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Bare-Bones Meditation: Waking Up from the Story of My Life By Joan Tollifson ( Three Rivers Press )
Release Date: 1996-09-24
Average Customer Rating:
List Price: $19.00
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Product Description
Born with only one hand, Joan Tollifson grows up feeling different, finds identity as a bisexual lesbian and a disability rights activist, but also sinks into drug addiction and alcoholism. She embraces Zen Buddhism and then a very bare-bones spirituality that has no form. Bare-Bones Meditation reveals the inner process of the mind in a new way, and Tollifson's account is beautifully written--intense and from the heart.
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 Bare Bones bares the marrow
This book is such an incredibly honoust account of her life, that you immediately fall in love with her. I can hardly imagine myself being so intimate with my own life let alone experience this intimacy while reading someone elses. By baring the suffering of existence itself, without 'explaining' it, a deeper inexplicable layer of existence emerges without giving words to it. Beautiful, bold and daring, I am left awed.
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 Nothing to lose if you don't read this book ( srikrishna_ghadiyaram )
As the author is presented as an enlightened person, I wanted to know what is written in the book. I found nothing remarkable about its contents. I read it because I could not give up the hope to find atleast one unique perspective from an enlightened person's writing, and also because I spent money to buy the book.
Should I give 5 stars just because the author was honest in telling all the gory details of her life story?
The book only shows that the author was unable to make a decision about her course of life, particularly in the spiritual search, and love life. At the end of 239 pages, I did not find the situation change much. If one wants to be reassured that one is not alone with respect to one's body, mind situations, reading this autobiography might present an example. Do not expect this book to reveal any spiritual secrets or provide direction in any easy way. It simply shows the author's struggle to adjust with life, and not able to see life in proper perspective for some 40+ years. At the end she learnt something which any intelligent human being would learn at a very early age, given some psychological support in the early stages of development.
Based on my own understanding, and evaluating the contents of this book, the author does not have a direct experience of enlightenment i.e being Here and Now, for ever; atleast it is not reflected in the book. Probably the descriptions match occassional lapse of "me" or receding of "me" from the forefront. Yes, life teaches many things and one gets tamed, and the mind gets tired and learns to live with what is at hand. But it is not enlightenment. Enlightenment is a direct, immediate and impersonal knowledge.
The author portrays that there is no 'event' that indicates enlightenment. The author is very much wrong in this aspect. It does not matter if one calls it 'event' or not. But, there is a definite recognizable discontinuity of 'me', a permanent shift in cognition. This is what the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita state very clearly. This is what teachers like Ramesh Balsekar say. If someone tries to explain any thing in contradiction to what Upanishads say, they are dead wrong.
It would be wise to choose to read one book of Ramesh Balsekar, or Leo Hartong (for example) instead of reading this book.
If one can go through the systematic study of Vedanta one can easily avoid the trauma and dilema that the author went through.
There seems to be a nexus among the authors of the spiritual books recommending each others' books. American marketing machinery is at full work even in the spiritual books field. I wish there was a way to sample the books before buying them.
Here are a few useful sentences I found in this book:
page vi
When conceptualization is seen for the imaginary abstraction that it is, something changes.
Meditation is listening. Listening to every thing. 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 and excludes nothing and sticks to nothing.
...
Meditation is not knowing what meditation is.
page 39
"In a certain sense," Mel continued, "limitation is freedom. Then you can let go of all the fantasies, all the possibilities, and just settle into what's actually in front of you. You find that really, the thing itself isn't so important, whether it's this activity or that one. But the settling in and penetrating to the root is very important. That's what sesshin is all about. Right now you're here. Exactly here. Energy needs to focus or else it turns to restlessness and daydreaming. Our suffering is our inability to settle. Suffering is believing there's a way out."
page 41
Listening to those talks, it was as if the lights had been turned on, and something became clear to me. I realized that the whole story of "me" is imaginary, that "I" exist as a separate, discrete individual only when I think of myself. Without this thought of me and my story, everything is permeable, spacious, without division. The thought of "me" is so powerfully conditioned, so seemingly real, so socially accepted, that we take it as an unquestioned fact. We exist, in our thoughts, as separate selves by telling stories to ourselves and each other.
page 54
Toni seems almost to be suggesting pure wonderment, without concentration, but she seems enormously concentrated. Perhaps the key lies in the realm of intention. Babies focus or concentrate on what interests or pleases them. As soon as a new interest emerges or appears, their focus will shift. Concentration thus arises naturally. It is spontaneous, alive, always moving. It is free. There is no resistance or effort. It is not a direction imposed by thought, some agenda of prescribed or forced behavior. Most meditatin practices, on the other hand, are created and sustained by thought, and seem to reinforce the image of a self - a meditator - who is "doing" meditation, and getting somewhere spiritually through such discipline and effort.
page 87
If you need time to achieve something, it must be false. The real is always with you; you need not wait to be what you are. Only you must not allow your mind to go out of yourself in search. - Nisargadatta.
page 151
Krishnamurti says, "If thought doesn't give continuity to feeling, feeling dies very quickly."
page 154
Any approach that sustains and strengthens the fiction (and the drama) of a self who improves (or declines) over time is ultimately an obstace to fully realizing the truth.
page 155
When there is not awareness, we are inevitably practicing something, whether it's meditation or old habits. In awakening, practice is no longer practice. It is effortless, free. There is no more duality, no "me" doing "it." How that realization can be encouraged is an open question.
page 171
Joko Beck says, "As long as our buttons are pushed, we have a great chance to learn and grow. So a relationship is a great gift, not because it makes us happy - it often doesn't - but because any intimate relationship, if we view it as practice, is the clearest mirror we can find."
page 196
Real healing is freedom from all habit patterns and fixed beliefs, not creating new and better ones to get stuck in.
page 225
"You have to let go of the paths not taken," Mel continues, "and really allow yourself to penetrate the one you've chosen."
page 231
Fully experiencing that terror in the body, nonverbally, is the gate to awakening. It's basically the same thing Gangaji and Toni also talk about, the willingness to directly experience what's there as sensation, without naming it or telling ourselves a story about it (what it is and how it got there and how long it will probably last and how hopeless it is), but just being still and feeling it out all the way to the bottom, where it is revealed to be nothing at all.
page 233
How much possibility there is. The limits are only imagined. Freedom is seeing, effortlessly, that thought does not have to be followed. Everything is happening. We are not in control. And we're not out of control either, because there is no "me" separate from the totality to manage it or be overrun by it.
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 a wonderful surprise... ( hipchickinc )
This book is written by a remarkable woman who is handicap, a recovered addict and a lesbian. Already you are into this or turned off. The interesting thing is that the author's "handicaps" are not the important aspect of this book at all. As a reader, one forgets all about joan as a person because it is so easy to identify one's self with her. Through her journal like writing, the reader gets to experience her awakenings with her and it is a great experience. I would reccomend it to anyone.
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a window into the author's process ( ratatosk )
This book is a very intimate look at the author's process. Here she is, suffering like the rest of us, living on an emotional roller coaster, compelled by habitual behaviours, confused, and at the same time engaged in her practice.She struggles. She learns not to struggle. Then she struggles again. Layers of confusion, resistance, and suffering drop away. At times reading this book was painful. I can see so many aspects of the author in myself. Almost everyone who is engaged in meditation practice should read this book. It is a very personal account, but at the same time it really is about all of us.
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Stop the insanity!!!
Yes, I know that line is taken, but its how I felt several times while reading this book.Joan Tollifson's birth defect seems to have spun her off a downward path from which she turned away only after a great deal of suffering and no small amount of effort. Part of what she did to herself was to become a habitual in-your-face type of person and a compulsive joiner. These are qualities that by one-third of the way through the book I found made Joan a bit hard to take. Once she manages to shake loose of her drinking problem and to move out of the orbit of groups which focused on her identity as that of one sort of victim or another I had a brief feeling that this was turning into a soft, warm, fuzzies type of book. No such luck, Joan continues to be a compulsive joiner - only this time she's a guru-chaser, one after the other, after the other and back again. There were times if she'd been in the room with me I would have given her a good shaking and probably screamed, "Stick with something, you ninny! Just stick with something for once." It was at those moments that I most realized exactly how much this woman and I were alike. And her frenetic flitting from one "enlightenment" thing to another was embarrassingly familar. So, I end up with a one-handed, lesbian, guru-chaser as a mirror. Could be worse. I think, for me, this was lesson enough. By the end of the book I didn't have the idea that Joan Tollifson was ready to hand down any secret doctrine. In fact, that may just put this book leagues ahead of those that attempt to do so.
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Addiction
