Joan Tollifson - Bare-Bones Meditation: Waking Up from the Story of My Life

A wonderful piece of writing and meditation teaching. Joan Tollifson moves decisively from self-preoccupation to self-knowing. She takes us with her, in writing that is simple, straightforward, and honestat times excruciatingly so. The tenacity of certain stubborn forms of conditioning is treated brilliantly. All who practice awareness must sooner or later face and see through such habit-energy.

This book also provides us with a rare and invaluable record of the teaching of Joans remarkable teacher, Toni Packer. Joan shows us how she learns and tests these guidelines in the fire of her own life. It documents one persons courageous commitment to self discoveryto come-what-may seeing. I was very moved.

I recommend this book to Zen, Vipassana, and nontraditional practitioners of mindfulness meditation. When the book ends, Joan Tollifson is in a strong and hard-earned position to take herself and all of us even deeper into the world of mind. She has the rest of her life to do that.

LARRY ROSENBERG , Guiding Teacher,
Cambridge Insight Meditation Center and
Insight Meditation Society

Meditation has no repetition at all
it is moment to moment.

V IMALA T HAKAR

This book is about meditation in the context of an actual life. It is based on journals I kept while living and working at Spring water Center, a nontraditional meditation retreat center in rural New York, founded by Toni Packer, an unusually clear-sighted woman who is now almost seventy years old. Toni does not call herself a teacher because she sees conceptual imagery like teacher and student as obscuring the truth.

As I see it, meditation is not merely a quest for personal peace of mind or self-improvement. It involves an exploration of the roots of our present global suffering and the discovery of an alternative way of living. Meditation is seeing the nature of thought, how thought constantly creates images about ourselves and others, how we impose a conceptual grid on reality and then mistake the map for the territory itself. Most of the time we arent even aware that thought is taking place. Meditation is realizing, on ever more subtle levels, that it is. When conceptualization is seen for the imaginary abstraction that it is, something changes.

Meditation is listening. Listening to everything. To the world, to nature, to the body, the mind, the heart, the rain, the traffic, the wind, the thoughts, the silence before sound. It is about questioning our frantic efforts to do something and become somebody, and allowing ourselves to simply be. It is a process of opening and quieting down, of coming upon an immediacy of being that cannot be known or captured by thought, and in which there is no sense of separation or limitation. Meditation is moment-to-moment presence that excludes nothing and sticks to nothing.

The meditation approach that this book describes is not dependent upon a method or a program. It questions any attempt by the mind to construct such a program or goal. It relies on no techniques, special practices, costumes, or body positions. It is utterly simple and available to everyone at every moment. It is that which we are, when all that we think we are is not in the way.

Meditation is a powerful antidote to our purposeful, growth-oriented, war-mongering, speed-driven, ever-productive consumer civilization, which is rapidly devouring the earth. We retreat in meditation work not from reality, but from our habitual escapes from reality. Meditation is a social and political act. Listening and not-doing are actions far more powerful than most of us have yet begun to realize. But meditation is much more (and much less) than all of this. Meditation is not knowing what meditation is.

This book is essentially a true story, although of course there is no such thing, but it is not intended to be an objective or historical account of Springwater or any other meditation center. It is my story, no one elses. I have made minor changes in chronology, characters, and factual details in a number of instances in order to enhance readability or protect privacy. In many places I have rolled a number of real people into a single composite character for those same reasons, and thus parts of the story have been lightly fictionalized. In particular, the staff at Springwater Center and the residents of Berkeley Zen Center who appear in this book are all composites, loosely based on real people. Names have been changed, except those of public figures, including my teachers (and Tonis husband, Kyle). No character in this book represents any actual person, and the picture I paint of my various meditation teachers is my picture only.

The book was written over an eight-year period, between 1988 and 1995, during which time I was living either in California or in Springwater, New York. It is a kind of spiritual autobiography intended to reveal not some distilled and final truth, but rather the actual messy process of spiritual exploration as it unfolds in the real life of one person, one person who is perhaps not so different from everyone else.

I offer it in that spirit.

J OAN T OLLIFSON

Springwater, New York

September 1995