I don’t believe in New Year’s resolutions, as I wrote this time last year.

I’ve believe — and have experienced — that once karma has been created, you cannot undo it. It has to come to fruition.

My New Year’s Day aspiration is to relate in a deeper way to my own karma so as to

1.  mitigate the painful affects of the karma that has come to fruition in this lifetime; and
2. create as little karma as possible for the future.

In this post, I will deal with number one.

I was making  my bed this past Thursday, getting ready to go to the shambhala buddhist centre for morning meditation practice.

(Pull the bedspread off the bed.)

I was thinking about how my eighty-eight year-old mother has never been able to dispense with her habitual patterns of thought towards me — no matter what I do for her, she’ll always see me as horrible.

(Pull back the covers.)

I then realized that I too had habitual patterns of thought, namely, that I’ll always see her as horrible.

(Pull the top sheet off the bed.)

Well, I thought, if my mother can’t get outside her cocoon of habitual patterns and reactions, then it’s up to me to get out of mine, not only for my own sake — but maybe this would also help her.

(Remove the pillows.)

“Our past lifes <sic> karma might be determined but in this life we should always try to remedy it, make efforts to make it workable.” (source: H. E. Terton Namkha Drimed Rabjam Rinpoche – e-mail Jan 2011;  http://www.ripaladrang.org/teachers.htm)

 But how?

(Smooth out the bottom sheet.)

We do this via the most basic meditation practice technique known as “labelling and following.” We begin to see how caught up we are in our discursive thoughts and emotions and the  habitual patterns created by them.

And then, when we’re somewhat familiar with this practice, we can move to Level 2 technique and begin to explore the cocoon we live in and see how this coccon was formed and how it is maintained. We start to gain some insight.

But I’ve never heard anyone explain what is it about this meditation technique that helps us to explore our cocoon. In other words, what are the logistics? Why is it that following the technique helps us to see how habitual patterns are formed?

(Pull up the top sheet.)

From my own experience over more than 30 years, I think it’s this:

• Habitual patterns are comprised of both thoughts and emotions, which in turn create a set of habitual responses to our world. It is these responses\volitional actions that create our karma.

(Pull up the covers.)

• By following the meditation technique of being mindful of when a thought or emotion is arising in our mind, we start to see how these  thoughts and emotions  form a pattern. The pattern becomes “habitual” when we grasp and fixate on it.
  

• It’s ego’s identification with and belief in these patterns that deepens the “rut” we are in. Another way to say this is that continually thinking the same thoughts, and feeling the same emotions associated with those thoughts, deepens the “rut.”  It’s  like  our car being stuck in deep, wet mud, and we move the car back and forth continually in an attempt to free the car. But often, we just succeed in deepening the rut.
  

• We have to somehow unwind the cluster. Meditation “unweaves” or pulls apart the strands that make up the clusters, which in effect breaks down  the pattern itself. When the pattern comes apart, the habitual response loses its power.

[P]ractice means not continuing to strengthen the habitual patterns that keep us trapped….” <source: Pema Chodron>

In short, when practicing meditation, we practice being immediate; being in the NOW, not in the future or the past. Meditation practice can cut through anger, fear. How? Being in the NOW cuts through fixation on\grasping at\attachment to these thoughts.

(I do not finish making my bed. I rush to my computer to write this…… before I get immersed in my cocoon and forget what I have just worked out.)

Happy Western New Year!

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