Tag: heart

Recommended Summer Reading 3

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Jeffrey Brantley is the director of the Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction program at the Duke Center for Integrative Medicine. I find that he is one of the clearest and best writers about  mindfulness meditation practice, giving straightforward and unfussy instructions. His latest book, written in conjunction with Wendy Millstine, is a lovely small-sized work entitled, True Belonging: Mindful Practices to Help You Overcome Loneliness, Connect with Others, and Cultivate Happiness.

The book essentially looks at how mindfulness practice can help us nurture connections and relationships, thus reducing the sense of separateness and loneliness which is increasingly common in today’s world.  It is divided into four sections. The first section, called “Foundation” introduces mindfulness and leads in a core mindfulness of breath practice. The Next three sections are entitled “Connecting with yourself”, “Connecting with others” and Taking mindful and compassionate action in the world”, and consist of reflections followed by guided exercises to help the reader enter into the theme covered in each chapter.

There is a lot of lovely material contained in these short pages, which would reward any reader who takes each chapter and allows the insights and practices sink gently into the heart. For example, sections such as “The Gift of Forgiveness”. “Nourishing your hunger for Connection”  or “Dissolve the Boundary” introduces readers into reflections on what separates them from others or what historical baggage may be holding them back. The subsequent exercises then, in a simple, direct way, leads the reader into mediations focused on these areas.

This book, although it does have a section introducing mindfulness, is a perfect one for deepening meditation practice and allowing it soak into the deeper aspects of our being and our lives. Its format makes it seem like a guidebook and it seems to me to be something to be taken up at different times during the summer months. It touches into,  and potentially can heal, the disconnectedness arising from the mistaken beliefs we have built up about ourselves and others.

Our deep hope and intention in writing this book is that as you read the narratives here, and most importantly, you try and directly experience at least some of the practices, you will gain increased understanding, a deeper sense of connection and greater peace and happiness. And we hope and intend that you will be guided and inspired by that experience in some mysterious way so that, just possibly, our world and others in it may benefit more than ever by the beauty of your life (p. 13).

Steering the mind

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For each and every one of us, the most important thing is our state of mind.  That which feels joy or sorrow, pleasure or pain, is just our mind.  But our mind doesn’t have to simply react to things around us.  It can be steered in different directions.  You can direct yourself toward what is good, and by doing so, you get accustomed to positive thoughts.  If you direct yourself toward being negative, that also can become a habit.  If you allow yourself to become apathetic and not care much, you become insensitive and dull.  The word spiritual refers to directing or steering our mind toward something good, something noble.  Simply that.  One of the most important factors in accomplishing that goal is to know how to let ourselves be completely at ease.

Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche, Recognizing Our Natural Mind State

We discover as we go along

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Walking on the country roads near my house early yesterday.  It is nice walking the same paths each day or each week – we see the changes that the seasons bring, and the colours which follow those changes. The fields demonstrate a constant succession of decay and growth. However, we also see what does not change and how the path stretches out in front of us each day, not matter how many things have moved on.

We don’t receive wisdom;

we must discover it for ourselves after a journey

that no one can take for us, or spare us.

 Marcel Proust

Making time for our better health 2: Noticing internal busyness

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[The Princeton] Study (see yesterday’s post) offers an important clue about internal busyness. It’s rooted in an attitude about time. When the pace of work is intensified, as it is in modern industrial and post industrial societies, time is seen as a finite, ever-dwindling commodity. Because time sees scarce, people try to squeeze the maximum amount of productivity out of every minute. They tend to spend less time on things like meditation, contemplation and singing – activities that can’t be made increase the “yield” on the time invested in them. Even we…who supposedly have our eyes on the inner depths of life, often find ourselves living by the basic capitalist assumption that what we do needs to yield a quantifiable result. How many of us got interested in meditation when we read about University of Wisconsin studies that  showed that people who meditate can increase activity in the “happiness” section of the brain?  This assumption – that if we are going to spend time on something, it needs to produce a measurable yield – is one root of internal busyness.

Sally Kemption, Busyness plan

Recommended Summer reading 1.

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Summer often allows an opportunity for catching up on reading so I will give some suggestions for books in the next week or two.

Over the past few years we have seen mindfulness practice  being applied to specific areas where people  may have difficulties, such as anxiety or depression, or indeed when people struggle with issues such as shyness in public or procrastination.  It is nice to see that  we are also  beginning to find reflections on the even more fundamental issue of the sense of self, or our basic sense of unworthiness, themes which I have covered frequently in some of the posts in this blog.

One book which covers these themes, and which I can recommend wholeheartedly,  is entitled Living with your Heart Wide Open, written by two of the most experienced mindfulness teachers in the U.S.,  Steve Flowers and Bob Stahl. A nice title, but,  in fact,  the subtitle reveals more about the material covered,  in a very accessible fashion,  in the chapters: “How Mindfulness and Compassion can free you from unworthiness, inadequacy and shame“.

As this subtitle suggests,  the book is concerned with the basic underlying narrative tone which pervades our life, dealing with different aspects in each chapter and applying mindfulness exercises to the themes covered. In other words, it helps us become more aware of the manner in which we talk to ourselves. It looks at the origins of this self-talk in the way our life history has shaped us, but focuses mainly on how it hinders us in our daily lives and leads to ongoing suffering. Although many of the exercises in the book are familiar, using them in a systematic way linked to themes  means that this book  leads readers –  with great kindness –  to reflect on the ingrained thought patterns that keep them trapped in self-judgement,  or criticism,  to potential greater freedom:

This book offers a mindful path to breaking free from these habitual thought patterns. Through meditation and inquiry, you can discover where this negative self-talk came from and why you are so judgmental towards yourself. Addressing this lack of self-compassion is essential. In a sense our very existence is threatened by an endemic of self-loathing. War essentially begins inside the individual, stemming from a sense of alienation and separation from the interconnectedness of life. Making peace within is one of the noblest endeavors you can pursue – for yourself, for others and for the world (p.5).

One advantage of this book is that it presents recent psychological research on the Narrative Self, Attachment, Shame and Self-Esteem in a very straightforward manner, which will be of great benefit to readers coming to this material for the first time. It does not go into too much depth as it always keeps in mind that the purpose of the book is to help the reader in a practical manner in areas that are potentially life-changing.  I particularly liked chapter five which deals with Self-Compassion, the subject of a number of studies and books at the moment. The authors show how cultivating self-compassion is necessary in this modern age, with its excessive emphasis on continual self-improvement,  and then lead into two practices to allow the reader develop it better in their daily lives. These reflections and meditations are rich enough to keep returning to them again and again, allowing a gentle healing of some of the deeper parts of our psyche.

As you continue to practice self-compassion, you may notice more and more things about the self you’ve created with all of your old stories. Perhaps you tried to be especially good to counterbalance the problems in your family. Perhaps you learned to be generous of yourself as a way of earning the value you felt you lacked. Self-compassion lets you be with all the hurt, loneliness and fear that the narrative-based self has concealed. In the open heart of self-compassion, the wounded child within you will begin to heal (p. 105).

To sum up, a book that could be a very lovely companion on our journey this Summer and after, as we move towards greater acceptance of our our selves and our history, allowing us to see through our stories and live in the present more richly.

Why meditation may help with deep emotions

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Research, mainly in the area of neuroscience,  is increasingly showing that meditation changes how the brain functions.  What I find interesting is how this harmonizes with the work of psychologists who look at the importance of early relationships or those who write about the unconscious. One of the most stimulating writers in this latter area is the modern psychoanalytical author, Christopher Bollas. Jon Kabat Zinn likes to say that meditation allows us to step out of “doing-mode” into “being-mode”. This strengthens our capacity to rest with experience rather than always conceptualizing it. As Ajahn Sumedho said in a recent  post, we simply recognize, without going into the need to analyse. Bollas’ quote here may suggest a link.  Maybe getting in touch with  silence may allow us reconnect with our earliest experiences which were processed without the use of language and thought. We may even say that sitting in silence and holding whatever arises may possibly, slowly,  heal these early experiences,  if they were somehow lacking.  His words also allow us see how our emotions contain a deep truth which may be outside of conscious thought, truths which may be “known” without being “thought”.

Some moments feel familiar, sacred, reverential, but are fundamentally outside cognitive experience. They are registered through an experience in being, rather than mind, because they express that part of us where the experience of rapport with the other was the essence of life before words existed….the aesthetic moment constitutes part of the unthought known. The aesthetic moment is an existential recollection of the time when communication took place primarily through this illusion of deep rapport of subject and object. Being with, as a form of dialogue, enabled the baby’s adequate processing of his existence prior to his ability to process it through thought. The mother’s idiom of care and the infant’s experience of this handling is one of the first if not the earliest human aesthetic. 

Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of the Object