Tag: Insight Meditation

Mindfulness: Going Beyond The Current Trend

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It seems mindfulness has become the tour de jour in 2015. It is everywhere. Parade Magazine called mindfulness meditation the number one health booster, the hottest well-being trend of our time. It is now used by the U.S. military to prepare soldiers for war and treat them for PTSD when they get back. Companies like Google are using mindfulness to enable employees to work harder for longer hours. A recent headline I found in Forbes magazine sums up the whole trend:

“Overworked and Overwhelmed? Use These Mindfulness Secrets to Restore Balance In 2015.”

The article opens with the following words, “Stress and burnout are all-too-frequent for executives…. But feeling overworked and overwhelmed not only reduces engagement and productivity, it also erodes happiness and personal health. What to do? Mindfulness is the answer.

Some of the benefits of mindfulness touted in the article include such attributes as flow, completely absorbed in work, elevated, a little bit of swagger, transparency, a sense of humor, calm, clear, confident, intentional, and laser-like focus.

There’s nothing wrong with any of this, of course, but from a Buddhist perspective the purpose of mindfulness goes much deeper. Most of the techniques used under the rubric of mindfulness in the popular culture focus on the peace that comes from a concentrated and calm mind, which can bring a lot of relief from the stress we face in our everyday world. But calming, concentrated meditation alone will not necessarily bring us wisdom, promote ethical behavior and ultimately lead to liberation from suffering. While concentration is a cornerstone of mindfulness practice, it can also be used in the service of the ego, for achievement and competition, to dominate others and to be selfish. It will not necessarily give us a perspective on ourselves, our suffering and the suffering we may cause others.

If we simply focus on entering calm peaceful states and staying there, we don’t gain any insights into who we are and all the neurotic stories and lies we can tell ourselves that fosters the illusion of a separate permanent self. In essence, by simply making the mind calm, without paying attention, we miss everything about us that makes us human.

Pema Chödrön puts it this way, “The most fundamental aggression to ourselves, the most fundamental harm we can do to ourselves, is to remain ignorant by not having the courage and the respect to look at ourselves honestly and gently.”

Vipassana (Insight) meditation is really a balancing act between mindfulness and concentration. Mindfulness grows by using the lens of a concentrated mind to look at whatever is passing without judgment, realizing and accepting what is the truth and then letting go. Bhante Gunaratana writes, “Mindfulness is cultivated by a gentle effort. Persistence and a light touch of the senses. It is cultivated by constantly pulling ourselves back to a state of awareness, gently, gently, gently, over and over again.”

Mindfulness leads to wisdom, not by trying to achieve anything, but by simply investigating how things really are for us in the present moment. It does not involve trying to analyze, blame, or fix anything. Instead, we face our thoughts, emotions and body sensations with a kind and detached discernment. Investigating this “self” that continues to arise and pass away in all its many forms. As Gil Fronsdal writes, “We learn to live with openness and trust rather than with a self-image and all the self-criticism, aversion and pride that can come with it. In mindfulness practice, none of our humanity is denied. We are discovering a way to be present to everything – our full humanity – so everything becomes a gate to freedom, to compassion and to ourselves.

Cultivating A Relationship With Stillness

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In my experience, one of the most poignant benefits of walking a spiritual path is the opportunity to cultivate a relationship with stillness. In the early years of my practice, stillness was like an unknown continent on the other side of the earth; a foreign land with a mysterious terrain I barely even knew existed. Before I entered the practice, my orientation to life was often like that of a shark: swim constantly, I thought, or else you’ll die! I was often in search of a set of experiences in the outer world that would fill what the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins refers to as the “god-shaped hole” in my heart. In the end, this wasn’t a very sustainable way to live, not if what I was truly seeking was a rich, grounded and meaningful life.

The early years of my practice also featured a good amount of fumbling around as I learned to walk – or should I say crawl? – on this new terrain. I was gaining exposure to an entirely new way of being that, in its formal structure, often centered on the concept of doing nothing at all. On my first silent retreat, my restlessness felt so large that there were many periods of sitting mediation during which I thought a freight train was going to explode right through my chest! Yet something kept bringing me back, something intuitively told me this was the path I needed to follow no matter how excruciating it may feel. Because, the truth is, that even on that first retreat I was able to touch moments of stillness that revealed a whole new way of experiencing this life; a way of being that wasn’t constantly pushing me towards the next thing but was allowing me to rest in the stillness and intimacy of not needing to do anything at all.

I can clearly remember a moment a year or two after that first retreat, I was at a Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction training with Jon Kabat-Zinn at the Mount Madonna Center outside of Monterey, when the full beauty of stillness truly landed for me. During this seven-day training, Jon incorporated three days of silence. During that time, I can recall sitting outside the dining hall one morning after breakfast, there was about a half hour before we were to meet again in the meditation hall, and I had absolutely nowhere to be and absolutely nothing to do. It was a clear, warm spring morning and I simply sat down in a chair in a small courtyard, overlooking the redwoods and Monterey Bay, and did something that was quite shocking: nothing. And not only did I do nothing but I enjoyed doing nothing. I wasn’t thinking and I wasn’t not thinking. I was simply sitting in a chair overlooking the lush green valley below me. I was simply feeling the warmth of the morning sun on my skin. That was it. Nothing more, nothing less.

As my practice has evolved, I’ve come to a personal understanding of stillness and it’s difference from silence. For me, silence is the absence of noise and distraction while stillness is an embodied quality of being. Silence is something I may be able to influence by going on retreat or by finding quiet spaces and places in my life in which to practice, reflect, or simply rest and relax. Silence can be beautiful and deeply nourishing but it’s not something I can always control. Stillness, on the other hand, is an inner quality that I can nurture and cultivate; it’s a refuge I can always return to because it exists within my body. In a challenging meeting at work, with intense emotions and divergent perspectives swirling all around me, silence may be something I desire but is not available in that moment. However, I can drop into the sensations in my body and seek refuge within a stillness that exists there. I can rest in the interior stillness that follows a few slow deep breaths. Stillness is a resource that, for me, exists both in and out of retreat, both on and off the meditation cushion.

Even in my formal sitting practice, I find a distinction between silence and stillness. For example, while my mind may be very active during a particular meditation – moving from the past to the future, from remembering to planning – my body is actually resting in stillness. While my mind may be far from silent and filled with “traffic,” my body is like a car pulled off to the side of the road. And, when life gets noisy and full of bumper-to-bumper intensity, it’s this car-by-the-side-of-the-road stillness that I seek out within myself. It’s a quality I can call upon no matter what’s taking place in the world around me. Over time, my body has learned to cultivate this relationship with stillness and it has been an unexpected, and deeply nourishing, aspect of my practice.

Car Alarm Lovingkindness

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As I move through my daily life, I know that one of my motivations to stay steadfast in my practice is to support my capacity to respond to the moments of everyday life with more patience, wisdom and care. I have the direct experience of how my practice lessons my suffering and, thus, the suffering of those whom I come in contact with throughout the day. I also know that I am practicing for the inevitable moments when the alarm bells will ring.

I had just one of those “alarm bell” moments recently: While at the gym, relaxed in the let-it-all-go end-of-yoga-class resting pose, I heard my name and “please come to the front desk” ring down the hall. Before I could get there, front desk staff found and informed me that my car had been broken into in the parking lot. My purse was in the trunk.

Fortunately, though my trunk was opened, somehow my purse wasn’t stolen, I was able to quickly change out my bank accounts, and everything turned out fine. What was challenging was my internal experience– a nervous system kicked into survival mode despite a false alarm.

On the day of the event and in the days following, the seeds I’d planted (over years) in my lovingkindness practice produced fruits that lessened my suffering. I had compassion for myself and, on a day following the event, in a moment when I was acknowledging the suffering of the man who broke into my car and sending him well-wishes for healing and peace, the fear running through my mind and body dropped– we were both human beings experiencing suffering, both human beings wanting healing and peace. It was all ok. This level of ease did not last, as a nervous system calms down in its own time, but that moment of no longer experiencing the man who broke into my car as “other” set my mind/heart free. This is the healing power of lovingkindness.

How might our lives change if we were to cultivate the capacity to turn unconditional friendliness, unobstructed well-wishes toward ourselves throughout our daily life? How might this lovingkindness towards our own being then ripple out towards others? Surely, we will each have multitudes of opportunities to inquire, to receive and know our direct experience, as we continue to walk our path.

May all beings be well.

May all beings know healing and peace.