What can Mindfulness Meditation do for you?

One of the arms of the Buddhist Eightfold Path is "Right View."  There are many meanings to this, but one that I find under-utilized is the idea that when we set out on the path, it is useful to have a "view" to where we are going.  It's like looking at the map before we set out.  It's also useful once you've been on the path for a while, because then you can take stock of where you've been.  In this context, I want to consider some ways of thinking about what the goals of Mindfulness Meditation are.

Broadly speaking, there are two styles of meditation practice - Familiarizing and Cultivating.  Mindfulness meditation focuses primarily on the first of these.

It is important to start the journey by familiarizing yourself with your mind and emotions.  How can you change or improve something until you understand how it works?  If my car isn't running smoothly, just wishing for it to work won't help. Buying new seat covers or putting an inspirational CD in the CD player won't make it run more smoothly.  By knowing how the car works, we can focus our efforts to the place that can actually make a difference.  Similarly, we need clarity about our circumstances and ourselves to be able to make a difference, but often when things aren't going the way we want, we get caught up in blaming and feeling that it "shouldn't be this way," and then we make a bigger mess.

Mindfulness meditation starts us on the path to understanding how our minds work.  As we gain familiarity, it also begins to cultivate three properties: Tranquility, Stability, and Clarity.

Tranquility is often one of the goals people explicitly have when they begin meditating - they want to slow the mind down and have some sense of peacefulness or stress reduction.  It is worth noting that people often also have the belief that the goal is to stop thinking.  This is not correct.  The mind will always think - that's what it does.   The goal is to not be so hooked by the thoughts.

As we slow the thoughts down, we begin to be better at focusing our attention intentionally rather than being so easily distracted by the next thought.  This increased stability is sometimes called one-pointed focus.

As we gain stability and tranquility, we also begin to gain some clarity by seeing deeper into our true natures.

The classic analogy in Buddhism is if you scoop a glass of water out of a muddy river, it is undrinkable at first. There is too much sediment floating around in it, and no amount of effort will change that. You can't get the mud to settle out by shaking it hard or trying to force it to the bottom. Instead, if you let it sit quietly, the impurities will slowly settle to the bottom of the glass, leaving the water tranquil and clear.

The goal of meditation, therefore, is not to get rid of thoughts, but instead (1) to understand how our thoughts are constantly changing, impermanent, and empty, (2) to stop believing them as if they are "true," and (3) to stop believing that your thoughts are you.  These realizations lessen the control that your thoughts have over you, and opens up the way that you can begin to change.

Another way we can think about Mindfulness Meditation is that the focus is always on being present.  But what do we mean by that?

There are at least three different aspects of "being present" in Buddhist practice.  The most basic and stereotypical is a heightened state of focus.  You can test this by staring at an object or space on the wall. You may notice as you focus on it that the rest of the room may darken, blur, or get wiggly.  This one-pointed focus is ironically equally a rejection of all other things that are also present.  You can, however, learn to focus on the target yet also notice all of the things in the periphery, noticing the full environment. Therefore, heightened focus doesn't necessarily have to just be about one object (such as the breath), although it's often beneficial to start here.

The second way of being present is noticing a heightened vividness, vibrancy, clarity, and specificity of your experience.  I notice this most clearly doing walking meditations, where I am astounded by the colors, the vividness, and the detail that exists in the world.  Each leaf and blade of grass is distinct and clear and interesting.

The third way of being present is focusing on the Karmic momentum of each moment and being present in the "gap."  Ethan Nichtern describes this as "where the past is creating a tremendous momentum of feeling and impulse, but we haven't yet figured out how we're going to react to it....it's the awkward vulnerability between impulse and action."  That is, based on all of our past conditioning and all of the present causes and provocations and emotions, we experience some feeling.  We usually react to these feelings with habitual responses, but what if we didn't?  What if we instead were present with feeling the momentum of the moment?  (This is the gap between steps 7 and 8, or between 8 and 9 of the 12 Nidanas for those of you who want to be Buddhist geeks.)

So these are three more aspects we gain from Mindfulness Meditation.

What takes our mindfulness away?  Strong emotions and habits -- the momentum of the past and all of our conditioning and the present causes.  As discussed in a previous post, we tend to react to each new stimulus with either grasping, pushing it away, or ignoring it.  These are the Three Poisons of greed, aggression, and ignorance.  Every time we act based on one of these feelings, we strengthen our habitual responses, so we can no longer see the gap between feeling and our habitual reaction to the feeling.

Once triggered, emotions have strong energy.  One technique that Buddhism teaches to help us deal with these emotions is that of antidotes.  For each of the afflictive emotions, there is a series of things one can meditate on to counter them (see here, for example). Note that the core assumption underlying this approach is one of change.  We are trying to break the powerful link of our habits.

Once we have achieved some level of tranquility, stability, and clarity, we can begin to work with our minds and our habit energies, but Mindfulness Meditation isn't really designed to change them.

We usually enter a spiritual pathway and practice in order to change something about ourselves.  We want to reduce our suffering, to find ease in the midst of turmoil, to be of more benefit to others, etc.  Yet, Mindfulness Meditation doesn't get us too far down that path, but it's the first step on the path. Other meditation techniques focus specifically on changing our habitual responses.

But there's a paradox present here.  We know that we're really just a quivering mess.  We don't want to be a quivering mess.  But to be the kind of person we wish we were, we have to stop being a quivering mess.  But since we are such a mess, we're not the kind of person we want to be.  So how can we break out of this conundrum?  The way out is to practice capacities that you already have, such as compassion, joy, and love.

This moves us into the next style of meditation technique - those that focus on cultivating rather than familiarizing.  We use these techniques to help grow something that already exists in us.  The next post will begin to examine meditation techniques on what are called the Brahma-viharas, or the four heavenly abodes.


These thoughts adapted from talks given by Ethan Nichtern and Alan Watts, among others.  Image sources: Here, here, here, and here.

Our Endless Cycle of Hope and Fear - The Second Noble Truth

In the last post, we discussed how we tend to have a pervasive feeling that things are unsatisfactory, stressful, or just not quite enough, and that even getting what we want often ironically increases this feeling.  Why do we have this feeling (dukkha)?

The Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta states that the origin of stress and suffering is "craving."  The Pali word used here is tanha, which can be also defined as a demanding desire or thirst.  This is distinct from chanda, a desire to do, which can be beneficial.  This statement that craving/thirst/desire is the root of suffering is known in Buddhism as the Second Noble Truth.

This seems to make intuitive sense.  If we truly don't worry about something, it doesn't cause much suffering.  But what does craving mean?  The Buddha said there are three types of craving.

1. Craving for sense pleasures
• Have you noticed how easily you can become bored with something, even something you really like?  Each of our six senses (sight, smell, touch, taste, hearing, and thinking) seems to like novelty.  We are attracted to things we haven't seen before, or are different from what is currently happening.
• Consider the sense of anxiety that many of us have that makes us check our email or text messages constantly, needing something new to see, hear, etc.
• The funny thing about this is that we believe that by following this desire for the next sense pleasure we will attain happiness, but it never works for long and the pattern never ends (this is one defining characteristic of samsara, the wheel of suffering).  But if you aren't grateful for and content with what you already have, what makes you think that having more will somehow change that?
2. Craving for existence - craving to be
• We have a desire to be stable, solid, permanent, and ongoing - we want to feel like we matter
• We want to believe that we have a past and a future
• We have a desire to compete, prevail, and ultimately dominate
3. Craving for non-existence
• We often spend a lot of time wishing (craving) for bad feelings, annoying people, and difficult situations to go away
• We want to be separate from painful experiences
• We don't want to experience the world in all of its rawness

Summing these up, it seems to me that we basically get stuck in an endless cycle of hope and fear.

One way of considering this cycle of hope and fear is the idea of the Eight Worldly Concerns, also called the Eight Worldly Dharmas or Eight Worldy Winds (Yes, Buddhists LOVE to make numbered lists of things!).  The idea is that we are constantly engaged in seeking something and avoiding something in this group of four pairs:

• Pleasure or pain
  
• Loss or gain
• Disgrace or fame
• Praise or blame

We clearly prefer one of these and not the other on our treadmill of hope and fear, constantly running from one of each pair and toward the other.  The problem is that no matter which of these 8 concerns arises, it is temporary and usually not particularly important in the course of our lives, so why do we make such a big deal to ourselves about them?  (To read what Buddha said about these and the difference between ordinary and enlightened approaches to them, read the Lokavipatti Sutta.)

But this is only part of the issue.  Although it is fairly easy to notice in ourselves how most of our planning and rumination about what just happened to us is linked to one of these eight concerns, these only focus on our personal motivations:  What we believe is happening to ME.  But we are actually concerned about far more than ourselves.  We care about what happens to others.  We care about what happens to our things.  We care about what happens to the planet.  We are not solely focused on these 8 worldly concerns - these are an outgrowth of a more basic human tendency called the Three Poisons (I told you Buddhists love lists).

The Three Poisons are how we almost automatically and immediately have one of three possible reactions to any and everything that arises in our experience - we are either attracted to it, repelled by it, or don't care about it.  This is true about people, situations, our sensations, and even our own feelings and thoughts.  In the Titthiya Sutta, Buddha describes the reasons why these occur.  The three are translated into different English words by different translators, so I have given a couple below to give a more complete sense of their flavor.

The Three Poisons

1. Attachment or passion
• Buddha notes that the cause of attachment/passion is the "theme of the attractive," and that it "carries little blame and is slow to fade."  That is, when we are attracted to something or someone, when we want it, we see only its good qualities.  We become unbalanced. The object of our passion carries little blame - we can't see the bad qualities.  We also believe ourselves to be be blameless in the pursuit of our beloved object, believing that the ends of getting our goal justify our means.  Because it is slow to fade, we will work very hard to achieve our goal of getting what we want.
2. Aversion or aggression
   
• Buddha notes that the cause of aversion/aggression is the "theme of irritation," and that it "carries great blame and is quick to fade."  That is, when we get irritated or annoyed by something or someone, we see only the bad qualities.  We again become unbalanced.  The person we are annoyed with carries great blame - we only see the bad qualities and the damage that they allegedly did.  We do not see how we were part of the problem, and we strike out in anger or frustration.  Once we have decided that the other is to blame, or once we have retaliated, we often feel somewhat satisfied, and the aggression fades until it is prompted again.
3. Ignorance or delusion
• Buddha notes that the cause of ignorance/delusion is "inappropriate attention," and that it "carries great blame and is slow to fade."  That is, when we think something is uninteresting, boring, or we honestly just don't know or care about it, it is because we really haven't yet tried to understand it.  The Greek roots of "ignorance" mean very literally "to not know."  We ignore the people and objects that don't seem immediately important to us, which can cause us to fail to act appropriately to get the most benefit out of the situation.  We ourselves are solely to blame for not paying sufficient attention, and we are slow to realize that we should take more care.

It is a good exercise when meditating to notice that almost every arising thought and feeling has one of the three poisons attached to it.  When planning something, we're grasping after trying to control something in the future - we are attached to the idea of trying to achieve some outcome.  When remembering some annoyance, we bring up feelings of aggression or we think about how we can work to avoid the person/situation in the future, or what unkind thing we "should" have said.  When we think of something that we don't really have a feeling about, we could approach it with a feeling of curiosity to try to understand it better, but we usually don't.  We even attach these feelings to our emotions, trying to avoid emotions we dislike and seek ones we like better.

Ultimately, in the Buddhist perspective, this grasping after certain outcomes, wishing to avoid others, and ignoring other possibilities is what causes our suffering and stress.  This is good news.  Knowing why we feel such discomfort in our own lives gives us something to work with to reduce it.  And we can reduce it - we can break out of this endless cycle of hope and fear (knowing this is the Third Noble Truth, which we'll discuss next).