Book Report: Why We Meditate by Daniel Goleman and Tsoknyi Rinpoche
Browsing is one of my favorite parts of the library experience.
I came across Why We Meditate, a joint venture from Daniel Goleman and Tsoknyi Rinpoche, in the Peak Picks section last week, and I’m so glad I did.
The book structure is a call-and-response.
In each chapter, Tsoknyi Rinpoche, a Tibetan Buddhist teacher and author, offers a lesson (labeled “The Explanation”) focusing on activities and concepts of meditation, building upon each chapter with more engaging practices and deeper psychological and spiritual ideas.
Following Rinpoche’s lessons, Goleman, a psychologist, science journalist, and author, provides an interpretation (labeled “The Science”) based on anecdotal experiences and corresponding scientific research.
The lessons included in this book are fantastic, especially if you are relatively new to meditation practice. They also carry weight for avid meditators hoping to deepen their practice.
Here are some of the concepts that stood out to me:
The Drop - Before we can heal and grow, we must become aware and accept the sensations we’re experiencing. Using a physical action, we can ground ourselves in present experience and prepare for the work of meditation.
“To heal, we need to feel our emotions in a raw and direct way. Then the wounds and patterns of resistance can start to open up from within.”
Beautiful Monsters - These are challenging emotional patterns making our lives and relationships more difficult. They are different for everyone, but we all carry them. Shame, guilt, anger, jealousy, you name it. Seriously, you should name yours. It helps create separation and activates the process of learning to love your unique monsters.
And make no mistake – we must learn to love them. We can’t wish them away. For many people, the monsters follow us no matter where we go or how hard we try to keep them back. We can accept and work with them, or they will continue to fight us forever.
“Once we make friends with our beautiful monsters, then we are no longer afraid of ourselves.”
Essence Love - Rinpoche argues that there are many different forms of love, the most fundamental of which is Essence Love – “a basic okayness underlying the feeling world.”
This subtle state exists in all of us, all the time. However, the stress of life and the pull of our emotional state can hide it from us.
Yet with practice – “small moments, many times” –, we can learn to return to this state even amidst the most intense periods of our lives.
This concept will likely stick with me above the rest. I’ve been referring to and working toward a state of being “neutral” since I first worked with a therapist in college. I enjoy thinking about this state as the foundational form of love.
Willingness to Suffer – No one wants to suffer. Avoiding suffering drives many of our primary instincts, and with good reason. Yet, by avoiding suffering, we actually welcome greater pain.
When we choose to suffer willingly, we take control over the experience. And when we suffer on behalf of others, often our pain starts to dissipate.
“Compassion is willing to suffer. The benefit of others becomes more important than avoiding discomfort in ourselves.”
The Changing Self – When we think about ourselves, it’s easy to fall into the trap of viewing the self as a concrete, static thing. “This is who I am,” or “that’s not what I am.”
In reality, our sense of self is constantly changing. We change based on who we’re with, whether or not we’re hungry or tired, our financial situation, past events, future plans, and on and on and on.
By accepting our ever-changing self, we can become more aware of the factors influencing how we feel in each moment, detach from anything that doesn’t serve how we hope to feel in that instant, and release some of the stress that comes from feeling like we need to control everything all the time.
With time, acceptance can grow into an expansive feeling of freedom.
“The sense of self keeps changing. It comes and goes. We form and shift and dissolve various identities in response to different situations.“
Thanks for sticking with me if you made it this far! This short book offered a lot of valuable lessons for me.
If you’ve ever hoped to start a meditation practice or want to push your current practice to a new level, I highly recommend Why We Meditate as a great place to begin.
I’ve been calling these “Book Reviews.”
I transitioned to “Book Report” starting with this post because it’s more fun.
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