What this means is that we can find our own happiness and peace of mind
just as we are in this very moment, because it is within us. We don’t have to change our thoughts or change ourselves into someone else.
We don’t need to think that who we are, this “me,” is not good enough, smart enough, or lucky enough to be happy.
Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, Resting the Busy Mind
Some kind of meditative practice is found in all the world’s wisdom traditions, and has been around for thousands of years, says Shauna Shapiro of Santa Clara University, co-author with Linda Carlson of the book The Art and Science of Mindfulness. Most include focusing attention and letting thoughts and emotions go by without judgment or becoming involved.
However, it is striking to note how in recent years meditation is progressively going mainstream, and is now the subject of research in scientific journals. A U.S. government survey in 2007 found that about 1 out of 11 Americans, more than 20 million, has meditated in the previous year. And a growing number of medical centers are teaching meditation to patients for stress and pain relief, as conventional medicine increasingly embraces healing methods once dismissed as “alternative medicine” and combining them with standard treatment. Jon Kabat-Zinn credits the “colossal shift in acceptance” of meditation to accelerating research on the benefits of meditation.
His enthusiasm is shared by practictioners on the ground, like Dr. Barrie R. Casselith, from the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center’s Integrative Medicine Service in New York: ”It’s not invasive, it has no side effects, it has tremendous benefits that are very well documented and it’s something patients can do on their own so it doesn’t cost anything. It’s not a cancer treatment….but… ‘it deals with quality of life and helps with symptoms. It can relieve pain, lower blood pressure and heart rate. It can make people feel calmer, it enhances mood. It does lots of good things.”
www.usatoday.com/news/health/2009-06-07-meditate_N.htm
http://www.nytimes.com/1999/11/23/health/a-therapy-gains-ground-in-hospitals-meditation.html
In order for a secure sense of self to develop, caregivers need to be attuned to the child’s desires. They need to be able to set aside their own needs in order to have the space to respond to the child’s emotional and physical needs. On the one hand, this means that they address the child’s needs promptly, so that the child feels secure. Using modern means of communication as an analogy, at times they need to respond to the child as if they have received an Instant Message and not wait for an email.
However, as well as being able to respond to certain needs swiftly, they also have to be able to leave the child alone, without insisting that it be there for their needs. They have to provide a non-demanding presence during times of rest so the child can simply be and develop its sense of being, before any need to do anything or earn the parents’ attention. In this way the child learns to simply enjoy each moment, without any intrusive aims or fears.
Winnicott calls this state “going-on-being” and writes about the importance of this capacity to allow the child simply exist: The mother’s non-demanding presence makes the experience of formlessness and comfortable solitude possible, and this capacity becomes a central feature in the development of a stable and personal self. This makes it possible for the infant to experience …a state of going on being…out of which…spontaneous gestures emerge.
We can see here the importance of being before doing. If the parent is excessively working through its own needs then it can happen that he or she impinges on the child’s quiet time, and continually draws the child’s attention. One consequence is that the child has to attune too early to the needs of others, rather than having time just for itself. In later life as an adult he or she can repeat this dynamic in a number of ways. One is by repeating the parents’ pattern and continually create interruptions and dramas. So, for example, when a relationship is in danger of being reliable the person repeats the drama of the parents – because that is more familiar – thus preventing the other person getting too close. The parents’ dynamic means that only unhealthy relationships are maintained; sadly, ones that have the potential to grow are rejected. Or the adult compulsively neglects his or her own needs, looking after others in an excessive way. In both cases we can see that, in a sense, the child has never managed to leave home.
This is where meditation practice can help. As Jon Kabat Zinn stated again in a talk which I was present at recently, we are essentially human beings before we are human doings. Sitting practice recreates a period when we can just simply be, without having to acheive anything. We simply watch the mind and body without holding on to anything or pushing anything away. This has the capacity to recreate and heal our early life experiences. As Gil Fronsdal has said, mindfulness practice can act as an antidote to the hurt caused by parents who did not have the space to truly see their children. He says that by being mindful, by quietening the mind, by being simply present with our experience, we are loving and healing ourselves. We learn to sit with ourselves and our lives as they are, without having to be afraid of them and try continually to fix them.
We expend a lot of effort to improve the external conditions of our lives, but in the end it is always the mind that creates our experience of the world and translates this experience into either well-being or suffering
Matthieu Ricard
I read an interview with Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, neuroanatomist and spokeswoman for the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center. She had a stroke that damaged her left hemisphere and for a while she could not walk, talk, read, write, or remember many of the incidents of her life. She underwent major surgery to remove a clot in her brain. She describes her experiences in the book My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey.
In the book she draws attention to brain patterns – or “circuity” – and states that we actually have much greater choice in the circuits we run than we think we have. For example, when we get sad, angry or afraid she says we have a choice – to run with that circuity or to not identify with it, to step back and observe it. There is not doubt that it can be easier to engage the circuitry. When this happens we identify with the emotion – I am my anger, I am my sadness, I am my fear.
However, there is another approach which is coincidentally developed in mindfulness practice. In it we work at being aware of what is going on in our mind at any moment. We learn to say – I am in this moment running this circuitry; is this the circuitry I really want to run? And how long am I going to run it? Dr Taylor states that we can have a real choice on which way we want to go. For example, when something happens which provokes us, we can be aware of the process of anger and see it as the brain working in a certain way. She puts it this way – “I’m running my anger circuitry, I can feel what this is like in my body”. Then we can develop the gap between ourselves and the strong emotion and decide if we want to stay with it or not.
She goes on todescribe some very practical, everyday ways in which we can develop our capacity to observe our brain circuity. We just need to pay greater attention to what we are doing in this present moment:
I think the most important thing is to consciously choose to bring your mind to the present moment. How do you do that? You decide that you’re going to see what your eyes are looking at; you bring your consciousness to the present moment. When you are going up the stairs, you look at the steps, you look at the handrail. Most of us unconsciously climb the steps, never think about the steps, can’t even say what the color of the carpet is, if there is a carpet, because we’re somewhere else.
Pay attention to the present moment. Bring your mind, bring your ears to the present moment, start savoring the awareness of the information you perceive in the present moment, and let that grow. And it’s like with any circuitry: the more you concentrate on it and experience it, the more it will develop itself.
For more about Dr Taylor you can visit her website: www.drjilltaylor.com
Quotations taken from interview “Balancing the Brain towards Joy” :
www.spiritualityhealth.com/spirit/archives/balancing-brain-toward-joy
The next MBSR Course in English in Geneva will start Tuesday November 2nd, 2010.
See details in the “Courses and Events” Tab at the top of the page or click on the Life in Balance logo on the right.
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