The following text is an edited exerpt from a talk by Patrick Sweeney given at a meditation program entitled "Yoga & Meditation" on November 15, 2002, in Ojai, California.

Meditation Practice

The Good News and the Bad News
The basic confidence of our practice is the fundamental understanding that the true nature of our mind, the true nature of our heart, is unobstructed. It's like space, completely open. It's not just a dead space, but it is an intelligent, vibrant, alive and responsive space. It's able to respond dynamically to the world.

The main problem that human beings face is that we have fallen into a state of habitual ignorance of that spaciousness, and we have lost our capacity to experience ourselves and our world without distortion. This habit energy does not just go away because we want it to; in fact, unless met properly, it persists and increases. Our way of life as practitioners of the buddhadharma and Shambhala dharma is to continually create an environment where we can meet ourselves and meet reality courageously and fearlessly.

Shamatha Meditation
Sitting meditation is the environment where the courage, the compassion, the clarity and the insightfulness of our basic intelligence meets the fear-driven or fear-based momentum of our habit energy. Through meditation, we start to be encouraged and we gain a sense of confidence that we can actually work with our mind. The meditation technique of shamatha literally means dwelling in peace. This peace is what comes with the synchronization of being completely engaged, and completely present, right now.

When we sit down to meditate, we encounter the momentum of our habit energy in the form of thoughts, storylines and emotional reactivity. We need a way to work with our minds that will allow this confused momentum to relax. The only way that our habit energy can exhaust itself is by being exposed to a space where it is neither rejected, nor accepted. The habit energy thrives by either being resisted aggressively, or by being seduced and loved. In the space of shamatha our confusion is given no fertile ground in which it can thrive. It's given space, and in that space, it's simply allowed to die.

Shamatha meditation is the environment where it is possible to glimpse the emptiness of the contents of our minds. Emptiness in this case means recognizing that the thoughts, concepts, prejudices and emotions that are the essence of our confusion are not solid and real. They have no permanent, continuous nature. They arise, dwell, and dissolve, and in this process are revealed to lack the solid existence that we, in our confusion, grant them.

The Seed of Emptiness
Once one glimpses the emptiness of something, one is no longer controlled or seduced by it, no longer at its mercy. It's like when children find out that their father really is Santa Claus. There's some kind of a fundamental shift that occurs in their minds. Similarly, when we find out through the practice of shamatha that we are not our thoughts, that we do not have to act on every one of our thoughts, that we do not have to be taken on a roller coaster ride by each and every one of our emotions, then something starts to shift inside of us. And in this tradition we call that shift freedom. That freedom is the essence of our being, our buddha nature.

The starting point of our practice is the ability to perceive choice. In the deep awareness of what is actually true that results from meditation, we witness the arising, the dwelling, and the passing away of a variety of story lines, thoughts and emotions. We also see that we choose to hook into them and believe that they are real. Initially, the major thrust of our practice is to allow this habit energy of believing all of our story lines to slow down. In this endeavor, shamata practice is a very powerful tool. Perhaps for the first time, when practicing shamatha, we discover an environment where there is absolutely no expectation to be other than who we are.

An Unconditional Friendship with Oneself
The purpose of the practice is to appreciate completely what we are. The point is not to judge or reject the habit energy, but to accept it fully. In that acceptance, we start to get some leverage and we discover the capacity to have a more spacious relationship with ourselves. This is the key to meditation: making an unconditional friendship with oneself. It's all right that we have the same issues after all these years. The question, however, is how are we working with them?

When we come to meditation, the activity is not to become a different person. We've spent most of our lives ignoring what we are, living up to expectations and ideals that don't have anything to do with how we really are. The purpose of meditation is to allow ourselves to experience fully what is actually there, not the stories that we've been told, not the perfectionism we have bought into, and not the American dream that's portrayed through movies, television, and advertisements.

The Process of Familiarization
So what is actually there? What does it mean to have a human body? What does it mean to have energy? What does it mean to have a heart? What does it mean to have a mind? These questions aren't answered conceptually, they're answered intuitively, through the practice of meditation, through an ongoing relationship with spiritual practice. These seats that we sit on are referred to as gomdens. Gom means "to make like family", den means seat. Thus, we have a seat of familiarization. Sitting on these seats, we become completely familiar with our confusion. At the same time, we also become aware of our awakened nature.

The technique is simply like a framework, or a net, that catches our body and our energy and our mind when it tries to take flight from what's present. What's present within the context of this technique is body. Not just any old way, but in a very particular way. Similarly, your breath is the natural out-breath. This particular framework becomes the context within which we discover nowness, the awareness of the present moment, over and over again. And that discovery of nowness starts to cut through the momentum of our habit energy, like a laser beam. It cuts through all sorts of confused and inessential material. This quality of awareness that starts to wake up is actually more powerful than the momentum of the habit energy. It's able to penetrate the core of that confused energy, cut through all sorts of dramas and allow those dramas to unknot themselves. That's our practice.

We try to follow the technique without any goal-seeking mind, without any ambition. We simply remain faithful to the spirit of the practice and to the technique. We don't place our mind in some pre-arranged, conceptualized spiritual state. We come back to the simplicity of the present moment, to the technique and to the nakedness of our mind, over and over again.

Facing Fear
Thus, the essence of the path of meditation is to come right up against our fear. Usually, we try to avoid the places that we are afraid of. Instead, we can go directly toward those places. Then, when we come to our edge, we see that it is not as solid as we thought it was, not as real as we thought it was. In fact, most of the time the fear we experience is nothing other than preference. What we begin to see is that our fears are self-created. And by moving towards these fears, we start to find a quality of courage, being able to face our own mind. In just that little thing, something starts to wake up, and we can go deeper. We find a stronger, or more stable capacity to be with ourselves. That's the journey.