Read Finding the Center Within: The Healing Way of Mindfulness Meditation. Online
Authors: Thomas Bien
Finding the Center Within: The Healing Way of Mindfulness Meditation. (2 page)
problems. It is an attempt to get a free pass to avoid difficulties and issues. One of the strengths of psychology, on the other hand, is precisely to help us face these things. It can help us acknowledge that our motivations are not always as saintly as we would like to think, and starting from there, help us become more whole and behave more effectively. Sometimes religious and spiritual people lose the connection between their spirituality and their daily life, confining spiritual practice too much to special occasions and rituals, to the meditation cushion or scripture study or a worship service. They may wish to build their lives on a solid spiritual foundation, but to really do so may require that emotional and psychological wounds be acknowledged and healed. Christ taught that before trying to improve your neighbor, you should take a look at yourself. You should remove the log from your own eye before attempting surgery on the speck in your neighbor’s eye. The world would be a much better place if people took this teaching seriously. But how does one do this exactly? How can we see ourselves, without distorting our attitudes and intentions in the direction of being better than we really are? How can we avoid the fate of religious people like those we have all met, who, now that they have become “spiritual,” seem to be more difficult to be around than they were before? Psychology is uniquely positioned to help with these difficulties—helping us, through self-acceptance, to know ourselves a little better, so we can see the log in our own eyes. Psychology has also developed useful practices that help us learn to live and deal with others more skillfully. The Buddha would commend the communication skills psychology offers us as a wonderful way to implement what he taught about skillful speech.
On the other hand, while psychology provides us with tools and insights, it cannot tell us what to use them for. Answering the “what for”
question requires a step outside of pure empiricism into the realm of spirit. The best tools do little good if we don’t know what we want to build in the first place, just as our cars and planes can take us faster and faster, but do not provide direction and purpose.
We hold it as a basic truth that we are spiritual beings. That is our essence. There is more to us than we imagine. The scientific view is helpful and important, yet by itself it can too easily flatten out. The world of science limits and truncates, leaving us two-dimensional in a many-dimensional universe. We are more than that. We are not confined to the space between our head and our feet, nor to the years be-00 BIEN pref.qxd 7/16/03 1:54 PM Page xiii
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tween birth and death. And since we are spiritual beings, there are limits to what psychology alone can tell us—valuable though it is. There are hopeful signs that the boundary between science and religion is not as rigid as it once was. Theoretical physicists sometimes sound like Buddhists. A form of psychology known as
radical behavior-
ism
—which many think of as a kind of ultimate empirical, scientific approach to the psychology of behavior—ends up sounding surprisingly Buddhist. Many psychologists, psychiatrists, and other counselors these days value both the spiritual and the scientific, and no longer feel the need to separate the two or defend the one against the other. On the other hand, many religious people have learned to value psychology and therapy. For more than thirty years now, clergy have been receiving basic training in counseling. Religious people may retain some uneasiness about psychology, and therapists may not always quite know what do with people’s spirituality, but there is a tendency toward greater acceptance. Scientists, like Edward O. Wilson in his stimulating book
Consilience,
may envision all realms of knowledge as ultimately reducible to science, while spiritual people will claim the reverse. But in the end, we will come to know that all of the different modes of knowing are ultimately one, since all of them are aspects of something larger than what we normally consider either scientific or spiritual. All ways of knowing concern the one reality, and the division between spirituality and science is ultimately as artificial as the division between poetry and prose or between ocean and bay. Until we can come to see things in a more unified way, we believe it is important to be open both to the spiritual dimension of life—to all that the great spiritual traditions of the world can teach us—and also to psychology, which can help us face ourselves and our lives with greater honesty and give us tools with which to build a well-grounded, decently human life.
Which Spirituality? Which Psychology?
But when we say spirituality, which spirituality shall we consider, and when we say psychology, which psychology?
While there is almost as much conflict among the differing schools of psychology as there is among the differing world spiritual traditions, all of these traditions exist because they offer something valuable and 00 BIEN pref.qxd 7/16/03 1:54 PM Page xiv
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important. Still, neither our treatment of psychology nor our treatment of spirituality can be exhaustive. So we must be somewhat selective in both realms.
Many years ago, I heard Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi give a talk at a university. As I remember it, he said that the true aim of learning and scholarship ultimately concerns the question, “What is the good life?” The farther we wander from this central, living question, the more abstract, dry, and remote study becomes.
In keeping with this insight, the criterion we have used is a simple one, cutting across different systems and beliefs: We have emphasized those aspects of both psychology and spirituality that are of the most practical relevance, that help us to live the good life and to become who we are meant to be. We emphasize that which most directly answers the question of how to live deeply and well. We emphasize teachings that tell us not only that we should love our neighbor, but also how we can go about doing it. For that reason, prominence is given to Buddhism among the spiritual paths, because it excels at maintaining a focus on practice and has a minimum of the sort of dogmatic beliefs and speculative philosophy that can become an obstacle to those who see things differently. And the heart and soul of Buddhist teachings is the practice of mindfulness. So while we refer to many spiritual traditions, none are as central as mindfulness.
Central to Buddhist teaching are the four noble truths. The Buddha gave this teaching, the record tells us, in his first sermon after his enlightenment, and these teachings set the tone for all of the teachings that followed. The first noble truth is the truth of suffering. This teaching is not so much that everything is suffering, but that suffering is the very thing that points us in the right direction. Suffering is to be learned from rather than ignored if we are to find our way out of it. It is something like the Christian teaching that resurrection must be preceded by crucifixion—that it is in our very struggles that God’s presence is to be found. The second noble truth is that the causes of suffering can be known and understood. The cause of our suffering is not the nature of reality but our own ignorance. Once we see the nature of reality clearly, we know why we suffer. The third noble truth is that once these causes are known and understood, we can stop suffering. We can enter the realm of nirvana, of bliss, what Christians would call the kingdom of God. The fourth noble truth is a description of what a life without suffering 00 BIEN pref.qxd 7/16/03 1:54 PM Page xv
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would look like. This is the famous eightfold path: right view, right thinking, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right mindfulness, right diligence, and right concentration. It is important to understand that this is not so much a moralism as it is a practical teaching. The eightfold path describes the way to live that is “right” (meaning effective) in eliminating suffering, in helping us cross to the shore of nonsuffering.
The Buddha maintained at the end of his life that he had taught nothing except the nature of suffering and how to end it. To some, this seems a little negative. And just as Christians can get too focused on the overwhelming sufferings of Christ on the cross, or Jews too focused on the vast atrocity of the Holocaust, there is a risk for Buddhists to get too caught up in the negative here. But doing so is a distortion. Since we are already spiritual beings with a divine nature, with Buddha nature, we do not have to do anything in particular to become those things. We are them already. All we need to do is know how to remove that which gets in the way. All we need to do is know how to work with that which causes us to suffer, so the shining joy underneath can be revealed. In this way, all of this talk of suffering is nothing negative at all. Every word in this book is also about suffering and how to transform it so as to cross to the other shore. It does not matter so much whether the method is something labeled spiritual or something labeled psychological. The psychology we draw on in this book is similarly aimed at transforming our suffering. Among psychological approaches, the practical focus of cognitive-behavioral psychology earns it some prominence for the same reason—having a minimum of speculative assumption and a maximum of practical validity, though once again, we draw freely from other psychological schools as well.
Our Journeys
Beverly and I came to appreciate the value of both spirituality and psychology from opposite directions. Both of us were struck by the similarity between the practice of mindfulness and the basic principles of psychotherapy. Mindfulness teaches that wherever we shine the light of awareness, transformation and healing take place. A basic tenet of psychotherapy is that difficult and painful problems gradually yield to an 00 BIEN pref.qxd 7/16/03 1:54 PM Page xvi
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accepting attention. Mindfulness uses breathing and meditation to calm our thoughts and feelings sufficiently to look deeply and find healing. Therapy uses the presence of another person who is accepting and nonjudgmental to accomplish the same goal. The similarity is not accidental, but reveals a primary and potent healing force viewed from different angles. I (Tom) began my professional life as a minister, deeply drawn from an early age to the spiritual dimension of life. From there, I became interested in pastoral counseling, and was gradually drawn to psychology. Eventually, this became a career change. Beverly, on the other hand, began her career in mental health and human services. As her need to stay centered in a difficult field became increasingly important, she slowly gravitated toward spirituality. From different starting places, we both met in the middle and arrived at the same place, with a deep conviction that both the psychological and the spiritual are of value and importance. Through the holy truth of our sufferings and struggles, we both felt psychology helped us to understand ourselves and other people and taught us how to cope with many kinds of difficulties. And at the same time, we both also clearly saw that we needed to connect with the spiritual center of life in a way that went beyond psychology. The combination of the spiritual and the psychological can be a powerful help in finding greater peace, joy, love, and well-being in your life. For those who would like to work at this in a systematic way, we offer a step-by-step program for inviting and deepening your capacity for psychological and spiritual well-being. It is a kind of retreat that you can give yourself, but one that you can take without traveling to some far-off place. In a way, it is even better than a retreat, for on a retreat there is always the difficulty of integrating the mountaintop retreat experience with the valleys of everyday life. Here, however, your retreat and daily life are one.
A Retreat in Daily Life
Week one:
During this week, we explain the difficulties in modern life and how mindfulness helps heal them. Introductory exercises initiate you gently into the program.
Week two:
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Weeks three and four:
In the third and fourth weeks, you learn how to begin a meditation practice.
Week five:
In the fifth week, you learn how to bring the meditative attitude into daily life.
Week six:
During the sixth week, we invite you to look deeply at your life and explore an alternative vision of what life is about.
Week seven:
In this week, you learn to use dreams to become acquainted with all of who you are and achieve maximum wholeness and selfacceptance.
Week eight:
In this week, we teach you how to work with and transform negative emotions.
Week nine:
This week focuses on practices to bring mindfulness to your relationships to make them healthy and healing.
Week ten:
In week ten, you learn to meditate on paper, using journaling as a tool of mindfulness.
We of course know that your spiritual growth is unlikely to be complete after ten weeks. These ten weeks are unlikely to remove all of your psychological issues or make you a saint or an enlightened person. But if you follow the program faithfully, you will have a good foundation for new habits and practices that can provide a solid basis for continuing spiritual growth and wholeness. How This Book Is Organized
This book is organized into four parts. In Part I, “The Key,” we describe the problems of modern life and how meditation and mindfulness help. This is the background information you need in preparation for the journey.
Part II is called “The Door,” since it leads us out into a new life. In these chapters, we teach you how to meditate and how to use a meditative approach to daily living. This section is primarily spiritual in orientation, but includes supplemental information from psychology. In Part III, “The Path,” we show you how to deal more effectively with negative emotions and relationships, and how to work with dreams and use a journal. This is the most directly psychological part of the book, though as usual, spiritual themes are incorporated throughout.
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