‘Meditation really changes things’

According to Buddhist monk Karma Sonam Rinchen (or Rinchen Blake as many address him), meditation is about bringing peace of mind and getting rid of all the negatives in one’s daily life.

He said it was common misunderstanding that people still thought that meditation was keeping one’s mind blank or getting in some situation where they just “blissed” out.

“It’s true if you meditate and you’re a good practitioner you would find not many thoughts and the mind is quite calm and you do feel a little bit blissful, but if you’re trying to reach that immediately, that isn’t helpful.

“The more we bring meditation into our daily lives the more contentment we feel, so we can let go of our habitual negative reaction, our greed, our anger, our ignorant behaviour and we feel less pressured to do these things, the things that cause us and everybody else to suffer. A lot of the things we do have consequences which in the end we don’t like it,” Rinchen Blake said during a recent interview at his apartment and meditation centre at Coblentz Avenue, St Ann’s.

He said the kind of bliss or happiness that some people longed for was not something that they tried and made happen, but that which rose of its own accord by basically doing a calm-abiding practice where you trained the mind into doing what you wanted it to do.

“If you can levitate then fine, but it is not the purpose. The purpose is to bring an end of suffering to yourself and others. And it’s easy to get sidetracked by what seems to be the special effects side of spiritual practice. And you can also become conceited if you have achieved this.

“These things may seem to be very important but they’re not, they’re not the main thing. It is not something that we encourage or that we hope will happen to us. What we hope for is that we’ll live our lives in a good way and be able to live in a content way and be a blessing to others,” Rinchen Blake said.

Strangely enough, when first introduced to the practice of meditation, Rinchen Blake was adamant that all the good feelings and the calmness and peace he began to feel was just because “we had a nice day”, and not because of meditation.

And it took him 20 years to decide to become a monk.

Born David Blake to a Jewish father and Christian mother in the United Kingdom, Rinchen Blake lived the life that many young men could relate to. He went to limes, had girlfriends, drank socially...nothing out of the ordinary.

He earned degrees in ship design and building and after college went to work in a shipyard. However, the business began to go bankrupt so, young Blake decided to combine his naval expertise with pleasure and do some sailing in the Caribbean before deciding to settle down.

This was the start of the journey of the rest of his life.

On his way to the Caribbean, Rinchen Blake met a young girl who began to teach him meditation and yoga.

“In those days if you did yoga it was considered to be unusual whereas now it’s very common. I had liked the girl and she lived with a Hindu teacher as a disciple so I did it just to please her, not expecting anything.

“Then I would say to her what a really good day we’ve had and she would say, ‘That’s the meditation’. I said no it isn’t we just had a good day. The next day I might say to her, what a lovely day, crystal clear quality and she would say, ‘Yes, that’s the meditation’ and I would say no it isn’t, we just had a nice day.

“When I was introduced to meditation I didn’t believe that it would change my life. When the girl pointed it out to me I began to sense that she may be right. It is said that the only birth you can get liberation from is human birth. It is not just that it will make you feel better, but you can find a very deep understanding which in zen they call the great matter, which is to understand life and death completely, how things work,” Rinchen Blake explained.

The monk said, to him, meditation was the most important thing because meditation was the heart of Buddhism, which he said was the fastest growing religion in the western world.

But, while he maintained his practice of meditation, Rinchen Blake continued with his life and he wound up with a high pressure job running a marina and charter boat company.

Then he began to question himself about what he was doing and what he really wanted in his life. He wanted to meditate properly, and he definitely was not doing this.

So, he moved to the quiet island of Montserrat where he lived for 12 years, but it still was not enough, he wanted more.

“Meditation really changes things. The chore was to really change what we call the zen, your being. You might aspire to being nicer, but you don’t seem to change really. I lived most of my adult life in the Caribbean. I got a job as a skipper with charter boats and I was lucky enough to find somebody who was also doing zen practice and we used to practise together, which was very beneficial.

“Then I thought, the monks were the ones who really understood the practice and if I joined the monastery, I could deepen my understanding and become a teacher, and that is what I did. There is only one zen monastery in Europe and that is in north England. I did nine years at the monastery and then they asked me to start my own monastery in Edinburgh and I did that for five years. It was the first zen temple in Scotland,” Rinchen Blake said.

He admitted that a monk’s way of life could be a very primitive one, a life similar to that which he led in the Himalayas and Montserrat, where he lived in a small stone house, living mostly by himself, away from the complexities of modern life.

However, Rinchen Blake spending years at a retreat was in itself not enough without returning to the civilised world to try and help others.

He said without meditation, there was no real chance of change.

“According to the Buddha, when we do something wrong, the way the suffering comes back to us sooner or later is through feeling. We don’t feel good, but we just don’t know why. The basic teaching of Buddhism is that all beings suffer— not that they don’t also have a nice time—and most of the suffering that we have, although it doesn’t seem like this in the beginning, we somehow create. Because of that we can bring the suffering to an end. The way of doing it is training the mind so that it doesn’t keep creating negative mental states.

“It’s not very difficult and within a month you will begin to find changes in your daily life, changes in the way you are and the way you feel. It is also a lifetime practice of deepening your sense of contentment, your wisdom, your understanding, your ability to be helpful to others. According to the Dalai Lama it’s not just one lifetime of practice, but many lifetimes,” Rinchen Blake said.

He said everything a person thought, said or did had consequences, so in learning to use their minds in a skillful way would only bring about good results.

“The important thing that everybody really wants is to find deep contentment and a sense that they’re doing something useful every day with their lives.”