To love, in the context of Buddhism, is above all to be there. But being there is not an easy thing. Some training is necessary, some practice. If you are not there, how can you love? Being there is very much an art, the art of meditation, because meditating is bringing your true presence to the here and now. The question that arises is: Do you have time to love?

I know a boy of 12 whose father asked him one day: “Son, what would you like for your birthday present?” The boy did not know how to answer his father, who was a very rich man, able to buy anything for his son. But the boy did not want anything except his father’s presence. Because the role the father played kept him very busy, he did not have time to devote to his wife and children. Being rich is an obstacle to loving. When you are rich, you want to continue to be rich, and so you end up devoting all your time, all your energy in your daily life, to staying rich. If this father were to understand what true love is, he would do whatever is necessary to find time for his son and his wife.

The most precious gift you can give to the one you love is your true presence. What must we do to really be there? Those who have practiced Buddhist meditation know that meditating is above all being present: to yourself, to those you love, to life.

So I would propose a very simple practice to you, the practice of mindful breathing: “Breathing—I know that I am breathing in; breathing—I know that I am breathing out.” If you do that with a little concentration, then you will be able to really be there, because in our daily life our mind and our body are rarely together. Our body might be there, but our mind is somewhere else. Maybe you are lost in regrets about the past, maybe in worries about the future, or else you are preoccupied with your plans, with anger or with jealousy. And so your mind is not really there with your body.

The most precious gift you can give to the one you love is your true presence.

Between the mind and the body, there is something that can serve as a bridge. The moment you begin to practice mindful breathing, your body and your mind begin to come together with one another. It takes only ten to twenty seconds to accomplish this miracle called oneness of body and mind. With mindful breathing, you can bring body and mind together in the present moment, and every one of us can do it, even a child.

The Buddha left us an absolutely essential text, the Anapanasati Sutta, or Discourse on the Practice of Mindful Breathing. If you really want to practice Buddhist meditation, you must study this text.

If the father I was talking about had known that, he would have begun to breathe in and breathe out mindfully, and then one or two minutes later, he would have approached his son, he would have looked at him with a smile, and he would have said this: “My dear, I am here for you.” This is the greatest gift you can give to someone you love.

In Buddhism we talk about mantras. A mantra is a magic formula that, once it is uttered, can entirely change a situation, our mind, our body, or a person. But this magic formula must be spoken in a state of concentration, that is to say, a state in which body and mind are absolutely in a state of unity. What you say then, in this state of being, becomes a mantra.

So I am going to present to you a very effective mantra, not in Sanskrit or Tibetan, but in English: “Dear one, I am here for you.” Perhaps this evening you will try for a few minutes to practice mindful breathing in order to bring your body and mind together. You will approach the person you love and with this mindfulness, with this concentration, you will look into his or her eyes, and you will begin to utter this formula: “Dear one, I am really here for you.” You must say that with your body and with your mind at the same time, and then you will see the transformation. 

Do you have enough time to love? Can you make sure that in your everyday life you have a little time to love? We do not have much time together; we are too busy. In the morning while eating breakfast, we do not look at the person we love, we do not have enough time for it. We eat very quickly while thinking about other things, and sometimes we even hold a newspaper that hides the face of the person we love. In the evening when we come home, we are too tired to be able to look at the person we love.

We must bring about a revolution in our way of living our everyday lives, because our happiness, our lives, are within ourselves. 

⧫

From True Love: A Practice for Awakening the Heart by Thich Nhat Hanh © 1997 by Éditions Terre du Ciel and Unified Buddhist Church, Inc. Translation © 2004 by Shambhala Publications. This edition published in 2023. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO. www.shambhala.com

The post Love Is Being There appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Have you ever had a sublime idea pop into your head while doing chores? If so, you are not so different from the Zen student Hsiang-yen, who, struggling with a koan, retreated to the shrine of the 6th patriarch Huineng (regarded as the founder of the “Sudden Enlightenment” school of Zen), in order to diligently maintain it. One day while sweeping, a pebble shot out from his broom and struck a piece of bamboo and—aha!—the sound resulted in Hsiang-yen’s instant awakening.

Aha moments, in which understanding arrives suddenly and with shocking clarity, are the holy grail for creatives, intellectuals, and Buddhists alike. As we struggle with a koan, math problem, or work of art, understanding can feel distant and obscure, like a destination to which we’d like to arrive though we lack directions or even a sense of what the terrain looks like. Desperate for a breakthrough, we grasp at solutions to no avail, bang our heads against the wall, grapple with writer’s block, and cast about desperately for answers. Then, having exhausted our capacity for contemplation and while engaging in a seemingly unrelated task, wisdom benevolently strikes. 

In his seminal work The Gift, the scholar Lewis Hyde examined the seemingly random nature of inspiration. “An essential portion of any artist’s labor is not creation so much as invocation. Part of the work cannot be made, it must be received,” wrote Hyde. He offered numerous examples of artists citing this receptive rather than productive quality. For example, the Nobel Prize-winning poet Czeslaw Milosz, who stated, “I felt very strongly that nothing depended on my will, that everything I might accomplish in life would be not won by my own efforts but given as a gift.” 

Interestingly, modern neuroscience has shown that the experiences of Hsiang-yen and Czeslaw Milosz are consistently borne out by others. Jonathan Schooler, a professor in the University of California’s Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, researches this nexus of mindfulness, creativity, and the brain. In a couple of studies involving almost two hundred professional writers and physicists, he found that twenty percent of their ideas occurred when engaging in “spontaneous task-independent mind wandering.”

When I connected with Schooler he made sure to clarify that the writers and physicists weren’t more creative when mind wandering versus when they were on task. “The ideas that they had in the shower were as good as the ideas that they had while they were actively trying to solve the problem,” he noted. But the shower ideas often had more of a breakthrough quality to them. “We found that the ideas that they had in this context, that is when they’re not actively pursuing the problem, and when they’re not at work, are more likely to involve overcoming impasses,” explained Schooler. “So it seems like mind wandering may be particularly useful for the kind of problem that you need to sleep on, where you’re sort of stuck, and you need a different kind of approach or solution.”

In a 2015 paper, aptly titled “Mind Wandering ‘Ahas’ Versus Mindful Reasoning: Alternative Routes to Creative Solutions,” Schooler’s team actually found a negative relationship between mindfulness and problem-solving. Mind wandering, noted Schooler, involves a perceptual decoupling, in which attention to external stimuli is dampened. Mindfulness involves greater attention to such stimuli. “But a big part of meditation ends up being mind wandering,” said Schooler. “Mindfulness is really the practice of learning to notice your self mind wandering, and then releasing that mind wandering.” 

When the research was further parsed, there was actually a positive relationship between mindfulness and problem-solving that required analytic strategy. Other research by Schooler’s team has shown that when people are not just ruminating but curiously and playfully questioning they tend to be more creative and happier, a type of mind wandering that Schooler labels “mind wondering.” Professional writers are more likely to engage in this type of thinking than the general public. One might posit that Zen students pondering a koan are as well, even when they are sweeping pebbles.

Schooler has a favorite analogy that he believes works well for explaining the phenomenon of spontaneous insight. “If you look out at the sky and notice a faint star, and then stare right at it, that star will disappear,” he explained. “That’s because the cones in the center of your retina are less light-sensitive than the rods on the periphery. When you think, ‘I’ve got to be creative right now’—when you stare right at it—it disappears. If you keep an eye out in the periphery for those ideas to pop up, that might be the best opportunity to catch them.”

Perhaps this is what is meant when practice is referred to as “the long gradual path to sudden enlightenment.” It would be much easier if we could one-two-skip-a-few our way to wisdom and spend less time struggling. All that consternation can feel like a pretty frustrating and useless part of the process. And yet there is something about it that may be integral. It orients us in the right direction, though we may spend too much time attempting to stare right at the star rather than explore the periphery. 

The Developmental Psychologist Alison Gopnik, also of the University of California, has shown how children can sometimes outwit adults at certain problem-solving tasks that involve creative thinking because they tend to be more open-minded about potential solutions. When we grapple with a problem it is often the very framework in which we’re working that entraps us. Yet sublime ideas don’t strike the populace completely at random. Someone watching Friends reruns rarely has earth-shattering insights. One has to be playing in the insight sandbox, so to speak, and become captivated by the sun glinting off a shovel, when, aha! 

“Without the imagination we can do no more than spin the future out of the logic of the present; we will never be led into new life because we can work only from the known,” wrote Lewis Hyde. When it comes to aha moments, perhaps the best course of action is to abandon any action whatsoever, and to foster the playful, questioning spirit of the wonderer. After all, the periphery between the known and the unknown, the visible and the invisible, is precisely where the mystery abides.

The post Aha! Moments appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Meditation is something you do on a cushion, right? Okay, maybe at a retreat center like the Insight Meditation Society you also do it walking slowly back and forth, and maybe even while standing, lying down, and eating. But at work? Work is what you come back to (usually quite reluctantly) after you have been on retreat, right? Or, maybe it is possible to meditate doing some kinds of work, like chopping wood or carrying water. The slow, steady repetition of simple manual tasks might be a fruitful field of practice. But a fast-paced, high-powered, high-stress professional job? Couldn’t be. How can a busy executive or office worker practice meditation without leaving the office or even holding all calls? There is, I submit, a simple answer: By doing Vipassana.

When most people think of meditation, they probably think of someone sitting serenely on a cushion in some pristine setting—beside a brook, in a Zen garden, or at a retreat center. Everything is calm and still; a half-smile on one’s face hints at the bliss one feels while breathing in and savoring the serenity. This is indeed an ideal setting for samatha or concentration meditation, but Vipassana, or insight meditation, is something different. Insight meditation is about mindfulness, whether or not it is accompanied by deep concentration.

Is it possible to perform at high speed in complex situations with mindfulness? I think it is. A challenging—even overwhelming—job can be an ideal practice ground for insight meditation. In my own experience, I have found it makes all the difference to keep in mind three basic things:

Change is OK

The first is that change—even high-speed change—is OK. It is inevitable, unavoidable, inescapable, natural. Constant change is the medium within which we work, the very ocean in which we swim. Recognizing this, we can embrace it. It is our friend, not our enemy. So much of our stress, and therefore our suffering, comes from resistance to, or resentment of, change.

If we accept at a very basic level that things will always come up, that we will always be interrupted, that each moment is born anew and nothing intrudes on anything else, then stress never has a chance to develop. If we pay attention—are mindful—in that narrow instant between the change and the attachment or aversion with which we respond to the change, then we have undermined the entire apparatus which produces and nurtures stress.

The Whole World is Imperfect

The second thing I find enormously helpful is recognizing that the whole world—including myself—is imperfect. Everything is so subtly but profoundly flawed that nothing will ever be “just right.” You will never “get there.” Something will always go wrong. Anything that works will surely break. This truth is sometimes called the law of entropy, sometimes “Murphy’s Law,” and, in ancient Buddhist texts, the noble truth of suffering. It is not a form of pessimism, for it is not to say that anything is bad or evil, just that our tendency to want to perfect things is unrealistic.

For the busy professional, or for anyone doing any kind of work, recognizing the limitations of our own capabilities, of our abilities to influence the environment, and of the environment itself in which we work, can be very liberating. It is not an excuse for shoddy work, and it leaves plenty of room for the notion of excellence. But knowing when to stop, when to let go of something, when to say (as carpenters do) “close enough, nail it!” frees us up to face the next moment, the next challenge, the next project. The tendency in many of us towards perfectionism can be debilitating. Either we get so bogged down on one thing that something else is neglected and we lose perspective, or we get so discouraged by the result of our labors not turning out good enough that we often do not get from our work the sense of satisfaction we deserve.

Everything is Empty

Thirdly, and probably most importantly, I find it helpful to recognize that everything in the world—including myself—is empty. Everything we are dealing with in our universe of experience is an idea, a construction, a fabrication. Words, symbols, money, plans, thoughts—all of it is just a mirage, an illusion, a theatrical performance we conjure up and participate in moment after moment. One of my favorite expressions, attributed to Chuang-tzu, comes in a discussion of epistemology when he says (in Burton Watson’s translation): “What makes things so? Making them so makes them so.” In other words, this whole world we’ve put together is all thoroughly arbitrary.

It can be profoundly comforting to realize that there is no intrinsic value to anything. Everything has only as much value as we decide to give it. Again, this is not a teaching of despair; it is not to say that everything is meaningless and therefore there is no point in getting engaged. Quite the contrary. Giving value to what we are doing is crucial, precisely because it has no intrinsic value of its own. Everything we do, everything we say, and even every little thing we think, is tremendously important—it just, ultimately, doesn’t matter all that much.

If we attend to everything we do in our lives with great care and precision, with mindfulness and clear comprehension, then we are investing our work with meaning. If we lose sight of the fact that it all has no meaning beyond what we give it, then we can get caught—very caught—by our affairs. If the work we do takes on too much significance, especially if it takes on significance we are not aware of having given it ourselves, then we become the slaves of our work. Our happiness, our very sense of meaning and self-worth, then rises or falls on the shirt-tails of something “out there” over which we often have almost no control.

In moments capable of creating the greatest amount of stress, when things are almost overwhelming, I often remark to myself or to a colleague, “Boy, it’s a good thing everything is empty!” With those words comes a great sense of relief, a great lightening of the load. If it were not all empty, then we would have to take everything so seriously and get so locked in to things that there would be no room for freedom. Recognizing the emptiness of everything does not diminish what we have to do to attend to a matter with responsibility and excellence, but it does dramatically change our relationship to what we have to do.

A busy, challenging work situation is like one of those video games where everything is rushing at you at immense speed and you are called upon to respond instantaneously. The pace and complexity of things are in your face, demanding your full attention and calling upon you to be present at every moment. What a gift for the practice of mindfulness! If you are sincere about developing and nurturing Buddhist values, you do not have the luxury of losing your temper, of treating people harmfully, of using wrong speech, or of a whole array of unhealthy states. And if you are not right there with every experience, it is so easy to lose your freedom.

If you are tied in to everything, without accepting change, without realizing the imperfection of it all, without the space between yourself and the world given by the perspective of emptiness, then you can’t help but react to events with those latent tendencies that incline you to cling to the things that give you pleasure and resist the things associated with pain. But when you embrace change, accept the inherent limitations of oneself and others, and use mindfulness to access the space of freedom, then you can survive and even thrive on the challenging complexity of a busy life. Every little detail, every thought, word, and deed, becomes immensely important—but, with the right perspective, they become our playthings rather than our tormentors.

⧫

From the Spring 1995 issue of Inquiring Mind (Vol. 11, No. 2) Text © 1995–2020 by Andrew Olendzki

Related Inquiring Mind article:

• “Getting Real About Exhaustion”
  

The post Mindfulness in the Office appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In our modern, busy lives, it can sometimes feel like we’re speeding through the day, hurrying from one task to the next. And while we may check more off our to-do lists by rushing, the constant thinking ahead means that our minds are never calm. Just as rushing can become a habit, it takes practice to tap back into the present moment and remind ourselves to pause. As meditation teacher Martin Aylward notes, “slowing down is an art and a practice,” which ultimately leads to greater contentment. Thankfully, one can practice slowing down anytime and anywhere. Here is a collection of teachings from Tricycle’s archives to help you slow down, whether that’s by extending the breath or taking a single, mindful step.

1. Recognize the Need for Quiet 

“We have the wealth of absolute truth, of immeasurable love and compassion—the whole wealth of the universe within us. It’s just waiting to be discovered. But within the hustle and bustle of morning-to-evening activity, we’ll never manage to find it. It’s like a golden treasure that is lying within us, that we can actually touch upon through the quiet mind. Anyone can do it, but they’ve got to become quiet… 

So we have that treasure. But if we really get busy, we have no way of unlocking that treasure chest. Unlocking it takes time, and it takes the quiet mind, the contented mind, the satisfied mind. It needs the mind which knows that there is something to be found far beyond anything at all that we can ever find in the world. And then we will make an attempt at checking out what is really necessary to do.” 

— from “There’s No Need to be Busy” by Ayya Khema

2. Notice When You’re Rushing

“Rushing reinforces the sense of time pressure. You feel squeezed, busy, harassed by time. Slowing down conduces to ease, gentleness, and relaxation.

Until you really give attention to this, you probably don’t realize how much you rush. We even try to make tea quickly, though you cannot make the kettle boil faster. One of my teachers used to tell me, ‘There’s no such thing as waiting for something else.’ There may be a good reason to move quickly. There is never a good reason to rush.

Notice how you go up stairs. Or make tea. Or brush your teeth. Or get dressed. Or wash the dishes. Or do your grocery shopping. Feel for the inner imperative that makes you feel busy. That compresses your sense of self into a forward-pushing agent called me. Focused on what I’m doing and where I am going. What happens if you soften and slow, just a little bit? Feel how that changes your experience. Your sense of yourself. Your capacity for ease in the moment.” 

— from “The Art of Slowing Down” by Martin Aylward

3. Extend the Breath

“The breath is one of the few ways that we can directly impact our autonomic nervous system. 

Take a breath in, and slowly breathe out through your mouth. As you’re breathing, you can also add a hum or a sigh. As we’re adding that hum or that sigh, notice the resonance in the throat, in the heart, or down in the belly. As you do this, observe any sensations of settling and letting go. If you’re around people and it would be weird to make a sound, you can simply inhale and exhale through the mouth, softly pursing the lips almost as if you were going to whistle. You don’t have to make a sound. 

As the breath empties out and comes back in, keep noticing: how does this voluntary action impact the involuntary response in the body? What’s different now?”

— from “A Reminder to Pause” by Kathy Cherry

4. Practice Mindful Eating

“Mindful eating is a way to rediscover one of the most pleasurable things we do as human beings. It also is a path to uncovering many wonderful activities that are going on right under our noses and within our own bodies. Mindful eating also has the unexpected benefit of helping us tap into our body’s natural wisdom and our heart’s natural capacity for openness and gratitude… There are many ways to slow down our eating and drinking. You might experiment by trying each of the following techniques for one week:

Put down the fork or spoon.

This is one of the most reliable and simple ways to slow down your eating. Each time you put a bite of food into your mouth, put down the fork or spoon, onto the plate or into the bowl. Don’t pick it up again until the bite you have in your mouth is chewed and savored completely and swallowed. For real appreciation of the bite that is in your mouth, you can close your eyes as you chew and swallow. When that one bite has been thoroughly tasted and is gone, then pick up the utensil, take another bite, and put the utensil down again. Watch the interesting impulses that arise in the mind with this practice.” 

— from “Mindful Eating” by Jan Chozen Bays

5. Take One Peaceful Step

“We walk all the time, but usually our walking is more like running. Our steps are often burdened with our anxieties and sorrows. When we walk in forgetfulness, we imprint our anxieties and sorrows on Mother Earth and on those around us. But when we walk in mindfulness, each step creates a fresh breeze of peace, joy, and harmony.

When we practice walking meditation, we do not try to arrive anywhere or attain any particular goal. Our destination is the here and now… 

The longer you practice walking with this connection, the more your heart will be softened and opened. Do not start with an unrealistic goal, such as practicing for an hour or so. But if you can take one peaceful step, you can then take two, three, four, or more.”

— from “Walking Meditation—Anywhere” by Nguyen Anh-Huong and Thich Nhat Hanh

The post 5 Tips for Slowing Down appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Like a fish out of water,
Thrown on high ground,
This mind thrashes about
Trying to escape Mara’s command.

— Dhammapada 34

In practicing mindfulness, it can be helpful to remember that the practice works even when it doesn’t seem to work. Perhaps this is explained best through an analogy.

Consider a mountain stream where the water is quite clear, and seems placid and still. But if you place a stick into the water, a small wake around the stick shows that in fact the water is flowing. The stick becomes a reference point that helps us notice the movement of the water.

Similarly, the practice of mindfulness is a reference point for noticing aspects of our lives that we may have missed. This is especially true for mindfulness of breathing. In trying to stay present for the breath, you may become aware of the concerns and the momentum of the mind that pull the attention away from the breath. If you can remain with the breath, then obviously mindfulness of breathing is working. However, if your attempt to stay with the breath results in increased awareness of what pulls you away from the breath, then the practice is also working.

Without the reference of mindfulness practice, it is quite easy to remain unaware of the preoccupations, tensions, and momentum operating in your life. For example, if you are busily doing many things, the concern for getting things done can blind you to the tension building in the body and mind. Only by stopping to be mindful may you become aware of the tensions and feelings that are present.

Sometimes your attempt to be with the breath is the only way that you see the speed at which the mind is racing. Riding on a train, if you focus on the mountains in the distance, you might not notice the speed of the train. However, if you bring your attention closer, the rapidly appearing and disappearing telephone poles next to the tracks reveal the train’s speed. Even when you have trouble staying with the breath, your continued effort to come back to the breath can highlight what might otherwise be unnoticed, i.e., the rapid momentum of the mind. In fact, the faster our thinking and the greater the preoccupation, the greater the need for something close by like the breath to help bring an awareness of what is going on. That awareness, in turn, often brings some freedom from the preoccupation.

When staying with the breath during meditation is difficult, we can easily get discouraged. However, that difficulty is an opportunity to become more aware of the forces of mind and the feelings causing the distractions. Remember, if we learn from what is going on, regardless of what is happening, the practice is working, even when it seems not to be working, when we aren’t able to stay with the breath.

Even when it is relatively easy to stay with the breath, mindfulness of the breathing can still function as an important reference point. In this case it may not be a reference point for the strong forces of distraction, but rather for subtler thoughts and feelings that may lie close to the root of our concerns and motivations. Don’t pursue those thoughts or feelings. Simply be aware of their presence while continuing to develop the meditation on the breath, so that the breath can become an even more refined reference point. When we are settled on the breath, the heart becomes clear, peaceful, and still like a mountain pool. Then we can see all the way to the bottom.

♦

Excerpted from Gil Fronsdal’s 2008 book, The Issue at Hand: Essays of Buddhist Mindfulness Practice. Read more about The Issue at Hand in the latest issue of Tricycle magazine.

The post How Mindfulness Works Even When It Doesn’t appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Back in 1965, in a book called Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, Thomas Merton recounted an experience he had while standing on the corner of a busy street in Louisville, Kentucky that changed the way he saw himself in relationship to others—though it would perhaps be more accurate to say that the experience had him, it was so potent in showing him the truth of our interconnectedness. What Merton realized as he gazed at a crowd of strangers milling about, was that they were his, and he was theirs, that he “was one with them” (his words) and that they were therefore not strangers. With words that could have come straight out of a Buddhist text, Merton described the experience as “waking up from a dream of separateness.”

“If only they could all see themselves as they really are,” he said. “If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed… I suppose the big problem would be then that we would fall down and worship each other. But this cannot be seen, only believed and ‘understood’ by a peculiar gift.”

It’s this peculiar gift I’d like to take up.

As Merton describes it, this gift allows us to see ourselves as we really are, a phrase that parallels the teachings of Buddhism. And the way we really are, is interconnected, belonging to one another, not separate. All of us have the ability to see this truth, but not all of us choose or are able to. Not all of us can disentangle ourselves, however briefly, from the tug of work and family and friends, or from the many other interests and responsibilities that make it difficult for us to be alone, to be still and silent, for this is what this gift requires. I like to think of it as the gift of contemplation. 

Contemplation gives us the space, time, and conditions to see things and ourselves as we really are. But Merton warns, if we could see this way all the time, we might go around worshiping one another—which, given the state of the world, doesn’t seem like a problem to me. We could use more reverence everywhere.

The word “contemplation” means to “gaze attentively, to observe.” In ancient Rome, an augur or diviner would contemplate natural signs—especially the behavior of birds—and interpret them as good or bad omens to guide the actions of rulers and priests. (In 236 CE, Pope Fabian was chosen to be the next pontiff when a dove landed on his head during the conclave. He wasn’t even a likely candidate, but everyone thought the dove was a sign from the Holy Spirit.) In Christian mysticism, contemplation took the form of a type of meditation, devoid of images or words, in which mystics would strive to have a direct experience of God or the divine. And although they could only reach this state of unity through solitude and silence, accounts of their experiences invariably give evidence of a deep kind of communication—a relationship with truth, with love, with sacredness.

In The Book of Privy Counseling, the anonymous author—who also wrote the well-known Cloud of Unknowing—says: “… There is no name, no experience, and no insight so akin to the everlastingness of truth than what you can possess, perceive, and actually experience in the blind loving awareness of this word, is.”

There is no name, no experience, no insight closer or truer than the truth of our own being, our own isness. There is no place closer to reality than the place we’re standing on. That is why resistance to what is, is so challenging. But it’s also the reason that it can be so fruitful for practice. In a moment when we say to ourselves, “I don’t want this”—whatever the this is—we are effectively saying no to reality. There are things, like injustice or willful harm, which should be resisted. Yet here I’m referring to the many ways in which we refuse or deny reality, and which inevitably cause harm. Refusal to accept situations that don’t favor us, for example, from the trivial to the momentous. Denial of our impact on others, of illness, of death. 

The practice of contemplation, therefore, creates a space in which to work with our resistance so that we can choose is. And more, it gives us the opportunity to fall in love with it. Because we don’t have to like all aspects of reality. Like or dislike have nothing to do with contemplation. Yet we can learn to love reality’s isness, which means honoring ourselves and others and things and beings as we and they are. From this perspective, contemplation is the profound practice of loving what is, of resting in and into what is, of not distancing ourselves from ourselves and the world.

All of us have wanted things to be otherwise at some point in our lives. All of us have wished for different choices, different stories, different results. Yet there’s enormous strength—and infinite possibility—in learning to love what is instead of what should have been, and one way to do this is to learn to attend, allow, and accept.

Attending is the opposite of denying or ignoring. It’s turning toward whatever we’re struggling with and choosing to not evade or repress. Attending is choosing to stay fully present to every shade of our being, from light to dark. It’s choosing to not turn away, no matter how uncomfortable our sensations, how embarrassing our thoughts, how ugly our feelings. Given how successful we’ve become at distracting or numbing ourselves, how pervasive is our inclination toward denial and aversion, attending is monumental. It’s like standing at the threshold of a room where a dinner party’s going on. You’ve been invited, but with a couple of exceptions, you don’t know anyone and you’re uncomfortable and not at all sure you want to come close. It’d be so much easier to just go home and turn on Netflix, you think. But you also know that’s no longer a satisfying replacement for intimacy, so you gather your courage and at the very least remain standing before the room, resisting the urge to bolt.

Contemplation is the profound practice of loving what is, of resting in and into what is, of not distancing ourselves from ourselves and the world.

Allowing is stepping into the room, which immediately gives you a sense of space. Yes, you’re uncomfortable, but maybe there’s something beyond your discomfort. Allowing is giving yourself permission to walk among these strangers just as you are, and letting them be who they are. When we allow, we realize we don’t have to control the situation. We don’t have to dissociate or numb out. Instead, we can stay embodied and step in closer. Walking slowly around the room, you run your fingers softly over the furniture, getting your bearings. You touch the soft fabric of the sofa’s back, the hard edges of a marble countertop as a stray word catches your ear here and there. You still can’t stop yourself from judging. I like this. I don’t like this. But you allow all of it—including yourself—to just be.

Accepting is saying yes to reality. It’s deciding that no matter what happens, you want to be comfortable in the room. Maybe you sit down across from a group of people, a table between you in case you still need a buffer, or more space. But as time goes on and you begin to relax, you edge in close. By the end of the evening, it becomes clear that you neither like nor agree with everything you’ve found there (you don’t have to like a cancer diagnosis or a racist uncle or your own tendency to berate yourself, for example). But now you understand that indeed, like or dislike have nothing to do with it—that by accepting you’ve consented to reality, which means you’re now in a position to decide what to do next. Either way, you’re in relationship with your thoughts, your feelings, with everything that’s happening in that room, and everyone else who’s there. You realize you’re no longer strangers, and in fact, you never were.

Attend, allow, accept.

There is much about our world that needs changing. The same may be true of our individual lives. But as long as we’re using up our energy to resist our circumstances, we won’t be able to dedicate it to the work of true transformation. Yet this is exactly the kind of work our world needs—radical, life-affirming transformation. 

“If only we could see each other [as we really are],” Merton says.  “There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed… I suppose the big problem would be then that we would fall down and worship each other.”

Well, that wouldn’t be so bad, would it? That wouldn’t be so bad at all.

The post The Gift of Contemplation appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Years ago, when I was worrying about the climate crisis, I was often told that I was catastrophizing. Those voices have become quiet now, and when themes of the climate crisis arise, people now turn their gaze down, as if quietly depressed or too disheartened to speak. This sense of anguish has become even more pronounced as we hear about the horrors of war raging in our world, which have pushed even the urgent fear for the environment off center stage. In my meditation groups that include first responders and people in public service, we often discuss how to be with our fear, despair, and hopelessness. Together we contemplate how we can avoid shutting down emotionally and how we can stay present and engaged amidst so much suffering.

In my search for ways to help and support others in this time, I think about the concept of Deep Adaptation, popularized by British professor Jem Bendell and introduced to me by Buddhist scholar and activist Joanna Macy. Bendell encourages us to accept the probability of a catastrophic future, and to begin thinking now about how we can adapt emotionally and practically to such a frightening prospect. He encourages us to shift our perspective from fixating on the outcome to contemplating how we can live in the best ways possible in the face of great loss and uncertainty. Bendell describes the need to restructure our way of life in society in clear, sensible, and practical terms. 

In addition to adapting to how we live our lives, I believe we also need a “deep adaptation” of the heart—an inner complement to the outer dynamic that is a necessary medicine if we want to become agents of peace and transformation. Whether or not we cannot turn our ship around, it is important that we meet our uncertain future internally, and the quality of being that we will find there will infuse our relationships and engagement in the world.

Cultivating a compassionate heart can help us avoid burning out, shutting down, or getting lost in anxiety and depression. It can help us stay calm, caring, and connected to a wider perspective so that we may even thrive in a grim situation. 

In his travel book The Colossus of Maroussi, novelist Henry Miller offers us a clue to how we can bring about such a change in attitude:

At Epidaurus, in the stillness, in the great peace that came over me, I heard the heart of the world beat. I know what the cure is: it is to give up, to relinquish, to surrender, so that our little hearts may beat in unison with the great heart of the world. 

But how can “our little hearts beat in unison with the great heart of the world?” How can we connect our heart to a much wider perspective? 

Reflecting on the traditional Buddhist metta practices of lovingkindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity, I have imagined a seven-step heart practice for this time of horror and sorrow we’re all enduring. And, drawing upon my knowledge as a psychologist and meditation teacher, I’ve especially thought about the practices that would be most helpful to caregivers, first responders, parents, friends, and neighbors in times of crisis and for working with trauma. 

These practices are rooted in mindfulness and embedded in natural or awake awareness. Natural or awake awareness, also called the field of awareness, is not localized in our prefrontal cortex, our “manager mind.” Instead, this quality of awareness is present everywhere, without localization, and is often likened to a vast ocean. When we rest in this quality of being, we are filled with aliveness, awakeness, and love. We can learn to cross over into experiencing ourselves this way, like the ocean viewing its waves arising and dissolving. Together with the experience of mindfulness and awake awareness, heart practices allow us to experience the basic qualities of openness, fullness, and love. 

7-Step Heart Practice

Step one: Trust in a wider perspective.

Soften your gaze and connect with the world around you. Trust what you feel. Even when our world is being gravely damaged by climate change and war, we can rely on our intention to trust in a wider perspective, as well as on our dedication to open our hearts to all suffering beings. This intention and dedication situate us into our heart space and allows the energy of the heart to radiate outward into our world. Resting in the felt sense of our heart space allows us to feel calm, warm, and connected. Trust reminds us that there is a bigger context in which we are embedded. Trust allows us to relinquish, to surrender, to let go into uncertainty, while holding the faith that doors will eventually open for us. Trust allows us to go beyond our personal sense of being in control, especially in times when control is impossible. Trust allows our little heart to drop into the great heart of the world.

Step 2: Heartfully rest in the field of awake awareness.

Resting in this way situates us in a much wider perspective than in our personal, often fearful, little heart view. The Isha Upanishad of the Indian Vedas tells us, “This is full, that is full, from that fullness comes this fullness, if you take away this fullness from that fullness, only fullness remains.” If we allow our personal hearts to rest in the limitless, boundless, knowing fullness of the universe, then we can anchor ourselves in a reality that is inexhaustible, that does not shut down, burn out, or get overwhelmed. Resting our hearts in this inexhaustible field of awareness provides the security, the psycho-spiritual container, to hold our suffering.

Step 3: Listen deeply to yourself. 

Deep listening allows us to tune into ourselves and to attend to our own fears. Imagine a child who has been hurt. When a trusted adult embraces and listens deeply, the child can feel pain, cry, and relax. However, when there is nobody to help, the child may get desperate and often angry. When we experience the fullness of there being enough, whether that’s attention or love, it is easier for us to be open and generous towards ourselves. Make ten minutes every day to listen to yourself, deep inside.

Step 4: Offer tenderness to yourself.

Tenderness for oneself brings us into the present moment and makes it possible for us to be with the felt sense of our own vulnerability and rawness. Psychotherapist Eugene Gendlin tells us that, “The moment you experience the felt sense of painful feelings is exactly when change can happen… Then something in your way of being starts to re-configure and you gain a healthier understanding of yourself and become increasingly free.” The felt sense of tenderness toward our own self allows us to heal and grow. Offer a sentence that expresses tenderness to yourself, such as, “May I hold myself with kindness and tender care.” You may gently place one or both hands on your heart.

Step 5: Accept what is.

Acceptance of what is allows us to let the reality of the world in, even though it may be harsh. Acceptance, here, does not suggest whitewashing or the condoning of wrongdoing, but, rather, it means seeing clearly. People can experience the feeling of acceptance when a skillful doctor tells them compassionately the truth about a difficult prognosis. The individual then has the chance to spend the rest of their life with what is essential to them. In a similar way we may be able to accept knowledge of a possibly devastating future with openness and a peaceful heart when we are held in compassionate and loving awareness.

Step 6: Offer loving compassion to yourself. 

Loving compassion unlocks our heart, so we can feel with the pain of others. Tapping into the openness and fullness that is naturally there, we can afford to preserve the essence of our humanity despite a possibly looming catastrophe. We know that parents, who are in touch with their own inner lives, are more easily able to share themselves sensitively and effectively with their children. In a similar way are those, who know themselves and care for their own physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health, able to be effective and resilient first responders, healthcare workers, parents, friends, activists, and citizens. You might say quietly to yourself, “May I offer compassion to myself, so I can also include others in my care.”

Step 7:  Set yourself—and others—free with heartfelt engagement.

Heartfelt engagement makes it possible for us to reach out to others in helpful ways, and to remain engaged and caring, while exercising the little influence we may have to help. There are many stories from wars and concentration camps where people who had an inner sense of “richness,” “wealth,” and “freedom of mind” were able to share themselves in incredible ways with their fellow prisoners. Those who serve others often experience a sense of strength, belonging, and profound meaning. Open to the possibility of engaging yourself on behalf of another to help or support a person or animal in need in a special way. As you have done so, notice the felt sense in your body and heart.

Heart work is deep adaptation. The stages of this seven-step Heart Practice build on each other, and together allow us to stay open and engaged, even when there is great suffering, offering solid, practical, and real-world support. Then, even when life is harsh, difficult, and at times devastating, we can stay healthy, present, and caringly available to others and our beloved world.

♦

For for more on the climate crisis, check out Tricycle’s Buddhism and Ecology Summit. In honor of Earth Day 2022, Tricycle is bringing together leading Buddhist teachers, writers, and environmentalists—including Joanna Macy, Roshi Joan Halifax, David Loy, Paul Hawken, and Tara Brach—for a donation-based weeklong virtual event series exploring what the dharma has to offer in a time of environmental crisis. Learn more here.

The post Deep Adaptation of the Heart appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The Roaring Twenties might refer to a historical era but the phrase also seems to be an apt description of the life trajectory of many founders. Even the Buddha indulged lavishly prior to renouncing the luxuries of the palace for the asceticism of the spiritual pursuit, eventually founding a religion that walked the Middle Path. Max Vallot and Tom Daly, the founders of District Vision, a company that began with running sunglasses and has since expanded to “tools for mindful athletes,” had a similar trajectory. In their mid-twenties, Vallot and Daly were working in the fashion industry in New York and enjoying all of the indulgences of that fast-paced lifestyle. According to Vallot, it showed.

“I was a nervous wreck,” he recalled of that period, when we spoke over Zoom. “Everything from my sleep to my digestion was a total mess.”

In the midst of this decadent phase Vallot entered a Transcendental Meditation studio that was next door to his office. “Instantaneously I knew that this was something I would be doing for the rest of my life,” said Vallot. “And that this might be the most important thing that I’ve ever done.”

The duo had always enjoyed running as a way of staying fit and curing hangovers, but it soon became a pursuit, along with mindfulness, that allowed them to engage with the world and build community in a fulfilling way. As Daly dove deeper into the world of running Vallot found himself hanging out with more athletes and becoming something of a mindfulness ambassador. He began to see a bridge between these two activities, in which mind and body have the opportunity to align, breath by breath and step by step, and started to offer meditation, relaxation techniques, and marathon mantras to his new friends.

By this time Vallot and Daly had left the palace, or in this case the high fashion industry, behind, but rather than found a religion they founded a brand. From the outset, they were committed to creating something as focused on product as on practice. “That was the philosophical starting point,” explained Vallot. “The umbrella that held it all together. And it still is today.”

Vallot describes mindfulness as not simply a wellness exercise but a lens through which one experiences and explores reality. It is no wonder, then, that District Vision’s foray into sports gear was through sourcing impeccably made sunglasses from a third-generation Japanese eyewear manufacturer with an artisanal approach to the craft. After the success of these sunglasses, District Vision launched into running apparel as well as courses related to aspects of practice like breathwork and mindful movement.

It would be easy to cast aside this combination of business and Buddhism as yet another example of McMindfulness: the appropriation of spiritual practice for the purpose of making a buck. As David Loy, a Zen teacher, professor, and author, and Ronald Purser, a professor and author of the book McMindfulness, stated in a viral article on the subject: “Rather than applying mindfulness as a means to awaken individuals and organizations from the unwholesome roots of greed, ill will and delusion, it is usually being refashioned into a banal, therapeutic, self-help technique that can actually reinforce those roots.” 

Since that article was published in 2013, mindfulness has only grown in popularity and many performance brands have taken note. In 2018, Nike partnered with Headspace to create a series of guided “mindful runs,” and in the same year Lululemon launched a mindfulness initiative centered around product feel and online courses. The optimist might say that this corporate embrace of mindfulness is a means for better business practices as well as the dissemination of practice itself. The pessimist would decry such an embrace as furthering greed and consumption via the savvy marketing of the very tool designed to weed them out. 

Which brings us back to District Vision. Do you really need $250 shades to run better? And how, exactly, does mindfulness make you a better runner? The answer to how you feel about a performance lens brand creating tools for mindful athletes might depend on whether you view such marketing through the optimist or the pessimist’s lens. 

Vallot is a realist. On the first point he concedes that you probably don’t need $250 shades, but it certainly doesn’t hurt, and the appreciation a beautiful and functional object can stir might even help one stay present. He likened it to the incense he burns while meditating. “It’s just another reminder to come back to the present moment, to come back to a simple awareness of what’s happening and come back to the breath,” said Vallot. “None of this stuff is ultimately needed. But I still have room for it. Even our product ultimately becomes a way of opening people up to all of this.”

As for whether mindfulness will make you a better runner, it often becomes the sticking point in conversations Vallot has with athletes. “The question that always comes up with runners,” says Vallot, “who are inherently competitive, is, ‘If it’s not going to make us faster, why should we bother?’ My response has been that it will definitely make you a wiser runner. You learn to bring attention to these raw sensations in the body as you move, and discern between the type of pain that is worth paying attention to or the type of anxiety that is worth reacting to. The mindful runner sees these states for what they are and understands that they’re transitory in nature just like everything else.” 

Julia Hanlon, an avid runner as well as a yoga and movement teacher, and the former host of the Running On Om podcast, is not one to get hooked by gear. She related to me that on a recent frigid New England day, since she doesn’t own any techy cold-weather running pants, she simply put on four pairs of pants and went for it. Yet Hanlon agreed that bringing mindful awareness to running is a way to blur the bounds between formal and informal practice. She described the impact of mindfulness as running through a black and white forest, and the colors suddenly “popping off.”

“It gives you such a deeper connection into your internal cues and into the cues of the environment around you,” explained Hanlon. “You’re really able to get clear on why it is you’re moving and what it is you’re moving for and how your movement can actually be in service of yourself.”

Hanlon herself has never felt any brand affinity, but she understands the attraction and the ability of a company to foster connection. “A brand has the potential to inspire community, and a community can show people a way of being and loving that might be different than their own,” said Hanlon. 

In addition, the right gear can take away ulterior concerns by eliminating unnecessary obstacles. It’s not that all obstacles should be removed but if tangential nuisances can be addressed by proper gear an athlete can drop more easily into a flow state. She mentioned a particularly challenging trail run she endured in Croatia, and the way her gear allowed her “to feel fully safe and fully present, because I had everything I needed with me.”

Ultimately, Vallot is well aware that there is quite literally an element of spiritual materialism in creating a mindful brand. In a materialistic society, however, this might offer one of the most relevant gateways to practice. “It’s a way of getting people into the funnel and opening their eyes,” says Vallot. “If you follow this lead, it is something that could profoundly change your life.” 

“The gear makes sense for now because this is what we’ve learned and I think we can add something there,” concluded Vallot. “But mindfulness is what I’ll spend my last breath practicing and sharing with the world.”

The post Can a Brand Be a Gateway to Practice? appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

As a person who is often caught up in difficult emotions, much of my practice focuses on processing them. Before I started to practice meditation, I could talk (for hours) about my feelings, but rarely did I actually feel my feelings. Mindfulness practice gradually taught me how to feel. It also taught me some coping methods that weren’t about fixing myself or figuring myself out but were about a direct knowing, a present–moment touching of my emotions. With my teachers’ guidance, I intuitively felt my way into a process that I now see is essentially based on the Buddha’s Satipatthana Sutta (the four foundations of mindfulness). Here he detailed the practice of mindfulness under four headings: mindfulness of body (sense realm), mindfulness of feeling tone or vedana (reactive impressions of pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral), mindfulness of mental states, and mindfulness of dhammas (impersonal phenomena). I found that mindfulness of the body is the fundamental tool for this practice, while the other three realms give perspective on what I discover in the physical sense-sphere.

When a difficult emotion is arising, the sensations give a clear, direct path to connecting with what’s happening in the present moment. My tendency is to go into thoughts like judging (I shouldn’t feel like this) or analyzing (Why do I feel like this?) or solving (How can I feel better?) I wind up stuck in my head and missing the actual experience. What usually happens when I think about my feelings is that the thoughts themselves trigger more feelings because I’m in conflict with myself, and I go deeper into a painful mood. Often when I’m struggling with sadness, the interaction of negative thoughts with low physical energy and dullness blossoms into depression as the blend of thoughts and sensations creates a kind of all-encompassing state, a mental and physical cloud that seems impermeable. By focusing on the body, I take myself out of the thought realm—there are no words in my body—and break this negative cycle.

Focusing on sadness in the body is challenging. The reason that I start thinking about my emotions in the first place is that I don’t want to feel them. The practice of mindful breathing eases this process. Instead of trying to dive right into the middle of the feelings, I start by feeling the breath, then gently moving my attention toward the emotion. This can be called “breathing into” as I follow the breath to the tender spots in the body where the sadness rests.

In this delicate process, mindfulness of the breath needs several companion practices. First is faith. I have to trust that I’ll be okay, that I can be with the feelings without being overwhelmed; my faith in the dharma and in practice supports this step. If I trust in the power of mindfulness, then I don’t have to “solve” the emotion. I also need acceptance and forgiveness of myself so that I’m not judging my own feelings.

The reason that I start thinking about my emotions in the first place is that I don’t want to feel them.

When I first started doing this work several decades ago, I was only aware of emotions in the most obvious places, the chest and belly; I still use those areas of the body as my first focus in this practice. As I’ve become more attentive and trusting, I’ve discovered that I can notice emotions in virtually any part of the body. When grief is arising, my throat constricts and my eyes swell as I hold back tears; fear can appear as tightness in the shoulders or streams of energy down the arms; excitement and joy might be surges of tingling through the back.

Another difficulty in being mindful of emotions is that, although the sensations are associated with the body, at times (especially with the eyes closed) they seem to exist in some slightly different realm—as if they are not quite inside the body, but around it. I’ve read or heard of something called the “emotional body,” and maybe this is what that term means. I don’t know if such a thing is “real,” but the concept helps me to understand what I am feeling, since the experience of emotions in the body can be so subtle and difficult to locate in space.

In any case, wherever emotions arise—whether “in” or “around” the body— one thing is clear: the sensations are always moving.

What I’ve seen is that one of the strongest factors sustaining difficult emotions, especially depression and anxiety, is the subconscious fear that they will last forever. There is something in our makeup that creates this impression, and it is one of the fundamental delusions the Buddha was trying to help us break. When I practice with emotions, I have to consciously remind myself that they are impermanent. This is stepping out of the realm of strict mindfulness, the direct knowing of an experience, and rather, reflecting on the nature of the experience. And this is the advice that the Buddha gives over and over in the Satipatthana—to contemplate the arising and passing away of all phenomena.

Once I’ve come to some balance around the emotions in my body, I can bring in the other realms of mindfulness to support, deepen, and sustain the healing. 

The second foundation, mindfulness of feeling tone (vedana), helps me to see my experience less as a personal drama and more as an almost biologically triggered impulse. Again, going beneath the realm of concepts, vedana points to the raw effect of the emotion—its pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral quality. In other words, it’s not about me, it’s just stuff happening. We’re way down in the lower centers of the brain here, where it’s all about the basics of survival. There’s no rationalizing happening on this level, and we can’t help our reactions. So the only way to understand the feeling tone of my experience is as something I can’t control which must be accepted. On one long retreat when I was becoming attuned, moment-by-moment, to the arising of vedana, my teacher told me that I was experiencing equanimity. At this level of awareness, I wasn’t moving into wanting or not-wanting, which is the natural reaction to experiencing pleasant or unpleasant feelings. Instead, by just seeing the feeling tone, I allowed pleasant and unpleasant to simply move through me with acceptance and mindfulness. This point of view has obvious benefits when dealing with painful emotions.

It’s not about me, it’s just stuff happening.

The third foundation, identifying mental states, is the way that I usually talk about my emotions, naming my feelings as anger, sadness, anxiety, frustration or something else. If I just do this kind of naming intellectually without the earlier steps of sensing in the body and recognizing feeling tone, it doesn’t help much. That’s because what I’m trying to do is clarify the karmic process by which feelings appear and disappear. When I follow sensations to the corresponding feeling tone and then name what is happening, I not only know what’s happening intellectually, I know it viscerally. Seeing this karmic process unfold is where insight arises—the process reveals impermanence, suffering and the lack of solid identity.

With the third foundation, if I add the word just to the emotion identified, I remove a lot of the sting—“just fear,” “just sadness.” And because I’ve deconstructed the emotion into its component parts of body, feeling, and mental state, the name isn’t so threatening. It doesn’t imply some hidden monster; it is known clearly. Now that I know what it is, I can consider ways of working with the feeling that aren’t just reactive avoidance. If I see that I’m angry, I can breathe, relax, soften my heart, maybe practice some lovingkindness (metta). If I see that I’m inclining toward sadness or depression, I can try to activate energy either physically, with exercise, or socially, by connecting with a trusted friend; or I might choose to intentionally focus on something positive like gratitude, beauty, or even my own positive qualities (if I can think of any in that mood). These “antidotes” don’t arise out of aversion, which would simply create more struggle and agitation, but out of the insight and intuitive wisdom that comes from watching the entire process play out.

The fourth foundation, mindfulness of dhammas or impersonal phenomena, supports this process by giving me the broadest view of what is happening. Here I can look at my experience through the lens of dharma. I can put my experience in the context of the Four Noble Truths, watching the arising of suffering (dukkha), its cause, its end, and the way to its end; I can view an emotion as simply one of the five hindrances (desire, aversion, sleepiness, restlessness and doubt); I can deconstruct an emotion into the component five aggregates (form, feeling, perception, volitional formations and consciousness). Once again, this view takes me out of the personal and into the universal experience of being a human with emotions.

I like to summarize the four foundations practice as, This is how my body feels; it’s unpleasant; I’m in a bad mood; it’s natural; and it’s not about me.

Once I’ve gone through this process—and it’s a process that might be repeated many times in a day—there has often been a shift, as simply approaching the feeling in this way has the effect of defusing it. I may still have the mood, but it’s often taking up less space in my consciousness as my viewpoint has changed from someone who’s in pain to someone who is observing the unfolding of the dharma.

Finally, I need to move on and do and think about other things. If I spend my whole day trying to be mindful of my emotions, it can turn into a narcissistic and obsessive exercise. At some point I just have to say, “Okay, fine, I’m in this mood,” and turn my attention elsewhere. One of the advantages of a mindfulness practice is that I can actually learn how to do this, to control and direct my attention to some extent so that I don’t have to stay stuck in one experience or one viewpoint.

♦

Related Inquiring Mind articles on resilience: 

• The Worst Zen Student Who Ever Was: Reflections on Depression and Buddhist Practice
• Angry Because I Care
• Tattooed Lotus

The post There Are No Words in My Body appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

I am a very committed mindfulness practitioner. I sit every day for thirty minutes, no matter what. The only day I missed in the last three years was the day my daughter was born. Nothing can stop me from paying attention. . . except, perhaps, the perception that nothing can stop me from paying attention. Adopting this stance can have an unfortunate side effect: the sense that I’m so mindful that it is totally fine if I become a “scrollbot” for 20 minutes on social media because I’ve somehow earned it. Even more dangerous is the misperception that practice makes me “good” and thus I’m incapable of doing bad (my wife might have something to say about that one). What I’m talking about might be called “blindfulness.”

This phenomenon is related to a psychological concept called “moral licensing.” In his podcast, Revisionist History, Malcolm Gladwell offered a commonly accepted definition for the term: “Past good deeds can liberate individuals to engage in behaviors that are immoral, unethical, or otherwise problematic, behaviors that they would otherwise avoid for fear of feeling or appearing immoral.” 

Gladwell then provided a prime example of moral licensing, uncovered by a psychologist named Daniel Effron from the London Business School. After Barack Obama became president in 2008, Effron surveyed people who identified as Obama supporters and found that the explicit support of a Black president actually led some people to be implicitly racist, believing their support somehow inured them to such behavior. “​​A significant chunk of the people who supported Barack Obama were then more likely, at least in the experiment, to express racially questionable opinions,” Gladwell explained. One step forward, two steps back.

Those engaged in mindfulness practice can run the risk of both moral and attentional licensing: the belief that one is above bad behavior or that one has earned a respite from paying attention in much the same way an athlete winds down from excess movement with excess stillness. Yet mindfulness doesn’t quite work that way. We don’t bank it and, a literal belief in karma aside, we can’t accrue goodness. So how can mindfulness practitioners be aware of the one-step-forward-two-steps-back pitfall? 

I posed this question to Zen teacher Brad Warner, the author of Sex, Sin, and Zen, and someone who has bristled usefully against the preconceptions people often have about practice. 

“I think it’s important to try to maintain the same attitude one establishes in zazen practice throughout the rest of the day,” said Warner. “It’s not that you try to establish an intense focus for 20 or 40 minutes and then you’re done. In zazen it’s not about establishing an intense focus anyway. It’s about noticing what you’re doing. If you’re vegging out, you notice that. If your concentration is intense, you notice that. These states come and go.”

In other words, creating a binary division between mindfulness and ordinariness might only serve to reify the idea that depth occurs on the cushion and anything goes off the cushion. This can lead to what Chogyam Trungpa called “spiritual materialism”—grasping at states that we believe are special to the exclusion of the richness that is inherent in all states.  

“What is it that is there in every state?” asked Warner. “Who is vegging out? Who is maintaining intense focus? To me, that’s the interesting thing to investigate.” An investigation that can be honed during formal practice but that is no less valuable during informal practice.

“We can get curious about that craving. . . and that curiosity itself feels better than the craving or the anxiety it produces.”

Another way to think about blindfulness is through the lens of neuroscience. Dr. Judson Brewer, the Director of Research and Innovation at Brown University’s Mindfulness Center, and the author of Unwinding Anxiety, has studied consumptive habit loops in the brain. We tend to engage in licensing because of the short term gratification of scrolling on Instagram or engaging in a salacious vice. According to Brewer’s research, bringing awareness to this habit loop is the first step toward seeing it clearly, and seeing how unrewarding such behaviors are in the long run. Mindfulness can become what he terms the “bigger, better offer.” As he explained to me, cultivating this openness can help us recognize that licensing is a pitfall rather than a productive pursuit.

“We can get curious about that craving,” explained Brewer, “and that curiosity itself feels better than the craving or the anxiety it produces. Because curiosity feels better, our brain starts to engage in that.” A rewiring can occur when our relationship with licensing behavior changes from indulgence to inquiry.

Avoiding blindfulness doesn’t involve going cold turkey on behaviors but seeing them clearly. It is not about establishing an internal police state through constant vigilance, and then guilting ourselves into being extra virtuous when we lapse. This only creates a division: good/bad, open/closed, mindful/blindful. Mindfulness is not a state but an action, a cultivation of openness, again and again in each moment. Blindfulness occurs when we believe we have achieved this state, our task completed. Mindfulness occurs when we humbly accept that the activity is ongoing and the choice to practice is always available.

The post ‘Blindfulness’: How to Avoid Moral and Attentional Licensing  appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.