A number of meditation centers call Gainesville home. And as meditation becomes more popular as a way to ward off stress, the Avenue wanted to find out the story behind a few of the centers in town.
This is the first installment in a series of three.
The Tibetan Meditation Center, tucked away in a forested neighborhood, is just a one-story, ordinary-looking house. At first glance, you’d never guess it was anything special. Lawn tools litter the front porch, and a blanket of leaves serve as the driveway. Look a little closer, though, and you’ll realize something is different. Colorful banners — splashes of blue, red and yellow — hang just below the roof. Through the window, you can catch glimpses of golden, round statues. A dog barks. The resident dog, a little brown-and-white toy named Mickey, bounds out, ecstatic at the presence of yet another human to love.
The center had another visitor on Saturday: Tibetan Buddhism teacher Khenmo Trinlay Chödron Karuna, who’s there to hold a three-week program.
Khenmo Trinlay, a former U.S. Army employee and a Wayne State University alumna, discovered Tibetan Buddhism in a bookstore in 1990 and has since begun teaching classes — one being in Gainesville last weekend.
Khenmo Trinlay broke down the meditation process.
One can think of meditation as three parts, she said: view, meditation and action. The view is your ideals and how you see the world. At the other end, the action is how you act in your daily life. Because your views and your actions often don’t mesh, meditation comes into play. Tibetan Buddhists use Deity yoga, in which you imagine yourself as an immortal being.
“Let’s say it’s a deity associated with compassion. So, become compassion in your imagination,” she said. “You rehearse then doing what the deity does. You go person to person and act compassionately. You take on the personality of that deity and, in that way, cultivate that quality.”
Medical studies have proven the positive effects of her religion’s philosophy.
According to The New York Times, a study published in 2008 showed that when people heard the sounds of people suffering, people who meditated had stronger impulses in the part of the brain connected to empathy than people who did not meditate. Another study published in “Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging” in January showed that people who meditated had increased gray matter in the area of the brain connected to learning and memory and reduced matter in the area relating to anxiety and stress. People who did not meditate did not show similar changes.
“We’re Buddhas-in-training.That’s how a Buddha acts, so we’re trying to make ourselves more into that ideal,” Khenmo Trinlay said.
She asserts that just five minutes a day of calm abiding meditation can help you because it’s important to calm the mind down.
“There’s a T-shirt — ‘Meditation: It’s not what you think.’ It’s about not thinking. And what I found with meditation is it changed my starting point, my set point,” she said. “And I would start living here” — she lowers her right hand a bit — “and then I could live here” — she lowers it some more — “I could live here”— she lowers it to her lap. “And it was a long way to anger or agitation or whatever. Meditation can distance you from that point where you’re uncomfortable.”
Khenmo Trinlay also uses her expertise to attempt to bridge the gap between ancient Tibetan-Buddhism customs and modern-day civilization.
"Now our job is cultural translation. Instead of using yaks as examples, we have to use cars. We have to change it a little bit," she explained.
One major difference between Westerners and Tibetan-Buddhists is self-esteem. She told a famous story to illustrate the point:
Many years ago, the Dalai Lama, the leader of Tibetan Buddhism, attended a conference with eminent psychologists and psychiatrists.
"Someone asked his holiness, ‘What's your approach, your Tibetan approach, your Buddhist approach to low self-esteem?' And the conference stopped at that point, and it took them half an hour to explain to him what low self-esteem was," she says. "Totally had no context to understand the concept. And why on earth would anybody think such a thing? How could anybody think badly of themselves? Inconceivable to him."
Khenmo Trinlay thinks part of this big difference takes root in our civilization's religious culture. "The starting point is something akin to original sin. Your essential being is evil, it's flawed, it's bad," she said, referencing Christianity, Islam and Judaism. "And I think that's permeated our culture."
It's quite different from her religion, where everyone is Buddha in nature. "Your essential nature is perfect. You're a Buddha: it's just been kind of covered up," she said. "Everybody starts out perfect - so the starting point of Buddha nature changes everything."
Recently, she gave a speech on how to cultivate love and kindness. She said one of the keys is to cultivate it for yourself first, a comment that elicited only blank stares from her audience members.
"Imagine yourself flourishing," she told the audience. "You have to, because if you can't love yourself, you have nothing to give anybody else."
The meditation process can help, and it can be done anywhere. In fact, when Khenmo Trinlay worked in Washington and before she began formally practicing Tibetan Buddhism, she had her own special place to hide when things got stressful.
"I would go into the ladies' room," she said with a laugh.
She would take five minutes to calm her brain down, confident that no one was going to bother her.
"If I can do it in the ladies' room, you can do it on the bus," she said.
