There is a wonderful profile in today's San Francisco Chronicle of a local meditation teacher, the Reverend Heng Sure. It fits right into my discussion. I recommend it very highly.

Q: Not everyone can devote themselves to spiritual pursuits like a monk does. People need to earn a living, raise their families and all the rest of it. So, what are you suggesting they do?

A: I would say that if you can sit in your bedroom, if you can sit in traffic, if you can sit at your cubicle, then you're really doing something. How many workplaces do you know where people are in despair? They're just sitting there feeling undervalued, so frustrated that their idea got shot down or whittled away, or they had the project of their life transformed by some know-nothing junior executive. If we had workplaces where people spent eight hours a day really taking care of their minds and refusing to let themselves get anxious or fall into despair, then that would be something. That would be the IPO to invest in.

Readers of this blog will recall a period last fall when I was regularly meditating on BART (rail mass transit where I live), for my twenty-minute AM ride, and sometimes for my PM ride, too. I was mighty proud to have reached this point where sitting wasn't excruciating, and I could meditate each day. I had, through my own experimentation, become hip to the fact that my meditation practice needed to be personal. It needed to fit with my life. I had struggled through many false starts to get here. I had blamed myself for years because my back and knees hurt so bad when I sat on a round cushion in a zendo, and I didn't want to sit quietly and follow my breath; I only wanted to get up and stretch and walk around and socialize and not meditate at all. I thought this torment was "meditation," and that I was failing at it. No. This brings us to my first "rule" for beginners, the first thing I wish somebody had told me years ago:

1.) If meditation is unbearable--or unbearably inconvenient--you're doing something wrong. It's time to back off, reassess, and change your approach.

In my case, personalizing my practice has meant always meditating in physical comfort, with my back supported, in a seat or chair. It has meant not trying to meditate when very hungry, or cold, or whatever. Making meditation bearable has meant altering the essence of my practice, from following my breath--which never really worked for me--to giving my mind something in the way of a task. The task I've given my mind, when sitting quietly, is to focus my attention in sequence on each part of my body: left foot, left calf, left knee, and so on. It's a modified form of the "body scan" espoused by Jon Kabat-Zinn, in his book Full Catastrophe Living.

After my temporary job in San Francisco ended last December, I didn't have to ride BART each morning and for a while I fell out of the habit of meditation. I was still thinking about how I needed to meditate, and how I missed its benefits (about which more below). But for months, I found reasons not to do it. Finally, one day late in March, I spoke to a peer counselor at the nonprofit jobseekers' organization of which I am a part. I told her about my block.

"What can we do, to get you around this?" she asked. "What non-essential thing do you do regularly, so you could always cut in on this time to meditate?"

"Well, I like to get up and turn on the computer check email first thing in the morning," I said.

"And you're very regular about that?"

"Extremely."

"What if you did not let yourself have any computer time in the morning until after you meditated?"

I thought about it. It was ingenious. If I had time to be reading email and surfing the internet in the morning, then I damned well had time to be meditating.

I took to throwing an afghan over my computer before I went to bed at night, so the afghan would be there when I woke up in the morning, to remind me not to turn on the computer until after I had meditated. Then I could turn the computer on, if there was time left over after I'd meditated at least ten minutes or so.

It worked. I don't even need the afghan anymore. I get out of bed and put on my bathrobe and go in the kitchen and make my tea, and as the tea steeps at my elbow, I meditate on the livingroom couch. My place ain't quiet. My apartment sits right on the street so I hear the morning sounds of the city: rush-hour traffic, water birds and song-birds, voices swirling up from the sidewalk--English, Spanish, Chinese, Filipino, Arabic, Croatian. Like the noise in my mind, it's just part of the background. I turn my focus inward, unimpaired.

This brings us to my second rule of meditation, a corollary of the first:

2.) Don't just think about meditation, don't just read about it. Get around to it--every day, for at least a few minutes. Think through your daily habits with a problem-solving approach, and settle on a routine for yourself that incorporates a practice. You can do it.

Now, for my favorite part of the discussion, about the benefits of meditation. When I'm meditating, I'm aware all the time of increased calm and focus, but for some reason, never more keenly than while driving.

Readers of this blog will recall my struggles with pique at fellow drivers who do obnoxious things. I have been known to curse harshly, inside my car, at somebody who peels around me from behind, blaring the horn, when I'm driving the speed limit. I have been known recount these and like offenses, quoting my violent ejaculations in response, in this very space--which has disturbed some of you.

Oh, I still get annoyed these days. But my responses have changed decisively.

Say I'm in heavy traffic and I encounter a cyclist peddling slowly along in the middle of my lane, just ahead of me, completely oblivious to cars. At one time, I would have loudly called the person awful names. Not out the window, mind you--road rage was never my thing--but inside the car, with the windows rolled up. Now, I slow way down, or try to get out of the lane, as I go by, noting the cyclist's lack of a helmet. (These kinds of cyclists usually don't bother with this commonsense protection.) I might say something like, "Oh, come on, genius. Do you want to live to see your children grow up? Wear a helmet, for God's sake." My tone is much softer. I am much less condemning, and sound almost indulgent towards the poor fool.

Invoking Buddha's assertion that all people are his children might take things a bit further, in a sanctimonious or corny direction, that I do not intend here: I obviously don't "love" the blonde in the late-model BMV who peels around me, blaring her horn. Or the jowly middle-aged man in a mint-condition classic car, who feels the need to lean his head out the window and call me a "fucking idiot," because I hesitate a moment in making a lane change.

A more precise thing to say would be that I don't feel quite as invested in these traffic incidents when I'm sitting, regularly and with a sense of purpose. Being "right" just isn't so important.
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