Reflections on Native American Heritage Month as a Non-Native to this Country

Image: Wikimedia Commons

“The only certainty is that nothing is certain.”Fortune Cookie

I sit at a Taoist meditation gathering, legs crossed, balanced on a plastic folding chair.

My Qigong teacher has just given a lecture on the Tao, and I expect now to sit in silent meditation and take in the familiar sound that always ends these nightly talks: the music of the gong.

“The gong” is what my teacher calls it, anyway. What I call it is a crystal singing bowl. The diameter of a beach ball, it’s a half-cut oval of frosted white glass that rings when struck and sings when stroked. When a musician sits down to play the bowl, gliding a wooden dowel around its outer edge in unbroken spiral after spiral, the crystal begins to sing. It starts quiet and scratchy, and builds to a crescendo of expansive song so loud and wide that it penetrates the air of the room and and cancels all other information inside.

The loudness of the gong silences everything in its wake.

The music of the gong is one of my favorite sounds. It’s a mystical sound, a sound seemingly from another world that somehow crosses into this material world and touches spirit to ground. Its ring expands through space like dust of a galaxy, enters my ears, and rings into my brain, echoing and bounding inside my skull. Every time I hear it, the song cuts through my consciousness so completely that it clears away everything in its path: any residue of thought, any dust of impure emotion.

I’m left afterward contemplating pure sound, hearing it recede, feeling my own self floating halfway between worlds. I myself feel momentarily both in this world and in the world of the unseen, the gong having transformed even my own energy into sound. I am left clear, renewed, with a sense of seeing and hearing again for the first time.

The clarity lasts for a few minutes, maybe a few hours. Then, inevitably, whatever is inside my psyche and experience will begin dropping its litter into the pristine fields of pure mind, and my neural highways start to become congested again. Life traffic builds up and starts honking.

I once told my teacher, “I love the sound of the gong. It opens me up like the sky.” He replied with a nod, “The gong is a great teacher.”

Tonight, back on my plastic chair, I once again await the gong. But tonight it doesn’t come. Instead, the voice of my teacher reaches into the dim light of the room, announcing that instead of meditation, tonight we’ll be gifted a unique presentation from some special visitors.

In November, we celebrate Native American Heritage Month in our country. As I ponder the meaning of that celebration, I think of a comment I heard recently from philosopher Noam Chomsky, remarking on a review of a book by someone he calls a “major American historian.” He said, the book’s author mentions that when early European explorers came to the Western Hemisphere there had been approximately one million native people living up and down the length of the continent. But the historian was far off in estimates of the true population, which Chomsky says would have been closer to 60-70 million.

Why the discrepancy? How did a historian miss 59 million-or-more people and instead only report one million?

Answer: by failing to count the millions upon millions of indigenous people of those lands who were killed—by disease, famine,

Photo by Şahin Sezer Dinçer on Unsplash

In the chaos of modern living, meditative practices are not “extras.” They’re essentials — for the activist, the seeker, and the everyday human just trying to stay sane on the ‘hamster wheel’ of daily life. May this practice help you stay strong, and keep your bearings in the storm.

Past & Future Meditation

~ in guided audio with text to follow ~

"Past and Future Meditation" addresses the tendency our mind has to be somewhere else — anywhere else. It teaches us to recognize and let go of thoughts that lure us into another time, entangling us in past memories or future fantasies.

Past and future thoughts distract us, and keep us from accomplishing the work we want to do in the world. Living outside the present moment is an energetic waste, keeping us from using our lifeforce for what is needed from us in the moment. Past and future ruminations also generate negative thoughts, such as regret and worry, which inflict unnecessary suffering upon us.

By re-centering ourselves in the present moment, we regain our power of attention, and find that we are free, flexible, and capable to achieve what we set out to do. Unencumbered by past and future mind clutter, we can stay focused on our intended path and, ultimately, create our most conscious life. In addition, by avoiding the suffering of past and future mind states, we generate fewer negative thoughts, thus increasing our balance of well-being, with positive effect on ourselves and others.

Past & Future Meditation

Background and Intro begin at 0:00 | Meditation begins at 3:30

~ Audio Text ~

When we sit to meditate, it is common for our mind to drift from the focus of our meditation. In our attempt to quiet the mind, we are continually carried away by memories, fantasies, anxieties, plans for the future, and general mental chatter.

If we observe the contents of this drifting mind, we’ll likely see that in general, the distractions that arise are one of two types: thoughts of the past, or thoughts of the future.

When we are pulled from the present moment of our meditation in this way, our psyche is in movement. Our attention is pulled in one direction or the other: past or future. Alternatively, when we are in the present moment, practicing awareness and observing what's there, we see that we are no longer moving; we are still.

This past and future meditation can help us recognize the phenomenon of being swept back and forth by the opposite polarities of time, to observe any helpful patterns in that movement, and to practice returning to the timeless present moment, again and again.

In this process of repeatedly connecting with the present-moment self, we come into closer contact with our true nature.

For our true self is not the self we used to be or wish we were. It's not the self we hope to be or fear we might become. Rather, the true self is simply who and what we really are. It is alive and accessible, always, in the present moment. It is a self worth sitting still for.

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~ Instruction ~

Sit in a comfortable position, with your spine straight,