Finding the Center Within: The Healing Way of Mindfulness Meditation. (9 page)

Consider driving. When you drive from the perspective of self, it becomes important who is in front of whom and who gets there first. Driving becomes a competition and a race. Sometimes, as with road rage, it even becomes a war. But what is the purpose of driving? Even within relative, goal-oriented thinking, the purpose of driving is to get safely from here to there, and only secondarily to get there quickly. It makes much more sense to think of driving as a situation that we are all in together, with a goal of getting from one place to another safely and efficiently. In fact, it actually works better that way. When we approach it in a no-self way, there are fewer accidents. We all get where we are going in one piece, and are far less distressed and worn out. It costs us a great deal when we cling to the idea of a separate self. We can go even further here. When you really examine it, all we have is our experiencing. It is not so clear that there is anything solid that does the experiencing, even though the convention of our language insists there must be a subject and a predicate for every sentence. But when we realize there is no solid, unchanging thing that experiences, we can see that the purpose of driving is not to get there but to drive, and the purpose of living is to live—to be fully alive. Abandon the Chase

There’s a bumper sticker that reads: “Life is a game. The one with the most toys in the end wins.” Funny, yes. But also sad. Wins what? Wins the heart attack? Wins the prize of dying early from one of the many other stress-related diseases? Wins the prize of missing the whole thing because you are never quite where you are, doing what you’re doing, but are always racing ahead to the next thing, as if life itself were a race or a competition? We pay an awful price when we think we are in a self situation but are actually in a no-self situation. And we are actually always in a no-self situation. Take another example—a job interview. You have researched this position, and you feel that you want it very much. Because you are thinking of it as a self situation, which is to say a win-lose situation, you get competitive. Your heart races and your sweat glands become overactive. This in turn makes you self-conscious. You second-guess yourself constantly: “Was that the right answer? Boy, that was stupid!” Because of 02 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 9:46 AM Page 41

So no self is not esoteric. It is pragmatic and effective. It works. The practice of mindfulness is exactly this simple, moment-by-moment attention. It is peaceful and refreshing to be in that place: Now this is happening, now this is happening, now this, and so on. It becomes a struggle as soon as ideas of self creep in: “Am I doing it right? Am I being mindful enough? Boy, I’m not very good at this!” Noticing the difference between these two kinds of awareness is itself the way out. But more about that later.

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tea is as valid as drinking it. Stay in the present moment. When your thoughts get ahead of you, gently return to the present and to what you are doing.

Before you begin to eat or to drink your tea, pause. Appreciate the prospect of your tea or food. Then slowly begin to eat or drink. While sipping or eating, savor each taste, smell, and sensation. Notice what it is like to chew, taste, and swallow. When other concerns arise, acknowledge them, and remind yourself you can deal with them later. Right now, only this cup of tea, this piece of fruit, exists. Give yourself the gift of being in the present moment.

Practice for Week Two

1. Perform the practices for this week:

• “Count the Breath” (p. 27)

• “Find Your Self” (p. 38)

• “Tea Meditation” (p. 41)

2. Try this special daily practice: “Moments of Mindfulness” below.

Moments of Mindfulness

There are many opportunities during the day when we are engaged in a relatively simple task that we usually do on automatic. For example: doing the dishes, taking a shower, vacuuming, going to the bathroom, drinking a glass of water, walking from your car to the office or the store, getting dressed, waiting at a red light, and so on. Choose one of these activities, and in the coming week, resolve to do it with total mindfulness, breathing in and out, aware of what you are doing, not getting lost in your plans and worries. When your mind wanders, bring it back to the present without wasting any energy in self-recrimination. 03 BIEN.qxd 8/18/03 12:25 PM Page 43

The Door

How then are we to open the door of mindfulness, and use it in our daily life? If meditation is the answer, it has been presented in ways that make it seem daunting and difficult to most Westerners—a practice for the spiritual Olympians among us. But when the essence of meditation is understood, this need not be the case. And when we can take meditation out of our meditation room and into daily life, a quiet power emerges that, while at first almost too subtle to notice, gradually transforms every moment and every experience. Part II is drawn primarily from traditional spiritual practices. In this section, we teach you the formal practice of meditation (weeks three and four). We tell you what meditation is and how to do it, and we answer questions regarding common difficulties. Psychological sources help us understand the effects of meditation and teach us how to give ourselves encouraging messages. In the chapters for weeks five and six we show you how to begin to integrate the meditative attitude into daily life. Spiritual sources are again supplemented with psychological input, such as comparing mindful living with the psychology of “flow,”

and keeping a balanced lifestyle.

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3

(Weeks Three and Four)

M E D I TAT I O N

o

We already are what we want to become. We don’t have to become someone else. All we have to do is be ourselves, fully and authentically. We don’t have to run after anything. We already contain the whole cosmos. We simply return to ourselves through mindfulness and touch the peace and joy that are already present within us and all around us. I have arrived. I am home. There is nothing to do.

—Thich Nhat Hanh,
Transformation at the Base
(2001) Befriend Your Inner Life: Kate’s Story

Kate was a trial lawyer. She was bright, dedicated, and hardworking. And though she was reasonably successful, something seemed to block her from living up to her full potential. In therapy, Kate came to see how thinking oriented and intellectualized she was. The moment she started to feel an emotion, she immediately 45

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converted it into thinking and reasoning, as though it were altogether intolerable to feel emotion. This was by no means all bad. It helped her stay in a problem-solving mode when others were losing their calm. But it also limited her effectiveness. To convince judges and juries, she needed emotion. She needed passion, and not just reason. In meditation, she learned that she could let emotions come up without being afraid they would sweep her away. Over time her emotional energy became more available to her, and she learned that she could draw on this when she needed to. She became more powerful in giving closing arguments, and her success rate—already good—improved still more. The Meditative Attitude

There is no better method for deep transformation and finding inner peace than meditation. Psychological research such as that conducted by the Harvard psychiatrist Herbert Benson has detailed the profound physiological effects of meditation. When we meditate, our pulse slows down and our blood pressure drops. Our brain activity shifts toward alpha waves—reflecting a state of calm awareness. These changes inoculate us against many stress-related illnesses, and they occur in even novice meditators. Yet these physiological changes barely touch upon the change of consciousness that advanced meditators report. For meditation is not just for fine-tuning the body and the mind (which it does), it is a path of enlightenment, a way to come into that place of unshakable peace called nirvana, moksha, satori—the kingdom of heaven. However, the practice of meditation is riddled with paradox. Trying to find peace, we first experience anxiety. Trying to just be, we experience the wild busyness of our minds, endlessly worrying, anticipating, planning, or regretting. This initial experience makes some of us recoil from meditation, glad to return to the distraction of our busy lives. Is it possible for ordinary human beings—who are neither saints nor ascetics, not monks, nuns, or gurus—to become meditators and to use this method of peace and transformation for themselves? Absolutely. The only catch is that although you start to meditate for a reason—

whether it’s to reach enlightenment or just to inoculate yourself against stress—you must give up this very goal, allowing your meditation practice to unfold as if you were not seeking to accomplish anything at all. 03 BIEN.qxd 8/18/03 12:25 PM Page 47

Meditation is natural. Just as you do not have to work to see the color blue or hear the sound of traffic going by, you do not need to try to force yourself to accomplish anything special in order to meditate. Encouraging meditative awareness is a little like encouraging sleep. You can do things to facilitate sleep: waiting to go to bed until you feel sleepy; turning off bright lights and putting yourself in a comfortable, safe, and quiet place; avoiding caffeine or stimulating activities before you go to bed; and so on. But you cannot force sleep. You cannot make sleep happen. Going to sleep is not something accomplished with willpower and flexed muscles and knitted brow. In fact, the art of falling asleep is the art of getting out of your own way enough to allow sleep to occur. As everyone who has been up in the middle of the night knows, the more you worry about how tired you will be the next day, the more you think that you’ve got to get to sleep right now, the more sleep eludes you.

Meditation is a state of calm, alert attention rather than sleep. But as with sleep, it can only be encouraged and not forced. If you sit with an attitude of accomplishing or forcing, you quickly come to recognize that you cannot control this process. The more you try to force yourself to feel peaceful and not feel sad or anxious, the less peaceful you become. Meditation is the art of getting out of your own way and of letting the process unfold at its own pace and rhythm. It is the simplest thing of all. But we are so used to doing—to being occupied and entertained—that it takes a while to reeducate this capacity for being. What makes it possible in the first place is that we are already Buddha. We are not trying to force ourselves to be something inimical to our nature: We are just uncovering what we already are, allowing something vast and unfathomable but normally in the background to come into the foreground of awareness.

Meditation is a little bit like what happens when you sit before a campfire in a quiet, beautiful place. It is more focused, but like your campfire reverie, you are not trying to accomplish anything. You are not looking at the fire because it is good for you, or to create peaceful feelings. You are just looking at the fire. And as you look at the fire, your mind settles down on its own. As your mind gradually quiets down, you get closer, layer by layer, to your underlying Buddha nature. And these are not empty words. Your Buddha nature is there. In the 03 BIEN.qxd 8/18/03 12:25 PM Page 48

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film
Phenomenon,
John Travolta plays a character named George who has suddenly developed super intelligence. In one scene, he studies the trees as they gently sway back and forth in the wind, allowing himself to sway gently in their rhythm. Wisely, the meaning of this behavior is never expressed in words; but what it shows is a person in harmony with nature, in contact with instinctive wisdom. When the woman he loves complains of anxiety about how to live and handle her life and its problems, George tells her, of course she knows what to do. He asks her, for example, how she held her children when they cried as infants. She pantomimes holding her baby and rocking back and forth, just as George had rocked in harmony with the trees. In this way, he puts her in touch with her own wordless knowing, her own instinctive wisdom. He puts her in touch with her Buddha nature, which is not always about knowing deep mysteries, but is sometimes just knowing how to comfort a child, or for that matter, how to comfort ourselves. Meditation is getting in touch with that.

Remember Who You Are

If you have been doing the exercises to this point, you are coming to know just how busy your mind is. The mind is always doing something. If it is not focused on drinking your tea or coffee, or on your breathing, it will be focused on your worries and plans and regrets and heartaches, gibbering and jabbering away with its incessant noise and chatter. In order to touch Buddha mind or big mind, it helps to give little mind something to do. Whenever we are fully engaged with something, there is an opportunity to become aware of big mind. When we touch big mind, there is a sense of coming to ourselves. In an interview John Lennon gave shortly before his death, he discussed a time in his life when he was having great difficulty. He was using drugs and experiencing a deep alienation. One day he took a warm bath, which he called a great female trick. Suddenly he came to himself, saying he knew who he was. What he described was a moment when he got back in touch with his true self, and not just the role he played as a former Beatle and rock star. The simplest things can help bring us to this space. Meditation is just the simplest. 03 BIEN.qxd 8/18/03 12:25 PM Page 49