Turn Your World Around

Today I participated in the last online meditation for the six week online retreat Turn Your World Around, with Pema Chodron. In a true retreat you can remove yourself from your regular routine and daily cares to focus on more spiritual matters, but I was taking in the lectures while working at home and going about my regular business, albeit under pandemic restrictions. I had ample opportunity to apply what I was learning every day.

Group meditations were scheduled for two half hour sessions each week. These were not guided meditations so much as a chance to drop into an online space where everyone was sitting to observe their breath. Otherwise, daily meditation was encouraged.

Although the online meditation sessions are over, I'm still progressing with the lectures and reading. The resources, including Pema's lectures, remain online, so I can go at my own pace and return to materials.

I enjoy her teachings because she is so accessible. One of the student monks in a dharma talk said she puts things into kitch-y terms but I don't agree that making a complex topic more simple to understand is necessarily kitch. 

For example, when she talks about observing klesha, she says, "it is not about getting rid of them but getting to know them." Very approachable.

Similarly, there are the 3 Rs:

• Refraining (taking a mindful gap)
• Reframing (so much depends on how you look at things)
• Relaxing (becoming "One With")

Of course, this seemingly simple approach is really not so simple at all. I find the lectures extremely helpful in shifting perspective.

Recommended readings for the course will keep me busy for quite awhile. Rather than a book a week I prefer to digest a chapter or two, with time to absorb the lessons. Now on my reading list for the year:

• Emotional Awareness, by the Dalai Lama and Paul Ekman
• Sacred Path of the Warrior, by Chögyam Trungpa
• The Myth of Freedom (Section IV) by Chogyam Trungpa
• Cutting Through Spiritual Materialsim, by Chogyam Trungpa
• Emotional Rescue, by Dzogehen Ponlop
• Taking the Leap, by Pema Chodron
• Welcoming the Unwelcome, by Pema Chodron

Of course it will take me at least a lifetime or two to get close to a deep understanding, so for the present I am just trying to take it all one breath at a time.