Finding the Center Within: The Healing Way of Mindfulness Meditation. (7 page)

Similarly, drinking a glass of water may be neutral, but if you experience it fully, it can be a pleasure. The breath is often experienced as neutral, but it can be quite enjoyable if we give attention to it. Breath also can help us calm down and digest negative experiences, transform neutral events into positive ones, and reduce our suffering from negative experiences.

Count the Breath

Sit comfortably. Loosen any tight clothing. Let your mind turn toward your breathing. With the first in-breath, count one. With the first outbreath, count one. With the second in-breath, count two, and with the second out-breath, count two, continuing up to ten. When your mind wanders, come back to the breathing, and begin again with one. When you reach ten, go back to one. Continue for five to ten minutes. Practice in an easygoing, relaxing way. When you are ready to stop, pause for another minute, and feel the effect of having done this on your body and mind.

THE EXPERIENCE (BEVERLY)

It’s about 5 A.M. on Thursday morning and I’m sitting in meditation. I felt so peaceful sitting down in my usual meditation chair. But as soon as I close my eyes, my work projects and worries are bouncing in my head, ricocheting in and out of my meditation. I decide to focus on one current personnel issue and hold that person in my attention for several minutes. I invite the universe to present possible solutions and then just hold her in my attention. No miraculous answers are evoked, but as I continue to focus on holding her in my attention, my mind calms down a bit. Breathing in and out, I feel more peaceful. My bouncing mind quiets and my focus shifts to my breathing.

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Killing the Buddha

There is always a risk of getting so caught up in your technique that you miss the point. The goal of spiritual practice is to come into your life more fully, to be more aware of the life you actually have. The secondcentury church father Saint Irenaeus said that the glory of God is a human being fully alive. The true goal is to be just that. As you become more fully alive, what initially felt unsatisfactory, boring, or even painful, becomes full and satisfying. But in the meantime, you can get caught up in the means and forget the point.

Meditation, for example, is about learning to be more mindful, about coming into your actual life and experience, about enjoying the present moment. But many people turn meditation into a project. As a project, meditation can become rigid and goal oriented. You fantasize about a time when you can meditate so well—when you are so enlightened—

that life will always flow smoothly and everything will fall easily into place. Or worse still, you start to think of yourself as “spiritual.” This becomes yet another role you play, an image to live up to. And in living up to that image, you become selectively open to certain experiences and closed to others that you would prefer not to notice. You may allow yourself to experience peaceful feelings. But you may resist noticing that you feel bored, because boredom does not fit your idea of yourself as a spiritual person. And it is even harder to admit that you are angry. Any teaching, any approach or method, becomes an obstacle if we let it. The Buddha described his teaching as being like a snake. It must be taken up very carefully, or you will get bitten, and be worse off than you were before. You can take any teaching, no matter how useful, and make an idol of it, constantly checking your experience against it. And if your experience doesn’t fit, you force it into the mold of what you think you should experience.

This is not the way. The way is to be with whatever you are experiencing, and to acknowledge it not only as legitimate, but even as primary.

There is a Zen saying that if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. This is a shocking notion. But the shock impresses the point. As with religious language in general, this is not to be taken rigidly or literally. What is implied is that even the Buddha—a fully enlightened being—can be a danger to you. If the Buddha becomes an idol, if you try to conform to your image of what a Buddha is like, this becomes de-02 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 9:46 AM Page 29

John was in psychotherapy for the first time. He thought he knew what to expect. But his ideas about therapy were drawn from indirect and questionable sources, such as movies and television, newspaper and magazine articles. His therapist wanted to help him face his anger, and he gave John an assignment to record his anger-related fantasies. John immediately translated this assignment to fit his preconceptions about therapy. His task, as he took it, was to really get into his anger. He felt that his anger was some awful thing that needed to be exorcised. Instead of looking deeply into the anger that was there, he went way beyond his actual feelings, trying to record what he thought he should feel. He described in great detail the horrible tortures he imagined doing to the person he was angry at, in this way trying to be a good therapy client and do what he should do. After writing this exaggerated version of his anger, John only felt angrier. Worse still, he felt bad that all this hostility and violence was in him.

When he read this material to his therapist at their next meeting, the therapist said, “Wow, you really were angry!” Since John was constantly scanning for cues about whether he was being a good client and having the kind of experience in therapy he was supposed to have, John took this comment to mean he had done it wrong and had gone too far. John was no closer to getting acquainted with his own anger, so anxious was he to conform to what he thought he should be feeling. A Zen koan asks: What was your original face before your parents were born? This question points toward the real you and your true experience, before you were trying to be anything other than who you are. This is the point of mindfulness, and not trying to make your experience conform to anything. If your philosophy is that matter is the only stuff in the universe, but you have an experience you can only call spiritual, let it be. If you consider yourself a spiritual being, but 02 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 9:46 AM Page 30

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continue to only experience the body and the material world, let it be. If you think of yourself as gentle but experience anger, or think of yourself as calm but experience anxiety, let it be. Be willing to experience whatever comes. See what happens as you become more accepting of your true experience, of your true face.

Acknowledge All Your Experience: Joe’s Story

Joe had a very stressful job. He was a middle manager for a technology firm, which was not doing well. Management blamed the workers, and the workers blamed management. Joe constantly got caught in between. Joe believed in being optimistic and strong. He boasted that he had never had a bad day. He would tell you this, if you asked him, even last Tuesday when half of the workers under him took a sick-out and his boss scolded him mercilessly right in front of the people Joe managed. That evening, Joe had what his doctor called a “cardiac event.”

Joe’s philosophy has merit. Optimism helps us through some tight situations. But taken to extremes, it causes as many problems as it solves. In one way there are no “bad days,” if what you mean by “bad”

is a day with no positive elements whatsoever. There are always some positives, no matter how extreme the situation. But if this means that there’s nothing going on that is less than wonderful or that causes pain, then this is not only absurd, it’s destructive. If Joe had allowed himself to realize earlier how uncomfortable his job had become for him, he would have felt his pain. By acknowledging it, he might have foreseen his need for a change. He might have combed the Sunday paper for jobs or done something to manage the stress he was feeling. Quite possibly, that “cardiac event” would not have happened. Joe was, in a sense, the opposite of John. John’s image of emotional health emphasized expressing negative feelings. John believed this so strongly that he actually cultivated his anger. Joe had adopted a life philosophy that seemed optimistic, adaptive, and useful, but he misused it to deny his own experience. That’s getting it backward. He was trying to impose his philosophy on his experience, rather than taking his life as it really is and working with that. And because Joe used his philosophy to deny negative aspects of his experience, he failed to heed the warning that the negative feelings were trying to give him. 02 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 9:46 AM Page 31

One day, sitting in theology class, I realized: Everything I was learning was simply an appeal to authority. How does one decide to believe this or that? You choose an authority, and go with what the authority says about it. The authority might be the Bible, or church tradition, or to some extent even the professor. What this ruled out was one’s own direct experiences. I liked psychology because the scientific method seemed different from such blatant appeals to authority. It took a few years to realize that psychology only substituted one authority for another. The authority was not the Bible, but data, research, and experimental design. It was not church tradition, but Sigmund Freud or Abraham Maslow or Aaron Beck. There is a lot that is good about research, just as there is a lot that is good about scripture and tradition. But the real authority still resides in yourself, since only you can decide what you will accept as authoritative. All external authorities are an attempt to bypass the authority of your own experience. The humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers said it this way: “Neither the Bible nor the prophets—neither Freud nor research—neither the revelations of God nor man—can take precedence over my own direct experience.” This is actually a good description of mindfulness. Rogers was talking about the refusal to allow for any mediator, the insistence on what he himself thought, felt, and experienced. If some external authority told him he should think or feel one way, but his own experience did not fit this, he trusted his own experience. Nor does this mean that you have to then fight the authority or try to convince someone with a different experience that yours is more valid. All that is needed is to abide with good-natured inflexibility by your own experiencing. You do not have to lock horns with anyone.

When you begin to do this simple thing—to just be mindful of your own experience in a gentle, nonjudgmental way—you find a path through the wilderness where you thought none existed. The knots of long-standing, difficult life problems are gradually loosened. And this happens—not by trying to force a solution, not by trying to feel peaceful and calm when you are anxious and afraid, not by trying to feel happy when you feel sad, and not by trying to force anything in particular—but just by being more present to all of it, softening to accept 02 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 9:46 AM Page 32

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what is really happening. If you could force your way through whatever problems you have, if there were some simple solution, you would already have done it and already have found it. Mindfulness is the art of deep presence, without struggle, without trying to fix anything. The best solutions occur when you are not trying to find a solution, but when you are just allowing yourself and everything else to be. This is not pacifism. This is not fatalism or just giving up. In fact, the opposite is the case. When you are deeply mindful and no longer trying to impose anything on your experience or trying to force a solution, you suddenly find yourself acting with surprising clarity and strength, with action that is both efficient and effective, because your action is in touch with what is really going on.

The Trappist monk and noted author Thomas Merton wrote about this quality of action in his book
Mystics and Zen Masters
. In the passage below he describes the actions of the sage, the one who follows the
Tao
or principle of harmony in all things. Note the blend of activity and passivity, without violence or force:

The sage . . . accomplishes very much indeed because it is the
Tao
that acts in him and through him. He does not act of and by himself, still less for himself alone. His action is not a violent manipulation of exterior reality, an “attack” on the outside world, bending it to his conquering will: on the contrary, he respects external reality by yielding to it, and his yielding is at once an act of worship, a recognition of sacredness, and a perfect accomplishment of what is demanded by the precise situation.

The problem in other words has something to do with trying too hard, with attempting to perform acts of force and violence on ourselves and the world around us. Such action may have good short-term results. But the long-term results are never good. When we stop forcing, and allow ourselves to experience what is happening clearly, effective action flows naturally and easily. The whole force of human evolution, indeed the whole force of the human spirit, cannot be harnessed and pushed. It can only be impeded or allowed to flow. When I began as a therapist, I focused on evaluating what was going on: Was I doing a good job? Did this person like me? Was he responding well to me? Or even worse: What is this person’s problem? What diagnosis fits? What kind of flaw in his early experience created this 02 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 9:46 AM Page 33