Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World (21 page)

I remember sitting down at the next week’s teachers’ meeting, sighing deeply, and saying, “If I didn’t have to, I wouldn’t teach tomorrow.” All of the teachers looked at me and said, “You don’t have to; we’ll help you.”

I sat there, stunned. It had never occurred to me I could stop teaching … I knew I was upset and tired, but until that moment I hadn’t realized how tightly I had been holding on to my identity as a teacher, or how forbidden it was for me to admit vulnerability. It felt like shirking responsibility.

Not teaching meant admitting that I was very sick … it meant acknowledging that I was tired and scared and that my energy was being zapped by fear and grief and anticipatory worries.

I wanted to be a model for my class, but teaching
regardless of circumstances was false. The kindness and compassion of my friends, my colleagues, helped me see the truth of my situation. They didn’t say, “You’re bad. How could you stop now in the middle of the cycle?”

My “shoulds” and “ought-tos” dissolved, freeing me from the box I hadn’t known I had created. As I took in, “You don’t have to; we’ll help you,” struggle ceased. With sadness and relief, it was decided that my colleague, Ferris Urbanowski, would come to my next class with me. I would tell the class what had happened and pass the reins to her. She’d teach this class and the next and then Florence Meyer would teach the final two classes. I would remain as long as I could, but as “patient.”

The next day, Ferris and I went to class together. As the class members took their seats along the walls of the room, we placed ourselves in the center. I began with a meditation:

Letting go of everything but this moment,
Allow yourself to leave behind work
And the thoughts of the day that has passed,
Or the evening to come.
Simply follow your breath.
As you breathe in, bring your attention fully to the in-breath,
And as you breathe out, bring it fully to the out-breath,
Allowing it to be as it is
Without trying to change it in any way.
²

We sat for a few minutes so that everyone could settle in and then I rang the bells, looked around the room at the people present, took a deep breath, and introduced Ferris.

“Ferris is a good friend and a wonderful teacher. She will
be taking over the class. I’ve just learned that the lymphoma I’ve had has returned and I will need more chemotherapy and some hospitalization. I would like t
o stay in class with you, but now it will be as patient.”

In her book,
Here for Now
, Elana describes with simple and painful beauty her journey through these most difficult times. Yet this was not just about surviving cancer. As her colleague, Saki Santorelli, said of her story, “It is about thriving in the face of death; about choosing life in the midst of complete uncertainty; about saying yes (over and over again) to the luminosity that is the core of our human inheritance.”

And what about the rest of us? How are we relating to those things, large and small, day in, day out, that remind us of our vulnerabilities? It is to this question that we turn in Week Five of the mindfulness program.

Whenever we’re faced with a difficulty—whether it’s the stress of a job, illness in ourselves or in a loved one, exhaustion or malignant sadness—it’s only natural to try and push it away. We can do this in myriad ways, from endlessly trying to “solve” it or by trying to ignore it or bury it under a pile of distractions. We all use these strategies, even though they may have stopped working many years ago. Why?

First, these methods appeared to work so often in the past that it seems entirely sensible to use the same tactic again and again. Second, there may be an element of denial; we simply do not want to admit that we are helpless and vulnerable because we fear that others will think of us as being not good enough. And deep down, perhaps, we fear that this means that we’ll lose some friends and then we’ll become lonely and abandoned. So we grind on—and on.

But sooner or later, there comes a point where these strategies no longer work because we either run out of steam or the difficulty we’re facing is truly intractable. When we reach this fork in the road we have two options. We can carry on and pretend that nothing is wrong (and lead an increasingly miserable existence), or we can embrace a different way of relating to ourselves and the world. This different approach is one of
acceptance
of ourselves and of
whatever
is troubling us. It means turning toward it, befriending it, even when—indeed, especially when—we don’t like it or it scares us.

For many of us, mentioning “acceptance” is heresy of the first order, but this initial reaction stems from the frequent inability of individual words to convey true meaning. Acceptance in the context of mindfulness is not the passive acceptance of the intolerable. It is not “giving up,” nor is it resignation or spinelessness. Neither is mindfulness anything to do with detachment—it is not about “not feeling anything” any more. Look at Elana Rosenbaum: she
wanted
with a passion her health, her husband, her life; and to do what she had to do, she had to be attached, very attached—more so than she had ever been in her life.

Mindfulness is not about detachment.

So what do we mean by acceptance? The root of the word (the same root as the words “capture” and “perception”) means to receive or take hold of something—and through this, it also means to grasp or understand. Acceptance, in this sense, allows the mind to embrace the true, deep understanding of how things really are. Acceptance is a pause, a period of allowing, of letting be, of clear seeing. Acceptance takes us off the hair trigger, so that we’re less likely to make a knee-jerk reaction. It
allows us to become fully aware of difficulties, with all of their painful nuances, and to respond to them in the most skillful way possible. It gives us more time and space to respond. And often, we may discover, the wisest way of responding is to do nothing at all.

Paradoxically, taking action in the conventional sense by deploying the mind’s Doing mode, is often an automatic reaction. It’s not proactive at all. And remaining a slave to our automatic reactions is true resignation to our fate.

In short, mindful acceptance gives us choices.

Perhaps Rumi, the thirteenth-century Sufi poet, summed it up best of all when he wrote “The Guest House”:

This being human is a guest house.

Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,

some momentary awareness comes

as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,

who violently sweep your house

empty of its furniture,

still, treat each guest honourably.

He may be clearing you out

for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,

meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,

because each has been sent

as a guide from beyond.

Jalaluddin Rumi, in
The Essential Rumi
,
translated by Coleman Barks, 1999

Of course, such acceptance can be very difficult. Some people who have embarked on mindfulness courses stumble at this point. Many people who read this book may stumble too. Some will continue repeating the meditations detailed in the previous chapters and will, no doubt, receive considerable solace from them. Others may abandon mindfulness altogether. We hope that you will continue with Week Five because it’s no exaggeration to say that all of the previous chapters have been leading up to this point. The meditations so far have acted as the practices necessary to build the “muscles” of attention. They have enhanced concentration and awareness to such a degree that you are now able to embark on the Exploring Difficulty meditation.

Whatever happens over the coming week or so, always treat yourself with compassion. Repeat the meditations as many times as you choose (but at least see if you can do the recommended minimum). No one is keeping score of your “progress” and you needn’t do so either.

Acceptance comes in two steps. The first involves gently noticing the temptation to drive away or suppress any unsettling thoughts, feelings, emotions and physical sensations. The second step involves actively meeting them “at the door laughing” and greeting them “honourably,” as Rumi suggests. This can be a hard and, occasionally, a painful experience, but it’s not half as difficult as resigning yourself to a life blighted by unsettling thoughts, feelings and emotions. The secret is to take tiny steps in the direction of acceptance.

The initial sequence for this week of two eight-minute meditations prepares the mind and body for the third Exploring Difficulty meditation: see the first two meditations as ways of grounding yourself, so that you can gain a clearer perspective of yourself and the world.