Finding the Center Within: The Healing Way of Mindfulness Meditation. (29 page)

mindfulness. It gently helps you to be aware in a different way, so you can break old patterns. However, with managed care, therapists often feel a time pressure, since they know that they only have a limited number of sessions. Under such conditions, therapy can deteriorate into sessions of advice giving. And while advice can play a role in therapy, it should be more like the spice in the dish than the dish itself. True therapy is first of all a place of deep, calm, mindful listening. A therapist who does not listen deeply and at some length before diagnosing your problem or making suggestions for change may be of limited help. So whatever the limits of your medical coverage, look for a therapist who listens deeply, who seems to want to understand you more than diagnose you or dispense quick advice. If you’d like more information on the topics covered here, see:
Depressive Thinking

Burns, David D.
Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy
. New York: Avon Books, 1980.

Schemas

Elliott, Charles H., and Maureen Kirby Lassen.
Why Can’t I Get What
I Want?: How to Stop Making the Same Old Mistakes and Start Living a
Life You Can Love.
Palo Alto, Calif.: Davies-Black Publishing, 1998. Young, Jeffrey E., and Janet Klosko.
Reinventing Your Life.
New York: Dutton, 1993.

Anger

McKay, Matthew, Peter D. Rogers, and Judith McKay.
When Anger
Hurts: Quieting the Storm Within.
Oakland, Calif.: New Harbinger, 1989.

Nhat Hanh, Thich.
Anger: Wisdom for Cooling the Flames.
New York: Riverhead, 2001.

07 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 9:58 AM Page 183

1. Continue with the practices of a day of mindfulness, moments of mindfulness, reading, walking meditation, and dream work. 2. Increase your meditation time to twenty-five minutes twice daily, if you feel ready to do so.

3. Practice the exercises in this chapter:

• “Challenge Depressive Thinking” (p. 161)

• “Identify Your Maladaptive Schemas” (p. 167)

• “Twenty-five Healing Things” (p. 171)

• “Work with Anger Thoughts” (p. 178)

• “Work with Worries” (p. 179)

4. In general, this week give special attention to your emotional life. Read this chapter at least twice. When negative emotions surface, recognize them. Don’t try to push them away, but don’t wallow or get lost in them either. Breathe in and out, making a calm, open space to experience them fully and clearly. Look into the roots of the problem. Do something to nurture yourself from your list of twenty-five healing things.

07 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 9:58 AM Page 184

08 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 10:00 AM Page 185

8

Week Nine

R E L AT I O N S H I P S

o

It is essential to remember that every being we encounter is someone who has been dear to us.

—Jeffrey Hopkins,
The Tantric Distinction
(1999) Love is possible only if two persons communicate with each other from the center of their existence, hence if each one of them experiences himself from the center of his existence. Only in this “central experience” is human reality, only here is aliveness, only here is the basis for love.

—Erich Fromm,
The Art of Loving
(1956)

Relationships test the heart. Not just our relationships with our spouses, partners, or significant others, but all relationships. The way we relate to our children, mother, father, and siblings—the way we relate to friends, coworkers, the postal clerk—this tells us more about who we are than the most powerful psychological test. When we are angry or irritated with others, the heart is too small. 185

08 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 10:00 AM Page 186

186

When that feeling of slight impatience arises because someone else is using the phone and we want to, or because someone pulls into “our”

lane on the highway, life is giving us feedback. It is telling us that the heart needs to expand. It is telling us that we need to learn to accommodate others’ needs without allowing our own peace to be threatened. When the heart is too small, other people seem to be a nuisance, and our life fills with tension and conflict. When the heart is large and ample, relationships are a joy and flow smoothly and peacefully. Good or bad, the quality of our relationships measures the adequacy of the heart. Usually we approach it the other way. We think that the quality of our relating reveals something about the other person. If he is easy to be around, if we feel good in his presence, we think he is a good, decent person. If he causes us discomfort or uneasiness, if he challenges us in some way, we think he is a bad, difficult person. Or worse still, we play amateur psychologist, pinpointing exactly what is wrong with the other, how he is sick or pathological or has “issues.”

Our primary need is not so much for a more sophisticated way of psychologizing, analyzing, and interpreting other people. Often this is just a more refined, intellectual way of blaming. We are already sufficiently skilled at that. What we need is a
change of heart,
a fundamentally new way of seeing the people with whom we share the highway, the office, and the bedroom. Invite a Change of Heart

Now that you have been practicing mindfulness for a while, perhaps you will have noticed that you are happiest when you feel most connected with others, when you feel love. Some of our saddest moments, on the other hand, occur when we feel alienated—when our connection with others is disrupted by conflict or anger. The closer the relationship, the greater the unhappiness when this is so. Our happiness has more to do with the people in our lives than we normally imagine in our individualistic culture. If we think of ourselves as separate, discrete selves, we may be misled to imagine that our happiness is a separate quantum, something to clutch and hold and defend. From the perspective of the small and separate self, happiness is a zero sum game: The more I have, the less you have, and the more you have, 08 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 10:00 AM Page 187

All religions teach love. In the West, Judaism is one of the most ancient traditions to give importance to love of neighbor. And the glory of Christianity is precisely to elevate this principle to centrality. Buddhist teachings on this subject are particularly helpful in showing us how to put these insights into practice.

All teach the importance of the quality of our relating to others. Yet injunctions to love our neighbor echo with sentimentality and seem quaint in a world where the things that really count are money, success, fame, and fortune, and all their accoutrements. Those fortunate enough to still relate meaningfully to their religious heritage may yet find it difficult to put the practice of love foremost in their awareness and breathe life into it. More likely, they find an unsatisfying split between belief and practice in a competitive and hostile world. Drawing on both the spiritual and the psychological, we will examine those practices that help open the heart and mind to others. Under the area of relationship skills, psychology has much to teach, while spirituality offers a crucial piece of the relationship puzzle by providing essential teachings on love. Open Your Heart

Before you entrust seed to soil, you must prepare the ground. For a seed to take root and grow, the soil must not be too hard or compacted. It must contain enough space for the seed to spread its roots and enough moisture and nutrients to support the young plant’s growth down into the earth and up toward the light. Without preparation, the seed will not grow.

08 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 10:00 AM Page 188

188

Practicing relationship skills without first preparing the soil is likely to yield results that are stilted and hollow, or worse still, prove impossible to do at all. The intention to be loving, compassionate, and skillful requires the soft soil of an open heart to achieve significant results. Buddhists refer to preparing the ground as “mental training.” We often translate these practices as “meditation” or even “prayer,” but Buddhism has no such terms in its vocabulary. The term
mental training
emphasizes above all changing
ourselves
. Western religious sensibility gives words like
prayer
an emphasis on changing external reality. This is not as absurd a notion as our materialistic culture often assumes. Dr. Larry Dossey and others have marshaled the scientific evidence that prayer does make a difference in recovery from illness, even when people do not know they are being prayed for. But the Buddhist emphasis is a little different. In Buddhist practice, one is not attempting to exert supernatural force upon the world so much as to align oneself more harmoniously with the world as it is, apart from our usual prejudices and conditioning. By expanding the heart with these practices, you change yourself. This is already a miracle.

Now that you have introduced meditation into your daily routine, you are already engaged in this process, already learning to open yourself to reality and become still, deep, and receptive. Perhaps you have already noticed changes in your relationships. Beyond general meditation practices, however, there are also practices specifically geared toward changing the way we relate to others. These are collectively called
metta meditation
.

Metta Meditation

The word
metta
(
maitri
in Sanskrit) means
lovingkindness
. This type of meditation or mental training aims to prepare our mental ground to be more open to others, more accepting and loving. The essence of this practice is easy to understand. But like all meditation practice, it requires patience and persistence. All beings, says the Dalai Lama, seek happiness. On this basis, taken in its most profound sense, one can see that there is no need to reject anyone, including ourselves; for we are all in the same condition, all trying to be happy, all trying to avoid pain. True, some of our efforts are shortsighted and misdirected. But if we can see these underlying intentions of seeking happiness and avoiding 08 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 10:00 AM Page 189

behavior to find these primary intentions at work. Likewise with yourself, when you find yourself doing things that you do not fully approve of, remind yourself that you, too, are simply trying to be happy and avoid pain.

This awareness, remembered throughout the day, is already a powerful antidote to the fragmentation and alienation we described in the first chapter. You increasingly feel relatedness and connection with all beings. The aggressive driver, the rude person on the telephone, the discourteous clerk at the store—none of them are foreign to us as we see that each is attempting to be happy and avoid suffering, as are we.

The ancient sage Patanjali makes this promise: “Undisturbed calmness of mind is attained by cultivating friendliness toward the happy, compassion for the unhappy, delight in the virtuous, and indifference toward the wicked.” Of particular note in this advice is how it differs from normal consciousness. Normally, we dwell only briefly on the positive in human beings, while being consumed by their negative aspects—their lack of understanding and insight. Reversing this trend is a powerful practice; the promise of peace is not overstated. Develop True Self-Love

Formal metta meditation involves rehearsing a set of intentions toward yourself and others in an ever-widening circle of concern. The practice 08 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 10:00 AM Page 190

190

begins
with yourself
. The Bible tells us to love our neighbors
as ourselves,
and in this practice, we take the last clause seriously. Love for ourselves is the assumed basis for loving others. In ancient times, this hardly required explication. People then, as in traditional societies today, could not have conceived of the self-doubt and low self-esteem endemic in our modern culture.

But for most of us, self-love needs emphasis. The psychologist Erich Fromm clarified that the capacity for love and compassion is a single, undivided capacity. There is not one separate capacity with which we love ourselves and another with which we love other people. It is one capacity. The more loving, understanding, and compassionate we are toward ourselves, the more loving, understanding, and compassionate we can ultimately be with others; the more loving, understanding, and compassionate we are with others, the more loving, understanding, and compassionate we can be with ourselves.

This issue is muddled in our culture because we confuse
self-love
with
selfishness
. One of Freud’s groundbreaking insights is that we display outrageously and excessively what we do not truly own. Our preoccupation with ourselves is not true self-love but its lack. Selfish behavior is not genuine self-love. It is shallow, hollow, and empty. It reveals an underlying, profound self-doubt and self-hatred. It is a symptom, which, like all symptoms, is a misguided attempt to find what is missing. It attempts to point us in the right direction—the direction of a deep, genuine, and grounded love of self. The slogan of a selfish culture is that more is better. If one piece of pie is good, then two are better. At the same time, because of our neurotic split about food, if it is good to be a little thin, then it is even better to be anorexic. If one glass of wine is good, then the whole bottle is better. The effects of such behavior reveal an actual lack of self-love, as we destroy body and mind alike. Self-loathing is evident in the result, as we become overweight or starve ourselves or destroy our livers and brains in a flood of alcohol.
This is not excessive love for self
and a lack of love for others, but altogether a lack of love, both of self and
of other.

So it is no accident that metta meditation has as its foundation the cultivation of genuine, solid self-love. The first person who must receive our love and understanding is us. And cultivating a true love of self, we at the same time deepen our capacity to love others. 08 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 10:00 AM Page 191