Finding the Center Within: The Healing Way of Mindfulness Meditation. (16 page)
Read Finding the Center Within: The Healing Way of Mindfulness Meditation. Online
Authors: Thomas Bien
Cultivate a Balanced Lifestyle
There is an important principle in psychology called a balanced lifestyle. This means that each day should have as many things in it that you are looking forward to as there are things that you have to do but would rather not do. In practice, this may be difficult on busy working days. But it is a good idea to make sure there are at least some enjoyable things even on the busiest of days.
Mindfulness takes this a step farther. Everything we have to do has enjoyable aspects. Tasks become easier once you find the fun in them. It is a matter of acknowledging the positive aspects of each experience. THE EXPERIENCE (TOM)
Today is a day for painting the house. The enormity of the job weighs on me a bit as I get out my materials. Then I remember: This is house-painting meditation. I breathe in and out, and come back into the present moment. I realize that there are many wonderful things about painting the house. I enjoy being outside on this beautiful fall day. Getting out the paint, scrapers, rags, dropcloths, brushes, and ladders is a kind of calming ritual, like lighting a stick of incense before sitting meditation. It is fun to dip the brush in the paint and cover the side of the house with it. I smile, breathe in and out, and enjoy each moment. When I start worrying about other things, or thinking about how large the task is, I recognize these thoughts, smile to them, and gently come back to the paint, the brush, the side of the house, and my breathing in and out.
Examine Your Environment
You do not have to be a feng shui specialist to know that the quality of the environment in which you spend your time is a major consideration. Take the time to notice your home and work environments as mindfully as you can. Just see, to begin with, what these places are like—as someone would who was seeing them for the first time. If you do this deeply enough, you will see ways in which your environment itself sows seeds of happiness or unhappiness in you. 04 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 9:50 AM Page 93
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Perhaps, to have a feeling of inner peace, you need less clutter around you. Or maybe, if you are too much of a perfectionist about order, you need a more relaxed environment, allowing a few things to be out of place, giving a feeling of creative chaos. Perhaps you need a little music in the background, especially music that helps you feel peaceful and happy. Maybe you need more color on your walls or a flower on the table. Maybe you need a peaceful statue of the Buddha or the scent of incense. Maybe photographs of people you love would help. Perhaps you want to get some paper and paint some mindfulness reminders to hang on the wall where you see them when you first open your eyes in the morning, such as “I vow to live deeply and peacefully every moment of this day,” or “Peace is always available.”
You may be able to do more things at home in this regard than at work. And even at home, unless you live alone, you must be careful not to make changes in the environment that create disharmony with others. See what you can come up with. While it may be important to visit beautiful places when you can, it is doubly important to make the everyday places beautiful.
Change Your Environment
After you have begun to notice your environment more clearly, meditate on the question: “How can I make this place one that evokes peace and happiness?” Spend time with the question. The first answers that come to you may or may not be the best. Sometimes the best ones will only come as you let your unconscious mind live with this question for a period of days or weeks.
Let Your Peace Return to You
Behavioral psychology does not study just behavior, but also the environment in which behavior occurs. It is of no use to study the behavior of organisms without looking at the environment they inhabit. It makes no sense, for example, to say that the mouse ran three feet forward, then went one foot to the right, and began chewing, unless you also 04 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 9:50 AM Page 94
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know that the mouse was in a T-maze with a piece of cheese at the right end of the T.
When Buddhism talks about no self, it means that there is no separate self apart from our context. We cannot expect to be in a destructive environment with extremely difficult people without it affecting us. If you find yourself in a very destructive work environment, it may not be enough to bear it stoically. Perhaps you should get out.
Nothing is worth
the sacrifice of your peace and joy.
You may think you are suffering for others’ sake, but when you lose your peace and happiness, you not only add to your own suffering, but you increase the suffering of those around you. For if you let yourself become miserable, then others have to deal with a miserable, unhappy person.
In the New Testament, when Jesus sends out the twelve, he talks about how to deal with people who are unreceptive. He counsels them to stay in one house and adds, “As you enter the house, salute it. And if the house is worthy, let your peace come upon it; but if it is not worthy, let your peace return to you.” If you are in an environment that overwhelms your peace and well-being, do everything you can to “let your peace return to you.” And if it is bad enough, find a way to leave that place or situation.
Stay in Charge of the Task
When we wake up in the morning, our minds are filled already with things we have to remember to do that day—errands to run, work to do, household tasks, and so on. The ultimate intention behind these tasks is happiness. We do these things because we believe we will be happier if we do them than if we do not. Even if, upon waking, we feel reluctant to go to work, it is important to know that the reason we go to work is ultimately for the sake of our own happiness. We work for many reasons, but at least one of them is in order to have enough money to live a decent life so we can be happy. We run errands and do chores for the same fundamental reason.
Sometimes, however, the tasks themselves take over, far beyond what is good for our happiness. This can occur in two ways. For one, sometimes the things we do no longer serve our happiness, but we continue to do them because we have always done them—out of habit. If your 04 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 9:50 AM Page 95
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job, for example, makes you miserable, it may no longer be contributing to the sum of your happiness. It may be time to pull yourself out of your rut and look for something else to do to earn a living. And how many parents are busy chaperoning how many kids to how many organized activities, without questioning whether these things contribute to anyone’s happiness? A kind of automaticity takes over that keeps us doing whatever we do without even posing the question. The second way in which the task takes over has to do with what happens once we start a task. We may start to paint the house because we believe we will be happier if we take care of our property in this way. Sometimes, however, once we start a task, a drivenness to get to the end of it takes over. At this point, we want to finish the job, no matter what. You are no longer within yourself, deciding to do something or not do something because it contributes to your happiness, but now the task has taken over. At this point, the task adds to your misery rather than to your happiness.
Ask: Who’s in Charge?
When you undertake any task, ask yourself repeatedly, “Who’s in charge?” Every so often, stand back for a minute, return to your breath, and ask if continuing this job right now is the best thing to do. If you have a tendency to have to bring a task to completion before stopping, even past the point where it is good for you, you may wish to take a radical countermeasure. For a period of time, practice not finishing anything at the first pass, at least as much as is practically possible. You can do this by finishing the task the next day, or more simply, by just pausing for five minutes to breathe when your task is almost finished. This is like the stimulus control strategy dieters are taught. Since eating is often triggered by the presence of food (rather than the more appropriate stimulus of hunger), it is helpful to leave a little food on your plate (despite those parental voices that lectured to the contrary). In this way, you are breaking the automatic, conditioned response of eating in the presence of food. Similarly, you can overcome letting the task be in charge of you instead of you being in charge of it by not finishing.
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Of course, if you are the kind of person who never finishes anything, but brings things to 90 percent completion and then never gets back to it, you might skip this particular practice.
THE EXPERIENCE (BEVERLY)
It’s Monday morning and I was out of my office all day Friday at a seminar. I arrive early so I have time to get organized for my day. My e-mail loads for about ten minutes and announces that I have twenty-eight messages. Friday’s mail is sitting on my desk and my cell phone rings even though it is only 7:30 A.M. Several minutes into my workday I already feel the calm from my morning meditation period leaving. And there is a nagging thought starting to emerge that I need to hurry up or nothing will get done. And then I laugh at myself. Habit energy! I sit comfortably in my chair and take some centering breaths. And I remember there is no such thing as multitasking. Instead of hurrying, I need to slow down. One thing at a time.
I move my mail off my desk onto my table and go over a list of priorities for the day. I decide to spend about twenty minutes responding to my e-mail. I pick up one of my projects and allot two hours to developing a first draft of my report to the board of directors. I enjoy working on the report, and pretty soon, I am in the flow.
Devote a Day to Mindfulness Practice
One thing that can help you generate more energy in your mindfulness practice is to have a day that you devote to mindfulness. Ideally, you are learning to live deeply and mindfully every day. However, it is all too easy to get pulled out of our intention to be mindful. Our lives are too demanding, too stimulating, and the quality of our mindfulness is as yet too weak.
A day of mindfulness is a day that you set aside to move more slowly and calmly. You resolve that, for this day especially, you will not do anything just to get it done, but will do everything for its own sake. In 04 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 9:50 AM Page 97
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other words, you make the bed to make the bed, not to get it done, and not in order to get to the next thing. You might spend more time than usual lingering over your morning coffee, not missing one sip. Take a luxuriously warm shower, enjoying every moment. Spend more time in sitting meditation and walking meditation. Play peaceful music. Write to a friend. Pause frequently to practice a few moments of mindful breathing. Write in your journal. If you work in the garden or do chores around the house, do them as if you had all the time in the world. If you become driven by tasks, practice leaving some unfinished. You may wish to practice “noble silence,” eliminating all or most all of your talking for the day or part of the day.
The day of mindfulness gives your mind and body the chance to slow down, to experience being rather than doing, to come into the present moment without always rushing into the future. It is similar to the Judeo-Christian tradition of the Sabbath—a time to rest and replenish. If you take this practice seriously, you will understand why rabbis struggled so much with the question of what was allowable and not allowable on the Sabbath day. In the Jewish tradition of the Sabbath, one is supposed to refrain from work—meaning anything that disrupts the natural flow of life through the artifice of human effort. This sounds simple enough at first. But if you take it seriously, what, exactly, constitutes “work”? Is it work to cook your breakfast? To get dressed? And if you have employees (servants in those days), is it okay to let them work?
What if they are not Jewish? Does that change the situation? Can Sabbath rules be lifted if there’s an emergency?
Both the day of mindfulness and the Sabbath traditions aim at giving you a day of rest. But on a day of mindfulness, you can do work. Simple manual tasks are best. Let your intention be to do each task with ease and grace, taking your time, aware of each movement, enjoying every aspect. You work as though not working (
wu-wei
). You do each thing as though it is the only thing to be done all day long—as though it were the last time you will ever have the chance to do it. If you vacuum your house, you vacuum in order to vacuum, not just to get the vacuuming done. If you empty the dishwasher, you empty the dishwasher in order to empty the dishwasher, not to get to the end of it so you can go on to something else. Also, you can choose any convenient day as your day of mindfulness, instead of the designated Sabbath.
However, as with the Sabbath traditions, questions arise. Is it okay to watch television or take in a movie on a day of mindfulness? How about 04 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 9:50 AM Page 98
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reading a novel? Playing a computer game? Getting caught up on a little work you brought home from the office?
Theoretically, all of these things could be done mindfully. But with some experience, you come to know which of these things will pull you away from the spirit of the day, and which will not. Perhaps the idea of entertainment in general is a little questionable. But it also makes some difference whether you are watching a movie about Gandhi or a scary sci-fi thriller.
There’s a certain tension in the stomach that develops when you are doing a task to get it done rather than for its own sake. The best answer is to find your own way, trying things with mindfulness, noting if they pull you out of your center or not, if they help you feel peaceful or give you the frantic energy of doing and achieving. Don’t fool yourself that you can do things mindfully that really bring you away from the spirit of mindfulness.