the simple question, “Can you give yourself permission to experience inner peace? Or be mindful? Or compassionate?” The act of giving oneself permission is a process of claiming our authority and trusting our essential goodness. When we become disconnected from the essential qualities of our innate goodness, we lose touch with the spontaneous intuition of how to authentically respond in any situation. We begin acting how we think we should or, sometimes, we rebel and do quite the opposite. We end up living out of a set of socially constructed concepts that obscure our essential wholeness. At its essence, meditation and psychotherapy give us permission and, through practice, enable us to trust more fully in our essential wholeness.
[i] Yeshe, Lama Thupten The Bliss of Inner Fire, Heart Practice of the Six Yogas of Naropa. Boston: Wisdom Publications (p. 77)
[ii] Yeshe, Lama Thupten The Bliss of Inner Fire, Heart Practice of the Six Yogas of Naropa. Boston: Wisdom Publications (p. 79)
[iii] Rinpoche, Sogyal, (1992) The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, San Francisco: Harper San Francisco (pp. 57–58)
