Following on from yesterday, here is a link to the next part of the BBC report which contains some material on brain scans, brain activity and meditation. One of the most exciting recent discoveries in the field of neuroscience is that the brain is quite plastic all through life, and that we can change its activity patterns depending on what we do. So if we practice calmness, the brain changes in response to that, in the same way as it responds to the occasions when we “practice” worrying or being anxious.
Befriending the wandering mind
From a different tradition than yesterday – this time from a former Catholic monk and friend of Thomas Merton – similar instructions on how to work with thoughts in meditation. He recommends a patient, gentle attitude towards ourselves, or toward the inevitable swings in thoughts and moods which we experience, not over-identifying with that which arises and passes away. This gentle, non-judgmental, befriending is the key to ongoing practice.
As we patiently learn to listen to the thoughts that arise, endure, and pass away within us, we come to a deep experiential knowing of ourselves as we really are. We learn to befriend our own wandering mind, neither abandoning it through daydreaming or sleepiness nor invading it with more thoughts about the thoughts that are already there. By quietly persevering in sustained nonthinking meditative awareness, we come to a new groundedness within ourselves. The meditative mind that neither thinks, nor is reducible to any thought. grows stronger, calmer and more stable. In time we learn to listen with God’s ears to our wandering mind while at the same time passing beyond all that our wandering mind can comprehend
Admitting we all struggle from time to time
Learn the alchemy true human beings know. The moment you accept what troubles you’ve been given, the door will open. Rumi
The irony of hiding the dark side of our humanness is that our secret is not really a secret at all. How can it be when we’re all safeguarding the very same story? That’s why Rumi calls it an Open Secret. It’s almost a joke — a laughable admission that each one of us has a shadow self — a bumbling, bad-tempered twin. Big surprise! Just like you, I can be a jerk sometimes. I do unkind, cowardly things, harbor unmerciful thoughts, and mope around when I should be doing something constructive. Just like you, I wonder if life has meaning; I worry and fret over things I can’t control; and I often feel overcome with a longing for something that I cannot even name. For all of my strengths and gifts, I am also a vulnerable and insecure person, in need of connection and reassurance. This is the secret I try to keep from you, and you from me, and in doing so, we do each other a grave disservice.
Rumi tells us that moment we accept what troubles we’ve been given, “the door will open.” Sounds easy, sounds attractive, but it is difficult, and most of us pound on the door to freedom and happiness with every manipulative ploy save the one that actually works. If you’re interested in the door to the heavens opening, start with the door to your own secret self. See what happens when you offer to another a glimpse of who you really are. Start slowly. Without getting dramatic, share the simple dignity of yourself in each moment—your triumphs and your failures, your satisfaction and your sorrow. Face your embarrassment at being human, and you’ll uncover a deep well of passion and compassion. It’s a great power, your Open Secret. When your heart is undefended you make it safe for whomever you meet to put down his burden of hiding, and then you both can walk through the open door.
Elizabeth Lesser, The Open Secret
Mindfulness in the news: BBC report on the 8 weeks training
The BBC Breakfast Programme is running a series of reports these mornings on Mindfulness meditation and the MBSR course, which are a useful introduction to the whole area. Their researcher, David Sillito, did the 8 weeks MBSR Course and reports on his findings over a number of days. You can follow the first report here:
Keeping things light
There is a difference between being aware of a thought and thinking a thought. That difference is very subtle; it is primarily a matter of feeling or texture. A thought you are simply aware of with bare attention feels light in texture; there is a sense of distance between that thought and the awareness viewing it. It arises lightly like a bubble, and it passes away without necessarily giving rise to the next thought in that chain. Normal conscious thought is much heavier in texture. It is ponderous, commanding, and compulsive. It sucks you in and grabs control of consciousness. By its very nature it is obsessional, and it leads straight to the next thought in the chain, apparently with no gap between them.
Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, Mindfulness in Plain English
A mind that looks and does not think
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
Wallace Stevens, The Snow Man
