In this Dharma Talk series, you’ll learn how to approach the uncertainties of life and find real happiness in a seemingly collapsing world. Jon Aaron, a teacher at the New York Insight Meditation Center, invites us to embrace the uncertainty of each unfolding moment as an antidote to despair and anxiety.

Jon Aaron is a New York Insight Meditation Center teacher and co-founder of the online meditation community Space2Meditate. A longtime student of Matt Flickstein, Jon has also studied with Thanissara and Kittisaro of the Sacred Mountain Sangha and is certified as a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction teacher and Somatic Experience® practitioner.

The post Finding Joy in Uncertainty appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

During a lecture, a student asked Shunryu Suzuki, the Buddhist priest who helped bring Zen to America, if he could sum up the Buddha’s teachings in a nutshell. To everyone’s surprise, Suzuki answered. “Everything changes,” he said. It was as simple as that. 

On a rational level, we all know this. Seasons pass, the lush leaves of spring transform to the vibrant, dying foliage of autumn. People grow older, wither with time, and pass away. On my New York City block, a new building stretches up to the sky where an old one sat just a few years ago. All of it is a part of the flow of life. “Everything changes.” Life is impermanent. 

In my psychotherapy practice, however, I find that my millennial patients in particular struggle with the concept of impermanence. Their anxiety is often high in part because they seek stability in the face of constant change. Who can blame them? The world feels as anxiety-inducing as ever. The planet is on fire, the climate in disarray. Wages are stagnant, but housing, medical, education, and food prices all continue to rise. In the last 20 years, my millennial patients have faced 9/11, two wars, a great recession, unprecedented political uncertainty, including the rise of Trumpism, and COVID-19. What will the world look like in five, ten, or twenty years? Is it responsible to have children when the world is burning? Should they focus on their career? Save for retirement? Does any of it matter if climate change is irreversible? 

Most of my millennial patients have reacted to this uncertainty by doing more. That means more work, more exercise, more time with friends, more meditating, more pressure on themselves, more of anything to gain a sense of control over their lives. It may seem like a sound strategy. If we feel unsafe, what better way to handle it than to take control? After all, most people believe they are in control of their own destiny. But thinking they are fully in control leaves many of my millennial patients more susceptible to self-blame when things go wrong. This way of looking at their lives has left them exhausted, anxious, and burned out. 

Instead of feeding into their need to “fix” their lives, I try to teach the concept of impermanence, and for those who are interested, I share mindfulness practices to help them understand and internalize the concept. 

Many of them already have experience with meditation, but it is often a goal-orientated practice in line with fixing themselves. In fact, I find that a goalless practice is the best way to understand impermanence. A goalless practice is about being right here in each moment without any conceptual objective in mind. It means giving up conceptual thinking and concepts, putting the brakes on constantly doing, releasing the need to be in control, and starting to just be in the world as you are. It means sitting with the fact that nothing is permanent, that everything is changing, and that is OK. I think of it as watching the clouds float by on a sunny day. Or, as Soto Zen teacher “Homeless” Kodo Sawaki Roshi said long ago, “Zazen is good for nothing!”

For my patients who think that constantly doing something is the best way to heal, this idea is understandably hard to grasp. I explain to them, paraphrasing psychologist and mindfulness teacher Rick Hanson, our brains have not evolved to make us happy. Our brains have evolved to keep us alive. They’re really good at being anxious, seeing the negative, and what can go wrong, and really bad at seeing the present moment just as it is. Without a mindfulness practice, it is very easy to focus on all the stressful aspects of modern living. But reality is just reality, right in front of our faces, right now. There is no need to be anywhere besides here in the constant flow and change of life. 

As Pema Chödrön says in her book When Things Fall Apart, “To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land. To experience each moment as completely new and fresh.” For my millennial patients, I would add, to live fully doesn’t mean to solve the many crises of modern life—or to fix oneself. To live fully means to be in touch with the impermanence of living in the service of greater compassion and equanimity, like a steady bamboo reed on a windy day. 

The post How the Concept of Impermanence Can Help Anxiety-Ridden Millennials  appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The Census Bureau does something called a Pulse survey, where they take the temperature of our nation’s mental health, and boy, is it grim reading. In 2019, about 10 percent of the people who filled out the survey registered symptoms associated with generalized anxiety disorder, or GAD. 

When that same poll was taken in 2020, it went up to 30 percent. And what was even more concerning is that for individuals who live alone, the number was 50 percent.

The end of the pandemic isn’t doing anything to lessen this. As I’ve seen in my therapy practice and in studies like this, there’s a preponderance of individuals who have been experiencing some degree of discomfort at the thought of returning to the interpersonal sphere of social interactions.

The pandemic and social distancing activated social anxiety for many people. Ordinarily, we have ongoing concerns about how well other people view us, whether we are thought about positively or negatively. We have ongoing social concerns that have been wired into us by evolution, and we have worries about social rejection.

If you have ongoing regular interactions with people, you get used to awkward social situations. You get used to awkward pauses in conversation, you get used to seeing people whose eyes or facial expressions you can’t quite make out.

What happens when we have ongoing social interactions is our fears of social rejection or being viewed as incompetent or worthless by others is overwritten by actual experiences. We have reaffirming positive interpersonal interactions that show us that we’re still solidly connected with others, which allows us to lessen our worries. It allows us to alleviate our concerns about any form of disconnection or rejection. But over the last year, we haven’t had those robust interpersonal interactions that can disprove our fears. And even if you did have those interactions, there was probably a mask over your face, and the other person’s face! So you couldn’t see the nonverbal cues that were being sent to you by others, the facial cues that help alleviate our concerns.

For the socially anxious brain, the threat is not a predator. It’s not starvation, it’s not the threat of being attacked. The threat for those of us with social anxiety is the sense that others will judge us, will view us as somehow flawed, or incompetent, or useless, or unworthy. This ongoing concern leads to a host of stressful states internally.

The first is we become hyper-vigilant and start monitoring other people’s facial expressions, looking for even the slightest hint that they are negatively evaluating us. That creates an ongoing challenge that’s actually quite stressful for working memory. While we’re trying to think of what we’re saying and doing, at the same time we feel the need to constantly monitor other people’s eye contact and expressions and body language for any sense of disapproval.

Social anxiety is notorious for activating self-conscious, ruminating thoughts along the lines of, after we say something, thinking, “Holy shit, was that a stupid thing to say?” It makes us awkward, we become stiff, we can’t relax, our bodies become tight, our heart rate increases. And we start to become aware, sometimes, if it’s really acute, of ourselves sweating, our heart pounding, or a sense of feeling overwhelmed. If this happens enough, it can turn into full social anxiety disorder, which is essentially a chronic, ongoing worry of embarrassing ourselves, or being judged as “less than” by others. It’s a hyper vigilance that never switches off, especially when we’re around others.

Over time, any form of social anxiety or general anxiety leads to avoidance coping, where we start avoiding situations and people that could trigger the anxiety. So the anxiety grows. And of course, the more we avoid social interactions, the scarier social interactions become, and the more anxiety it triggers. It’s a feedback loop. And on top of that, finally, over time, social anxiety can exacerbate core shame.

Core shame is an underlying feeling that there’s something wrong with us, something unlovable about us. It becomes a chronic sense that there’s something that we have to hide from others—that there’s something others will see in us that makes us unworthy of love.

Now, those facing social or any form of anxiety without any prior experience will struggle more, not less. This is because they’ve never had to manage the symptoms and the underlying roots of Anxiety Disorder. It can be very disconcerting for people who haven’t had much anxiety up until this point, or much underlying discomfort around groups of people, interpersonal events, interacting with colleagues, going back to an office, or whatever.

So what are the ways we address it?

Incremental Exposure

Every cognitive behavioral therapist will espouse a very useful tool known as incremental exposure. Rather than jumping back into our life as the pandemic begins to fade away, rather than rushing back into the world and going into situations where we’re surrounded by others, or events where we have to perform or anything of the sort, we start by connecting with those who are in our inner circle. These are people we’ve associated with in the past and with whom we find it safe and comforting to be around. We can just start with small, interpersonal gatherings of one, or two, or three people. And then we reach out to individuals that we’re slowly warming up to and expand our social circle to include, eventually, some situations that trigger some nervousness or discomfort. 

The goal of most approaches to anxiety is to take our time to socialize at our comfort level, and push ourselves each time to open the circle a bit wider or to include situations that are more challenging for us. Hopefully there will not be anyone in our lives trying to make us rush back into the world too quickly. Right now, May 2021, is the perfect time to start incrementally interacting with individuals. 

Disclosure

The second tool is revealing to others that we’re anxious, not trying to conceal it. Why is this so important? When we fail to disclose our internal experience to others, that sets up a notorious feedback loop that makes anxiety worse. It’s like this: We try to seem natural and comfortable. Yet we have to monitor if other people notice that we’re not comfortable and relaxed. So we have to pay careful attention to the subtleties of their facial expressions, looking for the slightest cues that they have spotted something in our demeanor that is a giveaway of our lack of comfort or anxiety. 

At the same time, we have to maintain an awareness of whatever it is we’re talking about, or whatever is going on. So that’s a classic menu or ingredients, I should say, for cognitive overload. It’s very difficult to be relaxed, present, and interactive if our brain is not only monitoring our internal state for anxiety, but also monitoring other people to see if they spot the anxiety. Then add in trying to be relaxed and funny and witty at the same time. 

From a personal angle, I can say that there are many social settings where I don’t feel particularly comfortable, as I’ve noted quite a number of times over the years. If there is a least favorite thing for me to do, it’s going to people’s weddings. There’s no excuse for throwing a big wedding.

I find them to be just a horrific experience. Because what happens? You get seated at a table with seven complete strangers who you don’t know. And generally in my case, because I’m a Buddhist pastor and I’m tattooed, people will put me at a table with the strangest oddballs in their entire family because they decide, Josh is a Buddhist, he’s weird, he can accept and deal with pretty much anyone. And then they’ll put Uncle Maury who once went to India at the table with me because they think we’ll have something to talk about. 

I’m just not gifted at wedding small talk. And the only way I can ever bond with people at weddings at the dinner table is when I say, “I find sitting at dinner tables at weddings really awkward.” Over the years, I’ve actually made quite a number of friends at weddings because they say, “Yeah, I really hate sitting at tables with strangers too.” And then we have all kinds of fun conversations. And then I don’t have to sit there hiding the fact that I find the experience rather difficult. 

One study showed that when people disclose that they have anxiety in public speaking, it was the most efficient way to regulate their heart rate and their skin valence. Disclosure is the best way. 

Attention

The third tool is shifting the spotlight. Attention is like a spotlight. What we focus on grows bigger and more prevalent in our life.

Here’s the problem with attention. If we don’t take hold of our attention, focus it and learn to guide it, then very often, our attention will be pinned to the most distressing sensation or internal experience in any setting. And that will focus our attention first on our anxiety, and then on the automatic thoughts associated with our anxiety.

So the key is to focus your attention on something that’s not stressful—to orient to safety keys in the environment. This requires practice. Most people only guide their attention very little on any given day. Most of the time, they just allow the unconscious mechanisms of the brain to guide attention.

So we’re prone to stressful default thinking. To alleviate anxiety, we have to learn to guide our attention to the safe, useful sensations and experiences. For example, if you don’t focus your attention, and you’re giving a talk, you will find the person who is giving you the least friendly expression and pin your attention to that one person. You would think your brain would not want to focus on the one person who’s frowning or giving you a negative expression. But remember the right brain, which controls attention when we’re not actively guiding our attention, will look for the single threat.

The heart of reducing anxiety is focusing away from our internal rumination, away from the sensations of our heart fluttering, or our stomach churning, and finding something soothing in the environment. It could be a nice painting in a room, it could be looking out of a window, it could be someone who’s actually looking at us smiling, it could be anything, as long as we’re resting our attention on something that is pleasant.

It’s very important to view anxiety not as something to be pushed away, but to allow ourselves to be scared. As we say in the dharma world, what we resist persists. 

The dharma focuses on learning to be with fear rather than trying to hide it or conceal it. One of the oldest Buddhist teachings is the five daily recollections: I’m of the nature to grow old, become sick, to die, to be separated from those I love and all that I own, and that I own all of my actions. But we could add to that list, “I am of the nature to be anxious at times.” Rather than view it as a mistake or something to be ashamed of, this is just another part of being human. 

One way I’ve also put it in my own practice is trying to move from “but” to “and.” “But thinking” is, I would like to travel, but I get anxious when I’m on a plane, so I can’t travel. “And thinking” is, I like to travel, and I get anxious, so I still do it. 

Even though we know we will experience anxiety, we welcome it. We don’t try to push it away. And in doing so, we actually mitigate the feelings of anxiety, we focus less on it, and we’re more likely to focus on other sensations. Remember, even if it seems that other people are relaxed and eager to get back to life in the world, we can’t see their internal experience. We are generally comparing our insides with their outsides. That’s never going to work. No one’s been through a pandemic before, so there’s no right way to do it. There’s no right way to go back into the world either.

♦

Adapted from Josh Korda’s dharma talk, “Addressing Anxiety After Social Distancing.” 

The post The Anxiety of Ending appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Threats to our health and wellbeing, like the coronavirus pandemic, increasingly frequent natural disasters, and social injustice, can instill deep-seated feelings of anxiety and concern for our safety and that of those around us. In this Dharma Talk series, Bön Buddhist master Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche teaches meditation practices that help us act from a place of calm awareness instead of fear.

Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche led a live meditation session, dharma talk, and Q&A session on Tuesday, October 13th. View the recording here.

Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche is the founder and spiritual director of Ligmincha International. Recognized as one of the few Bön masters now living in the West, he is known for his clear, engaging style and his ability to bring the ancient Tibetan teachings into a contemporary format that is relevant for Westerners.

The post Concern without Panic appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

At this stage of the COVID-19 pandemic most of us are focused on what we need to do to stay safe, take care of loved ones, and make ends meet. In quieter moments we may also face the question of how we want to be with what reality is throwing at us right now, and how we can respond to the crisis as an opportunity to deepen our spiritual practice.

For many people, this pandemic is a wake-up call, a concentrated reminder of core existential facts we often ignore. Like the Buddha before he left the shelter of his father’s palace, those of us living with privilege may have been insulated from sickness and death, or from poverty and lack of adequate health care. The pandemic also offers us stark lessons in impermanence, as well as interconnectedness, but our practice can go beyond simply receiving the Buddhist teachings that the current situation has demonstrated. 

If there was ever a time to meditate and chant, this is it. In my practice of zazen, I pour myself into breathing from the belly, let go of thinking, quiet down, and open up calm presence. (At least that’s my intention—easier said than done.) In meditation we are given the opportunity to settle into an awareness free from obsessing and worrying, if only for a few moments, and become more grounded and centered in the midst of crisis. When thoughts and feelings about the pandemic do arise—and they will—we can note them and let them go.

The great Japanese Zen master Dogen lifted up genjo, which I translate as “presencing,” something that is realized when we let go of thought, empty our mind (“forget the self”), and become filled or “confirmed by the ten-thousand things.” This calm, open presence helps us stay present in the present, and does not exclude our fear and whatever challenges the pandemic is sending our way. Presencing also helps us let go of reactivity—greed and ill will, like and dislike, attraction and aversion—and gain a taste of the equanimity that enables us to sit with uncertainty without being rattled by it. While helping us deal with challenges, presencing also helps us let go of expectations and our attachments to certain outcomes. 

But wait, we might say, with the magnitude of anxiety we’re feeling right now, settling down in meditation and manifesting calm presence seems impossible, even if we are lucky enough to have time to sit. Here, something else Dogen lifted up can help us: gujin, pouring oneself fully into whatever one is doing. Though we may not be Zen monastics, right now we can practice gujin in our handwashing, as we give ourselves fully to soaping and scrubbing our hands under hot water for twenty seconds. Or, as when Zen practitioners do samu—tasks done one at a time and thoroughly as acts of meditation—we can pour ourselves into projects at home: cooking, cleaning up, reducing clutter, fixing things, taking mindful care of our possessions, creating art, or making an inventory of people in our lives who are struggling and need our support. Those of us who are not at home—continuing our work as bus drivers, truckers, custodians, landscapers, nurses, cooks, and cashiers—can also bring the wholehearted attention of samu to our jobs in the midst of anxiety. Doing tasks fully and thoroughly can help ground us while also providing a sense of accomplishment and, by extension, an enhanced sense of agency.

As we engage in the physicality of giving ourselves fully to washing our hands, doing projects at home, or doing tasks at work, we can cultivate mindfulness, which extends outward from our meditative actions to mindfulness of what we are doing when we care for a child, head out for a walk, drive to a store, or go to work, and then return home and take precautions to make sure that we and the objects we carry back with us do not bring the virus into our abode. With this practice we can also develop our understanding and actualization of mindfulness beyond simply paying attention: the Pali and Sanskrit terms (sati and smrti) usually translated as “mindfulness” also connote remembering and keeping in mind. This sort of mindfulness can keep us safe as we collect ourselves before we head out the door, remembering to put on gloves and a mask and stay six feet away from co-workers or other shoppers, and keeping in mind the importance of not touching our face.

This can be supported by the practice, popularized by Thich Nhat Hanh and others, of pausing and taking several breaths before acting. The other day when I pulled into a supermarket parking lot and saw a long line of people with shopping carts waiting to enter the store, I felt anxiety well up in my mind and my breath rise up from my belly and into my chest. I fumbled as I reached for my face mask, the bandana to go over it, my nitrile gloves, and my shopping list. In the midst of this panicked swirl a thought arose in my mind: “Take three breaths.” After doing so, I walked across the lot to join the line, remembering another useful mantra, “Move at 80 percent speed.” By the time I grabbed a cart, I was calmer than before. 

In addition to a keener understanding of others’ suffering, I think this pandemic is fostering another component of the path, at least the Zen path: paying attention to the little things, such as the face of a loved one, the sweet taste of orange juice, or the daffodils blooming down the block. (Granted, for those of us who are sick or jobless and struggling to pay bills, this is not where our primary attention needs to go.) This attentiveness shades into the related practice of appreciating beauty, especially the restorative beauty of spring (for those of us in the northern hemisphere), and offers a respite from the pain around us. For those of us sheltering at home, daily walks provide a chance to savor flowers, bird calls, and budding trees. All of us can practice gratitude, counting these blessings and cultivating thankfulness for all the good and beautiful things that reality is bestowing on us each day.

It will likely be months before we can ease these social distancing measures, live with less fear, and resume the activities we may miss. In this respect, the pandemic is also giving us an opportunity to cultivate ksanti, patience or perseverance, one the Mahayana six perfections (paramita). Short of perfecting the ksanti necessary for countless lifetimes of work to end suffering, we will certainly need emotional stamina for the next three months or so if we hope to stick with social distancing, deal with risky workplaces, and address financial problems without getting burned out.

For those of us fortunate enough to be looking out across these three months in a safe home, it may be helpful to view this time as a retreat, not unlike traditional 90-day Buddhist retreats. Of course, it could be more than three months, but either way, a question for our practice is how we might work fruitfully with this unusual time rather than seeing it as a bad dream we need to endure. Many of us are already pulled back from ordinary life, sheltered at home. Letting go of any attachment or expectation that social distancing will end soon, we can focus our intention to use this time to cultivate our practices, whether meditation, chanting, prayer, or extending lovingkindness. Like the three jewels of the Buddha, the dharma, and the sangha, we can take refuge in our practice right now, and we can see our homes, with the simple living we are doing there, as our monasteries, or at least as our dojo, the “place for attaining the Way.”   

Perhaps “retreat” is the wrong construct here, for the coming months also provide an opportunity to go beyond individual practice and engage in the act of envisioning what might be the new normal for our societies and the world. The pre-pandemic “normal” was plagued with growing racism, inequality, and catastrophic climate disruption, and we can take this crisis as an opportunity to upend destructive political and economic structures and work toward a world based on the Buddhist values of non-harming, generosity, love, wisdom, and liberation. In this moment of suffering and regeneration, we can join with those who have been striving to organize mass movements necessary for structural change. 

Thus the pandemic also grants us a chance to expand our notion of sangha. In addition to our old “friends on the path” (kalyanamitra), our sangha now includes a wider community of practitioners that we have met since we began practicing social distancing—people we have encountered online or in our local communities. 

This moment provides a powerful chance to extend lovingkindness to others as we wish them safety and health, and activate compassion as we—if not in a dire medical or financial bind ourselves—make an effort to help those who are sick, afraid, financially strapped, or lonely, whether by reaching out to elderly neighbors, sharing food and masks, contributing to food banks, or making donations to organizations helping those who have lost their jobs. In this multifaceted outreach we can take inspiration from the thousand-armed Avalokitesvara, who lends a helping hand (a thousand hands!) to others, combining compassion with savvy in upaya, or skillful means, in determining what people might need. While our compassionate offerings may be more modest in number, through them we can begin to free ourselves from greed and attachment, cultivating the wisdom and compassion behind our bodhicitta, our “mind of awakening” that aspires to liberate sentient beings from suffering.

Ultimately, what much of this pandemic practice boils down to is choosing how we wish to respond to what is happening right now. Some of us will clarify our intentions, make vows, voice aspirations. Others may rely on mantras to help focus their mental activity, speech, and bodily actions. 

In recent years, as I age and get ever clearer about how reality keeps hurling challenges my way, I’ve formulated a reminder, a kind of mantra, that is helpful at this tumultuous time: “Meet what comes with mindfulness, wisdom, and compassion.” Perhaps this can help us create a new world out of this chaos.  

The post Alarming Truths appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The current coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak, declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) on March 11, is rapidly transforming everyday life around the world and taking a toll on mental health. We are making available for free three video Dharma Talk series that offer guidance for facing our fears, including our fear of death, and caring for ourselves and others. 

How to Be a Light for Yourself and Others in Challenging Times
with Ayya Yeshe

Our culture often associates spiritual practice with a form of escapism, but practice can be a powerful force for good in difficult times. Ayya Yeshe, a longtime Tibetan Buddhist nun and founder of the Bodhicitta Foundation, explores how to take obstacles as the path and walks us through bodhisattva training, or the spiritual commitment to work for the enlightenment of all beings.

Facing Fear
with Marcela Clavijo

What are you afraid of? In this series, Tibetan Buddhist nun Marcela Clavijo introduces the four immeasurables—love, compassion, joy, and equanimity—tools to help us replace unhelpful habits of mind and behavior for  states and traits conducive to coping with anxiety. With practice, these teachings can help assuage our deepest fears.

Finding Meaning in Mortality
with Reverend Marvin Harada

Accepting the reality of mortality is the key to a meaningful life, but doing so isn’t easy. Shin Buddhist Reverend Marvin Harada suggests that by turning to Buddhist teachings, we can transcend a dualistic view of life and death and work to treasure each day we have.

The post Dharma Talks for the Coronavirus Outbreak appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Let’s start with the obvious: this is not a book about doing nothing. Doing nothing could make for an interesting topic—and many Zen masters over the centuries have tried to write about it—but it is clear within the first few pages that the San Francisco Bay Area artist and writer Jenny Odell is not following in their footsteps.

Her subtitle, Resisting the Attention Economy, comes closer to revealing her true theme. “I want to be clear that I’m not actually encouraging anyone to stop doing things completely,” she confesses in the first chapter. For Odell, “doing nothing” is a metaphor for doing what you truly want, rather than what is most productive or profitable—either for yourself or for anyone else. As she puts it, “The first half of ‘doing nothing’ is about disengaging from the attention economy; the other half is about reengaging with something else.”

The resulting volume is closer to a loosely connected collection of erudite essays than to a singular manifesto. The various chapters cover topics as diverse as bird-watching and context collapse, progressive politics and industrial design. What unifies the bold (though occasionally meandering) prose is Odell’s refusal to surrender her attention to the highest bidder. Her book is a call to arms against the myriad temptations of distraction.

She offers a much-needed critique of our modern, connected lives: “There is nothing to be admired about being constantly connected, constantly potentially productive the second you open your eyes in the morning,” she proclaims early on, “and in my opinion, no one should accept this, not now, not ever.” And yet, of course, so many of us do accept exactly that. Why? How did we get to this place of maximum distraction?

Odell places more of the blame on technology and social media than I would. “The logic of advertising and clicks dictates the media experience, which is exploitative by design,” she claims, although she offers no particular evidence that this is, in fact, the intention of the designers and engineers behind such platforms. She herself worked as an artist-in-residence at Facebook, the epicenter of social media, but if she collected any anecdotes there revealing such nefarious motives, she shares none of them in her book. Perhaps she finds her charge to be self-evidently true, but my own experience working at Facebook was largely otherwise. (I see our devilishly distracting devices as a result of a series of unintended consequences rather than as evil plots.)

Odell’s book is most powerful when she moves away from conspiracy theorizing and back toward the practical. And that seems to be where her heart is anyway. “I am less interested in a mass exodus from Facebook and Twitter than I am in a mass movement of attention,” she explains. This is, in effect, the movement the Buddha himself worked to create, some 2,500 years ago—not just before the dawn of social media and smartphones, but before books and paper. The challenge of honing and owning our attention is not new, and the fundamental logic has not changed. As Odell puts it, sounding as much like a meditation master as an activist: “To pay attention to one thing is to resist paying attention to other things; it means constantly denying and thwarting provocations outside the sphere of one’s attention.”

Along the way, Odell quotes several famous “do-nothings” of the past, primarily from the Western canon, such as Henry David Thoreau and John Muir. But curiously, there is little reference to the long Buddhist tradition of nothingness. This is an odd omission. Formal meditation—perhaps the purest practice of pure attention—goes unmentioned as well. Perhaps such a basic, ancient solution to this modern-day struggle feels insufficiently radical.

Odell seems to find the problems more political than spiritual. “It’s tempting to conclude this book with a single recommendation about how to live,” she writes. But she does not. For her, “doing nothing” means more than “logging off and refusing the influence of pervasive design techniques.” It also involves the “intersection of issues of public space, environmental politics, class, and race.”

And yet, almost in spite of herself, she does close with some more concrete advice. “I find that I’m looking at my phone less these days,” she explains toward the end:

It’s not because I went to an expensive digital detox retreat, or because I deleted any apps from my phone, or anything like that. I stopped looking at my phone because I was looking at something else, something so absorbing that I couldn’t turn away.

The Buddha might add that you don’t need to go bird-watching or visit a rose garden to find reality so absorbing. Every moment deserves our full attention, and with practice, every moment can command it. Odell does us a great service by encouraging us to put down our phones and experience this timeless truth.

The post Resisting the Attention Economy appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Thousands of years ago, long before our age of smartphones and mindful everything, human beings had to rely on their instincts to survive. Taking a wrong turn in the woods might lead straight into a wolf’s den, so these early humans prioritized the identification of dangerous locations in their brains over more pleasurable places, such as a blackberry patch.

But even though we’re unlikely to encounter a wolf’s den on our walk to school, our brains are still wired to dwell on the bad. Take in the Good: Skills for Staying Positive and Living Your Best Life, a new book by the psychotherapist and mindfulness teacher Gina Biegel, is all about how we can move away from these ancient instincts to experience life’s positive moments just as often as, if not more often than, the negative ones.

In this how-to book for teens, Biegel leads readers through a series of fifty mindfulness exercises that include body scans and mindful walking. Biegel has her readers writing, reflecting, and paying attention to their thoughts and emotions in every single activity. In fact, there’s not a page in this book that didn’t make me feel a little bit lighter. You can write about yourself on every third page or so, and for the most part you’ll be writing about things that make you feel good.

Life in high school is fast-paced, and it can sometimes feel like there’s only enough time to go to school, do homework, and sleep. I read this book in the beginning of my junior year, and one idea that really resonated with me was that stress is like waves in the ocean. In order to manage stress, you must notice and ride these waves—and then find a way to “drop anchor.” Now, when I find myself in a stressful situation, I visualize each wave coming up and myself floating over it.

Take in the Good shows us that it’s possible to let go of our biggest stressors, embrace the good things in our lives, and remember what went well, not what went wrong. Maybe by following these teachings we won’t dwell too much on the wolf’s den (or an upcoming exam). Maybe we’ll think instead about how sweet those blackberries tasted in the hot afternoon sun.

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On May 8, 2006, a Japanese hiker named Tomomi Hanamure was stabbed to death while hiking to Havasu Falls in the Grand Canyon, a popular destination on the Havasupai Indian Reservation. She was murdered by an 18-year-old member of the tribe named Randy Wescogame. Reporting on the crime, Annette McGivney, a writer for Backpacker magazine, visited the reservation. The experience set in motion a chain of events that led to her own unraveling. As she learned more about the details of the murder and the abuse that Wescogame had endured, McGivney began to recall long-buried memories of the physical abuse she suffered at the hands of her father.

Reconciling with her past meant finding a new way forward. As McGivney continued to delve into the lives of Hanamure and her killer—which involved taking up Zen practice, traveling to Japan, and visiting Wescogame in prison—her own path to recovery from her past trauma became a part of the story. This journey culminated in her book Pure Land, which describes the conditions that resulted in Hanamure’s murder, and how the author’s struggle informed her grasp of it. It is a powerful story that explores the transformative powers of nature and asks how we can seek the “western land of peace and bliss” in a world full of suffering.

What prompted you to want to write about the murder of Tomomi Hanamure? Originally I was drawn to writing about Tomomi because I thought, as a journalist, that it was a great story. But I am also very committed to empowering people, especially women, to experience and connect with the outdoors, and to not be intimidated by sexist attitudes like “Women shouldn’t hike alone.” There was part of me that was very much into digging deeper to let the world know who Tomomi was as a person, and to honor her past in nature, and not to let her be known as just a woman hiking alone who got murdered. I also wanted to tell a broader story of the Havasupai tribe and the indigenous people of the Grand Canyon.

How did you realize your own experience would become such a pivotal part of the story? In order to understand Tomomi fully and to do a good job as a journalist, I needed to learn more about Buddhism. I was kind of ignorant about Japan and Buddhism coming into the topic. I assumed everyone in Japan was a Zen Buddhist, so as part of my research I joined a Zen meditation group in Flagstaff, Arizona, and I started meditating—and I thought, wow, this is good for me.

The first time when I actually stopped thinking—[Tibetan Buddhist nun] Pema Chödrön says, “It’s like when the ceiling fan stops”—I had the most horrible feeling. It was like someone dipped me in hot oil. I would later come to understand that I was having a flashback. It was the first flashback of many. I had no idea that I was a survivor of intense childhood trauma, but I also had no idea that meditation could take the lid off of that. That was the brick that fell out of the wall, and then all the other bricks started to collapse. That’s what started my breakdown.

Related: The Trauma Dharma

When I was going through all that I literally put the book aside. I was afraid of the book for awhile. It seemed toxic. But as I came to a better place emotionally and psychologically, I felt so connected to Tomomi and Randy and to finishing what I had started. Some of the principles of Buddhism that I’d been studying really helped me to understand that you can’t be attached to outcomes, and you have to go where the doors are opening for you. So I took the book up again and friends suggested that I should incorporate my own story. It was hard for me to believe that I should, but it seemed like the path was to share my journey as part of the book.

Where did you get the title Pure Land, and what does it mean to you? I am not an expert in Buddhism by any stretch, and it took me awhile to realize that the Hanamure family is actually Pure Land Buddhist. I started studying that and learned that Pure Land Buddhists pray for rebirth in the “western land of peace and bliss.”

For Tomomi, the Grand Canyon was her western paradise. That’s what Pure Land means to me. It is outdoors. I have always known this deep down, but researching the book has gifted me this as the guiding principle of my life. It is so much more to me than just a title.

Despite suffering deeply, you write that you felt “a profound and never-ceasing compassion that emanated from the natural world.” Do you feel a connection between contemplative practice and your experiences in nature? Yes, very much so. It was not until I began research for the book that I discovered how closely aligned Buddhist principles are with my love of nature. Rather than separating me from the earth, they support my desire to be one with it. For me, my contemplative practice is in nature. I do meditate indoors and practice breathing meditations when I wake and right before I go to bed. However, my true practice is on my daily hikes in the woods. Growing up in a state of fear shaped me as child, but the thing that transcended that was the compassion I felt from nature. When I walked through the woods I felt loved by the trees. I felt a warmth emanating from Mother Earth, as if I was being embraced by this unseen yet very powerful higher energy. When I hike outdoors now I continue to have a very strong connection to this energy, and I have a very primal need to plug into it. I spend about 1–2 hours a day wandering off-trail in the woods. This is my most joyful and restorative contemplative practice.

If the “fabled western land of peace and bliss” is actually one hike, or trail, or place in nature that you could choose to remain, where would your Pure Land be? I have hiked in so many spectacular wild locations. Yosemite is stunningly beautiful. The Grand Canyon has a very special place in my heart. I am also very connected to the San Francisco Peaks near Flagstaff, which is a sacred mountain to many Southwest indigenous tribes. However, I would say my Pure Land is in the Coconino National Forest, just a few blocks from my house where I hike every single day. There is part of me that is always up there with the trees. When I step off the road and into the woods, I feel instantly relieved, like I am entering my true home.

What advice do you have for others seeking to connect with the outdoors? In the same way that you take time to meditate by yourself in your house, you should take time to be alone in nature. Make a priority of that. It should be with no goal except to just be there and to connect with the outdoors and let it soak into your body. If you’re not sure how to do this, just follow the example of your dog. A dog is like, “Let’s go outdoors right now and let’s not do anything but be out here and enjoy it.” My dogs always help keep me straight and honest.  

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It feels like fascism is closing in. I have to pay my student loans. I’m ready to fall in love again. My mother is becoming more accepting of others. I’ve found myself.

These are some of the handwritten apprehensions and expectations that have been left in the Rubin Museum of Art’s lobby in New York City since February. The project, called A Monument for the Anxious and Hopeful, invites visitors to complete the statement “I’m anxious because . . .” or “I’m hopeful because . . .” on a notecard that is then pinned to a wall. The idea of the exhibition, created by artist Candy Chang and writer James A. Reeves, is to transform the foyer into a space “where we can reflect upon our emotional relationship with the future,” according to Chang.

“By definition, anxiety and hope are determined by a moment that has yet to arrive. How many of the people we pass by each day are excited about their future? How many are fearful? And why?” Chang asked. “We’re living through a very unsettled moment of uncertainty, isolation, and tribalism, and we wanted to create an installation that can help us address our uneasiness, reconnect with core values, and contemplate the prevailing mood of 2018.”

Neither of the collaborators grew up with religion or spirituality, which Chang said made them “feel unmoored and unequipped” to deal with tragedy later in life. Chang’s 2011 participatory art project, Before I Die, was a direct response to the grief and depression she had experienced following the death of someone she loved. In an effort to bring death into the open, she turned the side of an abandoned home in New Orleans into a chalkboard and invited visitors to fill in the blank: “Before I die I want to . . .” The installation has since inspired thousands of similar walls in nearly 80 countries around the world.

Reeves now has a daily meditation practice, and Chang says she has been helped by Himalayan art—in particular the wrathful Buddhist deities it depicts—to look at the world from a new perspective.

“I learned that in Buddhism many ‘wrathful deities’ are actually good guys who get fierce to remove obstacles or protect,” Chang said. “I like that idea of wrathful manifestations of wisdom.”

With A Monument for the Anxious and Hopeful, Chang and Reeves hope that by openly acknowledging desires and fears, and reading similar sentiments from others, visitors will feel that they’re less isolated and part of a larger community.

Another important aspect of the project is its anonymity, Reeves said, adding that the unsigned notes may convey a “more honest snapshot of our collective mental weather” than the self-portraits that many of us create for social media.

Chang and Reeves are curious to see which side—hope or anxiety—has generated more responses by the end of the exhibition in November 2018; a few weeks after the opening, there was a fairly even split.

“We’re particularly interested in areas where hope and anxiety overlap,” Reeves said. “We’ve seen responses that are very optimistic about technology while others are quite anxious about its impact. Or despair about our political climate juxtaposed with hope because citizens seem more engaged than before. We’d like to highlight these moments throughout the year and find ways to put people in conversation with one another.”

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