Arriving at Your Own Door: 108 Lessons in Mindfulness (5 page)

One thing is virtually certain. We will get stuck over and over again in the short run no matter what we do or think. Getting stuck over and over again is nothing other than practice too, as long as we are willing to see it and work with it through continual letting go, and through
continual kindness
toward ourselves.

The more things go “our way” for a while, the more we can believe that that is the way it is supposed to be. And when things don’t go “our way,” which sooner or later they will not, we can get angry, disappointed, depressed, devastated, forgetting that it was never “supposed to be” any one way at all.

Death is actually genetically programmed into life. Many of our perfectly healthy cells actually need to die for the overall organism to grow and optimize itself. This selective cell death occurs as our limbs and organ systems are developing in utero, and this dying of certain cells continues throughout our lives. In fact, it is absolutely necessary for our lives that many of our cells will die, and know when to do it.
We are dying a little every day
, just as we are being born a little every day.

“Only that day dawns to which we are awake.”

—
Walden
, Thoreau

At different rates, all of our cells live for a time and then die, to be replaced by new cells. This is true for our skin, for the lining of our stomach and intestines, for muscle and nerve cells, for blood cells, for our bones. There is both a coming into form and going out of form.
Without the going, there can be no coming, or becoming.

Maybe even our cells are trying to tell us that death is not such a bad thing, and nothing to be feared. Maybe our knowing of death, our ability to foretell its inevitability yet not know the timing of it is a goad for us to wake up to our lives, to live them while we can, fully, passionately, wisely, lovingly, joyfully.

Dying to the past, dying to the future, dying to “I,” “me,” and “mine,” we sense the mind-essence, which is intrinsically empty of all self-concept, of all concept, of all thought, only that potential within which all thought and emotion arises. That sensing, that knowing is vibrantly alive
here
and, in the timelessness of this moment of now,
forever.

Arriving at our own door is all in the remembering, the re-membering, the reclaiming of that which we already are and have too long ignored, having been carried, seemingly, farther and farther from home, yet at the same time, never farther than this breath and this moment.

The time will come, the poet affirms. Yes, the time will come, but do we want it to be on our deathbeds when we wake up to who and what we actually are, as Thoreau foresaw could so easily happen? Or can that time be this time, be right now, where we are, as we are?

For what else, ultimately, is there for us to do? How else, ultimately, are we to be free? How else, ultimately, can we be who we already are?

The time will come, yes, but only if we give ourselves over to waking up, to coming to our senses, and cultivating the full capacity of our sorely taken-for-granted and unexamined minds and hearts.
Only if we can perceive
the chains of our robotic conditioning, especially our emotional conditioning, and our view of who we think we are—peel our own image from the mirror—and in the perceiving, in seeing what is here to be seen, hearing what is here to be heard, watch the chains dissolve in the seeing, in the hearing, as we rotate back into our larger original beauty, as we greet ourself arriving at our own door, as we love again the stranger who was ourself.

Can we be inclusive? Can we be compassionate? Can we be wise? These are our challenges when it comes to the outer world, as they are
within the interior world of our own minds and hearts.
Being reflections of each other affords infinite opportunities for shaping them both and being shaped by them. Perhaps here, too,
as a society, as a nation
, there is every possibility to greet ourselves arriving at our own door and to love again the stranger who was ourself.

The last frontier for us is not the oceans, nor outer space, as interesting and enticing as they may be. The last and most important and most urgent frontier is the
human mind.
It is knowing ourselves, and most importantly, from the inside! The last frontier is our own consciousness.

The challenge to know ourselves is an
invitation to change lenses
, to experiment with
a rotation in consciousness
that may be as large as the world, while at the same time, as close as this moment and this breath, in this body, within this mind and this heart that you and I and all of us bring to what I am calling the nowscape.

We are sitting atop a unique moment in history, a major tipping point. This time we are in provides singular opportunities that can be seized and made use of with every breath. There is only one way to do that. It is to embody, in our lives as they are unfolding here and now, our deepest values and our understanding of what is most important—and share it with each other, trusting that such embodied actions, on even the smallest of scales, will entrain the world over time into
greater wisdom
and
health
and
sanity.

Simply bearing witness changes everything.

Gandhi knew that. Martin Luther King knew that. Joan of Arc knew that. All three
moved mountains with their conviction
, and all three paid for it with their lives, which only served to move the mountains even further. They stood for and behind what they knew 100 percent. And they knew it from the heart at least as much as from their heads. There is nothing passive about taking a stand in this way.

You don’t necessarily have to surrender your life to bear witness to injustice and suffering. The more bearing witness while
dwelling in openhearted awareness
becomes a way of life for all of us, the more the world will shift, because the world itself is none other than us. But it is sometimes, more often than not, a long, slow process, the work of generations. And yet, at times, a
tipping point
is reached that could not be predicted even one moment before. And then things shift, rotate, transform—and very quickly.

The more we say or think that we absolutely know what is right, the more likely we are to believe it. It becomes another
unexamined construct
of the mind, and thus an
impediment
to the very freedom and honesty and true morality we are advocating for others and claiming we live by and enjoy. You can just feel how dangerous that kind of thinking is, especially if we are unaware of it, because that is just what everybody feels, no matter what side of an issue they fall on. “I am right and they are wrong.” “I know what is right, and they don’t.” “What is wrong with them?” Then we start attributing motive. Right away, we’re in trouble.

Mindful dialogue invites true listening, and true listening expands our ways of knowing and understanding. Ultimately, it elevates discourse, and makes it more likely that we will gradually
learn and grow
from understanding one another’s perspectives rather than just fortifying our positions and stereotyping all those who disagree with us.

Mindfulness is really about freedom. It is first and foremost a
liberative practice.
It is a way of being that gives us back our life, and our happiness, right here, right now—that wrests it from the jaws of unawareness and habits of inattention and somnambulance that threaten to
imprison
us in ways that can be as painful, ultimately, as losing our outward freedoms. And one way it frees us is from continually making the same unwise decisions when the consequences of such are staring us right in the face and could be apprehended, if only we would
look
and
actually see.

Mindfulness can be a natural catalyst in deepening and broadening democracy, a democracy in which liberty is embodied not only in our rhetoric and in our laws and institutions, and how they are implemented in practice—as important as that is—but also in our
hard-earned wisdom
and c
ompassion
as individual citizens. Peace and happiness are not commodities to be acquired or conferred but qualities that are
embodied
and
lived.
They can only be embodied and lived in practice, not merely in the enunciation of principles, however lofty.

“The true journey of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having fresh eyes.”

—Marcel Proust

If others are not free, then in a very real way, we
cannot
be completely free or at peace either, just as we cannot be completely healthy in an unhealthy world.

Perhaps it is time to make the
suspension of distraction
a way of life. Imagine how healthy it might be for us personally, and for the world at large. We might truly come to know peace because we would be peaceful. Not naïve, not weak, not powerless, but truly powerful, peace-embodying and peace-appreciating, in our true strength, in our true wisdom.

When a loss stirs great sadness and grief in us, after the wailing and the tears and the tearing of our hair, there comes a time when we have to fall
silent.
Silence is the ultimate prayer.

We call a moment of silence an
observance.
How appropriate. It is a moment of pure being. It is also a nod to something deep within ourselves that we touch only briefly and then shy away from, perhaps out of discomfort or pure unfamiliarity. It is a
bearing witness.
In that bearing witness, we not only bear our burden better, but we demonstrate that we are larger than it is, that we have the capacity to hold it, to honor it, and to make a context for it and for ourselves, and so grow beyond it without ever forgetting.

The bell of mindfulness
tolls in each moment
, inviting us to
come to our senses
, reminding us that we can wake up to our lives,
now
, while we have them to live.

We humans are all intimately interconnected. How we treat each other matters to the health and well-being, perhaps even the survival, of us all as a species, not in some vague future, but in this very moment.
Kindness
is the natural response to recognizing interconnectedness. And in that kindness is
true wisdom.

Perhaps it is time for us to own the name we have given ourselves as a species,
Homo sapiens sapiens
—
the species that knows and knows that it knows
—to own our sentience and literally and metaphorically
come to our senses
while there is still time.

What is at stake, finally, is none other than our very hearts, our very humanity, our species, and our world. What is available to us is the full spectrum of who and what we are. What is required is nothing special, simply that we start
paying attention
and
wake up to things as they are.
All else will follow.