Arriving at Your Own Door: 108 Lessons in Mindfulness (2 page)

you will greet yourself arriving

at your own door, in your own mirror
,

and each will smile at the other’s welcome
,

and say, sit here. Eat
.

You will love again the stranger who was your self
.

Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart

to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored

for another, who knows you by heart
.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf
,

the photographs, the desperate notes
,

peel your own image from the mirror
.

Sit. Feast on your life
.

Derek Walcott, “Love after Love”

Mindfulness is moment-to-moment, non-judgmental awareness, cultivated by paying attention. Mindfulness arises naturally from living. It can be strengthened through practice. This practice is sometimes called meditation.
But meditation is not what you think.

Meditation is really about paying attention, and the only way in which we can pay attention is through our senses, all of them, including the mind. Mindfulness is a way of
befriending ourselves
and
our experience.
Of course, our experience is vast, and includes our own body, our mind, our heart, and the entire world.

In Asian languages, the word for
mind
and the word for
heart
are the same word. So when we hear the word
mindfulness
,
we have to inwardly also hear heartfulness
in order to grasp it even as a concept, and especially as
a way of being.

Many people are first drawn to the practice of mindfulness because of stress or pain of one kind or another and their dissatisfaction with elements of their lives that they somehow sense might be set right through the gentle ministrations of direct observation, inquiry, and self-compassion. Stress and pain thus become
potentially valuable portals
and
motivators
through which to enter the practice.

One scholar described mindfulness as “the unfailing master key for
knowing
the mind, and thus the starting point; the perfect tool for
shaping
the mind, and thus the focal point; and the lofty manifestation of the achieved
freedom
of the mind, and thus the culminating point.” Not bad for something that basically boils down to paying attention.

Mindfulness has been called the
heart of Buddhist meditation
. Even so, there is nothing particularly Buddhist about attention or awareness. The essence of mindfulness is truly universal. It has more to do with the
nature of the human mind
than it does with ideology, beliefs, or culture. It has more to do with our capacity for knowing, with what is called
sentience
, than with a particular religion, philosophy, or view.

The Buddha once said that the core message of all his teachings could be summed up in one sentence. On the off chance that that is so, it might not be a bad idea to commit that sentence to memory. You never know when it might come in handy, when it might make sense to you, even though it didn’t the moment before. That sentence is:
“Nothing is to be clung to as I, me, or mine.”
In other words,
no attachments
—especially to fixed ideas of yourself and who you are.

When mindfulness is cultivated intentionally, it is sometimes referred to as
deliberate mindfulness.
When it is available to us spontaneously, as it tends to be more and more, the more it is cultivated intentionally, it is sometimes referred to as
effortless mindfulness.
Ultimately, however arrived at, mindfulness is mindfulness.

We take care of the future best by taking care of the present
now
.

In any given moment, we are either practicing mindfulness or, de facto, we are practicing mindlessness. When framed this way, we might want to take more
responsibility
for how we meet the world,
inwardly
and
outwardly, in any and every moment.

Meditation is a way of being, not a technique
. Meditation is not about trying to get anywhere else. It is about allowing yourself
to be exactly
where you are and as you are, and the world to be exactly as it is in this moment, as well.

That doesn’t mean that your aspirations to effect positive change, make things different, improve your life and the lot of the world are inappropriate. Those are all very real possibilities. Just by
sitting down
and
being still,
you
can
change yourself and the world. In fact, just by sitting down and being still, in a small but not insignificant way, you already have.

But the paradox is that you can only change yourself or the world if you get out of your own way for a moment, and
give yourself over
and trust in allowing things to be as they already are, without pursuing anything at all.

The astonishing thing, so counterintuitive, is that
nothing else needs to happen.
We can give up trying to make something special occur. In letting go of wanting something special to occur, maybe we can realize that something very special is
already occurring
, and is always occurring—namely, your life unfolding in each moment
in awareness.

More than anything else, I have come to see meditation as a
radical act of love
, an inward gesture of benevolence and kindness toward ourselves and toward others, a gesture of the heart that recognizes our
perfection
even in our obvious imperfection, with all our shortcomings, our wounds, our attachments, our vexations, and our persistent habits of unawareness.

Every moment in which we are caught—by desire, by an emotion, by an unexamined impulse, idea, or opinion—in a very real way, we are
instantly imprisoned
by the habitual ways in which we react—whether it is a habit of withdrawal and distancing ourselves, as in depression and sadness, or erupting and getting emotionally “hijacked” by our feelings, as when we fall headlong into anxiety or anger. Such moments are always accompanied by a contraction in both the mind and the body.

Every time we get angry, we
get better
at being angry and reinforce the anger habit. When it is really bad, we say we see red, which means we don’t see accurately what is happening at all, and so, in that moment, you could say we have “lost” our mind. Every time we become self-absorbed, we get better at becoming self-absorbed and going unconscious. Every time we get anxious, we get better at being anxious.
Practice does make perfect.

As St. Francis put it: “What you are looking for is who is looking.”

Just as a pair of shoes protects us from stubbing our toe, mindfulness, if applied
at the point of contact
with any arising in the mind or body, or to any event that befalls us, whether it is threatening or seductive, can protect us and others from a great deal of suffering.

Each moment missed is a moment
unlived.
Each moment missed makes it more likely I will miss the next moment, and live through it cloaked in mindless habits of automaticity rather than living in, out of, and through awareness.

To be present is far from trivial. It may be the hardest work in the world. And forget about the “may be.” It
is
the
hardest work
in the world—at least to
sustain
presence. And the most important. When you do fall into presence, you know it instantly, feel at home instantly. And being home, you can let loose, let go, rest in your being, rest in awareness, in presence itself, in your own good company.

Life is surpassingly interesting, revealing, and awe-provoking when we show up for it
wholeheartedly
and
pay attention to the particulars.

If you move into pure awareness in the midst of pain, even for the tiniest moment, your
relationship
with your pain is going to shift right in that very moment. It is impossible for it not to change because the gesture of holding it in awareness, even if sustained for only a second or two, already reveals its larger dimensionality. And that shift in your relationship with the experience gives you more degrees of
freedom in your attitude
and in your actions in a given situation, whatever it is…even if you don’t know what to do.

Not knowing is its own kind of knowing, when the not knowing is itself
embraced in awareness.
Sounds strange, I know, but with ongoing practice, it may start making very real sense to you, viscerally, at a gut level, way deeper than thought.

Your awareness is a very big space within which to reside.

Resting in awareness in any moment involves giving ourselves over to all our senses, in touch with inner and outer landscapes as one seamless whole, and thus in touch with all of
life unfolding
in its
fullness
in any moment and in every place we might possibly find ourselves, inwardly or outwardly.

A wareness may not diminish the enormity of our pain in all circumstances. It
does
provide a bigger basket for tenderly holding and intimately knowing our suffering in any and all circumstances, and that, it turns out, is
transformative
—and
healing.

Paying attention is something we do so
selectively
and
haphazardly
that we often don’t see what is right in front of our eyes or even hear sounds that are being carried to us through the air and are clearly entering our ears. The same can be said for our other senses as well. Perhaps you’ve noticed.

It is so easy to look without seeing, listen without hearing, eat without tasting, miss the fragrance of the moist earth after a rain, even to touch others without knowing the feelings we are transmitting and receiving. In fact, we refer to these ever-so-common instances of missing what is here to be sensed or perceived, whether they involve our eyes, our ears, or our other senses, as being
out of touch.

Usually, we see what we want to see, not what is actually before our eyes. We look, but we may not apprehend or comprehend. We may have to tune our seeing, much as we would tune a musical instrument, to increase its accuracy, its sensitivity, its range. The intention would be to see things as they actually are, not as we would like them to be or fear them to be, or only what we are socially conditioned to see or feel.