Finding the Center Within: The Healing Way of Mindfulness Meditation. (36 page)

journaling. And when life throws them a curve, they intensify their journaling efforts.

Life chapters is an approach we have adapted from Ira Progoff. It is a journaling exercise that can be useful at any time, but perhaps especially during times of difficulty or stress. To engage in this process, come to quietness. Listen to your life. See it in its sweep, from its earliest beginnings to the point where you are today. Find the felt sense of your life as a whole. Then, just as if you were about to write your autobiography, let the times of your life organize themselves into life chapters, perhaps eight or twelve of them. Do not think about it too much or agonize over it. Simply let the chapters emerge. Then write out the chapter headings, with a one-or two-sentence summary of the content of that chapter of your life.

When you have completed this task, review your life chapters quietly. Take in the movement of your life. If it is difficult for you to feel accepting about some things in your life, look at it the way you would look at the life story of someone you love and admire. Tune in to your felt sense of your life as a whole, and notice whether it shifts as you write.

You cannot predict the results of this process. You may gain something from it altogether unexpected. But in general, this exercise puts you in touch with the movement and direction of your life. Ask yourself these important questions: If the trends you have just summarized continue, where is your life leading you? If you do not like what you see, what is your life calling forth from you? What change is needed? It is more important to hold the question in awareness and dwell with it than to get answers.

If you do this exercise some weeks or months apart, you may come up with quite different chapters. That is because the place you start from is so different that it spontaneously evokes a different narrative organization. Repeating the life chapters exercise at different times puts you in touch with the flow of your life story so you can see it multidimensionally. It also can help you change it if you choose to. It can give you a sense that, since things have changed before, they need not be stuck in the present configuration, either. You can feel the changes and 09 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 10:02 AM Page 233

Hold to the Center

It is said that if a Masai warrior is incarcerated, he will die. Lacking a concept of the future, he assumes that the way life is now is the way life will always be. To an extent, we are all a little this way. Psychological research has shown that our memories are compartmentalized according to our emotional states. When we are happy, it is easy to recall happy times and events in our lives, and difficult to recall sad times. When we are sad, the reverse is true. This is how the brain is organized. For this reason, we can easily get locked into compartments of sadness or other negative emotions, finding it difficult to recall things that give us joy or hope.

One of the things the life chapters exercise can do is give you a direct experience of what the Buddhists call impermanence. If your life is a point on the rim of a bicycle wheel, then as the bicycle moves forward in space, the point on the rim also travels up and down. Similarly, our lives go up and down. But whatever we face today, it is no more permanent than what we faced yesterday. The point of the medieval figure of the wheel of fortune (still seen in tarot decks) is that if you live on the surface of life, on the outer rim, you are either going down or going up. Only if you live at the center do you have any stability. The life chapters exercise helps you see these ups and downs in perspective, and puts you in contact with the center of the wheel, the still point, what we have been calling the center within. And when you view several instances of the life chapters exercise, your perspective broadens out from the present to take in your whole life as a single gestalt. You gain freedom from the tyranny of the present, one-sided view of things, and see it
sub specie
aeternitatis
—from the perspective of eternity. Find Your Creativity

A journal can be useful as a repository for creative thinking. As noted above, by befriending our difficult thoughts and feelings, we begin to find more creative ways of dealing with life dilemmas. But more than 09 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 10:02 AM Page 234

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that, we can also record artistic inspiration. If you write, here is where you can record an idea for that wonderful novel. Or perhaps you have an idea that does not fit anywhere you can think of right away, but you note this fragment, trusting that it may fit somewhere. Perhaps you have an idea for a song lyric, the solution to a physics problem, a sketch of a new painting, or a solution to a business dilemma. Each of us has our own creative genius. To find it, we have to begin to trust our inner process—to begin to trust ourselves as essentially creative and reliable guides, as Buddhas in the making. Einstein trusted his instincts and developed his theories of special and general relativity, overturning established notions about the nature of the universe. The only certain path of failure is to ignore your own flashes of illumination. Emerson wrote: “A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages.” Journaling is a way to pay attention.

In Essence

Journal writing is a technology for seeing new options. It is one way to be with our feelings—even our most troubling ones—and calm them sufficiently to find new ways of dealing with them. It is a way, as a wise client said about psychotherapy, of being “side by side” with these feelings without being overwhelmed by them or controlled by them. Journaling is an effective way to get in touch with your inner depths, and thereby find creative solutions to problems, whether these be problems in living, esthetic problems, scientific, or spiritual ones. It is a tool of mindfulness. Whereas Buddhist meditation is predicated on the concept of
anatta
or “no self,” journaling can be especially helpful to some because it is compatible with our western culture and its valuing of the individual person.

It is worth giving journaling a chance by doing it regularly enough for a long enough period that it becomes a habit. If it is helpful, if it is on your path, you will come to value this as an important tool for living. You will even miss your journal when you have been away from it too long.

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1. Increase your meditation time to thirty minutes twice daily. 2. Continue with the day of mindfulness practice, reading, walking meditation, and work with dreams.

3. Start a journal. Try to spend some time each day this week writing in it. Experiment with each of the approaches in this chapter:

• “The Felt Sense” (p. 222)

• “Journaling to Remember” (p. 223)

• “Build a Memory Bridge” (p. 223)

• “Use Stream-of-Consciousness Journaling” (p. 224)

• “Inner Guide Journaling” (p. 225)

• “Dialogue with Significant People” (p. 229)

• “Write Your Life Chapters” (p. 231)

• “Find Your Creativity” (p. 233)

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Arriving Home

Thich Nhat Hanh says life is a walk. That is to say, life is a matter of taking each step, of facing each thing that comes along with mindfulness. If there is work to do, we work mindfully. If it is time to play, we play mindfully. If sadness comes up in our consciousness, we take care of the sadness with our mindfulness. If joy comes up, we strengthen it with mindfulness.

Arriving home is the same as continuing the walk—continuing the journey so that with each step we already arrive in the realm of nirvana. Each step is a fulfillment already, and we are no longer looking forward to some other kind of fulfillment, nor stuck in the past. Now that you have made a beginning, you face the issue of how you want to continue your journey. How will you do that so you do not lose the momentum you have been building over the last weeks? While there may be some basics such as meditation that you need to practice all the time, your practice will grow and evolve in accord with your changing need and circumstance.

Only you can answer the question of how you shall continue. But in the following chapter, we offer some principles for guiding your decision.

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10

Week Eleven and Beyond

B U D D H A A R E Y O U ?

o

Beware of confining yourself to a particular belief and denying all else, for much good would elude you—indeed the knowledge of reality would elude you. Be in yourself a matter for all forms of belief, for God is too vast and tremendous to be restricted to one belief rather than another.

—Ibn al-‘Arabi, Sufi master (1165–1240)

According to Buddhist teaching, there are 84,000 dharma doors—84,000 ways to find peace, to liberate oneself from suffering, to enter nirvana. If anything, that may be an underestimate. How does one then go about deciding which modes of practice are best? How will you best practice the dharma? What kind of Buddha will you be?

A Western Buddha-Dharma

When Buddhist teaching left the metaphysical atmosphere of the Indian subcontinent, it was already startlingly pragmatic. The Buddha 239

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was not interested in speculation; for the forty-nine years of his teaching career, he insisted repeatedly that he taught only suffering and the end of suffering. While the pristine essence remained constant, as the teaching entered China, it underwent transformation. It became Chinese. Again, as it reached Japan, the dharma became Japanese. It became Korean in Korea. In each place, the dharma has had to meet the people of that language and culture.

At this critical point, the dharma is encountering the culture of the Western world. The rough outline of a new form of the dharma is emerging. Here are some of the characteristics we see:
1. A Western Buddha-dharma will not be primarily for priests, monks,
and nuns.
Most practitioners will be “lay practitioners.” This term itself probably needs revision, since it already sounds somewhat pejorative. The democratic spirit runs too deep for monasticism and ordination to be considered more important than so-called lay practice. While monks and nuns will also play a role, the Buddha-dharma in the West may be above all for those who remain in the world, who marry or have committed relationships, have families, drive on crowded freeways, and struggle to earn a living; who transport children to soccer games, and seek a healthy and enriching sexuality.

2. Most practitioners of the Buddha-dharma will not become “Buddhists.”

We have already mentioned there is no word in the East for Buddhism. Buddhism is a term invented in the West to try to fit it into our own categories as a “religion” among other religions. The closest Eastern term is Buddha-dharma—the teaching of the Buddha. In keeping with this insight, most people will seek to incorporate Buddhist practice and teaching into their own lives in their own ways. Atheists and agnostics will tap these teachings in ways consistent with their point of view. Most Christians will remain Christians, and most Jews will remain Jews, if they are already connected with their tradition in a helpful way. The dharma will help them connect with their own traditions more deeply, rather than causing them to reject them. Many practitioners will claim no formal religious affiliation at all. And a few will identify themselves as Buddhists.

Buddhist teaching is not another ideology. It is not about becoming Buddhist rather than some other tradition. The dharma teaches us that such divisions are based on concepts, and concepts have no ultimate re-10 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 10:02 AM Page 241

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ality. If we are to connect with the spiritual in a way that can bring healing in this post–September 11 world, we must give up our tendency to harbor the secret or not-so-secret belief that our way is the only true way. For this thought contains a seed of violence that inevitably will at some point break out and infect the world, as it has again and again.
3. Western Buddha-dharma will be psychological as well as spiritual.
The Tibetan master Chögyam Trungpa said, “Buddhism will come to the West as a psychology.” This should not be surprising. Buddhism is deeply psychological, and our culture is a psychological one. Everyone uses terms like
complex, ego, libido, defense mechanism, conditioning,
and
re-
inforcement
. Many of the same people who are most interested in the peace and liberation of Buddha-dharma will be the ones already most acquainted with psychology. We believe this connection is vital if Buddha-dharma is to remain healthy in the West.
Finding the Center
Within
is a contribution toward connecting dharma and psychology in practical ways.

4. Western Buddha-dharma will remain individualistic.
Individualism runs too deep in the West for us to abandon it. The question here will not be so much about how to become a Buddha but about how to become the sort of Buddha that you, as an individual, are meant to be. There are quiet Buddhas and outrageous Buddhas. There are Buddhas who dance and sing and Buddhas who sit in unruffled silence. There are Buddhas who move like mountains and Buddhas who move like a swift mountain stream. What kind of Buddha are you?

There are paradoxes here. How do we combine no self with individualism? When viewed as concepts or logical categories, they seem like blatant contradictions. However, they are not irreconcilable. The teaching of no self can loosen our anxious, clammy grip on our individuality, recognizing that, on the ultimate level, this is all emptiness. This can free us from the
cult
of individuality—ultimately just another conformity. And when we are freed to understand no self, we can become most deeply that which we truly are.

On a practical level, a problem here is how to tap the support of community (sangha) while retaining the freedom of individual practice. So far, most people are attempting to practice on their own and only a few are joining in community practice on a regular basis. New models are needed to help us tap the strengths of community, while allowing space for individuality.

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