Finding the Center Within: The Healing Way of Mindfulness Meditation. (8 page)

By simply being willing to be present to what is going on, we find our way.

Release the Illusion of Control

Because of past conditioning, we inevitably import attitudes into the practice of mindfulness that do not belong there. If you were in the military, you might hear the call to mindfulness as the voice of the drill sergeant: “Straighten up, soldier! Pay attention!” Or, since almost all of us have been to school, you might hear the voice of old Mrs. So-andSo, the mean schoolteacher who filled your life with terror the year you were in her class: “Now listen up! I do not want to have to say this twice!”

Mrs. Reston loved to lay traps for her students. A year or two from retirement, she had been teaching since 1929 when I had her for a teacher. To us twelve-year-olds back then, the year 1929 sounded prehistoric. Mrs. Reston seemed like the dinosaurs we saw on our field trip to the Museum of Natural History. Sometimes she would tell us to remain at work quietly while she went to the office. This was a ruse, fabricated solely to entrap us. She would then wait in the hall outside the door until we gradually began to loosen up and talk. When the noise and activity reached a crescendo, she would pop in, walking stiffly erect, the sternest of looks on her face. She would scold us at length for not following her orders and not paying attention to her instruction to work quietly. This was her way of teaching us a lesson. And lessons were learned, though not necessarily the ones she intended. 02 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 9:46 AM Page 34

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Mindfulness is not like this at all. It is gentle and forgiving. When we are mindful, we lose our illusion of being in control. Then we can settle back and experience fully and deeply. And of course, if we are not in control, how can we blame ourselves or be ashamed? Mindfulness doesn’t tell us that we are bad when our mindfulness slips, but that mindfulness is always a miracle. And whenever we come back to the present moment and to what is actually going on, the spirit of mindfulness smiles on us. It does not matter whether we come back five times or five hundred times in the space of an hour. What matters is that we come back.

Don’t Worry about Doing It Right

Some of us sabotage ourselves by the very intensity of our efforts. Our desire to be right and correct interferes with coming into the present moment. If you are even a little bit more present to your life, even a little less distracted by thoughts and worries and plans, then you are doing it right. You are moving in the right direction.

THE EXPERIENCE (TOM)

Today I am giving a talk to some colleagues. I am more nervous than usual before a talk. There is something intimidating about all those Ph.D.’s in the room. I hear the voices of my graduate school instructors in my head making their most damning comments—as if I were revisiting my oral comprehensive exams. I find myself imagining one criticism after another, then struggling to rebuff them. As if coming out of a fog, I somehow fight my way back to the cup of coffee I’m drinking. I smell it deeply, then take a sip. I know I am having a difficult time being mindful this morning. But I remind myself it is a miracle to come back to the present at all.

See That the Island Is Beautiful

Sometimes we can coax our feelings along a little bit, especially if we are gentle and patient about it. We can cultivate happiness, joy, 02 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 9:46 AM Page 35

There is a Korean Buddhist story about a man who hears that a beautiful island is inhabited and goes to find the one who lives there. He searches the island up and down to find its inhabitant, but fails to do so. Finally, at some point, the searcher gives up and stops all his searching. He suddenly realizes the island is beautiful. Beginning to practice mindfulness is like that. At first, we are looking for something that we expect should be there. We search and search. But when we finally give up a little, and relax into where we are with no special effort, we experience an epiphany; the beauty of the place reveals itself. While we employ methods and techniques of practice in order to find peace, peace is not a method. When peace unfolds on its own, we can ease our grasp of the method. At that point, there is no method, there is only peace.

Practice Radical Acceptance

The practice of mindfulness is a kind of radical acceptance. It is not so much that we seek to be peaceful, no matter what is happening, as it is that even when we are not peaceful, we accept
that
experience, just as it is. If in this way we tune in to
what is,
even if
what is
is something we do not particularly want, peace emerges. To put it somewhat differently, much of what interferes with our enjoyment of life is the continual struggle to impose a different kind of order on experience than what is already there. Peace is found when we cease this struggle. And the doorway to the cessation of struggle is first to accept that right now, struggle is what is going on.

Some object at this point that radical acceptance is dangerous, that our own experience is not to be trusted. But once again, you have no choice. If you do not accept your own experience, what else can you do?

Even if you place your faith in some external authority, it is still you who must decide which authority you will accept. So how do you know you can trust your decision?

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche spoke of human 02 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 9:46 AM Page 36

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development in his famous parable of the camel, the lion, and the child. At first, we are the camel. We need to take on the load of tradition, of rules and guidelines for our behavior. If we do not do this in early life, we are not civilized beings at all. Instead, we live in the world of fangs and claws and ruthless aggression. But then we must make the transition to the lion. At this point we come into our power. We still follow the rules, but we use them to achieve and succeed. We become something in the world. But finally, we become the child, and as the child, we throw off the rules we took on as the camel and return to innocence and freedom. This is like Saint Augustine’s dictum, “Love God, and do what you will.” If you do what you will while having the love of God in your heart, there’s no danger of your doing wrong. The person who reaches the child stage is still a civilized being, but the rules and traditions no longer restrict her freedom.

THE EXPERIENCE (TOM)

Sitting outside this morning, I am glad to live in a climate where I can do this even in March. I delight in everything: the blossoming of the fruit trees in the yard, the greening of the grass, the feel of the warm sun on my skin. Before I am fully aware, however, my delight begins to shift. I start to notice the many things I need to do out here. Some trash has blown into the yard. The vegetable garden needs planting. The peeling skin of my house portends paint buckets and brushes and ladders in my future. And so in a short time, my peaceful sitting has become a review of things to do. Whereas before I could feel the trees as something real, as living presences, now they exist in a kind of abstract way: They are a task that needs doing, an item on the list. I have worked with mindfulness long enough to know I cannot force myself to feel peaceful when I am like this. So I just gently breathe in and out, watching these thoughts come and go, letting them jump around as they will. All on their own, held lovingly by the energy of mindfulness, they calm down a little. And there are some moments when the trees are trees once again.

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The practice of mindfulness is embedded in the Buddhist teaching of no self. And while it is not our intention to make Buddhists of our readers, it can be helpful to understand a little about what this means. Student: How can I make myself enlightened?

Teacher: What would you do with a self?

In the West, we are preoccupied with self. We want to be ourselves, free ourselves, make ourselves be the best we can be, grow ourselves to the fullest extent possible, fix ourselves, and accept ourselves. While Buddhists are not allergic to using the word
self,
this talk of
self
can sound a little strange from the perspective of Buddhist teachings. The self is made entirely of nonself material. You may feel that you are quite solid—a real, separate person—until you look a little more deeply into this. Where do the molecules of this solid body come from?

There is not one molecule of your body that does not originate elsewhere. Every molecule, including the 70 percent of you that is water, comes from outside. The calcium that makes up your bones is not your own but comes from the earth. And do you think that your genes are you? They, of course, came from your parents and your ancestors. Although we have a sense of being a solid and separate self, this feeling does not stand up to examination. We are used to thinking as if there were a solid boundary at the skin. Everything within that boundary is self, everything outside of it is nonself. But look more deeply. Skin is porous. Material is constantly coming out of these openings, constantly coming in through them. Every moment, we inhale or exhale—

again, exchanging material with the world around us. How much sense does it make to say that the molecules of air that have just filled my lungs are now me, whereas a few seconds ago they were not me?

Likewise, we eat and drink and eliminate waste. What wasn’t self a moment ago is now self, and what was self a moment ago is no longer self. And whereas we are used to thinking of ourselves as separate and solid, as if we are a solid self moving through the emptiness of space, we know this is not the case. At the boundary of the skin, the slower-moving molecules of our body meet the faster-moving molecules of the surrounding air. 02 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 9:46 AM Page 38

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And we can go further. If we go beyond the molecular level to the subatomic level, we know that we are mostly space. Our hand may appear quite solid to us, but looking at it at the quantum level, we know that it is really more like a cloud or a field of energy. When our hands appear to pick up an object, the reality is more like one field of energy interacting with another. There is nothing solid there at all. So where is the self?

In
Star Trek: Voyager,
there is a character known as the EMH, or Emergency Medical Hologram. This doctor is actually a computer program. His outer form is actually light, photons emitted from a holoprojector. He appears to have a personality, full of little quirks, oddities, and idiosyncrasies, but these, too, are just his programming. He seems to learn from experience because, of course, he is programmed to do so. Now here is the point: How are you or I different from the doctor?

We want to protest immediately that we are more than computer subroutines and photons. But are we? How much difference does it make that we are made of water and carbon rather than photons, or that our programs are the result of the interaction of neurons rather than microcircuits? Where in any of this is a self—either in the doctor or in us?

If I am not a separate self, then what am I? At the deepest level, at the level where the word
I
no longer has clear meaning and reference, I am life itself. I am the universe. I am one with all of it. And I see that your needs and my needs only appear to be in conflict, but cannot ultimately be so, since you and I are not separate. We are in fact so deeply connected, you might say we “inter-are.”

Find Your Self

Try this experiment to have an experience of no self. Sit for a few moments and watch as thoughts and feelings come into your mind. Where do they come from? Where do they go? We believe we think, but if we look more closely, the experience of what we call thinking is more like thoughts just coming and going on their own. They appear, elaborate on themselves, then go again. We are no more in charge of this process than we are of clouds passing through the sky.

Now ask yourself: Where is something which I can call “I”?

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At a talk I gave, someone objected to the idea of no self, saying that the self is what is doing the observing. This is an insightful comment, and shows that the person took the idea seriously. However, what happens when this self stops observing? Where is it then? If the self exists only intermittently, then it is something quite different from what we usually mean when we talk about self. It is considerably less solid and substantial. The reality, according to Buddhist teachings, is that self is just another thought in the stream of our thoughts.

This may sound a little esoteric. But this principle is actually quite practical. The key to understanding Buddhism is to see it as always about practice, about suffering and the end of suffering. The Buddha was always practical. Sometimes he refused to answer speculative metaphysical questions posed by curious disciples—not because he could not, but because he did not feel it was helpful to get distracted by such things.

It may seem frightening to question such a basic idea as the existence of a self. It can give you that feeling of being on no solid ground, as if there’s an earthquake going on. But once you get past the initial shock, it is liberating. This is well stated in a poem by Emily Dickinson:

[Text not available in this electronic edition.]

It is freeing to lay down the burden of having to be a somebody, and come out onto the broad, easy plane of just being. 02 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 9:46 AM Page 40

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