Do you have patience to wait till your mud settles and the water is clear?
Can you remain unmoving till the right action arises by itself?
Lao Tzu
Tag: Meditation
Being mindful of scrambled eggs
The practice is quite simple really. It is to pay attention to each moment as it actually is, and be open to whatever is happening in that moment. It is not about creating a sense of calm or fixing our personalities. It is not about changing things at all, in one sense, but rather being with them in the light of awareness.
Seems simple. However, I continually find that it is not so easy to keep the mind focused on just this moment or this act. It often prefers to race ahead, thinking about what needs to be said or scanning the horizon for the next task to be done. I got a simple example of that this week. I was standing in line to get breakfast and was putting some food on the plate. I came to the last of the hot items, scrambled eggs, and put them on my plate, looking ahead to see where to get coffee and where to sit. Jenn’s voice from behind came, saying, “Thanks Karl for taking all the eggs“, which indeed I had. Leaning into the next moment – where to sit – or being busy composing an answer in a conversation, meant that I had filled my plate without noticing and consequently without considering others. Luckily, Jenn was kind enough to allow me make amends and to accept some of the portion I had put on my plate ……even though she could not help reminding me of it for the next few days.
When we don’t pay attention to this moment we can notice our minds speeding up to already be in the next. We also fail to pay attention to the deeper possibilities of caring for or listening to others. Mindfulness is sterile if it does not lead us to being more compassionate, more sensitive. A simple lesson, which we have to learn over and over again, hundreds of times each day.
The habit of ignoring our present moments in favor of others yet to come leads directly to a pervasive lack of awareness of the web of life in which we are embedded. This includes a lack of awareness and understanding of our own mind and how it influences our perceptions and our actions. It severely limits our perspective on what it means to be a person and how we are connected to each other and the world around us.
Jon Kabat Zinn
How to remain calm
You will soon find that thoughts are like the wind; they come and go.
The secret is to not ‘think’ about thoughts, but allow them to flow through the open mind.
Soygal Rinpoche
Meditation is pointless
A friend of mine – who ironically is starting a meditation retreat this week in the US – expressed the opinion not so long ago that sitting meditation was just pointless. I knew what she meant at the time, but knew also that she had to discover its real value for herself. In one sense she was right – sitting practice is waste of time because it is a dedicated period of non-doing. On an outward level it appears to achieve nothing. Another aspect which she drew attention to was the fact that nothing really changes day to day: you sit, you get distracted, you return to the breath, you get distracted, day after day.
One difficulty in meditation is the the results are not immediately tangible while the actual practice can be difficult. The point to meditation, however, is precisely by doing “nothing” and slowing down, gaps are created between activities and we work on our capacity to be aware of what is going on. And it seems that when one is aware, things tend to fall as they should.
However, we can probably find scientific backing for stating that this “pointless” activity is, in fact, achieving something simply while we are sitting. It has been shown that people who meditate activate a different part of their brain that is associated with less anxiety and a better outlook on life. By not activating the anxious parts of the for dedicated periods of each day, our bodies are less likely to be tense, less likely to trigger well-conditioned patterns when faced with difficulties.
Daniel Goleman & Tara Bennett-Goleman*, suggest that meditation works because of the relationship between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex. Simply put, the amygdala is the part of the brain that decides, among other things, if we should get angry or anxious, and the pre-frontal cortex is the part that makes us stop and think about things. However, the amygdala is prone to error, such as seeing danger or exaggerating anxiety where there is none. Because there is roughly a quarter of a second gap between the time an event occurs and the time it takes the amygdala to react, the slowing down practicing in meditation may allow us be able to intervene before an automatic response takes over, and perhaps even redirect it into more constructive or positive feelings. In other words, meditation seems to develop emotional brain fitness and therefore this pointless activity may not be pointless after all.
Bennett-Goleman, Tara, 2001. Emotional Alchemy: How the Mind can Heal the Heart, Harmony, (2001).
Come down from the mountain
Meditators face a very real danger of coming to prefer the view from the top of the pole to their real life on the ground. But such peak moments, no matter how profound, always end, leaving us with the problem of how to live in accord with the perspective they provide. Unless we learn to step off the pole, our practice will devolve into mere addiction to the highs of peak experience.
Barry Magid, Ordinary Mind
Developing a secure sense of self:2 – True self, False Self
In the previous related post we saw how our sense of self is shaped in our early years. There is a relationship between a strong inner sense of self-cohesion and the consistency of love we got in our early relationships. However we also saw that an insecure working model of relationships can be formed and will be reflected in the way we relate to others in adult life, due to the fact that we did not feel safe some or most of the time. The last post ended with the encouragement to understand your childhood insecurity and the force it still contains. This post will suggest some other reflections.
One way we respond to our unmet needs when we are a child is to create a False Self. We realized that safety and affection were more likely when we behaved in certain ways. Thus the False Self is created, effectively to please the parents or other caregivers and maintain their love, which we instinctively grasped to be based on certain conditions – such as that we always perform well. It develops when the mother, father or other caregiver reflect their own defenses or emotional lacks onto the infant rather than reflecting the infant’s actual moods. It then goes on, even into adulthood, to constantly anticipate the demands of others and keeps up this mask because it believes that is the best way to get approval.
Now, most of us, to some extent, have masks or public personas which we use in different situations in adult life. However, what we are referring to here is a False Self functioning which operates in an unconscious way in repeating patterns and internal demands in our adult choices.
The False Self helps comes about to hold the family together by balancing or denying problems and keeps a certain functional harmony alive. However, it becomes so well constructed and adapted that eventually the true self can become lost to us. We find it hard to “be ourselves”. We use the False Self as our “better self” because our true self feels too weak at times to gain approval.
This can lead to low self-esteem. Self-esteem is a person’s core belief about himself or herself, and although it varies depending on circumstances, the pattern usually leans toward a optimistic or pessimistic sense of self. In general, one way of dealing with a pessimistic view is to look for anything outside to make us feel better. For example we may have chosen to become a perfectionist. The reasons are clear: if we do something perfectly, then we will be praised and get the affection of others. Or we can develop dependent behaviour, when as Dr Weiss states, one’s “whole life is spent in wildly swinging arcs to meet others’ expectations. If you’re nice to me, I’m a good person. If you look at me funny, I’m a bad person. I don’t know who I am. I am incredibly dependent on other people to tell me who I am.”
Developing Self Compassion is one way to work with low self esteem. This is the ability to treat oneself kindly in the face of failure, rejection, defeat, and other negative events. Being self-compassionate means we are less likely to compare ourselves with others, to seek all our support outside ourselves and to dwell too long on negative feedback. We will post more on this in the next post.
