When we know how to listen deeply and how to breathe deeply in mindfulness
everything becomes clear and deep
Thich Nhat Hahn
Tag: Awareness
When your day is blue, or grey, look for red
The snow returned briefly yesterday, and today there is a bitter north wind. When times are grey or cold, or if our mood is blue (as this week is purported to be) we need to consciously notice the moments of colour and warmth in our lives, explicitly savouring them a little longer. We have to let positive facts become positive experiences. Just as Mary Oliver does when she pays attention to the red bird in this poem. What were or are the moments of colour in your day today that you can be grateful for? Who or what brought warmth? Allow yourself to feel good if you achieve something however small, if someone smiles or if you notice a good quality in yourself. As studies have shown, the more you take in the good in little details, the more your brain tilts towards the positive in an overall sense.
Still, for whatever reason —
perhaps because the winter is so long
and the sky so black-blue,
or perhaps because the heart narrows
as often as it opens —
I am glad
that red bird comes all winter,
firing up the landscape
as nothing else can do.
Work with your day as it is
To practice we must see exactly where we are. Of course we can always imagine perfect conditions, how it should be ideally, how everyone else should behave. But it’s not our task to create an ideal. It’s our task to see how it is and to learn from the world as it is. For the awakening of the heart, conditions are always good enough.
Ajahn Sumedho
Deepening your Practice 1: Let things be
Try to be mindful, and let things take their natural course. Then your mind will become still in any surroundings, like a clear forest pool. All kinds of wonderful, rare animals will come to drink at the pool, and you will clearly see the nature of all things. You will see many strange & wonderful things come and go, but you will be still.
Ajahn Chah
Deepening your Practice 2:Become an observer
Sit where it is quiet and close your eyes: the natural inclination to make contact will bring up mental images characterized by feelings. These will most likely be taken as aspects of yourself and you’ll find various reactions occurring and you will get busy, sitting still. However, the practice of sitting quietly with your eyes closed in meditation is useful in that, with steady attention, you can realize that all of this mental stuff is something that can be watched, and that it is therefore a series of objects – not the subject, the self. You only experience contact because of feelings and perceiving something. And since what is felt or perceived must always be an object, how can you ever contact a true subject, or self? This understanding in itself takes some of the drama out of the show, and the mind stops feeding on contact, it steps back into balance and quiets down.
Ajahn Sucitto, Turning the Wheel of Truth
Growing old but not growing hard
There are different ways of saying the same thing when we speak about being mindful. We can say, as Jon Kabat Zinn frequently does, that we try to stay just in this moment, because this moment is the only moment we have to work with, as we “are only alive in this moment”. Or we can say that we try to approach each experience with a “beginner’s mind” or the “eyes of a child“- always fresh, not stuck in our preconceived ideas. Or we can pay attention to what is happening in the body and in the mind at any given time. Or simply we stay with this breath, and then the next breath, and the next breath.
All of these say the same thing. We define ourselves in each moment as something new, something fresh. We welcome each moment like a child – experiencing each new event in life as directly as possible without always mediating it through our thinking about it. The more I work with this, the more I realize that life is best seen as a series of experiences, which arise one at a time and then pass away immediately. We can experience great freedom and compassion when we see things this way – a series of moments of consciousness arising in succession. What we present to the world as something solid – our ongoing “identity” – is in actual fact subjective events experienced in the mind and the body. We like to tell our life story as a coherent narrative. What we notice when we sit in meditation is that we frequently go back to the story we are telling about our life, embellishing it, with its villains and victims. To us it constitutes a solid reality, but it is worth reflecting on what elements we have chosen to solidify.
For example, by which elements from our past do we allow ourselves be defined today? Research shows that the brain has a preference for storing and recalling negative experiences, bringing them to the mind in thoughts about ourselves and the reliability of others, and as an emotional tone towards events. Hurts or disappointments from the past can feel so real, and leave a mark in such as way that they can dominate the mind in a solid fashion, and cause us to identify with them. Because of this, the story we tell about ourselves today can be strongly coloured by the negative events and words of the past, even those which happened when we were very young and which now have an influence deep within our cells.
If you look at it more closely, this negative identification is often fixed in nature – almost frozen and solid – and it resists attempts to approach it by signalling anxiety. Thus we can have a tendency to stay the same through time, not to heal past hurts, not to look forward but to be hooked in the past. If the event is recent or can be recalled clearly, then moving on is tough because the hurt, pain and sense of betrayal caused reminds the mind that it is not safe to go back, even in our thoughts.
Now, it is right to have regret about past actions, when we have been in the wrong or hurt others. But it is also good to distinguish between the emotions connected to an event in the past and the way they influence our sense of self in the present – producing self-judgements which are experienced now as lack of self-esteem or worthlessness. We tend to place great importance on some experiences, thus making someone or something from the past responsible for our present life. So it is good to let go of some of the solidity we put into thoughts and emotions from the past, and see them as energies that arise and can pass away. In other words, we can stop getting lost in what happened and simply learn to observe the effects in this present moment. As Charlotte Joko Beck reminds us in Everyday Zen , there is a big difference between saying “He (or she) really let me down” and “Having a thought that he (or she) really let me down“.
If we stay with the first way of seeing things, we allow situations harden and define us. We attach some of our identity to them – and the narrative that accompanies them – and become stuck. If we work with the second way of seeing things, we remain fluid and soft, and let go more easily. We have more energy and space to see each new moment freshly. We are here, now, not trapped in our story. It stops us wasting time in this short life on regrets and opens us up to the fulness of life as it is available to us.
Another factor we cultivate in the transformative process of meditation is attention to this very moment. We make the choice, moment by moment, to be fully here. Attending to our present-moment mind and body is a way of being tender toward self, toward other, and toward the world. This quality of attention is inherent in our ability to love. Coming back to the present moment takes some effort but the effort is very light. The instruction is to “touch and go.” We touch thoughts by acknowledging them as thinking and then we let them go. It’s a way of relaxing our struggle, like touching a bubble with a feather.
Pema Chodron
