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. (6 page)
Become the Beloved
With paper and pen in front of you, think of the person you feel closest to—perhaps your partner if you have one, perhaps a friend or relation if not. With eyes closed, imagine yourself becoming that person. Be him physically. Think his thoughts. Feel his feelings. Now open your eyes. Let this person express his deepest feelings, his hopes and fears, his strengths and self-doubt, everything. Also record this person’s feelings about you. Write this all down. Do not worry whether this is accurate or not. In fact, do not assume that it is. It is not the particular things that are of importance, but making the effort to see it from the other’s point of view. By doing so, you may begin to notice whether your guesses are correct, because you begin to observe more closely. Perhaps you even ask. It is all about paying attention. See Yourself as a Flower
In
Psychotherapy East and West,
the author Alan Watts described a similarity between the activities of the Zen master and those of the psychotherapist. In Rinzai Zen, the master gives the student a koan, a kind of unsolvable riddle such as “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”
He instructs the student to meditate continually on this intellectual jawbreaker until he attains insight. The student approaches the teacher many times attempting to answer with the required insight, which the teacher just as many times rejects, until something of a different quality 01 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 9:44 AM Page 21
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emerges in the student’s answer. It is not any particular words that the teacher is looking for. He is looking for an answer that demonstrates spontaneity and trust of one’s own being. But this understanding only emerges out of finally
giving up
the effort and relaxing into a knowingness. Zen masters are tricky fellows and have a knack for knowing the difference between a true, spontaneous emergence and a fake one. Watts wrote that Western psychotherapy accomplishes something similar. The psychotherapy patient in essence approaches the expert therapist and says, “Fix me.” Now every master therapist knows at some level that this is an absurd proposition. One human being cannot fix another human being any more than, in the Zen context, the teacher can make the student into a Buddha. So the therapist dispenses her own unsolvable riddles. If the therapist is a classical Freudian, the riddles will be about mother, toilet training, penis envy, and castration anxiety. If the therapist uses a modern cognitive approach, she will tell you to identify your irrational thoughts and counter them with more rational thinking. The patient keeps coming back, thinking he just does not get it, and the therapist keeps giving out more riddles, until eventually, the patient
gives up
and allows himself to just be as he is. The problem, you might say, is our perception that we are a problem that we have to fix. And once we stop thinking of ourselves as a problem, we discover that we are (and always have been) okay. In Buddhist terms we uncover our Buddha nature.
Of course, this is an oversimplification of both Zen and psychotherapy. It is like saying that bread is just water, yeast, and flour. So why bother with all that baking? Just eat the separate ingredients, then jump up and down for a while to mix them, and let them bake in the heat of your body. Isn’t that the same thing? But this oversimplification has a point. Who told you that you were a problem to fix?
You are not a prob-
lem to fix any more than a flower is.
A flower is there to appreciate. You are much more like a flower than like a Rubik’s Cube. Be wary of anything that teaches you that you are a problem to fix, that sets you at war with yourself, diminishes you, and reduces your capacity for peace. Practice for Week One
1. Do the practices contained in the chapter:
• “Where Are You?” (p. 8)
• “Acknowledge Your Many Roles” (p. 10)
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• “Reconnect with Your Roots” (p. 15)
• “Be Aware of Self-Punishing Thoughts” (p. 17)
• “Become the Beloved” (p. 20)
2. Try this special daily practice: “Take Up Your Robe, Sandals, and Begging Bowl” below.
Take Up Your Robe, Sandals, and Begging Bowl
Wearing special clothes contains power. I knew a minister who wore a clerical collar every day. At one point he considered leaving the church, but in the end he decided to stay. What held him was a simple thought: He couldn’t imagine not putting on his collar in the morning. When a traditional Buddhist monk or nun wakes in the morning, there are no choices to be made about what to wear. Every morning, he puts on his robe. Every morning, she puts on her sandals. Every morning, he takes his bowl to beg food for the day. Every time you put on your clothes in the morning this week, or change them during the day, or take them off at night, say to yourself,
“This is my robe, these are my sandals.” Whenever you take out your wallet to pay for something, say to yourself, “This is my begging bowl that the universe has filled.” Use this as a way to remind yourself that, whatever role that you may be playing at the moment, your central calling is the same as that of anyone under religious orders: to be a person of peace, of calm, of mindfulness, of lovingkindness and compassion, of joy, and of equanimity. This is your true career.
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Week Two
o
In the immediate experience of the Presence, the Now is no mere nodal point between the past and the future. It is the seat and region of the Divine Presence itself. No longer is the ribbon
[of time] spread out with equal vividness before one, for the past matters less and the future matters less, for the Now contains all that is needed for the absolute satisfaction of our deepest cravings.
—Thomas R. Kelly,
A Testament of Devotion
(1941) Peace can be elusive. If you seek it but fail to find it, the problem is not always lack of effort. Sometimes you are looking in the wrong place. If the problem is something lacking in you that needs to be filled from the outside, then whatever experiences you seek will only disappoint you. You are left in the realm of overexpectation, fragmentation, and disconnection. You find yourself in the land of the hungry ghosts, where you remain empty and unsatisfied despite the abundance all around you.
Of course, if you lack the necessities of food, shelter, and clothing, it is difficult to find peace. Moreover, if you need more success and appreciation, if you need a partner, or if lack of money prevents you from enjoying many of the good things in life, these are important, too. It is 23
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a mistake to be so spiritual that you do not honor such needs. But if peace means having all our needs met in a totally satisfactory way, we will never find it.
For most of us, our dissatisfaction is not about fulfilling basic needs. It is about endlessly searching outside of ourselves and our own experience for what was never missing in the first place.
We do not need to fill
ourselves with new things—we need to experience more fully what is already
there.
So how do we learn to soften and open to what is already present?
How do we come to live fully and deeply
this
life and not some imagined life that we hope someday to have?
In this chapter we describe the main principle for finding the center within, the Buddhist practice of mindfulness, and show how it meets the dilemmas of modern life.
Mindfulness
Mindfulness is a quality of gentle presence. Mindfulness is the capacity to be present with what is going on here and now, without judgment or resistance, without evasion or analysis. It is a willingness to experience without reservation what is happening in our lives in the present. It is the practice of
radical acceptance
.
This is easier to understand as a concept than it is to experience or practice. But the practice is what matters. Often we dislike what is happening in the present. This is why we keep so busy, trying to push ourselves ahead to some future time when things will be lined up more the way we like, engaging in all manner of fantasy about how it will be in that illusory future. It’s a good thing that life does not come equipped with a fast-forward button. We would all be dead already. For instead of experiencing what is going on, we are busy trying to avoid it. Even when we try to come into the present moment in a mindful way, most of us experience the wild, intractable nature of the mind. This “monkey mind” is a total restlessness and jumping about from limb to limb and tree to tree, never stopping anywhere for very long, not finishing this bite of our banana before we are already stuffing the next one in. Fortunately, there is help. There are time-tested ways to develop greater presence or mindfulness in your life. There are ways to learn to keep your appointment with life in the only place it can be kept: 02 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 9:46 AM Page 25
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the present moment. That is the good news. And we will introduce you to some of these ways, both Eastern and Western, both ancient and modern.
Work with Three Kinds of Experiences
Though mindfulness is a single thing, it is helpful to distinguish three types of objects: things that are difficult and painful; things that are delightful, healing, and restoring; and things that are somewhere in between or neutral. The practice of mindfulness involves all of these. If you are doing walking meditation along a forest path and suddenly remember that there isn’t enough money in your bank account to cover a check you wrote earlier that day, you should be aware that you are walking down the forest path. Come back to the present. Feel the earth beneath your feet. Smell the pine trees. Feel the wind caress your hair. Notice the little wildflowers along the side of the path. Be where you are. This is the practice of being in touch with what is healing and restoring. This does not mean that you should try to repress your financial fear. You have to respect these feelings and work with them. But don’t forget to experience walking in the forest when you are walking in the forest. Some fear or worry or concern is always lying in wait for us. What is the point of being alive at all, if we let these things dominate our attention? This is cultivating mindfulness of what is delightful.
The second type of practice is to work with the negative feeling itself—in this case, the financial fear. However, even then, you need to be in touch with the present moment. To practice in this way is in effect to tell yourself: “Here I am walking in the forest, and also worrying about my checking account. I hold these feelings of fear tenderly, and smile at them. I am completely willing to be here, walking in the forest, and also having these thoughts and fears about money.” With gentle persistence, you learn what your fear is trying to teach you and integrate it, but are no longer captive to it. You may even be able to come back to just walking in the forest. This in itself is a miracle. Evolution has provided us with a gastrointestinal system that is skillful at digesting the food and nutrients we need to maintain a healthy body. It is not always perfect. Some people have allergies to certain foods. These types of food will not be digested well and may cause 02 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 9:46 AM Page 26
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problems. All of us lose digestive enzymes as we age. Food that we once could digest easily now no longer agrees with us. Many people, for example, lose the ability to digest dairy products. Similarly, the human mind is the gift of evolution as well. It has become skillful at anticipating problems and solving them. It has become good at digesting unpalatable experiences. Troubling experiences may be metabolized in dreams, or by thinking and talking about them until we are through thinking and talking about them. Sometimes, however, this system of mental digestion breaks down. Sometimes the mind gets stuck in its processing. We may have recurrent dreams, or even relive traumatic experiences as if they are happening all over again. Someone with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) may relive wartime experiences again and again, caught in an endless and frightening loop. When we get caught in such a loop, when our minds are not digesting difficult feelings and experiences, we need help. At this point we need some way to bring calmness to our experience. Just as we do not digest properly if we eat while we are agitated, so we cannot process feelings if we are not calm. If we cannot do this on our own, psychotherapy aims to restore our ability to digest difficult experiences, so we can learn from them without being dominated by them. Key in this process is the ability to recognize that what you are experiencing is a memory and not a present reality. The presence of a therapist helps clients realize that they are not
reliving
this old experience, but they are safe with a caring person at their side,
remembering
it. When this happens, the mind’s capacity to digest the difficult experience is restored. We get stuck when fears, worries, or old traumas put us into a trance of pain that takes us out of the present moment. So with the person walking in the forest and worrying about money, it is important that he knows he is walking in the forest. If he gets so caught up in his fear that he is overpowered by it, with the same thoughts and feelings looping endlessly, he will get stuck there. It is already helpful when he realizes that he is in a lovely forest, walking in peace, even while at the same time he has this fear and worry. That way, he is not completely engulfed in the negative material.
Neutral experiences can become positive if we receive them with calmness and clarity. The bluebird that flew right across our path this morning as Beverly and I took our morning walk was very beautiful. 02 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 9:46 AM Page 27