Worried? Read on!

Last week I had jury duty, so I made sure my calendar was clear in case I had to serve on a longish trial. It turned out that I didn't. But it gave me the opportunity to see how it felt to have a clear calendar, and wow, I have to say, it felt very very pleasant.

That sense of ease and openness made me realize that in my inner landscape of mental activity, future events are sometimes like black holes that suck up a lot of energy. This goes beyond simple planning. Long after the planning is done, the mind might be drawn into that black hole, circling around the anticipated event -- a trip, a social gathering or something like jury duty -- pretty much anything that has unknown elements, which is everything in the future, isn't it? Being a woman, charged full of oxytocin, the 'bonding hormone', I also expend a lot of mental energy worrying about the well being of my loved ones.

Sound familiar? Well, don't worry about it. It's part of the human condition. Over 2600 years ago, the Buddha identified worry as one of the Five Hindrances (Sensual Desire, Aversion, Restlessness & Worry, Sloth & Torpor, and Doubt). Maybe for you, one of the other Hindrances is more a presence in your life. Most of us have all of them to varying degrees. But why did he call them 'hindrances'? What are they hindrances to? They can get in the way of opening to and receiving this moment fully. This doesn't mean we have to get rid of these hindrances. Good luck with that! But we benefit by noticing them when they arise in our awareness, seeing them for what they are. Simply noticing them in a spacious compassionate way weakens their power to hold us.

I have written about all the hindrances in the past, and you are welcome to check out those posts, but let's stay with worry for now. You can see how worry gets in the way of being fully present. The mind is stuck circling that black hole of future event or the black hole of what someone we love is experiencing, and it keeps going there even when there is absolutely nothing more we can do about it now.

When we meditate, we are practicing making ourselves fully available to the sensations of this moment. With openness to whatever arises in our experience and compassion for ourselves when we find we've gotten lost in thought, we return our attention to the breath or other physical sensation. In that moment we come to understand the way of things: We see that there is impermanence, so we know that this too shall pass. We see that we are all of a piece here, made of the same microscopic stuff as the air we breath the earth we walk on and each other. And we see how when we forget those two things - impermanence and no-separate self -- we suffer because we get caught up in grasping at lifesavers and clinging to cliffs, shoring up barriers, chasing after empty promises and running away from imagined monsters. All of which takes a whole lot of mental energy.

So worry if you will, but be aware of the quality of worrying. Don't make an enemy of worry, but see it for what it is. Be compassionate with whatever arises. There's nothing wrong here.

Yesterday Will and I went on a hike on Hoo-Koo-e-Koo trail up in the hills of Kentfield, CA. Most of the trail is fairly level, following the contours of the mountain, in and out of canyons. In normal years there is at least a little waterfall running down each canyon, but now in early fall, after four years of drought, even the deepest cool dark canyon is dry. Standing there, surrounded by hillsides of bay trees, ferns and dried leaves and the boulders normally covered with a cascade, we stood still to listen to the absolute silence. The stillness I experienced there is akin to the stillness deep in a meditation. So peaceful. Accepting the moment as it is, not wishing the water was running; not worrying, in that moment, about whether there will be rain in our future: That is what we are learning to do with our practice.

Thoughts & emotions in meditation, continuing the Anapanasati Sutta

In our continuing exploration of the Anapanasati Sutta, the Buddha's teaching on mindfulness of the breath, we now come to the third Tetrad, the Mind Group. Here we bring our friendly focused attention to the whole of the mind, which includes the heart in this tradition so that we notice both thoughts and emotions as they pass through our spacious field of awareness.

The second step of this group instructs us to 'gladden the mind'. This is not an instruction to put on a happy face. It is asking us to notice and in that noticing appreciate this joyous state of being fully alive and aware. It knocks us out of the temporal reactivity of our normal state and allows us to sense into the quality of infinite being. The Sutta doesn't use those words, just 'gladden the mind' but see where it takes you.

The third step instructs us to steady the mind, bringing some balance into the mix. We're not floating off into ecstasy. We want to develop states that are functional, that end suffering in our daily lives, not just a temporary escape from our personal challenges.

The last step of this tetrad instructs us to 'liberate the mind'. This isn't freeing the mind to run amuk. This is liberation from mindlessness, from assumptions not based in fact, from auto-pilot, and from habitual thinking. If you remember our investigation of the Hindrances in the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, at this stage you can really observe them in action: the clinging, aversion, restlessness, worry, torpor, sloth and doubt.

Deepening in this practice of following the breath and noticing the mental processes, we can begin to see the tenacity with which we hold onto lifelong habits, patterns and processes. We notice the activation of judgment, justification and argument, as well as various emotions that fuel aversion and desire to do anything but simply be with what is in this moment.

But if we can expand our spacious field of awareness to hold all of those difficult thoughts and emotions, without acting on the desire to push them away, then we discover we can live with them in a kind of intimacy that is softening and illuminating. We see for ourselves the pain of attachment. Then with consistent compassionate attention we might see the superfluous nature of attachment. Then eventually, without effort beyond the wise effort of our sitting practice, quite naturally the attachment softens and perhaps dissolve.  

This kind of liberation of the mind leads to awakening and a deepening of wisdom. It is a willingness to be present with whatever arises and see it with a clarity, and a willingness to question everything. 'Is this true? How do I know this is true?'

Next week we will complete this brief look at the Anapanasati Sutta.

Gravitational Pull and the Five Hindrances

Meditation is the practice of being present in this moment, becoming more skillful in how we relate to our experience and becoming more compassionate with ourselves and others. With practice we develop mindfulness throughout the day. With mindfulness we are able to notice the nature of the thoughts that pass through our field of awareness. I have begun to notice how sometimes these thoughts have a gravitational pull, drawn to a certain future event, like the treat I've promised myself later in the day or a concern I have about whether the layover on an upcoming trip is long enough for us to catch our next plane. Or the pull might be toward something that happened in the past, something I'm still feeling emotional ripples from experiencing, or something I'm figuring out how I might have handled differently with better results.

That sense of gravitational pull makes these small future or past events feel like the center of my mental universe. They are where my mind is drawn if I’m not busy with something else. 

Have you noticed any gravitational thoughts -- events in the past or future that hold your attention? Maybe it’s the dread of some chore, the daydream of some future situation, anticipating or longing for pleasure, questioning whether you are up to the task you set out to do, or maybe your thoughts are more muddled and you just want to sleep. Each of these kinds of thoughts can be categorized in what the Buddha called the Hindrances: Sense Desire, Aversion, Restlessness & Worry, Sloth & Torpor, and Doubt. [Read more about the Five Hindrances.]

Being able to identify the nature of our thoughts in these categories hones mindfulness skills. It reminds us that our thoughts are not ‘ours’ but natural byproducts of the universal nature of thinking mind. This depersonalizes our investigation, making it feel safer. Many people avoid this kind of inner exploration because they fear discovering something awful that will make them feel even worse about themselves. These five hindrances are not labels to brand ourselves. To have a slothful thought does not make me a lazy person. To have a lustful thought does not make me a slut. If we understand that the thoughts are not personal and do not define us, then it makes the idea of mindfulness and inner investigation much less scary.

‘The Five Hindrances’ is one of the Buddha’s useful lists found in the Four Foundations of Mindfulness. This one identifies mental obstacles to awakening to the present moment.  Noticing the nature of our thought patterns brings them into the light, creates spaciousness with which we can take wise action in regard to the thought.

For example, since I found that I kept worrying about that short layover, I was able to determine that the wise action was to call the airlines and discuss whether I needed to change one of the flights. Having made the change, that worry has dissolved and therefore has no gravitational pull. I am able to be present in this moment with whatever is happening here and now. Yay! If I didn't pay attention and had not identified the thought that was causing my discomfort, I would have carried it with me for days.

Sound familiar? Stop, close your eyes, anchor your awareness in physical sensation for a moment, and then notice your thoughts as they pass through your field of awareness. Is there a recurring thought that comes up for you? Maybe it is so powerful it is draws you in and you find yourself caught up in a tangle of story.

Once you have identified the thought that has you in its gravitational pull, ask yourself:

• Does this thought pull you into the past or the future?
• If it’s in the past, would you say it is mostly regret or nostalgia? Is there a strong emotional content? Is there anger? Is there shame?
• If it’s in the future, would you say it’s mostly worry, dread, excitement, restlessness?
• Notice how the thought feels in your body. Is there tension? Is there an ache in the chest? Does all the energy drain from your body?
• Notice what associated emotions, memories and images arise. Bring that past experience into your spacious compassionate field of awareness where you can see it clearly. Keep breathing, stay present, be kind. If judgments arise, notice them too. Replenish the field with as much spaciousness and compassion as you can muster. Release all expectations. (If what you come upon is so extremely painful that you don’t feel you can continue on your own, find a skilled therapist who knows how to walk you through the process of this kind of self-investigation.)
• If you are worried about something, what is a skillful action you can do to address or alleviate your concerns? For example, if you are dreading some overwhelming chore, you might break it down into incremental bits and allot an hour a day to it.
• Is there a wall you come up against, some lack of information or a sense of self-doubt, for example? Noticing what is needed opens the door to being able to get the information or alleviate the doubt, either by developing the skills necessary, finding someone else who has those skills to help with the task at hand, or confirming that you indeed can do this.
  
• If there is nothing in your power to do about it, or it is not your problem to solve but you're still concerned, you can always send metta, infinite loving-kindness, to the person or situation. Sometimes this is the best we can do, and it is actually quite a lot to do!

To see the nature of thoughts and emotions is the gift of the practice of meditation. More and more we are able to live mindfully. Seeing how these thought patterns fall into the categories the Buddha delineated 2600 years ago certainly depersonalizes them.  When we understand this is a universal experience of being human, it is much less intimidating to face our fears, to see them for what they are, and to use this understanding to further bring mindfulness to our current struggles so that we can alleviate suffering. But remember that to strive to get beyond hindrances is just another hindrance (aversion). Striving is not the way. We do this practice with wise balanced effort. All that is necessary is to have the paired intentions to be present in this moment, anchored in physical sensation, and to be compassionate with ourselves and others when we discover that we (or they) haven’t been present at all.

And why aren’t we present? Because some thought or emotion is holding us in its gravitational orbit, pulling us in like a black hole. Wake up!

It’s a Jungle In There! Coming into Healthy Relationship with Our Minds

Continuing with our focus on the Third Foundation of Mindfulness... 
Imagine ‘pleasant’ ‘unpleasant and ‘neutral’ as seeds scattered in the garden of our minds. If we leave them to their own devices, if we are not mindful of them, they root and grow into a jungle of thoughts and emotions made up of desire, greed, aversion, hatred and delusion. We get entangled in the vines and feel trapped. We are so entwined we can’t see sky, can’t feel the ground beneath our feet, can’t imagine anything beyond this strangling-vine existence that we take to be who we are. We are lost deep in the jungle, and this is normal for most of us.

When we meditate, we develop the skill of mindfulness. This is a radiant quality that sheds light infinitely in all directions. This light allows us to use all our senses to become fully aware of this moment and our current experience. We can feel the earth beneath our feet, see the sky and feel the rain. In this state of awareness, we see the tangle for what it is -- not us! Not who we are. Just a jungle of thought and emotion that now has more and more space between the trunks and vines so we can explore mindfully.

At this point, we might develop an aversion to the jungle. We might think meditation is our ticket outta-here. But that is just planting another ‘unpleasant’ seed that grows quickly into a tangle of aversion. 

So we look at those seeds more carefully. When we notice ‘unpleasant’ arising in our experience in response to some cause or condition, before it can turn into a full-blown angry rant that twists us so tight we cannot breath, we shed the light of awareness on it and the seed, exposed, dries out and dissolves. 

Next we notice ‘pleasant’ arising, and before it grows into a kudzu vine of craving more of this pleasant experience, we shine our full light of awareness on it. We find we can be with a sense of pleasant without being taken over by desire for more and more and more of it.

Shedding the full light of awareness is what the Buddha did as he sat under the Bodhi tree confronted again and again with all manner of ‘pleasant’ and ‘unpleasant’ thoughts and emotions that could easily have gotten him entangled, and surely had in the past. But his purpose was clear: To stay mindful, to stay present, and to see the manifestations that taunted and tempted him for what they were. In this skillful way, he was able to see the causes of suffering.

When we are entangled in the jungle of thought and emotion, thinking ourselves kings or queens of this jungle, claiming it proudly as our own -- while in reality we are as much its victim as a bug caught in a spider’s web -- then we are suffering. We might not be aware that our entrapment and attachment to that entrapment is the cause of our suffering, but with mindfulness we see it clearly for what it is.

Now in this same garden of our existence there are also seeds that are pleasant, unpleasant and neutral that thrive in the full light of mindfulness, that root and grow in ways that are beneficial. There is the pleasantness of sitting and knowing we are sitting. If we can simply allow that pleasant seed to grow into a dedication to practice, it will bear the fruit of pure joy and wisdom. There is the unpleasantness of forgetting to do our meditation practice, and with the light of awareness it will grow to remind us that mindfulness requires dedication to practice. 

There is the pleasantness that comes with being kind and generous, and there is the unpleasantness that comes from having said or done something hurtful. Both of these seeds, when noticed, inform us in a way that we become more skillful in our words and actions, bring more joy into the world and into ourselves. 

There is the neutral of noticing all aspects of a situation, not ignoring things that might make us uncomfortable or don’t support our argument to which we may be very attached.

It is important not to embellish this jungle analogy with chores beyond what is prescribed by the Foundations of Mindfulness. Shedding compassionate radiant light is all we need to do. We do not need to weed, eradicate, dig or spray toxic chemicals in the jungle-like garden of our mind, and doing so would be counterproductive. We are not doing a makeover! Whatever changes happen arise naturally as a result of our paired intentions to be present in this moment, and to be compassionate with ourselves when we discover we have not been present at all.

In class students said that this analogy helped them to visualize the way thoughts and emotions work. Does it help you? I’m always happy to read your comments or answer any questions. Just click on ‘comments & questions’ below.

Third Foundation of Mindfulness - Awareness of Mental Phenomena

Last week we discussed the Second Foundation of Mindfulness and in class we practiced noting whether a current experience was ‘pleasant, unpleasant and neutral.’ The homework was to continue noting throughout the week, in meditation and in life. This noting is in addition to anchoring awareness in physical sensation. That is our foremost practice. All other practices within The Four Foundations of Mindfulness are done in conjunction with the First Foundation.

The practice of noting sets the stage for the Third Foundation of Mindfulness, the awareness of the arising and falling away of mental phenomena -- thoughts and emotions.

It is surprising to me, looking through my translation of the original instruction for the Third Foundation of Mindfulness in the Satipatthana, to see how short it is. For us in the modern era, the exploration of thoughts and emotions seems such a huge topic, almost insurmountably complex -- as if all life is lived in the realm of thought and emotion. That is because we are steeped within the thoughts, so enmeshed in them that we can’t see them clearly. Yet we take all our cues for our speech and behavior from these thoughts and emotions that have us caught up in their tidal pull. 

What the Buddha taught is a practice that enables us to swim in the ocean of thoughts and emotions, fully aware of the nature of waves and tides. We can stop struggling, thrashing about, thinking we are drowning, and begin floating, enjoying ourselves and swim. Or surf!

My friend Mary Wagstaff, after years of dedicated study of Buddhism, at the age of 50 took up surfing. Being on the ocean gave her the insights that had been eluding her in her studies. Nature’s like that. So smart and instructive if only we would pay attention! Her years of practice and instruction taught her to pay that kind of attention. Mary’s still surfing and was featured in ‘O’ Magazine as an inspiration and illustration of ‘no limits.’

What we are learning in this Third Foundation is how to apply the skills we have developed in the first and second foundations to the way that thoughts and emotions arise, transform into other thoughts and emotions. To use another nature analogy, we watch them like we might watch clouds form and transform as they drift across the sky.

In this practice, the thoughts and emotions are simply phenomena for us to notice. We can see how the Second Foundation’s ‘pleasant’ or ‘unpleasant’ experience transforms into a multiplicity of reaction thoughts and emotions right before our eyes. The unpleasant experience quickly turns to aversion, to a thought of how to change the scene or situation, that might then turn just as quickly into a judgment of ourselves for not being able to stick with the assignment, and then we launch into a reminder that we are supposed to be compassionate, and then maybe a story about how we don’t deserve compassion. And on and on. You know the drill!

Key to seeing clearly the constant unfolding of thoughts and emotions is quieting down. This is why an extended silent retreat is so valuable for developing this mindfulness practice. But we can give ourselves the gift of silence also in our daily lives. We can turn off the radio, television, cell phone, computer. We can give ourselves permission to be unplugged for a while so that we can plug into the universal wisdom that is right here and now, whenever we are ready to pay attention.

Through this awareness we are liberated from being strangled by the tangle of thoughts and emotions. We neither run from them, push them away or chase after them. We allow them to exist, noting the arc of their arising and falling away within the field of our awareness. (In this blog you will find many dharma talk posts on the subject of thoughts and emotions. If you would like to read more, you’ll see the links listed under 'Labels' when you scroll down in the column on the right.)

We are not our thoughts
As we unplug from the busy world and plug into universal wisdom of the here and now, we also come to understand that all these thoughts and feelings do not define us. Just as we notice the physical sensation of hot or cold without identifying it as who we are, we can notice the arising and falling away of thoughts and emotions without any sense that they define us.

They are just the universal ocean of thought and emotion. They are not who we are. They do not make us more or less special, unique, weird or despicable. This is a great relief for most of us! We take responsibility for our actions and speech, but our thoughts and  emotions, just like our dreams, are of a different nature. We are neither their masters nor their victims. When we notice them, we can take a much wider view and hold the whole process in an easeful way. By doing so the contents of our thoughts and emotions will settle down.

If you balk at the statement ‘We are not our thoughts,’ you are not alone. In any given meditation circle there might be one student brave enough to say, ‘Hey, that’s not my experience. I am my thoughts!’ That student is probably saying what at least some of the others are thinking as well.

There is nothing a teacher can say that will change their minds. This is an insight that arises out of the experience of meditation practice. But a teacher can give guidance to create conditions where such an insight might arise. So in response to that statement in our meditation circle, I led the group in my ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’ letting go exercise. Several requested I send them a copy and wrote me back to say they found it helpful, so I include the link here.

Why does it matter whether we believe ourselves to be our thoughts and emotions or not?

First, if we believe ourselves to be our thoughts and emotions, we are too enmeshed in them to see the habituated patterns that keep us in bondage, where we are tossed about at the whim of our thoughts and emotions. A more liberated view comes only when we recognize that thoughts and emotions arise and fall away as part of a process -- like breathing. The mind processes thoughts and emotions in the same way the lungs process air.

Second, if we think we are our beliefs, opinions, etc. then we can’t safely examine them or question them. We might find something too awful, too shameful. After all we are ‘stuck’ with ourselves for the course of this lifetime. Why would we want to find out that we are basically rotten at the core? This belief that we are our thoughts and emotions, that we are the accumulation of our experiences and personality traits, makes us rigid and fearful. We develop strong attachments to this idea of self because we carefully seal off our intrinsic awareness of our beingness at a deeper level, the way in which we are not separate from all of life in a sack of skin that is our sole dominion. We fill our lives with busy noisy goings-on, afraid that peace and quiet would open a door we would rather keep shut. But my students would not be attending class and you would not be reading this post, if some deeper sense of knowing wasn’t present. Trust in that inner wisdom.

If a sense of deep connection is difficult, practice metta, sending loving kindness. Remember that we have two paired intentions: to be present, anchored in sensation and to be compassionate with ourselves and others. They work together and create a balance. One fuels the other. So if you find yourself struggling with a concept, let go of the concept and send metta to all beings. To the cashier, to the careless driver, to the texting teen, to the man muttering to himself on the street corner, to the politician who blundered, to the person you love most in the world, to the person who represents all that is evil to you, to the earth itself and all its inhabitants. May they be well. May they be happy. May they be at ease. May they be at peace.

Sending metta calms the heart and attunes us to the unitive nature of our being in a way that thinking cannot.

From this state of kindness and connection we can see that clinging to a sense of separate self means living in a disconnected way where we feel we have something to fear, something to hide and something to prove -- that we are ‘good enough’ in whatever form that takes. When we live from that kind of motivation, our life is a misery. The lives of those around us are made more miserable as well. We live in a state of dysfunction, prickly or cloying, always working from some agenda that can never be met. This is what the Buddha called suffering. This is what he spent his lifetime developing practices to alleviate, including, and perhaps most especially the practices of The Four Foundations of Mindfulness.

When we sit or walk in silence, hearts and minds open, we offer a large container for the ocean of thoughts and emotions to show us its tides and wave patterns, and to eventually quiet down. Even if it doesn’t quiet down, it is seen with greater clarity.

So this is the practice, to give an attentive dispassionate awareness to thought and emotion, just as we do to physical sensation, just as we do to noticing the pleasant, unpleasant and neutral experience. And by doing so, we come fully into the present moment.

The simplest instruction for meditation is to sit and know that you are sitting. The Third Foundation of Mindfulness is to recognize thoughts and emotions. To think and know that you are thinking. We can name the kind of thought or emotion that arises. Judging, planning, worrying, anger, longing, etc. This gives us an activity that short-circuits the story the mind wants to tell. The story gets started and as soon as we recognize it we can name it ‘planning’ (or whatever) and we are back in full awareness, anchored in physical sensation.

Add this technique into your meditation practice if you are ready to do so. Notice the tendency to judge the thought, to judge the wandering mind, and name it ‘judging.’

Here is a poem I wrote about the wandering mind that might help to bring more compassion to your own wanderer.

Prodigal Mind

When my mind
returns to the breath
there is such a sense
of homecoming
such a celebration of
this most perfect union

that I would not be surprised
if the invitations were sent out
the band hired
and the cake decorated

were there only enough time
before my wayward mind
sets off to wandering again.

- Stephanie Noble

Eightfold Path: Spacious Effort

Imagine a bird soaring in the sky, held aloft by the air currents. Spacious effort is like that. Out of a sense of connection with all that is, we are held aloft, so that we are not alone and solely responsible to carry the weight of the world upon our shoulders or push a boulder uphill over and over like Sisyphus. We can instead be like sailors who know the tides and the ways of the winds, and with a slight shift of the rudder and choice of sails, align with the already existing energy of the universe to do whatever needs to be done.

How does this play out on dry land? Through the Spacious Intention to be present, to sense in to the energy of the universe as it courses through our own bodies, we can come into Spacious View, seeing the interconnection, feeling the support of that vibrant web of life.

Although this would not be the traditional way of explaining right or wise effort*, and actually seems more akin to the Taoist term Wu Wei**, it still feels accurate to me to describe Spacious Effort as aligning with and feeling supported by the infinite energy of which we are made and that breathes through us. From this sense of connection and support, our effort will be fruitful, sincere and well-received.

But how often does that happen? For most of us accessing and riding the infinite energy of the universe seems like a fantasy. The world we live in is full of challenges, difficulties and obstacles to be overcome, and it certainly seems that none of it will happen without serious effort on our part. Even as I say this I can feel the locking down of my muscles, the clamping of my jaw, the clenching of my heart and the overloading of my brain. It’s true, I cry, it’s true. Life is hard and I sometimes have a hard time coping.

Life is a challenge! Any given life at any given time has a set of responsibilities that can be daunting to contemplate. Perhaps we really do feel as if we are carrying the world on our shoulders up a steep incline with no summit in sight. Or maybe we feel like a waiter with too many plates to carry and too many hungry diners making excessive demands. Perhaps you’re thinking, “Well, wouldn’t it be great to have a sailboat to ‘align with the universe! Wouldn’t that be just dandy! But that’s not how life is. Give me a break.”

Okay, okay. Reality check! But here’s the reality: Most of what we are dealing with on a daily basis is not reality, but perception.

Whatever seems true in our lives right now is a mirage, as much a lie as what we see when we look in the mirror. Think about it: What we see in the mirror is flipped horizontally, only the front of our body, probably cropped, fixed in an unusual stationary moment, and distorted by our filters of selective perception. That false mirror distortion of our body actually mirrors how it is in our lives as well.

Think about your own to-do list. Think about the people who depend on you. Think about your fears of what will happen if you don’t fulfill your obligations. Bring everything to mind, everything you can think of.

Now sense in to your body. Notice any tension that may have escalated just that quickly. Feel the clamping down. This is the adrenaline of fear coursing through us. Most of us live in this constant bath of adrenaline, putting strain on our bodies and minds.

Now focus on your breath. Breathe in the generous infinite air that surrounds us. Allow the breath to ease the tightness of muscles, soften the heart and open the mind. Allow yourself to be held in this spacious presence of sensing in.

Sensing in, we relax. Sensing in, we become aware of what is true in this present moment. Sensing in we find reality, beyond the mirage of our perceptions.

When we access the moment, we bring ourselves into alignment with the ever present infinite energy that is a simple factual scientific truth, not something requiring belief. There is nothing woo-woo about it, as we discussed when studying Spacious View.

(I admit I am finding that this word ‘spacious’ does seem to have some quasi-magical incantation quality. I find saying to myself ‘spacious mind, spacious heart, spacious life’ gives me access to a calm centered place where I can remember that I am just one of six billion people on the planet and it’s not all up to me. I have had feedback from some of you that the word spacious has the same effect on you!)

Whatever challenge we are facing, being grounded in spacious awareness allows us to meet the challenge. There is a quality of release and letting go in spaciousness. For those of us who find we are tense and determined to accomplish goals, to get something right, to become the best we can be, we can begin to question the value of our exertions. ‘What is it I hope to accomplish? Are my efforts effective? If I feel tense, is my tension serving me or sabotaging me? When have I exerted effort and felt joy in the exertion?’

Let’s play a little with this last question. Perhaps you remember a physical activity like swimming where the pure pleasure of the strokes and the sensation of the water against your skin brought you more fully into the moment, and you felt alive, awake and joyful. This was an experience of Spacious Effort. Sensing in, you felt the joy of using your muscles, and hopefully, sensing in you knew when your body was ready to stop, and you did, rather than forcing some over-efforting thought control onto what was a joyous and healthy experience. Studies now show that forcing ourselves to do exercise that we don’t enjoy actually adds so much stress that it negates any health benefit.

Connecting to the isness of being is plugging into creative energy as well. I remember when I used to write advertising copy, whenever a co-worker and I brainstormed together and laughed until our jaws ached in the creative process, the resulting ads were the best work either of us every did. Quality results arise from joy and a unitive state of ease! A worker in a factory who stays fully present in the moment and honors the work being done as almost a ritual and a gift offered in joy will also produce a finer product than a worker who is tensed, afraid of making a mistake, or sluggish, grumpy or daydreaming, potentially causing harm to the product, themselves and others. We’ll discuss that more when we get to Spacious Livelihood, but you can see the nature of Spacious Effort in these two work examples.

Unskillful effort comes from not being fully here and in this moment. With over-efforting, mostly likely we have a goal, an expectation or a desire that keeps us feeling locked out of the moment, stuck in some future moment of triumph, accomplishment or relief. How often do we keep ourselves slogging away with mental visions of a hot shower, a cool drink or a cozy bed? We are avoiding being present because of discomfort, when it would be more skillful to honor the moment, pay attention to our bodies’ cues, take a break from the activity, have a sip of water, a change of pace, and sense in to the sensations of the moment before proceeding. Slogging away is a sure way to end up falling down on a hike or making errors in our work. Spacious Effort honors the body’s cues and responds with compassion.

With under-efforting, we have some inner conversation that is making such a convincing argument that we can’t seem to get off the couch to do what needs to be done. Spacious Effort brings us into the moment, into noticing the inner conversation and compassionately working with the inner messages we hear.

Before we start really listening we might think of our thoughts as a monolog, as ‘our’ thoughts, an expression of our true selves. But when we begin to listen more closely with spaciousness and compassion, we begin to see that it’s not a monolog but a dialog. There’s the voice that says ‘I want….” and another voice that questions the veracity of that statement. The more we pay attention, the more voices we begin to notice, until we see that our thoughts are more of a symphony of various component parts. Now this is not a case of split personality. It’s just the nature of thought. Thoughts are drawn from all over the place throughout the course of our lives. When we meditate and give ourselves space to explore, we can begin to see the source of some of our thoughts. Maybe we believe something about ourselves because someone in high school said something hurtful. We incorporated it into our thinking and haven’t bothered to question it since. Giving our minds space, and noticing, we can see the associative images and memories that fuel these thoughts. Once we see them, sometimes they simply vanish because the source revealed is so obviously unreliable we can no longer believe it. But most often this noticing is just the beginning of a very sweet process of inner exploration.

An effective way of working with all these messages is to begin to notice their variations of voice and tone, and begin to assign them pet names that have something of the nature of their general message, so that we recognize them more easily when the message arises in our minds. In this way we can say, ‘Ah, yes, I know you,’ just as the Buddha recognized Mara in all its guises as he sat under the Bodhi tree.

Here’s an example: Many years ago when I had a problem getting myself to exert some effort to exercise, I noticed the inner aspect of myself that hated exercise and loved bed and, once identified, I gave it the pet name ‘Slug’ to help me notice when those kinds of thoughts arose, and to give me a way to address this aspect in an inner dialog.

Slug told me that he loved bed because it was like a big mommy hug, and he missed his mommy. This was in the early 1990’s. My mother had died in 1989 and I had not taken sufficient time to honor her passing and to honor my grief.

Being compassionate toward an inner aspect, it is possible to negotiate a way to meet its needs without sabotaging my own. Because Slug missed his mommy, I decided it might work to attend the yoga class of a friend who was the same age as my mother and who at the end of class when we would lie on the floor in shavasana (corpse) pose, would come around with blankets and lovingly tuck each of us in. Well, needless to say Slug was in heaven with this motherly treatment, and I could begin to rediscover the joy of stretching and moving my body. Eventually I was able to add other forms of exercise without Slug complaining.

You can see how the Spacious Intention that we discussed last week is so important here. The intention to be present allows us to be aware of thoughts that push too hard or sabotage our efforts. Our intention to be compassionate enables us to explore in a loving way the roots of our over or under efforting.

We can notice if we are tense, frantic, frenzied, or sluggish, lethargic, exhausted. Spacious Effort will feel calm, balanced, infused with an enthusiasm that is whole- hearted and centered. We will feel both at ease and alert.

We can notice what is sabotaging our ability to exert Spacious Effort. Noticing the quality of our effort gives us valuable information as to how we feel about the project at hand and how we feel about ourselves. If we are trying too hard, who are we trying to please? What goal are we trying to reach? Why is it so important to us? If we are feeling sluggish and resistant, what is it that we are resisting? What aspect of self is telling a story here? And what is the story being told? There are many questions that can lead to rich exploration. But we can only begin the journey if we first notice what’s happening.

Over-efforting often has to do with people pleasing which has to do with seeing ourselves as the objects of others’ views rather than the subject of our own lives. I talk about this a lot in my book ‘Tapping the Wisdom Within.’ It is not something that I have ever heard addressed in my years as a student of Buddhism. I think it might be more of (though not exclusively) a ‘girl thing.’ The Buddha probably didn’t have this issue so didn’t think to address it. But it is epidemic among girls and women in our culture. Think about how we are objectified, how important our packaging is and how effectively advertisers work our fear of not being the most desirable object. We get stuck trying to be what we imagine others want us to be, whether it’s pretty, smart, funny, efficient, capable, etc. We imagine that if we are not all these things we will not be lovable and we will be alone.

Our fear of separation drives us out of balance. We have no center. And when we have no center we can’t connect with others because we’re not where they expect us to be. They try to get to know us, but we are too busy trying to figure out what would make them like us to let them in! We are imagining how they see us and making constant adjustments.

I certainly had this object-orientation for the first forty or so years of my life. It wasn’t until I was flat on my back with a nine-month illness that I was able to quiet down enough to see what was happening. I spent that nine months meditating and taking notes on the insights that arose. The subject versus object issue was high on the list of topics of concern. And over that time I began to get to know myself, my own preferences, my own opinions, my own feelings. It was fascinating to discover them, to discover myself without the until-then all-important feedback of others.

The over-efforting that was a part of my having seen myself as object rather than subject of my own life led to my illness. It is very stressful to always be trying to figure out what others want from you and how to please them! So part of my healing was coming back to center, coming back to acknowledging that the only person I can be is me, even if everyone dumps me. But what happened was quite the opposite. When I was well enough to socialize, my simply being myself instead of the person I thought people wanted me to be actually improved all my relationships. I was who I was and they could find me where they expected to find me and understand me in a way that they couldn’t before, back when I was a shape-shifting blob of desire to please them.

So over-efforting and under-efforting are clearly unskillful, landing us in states that are even more unpleasant than the one we are trying to escape through under-efforting or over-efforting!

What do you notice for yourself about effort? What stories drive you or keep you from bothering? Take on this valuable exploration, a gift of the Eightfold Path. In the coming weeks notice where you over-effort and where you under-effort. Notice it in the areas of work, relationships, food and exercise, or any place else. Begin to notice the thoughts that are the source of what drives you or undermines you. This is the beginning of coming into clarity, balance and Spacious Effort.

To read more about this subject, check out the post on Right Effort from our first go round exploring the Eightfold Path in 2009.

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* ‘avoiding unhealthy mind states, abandoning unhealthy mind states once they have arisen, moving the mind to healthy mind states, and maintaining the mind on healthy mind states that have already arisen.’

Now I imagine that the majority of the Buddha’s students were younger men, and I understand that getting a guy to stop thinking about sex would be a huge challenge. Also with all that testosterone, perhaps the challenge is also to stop fantasizing about acting out anger through violence. But my students are mostly mature women. For most of us this is not our challenge. We have other challenges, which I address in a way that feels more useful to me. If of course, any of you do have runaway thoughts of sex and violence, then that is what you will be noticing and questioning.

The Buddha always encouraged questioning the veracity of any statement. I don’t question that inclining the mind toward healthy states is useful, but I believe most of my students have been attempting to focus on healthy mind states most of their lives and don’t need my reminder to do so. The duality of healthy vs. unhealthy thoughts seems more likely to keep us in the ongoing inner battle rather than shifting our focus to the spacious interconnection that has room for it all, even the errant negative thoughts that are clues that are more useful being respectfully questioned rather than suppressed.

** Wu wei is the ‘action of non-action,’ when our actions are in alignment with the ebb and flow of the cycles of the natural world.

Noticing: Thoughts on the Beach

Walking on the ocean’s edge yesterday, I noticed huge clumps of kelp, all tangled like beached whales. This, I thought, is how thoughts are when they get tumbled in the rough storm of emotion.

The beach was so clear that even the delicate tide lines showed, even the impressions of tidal bubbles left lacey tracks. And I thought: This is like the meditative mind, so quiet that even the most subtle thoughts, emotions and sensations become clearly visible.

I looked at the interwoven smooth and salty surfaces of the maroon and ochre kelp, remembering how as a child I would take that bulbous length and run with it, whipping up the sand for the sheer joy and exuberance of such a vast expanse of space.

In some of the clumps were tangles of turquoise rope. I imagined the small boat from which it came, for this was not a shipboard purchase but the choice made in a boat shop where the color promised tropical sea sailing instead of the cold cruelty of the choppy Bay, Gate and Pacific Ocean. Nearby on the beach there was what looked to be a peach-colored oval stone, but when I picked it up it was light-weight, with four evenly spaced holes and a wedge cut the full length of both sides for line to slide, so I knew it to be nautical in nature. I suppose there are some sloppy sailors, but I noticed how images of some mid-ocean mishap arose within my mind.

There was a dark green plastic garbage can stranded on the beach, without wheels or lid. I noticed how this object launched a long involved fantasy beginning with imagining dragging it along, picking up the detritus of human life, leaving the shore devoid of all but footprints. But there seemed so much, and I thought how it’s a long way to April 22nd, so I imagined an ‘earth day every day’ party where we would don gloves and carry garbage bags to pick up the oil cans, the bottle caps and bags. And people would come to help and come for the tasty picnic part with rich conversation and camaraderie and leave feeling nourished in every way.

Together my husband Will and I imagined a lot of photos we might have taken had we remembered the camera – especially of the dune grasses thatched so decoratively against the russet cliffs in the distance. We framed potential paintings and planned to return, camera in hand, while knowing no moment can ever be recaptured, that the light would shift and the grasses would fade.

We watched, enchanted by the chubby little sanderlings racing on their tiny legs, chasing each receding wave as it exposed choice tidbits, with precious few seconds to poke, suck and swallow before rushing to escape the incoming flow that followed.

And now I share this experience with you, not in the hopes to take you there yesterday at the beach, though it would have been fun, but to offer up this example of a typical mind at work, and all the kinds of thoughts that traverse through it like the kelp through the storm, like the turquoise rope through the oval fitting, that now washed ashore whispers scary stories, like the plastic leavings and the thatched grasses calling up regrets, wishes and plans.

And the shore birds bringing attention back to this moment, as they need -- as we need -- every moment to be conscious.

So we become conscious of the thoughts that are just the tangled detritus of our nature. And if we find that we are caught in the tight tangle of thoughts, we can, through meditation and metta (loving kindness), give ourselves the spaciousness of the vast expanse of beautiful beach that is contained in our every breath, our every awareness of physical sensation.

The thoughts do not disappear. We simply see them in the context of how the brain functions, a part of the experience of being alive in human form. By broadening our spacious awareness through practice we make room for all of life. And this making room for what is arising in this moment is the key to finding joy and relieving suffering.

But how do we practice it? During meditation we practice opening into the silence, releasing tension, setting intention, and paying compassionate attention to a sensory experience – the breath, the sounds in the room, etc.

What about after we open our eyes? I would like to encourage a continuing of this kind of awareness practice even after the meditation is over. The meditation shows us what’s possible, but if we treat it as a getaway vacation instead of instruction for living our lives, we are peeling the apple, tossing away the most nutritious part.

The most nutritious part of meditation comes outside of formal practice when we continue to maintain a level of awareness. Meditation is training us to be present, but if we don’t practice being present in every moment, then what is the training for?

In our post-meditation discussion this week we did this. And it is something you can do on your own, with friends or in a meditation group.

We adjust our bodies to be relaxed but alert. We stay present with the rising and falling of the breath or other sensory focus, even as we listen to each other, even as we notice our thoughts, our judgments, or questions, our feelings. And in our discussions we actively practice using our language in a way that helps us to continue to recognize the nature of our thoughts. Instead of stating our opinions or facts, we can actually say, “I notice that when you say ________ a judging thought comes up for me, or a question comes up for me, or tension arises in my body, or a feeling of ______ comes up.” Now this is by nature a slow and maybe at times awkward structure, BUT it is a way for us to intensify our practice and bring it into the rest of our lives where it might serve us well.

This process is at once deeply personal yet universal. The thoughts we each have are not our thoughts. They are just the nature of thoughts, and we all experience them as they pass through, given a wide variety of factors, causes and conditions. Perhaps some system of thoughts gets stuck in a holding pattern, like the eddy of a stream where branches get stuck, and it easy to think of them as ours because we become so familiar with them we begin to define ourselves by their existence. But there is no thought that defines who we are. Knowing this frees us to greet thoughts with curiosity and loving kindness, neither grasping them nor pushing them away.

So try this exercise of speaking from your most conscious spacious awareness, bringing to light with loving kindness the process of your thoughts.

Enjoy the spacious beach-ocean-sky of the human mind, including all the thought forms that pass through it!

What keeps us from knowing our Buddha Nature?

Central to Buddhism is the understanding that there is no place to get to, that enlightenment is not some distant place, but lives ever present within us. This sense of presence is called our Buddha Nature. It is our inherent loving-kindness, our spacious mind that knows we are each expressions of a whole rather than the separate individuals we habitually believe ourselves to be.

This Buddha Nature may be a treasure we have yet to recognize, hidden in plain sight but camouflaged by our habitual patterns of seeing. But have no doubt! It is there, shining within us, a light of incredible brilliance that, when discovered, illuminates our experience, clarifying our understanding and dissolving the tangle of fear-based roots that has kept us feeling tethered, weighed down and out of kilter.

We have been studying the Third Noble Truth that promises that we can know and even live fully from this Buddha Nature. Our practice is to make ourselves available to this Buddha Nature by being as present in this moment as we can. We relax into the moment, for it is in this ‘here, now and fully-relaxed’ state that the inherent Buddha Nature makes itself known.

It seems simple enough to do this. The instructions are clear. Yet often, sitting after sitting we come away feeling as if we have waded through a bog of mental mud! We begin to doubt if we are capable of finding clear spacious open-heartedness or even a little precious peacefulness where we can momentarily rest our weary minds. We begin to worry that we are the only person in the world who doesn’t actually have Buddha Nature.

This is absolutely normal. There are so many ways our habitual mind sabotages our intention to access our Buddha Nature. We know that habits die hard. I remember when my mother finally quit smoking after her doctor told her she had emphysema. She told me that it wasn’t the addiction that was so difficult; it was her inability to imagine who she would be without a cigarette in her hand. In her mind, smoking made her more sophisticated, intelligent and glamorous. Without that little burning stick in hand, who would she be? After she quit, she was still just as vital, beautiful and exciting as she had ever been. And once the smoke cleared, she could see that that cigarette did not define her and had instead been hindering her from full enjoyment of life. But for so many years she had been too afraid to let go, to find that out; and that fear fostered the self-destructive behavior that killed her.

My mother’s experience illustrates how we cling more tightly than ever to our habits if they are entwined with our self-image. So if, for example, we like to think we are practical and not susceptible to any woo-woo nonsense, then we create a strong resistance even to something that offers us the possibility of a happier life.

This is not to say we should abandon good judgment and fall for every feel-good scheme that gets marketed to us! Quite the opposite! Instead, we need to become aware of our OWN inner wisdom. When we are disconnected from it, if we are honest we can feel that disconnect. During a period many years ago when I was ‘too busy’ to meditate or even to give myself much-needed alone time, I remember saying to a co-worker, “I feel totally separate from myself.”

This was a potentially pivotal moments in my life. Had I heeded the words coming out of my mouth instead of just finding them amusing, I might have saved myself and those I love a lot of subsequent suffering. (Often the wisest words are words we say ourselves, and just as often we don’t listen to them. It really pays to notice what advice we are giving others. It’s often for us as well.)

But I didn’t pay attention to my words of caution. Instead I continued my grueling schedule and ended up getting a serious chronic illness that incapacitated me, forcing me to leave my career, cutting our family income in half. Had I heeded my own words, I might have been able to make a milder and less painful course correction.

I began to meditate again, and since there was little else I could do, I meditated as if I were on what turned out to be a nine month retreat. I had been so out of balance and then so ill that that level of intensity felt necessary. In this way, I came home to my own inner wisdom, my own Buddha Nature, not just in rare moments, but as a steady guiding light in my life. Eventually that inner wisdom diffused in such a way that I understood it was not some separate inner guru replete with personality, but simply a shift of perception, from a sense of separation to a sense of connection.

These habits of mind we all have are deeply rooted in this disorienting belief that we are separate and isolated beings encased in envelopes of skin. I say ‘disorienting’ because at some level we know it is not true, so we have angst and restlessness, as we look all over for the things in the world that will make us feel connected. When everything fails to satisfy this deep longing, we feel steeped in fear that expresses itself in all manner of negative emotions and results in suffering, for ourselves and those around us.

As we meditate, we practice developing the mental muscles of setting clear intention to be present with whatever arises in our experience. We practice relaxing our muscles and letting our bones support our bodies. And we develop a sense of compassion so that we can meet our distracted minds with kindness rather than our habitual harangue. With steady practice we begin to find more spaciousness, and more clarity to notice habitual mental and emotional patterns. With compassionate curious attention, these patterns soften and may even dissolve.

The briefest glimpse into this spaciousness can be sufficient to begin the unraveling of these old fear-based habits. Buddha Nature is timeless, and therefore, once known, once perceived, is always available. Years ago there was a popular activity of staring at a visual puzzle, where an image was hidden within a complex pattern. People would stare and stare at this puzzle. Some would become frustrated and give up. Some would see it quickly. With others it took time, but by relaxing and keeping their vision refreshed, they finally saw it. But everyone who saw it couldn’t later un-see it. The image would always be there. This is also true of Buddha Nature. Once you know it, you can never un-know it. You may ignore it, but you will never again be unable to sense it if you open to it.

Since we are creatures of habit, we can set the intention to develop new healthy mental habits – habits of noticing, habits of being aware of sensation, habits of compassionately observing our mind at work. This is a very effective way to prepare ourselves for whatever shift in consciousness that might arise out of repeatedly making ourselves available.

Allowing for the possibility, making ourselves available – these are good ways of thinking about how this shift of awareness happens. They remind us that this is an opening to what already is, rather than a search for something hidden elsewhere. It’s more like tuning our instrument to play harmoniously. Perhaps we are currently strung too tight and so are playing a sharp instead of a natural. Or perhaps we’re strung too loose, sluggish in our energy, foggy in our thinking, sleepy in our meditation, so we need to focus on refining, clarifying and brightening our concentration. This is not done by hunkering down, gritting our teeth or bracing ourselves, but through opening to the energy that is ever-present. We can draw it into our being, feel its strength and healing power, and let it rise up to express itself through us.

As we open, allowing for the natural shift to a more fluid connected state that is always available, we can see that in this state the old habits of fear that we thought were serving to protect us serve no purpose. Their efforts only exacerbated negative situations, escalated arguments and confrontations, and cut us off from healthy interaction.

The idea of retiring our emotional weaponry sounds nice, but what if we are feeling stuck in fear? What if we are fearful of the ideas presented here? First, let’s remember that none of this is new news but draws from the well of universal wisdom that is at the core of all world religions and spiritual traditions. And, if religion scares us, we can find the same wisdom in the latest scientific findings.

Secondly, it’s valuable to recognize that all of these habits of mind are striving for our survival as best they can. They are trying to protect us from a perceived harm. So it is just another fear-based habit of mind to feel threatened by the habits themselves. It is more useful to see them as misguided allies.

I have occasionally referred to working with the various aspects or voices we discover as we really listen to our thinking mind. I have found in my own experience the value of inquiring into the specific desires and concerns of these aspects, and then compassionately negotiating a way for the aspects needs to be met without undermining my well being.

You may recall the story of my inner aspect ‘Slug’ and his resistance to exercise. He loved bed. Bed was for him a big mommy hug, and he missed his mommy. Well, of course, I missed my mommy too as she had died a few years before this encounter. But I knew my mother wouldn’t want me lollygagging in bed anymore than my own inner wisdom did, so I found a yoga class with a teacher about my mother’s age and who, at the end of class, as we students were lying on the floor in shivasana pose, would come to each of us with a blanket and tuck us in. Well, of course Slug LOVED this yoga class. And that’s how I was able to negotiate getting some much-needed exercise.

But as useful as it can be to work with aspects of self in this inter-personal way, giving them cute nicknames and personalities to encourage compassion in our dealings, there are many other ways to view these complex inter-workings of our mind.

These habits of mind are caught up in a view that is totally relative. Through the lens of these habits steeped in fear, we see things from an embedded perspective, like a journalist embedded in a military operation. We see a very intense, very personal, but very one-sided view of things. And it is so intense -- this living a life -- that we completely buy into it being the whole truth. But all the while we are stuck in this perspective that is vested in maintaining this singular point of view, as if we have pledged allegiance to it and must defend it, or are employed as its public relations representative.

We are not! We are free agents! We are free to walk about and observe with fresh eyes and see for ourselves what is true and what is not. How much of what we hold to be true have we really questioned or examined?

I was so taken years ago when I heard about a listening project in the Southern US, where trained volunteers visited homes and simply listened to the inhabitants express their views of the world. They were trained to notice when they made statements that seemed rote, as if accepted long ago and not examined since. And they knew how to probe, encouraging deeper self-reflection, so that on their own the interviewees began to see the flaws in their own arguments, and through further exploration, using their own good sense, they found they didn’t buy into the pre-packaged hateful things they had so readily spouted just an hour before. In this way the listening project did not promote another view; it just provided the space for exploration.

And this is what we do. We provide space and a willingness to notice and question our standing operating procedures, our pre-packaged beliefs, our previously unquestioned inheritance of values and ideas. We see where we may be holding two opposing beliefs at the same time and have never stopped to question them. No one else can do this inner work for us. We may be inspired by what others say, but the experience of questioning is an ongoing inside job.

For some this idea might at first feel very threatening. Our inherited beliefs may seem comforting, something to hang onto in a dangerous world. They may seem like the one way we do feel connected to something. And it may be true that at core they do offer that entrance to a sense of connection, but unexamined, accepted as truth without exploration, they are about as powerful as a baby’s security blanket.

Opening to the possibility that these habits of mind -- these negative emotions, judgments and discomforting thoughts -- are not personal but universal, helps us to feel safe in our exploration. Understanding that most of us look at the world from a particular mindset -- not from our deepest and truest nature -- helps us to let go of the need to defend our position.

How refreshing and relaxing it is to realize that these habits of mind are not traits that define us, but common patterns that course through us, shaping our thoughts and our behavior. These patterns are like the readily visible patterns in that visual puzzle mentioned earlier, before we see the image that is hidden in plain sight.

Insight meditation is the practice of noticing these patterns of mind, actively observing in a spacious way. If we notice when we are getting caught up in them and pause to breathe more spaciousness into our noticing, and then look with fresh eyes in a more relaxed way, we can begin to see something else emerging.

These relative mindsets we have believed to be our true selves all these many years, do not define us any more than my mother’s cigarette defined her. As we make that distinction and begin to see that we are not these habits of mind, then we can open ourselves more easily to the possibility of allowing them to pass through our current experience without feeling we have to rise up and do battle with them. In time we see that bringing spaciousness into our relationship with them gives us the ability to see them more clearly, to see all the thoughts, emotions and image associations that give us deeper understanding. Eventually, with that shift into seeing from our inherent Buddha Nature perspective, these habits lose their sense of purpose. With their need to protect us gone, they can dissolve quite naturally.

So what keeps us from knowing our Buddha Nature? Believing that our habits of mind --our endless thought stream, and our ocean of emotion -- define us. As we let go of our clinging to this sense of separate self we become available for the revelation of the absolute reality of oneness with all that is that patiently waits within us. This is our Buddha Nature.

Freedom from Struggle

We have been framing the conversation over the past weeks in terms of freedom. A sense of freedom is one of the many benefits of a regular practice of meditation. But I am aware that talking about these freedoms could easily set up expectation about what we should be feeling when we meditate or how our lives should be because we meditate. It is not my intention to ‘sell’ anyone on meditation by promising a multitude of benefits. Instead I want to keep reminding my students, my blog followers and myself to simply stay present with our own experience as it arises with an open embrace.

Have you noticed how when you try to be a ‘really good’ meditator, you end up miserable and disappointed? We create terrible stories about ourselves and our situation that make a simple practice of sitting and being aware that we are sitting into a Herculean struggle. The struggle locks the door on accessing the spaciousness of mind that can arise from being here and now. It is like those Chinese woven straw finger puzzles that the harder you try to pull your fingers out, the more stuck you become. With the puzzle, as with meditation, calming down and relaxing releases us from the struggle.

These terrible stories we tell ourselves have many variation. One is that we have hopeless ‘monkey mind,’ as a friend of mine recently told me she had.

This idea that the mind should be thought-free sets us up for struggle. We tell our minds to be quiet and we get frustrated because the thoughts continue. It is not the thoughts that are causing the problem. It is the belief that the thoughts are unacceptable. It is believing that we, of all mediators, are the only ones whose mind wants to think.

I remember attending a daylong retreat at Spirit Rock years ago, and at one point at the end of the day the meditators were invited to comment and question the teachers. One meditator said that she was a psychic and she noted that there certainly was a lot of chatter going on in the gathered meditating minds. She said it as an accusation, like the iconic old schoolmarm scolding us bad children with our naughty thinking. I don’t remember the teachers particularly responding to her other than to nod sagely as teachers do. Yes, the thinking mind. Quite a lot of chatter, it’s true.

Does it help to know that a whole roomful of practiced meditators had chattering minds, according to our resident psychic? Yes, I think it does. We like to be normal. Thinking is normal. How could thinking not be normal? It’s what our brains were created to do!

But most of us see thinking during meditation as naughty, just as that woman did who sat in judgment of the rest of us. She might have held us all in tenderness and compassion, but instead she felt that we were the obstacle that kept her from being able to meditate, with our chattering minds. It was all our fault. How would her experience have been different if she had taken the opportunity to send metta (loving kindness) out to her fellow meditators. How would our experience of meditation be different if we sent a little compassion to that part of ourselves that sits in judgment? (Sending metta is a wonderful way to deal with any source of irritation or anything we deem as ‘other.’ It is usually our judgments that are our problem, not the ones being judged, so shifting into metta mode changes the whole experience. Try it and see if it doesn’t help the next time you find yourself impatient or irritated by someone’s behavior.)

Insight meditation is not about shutting down the mind, but opening as much as possible to whatever is arising in the moment. We open our field of awareness to be spacious enough for thoughts to come through without our attention getting carried away by them, getting lost in them. We are ever expanding the field of our awareness so even with thoughts floating through we are still fully present, fully aware of all the sensations in our body, our breath, the temperature on our skin, the sounds we hear – everything! – including these threads of thought and emotion that pass through the field. If we discover we have been caught up in a thought, that we have lost awareness of this moment, it’s not time to attack but to celebrate our sudden awareness of the moment. After all, not everyone has access to even this much awareness in their lives. So even this little bit of awareness is a rich gift to feel thankful for. And then, before we get caught up in self-congratulatory thinking or remembering, we simply check in with our bodies, releasing any tension, softening and expand our awareness so that we can make room for the thoughts that arise.

You know how when you see a cyclist straining excessively up a hill, you want to call out ‘Change gears! You don’t need to work that hard!’ Well, it’s the same with meditation and anything else in life really. If we notice we are struggling, striving, exerting painful amounts of energy to do whatever we are doing, we might consider whether there is another gear that might be more efficient and effective.

In meditation ‘switching gears’ is sensing in to the body, noticing that tense jaw, for example, and then breathing into it and letting go. The gears will shift. It is that simple.

The Buddha called this kind of noticing Wise Effort, which we discussed back when we studied the Noble Eightfold Path.

Ultimately, in the deepest awareness of this present moment, we come to know that there is nothing to struggle against, that just as with the finger puzzle, instead of struggling, relaxing into the truth of whatever is happening in this moment is what frees us. We let go of this idea of perfection and achievement, and dance with the one that brought us: This life, this body, this mind, this moment.

Freedom from ‘Our Story’ through Meditation

We talk about the lure of thoughts during meditation, but what about when we are not meditating: Don’t we have to go back to thinking? If we didn’t, how could we live in the world?

Vipassana or insight meditation is about staying present with what is in our current experience so that we develop the skill of being present in our daily lives as well. When we live our lives fully present, we discover how rich and satisfying it can be, so we are less likely to want to get lost in what we call ‘our story.’ Practicing this form of meditation where we simply ‘sit and know that we are sitting,’ as many Spirit Rock teachers say, we learn to differentiate between the thinking that is useful and necessary for living and the thinking that is keeping us from living fully.

‘Our story’ is all the thoughts we have about our lives, about the people in our lives, usually flavored with all our wants, fears and judgments. Since we were children this is the kind of thoughts we have had, just like everyone else in our culture. But these thoughts are neither nurturing nor fulfilling. We may get very emotionally stimulated as we have them, but ultimately they leave us feeling confused and somehow wounded. They do not bring about a joyful sense of ease. They only stir up our anxieties and our dissatisfaction with things as they are. Our story is very good at creating suffering.

You may well wonder how we could possibly be freed from our story when it is so very much a part of the fabric of who we perceive ourselves to be. And anyway we like our story. Even if it does make us miserable, it’s our story, thank you very much. We don’t want it taken away….Okay, we allow that thought to be present as we explore a little further. We can hold both because we have spacious minds!

Allow me to suggest that our attachment to ‘our story’ is as if we have been brought up exclusively on a diet of pre-packaged chemically-enhanced ultra-sweet sponge cake and we can’t figure out why we don’t feel well. We go about in a fog and we look for a way out, but it would never cross our minds to stop eating this food that is our cultural heritage, that is celebrated and venerated, that everyone we know eats as well. It would be outrageous to even consider. And yet, here we are in a fog, in misery at least part of the time. We never feel absolutely well, absolutely comfortable in our skins, absolutely at home in the world. We can’t even imagine what that would be like.

Our story is junk food for the mind. Meditation offers a wholesome diet comparable to organic vegetables and whole grains. Peace, quiet, tranquility, authenticity, groundedness, spaciousness, and awareness: These are the wholesome foods for our minds.

Just as if we had spent our lives eating only junk food, if we have spent out lives caught up fully in our story, and if our culture has fed our story with non-stop distractions in the form of news, gossip and advertisements, just for starters, then how could we imagine this presence of mind that meditation teachers talk about? It’s a dilemma that leaves the majority of the population stuck in their stories. They hear about meditation, about long retreats in silence, and they run screaming from the room. “I’d be bored out of my gourd! I need my radio, iPod, computer, television, phone, etc.”

But not you! You sensed something was missing on your plate. You felt that the junk-thought life style was not satisfying you. Even though maybe you weren’t sure what it was you were hungering for, you braved giving meditation a try to see if it had some nourishment for you. You turned off the technological distractions and sat for a while in silence.

Good choice! Of course, just like tasting broccoli for the first time, or switching from processed white bread to whole grain, it can take a while to develop a taste for it. Perhaps at first sitting practice feels weird. Perhaps we can’t concentrate. Perhaps we are uncomfortable. Perhaps we spend our whole sit convincing ourselves this is stupid.

But if we stay with it, the benefits will start making themselves known. As we notice that we feel more relaxed, more spacious, more generous, less angry, less anxious, and generally happier, we develop a taste for this more wholesome diet of mind.

Our story is still there but it is not our whole meal. And as we practice bringing our attention to the present moment and discover the riches available to us in that simple act of paying attention to what is, we find we are less and less dependent on our story.

So, what is our story and why is it junk food? Our story is first and foremost the things we believe to be true about ourselves, others and the world around us. Before we begin to meditate, often our story is pretty solid. We don’t just believe, we know what is true, what is right. We know it all.

But as we meditate, we begin to recognize that this hard fast knowing is something we have been clinging to, something that we felt made us safe. As we develop spaciousness of mind, we begin to feel a deeper sense of safety, not dependent on causes and conditions. We feel safe enough to begin to question some of our long held assumptions. We soften some of the hard knots of the tangle of story we have been caught up in for so long. The more spacious our minds become, the less tangled the story threads become. They don’t disappear, but we can see them for what they are. And we no longer cling to them. Eventually we recognize that the story is not a safety net but a heavy weight that has been keeping us from really living.

When in our daily lives we get caught up in story, when we gossip about others, when we are blindly bent on satisfying some craving, eventually we come back to the present moment. And we recognize the unpleasant residual sensations of having been entangled with story. As we get more practiced, we can notice sooner when we are caught up in story, perhaps at the moment we are beginning to act out our urge to binge or gossip or rage about the injustice of it all. We can see it, we can really hear what we are saying to ourselves (or others), we can question whether it is really true, we can notice the emotional tone and where we feel it in our body, we can see where it might have come from, we can see the fear that prompted it, and we can compassionately bring our new-found awareness to bear on the situation.

Now believing we can live a life free of story is, of course, just another story to get caught up in, one that makes us dissatisfied with the truth of our experience. So we develop a relationship with our story that is as compassionate as we can manage in this moment. We recognize story for what it is. We understand that we can still be attracted to the empty calorie promises it offers. We set our intention to be as skillful as we are able so that we are not forcing our story on others.

Many aha moments arise out of this noticing when we are caught up in our story. Perhaps we can soften our judgment enough to smile at the way we are so easily drawn in yet again. And we can rejoice in awareness that offers us the freedom to let go of our story. Again and again.

As I mentioned in the last post about the lure of thoughts, it is that moment of release from delusion, from being so caught up in our story, that is really pivotal. Suddenly we have freedom and choice. At this point it is good to remember to focus on one of the many sense anchors to the present moment we have available to us: rubbing the texture of cloth on our clothes, sensing our breath, really looking at the light and shadow, shapes, colors and textures of the world around us, hearing whatever ambient sound there is – whatever works, to bring us as fully as possible into the present moment. I am at this very moment feeling the smooth texture of the computer keys under my fingers.

Why is this present moment freedom and our story is not?
Our story is based on the belief that we are separate. Our story runs on the finite, depletable, polluting energy of fear. Check out for yourself if this is true. Notice your stories. Question what is driving them.

Many of our stories begin with the words “If only…”: “If only I had more time,” “If only I wasn’t so….,” “If only he wasn’t so…,” “If only the world wasn’t so…,” “If only I were – fill in the blank: richer, thinner, smarter, more compassionate, etc.” This ‘if only’ is a stick to beat ourselves up. It is a violence we do to ourselves and others, and is based purely on fear.

If we truly felt ourselves to be deeply connected to all that is, then the stories would fall away. What on earth would we wish for that we don’t already have in some part of our vastly extended self, the self not defined by I, me, mine? When we have this sense of joy for the fullness of life through our connection, we experience mudita, happiness for the happiness of others, because there is no ‘other’. All joy is all of our joy.

It’s easy for us to hear this kind of talk and immediately start another story. “If only I could sense my connection to all that is, if only I could feel happiness for the happiness of others because there is no other! Then I’d be happy!”

Yes, we continually deal with our stories. But as we become aware of them, we come out of the fog of them, out of that tight tangle woven by the thought threads that make up these seemingly ironclad tales that we have held to be truth for so long. Then we can see them simply as story, and allow ourselves to be curious, to explore the nature of the tales we tell ourselves. We can question the validity of our stories in a way that we couldn’t when we believed we were our stories. It was too threatening to our existence to question them then. But as we begin to get an inkling of an understanding of the vast expansiveness of our being, we may be willing to let go of our dependence on our stories. And that is freedom.

So then what are necessary thoughts?
In our daily lives we have the thoughts that are necessary in that moment in order to take care of any responsibilities we may have. If we are on retreat and we have only the responsibility to get to the zafu when the bell rings, to set our intention to be mindful, to do our daily yogi job with full mindfulness, to eat mindfully, etc., then there are very few thoughts that are necessary. This gives us a great opportunity to see our story more clearly. Because we cannot pretend it is necessary in this moment to solve past, future or distant problems.

In our daily lives obviously we have more responsibilities. We have the care of our bodies, our home, our relationships and our financial stability to think about. But how many of our thoughts directed to these responsibilities are useful? How many are like wholesome fresh vegetable thoughts that nourish and how many are an old smelly stew we keep churning and churning? If we are paying attention we can tell the difference.

It is helpful to identify when you want to think actively about something. Set aside a period of time to plan a trip, solve a problem, or find a job, for example, and really focus on doing all that is required. Do the research, make lists. Have a thinking period that actually moves your plan forward. Otherwise it’s just a daydream story. Much of our story is really just procrastination thoughts, giving ourselves excuses about why we aren’t making that dentist appointment, fixing that broken toilet, writing that report, etc. We go around and around in our heads about it so many times, over and over, you’d think we’d get dizzy! Actual doing something about it takes up much less thinking space! As one of my students aptly put it, “You know you’re going to have to do it at some point, so just get on with it.”

With relationships you may find that thinking about them is not nearly so useful as you might have believed. In fact, most relationships would be much improved with less thinking and more being fully present, really listening, really appreciating each other, and responding from a deep heartfelt sensing in to the truth for us in this moment. Not dragging in all that old story!

This discerning between what is story and what is necessary thought arises out of the regular practice of meditation. It is not something you have to add to your to do list. It is just something you might notice in your own practice. If you don’t notice it, don’t worry. Just know that your practice itself is the door to freedom.