By Yael Wasserman

Metta, loving-kindness, is a term most yogis at BMIMC are familiar with. It’s something we all aspire to. Something innately good that we would like to see more of, in ourselves and in those around us. Often a metta chant is recited at the end of the day during retreats before the yogis retire for the night. Teachers sometimes talk about it in dharma talks. Some teachers include metta sessions in their retreats. Metta meditation (metta bhavana) appears in many suttas. Yet unlike vipassana there are not a lot of opportunities for intensive metta bhavana practice.

It seems the reason for this is in the way that meditation was introduced to the West. Many of the first generation of western Theravada dharma teachers trained in the insight meditation (vipassana bhavana) systems that came out of Burma. It’s not by accident that our Centre is called the Blue Mountains Insight Meditation Centre or the famous US centre the Insight Meditation Society is so named. And of course we have the almost mainstream “Vipassana” organisation of S.N. Goenka. These were conceived first and foremost as places for insight practice. As such metta, while revered, has tended to present as something peripheral to the main game. Yet metta bhavana is a practice in its own right. And as with vipassana, it can be practiced for sustained periods in retreat as well as in daily life.

I have been fortunate enough to practice intensive metta bhavana both at BMIMC and in Burma under the guidance of Ariya Baumann, Venerable Virañani and Sayadaw U Indaka. They teach the classical form set out in the Visuddhimagga where the yogi starts by radiating metta towards themselves, then to a benefactor, followed by a dear person, a stranger, an enemy and culminating with radiating metta to all beings.

My initial impression of this style of practice was that it felt mechanical. Repeating the phrase “May they be well, happy and peaceful” ad nauseum felt forced and artificial. But after a few days the practice started to feel more authentic, spacious and joyful. Compared with my experience of vipassana, metta bhavana is far more gentle, and is often profoundly pleasant. I have never experienced the level of contentment or feelings of unconditional kindness for others that I have experienced on a metta retreat. Even though I’m not at a stage where I can sustain this outside of retreat, seeing that these qualities of mind can be cultivated to such an extent and experienced repeatedly proves that we do have the ability to transform and to become better human beings.

People I talk to about metta practice often report an aversion to the Visuddhimagga form similar to what I experienced when I first started. Sadly, many conclude this means metta meditation is not for them. I suspect in some cases this is because they haven’t given the metta the time it needs to arise. Possibly they have practiced just for a few sessions in a predominantly vipassana retreat. But for many people, perhaps even most, it takes several days of continual practice for true metta to arise, so for this reason I encourage people who want to explore this amazing and beautiful quality of the mind to sign-up for a metta retreat.

Of course, a metta retreat is not all roses.  Just like vipassana, it is in its own way, hard work and there are good days and bad days. But I have found the gentleness of metta allows me to be much easier on myself which, as someone prone to striving, makes finding the sweet spot of right effort far less of a struggle.

Practice Interview with Sayadaw with Ariya translating.

If you are interested in exploring metta bhavana further, Sayadaw U Indaka is leading a nine-day metta retreat at BMIMC in December. He also hosts and co-teaches two two-week metta fusion retreats with Ariya Bauman and Ven. Viranani at his monastery in Pyin Oo Lwin in northern Burma during January and February every year. If you would like more information please refer to the Chanmyay Myaing Meditation Centre website.

May you be well, happy and peaceful!

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Yael Wasserman is member of the BMIMC Management Committee and former resident staff member.

By John McIntyre

A number of us with connections to BMIMC were fortunate enough to attend a week-long study-practice retreat with Bhikkhu Anālayo, who is well-known for his commentary on Satipaṭṭhāna: The Direct Path to Realisation. An esteemed scholar with a gift for lucid expression, he is also an inspiring teacher and practitioner. In a number of books since Direct Path he has explored the ‘thought world’ of early Buddhism. We owe a great debt of gratitude to Jill Shepherd for bringing about Anālayo’s visit and singlehandedly organising and managing the retreats.

The retreat involved mornings of study of texts, employing a group process examining the implications for practice. Anālayo’s scholarly methodology followed his Perspectives on Satipatthana. This compared the Theravadan text of the Sutta with later versions preserved in Chinese, making it possible to estimate what was added and changed over the centuries. The point of this scholarly work is primarily to inform meditation practice, by revealing the earliest elements of the Suttas.

We were privileged to be given an entirely fresh understanding of Satipaṭṭhāna meditation, an approach that challenged some commonly accepted and fixed ideas about the practice, including those we have inherited through the Goenka or Mahāsī traditions.

Anālayo’s approach emphasises Satipaṭṭhāna meditation as a practice of open awareness informed by a range of specific contemplations of the body, mind and dhammas included in the four Satipaṭṭhāna domains. The afternoons and evenings were given over to practice with guided meditation of these specific contemplations, growing ever more complex as each day introduced more elements.

New insights into Satipaṭṭhāna practice emerged in small group discussion of the texts, and the various philosophical issues that arose. There was an emphasis on recovering an understanding of the Satipaṭṭhāna meditation as an open and flexible practice. It was striking how mindfulness was understood as ‘embodied mindfulness’ and ‘knowing the presence of the whole body’ as the ‘hub’ of an entire schema of Satipatthana practice in ten specific contemplations.

As an example, Anālayo recommends a specific contemplation of the anatomical parts of the body simplifying the classical ‘32 parts’ in a series of body scans contemplating ‘skin, skin’, ‘flesh, flesh’, ‘bone, bone’, with awareness of the unattractiveness of the body. There are further contemplations of the elements in the body, and its impermanence, culminating in the contemplation of death. Details on these practices with guided meditations by Anālayo are generously made freely available.

A sense of Satipatthana as an open and dynamic field of practice was (in passing) contrasted with the way the Theravada over centuries systematised the Buddha’s teachings, as in our own time, the ‘modern vipassana movement’ has further systematised the teachings on Buddhist meditation. Thus Anālayo challenges the strict Theravadan distinction between samatha (tranquillity) meditation and insight (vipassana) meditation, as a restriction not found in early Buddhism. It is a later development to simplify transmission.

In any system, there is a reification of qualities. This certainly seems to be true of mindfulness, in our own time, when it is abstracted from its doctrinal context to play a part in Western psychotherapy. There is a loss of the understanding of the dynamic relationship of sati to other qualities in different contexts (as a Faculty, as an Awakening Factor, as a factor of the Noble Eightfold Path). This complex understanding of sati is well-developed in The Direct Path to Realisation and one of the book’s distinguishing features. It was a joy to have this come out in the discussion.

In another philosophical aside, Anālayo  remarked that in early Buddhist thought, mindfulness’ (sati) and ‘clear knowing’ (clear comprehension, sampajañña) were regarded as distinct and cooperative qualities, just as they appear in the Sutta’s refrain, whereas in later Buddhism, these qualities became conflated (literally, fused). It has been observed (I think by Joseph Goldstein in his talks on the Satipatthana) that the Sutta mentions mindfulness in the beginning, but it is the ‘clear knowing’ of the meditator that is continuously emphasised in the various contemplations.

Also in this philosophical vein, Anālayo remarked that early Buddhist thought did not hold, as our thought-world does, with a mind-body dualism where mind is equated with brain rather than the entire nervous system, There is an important implication for practice—what understanding can replace Cartesian dualism? Anālayo held up the five fingers of his right hand, and signified it was the Five Aggregates (form, feeling, perception, volition and consciousness).

In the treatment of the other three Satipaṭṭhānas, Anālayo gives some emphasis to the contemplation of feeling (vedanā nupassanā), recommending a body scan, exploring pleasant, unpleasant and neither pleasant nor unpleasant feeling, its impermanence and therefore dukkha.  The third and fourth domains are practised together. Contemplation of Mind  in terms of the presence of mindfulness, the presence or absence of distraction due to desire, aversion or delusion, leads on to Contemplation of  Dhammas, the investigation of the Five Hindrances and the transition (with their overcoming) to the contemplation of  the Seven Awakening Factors. This focus finds justification in textual criticism that reveals that certain doctrinal elements, notably the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path, were later inclusions in the Sutta.

There is much more to be told, but happily this is to be found in full in Anālayo’s most recent book on Satipatthana Meditation: A Practice Guide. Again, we thank Jill Shepherd for making this rare experience available, and hope that Bhikkhu Anālayo will return in the future.

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John McIntyre has a long association with BMIMC since his first introduction to the Mahāsī tradition thirty years ago. He now lives in Canberra and assists Lesley Lebkowicz with the Canberra Insight Meditation Group and coordinates its Dhamma Discussion.

By Jill Shepherd

At the end of a recent nine-day retreat, one of the participants asked a common question about readjusting to post-retreat life: “How can I transition back to the world of devices, stressful jobs, and ‘no time’ syndrome, and infuse mindfulness and metta into daily life?”

Over the years, I’ve heard dozens of meditation teachers respond to this kind of question by talking about the importance of maintaining a regular meditation practice, as a way to mitigate the challenges of daily life. But this time, something about that standard response felt inadequate.

This particular retreat was held at an off-the-grid retreat centre in the middle of the New Zealand bush.  Perhaps because of the quietness of the setting, by contrast, the relative insanity of ordinary life felt acutely obvious. I started to think that instead of trying to adjust ourselves back to that insanity, a more sane approach would be to question the assumptions and norms that we’re living by. Because if the way we’re leading the rest of our lives is basically hostile to the qualities of kindness, compassion, calm and clarity that we so value on retreat, then a few minutes of metta and a few moments of mindfulness each day is probably not going to have much effect.

In the way that the dharma has come to the West though, so far, more emphasis has been placed on meditation practices than on what we do off the cushion. As a result, most people who come on retreat have a sense that they’re meditating in order to change their lives, but they don’t always understand that they might need to change their lives in order to meditate more effectively.

On one level it’s obvious that meditation doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and that what we spend the rest of our lives doing will have an effect on our minds when we do sit down to meditate. The recent mainstreaming of mindfulness seems to have given many people the impression that a meditation practice of 15-20 minutes a day should not only be able to reduce all the stress of being hyper-busy, alienated, and exhausted, it should also bring us into states of deep calm and transformative insight! Then, if the practice doesn’t produce the expected results, they either blame themselves for not being good enough meditators, or blame the practice for not working.

If we look at the Buddha’s teaching of the Noble Eightfold Path though, three of the eight path factors are about how we live in the world: Right Speech, Right Action, and Right Livelihood. All of these have a direct impact on our meditation practice, but Right Livelihood in particular has a strong effect. It’s what we spend most of our time and life-energy engaged in, so it conditions us more deeply than things we do only occasionally.  Therefore, if we want to experience the deeper benefits that insight meditation promises, then looking more closely at how we live the rest of our lives is crucial.

Livelihood in this context doesn’t refer just to paid work. According to Gil Fronsdal, the Pali word for Right Livelihood, sammaajiva “means the way one lives,” so it encompasses more than one’s job or occupation. “It includes such lifestyle choices as what we buy, consume, use for housing, and rely on for financial support. It also includes how we parent, care for our family, or live in retirement. When walking the Eightfold Path the question regarding Right Livelihood is whether or not the way we live moves us toward more compassion, peace, and freedom. Is it nourishing? Does it support the development of ease and insight? Does it help us become a better, happier person? Does it help others?” [1]

If it doesn’t, then we might need to make some difficult choices and difficult changes; ones that bring us into closer alignment with our deepest aspirations, and support us to experience the full benefits that this path of practice offers.

[1] Gil’s study guide on the path factor of Right Livelihood includes many other helpful reflection questions, and suggested practices for exploring this aspect of our lives. https://media.audiodharma.org/documents/Right_Livelihood_Study_Guide.pdf

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Jill Shepherd is a regular teacher at BMIMC and former Centre manager

By Margie Sampson

Before I was on staff at BMIMC, I used to hear ‘Winter Recess’ and think of it as a  cosy time, maybe staff roasting chestnuts around an open fire, blankets,  pink cheeks-  a time for contemplation and regrouping, while outside, the grounds were still and white with frost.

Well, the BMIMC grounds ARE still and white with frost, but otherwise the centre has been a hive of activity over this winter break.  After the one month retreat with Sayadaw U Vivekananda came to a close, the house was stripped of all of its furnishings preparatory to the carpet being pulled up. Our Vesak Appeal this year raised money to re-carpet Sasana House, where the carpet was becoming threadbare in high traffic areas and thoroughly munched by carpet beetles in the teacher’s sunroom. The original carpet was laid in the late 1980s/ early 1990s (by our collective reckoning), and had served well over 20 + years.  Daniel put in a super effort with Bugs to move all the furniture out and then pull up the carpet exposing some lovely floorboards, which, unfortunately due to the cold, will have to stay hidden. A beautiful pure wool new Berber carpet was laid  ( it matches the old one in quality, so we know it will last just as long!) with extra thick underlay for better insulation and reduced heating costs. Yogis mindfully walking through the house now will note how very bouncy it is…. ‘noting springy, noting woolly….’….   Moving all of the furniture, the office and the linen cupboard also gave us an excellent opportunity for some spring…(well, mid-winter) cleaning  and re-organising.  Funds kindly donated for Vesak have covered half the cost thus far, with the rest coming from the Centre’s building fund from previous Yogi donations. Saddhu Saddhu Saddhu. 

Other fun winter activities have been the continuing re-stumping of the staff verandah, which on inspection had been laid down with no foundations on bushrocks, and had rotting crossbeams and had dropped so much so that we could see daylight peeking under the wall in verandah room 1! Daniel, our wonder handyman and jack-of-all-trades has put in new brick foundations, dug proper drainage and replaced some of the floor timbers. The wall along the teacher’s sun-room has had damp issues for a long time, so Daniel & Bugs have also dug a trench alongside that wall, laid geo-textile and filled the trench with gravel, so water will flow away from the wall and down under the house.

It’s been a messy, clay-ey job in quite low temperatures, slowed by inclement weather – however, the winter recess works perfectly for infrastructure projects like these before we ramp up again for the retreat ‘season’ in the second half of the year.

With grateful thanks to our hard workers onsite and the generosity of BMIMC donors.

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Margie Sampson is the BMIMC Resident Centre Manager