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Life for everyone these days have become a lot more challenging and difficult.  There are so many people right now suffering, not able to pay bills, food is difficult to buy, fear of the unknown, people struggling to stay healthy and a myriad of other hardships that we have not faced ever in our lives. A lot of suffering, a lot of fear, and a lot of confusion for billions of people world-wide.  For everyone, I send you all loving kindness, and compassion.  We are all trying to find our way through this and we all need to show compassion to one another in this time of difficulty because we all are struggling with this and we are all in this together. I know it is tough in a lot of cases but we are a lot better together than we are apart.

For me, this past spring and summer, I was put on furlough and then I lost my job.  I kind of expected the layoff after 3 months because the travel industry had not even come close to recovering.  That moment marked the end of another chapter in my life.  I am so appreciative of everything I went through and experienced.  The 2 1/2 years at Apple Leisure Group helped open doors for me, I met more great people, and I learned so much. If it wasn’t for my time at Apple Leisure Group, I would not have taken the initiative to try meditation, I would not have gone to Dragonfly Meditation to start my journey and I would not have met some wonderful people.  With the changes, I started anew.

After I was on furlough and we all were on quarantine, I went to seek out ways I could continue my practice with a community.  I wanted to see if there were other options other than Insight Timer the app. I felt in order for me to continue and grow, I needed to find a community that was meeting regularly.  My studio Dragonfly had very limited sessions online. I needed to find a way to continue my practice and deal with not only the things I was dealing with before COVID but COVID effects and the future prospect of losing my job.  I found another local studio that was offering online meditation sessions and I decided to jump in just like I did with Dragonfly, with openness and curiosity.  I discovered Rooted in Mindfulness another studio here in Milwaukee.  I started in March of this year and was welcomed right away by the community.  That first week started me on my next phase in my meditation journey that yet again has changed my life.  I started practicing on all virtual drop-in days that I could and started experiencing a sense a community that I had with Dragonfly only now online.  I started deepening my practice and adding more knowledge and direction to where I needed to go. This step became crucial in my development.  I am so grateful for taking this next step.  I am learning so much and my practice has brought more peace, clarity, and a sense of calm through all of this craziness.  With the changes, I started anew.

Fast forward about 6 months since I started RIM and a new change happened to me again.  I started a new position working on a 6 month consulting project. Something that scared me and excited me at the same time.  I brought an equanimity to the whole experience, so that I don’t cling to positive thoughts and push away and negative thoughts and feelings.   This change also marked the end of some of the practice time I do with my practice with with RIM but it also gives me an opportunity to take my practice to real life situations outside of the house.  Meditation practice is not effective unless we put it to practice in our real lives.  After my first week of work it was a struggle internally but for the first time I was able to bring awareness to my feelings. I was restless, agitated, anxious at times and I struggled with focus in my personal practice.  One of the most important things about the practice is awareness on how you feel.  Once you have that awareness, it allows you to work with those feelings and respond with skill and compassion when needed.  It allows me to be present.  So in summary the job change I went through was a good thing because I now noticed difficult emotions and thoughts that may have challenged me many times in the past. I now can see them, recognize them, and work through them.  Without my practice, that awareness would not have ever happened.  I would have been caught up in my thoughts and I would have reacted to everything.

For me, the last 6 months have brought me to starting anew.  What is so important to share, is that every day is like a new day bringing different thoughts, challenges, emotions, and perspectives.  No matter what comes in front of us, what changes are in store, starting anew with our practice is how we start and continue to learn and grow ourselves.  My changes that happened to me opened new doors into being a better me.  I look forward for me to start anew each and every day. I look forward to my practice at RIM as much as I can with my new job. I also hope to get back to Dragonfly too.  Changes may be hard but they can help you grow with the help of your practice. Embrace change to start anew.

 

It has been a month or so since I have blogged but I wanted to share some insights on my practice, uncertainty, fear, anger, anxiety, loving kindness, gratitude, and everything else I have experienced during this furlough.  I call this blog compassion.  I am letting my thoughts and feelings flow.

To say that this period in my life and a lot of our lives is crazy, uncertain, hard, saddening, and filled with anger along with a myriad of other emotions is an understatement.  COVID and the recent protests for Black Lives Matter are bringing up a lot of emotions that a lot of people may not have dealt with. These events have shined a light on the suffering that others are experiencing, some for the first time.  For me, this time has really shined a light on all of these emotions inside of me on top of the ones that I already deal with in my own personal life.  This is probably the most difficult time in my life.  I would imagine a lot of you who are reading this feel the same way too.  When I started my furlough from work, I made a commitment to really take time to sit on the cushion to help me understand some of the struggles that I have been dealing with my whole life.  What I have noticed is that the time that I have spent on the cushion allows me to see those emotions and be with them.   I cannot solve all my problems and struggles.  I don’t have many answers and at times and sometimes I am truly confused. One thing I can always do is apply compassion for myself and everyone else during this time.  That compassion allows me to see my emotions but not get caught up in them too much.  If I have compassion for myself and the suffering that is going occurring, I can tell myself that it is okay, suffering is present. I then apply a little love for myself.  Through that practice it helps me not get caught up in the emotions and really understand that there is suffering within myself. This awareness helps me not allow my emotions to”drive the ship” or guide my responses. Like everything, it takes practice but I am better than I used to be.  A very powerful practice when you are really struggling to deal with everything going on.

 

Compassion for others during this difficult time is also very important.  Almost everyone is suffering inside with everything going on. When I sit on the cushion bringing loving kindness to all beings, it lets me know that we are all in this together.   If we all were to have compassion for others, we start to open up to listening to one another.  If we start by recognizing that the person we are talking to or arguing with is also suffering, it allows you to listen a little bit more and have some understanding of where that person is coming from.  Compassion is very important even when we don’t want to give it.  When we open our hearts to others, strangely enough our minds and our ears open up too.  It is amazing how much emotions affect our total body.  That small change in mindset can make a huge difference in how we all approach the world.   In this challenging time, it is very important to give compassion to  both ourselves and others because compassion helps open us up to others and that openness can make real changes happen.

 

Loving Kindness Meditation

For those looking to add a little compassion to your practice, try a simple loving kindness meditation:

 

• Close your eyes and get into your meditation posture
• Start with breath meditation and focus on your breath allowing thoughts and emotions to pass by without attaching to them
• Once you settle into your breath, start by bringing yourself into awareness
• Say to yourself:
  • May I be well and healthy
  • May I feel safe
  • May I be free from suffering and anger
  • May I be loved
• Notice how that feels in your heart

• Then shift your focus to someone you love (past/present alive or deceased)  Say to yourself:
  • May you be well and healthy
  • May you feel safe
  • May you be free from suffering and anger
  • May you be loved
• Notice how that feels in your heart

• Then shift your focus to someone you are indifferent to like a delivery person or person that works at a store you shop at times.  Then say to yourself:
  • May you be well and healthy
  • May you feel safe
  • May you be free from suffering and anger
  • May you be loved
• Notice how that feels in your heart

• Then shift your focus to someone you have trouble at times dealing with.  Then say to yourself:
  • May you be well and healthy
  • May you feel safe
  • May you be free from suffering and anger
  • May you be loved
• Notice how that feels in your heart

• Then shift your focus to all beings human and non-human.  Then say to yourself:
  • May we be well and healthy
  • May we feel safe
  • May we be free from suffering and anger
  • May we be loved
• Notice how that feels in your heart

• Allow the feeling to be present with you for a few minutes after you complete the loving kindness practice.
• After you complete the meditation, notice how you feel.   Do you feel warmness in your heart?  How do feel about others?  How do you feel about yourself?  Notice what the meditation brings you.  If there is a warm feeling, allow yourself to bring it forward through the rest of the day.

 

This simple practice allows compassion and kindness to be with you.  It helps change the way you see the world, just a little bit at a time.

Now that I have had sometime on furlough from my company, I have committed myself more to my practice as well as leading some meditations for family, neighbors, and a friend or two. This gift of time has been really valuable to me to spend time with my mind, heart, and body.  When you get to spend 30-60 min per day to pause, you get to see so many different things; what emotions and thoughts come up, what is causing me to react to difficult situations, why am I hurting about different things.  So many things to see and understand about myself.  The scary thing is that I am just scratching the surface for myself.  I have a whole lifetime remaining to better understand and see everything, still.  The more I spend time on the cushion, the more I have awareness about things in my life.

Lately for my personal practice I have been doing more loving-kindness and heart based meditations.  As you read from above, there are a lot things I am dealing with personally that I need to dig a bit deeper into.  I use breath meditations to open me up to my thoughts and feelings.  It is still very powerful to bring awareness to everything going on inside me.  However, when I use loving-kindness and heart based meditations, they help me to spend more time with my heart and how I feel.  One of the more powerful and compassionate meditations is called R.A.I.N.  Tara Brach is someone I have been following in the meditation circles that really focuses on this particular meditation type.  RAIN stands for Recognize, Allow, Investigate, and Nurture.  It is a way to see the feelings: Hurt, Anger, Frustration, Fear, Anxiety, etc.  and to help you deal with them in a very compassionate and nurturing way.  The goal is to experience the emotion or feeling and spend time with it.  Don’t run away from it.  Recognize the emotion; ” Hurt”. Allow; let the emotion be there,  see if it is okay to be there with you. Investigate; where am I feeling this emotion in body? what does it need? how is that emotion affecting me? Finally Nurture; based on the Investigate, give it the attention needed to be okay.  Does it need someone to support it? Does it need a hug? Does it need encouragement or support?  You as yourself will see what your emotion needs and will be able to help it.  Sometimes it is more painful to spend time with it than others.  Sometimes you may not have an answer as to what the emotion needs.  But just doing the first two parts of RAIN, recognize and allow is very powerful by itself.  The awareness is a very important part of healing and moving forward.  On a weekly basis, I make it RAIN for myself.

 

How to make it RAIN for myself?

 

If you are struggling with emotions, you take a seat in any chair, close your eyes, place your hand or hands on your heart area.  Spend a few minutes to recognize the emotion or feeling that comes up.   Then allow you to feel the emotion as much as you can allow yourself.  If you notice that the emotions are too much, relax a bit to where it is comfortable.  Once you are comfortable to allow with whatever emotion you have, say to yourself, “Hurt”, “Pain”, “Stress”.  Try not to get caught up in the story of the emotion and try not to attach yourself to the emotion, such as “I am hurt”.  Just say the emotion or feeling to yourself.  Spend a few minutes feeling the emotion that has arised.  Start you investigation, see where do you feel it in your body, figure out what it needs.  Spend a few minutes with Investigation.  Finally this is the compassion and loving-kindness part,  give that emotion what it needs.  Help your emotions with compassion.  Notice how that feels within you giving your self compassion.  After you have completed the Nurturing part, open your eyes and notice how you feel afterwards.  Spend a few minutes feeling that difference in your heart, mind, and body.  You can do this meditation any number of times to get to where you need to for each emotion.  If you want more details about RAIN you can learn more from Tara Brach at https://www.tarabrach.com/.

When are feeling down and it is raining outside, you have a tool to make it RAIN for you in such a positive way.  When you are hurting, MAKE IT RAIN!  This will truly make a positive difference in your life.

It has been a while since I blogged about my journey through meditation. I was about to start leading my first meditation sessions but I caught the flu and then we had our state-wide quarantine, so I will now have to wait until Dragonfly reopens from the quarantine to lead my first meditation sessions.  I am still excited for that future opportunity.

In the mean time, I have been doing my daily practice.  Now more than ever, we need to take that extra time that has been given to us through this world-wide pandemic and really spend time with ourselves.  If you meditate, this is a great time to take a seat on the cushion.  This time is really valuable because normally we are all so busy with trying to live that we forget to take that time we need to be present with ourselves and our moments. Most of us are home and will probably not go anywhere.  In addition, a lot of people are really struggling through this, whether it is loss of a job, being sick with Covid-19, losing a loved one, or just being stuck at home without being able to do what you love, there is a lot on our minds right now with an unknown future.  What better time to meditate or take up meditation than now.  I take a seat daily to help deal with the thoughts, feelings, and anything else that effects my life. Sometimes it is relaxing and refreshing, and sometimes it is difficult but everyday is something new to work on. I encourage you to that take up meditation during this tough time.  It does not have to be much. You can start with 5 min a day. It will make a big difference over time. You can use an app like Insight Timer or Headspace, find a good stable chair and a quiet space and you should be good to go.  For a 5 min practice, keep it simple; do a breath meditation and just bring attention to your breath. You don’t need anything fancy.  Here are some easy recommended steps to get the most from your meditation:

1. Sit with an elongated spine in the chair.  Sit up straight.
2. Keep your eyes closed.  If you want to keep them open, focus on a point on the floor near you
3. Feet flat on the floor
4. Hands in your lap palm down or nestled together in the middle of your lap
5. Take a deep breath and you can start on your way.

There are so many benefits from meditation that it can help anyone. There are different kinds of meditation that you can try.  Find what works for you.  You are worth the time that you take for yourself.   Know that meditation is journey that you take.  If you miss a practice, that is okay, you can just restart the next day.  If you need help or assistance with meditation, you can message me through Facebook messenger or you can email me at jimzonoozi@gmail.com.  I will be glad to give tips or pointers.

Be kind to yourself!

 

 

Since I blogged earlier this week, I just have some smaller thoughts about my practice.

When you start meditating, you noticed a lot of times that your mind can generate thoughts and can be a swirl of thoughts and emotions and sensations.  One of the important things you notice when you take a seat with your meditations is that these thoughts are ever changing and almost always about situations that are not really existing.  For example, currently I may be thinking about something I did that I thought was “bad”and how it affects the future.  I kept worrying about what could happen and how that action I did affects others without any facts.  30 min later I could get a small fact that changes the way I perceive the future and as quickly as I got the information, I no longer worry about the future for that.  However, my mind then decides to worry about something else.  Your mind needs to create thoughts.  That is what it is built to do. Meditation allows you to be aware of them and spend some time with them. In doing that, it allows you to think about those thoughts and make decisions about what to do with them in the present.  No need to react when you don’t need to.  Notice your thoughts.  Allow those thoughts to be and spend some time with them.  They need a little attention with kindness, without judgement and with curiosity.

 

This meditative journey has taken me down many paths but the one I want to share today was so important to me that I had to break my cadence for posting my blog.  About 6 months ago I saw this book on a table called Awake at Work: 35 Practical Buddhist Principles for Discovering Clarity and Balance in the Midst of Work’s Chaos by Michael Carroll.  I saw this book and was interested because among many things that challenge me in my life, work is definitely one of them.  I decided to get an e-book on this.  I read this book and finished the last chapter today.  Overall it had some very good things to think about and to incorporate in my informal practice. 

Today when I got to the last chapter called Keep your seat, I was puzzled initially while reading through the story.  It talked about the samurai warriors and that a samurai lord would setup a tent at a location in the battle and would be the location to strategize the plan for battle and once the battle would commence the samurai lord would sit and stay seated watching through the entire battle whether it was 1 day or 10 days.  He would stay seated no matter if his samurai were winning or losing.  Through all of the turns of the war the samurai lord would stay seated.  During that whole time there is a samurai warrior that would stay with the samurai lord. That person’s role was to attend to the lord.  If during the battle the lord’s side had lost and the opponent would take over, the samurai warrior’s job was to kill the samurai lord; the person he was watching, by cutting off his head. This was considered a very honorable thing.  The point that was brought up was that this lord was to be confident in who he was and what he was doing through the whole battle no matter what the outcome.  The lord kept his seat, no matter what happened.

As you might be thinking, what does that mean?   How is that being mindful? Why do I need to keep my seat?  The author does a great job of connecting this story to mindfulness.  Below are the last few paragraphs from the chapter and book. It provides context and it impacted me so very much on why this was so important. He talks about the importance of keeping our seat.

“In order to keep our seat, we must first understand what inspires us to do so. Maybe we keep our seat in order to protect our territory, determined to defend our job or title or prestige under all circumstances. Keeping our seat in this way makes us feel suspicious rather than alert, and stubborn rather than confident. Or we may keep our seat in order not to flinch, like the game of chicken where we test our will against another’s to see who cringes first. We keep a poker face, never letting on how we truly feel. We don’t wince when we lose the fourteen-million-dollar deal. We don’t jump up and down and cheer when we are promoted to CEO; we don’t want anyone to know how deeply we desired the promotion. By keeping our seat in such a way, we feel smug rather than confident, entertained rather than precise, detached and unavailable rather than composed. In order to be awake at work, we cannot keep our seat merely out of stubbornness or as a game of chicken. Rather, we keep our seat because to do so is to be who we are where we are. In the Buddhist tradition, such conviction is developed by quite literally keeping our seat in meditation. When we keep our seat on a cushion, we are not actually challenged by fierce samurai armies or difficult business problems. We face a different challenge: to keep our seat whether we are relaxed or tense, cold or warm, cheerful or sad, rich or poor, healthy or distressed, young or old. We may keep our seats in meditation because we are scared or stubborn at first, then later because we don’t want to flinch. But at some point, by sitting on a cushion, we discover that we are keeping our seat because we are basically fine as we are where we are. We discover our authenticity and that our confidence, alertness, and precision depend on nothing other than our willingness to be who we are where we are. Developing authentic conviction is extraordinarily powerful because we establish how to be before exploring what to do. Such an approach reveals that we have already profoundly succeeded before engaging any activity. Whether it’s running a business or driving a taxi, performing surgery or mowing a lawn, keeping our seat already accomplishes a major part of the task: determining how we are going to be. As a result, we do not lose our composure and power in a rush to do something or be someone other than who we are. Our confidence, alertness, and precision arise naturally by simply and bravely being who we are where we are—without waiting for circumstances to confirm or deny our state of mind. As situations arise, whether disappointing or rewarding, surprising or predictable, we act from our own innate courage, alert to shifting circumstances, precise in our words and deeds and confident in being thoroughly present and available. Keeping our seat in such a way brings the courage and wisdom of the ancient samurai to our livelihood. It is said that the samurai masters who had firmly established how to be before engaging battle had developed a vast point of view called the all-victorious mind: a mind whose victory was timeless whatever the outcome of combat. Today, by keeping our seat on the cushion, at work, and throughout our lives, we too may discover the same “all-victorious” truth about our mind: that being who we are where we are is unlimited, endowing us with a courage that never fades.”

— Awake at Work: 35 Practical Buddhist Principles for Discovering Clarity and Balance in the Midst of Work’s Chaos by Michael Carroll

I left reading this chapter speechless and truly emotional.  It is the point with which we all want to be in life no matter what is going on.  We could be suffering through death, indifference, money problems, and personal struggles or enjoy, happiness, joy, achievements, love and through it all we need to be kept in our seats in the confidence of who we are at that moment. As I look at my journey of where I need to go, I know that I am not there, but I know where I want to go. I may not get there but I hope to make progress in my life to be that confident person to stay in my seat. For those who have not regularly practiced meditation the practice is simple, hard, beautiful, and painful all rolled into one.  When you do your formal practice you are with all of those thoughts and emotions right in front of you.  You are not running away.  You are facing everything as who you are where are at that moment. You can learn to let those thoughts and emotions just be through the practice. Every day is different, some days you are suffering, some days you have joy. You need be confident no matter what, in who you are where you are, that you are doing the right thing and that you will make the best decisions in that moment.

I cannot stress how huge this is for me.  It may not always be apparent, but I do lack confidence in doing the right thing especially in difficult times.  I am not always present because I don’t always have confidence in myself. I spin on things, ponder unknowns and inaccurate futures, and I worry about everything.  I think a lot of people do this and this chapter accurately and explains the power of the formal meditation practice in helping that. This chapter in this book is a life lesson that I will be pondering about for quite some time. I hope you enjoy this insight into me, the practice and this great book.