Seeking Emptiness in a Crowded City

Anne Lilburn

February 11, 2004

It's tough to understand just how loud rustling clothes, shifting feet, creaking floors and passing traffic six floors below can be. Until, that is, you sit for meditation at a place like the Shambhala Center, a meditation center in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood.

Located on West 22nd Street, a busy street crowded with delivery trucks, the Shambhala Center offers meditation classes, a series of courses on Buddhism, and an open meditation space. Its weekly Dharma service, held on Tuesday nights, is a combination of group meditation and a sermon-like lecture, called a Dharma talk, delivered by a Buddhist scholar.

To start the weekly Dharma service, one hundred or so people gathered in a large, airy roomy that resembled a dance studio, minus the barre and mirrors, with white walls and hardwood floors. Some were Buddhist, but others were just stressed-out New Yorkers looking for calm and as much quiet as one could reasonably expect in midtown Manhattan. Most sat, legs crossed, on small towers of two or three cushions: large, soft mats, firm square blocks, round seat-cushions. Others, like a seemingly confused older woman and a 52-year-old first-time visitor complaining of a bad back, chose the cushioned folding chairs lining the back and sides of the room. Some read books or focused on objects; all were silent.

From the cushions to the large double doors, most of the decorations in the room were the same red-orange that would be somewhere between "bittersweet" and "orange-red" in a Crayola crayon box. Here and there, touches of orange-yellow trim completed the color scheme. Small shrines, adorned with candles, lined the walls next to large framed photos of Buddhist monks.

Just a few minutes into the service, about a third of the gathered left after Dharma teacher Eric Spiegel excused himself as he quietly interrupted to advise all the newcomers, most easily identifiable by their wandering eyes and curious expressions, to head to another room for a short lesson in meditation with teacher Jane Kolleeny. As the curious and confused first-timers shuffled out like sheep, the rest of the meditators returned to their practice.

Kolleeny pointed out that her class was just an introduction to meditation, a skill that can take years to refine. At its core, Kolleeny told her class, meditation is about "observing the activity of your mind without acting it out."

Meditation, she said, is only a tool. "The goal is to help us work with ourselves, not to be a good meditator."

She explained the three starting points: posture (sitting, preferably cross-legged, propped up from the floor on cushions, with a straight back but relaxed shoulders); placement (Kolleeny suggests focusing on your breath -- to center your thoughts); labeling your thinking (observing stray thoughts, recognizing them, and returning to your breathing).

"Be gentle with yourself," offered Kolleeny as her last bit of advice; meditation can be a challenge. Instead of being angry at themselves when they lose their focus and their thoughts drift, said Kolleeny, those new to meditation should gently redirect their thoughts and bring themselves "into the moment." Meditation is difficult, she said, because in our society, we're not comfortable with doing nothing.

"It looks like you're all doing well," Kolleeny, who admits to meditating while commuting into work, told her class. She then smiled, a little sheepishly. Meditation is not exactly something that an observer can critique very easily -- at least, not without telepathic powers. It's tough to know what your students are thinking, she admitted.

Kolleeny says that Buddhist beliefs underlie her teachings. Meditation serves as a way to break away from the need to constantly "fulfill our desires," whatever those may be.

Eric Spiegel, a Buddhist scholar who worked on Wall Street for over 20 years, led the Dharma talk, titled "Meditation: Thoughtless Bliss, Vegetative State, or.?"

From a wooden chair at the front of the room, he sat with a small microphone pinned to his plaid shirt, pausing every few sentences to reach for his glass of water.

Spiegel said meditation could help people to put things in perspective by seeing the world through the Buddhist teaching that nothing, from thoughts to relationships to problems to possessions to even our sense of self, is permanent. Meditation, he said, was the way to work toward ending attachment in life.

It's a good thing there was an open question and answer session following the talk, because the brochure-clutching newcomers seemed confused.

One man, dressed in a blue t-shirt, slumped against the back wall as he raised his hand with a wary look. When the microphone finally reached him, he stumbled to find his words before asking Spiegel how all this tied into love (and his wife).

"How, "he asked, "could you love someone completely and not be attached?"
Spiegel nodded as he listened, then shook his head and shrugged.

"No idea," he told the crowd, which laughed. "It's a really good question," he added. "I think the best places to work on are really the most difficult ones, when you really love something or someone."

Mediation, said Spiegel, could help people to realize just how small they were in the world.

"If you look at a space shot of earth," he asked, "like, do you even see your house? Or your neighborhood? Or your city?"

Each being on earth, he said, was centered on itself alone. There are thousands of bugs on the planet, he said, and "each bug thinks that its mission in life is profound."

Buddhism, said Spiegel, teaches that all of this focus on the significance of the individual, is an illusion. Buddhists he said, embrace a more interconnected view of the world.

For Sahra Motalebi, who has been practicing at the Shambhala Center for two years, the practice "is really about sort of slowing one mind's down enough to see the false distinction between ourselves and other people."

Motalebi said that for her, meditation gives "the sensation of watching your thoughts float by as clouds."

"It's magical," she said. "There's really no way of explaining it. It's a process of irrevocably creating space in one's mind. When you experience yourself in the still space, you trust the universe more and can reach out to other people."

For many people at the Shambhala Center for the Dharma gathering, meditation was not about Buddhism.yet. Buddhism may have brought meditation to the masses, but the practice has taken on a life of its own. Now, meditation, and the peace it brings many of its practitioners, is what draws many new Buddhists.

Gregg Moore, a 39-year-old actor, has been coming here since October. He tries to meditate every other day or so. It doesn't necessarily relax him, he says, but he said he finds clarity in the practice and feels "more at ease with the world" when he meditates.

"It's new to me," he said, "so I don't know enough about Buddhism. Right now, for me, it's all about the meditation."

Maggie Hinders, a 52-year-old book designer, began reading about Buddhism and meditation when she found a spare throwaway book at work and started browsing through it.

"The more I read," she said, "the more interested I got."

Hinders grew up Catholic, and is now looking for a "less invasive" religion, but she said that decades of Catholicism are not something you can get rid of in a few weeks. For her and for many other Catholics, she speculated, "there's a feeling that you can never get out."

For now, she said, meditation is just meditation, but that doesn't mean she wouldn't rule out becoming a Buddhist.

"I wouldn't mind if it became a religion," she said, "but I'm very cautious."

And then there's that attachment thing. Hinders says she's still struggling to come to grips with that. She likes her possessions, her relationships, her job.

"What happens to our actual needs in the face of attachment?" she wondered.

The question now, for Hinders and others like her, is not whether to learn more about Buddhism and meditation, but instead "how to live a life realistically with this."

(Updated April 26, 2004)