In as much as there’s and purpose or meaning to our Awake Local Experience, The Absolute is likely it. It means the sum total of experience, of all the energies and forces of the universe. In so much as everything is energy, the Absolute is all of it.
     There may be as of yet undiscovered or unstudied consciousness energies. It seems likely, but science is only a part of the appeal. What is it that makes us fear death, seek patterns, and crave experience outside ourselves? That’s what we call vitality, and it’s wired into each of us and likely stumped in our DNA.
     So simply acknowledging that the universe and the life in it—our lives—are magnificent is a good way to answer the questions of the Vital self. And this isn’t a metaphysical thing. The universe is energy. Period. We are super-complex electric meat. Celebrate that. Learn from that. Integrate that into your life in meaningful ways.
      Again, it’s what you’re meant to do. So don't be put off by any talk of The Absolute as if we're pushing a worldview or spirituality. We are not. We are simply acknowledging the facts of the universe and our experiences of it. What you do with those facts, to answer your own vital questions, is entirely up to you.
      Maybe try meditating on it.

Thanksgiving is very much about gratitude, or at least it could be. For many of us it will be a challenge.

First let me acknowledge the complication of subjugated and marginalized indigenous people. The past trauma of their persecution has transmitted its familiar jinxes into fresh traumas lived today. That has to be acknowledged before it can be healed. And you’re an asshole if you can’t at least acknowledge that.

But don’t worry, meditation is for assholes, too. (note: great book idea: Meditation for A%#@oles)
And speaking of assholes, back to thanksgiving and what it means in current times to most.

Our family are our best and worst thing for us in terms of our mental health and sense of SELF. They have such power over us that the slightest ignorance can make us feel so small. And yet, without them we’d be nothing. And trust me, we’re better off with them than without.

The best medicine for family trouble, from a meditation standpoint, is the Loving Kindness meditation, or as we call ours, Absolute Love and Kindness. It’s a goto meditation for trauma therapy and a pillar of some kinds of Buddhist meditation systems. The idea is that we extend love and kindness to people, including those we're at with, and sincerely wish for them to be happy and well, such that we ourselves realign our relationship, taking some kind of high road or control.

In our practice, we often imagine before us someone with whom we’re quarreling (always on the menu at Thanksgiving, right?). We try to extend Absolute and sincere love to that person and imagine them receiving it and experiencing it.
It is a powerful exercise that often brings tears in class. And it has the added bonus of extending the same love and kindness to ourselves. Who couldn’t use more self-love and self-kindness?

So soon we’ll have 2 introductory meditations online, one of which will be our Absolute Love and Kindness meditation. For now, a simple googling will get you there. There are some good ones on YouTube. Most meditation apps have a Metta or Loving Kindness exercise. The Waking Up App (I can’t say enough good things about this app) has an entire section devoted to this practice.

My advice is to use this Absolute Love and Kindness, this Metta tool BEFORE, during, and after the holiday to keep yourself positively aligned with the people in your life in a way that keeps your SELF in charge and protected, but engages them in a positive way to balance out any….disagreements that might come up. 

Enjoy your time. Speak to your values and stand up to nonsense or injustice, and have keep a sense of humor if possible. May your Thanksgiving be something worthy of your gratitude. May it truly be filled with Absolute Love. And may you fill it with Absolute Kindness.


Love,
Jeff

Not The Meditative Arts—I’m talking about art, properly. Painting, singing, acting, writing, designing.
I think as far as meditation goes there are two ways to think about art: creation and experience.
Creation of art can be quite meditative, especially if one has the training and intention to create proper art (as distinguished from craft or entertainment—a distinction best left for another post). This isn’t to say everyone has to paint a masterpiece or write a Pulitzer-worthy poem to create art that is meditative. It is instead an acknowledgment of the overlapping skills required and states experienced in both art creation and meditation.
There is a mindfulness and purposefulness required of the act of creation, such that the act is essentially meditative on its own. Think about a meditation lesson where you focus on the skin of your fingertips, where the skin ends and the space around you begins. Now add clay to that space, and experiencing the texture and temperature of the clay as something—you’re not quite sure what—guides your fingers to bend and shape the clay. Putting your awareness at your fingertips in this way is automatically mindfulness training, and it is necessary to making an object of beauty, the real goal or art as far as it can be boiled down into a statement. (see the last lines of Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” for QED)
But art can be meditative from an experiential perspective, too. Take the Grecian urn and it’s lessons, what it is trying to communicate to us through space and time from the person who created it, a person no doubt very much like ourselves. I think about the thesis of a work of art being meditative in the way i think about the Koan tradition, where phrases of wisdom and lines of coded thought are repeated over and over in the meditator’s mind. The point of the Koans seems two-fold to me: giving the mind something to do while meditating and also revealing, often subtly, greater wisdom and understanding.
So think about visiting a museum and contemplating and appreciating works of art from one artist or many. You walk around pondering each piece and eventually a perspective builds and before you know it, it’s three hours later and the docents are telling you it’s time to leave.
Whether as experience or creation, art has a lot to offer the meditator. And let’s not forget the real value: Vitality.

Broadly speaking there are 3 modes of mediation: mental hygiene, spiritual exploration, and reflective contemplative.
Mental hygiene (we often call it tidiness) is what we teach, through practical lessons and exercises, guided by an instructor. For example, what to do with stray thoughts while meditating. It’s one thing for a meditation video or app or facilitator to say “empty your mind,” but what on earth (haha) does that mean? How?
Our mediations are designed to help you understand dealing with these thoughts rather than just telling you to do it while we wait.
Second, spiritual exploration has brought more people to meditation than any other goal or set of guiding principals. Many religious traditions have meditative teachings and many modern systems of meditation come from, in whole or in part, ancient wisdom traditions.
But also think of the greater Consciousness Movement at work in our culture today and things like CE5. Quite a lot of folks are coming to The Dojo for those kinds of experiences.
Then there is the contemplative mode, wherein people use their meditation mind to discover profundities of their life and human experience. Think of the phrase “meditating on it.” Having that kind of intention for meditation can be very instructive and useful, especially when part of a larger system of understanding.
Necessarily there is overlap among the three modes which are, by admission, supremely generalized and reductive. The key to any and all mediation is consciousness. Greater awareness and agency of consciousness is the ultimate goal—stated or not—of any meditative mode.
Awareness and agency of consciousness. Wow. Talk about generalizations! We’ll tackle those subjects in future posts.

I had in my schedule for today’s post “Notes on first class”
I was going to lead with how class started with an emergency—a woman screaming from out front. There was an accident at the busy intersection where our studio is just as out folks were showing up. Quite a commotion of sirens and lights followed, and also of some good people helping her out. Thankfully she wasn’t hurt as badly as she could have been, and thankfully at least one of us thought to say a Loving Kindness for her.
That’s where I want to land, I think, with this post about our first class: the vital lesson of gratitude.
I’m thankful for the newest good human I met and for the important work she does. I’m thankful for Mrs K and her beautiful spirit. I’m thankful for my daughter who knew what a ringer is and was happy to be one. I’m thankful to Nic who couldn’t be there, but is such a big part of everything anyway. And I’m especially grateful for R, the best friend a guy could want and an unrelenting advocate for what we’re doing.
     
Gratitude is one of our GART lessons—that’s Human Goodness and Art— and showing it, not just feeling it, is a powerful way to access our Vitality and keep it flowing.
So thanks again to all who came and couldn’t. To be where we are is a dream enough come true, and we’re just getting started.
With Absolute love—Jeff

Buddhist meditators might recognize the term. It means balance of a sort. The idea is to use meditation, stretching exercises, and GART to create a balanced experience of our SELFs, and expanding consciousness is the key.
This need not be thought of in mystical or New Age terms. Expanding consciousness just means expanding our awareness and experience of ourSELFs and the world. It means getting out of our head and giving our consciousness agency over our body and vitality and mind. 
With that expanded awareness and agency you can do quite a lot.
Equanimity comes from practicing relaxed, aware conditions in our meditations and other exercises so that in our Awake Local Experience we can have some balance, robustness, and flexibility to deal with the world and its challenges. 
The point is not to have several perfect mediations a week. It’s to increase our total awareness of SELF in the world and live in that world more fully and easily. Balance is everything. Our minds, our bodies, our beings—our 3 energies of SELF—can be brought into alignment and equalized to create that living experience.
​It just takes practice. And a teacher. Or a very good app. Whatever works for you.

No. In fact, I go out of my way to avoid the word because it’s misused and overused so much. Mindfulness Meditation refers to a specific therapeutic system that is well-studied and quite excellent. But it isn’t what we do.

We focus more on relaxation and consciousness exploration. Call it consciousfulness.
Most meditation practices use a lot of the same techniques and vocabulary, so anyone who is familiar with Mindfulness will feel quite comfortable with our system. But no, it is not properly Mindfulness Meditation, so we don’t call it that. 

I have had some training in Mindfulness techniques and use an app that employs it quite effectively. I believe it is a powerful tool in a therapeutic setting or when taught by a qualified practitioner. I think you should be wary of anything that claims to be Mindfulness outside of therapy. It is maybe a part of the whole at best, but usually a buzzword without any useful connection to proper meditation. 

Now any little bit helps, so don’t just run away from youtube videos that claim to be mindful just because I said so. Just realize you aren’t getting what the powerful ACTUAL Mindfulness Meditation can deliver in the therapeutic setting. 

Hope this answers any questions about Mindfulness and our programs