Arriving at Your Own Door: 108 Lessons in Mindfulness (3 page)

One way or another, our minds often obscure our capacity to see clearly. For this reason, if we wish to take hold of life fully, we will need to train ourselves to
see through
or
behind
the appearance of things. We will need to cultivate intimacy with the stream of our own thinking, which colors everything in the sensory domain, if we are to perceive our interior and exterior landscapes, including everything that happens within them, to the degree that they can be known, in their actuality, as they truly are.

Embracing the full catastrophe of the human condition is part of waking up to our lives and living the lives that are ours to live. In part, it involves refusing to let the dis-ease and the
dukkha
(suffering, dissatisfaction), however gross or however subtle, go unnoticed and unnamed. It involves being willing to
turn toward
and
work with
whatever arises in our experience, knowing or having faith that it is workable, especially if we are willing to do a certain kind of work ourselves, the work of awareness.

It is indeed a radical act of love just to sit down and be quiet for a time by yourself.

With our cell phones and PDAs, we are now able to be in touch with anyone and everyone at any time. In the process, we run the risk of
never being in touch
with ourselves.

What about
not connecting
with anyone in our “in-between” moments? What about realizing that there are actually no in-between moments at all? What about being in touch with who is on
this
end of the line, not the other end? What about calling ourselves up for a change, and checking in, seeing what we are up to? What about just being in touch with how
we
are feeling, even in those moments when we may be feeling numb, or overwhelmed, or bored, or disjointed, or anxious or depressed, or needing to get one more thing done?

A wareness is fundamentally non-conceptual—before thinking splits experience into subject and object. It is
empty
and so can contain everything, including thought. It is
boundless.
And amazingly, it is intrinsically
knowing.

Who do
we actually think we are? And
what
do we think we are? We avoid bringing our full intelligence to inquiring deeply into such matters, even though they matter most. If we think we are a
somebody
, no matter who we are, we are mistaken. And if we think we are a
nobody
, we are equally mistaken. Perhaps it is our
thinking
itself that is the problem here.

We need to watch out above all for our relationship to the personal pronouns. Otherwise, we will automatically take things personally when they really aren’t at all, and in the process miss, or
mis-take
, what actually is.

We are caught believing in and living in a dream reality, invested in it emotionally, unwilling and unable to see through it because of our own personal
attachment
to the dream, especially if it seems a good one.

There is no time other than now. We are not, contrary to what we think, “going” anywhere. It will never be more rich in some other moment than in this one. Although we may imagine that some future moment will be more pleasant, or less, than this one, we can’t really know. But whatever the future brings, it will not be what you expect, or what you think, and when it comes, it will be
now
too. It too will be a moment that can be very easily missed, just as easily missed as this one.

Even the briefest moment of silence is both a way of coming into the present and a way of moving on.

Now is already the future and it is already here. Now is the future of the previous moment just past, and the future of all those moments that were before that one. Remember back in your own life for a moment… The you you were hoping to become in the future, it is you! Right here. Right now. You are it. You don’t like it? Who doesn’t like it? Who is even thinking that? And who wants “you” to be better, to have turned out some other way? Is
that
you you too? Wake up!
This is it.
You have already turned out.

Each moment of now is what we could call a branch point. We do not know what will happen next. The present moment is pregnant with possibility and potential. If we are present in this moment, that naturally affects the quality of the next moment. If we wish to take care of the future, the only way we can do that is to recognize each moment as a branch point and to realize that how we are in relationship to it makes all the difference in how the world, and our one wild and precious life, in Mary Oliver’s delicious phrase, will unfold.

We can keep in mind and continually “re-mind” ourselves that we
can
rest in awareness with
any object of attention
whatsoever, the breath, various aspects of the body such as sensations and perceptions, with the myriad thoughts and feelings that flux through our minds, or in a vast, boundless, choiceless, open awareness beyond all doing, and be the knowing that awareness is.

Out of that knowing, we can act appropriately in the present moment to meet whatever requires being met, outwardly and inwardly. We speak of this as letting our doing
come out of being.

Sometimes I use awareness as a verb rather than a noun. It gives more of a sense of a process, of experience unfolding and being known.
Awarenessing is a core function of our minds.
While we are pretty out of shape in this area from lack of systematic attending, our awarenessing has the potential to
balance out
and
modulate
another core capacity of the mind, this one very highly developed and too often really inaccurate or incomplete—namely our thinking.

When we speak about formal sitting meditation, we have to understand what it
means
to sit. It doesn’t just mean to be seated. It means taking your seat in and in
relationship
to the present moment. It means taking a stand in your life, sitting. That is why adopting and maintaining a posture that embodies
dignity
—whatever that means to you—is the essence of sitting meditation.

The embodiment of dignity inwardly and outwardly immediately reflects and radiates the sovereignty of your life, that you are who and what you are—beyond all words, concepts, and descriptions, and beyond what anybody else thinks about you, or even what
you
think about you. It is a dignity without self-assertion—not driving forward
toward
anything, nor recoiling
from
anything—a
balancing
in sheer presence.

Could you possibly be here, wherever you are?

Once established in a sitting posture, we give ourselves over to the present moment. We can feature any part of our experience center-stage in the field of awareness, but a good place to start is with the body… and especially with the sensations of the body sitting and breathing.

We are
not
thinking about the breath or the breath sensations, so much as we are
feeling the breath, riding on the waves of the breath
like a leaf on a pond, or as if we were floating on a rubber raft on some gentle waves on an ocean or a lake,
feeling
the breath sensations, moment by moment by moment.

When we find that the mind has wandered away from the primary focus of our attention, as is bound to happen over and over again—whether we are featuring the breath, various body sensations, a sense of the body as a whole, or seeing, hearing, feeling, or the stream of thinking, whatever we are attending to—without judgment or condemnation, we simply note what is on our mind at the moment we
remember
the original focus of our attention, say it’s the breath, for instance, and realize that we have not been in touch with it for some time.

We note that the realization that we are no longer with the breath is itself
awareness
and so we are already back in the present moment. Importantly, we do not have to dispel or push away, or even remember whatever it is that was preoccupying the mind the moment before. We simply allow the breath to once again resume its place as the primary object of our attention, since it has never not been here, and is as available to us in this very moment as in any other.

Watching our thoughts and feelings come and go is extremely difficult because they
proliferate
so wildly, and because, even though insubstantial and evanescent, they are so seductive.

Maybe the fear is that we are less than we think we are, when the actuality of it is that we are much much more.

As a rule, we are very attached to our thoughts and feelings, whatever they are, and simply relate to their content unquestioningly, as if it were the truth, hardly ever recognizing that thoughts and feelings are actually
discrete events
within the field of awareness, tiny and fleeting occurrences in the mind that are usually at least somewhat if not highly inaccurate and unreliable.

Our thoughts may have a degree of relevance and accuracy at times, but often they are at least somewhat
distorted
by our self-centered and self-serving inclinations, our ambitions, our aversions, and our overriding tendency to ignore or be deluded by both.

The rehabilitation of the body—in the sense of fully inhabiting it and cultivating intimacy with it as it is, however it is—is a universal attribute of mindfulness practice, including mindful yoga. Since it is of limited value to speak of the body as separate from the mind, or of mind separated from body, we are inevitably talking about the
rehabilitation
of our whole being, and the realization of our wholeness moment by moment, step by step, and breath by breath, starting, as always, with where we are now.

It is awareness itself, rather than the objects of our attention, that is most important. Can we rest in awareness itself, be the awareness, the quality of our own mind that immediately knows any movement within itself, any appearance of a thought or feeling, an idea, an opinion, a judgment, a longing? In awareness, each thought can be seen and known. Its content can be seen and known for what it is. Its emotional charge can be seen and known for what it is.

And that is all. We don’t move to pursue it or suppress it, hold on to it or push it away. Each arising is merely seen and known, recognized, if you will, and thereby “touched” by awareness itself, by an instantaneous registering of it as a thought. And in that touching, in that knowing, in that seeing, the thought, like a soap bubble touched by a finger, dissipates, dissolves, evaporates instantly. As we noted before, it could be said, as the Tibetans do, that in that moment of recognition, the thought, whatever it is,
self-liberates.

All thoughts are events—they arise and pass away in the spaciousness of the field of awareness itself, without our effort, without our intention, just as waves on the ocean rise up for a moment, then fall back into the ocean itself, losing their identity, their momentary relative self-hood, returning to their undifferentiated water nature. Awareness does all the work. We have done nothing, other than
desist
from feeding the thought in any way, which would only make it proliferate into another thought, another wave, another bubble.