Tag: Meditation

Balance 2: Resting

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Our culture invariably supposes that action and accomplishment are better than rest, that doing something – anything – is better than doing nothing. Because of our desire to succeed, to meet these ever-growing expectations we do not rest.

Because we do not rest we lose our way. We miss the compass points that would show us where to go,  we bypass the nourishment that would give us succor.

We miss the quiet that would give us wisdom. We miss the joy and love born of effortless delight.

Wayne Muller, Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal and Delight in our Busy Lives.

Spring: Undoing and letting go

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All though our lives, we experience loss, in little and big ways. Some we acknowledge explicitly and grieve for. Others we may not have had the time or space to grieve for and they can come up later on in life, and attach themselves onto some other loss. There can also be the gradual loss of our hopes and dreams, or the plans we have invested in our work, or the direction of our lives.

Robert Neimeyer, who has written extensively in this area, says that when we go through a significant loss we have an undoing of our individual and collective life histories. It affects our world, and changes our sense of self. If it is a significant loss, such as the death of one who meant much to us, or the loss of a partner or even a move from work or familiar suroundings, we can feel uprooted and homesick. He says that what is needed at such times is having people to turn to who care for us, as we “tell and retell our story”. We need someone who can listen.

Why is this? Because as humans we like to give our lives meaning by underpinning them with a coherent and consistent story. Thus when we experience these losses we need to reorganize our sense of sense and our sense of meaning in life. We reach a limit where we are invited to tell our story again, but in a new way. The losses of life can make us hard and fearful of life or can make us more open, more caring for others.

The Tibetan Buddhist master Chögyam Trungpa talks about a soft spot, a raw spot, a wounded spot on the body or in the heart. A spot that is painful and sore. A spot that may emerge in the face of a loss. We hate such spots so we try to prevent them. And if we can’t prevent them we try to cover them up, so we won’t absentmindedly rub them or pour hot or cold water on them. A sore spot is no fun. Yet it is valuable. Trungpa Rinpoche calls the sore spot embryonic compassion, potential compassion. Our loss, our wound, is precious to us because it can wake us up to love, and to loving action.

Norman Fischer, Love, Loss and Anxious Times

Not letting our fears control us 3: Stop running

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We are often – even sometimes without being aware of it – driven by fear. I do not mean the nervousness that comes if we have to go to a difficult meeting or give a presentation, or the useful type of stress which allows us perform better. What I mean is a deeper, more fundamental type of fear, a more deep-seated anxiety, which appears and reappears or can keep us awake at night. This type of fear is only intensified by our normal strategies to push it away, or to distract ourselves from noticing it. All that does is play with the fear, like the cat with the mouse, pushing it away briefly so as to allow it return even more nervous.

All fear is really related to our desire for safety, to feel secure in this world, a world which is by its nature insecure and unreliable. This is deeply ingrained in our make-up after centuries of evolution. However, the deeper roots of this anxiety comes from the fear to be with ourselves. We can see this most clearly when we sit down to practice. Our minds will do anything to avoid just being in the simple present with ourselves, and will run to thinking and planning and dreaming. We can notice that a lot of this thinking revolves around fixing ourselves, our lives and others.

And why are we afraid to be with ourselves? Because if we are forced to be just with ourselves we might feel that we are not good enough, that we may not measure up to the standards which we or others have set for us and which we have internalized. It is hard to be just with oneself, and not discuss with, or ask permission from, the presences in our heads, with whom we unconsciously and continually dialogue. To defend ourselves, we construct stories and fantasies, perfect futures which we use to distract from a not-so-perfect present. Fear is what happens when these stories run up against the reality of daily life and our deep inner selves. Other common strategies we use to avoid facing ourselves is that we keep extra busy, or throw ourselves into work, hobbies, a relationship or something else outside ourselves.

However, what we gradually see is that the whole purpose of practice is to work with our heart in the presence of our fears. Not in the way that many who start meditation think, namely, that it will make all fears go away. On the contrary, people often lament that they notice much more fears and anxiety after they started practicing and things were calmer before. What practice gradually does is stop us running. It gives us the courage to stay. That is why I love the simplest of all meditation instructions, the simple “Take your seat”. If we can do that consistently, and gently stay with ourselves, we go against the natural instinct of the fear and the slow healing can begin.

Not letting our fears control us 2: Open to disappointment

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One of the more important things for our psychological health is how we have to cope with disappointment. Losses are present in our lives from infancy onwards. Indeed, as Winnicott reminds us, a certain amount of disappointment is necessary as infants in order to allow a secure sense of self to develop. The parent has to gently “disappoint” the child in order to allow the child develop the independence to take on certain tasks for itself, to face the world without relying totally on the parent. This allows the infant have the resilience for facing the ups and downs of this world, as well as understanding that there is nuance in every person, and that we cannot expect anyone to perfectly satisfy all our needs.

If established well, the person can be comfortable on their own and have the space in later life to deal with the inevitable ways in which others let them down. If not, then one can struggle when a partner changes, a parent disillusions, a relationship goes sour or a job turns out to be unfulfilling, because one has looked to them to give life meaning. Another negative aspect could be that the child feels responsible for the loss and may pick up the mistaken idea that negative emotions are wrong, and to admit them is to show weakness or a lack of self-control.

Over the years all these losses add up. Some we have time to acknowledge, some not. Stephen Levine reminds us that grieving that has to go on for all the little losses and disappointments that happen throughout our days. He calls this “our ordinary, everyday grief” which builds up following the “disappointments and disillusionment, the loss of trust and confidence that follows the increasingly less satisfactory arch of our lives”.

One thing we can do in response is try to avoid feeling this grief, by hardening our hearts or denying to ourselves that the loss had any real meaning. However, although this provides a momentary feeling of safety, it can either lead to a gradual deadening of our experience of the world or reappear in our unconscious as anxiety or repeating behaviours. A better option is to stay open to life and acknowledge its inevitable losses, even the little ones. Ultimately, being open to feel the fear of loss is the only way to integrate it. It’s also the only way to a genuine relationship with others, because closeness to others cannot be founded on neediness or on the fear of being alone. Before we can be in relationship with others, we need to be able to accept a certain type of aloneness in ourselves. If we do not see that we will always be disappointed in the things that we think will fill it.

Lent

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The word Lent, as I said before, comes perhaps from the Old English and refers to the lengthening of the days in Spring. However, the latin name for this period is quadragesima meaning “forty”, and reminds us that one of the inspirations for this period is the forty days that Jesus spent in the desert. So one way we can regard this period is that it reminds us to simplify, in a more focused way, in order to reflect upon the real priorities in our lives. Remove clutter, spand less time in front of the TV or internet, set aside time for reflection, writing, and walking.

“It seems to me that the strangeness and wonder of existence are emphasized here by the comparative sparsity of the flora and fauna: life not crowded upon life as in other places but scattered abroad in spareness and simplicity, with a generous gift of space for each herb and bush and tree, each stem of grass, so that the living organism stands out bold and brave and vivid against the lifeless sand and barren rock. The extreme clarity of the desert light is equaled by the extreme individuation of desert life-forms. Love flowers best in openness and freedom.”

Edward Abby, Desert Solitaire

Worrying

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The roots of the word “worry” comes from an old Anglo-Saxon word, Wyrgan. It originally meant to strangle, choke, or tear at the throat with teeth. It was used of animals who would attack other animals, such as dogs biting the throat of sheep. We can still see this use when we speak of a cat worrying a mouse. Cats play with their prey before they kill it, sometimes throwing it up in the air or slapping it back when it seems about to escape.

Yesterday morning, bright and early, our cat Barney proudly brought a big mouse into the house and let it free in the hall. Having safely confined Barney in another part of the house I was surprised to see the mouse sitting on a shoe, licking itself, apparantly unbothered. Without too much difficulty I managed to catch him in a plastic container and release him outside, much to Barney’s disappointment.

Our modern use of the word worry started out life in a similar way to this animal meaning, as “to cause mental anguish”. It later developed into its more common modern days sense of “to feel mental anguish”. Reflecting on the early morning cat and mouse tale, I felt that the original sense has much to tell us. We frequently worry ourselves, cause ourselves mental anguish. We have a lot of input into the process, and can sometimes return to an issue, just like a cat playing with a mouse. We can generate negative thoughts, imagine catastrophies, increasing our anxiety by developing scenarios which may never actually occur. In this way we “play” with a situation which may be simply registering in the body as a physical feeling and refuse to let it just be that.

As one meditation teacher reminded us, we should always notice the “add-ons” – the stories we bring to an experience. We may be feeling nervous about starting out on a new process, but then we add on stories about our worth or how our past has developed. We may be shy making friends, but then we add on a commentary as to how we will never be happy. We may have made a mistake and then exaggerate it into something that reflects our whole life and conduct.

One way to do this is to try and stay in the present, with the raw experience of the situation, and not add to it by remembering past qualities or mistakes, or move to the future by picturing certain outcomes. We can try and stop “playing” with our problem, like the cat does with the mouse, stop returning to it again and again, stop worrying it. We can try and let the situation just be, rather than returning to it, mistakingly thinking that this is a better way to “fix it”. We can let it go free.

We need to examine that notion of “fixing” ……. We need to question our concepts about how we want things to be and what we want people to become. If we can let go of some of that, we can see more clearly what we can and cannot do. We can learn not to obsess about all the problems we cannot solve, but to sort through them to find the one or two things we can actually do that might be helpful. It is better to do one small helpful thing than punish yourself for the many things beyond your power and ability to change or affect. Some problems can be solved, some cannot, and some are best left unsolved.

Judy Lief, The problem with problems