Arriving at Your Own Door: 108 Lessons in Mindfulness (4 page)

Arriving someplace more desirable at some future time is an illusion. This is it.

Through consistent practice, we come to see that we can rest in our being without getting caught so frequently by our thoughts and feelings. Our speech and our actions, even the way we are in our body and the expressions on our face, are no longer so tightly coupled to our thoughts. Because we are
seeing
more clearly from moment to moment, we can let go of more and more unwise, reactive, self-absorbed, aggressive, or fearful impulses, even as they are letting go of us because of our knowing. So there is a
mutual freeing
here when we see and know that our thoughts are just thoughts, not the truth of things, and certainly not accurate representations of who we are. In being seen and known, they cannot but self-liberate, and we are, in that moment, liberated from them.

As an experiment, see if you can be here in the pure awareness of hearing.
Surrendering
over and over, again and again, to a hearing that is always happening without your having to do anything or exert yourself at all… opening to sounds and the spaces between them, and to the silence lying inside, underneath, and in between all sound.

Practice is not about doing, or “doing it right.” It is about
being
—and being the knowing, including the knowing of not knowing.

If we cannot be gentle with and accepting of ourselves and the experiences we are having, if we are always wanting some other, better experience to convince ourselves or others that we are “making progress,” or becoming a better person, then perhaps we should consider
Why
we are practicing in the first place. Perhaps it would be wiser and more compassionate to give it up than to make it one more doing or striving.

Otherwise we will certainly be creating a great deal of stress and pain for ourselves, and then will ultimately blame the meditation for “not working” when it might be more accurate to say that we were
unwilling
to “work with” things as we found them.

The soil of practice requires the fertilizer of deep
self-acceptance
and
self-compassion.
Harshness and striving ultimately only engender unawareness and insensitivity, furthering fragmentation just when we have an opportunity to recognize that we are already OK, already whole.

Gentleness is not a luxury, but a critical requirement for coming to our senses.

Obstacles to practice are infinite. Yet all of them turn into
allies
when they are embraced in awareness. They can feed the practice, rather than impede it, if we recognize them for what they are and allow them to simply be part of the nowscape because, wonder of wonders, they already are.

The most important support for mindfulness practice comes from the quality of your motivation. No amount of outside support can substitute for a quiet but determined passion for living life, every moment of it, as if it
really mattered
, knowing how easy it is to miss large swaths of it to unconsciousness and automaticity and to our deep conditioning. That is why it is important to practice as if your life depended on it.
It does.

Only if you suspect that your life does indeed depend on your practice will you have
sufficient energy
and
motivation
to wake up earlier than you normally would so you can have some uninterrupted time for yourself, a time for just being, a time outside of time—or to make a time for formal practice at some other hour of the day that works better for you; and to practice even on days when you have a lot going on and don’t feel like it.

A bove all, we can allow life itself to become the real meditation practice, so that there is a
willingness to bring mindfulness to every moment
, no matter what you are doing or what is going on. Even though we call this
informal practice
, it can feel after a while more like the practice is doing you, than that you are doing the practice.

Ultimately, you will find that if life is the real meditation practice, then
everything
and
everybody in your life
becomes your
teacher
, and every moment and occurrence is an opportunity for practice and for seeing beneath the surface appearance of things.

Everything supports wakefulness if you are willing to let yourself be awakened by tenderly yet consistently connecting through your senses.
Everything.
But it requires a brave heart, and a mind that sees the folly in clinging… to anything.

Healing is a
coming to terms
with things as they are, rather than struggling to force them to be as they once were, or as we would like them to be, to feel secure or to have what we sometimes think of as our own way.

Extending the reach of our own heart lets us live in the world in ways that embody greater wisdom and compassion, lovingkindness and equanimity, and ultimately, the joy inherent in being alive.

It is useful to train the mind to inhabit the body, to let our experience of being alive be
co-extensive with the body
, enfolded into body, not as a fixed state but as a vital, moment-to-moment, constantly unfolding flow. Then the body becomes our ally and helps us to understand what we are really feeling and sensing.

When at first we attempt to open to stillness and silence, it is amazing—
all there is
is hearing yourself think, and it can be louder, and more disturbing and distracting than any external noise.

When unattended, our thinking runs our lives without our even knowing it. Attended with mindful awareness, we have a chance not only to know ourselves better, and see what is on our minds, but also
to hold our thoughts differently, with greater wisdom
, so they no longer rule our lives.

Acceptance doesn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, mean passive resignation. Quite the opposite. It takes a huge amount of
fortitude
and
motivation
to accept what is—especially when you don’t like it—and then work mindfully as best you possibly can with the circumstances you find yourself in, and with the resources at your disposal, to be in
wise relationship to what is,
which may mean at some point acting to mitigate, heal, redirect, or change what can be changed.

When awareness embraces senses, enliven them.

When we adopt a wiser and more accurate way of seeing and knowing and accepting what is,
the dynamics of what is are already different.
Very interesting shifts tend to follow in the wake of such a rotation in consciousness.

Saying “yes” to more things than we can actually manage to be present for with integrity and ease of being is in effect saying “no” to all those things and people and places we have already said “yes” to, including, perhaps,
our own well-being.

One challenge of living mindfully is to be in touch with the natural rhythms of our own life unfolding, even if at times we feel far from them or we have lost touch with them altogether and find we have to listen afresh for those inner cadences and callings,
with great tenderness and respect.

Every moment we are arriving at our own door.
Every moment we could open it.
In every moment, we might love again the stranger who was ourself, who knows us, as the poem says, by heart.

What would it be like to
settle into your own body
, even for a few moments at the end of the day, lying in bed or just sitting around in the evening, or at the beginning of the day, before you even get out of bed?

When you are taking a shower,
check and see
if you are in the shower. You may already be in a meeting at work. Maybe the whole meeting is in the shower with you.

Awareness is immanent, and infinitely available, but it is camouflaged, like a shy forest animal.

Lying back and watching clouds, bathing in birdsong or the desert breeze, feeling the air around the body, the heat coming off canyon walls, the play of light on stone; or feeling the muscles on the back of your neck tighten as you try to find a parking place downtown in a snowstorm when you are already late for an appointment, whatever is offering itself to you in the place where you find yourself—wilderness, metropolis, or suburb, in a meeting with colleagues or by yourself—
why reject where you are?
why seek elsewhere for excitation, entertainment, or distraction when life is always unfolding here and now, and
there is no place better and no other time?

Directly experiencing a particular place can only happen if you manage to be present without your usual filters. Otherwise, you might only be in your
concept or idea
of a place, whether it be your home, your work place, or, for that matter, an exotic vacation destination. That postcard from the edge may very well apply: “
Having a great time. Wish I were here.
” But you are! But you are!

We could say that the underlying essence, the true nature of water, is H
₂
0. Depending on changing conditions, water can manifest in different phase states: the frozen state, the liquid state, or as a gas. In each of these states, its properties, its outward appearance and “feel,” will be different, and it will
behave differently
in the world. It is the same with the mind and the body.

The mind and body too can go through what feel like phase changes as conditions change. The changing conditions can create pressures of one kind or another, or alleviate them. Changing conditions can heat things up or cool things down emotionally, cognitively, somatically, spiritually. We call these various changing conditions that require us to adapt one way or another “stressors,” and we refer to our experience of those changes, especially if we do not respond adaptively to them, as “stress.”

Only trust. Don’t the leaves flutter down just like this?

Sometimes, if conditions are such that we feel free from the pressures of life and things don’t feel like they are heating us up to the point of boiling, or freezing us to the point of rigidity, the
mind can be quite spacious
, like a gas, expanding infinitely and subsuming whatever occurs within it, or like water, flowing freely, unimpeded over and around boulders and other obstacles in our path.

If we can say that awareness itself is in some sense our true nature, then abiding in awareness can
liberate us from getting stuck
in any state of body or mind, thought or emotion, no matter how bad the circumstances may be or appear to be. But when we feel locked in the ice, for instance, we don’t even believe in the possibility of water, nor do we remember that our true nature is beyond any of the forms that it can assume.