Hawk Rising: Soaring on the Wings of Desire - Softcover

Cowan, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1440141274 ISBN 13: 9781440141270

Verlag: iUniverse, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

Thousands in the Western world have sought a brighter life through the practice of Eastern meditation. While many have experienced a deeper sense of calm, most have never experienced the enlightenment promised by these methods. Through witty, entertaining anecdotes, Hawk Rising shares the secret to understanding, observing, and then managing a calming approach that softens, but does not stifle the desire for achievement.John Cowan has spent his lifetime learning within the worlds of spirituality and motivational psychology and offers an innovative method derived from the Buddhist system that effectively reduces anxiety through meditation and visualization. Cowan teaches through exercises and personal stories that viewing the imagination as part of the here and now will end frustration and increase the ability to begin each day with renewed power and confidence.Anyone interested in remaining in the hustle and bustle of the world and still achieving a new level of inner-peace will benefit from his explorations of the sources of anxiety, its causes, and how to develop a method for being usefully anxious while living a free, active, and creative life.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

John Cowan has been a student of Zen for over forty years. Currently, he is an Episcopal priest and an interim rector at St. Anne's in Sunfish Lake, Minnesota.

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Hawk Rising

Soaring on the Wings of Desire By John Cowan

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2009 John Cowan
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4401-4127-0

Contents

Why Read This Book?...............................................1The First Parable: The Heart of a Tiger...........................3Chapter One: Ruminations on a Flat Tire...........................5Chapter Two: How You Became Anxious...............................17Chapter Three: The Creative Anxiety Model.........................29The Second Parable: The Disappearing Puppet.......................41Chapter Four: Pictures............................................43Chapter Five: Observing...........................................57Chapter Six: Anxiety..............................................67The Third Parable: The Motorcycle Club............................77Chapter Seven: Feeling-Response and Intention.....................79Chapter Eight: Creative Anxiety...................................87The Last Parable: The Hawk and the Fox............................101Summary of the Creative Anxiety Process...........................103Several Exercises.................................................105My Bookshelf......................................................109About the Author..................................................113

Chapter One

Ruminations on a Flat Tire

My Experiments with Meditation Practice

This starts earlier than the flat tire. Perhaps it starts twenty years ago when a friend suggested that I attend a five-day vipassana meditation retreat. At the time I was an Episcopal priest, so the invitation to a Buddhist event might seem unlikely. However, the friend who issued the invitation was a witch, and you can see how a priest who has a witch for a friend might do unlikely things. Before being an Episcopal priest, I was a Roman Catholic priest who from the seminary on religiously read Zen texts, so it was even likely that I would be invited to a vipassana retreat. And now I am a Quaker. After three major religious changes, stability should not be expected from me. The experimental is ordinary.

Whatever the likelihood, I did go to the retreat and began the daily practice of observing with loving attention the breath and whatever else came up.

I found this an invaluable addition to my spiritual life. At last I had something that I could do regularly that made a difference in my deepest understanding of the nature of life, and the nature of myself. At the same time, I was absorbed in scholarship about what Jesus really said and did in his brief stay on earth. These two sources of wisdom became meat and potatoes for my spirit.

To refresh the meditation practice, from time to time I attended other such long retreats. I had just finished checking in to one of them at the Franciscan retreat center we frequented in those days when Sister Ellen, a Franciscan nun with whom I had chatted on other occasions, asked me how long I was staying. (In deference to the needs of people, there was a choice of attending the weekend only or continuing for nine days of complete silence.)

I told her I was there for the longer period and started down the steps to the meditation room. As I walked away, I heard her say, "Oh, I did not think you were the type."

Since in the course of the next week almost nothing else was said to me directly, those last words kept recurring in my mind. What the *#^* did she mean by "You're not the type?" I had no idea.

First thing at the end of the silence, I sought her out and asked her. Her answer was: "You are too restless to last that long."

My retort was: "Well, I did last that long!" She nodded, but skeptically.

Suspicious Behavior

I had to admit there was reason for her doubt. About day three the leaders had begun complaining that some people were not following the spirit of the retreat. I suspected that they had noted my bicycle locked to a pole outside of their bedrooms (the only safe place I could find), and they had also noted that it disappeared every afternoon around three to return about five. I was not the only person cheating a little on their plan, but probably one of the more obvious. I found the two strenuous hours on the bicycle a marvelous relief from the physical inactivity of the other twenty-two hours. Like a soaring hawk, I found relaxation in the freedom of the roads after the confinement of the meditation room.

At one point on day three, one of the leaders said that the workshop had been carefully designed and those interfering with the schedule would lose all hope of great advances in their awareness. In my twelve years of seminary life (from freshman year of high school through four years of postgraduate study), I had been guilted often enough by past masters of the trade who wanted me to live within their boundaries that this attempt washed off without effort on my part.

Indeed, I nearly giggled as I imagined the leaders designing the workshop saying to each other:

"What should we do next?"

"Let's do sitting meditation!"

"Oh, what a good idea. That will work well since just before it we have walking meditation, and before that sitting meditation."

"You know, I bet people will be surprised and stunned if after this sitting meditation, we fed them a change and did walking meditation."

"Oh, Charlie, you are so brilliant. And then we could break for lunch."

"Smooth move, Lydia. They would never expect that at noon, especially if we call it eating meditation."

At one of those retreats, late October, it was frigid in the building. The meditation room and the cafeteria were comfortable, but everywhere else it was about sixty degrees. This would be fine if I were moving around with some vigor, but walking meditation does not get the blood running and sitting in my room gave me the chills. At night when the temperature dropped further, I piled on every blanket I could find. So I wrote a note to the managers (those assigned to keep the logistics working), complaining of the cold. The next morning one of them rose to say that there had been one complaint about the cold. Sixty-five people and one complaint. Me!

They went on to say that they had taken that complaint to the nuns, and the nuns had informed them that they do not turn on the heat for another week. Case settled!

I had been noticing this. While most of the teachers seemed vigorous enough, there was a definite tendency for students to begin to wimp out. Many of them when talking, for instance during question periods, sounded as if they had laryngitis. I had paid a lot of money to the nuns to stay in that place, and I thought they damn well should have turned on the heat. But I carried the argument no further. One against sixty-five was daunting, even for me, and I had come to meditate (and bicycle a little) but certainly not to engage in battle.

I once listened to a Zen abbot from the east coast speaking at the local zendo in St. Paul. He told of hiring a backhoe to do some excavating around the monastery. The job went on for an extensive time, so he and the operator in their many conferences about which rock was to go where became quite friendly. The abbot found the operator quite a Zen-like guy, with a great sense of the appropriateness of placement and respect for the nature of the phenomena he was pushing from here to there. After a month, possibly emboldened by their previous exchanges, the operator asked the abbot why it was that all of the monks walked...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: iUniverse
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1440141274
• ISBN 13: 9781440141270
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 120
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: KreGa Onlinehandel GmbH; 4950000000000; info@krega-onlinehandel.de; ; Birkenweg 31; Brakel; 33034; Deutschland