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Bare-Bones Meditation: Waking Up from the Story of My Life
Born with only one hand, Joan Tollifson grows up feeling different. She comes out as a lesbian in the tumultuous 1960's, sinks into alcoholism and drug abuse, sobers up in 1973, becomes a political activist, embraces Zen Buddhism and then a very bare-bones spirituality that has no fixed form or tradition, and spends a number of years living and working at a rural meditation retreat center. 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.
260 pages, Paperback
First published September 24, 1996
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
August 2, 2018
My review of this book will incorporate a contrasting review. So, says in "Kirkus Review," Bare-Bones Meditation is "rather tedious rambling." The account reads like an intimate diary mirroring a struggle not linear, moving in all directions, unpredictably. So, yes, if one were looking for neat and tidy, A to B to C ... and not back and forth and around and up and down, then one would not find it in this book, nor in life either. This account mirrors a search intense, painful, blissful, despairing, hopeful, and intimately personal and collective at the same time. If the search means dropping the search, or it dropping itself, being seen as futile, the search provides the context for this discovery. I came away seeing Tollifson's spiritual search, like our's, was essential: the futile search is paradoxically all-but-futile. Possibly, that is the theme of this book: the search is futile and essential ~ and the search drops, ends, yet goes on and on and on.
"Kirkus Review" again. And "to a nonpractitioner of meditation, [Tollifson's] concern over whether it is better to meditate on a cushion or in an armchair seems petty, her hero worship of her teachers seems juvenile, and her repeated changes of mind about the form of meditation that is right for her become wearisome." All this is somewhat true. I would not be surprised if Tollifson would agree. That is the irony here. This book is an autobiographical take, the author inviting us into her inward struggles in a rare fashion: so we can identify with her, so we can see our own egoic fascination and that we, like her, can learn to live through that to see differently, to know samsara and nirvana, hell and heaven, dysfunctional and functional, ... all belong in the all-embracing embrace of Life. All of this is not two or one, is. So, yes, the account guides partly through what seems to me the egoic traps of a spiritual path, even wherein radical nonduality keeps getting caught in its own dualities, its own philosophically performative error of nonduality-duality and, so, showing radical nonduality, like every idea, is a flawed idea, like every system, contradictory. Surely, if nonduality is nonduality, whether one sits from a cushion or from a fishing boat out on the river really is not of prime importance at all. So, the account provides guidance in seeing how neurotic a wisdom path can become, better how we bring our fallibility into a path that is neither fallible nor infallible, just a path.
My rating the book 5 is due to the impact the book had on me, how I was captivated by the honesty of the author, and how her struggles seem to me to be true to most of us on a spiritual path. That is, her struggles may not be mine, but my struggles are the same struggle. I appreciated the presentation of another human on this way of spiritual quest being fallible and flawed, rather than reading a spiritual "expert" who writes as though he or she is above this wonderfully imperfect humanness and advising us unenlightened suffering beings on how to get out of our personal mess. So, if you feel certain being enlightened, liberated, saved (whatever) is being bleached-clean, this may not be a book for you. If you are suspicious when anyone is presented or presents himself or herself as aloof from the mess and stink of humanness, you may delight to read this story.
Finally, the subtitle is truer to the content of this book than is the main title. The book is not a book on meditation, other than being one aspect of a larger story of waking up from the dream of effortful spiritual practice, waking up to the wonder of life right here, in this now, where we are and still having a case of egotism.
"Kirkus Review" again. And "to a nonpractitioner of meditation, [Tollifson's] concern over whether it is better to meditate on a cushion or in an armchair seems petty, her hero worship of her teachers seems juvenile, and her repeated changes of mind about the form of meditation that is right for her become wearisome." All this is somewhat true. I would not be surprised if Tollifson would agree. That is the irony here. This book is an autobiographical take, the author inviting us into her inward struggles in a rare fashion: so we can identify with her, so we can see our own egoic fascination and that we, like her, can learn to live through that to see differently, to know samsara and nirvana, hell and heaven, dysfunctional and functional, ... all belong in the all-embracing embrace of Life. All of this is not two or one, is. So, yes, the account guides partly through what seems to me the egoic traps of a spiritual path, even wherein radical nonduality keeps getting caught in its own dualities, its own philosophically performative error of nonduality-duality and, so, showing radical nonduality, like every idea, is a flawed idea, like every system, contradictory. Surely, if nonduality is nonduality, whether one sits from a cushion or from a fishing boat out on the river really is not of prime importance at all. So, the account provides guidance in seeing how neurotic a wisdom path can become, better how we bring our fallibility into a path that is neither fallible nor infallible, just a path.
My rating the book 5 is due to the impact the book had on me, how I was captivated by the honesty of the author, and how her struggles seem to me to be true to most of us on a spiritual path. That is, her struggles may not be mine, but my struggles are the same struggle. I appreciated the presentation of another human on this way of spiritual quest being fallible and flawed, rather than reading a spiritual "expert" who writes as though he or she is above this wonderfully imperfect humanness and advising us unenlightened suffering beings on how to get out of our personal mess. So, if you feel certain being enlightened, liberated, saved (whatever) is being bleached-clean, this may not be a book for you. If you are suspicious when anyone is presented or presents himself or herself as aloof from the mess and stink of humanness, you may delight to read this story.
Finally, the subtitle is truer to the content of this book than is the main title. The book is not a book on meditation, other than being one aspect of a larger story of waking up from the dream of effortful spiritual practice, waking up to the wonder of life right here, in this now, where we are and still having a case of egotism.
June 6, 2025
I tried reading another of Tollifson's books a few years ago and it landed with a thud, I didn't get what she was saying AT ALL. It was called Nothing To Grasp and boy I did not grasp anything she was saying. I decided to give her a second chance and try her memoir. I hoped going into it that a memoir would make the subject matter more understandable, since she'd be figuring it all out as I am trying to figure it out. And luckily, that is what ended up happening.
First of all, the early part of her life, which she skims over in order to get to the meditation stuff, is over the top. Seriously, she could have chosen to write a memoir about so many facets of herself. She was born in 1948 without a hand. Before the disability rights movement(of which she was a part) this was a big issue. Not having a hand, being deigned a "cripple" as a kid, really impacted her. She was also gay and before the gay rights movement, back when being gay was a crime, her sexuality was something she struggled with. Those struggles with being different led to drug and alcohol addiction. It was the dark side of the hippie movement of the sixties, the addictions. She also became really active in the anti-war protest movement in the 60s. Then in the seventies she pivoted to the alternative health scene after she got sober and did the AA thing. She also was big in the gay rights and disability rights movements of the seventies. She became a masseuse and started going to the San Francisco Zen Center and studied Buddhism. So there was A LOT going on in her early life and any one of those paths would warrant an entire memoir.
She blows through all that information about herself in like the first fifty pages and then slows down once she really leans into the world of meditation and mindfulness. I appreciated learning about how this wasn't a straight path for her. She kept hemming and hawing and going back and forth between cities and relationships and jobs and religious practices. Where ever she was, she wanted to be elsewhere.
I did wonder at times, how was she getting money? I guess life was just so so much cheaper for Baby Boomers - rent, food, cars, etc - so she didn't have to work much to make ends meet. I mean, who has the time to meditate for hours and hours every day? Someone without a full time job or kids, that's who. She seemed to be always pivoting to a new situation without anything hampering her. She could always have the focus be on her and nothing else.
Part of me found the lifestyle of living at a meditation center so appealing. No responsibilities! No cares! A build in group of people to hang out with! At one point she mentions that meditation centers attract people who want to escape from life's responsibilities so I felt validated in what I had been thinking, about how it's an escape from the world.
such communities tend to attract immature and troubled people, and then encourage dependencies. You get room and board, there is the absence of certain pressures, demands, consequences that you'd find out in the "real" world. Residential centers by their very nature do in
some ways tend to resemble halfway houses and may attract people who need shelter, or feed into people's tendency to want to be taken care of, and this is certainly a pitfall if it is catered to. Your shopping, food preparation, and cleaning is done for you. It's virtually impossible to be fired.
I feel that my bliss is being right here, in silence, doing nothing at all. But there are fears:
Maybe being here means I failed to make it "out there" in the "real" world.But who decided that retreat centers are not "the real world"? Here we are on the verge of nuclear holocaust and environmental annihilation, and I'm worried about being successful in the so-called "real world"!?
I screenshot the ebook like crazy. Here are some quotes to help me recall the book later on down the road.
"We're always looking for diamonds in the mud. But actually the mud itself is pretty interesting. That's what Zen practice is about. The mud.
Joko has you use a full sentence label, beginning with the line "Having a thought that .." So you might say, "Having a thought that the person next to me is breathing too loudly," or "Having a thought that Zen is useless." As Joko points out, there's a big difference between: "Bill is a jerk" and "Having a thought that Bill is a jerk."
State of mind has two components: concentration, which is a narrowing down and focusing in, and wonderment, which is expansive and limitless. Wholehearted attention must paradoxically include both dimensions simultaneously.
There is a feeling of absolute loneliness and isolation that is probably at the bottom of all my addictions. The fear of being separate. The fear that others don't like me, don't see me accurately, that I'm all alone. There is an urge to cover this fear with something - food, sex, entertainment, drugs, alcohol, thinking—or else to have other people show and tell me that they love me, they want me. I am beginning to discover that l engineer all kinds of subtle manipulations to weasel such reassurances out of others.
There is the habit itself (finger biting, smoking, drinking, whatever), and there is the observer
who wants to stop, who is also a habit. And there is the conflict, the battle between the desire to in-
dulge, which is an escape from what is, and the desire to stop, which is also a movement away from what is. Both of these "me's" are images constructed by thought and imagination. What's actually going on is just an alternating, conflicting series of thoughts.
I love the fresh air, nature, silence. Such a pervasive, wondrous quiet. The relief of a life without date books and appointment calendars, without the constant interruptions of phone calls and activities, all that delicious sound and fury, in which my energy gets so easily dissipated and scattered. I go for months at a time without ever riding in a car or walking on concrete. I like being in a place where social interactions occur spontaneously, organically, instead of being planned days or weeks or months in advance. Life at Springwater is focused and still in some way, healing.
"It gives one a feeling of importance and security to be identified with something larger, greater than oneself, and therefore this something assumes great importance." It is so easy to confuse the institution with the inquiry, to become idolatrous.
Disabled lesbians, for example, are invisible. We do not exist on television. Perhaps straight white men have no idea what it means not to have that. Or maybe men have been wounded as a class
as deeply as women have, just differently.
Can we learn about social oppression without placing blame, without creating an other, without wanting to be the Most Hurt, without getting locked into a fixed ideology? Can we stay open to listening? It isn't easy. I have so much charge behind all of these identities.
I cling to my pain. I hear myself telling the story of how much I've suffered over and over and over again, like an old broken record, and I sense there's something false as well as true about this litany of oppression.
Zen practice is perhaps particularly challenging and difficult for people like blacks or gays who are working on finding their identity in a certain sense, or regaining it, because this practice is about having no identity at all.
Perhaps meaning is not a fixed thing, but rather something that is continuously unfolding. Maybe it is absolutely essential at one time to be part of a separate group of women writers or disabled lesbians, and equally essential at another time to be completely inclusive and refuse all labels and definitions of oneself. Perhaps the point isn't that only one of these apparent choices is correct.
I'm realizing that we're all put here in various bizarre costumes: black skin, white skin, amputations, old age, cerebral palsy, Down's syndrome. Some people get more bizarre costumes than others, but everyone gets one, without exception. And then no one really sees anyone else. We see the costume. We can't get past it. Some people never even realize they're at a costume party.
Living here, I see men's pain. I am learning that men do not feel seen either, that the cultural stereotypes hurt them too, that many of them feel more alone and more hurt than I will probably ever feel. I don't envy them. I am constantly having to give up my ideas. I see how frightened we all are, protecting our ideas, feeling misunderstood.
Identifying yourself with a group is a way of escaping your fear by identifying with what Böhm calls a false universal. In order to move away from separation, one must be free of this false universal.
insight cannot be forced or willed to happen, but it can certainly be cultivated and encouraged, as a garden can be.
I don't believe anymore that there are any easy answers. It all seems much messier and more complex to me now than it once did, when I neatly divided the world into good guys and bad guys and thought I was on the right side. Now I don't know.
Can awareness be sustained? Does it have to keep disappearing, sometimes for long
periods? Where does this question come from? Is it thought again, conjuring up time, wanting some-thing, something permanent, something for me?
First of all, the early part of her life, which she skims over in order to get to the meditation stuff, is over the top. Seriously, she could have chosen to write a memoir about so many facets of herself. She was born in 1948 without a hand. Before the disability rights movement(of which she was a part) this was a big issue. Not having a hand, being deigned a "cripple" as a kid, really impacted her. She was also gay and before the gay rights movement, back when being gay was a crime, her sexuality was something she struggled with. Those struggles with being different led to drug and alcohol addiction. It was the dark side of the hippie movement of the sixties, the addictions. She also became really active in the anti-war protest movement in the 60s. Then in the seventies she pivoted to the alternative health scene after she got sober and did the AA thing. She also was big in the gay rights and disability rights movements of the seventies. She became a masseuse and started going to the San Francisco Zen Center and studied Buddhism. So there was A LOT going on in her early life and any one of those paths would warrant an entire memoir.
She blows through all that information about herself in like the first fifty pages and then slows down once she really leans into the world of meditation and mindfulness. I appreciated learning about how this wasn't a straight path for her. She kept hemming and hawing and going back and forth between cities and relationships and jobs and religious practices. Where ever she was, she wanted to be elsewhere.
I did wonder at times, how was she getting money? I guess life was just so so much cheaper for Baby Boomers - rent, food, cars, etc - so she didn't have to work much to make ends meet. I mean, who has the time to meditate for hours and hours every day? Someone without a full time job or kids, that's who. She seemed to be always pivoting to a new situation without anything hampering her. She could always have the focus be on her and nothing else.
Part of me found the lifestyle of living at a meditation center so appealing. No responsibilities! No cares! A build in group of people to hang out with! At one point she mentions that meditation centers attract people who want to escape from life's responsibilities so I felt validated in what I had been thinking, about how it's an escape from the world.
such communities tend to attract immature and troubled people, and then encourage dependencies. You get room and board, there is the absence of certain pressures, demands, consequences that you'd find out in the "real" world. Residential centers by their very nature do in
some ways tend to resemble halfway houses and may attract people who need shelter, or feed into people's tendency to want to be taken care of, and this is certainly a pitfall if it is catered to. Your shopping, food preparation, and cleaning is done for you. It's virtually impossible to be fired.
I feel that my bliss is being right here, in silence, doing nothing at all. But there are fears:
Maybe being here means I failed to make it "out there" in the "real" world.But who decided that retreat centers are not "the real world"? Here we are on the verge of nuclear holocaust and environmental annihilation, and I'm worried about being successful in the so-called "real world"!?
I screenshot the ebook like crazy. Here are some quotes to help me recall the book later on down the road.
"We're always looking for diamonds in the mud. But actually the mud itself is pretty interesting. That's what Zen practice is about. The mud.
Joko has you use a full sentence label, beginning with the line "Having a thought that .." So you might say, "Having a thought that the person next to me is breathing too loudly," or "Having a thought that Zen is useless." As Joko points out, there's a big difference between: "Bill is a jerk" and "Having a thought that Bill is a jerk."
State of mind has two components: concentration, which is a narrowing down and focusing in, and wonderment, which is expansive and limitless. Wholehearted attention must paradoxically include both dimensions simultaneously.
There is a feeling of absolute loneliness and isolation that is probably at the bottom of all my addictions. The fear of being separate. The fear that others don't like me, don't see me accurately, that I'm all alone. There is an urge to cover this fear with something - food, sex, entertainment, drugs, alcohol, thinking—or else to have other people show and tell me that they love me, they want me. I am beginning to discover that l engineer all kinds of subtle manipulations to weasel such reassurances out of others.
There is the habit itself (finger biting, smoking, drinking, whatever), and there is the observer
who wants to stop, who is also a habit. And there is the conflict, the battle between the desire to in-
dulge, which is an escape from what is, and the desire to stop, which is also a movement away from what is. Both of these "me's" are images constructed by thought and imagination. What's actually going on is just an alternating, conflicting series of thoughts.
I love the fresh air, nature, silence. Such a pervasive, wondrous quiet. The relief of a life without date books and appointment calendars, without the constant interruptions of phone calls and activities, all that delicious sound and fury, in which my energy gets so easily dissipated and scattered. I go for months at a time without ever riding in a car or walking on concrete. I like being in a place where social interactions occur spontaneously, organically, instead of being planned days or weeks or months in advance. Life at Springwater is focused and still in some way, healing.
"It gives one a feeling of importance and security to be identified with something larger, greater than oneself, and therefore this something assumes great importance." It is so easy to confuse the institution with the inquiry, to become idolatrous.
Disabled lesbians, for example, are invisible. We do not exist on television. Perhaps straight white men have no idea what it means not to have that. Or maybe men have been wounded as a class
as deeply as women have, just differently.
Can we learn about social oppression without placing blame, without creating an other, without wanting to be the Most Hurt, without getting locked into a fixed ideology? Can we stay open to listening? It isn't easy. I have so much charge behind all of these identities.
I cling to my pain. I hear myself telling the story of how much I've suffered over and over and over again, like an old broken record, and I sense there's something false as well as true about this litany of oppression.
Zen practice is perhaps particularly challenging and difficult for people like blacks or gays who are working on finding their identity in a certain sense, or regaining it, because this practice is about having no identity at all.
Perhaps meaning is not a fixed thing, but rather something that is continuously unfolding. Maybe it is absolutely essential at one time to be part of a separate group of women writers or disabled lesbians, and equally essential at another time to be completely inclusive and refuse all labels and definitions of oneself. Perhaps the point isn't that only one of these apparent choices is correct.
I'm realizing that we're all put here in various bizarre costumes: black skin, white skin, amputations, old age, cerebral palsy, Down's syndrome. Some people get more bizarre costumes than others, but everyone gets one, without exception. And then no one really sees anyone else. We see the costume. We can't get past it. Some people never even realize they're at a costume party.
Living here, I see men's pain. I am learning that men do not feel seen either, that the cultural stereotypes hurt them too, that many of them feel more alone and more hurt than I will probably ever feel. I don't envy them. I am constantly having to give up my ideas. I see how frightened we all are, protecting our ideas, feeling misunderstood.
Identifying yourself with a group is a way of escaping your fear by identifying with what Böhm calls a false universal. In order to move away from separation, one must be free of this false universal.
insight cannot be forced or willed to happen, but it can certainly be cultivated and encouraged, as a garden can be.
I don't believe anymore that there are any easy answers. It all seems much messier and more complex to me now than it once did, when I neatly divided the world into good guys and bad guys and thought I was on the right side. Now I don't know.
Can awareness be sustained? Does it have to keep disappearing, sometimes for long
periods? Where does this question come from? Is it thought again, conjuring up time, wanting some-thing, something permanent, something for me?
August 8, 2010
For me, this book put quite a different spin on meditation and what it is or can be. Awareness, listening - not only to what goes on outside, but what goes on inside, both our brains and our bodies. I gained a lot of insights from this little book. Would highly suggest to anyone wanting to learn more about themselves and who they really are.
February 5, 2017
Like so many books, there was some good stuff early in the book - interesting biographical information and some good tips and from her early meditation experiences. But then it lost steam and became repetitious.
December 1, 2019
Interesting, useful, and insightful at times. But insufferable, excessively whiny, and tiresome more than I'd like.
November 21, 2020
Review
I love the way the description of everyday thinking and feeling is so perfectly described. I feel more connected with life. I’m just like everyone else. Thank you!
I love the way the description of everyday thinking and feeling is so perfectly described. I feel more connected with life. I’m just like everyone else. Thank you!
September 24, 2022
Joan has experienced a very vibrant life and her books reflect this with the beautiful non-duality theme.
January 31, 2024
An older book that I had always wanted to read, but had not yet. I’m happy I finally read it. An in-depth account of the practice of meditation. I appreciated her candor and vast experience.
June 20, 2020
Well done!
My newest favorite author....I am charmed and enthralled by her no nonsense take on the bedrock practice for a no nonsense life. I have found that a constant meditative frame of mind, throughout the day, creates a very still and calming internal mental environment. No structure, no mantra, no thoughts. Simply this, that and there....Cheers, Ms. Tollifson!
My newest favorite author....I am charmed and enthralled by her no nonsense take on the bedrock practice for a no nonsense life. I have found that a constant meditative frame of mind, throughout the day, creates a very still and calming internal mental environment. No structure, no mantra, no thoughts. Simply this, that and there....Cheers, Ms. Tollifson!
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October 9, 2007Reflective for me. If you want to see your own awakening in someone else's story.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews