Mind Practice: What Is It?

[Michael Erlewine]

I am recognized to some extent as having helped to advance astrological technique, at least on the computer side. I can tell you from experience that astrologers did not go gently into that log-table goodnight. Computers were not an instant favorite by many astrologers, but were viewed with disdain equivalent to holding up crossed forefingers – the devils’ instrument. I received letters from well-known astrologers attacking the fact that astrology calculations were being computerized. And yet, looking back on it, today most astrologers use computers and are very glad of it. Nowadays computers are considered just something that astrologers have to learn, another tool of the trade.

In this post I want to present another tool that is, in my opinion, even more important than the computer, a tool that will have a lot more astrologers howling and crossing their forefingers than the computer ever did, and that is meditation. If we are computer-phobic, then we are really meditation-phobic. Either that or we think of meditation like meditating on world peace or something, which is not the kind of meditation I am presenting here.

Worse, many think that to meditate or not-to-meditate is a private matter, like politics and religion, and not a tool they just can’t do without. I have given you fair warning so please take note and act accordingly. This article may not be your cup of tea.

To make matters more confusing, the word meditation in this country is about the only word we have, while in Asia there are scores of words and terms for this general concept. Meditating on a Shakespeare sonnet or meditation on world peace is NOT the connotation for the word ‘meditate’ used here. By mediation, here we mean something more formal; let’s call it ‘mind practice” or “mind training.”

The concept of mind practice is not well known here in the West. How many people do you know who consciously practice using their mind for its own sake, anyway? Most of us assume that the mind is already quite usable just as we find it, and does not require any special exercise or training.

However, in many countries in the East, mind practice is not only common knowledge; it is considered an essential part of the education of every person. And these folks far outnumber westerners. This is true for countries like Tibet, Nepal, India, and much of China and Japan, where it is understood that the mind, by its inherent (or inherited) nature, is unruly and hard to manage.

By ‘unruly and hard to manage’, we mean that our mind is subject to a wide range of emotional reactions, everything from sudden anger to intense feelings of loss, happiness, fear, and so on. By fear, for example, I am speaking of the fear we can have when we lose our job or our 401K. That is fear.

We are subjected to these emotions and often get carried away by them. In Eastern cultures it is assumed that little can be accomplished in life without first learning how to calm, stabilize, and focus the mind. In short, basic mental stability or mind practice, as it is called, is considered an essential part of education for life in many parts of the world.

While it is true that Western countries have a long history of mental disciplines, most of them are academic. Aside from some philosophical interest in introspection, there is little general concern in looking at the mind itself, much less a formal discipline or method of training that average persons subscribe to. Universities here may have advanced philosophical logic, but the common people know nothing about it. In the East almost everyone practices some form of mind training as an integral part of their upbringing.

We might ask why the eastern type of mind practice has never caught on in Europe and the Americas. The answer to this question would require a small but fascinating book, but one thing is for sure: the concept of ‘meditation’ would be a core issue. Another feature would be the difference in the concept of the ‘Self’ in the East versus the West. Here we are told on the one had to find our self and on the other, not to be selfish – a basic contradiction. In the East, the concept of the Self is considered like the game of Pick-Up-Sticks, in that when the last stick is gone there is nothing there. This could another post.

In the East, there are hundreds of specialized words for examining the mind itself, while here in the West most (if not all) such concepts have been bundled under the single word ‘mediation’. As mentioned earlier, it is further confusing (and unfortunate) that meditation here in the West has come to be understood as something akin to relaxation therapy, a way to relax and get away from the worries of our day-to-day world, perhaps in the contemplation of some quiet inner landscape or a poem or theme.

This concept of meditation as relaxation, although valid in its own way, shows little resemblance to its Eastern counterpart, which is not concerned with various methods to temporarily relax and get rid of tension. Instead, their focus is on the root and cause of our unrest, our conflicting emotions, and they seek resolution at that level. And, while the end result of mind practice may be a more peaceful you, the actual practice of sitting meditation is anything but restful. The Tibetan or Zen Buddhist concept of meditation or mind practice involves very intense use of the mind, methods that can stir up our mind, bring confrontation that shows to us our mental instability. It is not helpful that here in the West these more active forms of mind practice have been subsumed under the more general label of meditation as relaxation therapy. Two poems about my practice.

Testing the Rest
Learning to rest the mind,
Really puts my practice to the test,
So sometimes I just need to take a break,
And simply get some rest.

The Rest of the Mind
You cannot rest the mind,
But you can let the mind rest.
Just let go,
And don’t mind the rest.

This is not the place to go into the techniques involved in meditation practice, but I would like to briefly point out some of its characteristics. Beginning meditation is difficult, not easy. For most of us it is a challenge that we have never faced in our lives - learning to look at the mind itself. Physically sitting still for more than a minute or two is difficult enough, but facing our wild and untrained mind is much more challenging and often downright humiliating. Those folks who tell you that they need to go sit for an hour to relax (like going for a run) are probably using meditation in the sense of meditating on peace or some other topic. Adept meditators of the ‘mind practice’ variety would not need to go anywhere to relax and those who think they do mind practice and speak like that are dreamers, literally day dreamers - fooling themselves. For most of us beginners, proper meditation is very tiring and filled with difficult moments, at least for the first few years. Why is this?

For one, we are not used to grabbing the mind any more than we could grab the tail of a tiger and expect no response. The mind won’t be grasped that easily. There is a technique to calming the mind, a technique that can’t be faked, one that for most of us takes a long time to get the hang of. That technique is called mind practice, mind training, or simply: meditation.

Learning to meditate in this way involves first recognizing that the mind is anything but calm most of the time. It is filled with doctor’s appointments, itches, longings, anger, irritation, and above-all side trips - distractions. The harder you try to focus the mind, the more easily you tire and wake up later daydreaming this or that. You wake from a distraction and remember that you sat down to meditate and simply focus on your breath, but you wake up daydreaming, again and again. The tradition tells us that we have been doing this all of our lives.

Beginning meditation technique is mostly about what you do when you wake up from a distraction and recognize that you have been absent,. You are present again for that very brief time before the next distraction. Otherwise you are gone away somewhere. We spend most of our lives gone in this way. Beginning meditation is about bringing your mind gently back to whatever focus you set out to place it on. It is about taking our life back, moment by moment.

Advanced meditation is like when you take your computer mouse and place the cursor anywhere on the screen and take your hand away. What happens? The cursor stays where you left it until you decide to move it again. Good meditation is like that. You place your mind on an object and there it sits until you decide to move it. Just try it. It takes years to learn.

This is not the place to get too detailed about meditation technique, which is best done working live with someone who knows it. It is hard or pointless to learn from a book. The idea here is to point out that as a group, astrologers do not know how to meditate and are often too proud to learn it. To them, their mind is already ‘right’.

The Benefits of Meditation for Astrologers

Why learn meditation? The benefits are beyond calculating. For one, there is being present and awake more of the time than you are distracted and daydreaming, and you have been constantly distracted your whole life. Think about that.

It is like getting a second chance at life. Instead of a nest of mosquito thoughts buzzing around your head all day, instead of a crowd of inner voices reminding you to take the trash out, instead of an endless supply of meaningless thoughts you must entertain, you have instead some space in there – room to live in. And that added room or space gives you the time to do the things you really want to accomplish, some breathing space.

I am amused by those who tell me how busy they are and that they don’t have time to do this or that. Time is something we make. We make time for the things that are important to us. Meditation can give us back the time we are now wasting by freeing us from the distractions that take up most of that time.

Above all, I want to point out that meditation techniques like I am describing here are not part of any religion. I meditate, but I am not what I would call a religious type. Meditation has helped to give me back the time I otherwise have wasted all my life in endless daydreams and distraction. That is one of its values – time saved, and the quality of life provided.

Another value is clarity of mind and this is what in my opinion would benefit astrologers the most, seeing more clearly, each of us.

Meditation teaches us to focus the mind, but the result of that practice is the ability to actually rest the mind and let the creative areas of the mind bring impulses and ideas to our attention. We learn to discriminate better what thoughts are really important to us.

So the pitch here is that mind-practice techniques are a required tool for astrologers, not merely an option. The analogy of the eye glasses is a good one. If we have been peering for centuries through a dirty pair of glasses fraught with fear and distraction… and if we are going to counsel others… then we owe it to ourselves and to those others to check our prescription and make sure we are seeing clearly. Right now it is an option, but in the future every good astrologer will learn these techniques just as today we all have computers. It is a tool we cannot be without.

A little adjustment of our eyeglass prescription is a whole lot easier than trying to change everything in the outer world to our satisfaction. A change in our attitude affects everything we see and touch. If you are unsure how and where to learn the basic meditation technique, email me at Michael@Erlewine.net and I will do my best to find a center near you that teaches authentic meditation, probably of the Tibetan or Japanese tradition.

- Michael Erlewine

[Kyle_Pierce]

Michael, I really enjoyed your story, and I heartily agree with your thought that astrologers can indeed benefit from meditation practice. I can't think of a better way to prepare myself for a chart reading, than through a brief meditation session to awaken a calm and insightful state of mind. In this calm state I am more able to pick up on the proper way to read the chart as well as the life situation. Some practitioners might find that they become more receptive, while others might notice a heightened sense of engagement with whatever is there in the present moment. As in astrological practice, everyone finds their own path in meditation, and every path has a humble beginning.

Kyle

[Kay_Taylor]

Thank you Michael for your insightful article. I absolutely agree with you and have been writing and lecturing a bit on a related subject: the value of developing intuition for astrologers. When I speak of intuition I am talking about clarifying one's mind through meditation and a heart centered practice to be able to be absolutely present in a session with the soul you are graced to be sitting with. To me, the regular practice of meditation is the cornerstone of being a clear astrologer. From this place we can be clearer about the consciousness of the person we are reading for, knowing more accurately how to see and phrase their chart symbology so they feel seen and can connect with the deeper meanings of their path.

[Steven_Forrest]

Kay - fancy meeting you here! I shouldn't be surprised. And yes, everything Michael has put forward here is my reality too. People can pump their heads full of "data" and still not be able to really do astrology. If we attend to the actual, precise reality of the interpretive process, I think most of us who've had success in the field recognize that there is a certain moment of openness when something goes "pop" and suddenly there in your mind is the phrase you need to use with the client. How to cultivate the receptivity to that "pop?" How to attend to the part of the mind that offers it to us, if we are not "in the way?" These are questions of mindfulness and mind training, not of academic astrological education. That said, I've never figured out a good way actually to teach this to my students except perhaps via direct resonance with me as I demonstrate it. In modern, diverse America, I can't shoot them all off to sit with a Rinpoche. I already probably edge too close to being "preachy" in my work.

[Michael Erlewine]

Welcome Steven! I loved your phrase:

“… and suddenly there in your mind is the phrase you need to use with the client.”

That is so true and enabling this kind of intuition is astrology at its best, what I call the oracular nature of astrology, letting astrology speak to us as an oracle.

Mind practice techniques are one sure way to improve that quality, although they can take a long time to develop. Here is a technique that, while not as good as learning to use the mind, does bring some quick results.

To pick another phrase out of Steven’s post, I too don’t want to get ‘preachy,” but often what looks like preaching is just practical advice. Here is some:

I can’t use caffeine anymore, even decaf… not if I want to sleep at night. In the process of learning to leave coffee, tea, chocolate, etc. alone, I discovered something I found very interesting that relates to what we are discussing here.

Caffeine is like ‘white noise’ when it comes to the mind. Sure, it speeds us up and gives us a big boost in the morning, but it also introduces a lot of white noise into our awareness and the signal to noise relationship degrades accordingly. The additional static that caffeine introduces is enough (at least for me) to drown out and obscure whatever little bit of intuition might be percolating up from my psychic depths.

Something I learned early on is that if I planned to write anything in a given day day that I might as well forget about the quality if I was going to have a cup of coffee. Sure, I wrote like crazy, but the next day or whenever I was relaxed enough to read what I wrote, I could see that my overdriven mind had squeezed out any possibility of anything really intuitive surfacing. I soon learned that I valued the intuition way more than the caffeine boost.

As I get older, and that is what I am doing these years, I am discovering that every substance I take will reveal its nature to me if I will listen to my body. Each has its price. Alcohol is another substance I have had to do without, so let me mention what happens when I drink.

Through a careful study that went on for many years I might add <g>, I noticed that when I drink, something very predictable happens. About a day or a day and a half after I drink, I get an emotional reaction in the form of feeling psychologically vulnerable and overly sensitive to anything coming from the outside, and also probably just a little paranoid.

Having watched this happen again and again (and I also verified the same reaction in others), if you will carefully watch the next time you have just a wee bit more than you might want, this should be clear. As William Blake wrote “Enough or too much” seems to be the norm. I never knew when I had had enough until I had too much. I should add here that I have never been much of a drinker.

Within a day to two days after you have had alcohol, check out the stability of your emotional state to see if you tend to react just a little too easily to whatever or whomever. Check to see if your emotions are exaggerated somewhat and you fly off the handle or feel more vulnerable than usual. I have also found though counseling alcoholics that when there is regular drinking, either daily or every day or so, that the mind not only becomes vulnerable, but never has a chance to stabilize before the next alcohol event, with the result that the emotional state begins a slow downward spiral, etc.

So, please forgive me if this sounds too preachy, but from my view this is just the result of a bit of research on my part as to how substances affect our mind. And I feel (as the Tibetans point out) that the mind is the precious jewel of great price. There is no substitute. Anyway, I welcome any more discussion on these topics.

[Adam_Gainsburg]

Greetings All,

In resonance with Michael's last post, the types of choices i make leading up to a session has been a rich path of discovery. These days, I find less motivation to choose something which would cause my awareness and attention to be less than what i expect from myself in a session with clients. It has become much easier, naturally - to choose a supportive inner environment for the work.

To Steven's post in which he says, "That said, I've never figured out a good way actually to teach this to my students except perhaps via direct resonance with me as I demonstrate it", I continue to enjoy how the wisdom of this Zen phrase easily slips up into awareness as a reminder to continue my practice:

Enlightenment is an accident.
Meditation makes one accident-prone.

Blessings,
Adam

[Gary_Caton]

Hi Everybody,

I really don't want to be the "devil's advocate" here, and i dont consider myself meditation phobic but I do have some questions/concerns.

First off, I'm not sure if I understand intuitive the same way you do. In terms of myers-briggs, I am highest in intuition. I have always had a mind that is extremely quick. I can see several moves ahead, if you will, and get very bored very quickly with anything where you have to take all the steps in order....Like I always knew the answer in physics class but infuriated my instructor because i could not do the "proof" of how to get there...when i did sales i could pre-qualify leads on the phone to the point where i sold high ticket items to about every third person i showed the thing to....In many ways being a card reader or astrologer is one of the few times i really get to be myself because in so many other life situations i am constantly having to slow down or explain myself or why or how i know what i know ...

anyway, i have never tried to train my mind -it just does what it does naturally and pretty much without effort on my part. I am reminded of the line Achilles tells the maiden in "Troy" when he says "I chose nothing. I was born and I am what I am."

I consider myself to be a good astrologer and counselor and have had people describe a session with me as a "life changing experience" so i must be doing something right.

So, my first question is something to the effect of: if it isn't broke -why fix it? In other words, if i seem to have a natural gift for doing this sort of thing -why would i want to "train" that gift? To make the red-neck or "common sense" analogy it reminds me of a dog who hunts naturally and someone trying to teach it discipline in order for it to do better what it already does just fine...the tragedy is that it seems you could confuse the poor thing and take away the very "unruly & emotional reactions" which are responsible for its natural ability

on another note, i dont really do many drugs anymore but i do like to have a cup of coffee in the morning and a beer or glass of wine or two now and then...which is pretty moderate compared to what i often see going on at astrology conferences! Heck, people have basically called me a terrible prude for saying that the people running astrology orgs should probably not be sleeping with each other...

anyway, i guess my second point is that i have no desire nor intention of living like a monk. i want to live life like a regular person. If what michael says is true, that meditation will become required to be an astrologer, then i am afraid that represents another chance for astrologers to be out of touch with the lives of regular people -i would be concerned this would result in some sort of spiritual eletism rearing its head -similar to the academic eletism that already threatens to subjugate our art.

[Michael Erlewine]

Hey Gary,

I hear what you are saying, but I am not proposing that we have meditation certification for astrologers as others have proposed written certification exams, etc. No tests! Most astrologers might fail the test. <g>

One of the problems with having these online discussions (and with many books in general) is that what to one reader may appear as a path or method to get make things easier, appears to someone else as another obligatory requirement that they feel they must look into. That is not the intention here. Also, there are some forums and topics here that I don’t post on because I know nothing about them or have no interest.

Take my comments on substances for example. As a musician for many years, I am no stranger to substances. In fact, I know them well. So my comments were not that folks should not drink alcohol, smoke pot or cigarettes, or have caffeine. Many quite happily do. The point of that particular post was to hopefully start a discussion on what happens physically and mentally when we do. I find the ‘cause and effect’ of any substance, food, etc. to be fascinating. Everything is medicine for something.

The same goes for looking into meditation and the mind. The words in your post are identical to my own some many years ago. I thought that my mind, just as it came out of the box, was just good-to-go. And like you, I did not want to take a chance of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak. If it works, don’t fix it. And don’t interfere with my fun by giving me anything more to do.

As I understand it, what changed for me is that after a while I began to run into situations where I realized that the white noise from my own habits and the noise from my general lack of awareness began to interfere with my desire to realize what was happening to me mentally, psychologically, or even physically. And, at odd moments of inspiration, when I just happened to have greater clarity, my own mind pointed out to me that by learning to work with my mind, my particular collection of obscurations could be permanently reduced with the result that I could see more clearly into my life and my astrology. And I liked that.

So, I was not shamed or coerced into seeing how the mind works, meditation, or whatever we can agree to call it, but like a car with clutch problems, I kind of lurched into this area, two steps forward and one step back.

I had all of the comments and thoughts you mention in your post and was not about to be talked into something as boring to me as meditation, and so on. But it turned out that I was mistaken in what I imagined or expected or feared about working with the mind. I was wrong about that.

Have you ever tried to play an instrument or do anything that required learning a skill? If so, then you know how awkward, uncomfortable, embarrassing, and just plain tedious that kind of learning situation can be, that is, until we get the hang of it. If we do, then of course, we love to play music or whatever. It is learning the skill that is tough – the chops.

This is even more true with meditation because our culture does not have a history and tradition of working with or looking at the mind itself. It is difficult to estimate how much this puts us at a disadvantage and makes the learning curve so much tougher. I know, because I have walked that road. And I believe that meditation was probably for me the single most difficult, disappointing at first, tedious, and exasperating thing I have ever done in my life.

You and I have met and talked, so you know I am not a complete dummy. I am a pretty quick learner and quite used to teaching myself just about anything I want to learn. But learning meditation for me was almost impossible, so I have great compassion for anyone who contemplates going there, and no one ever said it would be easy, least of all me.

As for astrologers needing to learn this, well yes, they probably will be learning it, just as they have learned or are learning to use a computer, a word processor, a software program, or what-have-you? There is always a learning curve. And there are always new technologies knocking at the door, and meditation is one of newest, at least to westerners. No one says we have to learn it, just as some astrologers still create charts using log tables, etc.

And the learning curve here is MUCH steeper than any of those mentioned for the reasons set forth above, that we don’t even have a tradition of looking at our minds, so we don’t know what we are talking about. Fear of the unknown is also a factor.

We need to stop associating meditation with religion, as in “Don’t talk to me about meditation, because that is a religious choice,” etc. Meditation is a technique that we learn just as we learn to type. There is nothing magical, mystical, or religious about it. Anyone can learn it.

I can only suggest that you leave meditation alone until such time as you find yourself exploring it with interest. That is what I did. I was guilty of bad-mouthing it for years to anyone who would listen, but that was mostly my own fear that sooner or later I had to stop talking about what I didn’t even know and just end that worrying by going to see for myself what the fuss was all about. And this is what I eventually did. And it was not easy for me!

I will end with this: discovering how the mind works is not about Vision Quests, psychology, philosophy, and all of those things that we as astrologers are quite comfortable with - not at all. Instead, it is something we know almost nothing about whatsoever. If you want to prove this for yourself right now, just try looking at who is doing the looking at these words. Look at the ‘looker’ for a moment and tell me what you find. One thing you might find is that it is not an easy thing to do.

As someone who has had to come to terms with meditation myself, I can say with complete confidence that learning to know the mind (as we have been discussing here) is the single most important step I have ever taken, astrologically speaking. Why?

Because it has given me the ability to see into the nature of my own mind, to realize obscurations that have been obscuring my vision, and helps me to see what astrology is about much more clearly. And don’t imagine that I think I am any good at meditation. I know I am just beginning, but I do know that at least I am on the right road because I am getting results that help me in my life, astrologically and otherwise.

So thanks Gary for the great and honest post. I would not have expected anything less of you.

[Gary_Caton]

Hey Gary,

The words in your post are identical to my own some many years ago. I thought that my mind, just as it came out of the box, was just good-to-go. And like you, I did not want to take a chance of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak. If it works, don’t fix it. And don’t interfere with my fun by giving me anything more to do.

I had all of the comments and thoughts you mention in your post and was not about to be talked into something as boring to me as meditation, and so on.

LOL! Thanks Michael, I will take your advice then and wait until I get curious or seem to need some help. Fortunately, I know who to call when that happens

[Timothy_Smith]

Let's see--there are several strands that resonate here:

re: caffeine--yes it is a white noise generator, so when one has a mind that is already filled with that state it is naturally attractive. especially in large doses of brown coffee. however, a small dose--say in green tea--may provide a burst of energy that can effect the transition into a sitting-still meditation more effectively--or facilitate the reclamation of language upon one's return. I use it for this latter purpose. sometimes my mind is so clear that language is a remote resource, and I need to bring it closer if I'm to teach/counsel students and clients. left to myself I can do without...but that's not what they've come for... But quantities and habitual ingestion of caffeine will 'leave a mark' on the lower mind (manas) or stir it up so that the deeper mind (buddhi) remains inaccessible.

re: alcohol. yeah, I have found that the cost of clarity is about 2 days per drink, where 'drink' is less than a glass of wine etc. again there's a 'but.' sometimes the emotions or body is so tense that it needs to be reminded how to relax; in which case the consumption of a moderate amount may be worth the loss of mindfulness. being mindfully aware of a lot of tension and having to expend attention on relaxing it can be as much a distraction as the somewhat muddled attention subsequent to the alcohol. so a price, and, perhaps a benefit.

for myself, with the long meditations which are my wont, i rarely touch either at this point--a far, far cry from my youth! (damn!) .. and so on.. basically we're releasing racial/biological memories of states of concentration or relaxation into our mind, and, having started in the (apparent) body to achieve a mental state, the subsequent state is necessarily ersatz, albeit attractive; plus, having started, it must necessarily stop. when the mindfulness 'flows' there is neither a stopping nor starting; there is only a peripheral sense of abiding...

and yes, I meditate with & without the chart of my client in mind before and after each reading; it is the state of mind that I bring to the work that I think is the greatest gift I have to offer; the sense of - or at lease seeking of - clarity, being present, and being able to see what is 'there' or rather 'here' -- instead of what I think or learned or believe or feel that the client or horoscope ought to be saying. a scarier ride sometimes, but always enlivening!

finally, no other place to put this, so I'll post it here: I was thinking of your image of the wild horses and your teacher pointing out which one is yours. The oft-misquoted second verse of the yoga sutras runs: yoga citta vritti nirodha which is to say: yoga is the cessation of thought. this is wrong the words are all in the nominative case, thus allowing a matrix of meanings wherein each and every word has pride of place as the subject to be understood. furthermore the best translation that I've come up with* is more like: "harnessing the cyclic power of the mind is the true 'corral' (where one might tame one's horse). one could also say: the cyclic restrain of the mind's movements is the discipline of (lower) mind. ... so this ancient text, which I regard as the best and least dogmatic 'owner's manual' for the mind, echoes your teacher's instructions...




*(I have been translating Sanskrit for some 20 years now, and am on my 4th pass through Patanjali's work)