Finding the Center Within: The Healing Way of Mindfulness Meditation. (24 page)
Read Finding the Center Within: The Healing Way of Mindfulness Meditation. Online
Authors: Thomas Bien
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solid walnut table suddenly split with a deafening crack. It was difficult to explain this, since it was a summer day in a relatively humid climate, and the old table did not split at a joint or crack. Two weeks later, a parallel event occurred. A bread knife that had recently been used and put away in a cupboard suddenly and loudly split into several pieces. Jung took it to a cutlery specialist, who told him the metal was sound, and someone must have been pulling his leg. Jung does not attempt to explain these events, except to say that their co-occurrence was not accidental. Jung has been criticized for such ideas. To scientists, such things sound like hocus-pocus. To spiritualists, Jung’s objective analysis does not make enough of such occurrences. But when you work with dreams regularly, synchronicity becomes a familiar experience. Not too long ago I had a dream about a particular kind of a plant held in a horizontal position. I drew it the best I could in my dream journal, but did not recognize the plant and could make nothing of its appearance in my dream. That evening on the news there was a piece about cocaine traffic in Colombia. It included an image of a man holding a coca plant in his hand in a horizontal position, the same plant in the same position in which I had drawn it that morning. Immediately, the dream image clicked. I showed the image to Beverly to ask her what it reminded her of, and she, too, was reminded by my drawing of the image we had just seen on television. If you are aware, you will have many such things happen.
The subject of synchronicity raises more questions than it answers. An individual experience like that of the coca plant could perhaps be explained in other ways. But when such events occur fairly often, they become increasingly difficult to explain away or rationalize. Whatever such things ultimately mean, they at least indicate that there is a kind of knowingness in dreams that goes beyond our normal ways of knowing. We are interconnected with the world in ways beyond what we can logically understand. Know Yourself
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times terrifying realm, it can also bless and guide you greatly. If you do not know your dreams, you do not know yourself.
Practice for Week Seven
1. Continue to practice meditation (twenty minutes twice daily), mindful moments, daily reading, and walking meditation (chapter 3). 2. Begin to record and work with your dreams, using the suggestions and ideas in this chapter. If you do not always have the time in the morning to work with a dream, at least jot some quick notes to jog your memory. Then record it more fully later in the day. 3. Continue to practice a day of mindfulness (chapter 5). 4. There’s a lot of information in this chapter. If it is largely new, you may want to read it several times as you work with your dreams this week.
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7
Week Eight
o
The highest form of worship is simply to be happy.
—Anonymous Hindu saint
Sadness and Worry: Barbara’s Story
Barbara was devastated. She hadn’t seen it coming. She thought everything was fine. In fact, since everyone had praised her work, she had begun to wonder when she would get a raise. But today her boss said he had to let her go.
The company was not doing well. Since she had been the most recently hired, she was the first to go. He appreciated her; he promised extremely good references. They would send her four weeks’ pay. Barbara was stunned. On the drive home, she struggled to take it in. The company had seemed to be doing well. All the trappings of success were there. The office suite was impressive, the furnishings custom designed. Everyone wore the best clothes. Yes, she had noticed that the number of clients had dropped off. But since she had only been there four months, she thought this was probably just the natural ebb and flow of the business. And about a month ago, her boss had a pained look 151
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when he said her paycheck would be a couple of days late. But she believed him when he explained it was just a banking error and that it would be straightened out.
By the time she reached the door of her apartment, the difficult news had grown into a full-fledged disaster. “This is horrible!” she told herself. “It took me four weeks to get a job last time. And even then, I felt lucky. I may not even
find
another job! What if I end up on the street?”
As she stared blankly into her empty refrigerator, her vague premonition of doom became utter certainty. She was convinced that she would never find work again. She envisioned herself homeless, pushing a shopping cart with her few possessions around the dirty city streets. Barbara closed the door of her refrigerator and opened the large bottle of red wine on the counter. Several glasses later, as she sat dazed in her living room, no food in her stomach, the day’s disaster became proof positive of her worthlessness. It did not matter that this didn’t make any sense. “I’m just no good at anything,” she thought. She continued to sit and drink as the winter light faded in her dark apartment. When her best friend called, she let the machine answer. Mercifully, at some point, she just fell asleep.
Learn the Lessons
Barbara deserves our sympathy. Being suddenly terminated from employment is hard to bear. And while her reactions were not constructive, they are thoroughly understandable. Her job was important to her, and losing it would hurt financially. She faced the prospect of weeks, perhaps months, of job hunting.
And yet while we sympathize, it is also easy to see that Barbara did not do much that evening to help herself. Long before her firing, she had refused to notice the negative signs at the office. She had indulged herself in expectations of quick salary increases that raised her hopes unrealistically and made her termination feel like that much more of a fall. As the news slowly sank in, she nourished her own hysteria. What was a bad situation now became a total disaster. Instead of taking care of herself by talking with her friend, she shut herself off and ignored the phone call. Worse still, she engaged in a mild self-poisoning by overindulging in wine.
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times make it worse by refusing to do constructive things and choosing destructive things instead. To criticize ourselves for these tendencies is not helpful; nor do we want to criticize Barbara. But what can we learn from her experience?
For one thing, Barbara focused on the external problem without realizing her immediate need for self-care. She worked herself into a state of near panic. She cultivated and exaggerated the negative elements of her situation. For example, she convinced herself that the difficult task of finding work would be all but impossible. She also cut herself off from positive elements, such as a nourishing meal or a call from a friend. And at least to this point in the story, she did not do anything to change what could be changed.
Reflection on this pattern tells us a lot about what helps when something triggers a negative emotional state. The things that help us cope with negative situations and the emotions they elicit are quite different from the things Barbara did. First, we need to recognize that we are suffering and that we need to take care of our emotions. We need to find a way to calm body and mind. We need to reflect and look deeply into the causes of our suffering. We also need to find ways to nurture ourselves and take constructive action.
Let’s take a look at these elements.
Recognize the Need for Self-Care
Like many people, Barbara focused on the external situation. Since there was nothing she could do about it at the moment, this just made her more upset. The more she did this, the more upset she became. The more upset she became, the more she lost perspective. She continued to work herself into a negative mood, telling herself that she may never find work and may end up homeless.
When your house is on fire, the first thing to do is put it out. It is not a good time to stand around and complain or try to figure out what happened and who’s to blame. When your emotions are on fire, you need to take care of them. Only then will you have perspective on what happened and what you need to do about it. Once you take care of the fire, you have already faced the hardest part.
You cannot deal all at once with a problem like finding work. There are many steps involved, and they have to be executed over a period of 07 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 9:58 AM Page 154
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time. But if we take the first step of caring for our emotions, we will be able to find our way, one step at a time.
Calm the Feelings
We have talked a lot already about the importance of the breath. Both Buddhism and behavioral psychology use the breath for self-calming. Whenever you breathe in and out with awareness, you come back to yourself. Most of the time, mind and body are separated. The body is here, but the mind is off elsewhere, worrying, planning, ruminating, and scanning for trouble. When you breathe mindfully—even for just the span of one breath—you achieve oneness of body and mind for that period of time. Help is already there, just one conscious breath away. It takes determination, however, to do this in the face of trouble or disappointment. Your relationship with your breath is like a relationship to a friend. If you have ignored a friend for a long time, you cannot expect her to be there for you when you suddenly need her. For conscious breathing to be a help to you in times of distress, you must have practiced it in times of relative calm. If you have practiced in the calm times, it will be there for you when you need it in the difficult times. Calming yourself is not denial. In fact, it is the opposite. When sad feelings come up, you welcome them into your awareness. You just refuse to cultivate panic. Instead, breathing in and out, you calm these feelings, so that you can integrate them into your awareness. Hysteria and panic actually shut down and restrict awareness and therefore accomplish much the same thing as denial or repression. Barbara was experiencing a significant change in her life through the loss of a promising position. It is not that she should be happy about this, or indifferent to her own distress. The goal of spiritual practice is not becoming insensate. But neither should she make it worse by working herself into a state of panic or hysteria. She may be thinking: “I’ve lost a job I was counting on. I feel sad and distressed. I am very disappointed that I will have to look for work again.” All of that is realistic and reasonable. Breathing in and out, calming these thoughts and feelings, she can accommodate to this loss, and ready herself for the steps that will be needed to cope with her new circumstance. There is no problem with acknowledging our disappointment, frustration, sadness, or anger when something happens that triggers these 07 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 9:58 AM Page 155
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emotions. These are part of life, and even advanced Zen masters and spiritual teachers must contend with them. The problem arises when something else gets added. Often we go on to tell ourselves something extra and quite unnecessary—something perhaps a little like this: “I’m sad about this loss.
And it is absolutely terrible and horrible! This
must not be so!”
In this way, we cultivate distress rather than calm and perspective.
What is it about us that loves to indulge in self-torture? There are certain moods in which we all but gleefully cultivate the rottenness of our own negativity. It may taste bitter, but at least it is our own bitterness, and we sit down to it, clanging knife and fork at the banquet of our own despair. Something hurtful or even tragic has happened. That is bad enough. That is
difficult
enough. But then we make this all so much worse. We cultivate thoughts of how unbearable it all is, how unfair. When we think like this, our bodies tighten and our breath becomes shallow. Our thoughts and feelings turn dark and despairing. In some cases, our despair even reaches the point of suicide. You don’t have to do this. You can be sad—even extremely so—without losing yourself in despair. And the first step, the key to all this, is to come to the breath.
When pain or loss strikes, first recognize that the immediate problem is not
to fix the external situation, but to take care of your emotions.
Come back to your old friend the breath. Breathe in and out. Do not fight with the sad feelings or struggle against them. It is enough at first just to avoid cultivating them or making them worse. Breathe in and out, and feel and experience the sadness.
Every experience of sadness connects with every other experience of sadness we have had. This means that sadness never comes as a stranger, but always as an old friend. Smile to your old friend. Calm the feelings. Investigate. How is it with this old friend of yours? What is your body like when you feel sad? How does your breath change? What happens to your mind? Breathe gently in and out, with full awareness, accepting and calming these feelings, and sadness need not become despair. THE EXPERIENCE (TOM)
This is the second time I’ve written this section. Right in the midst of the first attempt, my computer froze. Zap! Several pages 07 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 9:58 AM Page 156
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of unsaved work were gone. As self-pitying emotions welled up, I knew what I needed to do, especially since I was writing about negative emotions. I recognized my need to take care of my feelings, even before I tried to fix anything. In this way, I took care of myself before the emotions got out of hand. I practiced some conscious breathing, then calmly returned and started rewriting. No big deal.
I also began saving my work more often.
Look Deeply at the Root of the Problem
While becoming calm is the critical first step in dealing with a negative mood, there is a second step. To heal pain, we must look deeply into it. How did this pain arise? What is its origin and cause? And how did we create or encourage it?
To gain this kind of insight, you must have calmness in yourself. Calmness and looking deeply are intimately connected, for it is impossible to look deeply if you are not calm. At the same time, if you are calm, you already begin to see more clearly.
Psychologists talk about three aspects of negative moods: what we feel (emotions), what we think (cognition), and what we do (behavior). Each of these influences the other:
Emotions
Cognition
Behavior
Our emotions influence our behavior and our thinking. Our thinking influences our emotions and our behavior. And our behavior influences our thinking and our emotions. While we cannot cause ourselves to instantly snap out of negative emotions or moods, there are 07 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 9:58 AM Page 157