Finding the Center Within: The Healing Way of Mindfulness Meditation. (19 page)

We offer no rules for mindful consumption. We will not say you should not eat meat or drink alcohol, or that you should avoid violent movies, or any other form of prohibition. To do so only results in an authority-based morality. And given human nature, authority-based rules lead to rebellion as much as obedience. Great spiritual teachers have differed on these points, some prohibiting, some proclaiming freedom from prohibitions.

We want to foster a mindfulness-based morality. The best course is to let your own mindfulness be your guide. Feel the effects of what you consume. If you know that something has a negative effect, but you still cannot give it up, be gentle and patient with yourself. Practice mindfulness of the consequences of harmful consumption until you find a readiness to change. (Our book
Mindful Recovery
offers help for those recovering from addiction.) You may decide that some of the traditional prohibitions of spiritual teachings make sense for you. Or you may decide that they do not. But let this grow out of your own insight, with knowledge of yourself and your life context. Otherwise your spiritual practice can become heavy and joyless.

Practice Mindful Consumption

Notice carefully what happens whenever you take something into yourself, whether into your body as food and drink, or into your consciousness. Areas for observation include:

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Watching a movie

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Eating a meal or a snack

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Drinking a glass of water or juice

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Drinking coffee or tea

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Drinking an alcoholic beverage

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Buying something on impulse

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Buying something you have saved for

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•

Seeing or hearing a commercial

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The sights and sounds as you drive across town, and so forth While observing these inputs, notice:

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What your mood is like before you take in this experience

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What your mood is like a short time after and a longer time after

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What your body feels like before, during, and after

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How your body and your emotions may interact

Devote at least one day to this practice, noticing without judgment everything you can possibly become aware of about it, bringing mere recognition to the act of consumption and its consequences. Lower Your Threshold of Pleasure

By adolescence, if not sooner, we have received millions of messages persuading us that we need more and more. We come to require ever higher levels of stimulation to be happy. These messages make hungry ghosts of us, leaving us perpetually discontented in the most prosperous society in the history of the world. Mindfulness lowers the level of stimulation that we need to reach in order to have fun. By living mindfully, you are training yourself to require lower levels of stimulation. You can come to enjoy just making your coffee, just sitting in your backyard in the fading light of day, just talking with a friend.

Our society teaches us quite a different lesson. The popularity of cocaine and other stimulant drugs is no accident. In fact, cocaine is a great metaphor for this process. The cocaine addict becomes used to a very high level of stimulation. Once adjusted to this level, anything below it seems flat and dull. Similarly, if you often watch action-packed films, full of violence and tension, movies dealing with the subtleties of human life will seem boring. Drinking soft drinks, you lose your appreciation for water. Watching television, you come to find reading difficult. By continually doing things that involve a high level of stimulation, you lose your taste for anything below this threshold. 05 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 9:51 AM Page 115

Give Up the Struggle

Without knowing it, many of us are addicted to struggle. We are often unaware of this because we attribute so much to outside factors; it’s our jobs that keep us running, our busy families that won’t give us a break. However, even when we finally do get a chance to relax, it is easy to observe that a lot of this pressure is generated internally. When we finally get to sit on our back patio, all we see around us are things to do—the walk needs sweeping, the garden needs weeding, the lawn needs mowing, the trees need pruning, and so on. Our minds are still racing, because it is the pressure inside that really keeps us hopping and struggling.

Part of what keeps us addicted to struggle is that our society reinforces us for being busy. We all talk about how busy we are. When someone asks us to do something we are not terribly interested in, we say we cannot do it because we are so busy. When was the last time you heard someone say, “Boy, I wish I had more work and responsibility!

I’ve got way too much time on my hands!” Being busy is a status symbol: It shows what important people we are. Cell phones and pagers proclaim our importance to the world, declaring to all that we cannot afford to be out of touch for even a minute.

If we were to give up this idea of being busy, we would have to face the naked truth of life as it really is, apart from the mythology of selfimportance and struggle. A myth, it has been said, is something everyone believes and no one seriously questions. Part of the American myth is that success creates happiness, and the sign of success is being busy and hurried. To be successful, you must struggle and work hard and sacrifice. And if you keep struggling, one day you will be happy. If there is some truth to the idea that hard work brings success, it certainly is not always the case. Look around you. Is it always the most hardworking people who have the most success? Some people are lucky. Many others have worked very hard, but still have not 05 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 9:51 AM Page 116

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achieved much success. It is obviously not always true that working hard brings success. You need talent. You need to be working at the right thing in the right way at the right time and place. You need luck.

And if the relationship between struggle and success is not always that more of one brings more of the other, it is clearly not true that success brings happiness. Success is a wonderful thing, but it may be more true to say that happiness creates success than the other way around. Happier people
feel
more successful. And because they are happy, others enjoy being around them, which helps tremendously no matter what your career is. Struggle perpetuates itself. You can see this, for example, with people who achieve wealth through scrimping and saving. They may no longer need to scrimp, but it has become such a habit, that they continue to bemoan every penny spent. When will they enjoy what they have?

Inevitably the drama of struggle fails us. And since we are so used to living this drama, when things are quiet we at first feel a terror of emptiness. We quickly find things to get us busy again, to reinvolve ourselves with the struggle, to convince ourselves we are important and push this emptiness away. However, when we come into the present moment—when we learn to enjoy the simple things we do every day—

we no longer need the drama. And the emptiness we feared reveals an underlying luminosity.

Challenge Your Busyness

For a day or two, practice being aware of how often you say how busy you are. Notice your intentions behind it. How often do you say it to get out of something you don’t want to do or to make an excuse? How often do you say it with a background of self-importance? How often do you say it because you simply are busy and overwhelmed? How often do you say it for some combination of these reasons?

When it is not a matter of simply being busy and overwhelmed, correct yourself internally. For example, you might say to yourself: “I said I was busy, but what I really mean is that other things are more important than what this person just asked me to do.”

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Protect Yourself

There are some jobs and professions that, by their nature, bring one into contact with a lot of human suffering. Therapists, doctors, nurses, criminal lawyers, social workers, and others experience a lot of difficult people and human suffering every day. Should they quit their jobs because of the toxic atmosphere? Perhaps. The important thing, however, is to monitor the effect these things have and seek ways to protect oneself. To a certain extent, professional training provides a shield against some of this. However, it is unfortunate that the professional shield often comes with a cost. Many professionals cope with the difficulties of their work by ensconcing themselves in a protective layer of arrogance or white-coated professionalism. There’s another way. If you are strong enough in yourself, a spirit of compassion can protect against these toxins, without the layer of insulated professionalism. To cope with such difficult things,
more
compassion, rather than less, may be the answer. Compassion must be linked with clear, accurate knowledge of yourself, your role, your abilities, and your limitations. Our society reinforces us for putting up a false front, for pretending to be more capable and knowledgeable than we are. Such pretense creates stress. If you know that the situation before you is beyond your capacity to help or change, but you are trying to pretend that you can, that becomes an awful burden. No wonder you may then feel a need to detach and pull back.

To be compassionate, you must also practice equanimity. Equanimity practice is often linked in Buddhist traditions to compassion. For you must recognize that you cannot control all circumstances in which others find themselves, and you cannot control their choices. You must be willing to let things be and accept life as it actually is. If you cannot do this, then practicing compassion becomes overwhelming, and you will tend to just numb yourself to others’ pain rather than open to it. If you are in a helping profession, recognize what you can and cannot do to help. Know and accept your limits.

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Be Free to Be Yourself

Thich Nhat Hanh teaches this gatha: “Breathing in, I see myself as space. Breathing out, I feel free.” Being free, especially in the sense of being free to be yourself, is essential. You must be free to be the person you are and are meant to be. You must be free to blossom in your own special way. The goal is not to become the same as that other person whom you admire; the goal is to become the person you and you alone can become.

The Jewish teacher Martin Buber once said that when he got to heaven, he would not be asked why he was not Moses. He would be asked, he said, why he was not Martin Buber. For the real tragedy is not that we did not live up to someone else’s vision of life, no matter how wonderful, but that we do not live up to what we ourselves can be. Insist on yourself, and watch out for collectivism in religion, spirituality, or philosophy. We caution against any “ism” that substitutes authority for the responsibility of doing your own thinking and reaching your own conclusions.

In the West, the dangers of self are obvious: selfishness, arrogance, competitiveness instead of cooperation, aggression, and violence. But a literalism about no self is at least as dangerous. In fact, the Buddha said the clinging to no self is even worse than clinging to self. Clinging too hard to no self brings despair, nihilism, or collectivism. It also leads to correcting others whenever they use the word
self.
So don’t get caught on either edge of this dangerous sword—self or no self. But use both effectively to cut through delusion. The world has had some bitter lessons about collectivism. The Holocaust in Nazi Germany is one such lesson. The tragic consequences of cult involvement such as the Jim Jones mass suicide in Guyana or David Koresh in Waco are others, and show that a cloak of religiosity is no protection against destructive collectivism. We need one another, and having a community of people with whom you meditate and share spiritual practice can be helpful. Sometimes it may make the difference between being able to maintain a spiritual practice and not being able to. But we also need the space to be ourselves.

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but without it, you will not have the capacity to help. Similarly, psychology teaches us the danger of being insufficiently individuated—of being only a part of the “undifferentiated family ego mass,” as the family systems therapist Murray Bowen expressed it. We must have the space to be ourselves. The preciousness of the individual is the West’s gift to the East and to traditions like Buddhism, the highest fruit of Western spirituality.

More than fifty years ago, Krishnamurti was already teaching that the age of the guru is past. We also believe this is so. We must cease to project the best that we are onto others instead of claiming it as our own. As the abuses of power of so many teachers, political leaders, ministers, gurus, and others testify, we need to connect directly with our own wisdom.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, in a journal entry dated November 1842, put it this way: “Each man being the Universe, if he attempt to join himself to others, he instantly is jostled, crowded, cramped, halved, quartered, or on all sides diminished of his proportion.”

Avoid Roadblocks

Precepts and commandments in spiritual teachings are designed to be a gift, but often come to feel like a burden. In the West, they can elicit our rebellion, as we stand up for our own freedom and our own insight. To understand this dilemma in a new light, imagine it from the perspective of an enlightened person. If you were such a person, people 05 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 9:51 AM Page 120

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