What is Mindfulness of Breath When You Can't Breathe?

Warning – I describe in some graphic detail the recuperation from a surgery.

I wake up slowly in the recovery room, blood beginning to drain from my nose.  The next 36 hours will become an intriguing study of mindfulness, compassion, self-pity, and watching mind’s neurotic habits.  First thing I notice – I’m not blind.  They said there was 5% chance of blindness from this operation.  That did not seem like a small and comforting number to me.

It started about six months ago – I noticed that my lower left sinus cavity was beginning to feel blocked.  Three different courses of antibiotics over three months didn’t help.  The CAT scan showed that there was no space left in my left sinuses.  There were many nights where I became completely congested and couldn’t breathe, or could only with very strenuous pulling.  Doing mindfulness of breath meditation when one can’t breathe gives a new appreciation for it. 

I often liken mindfulness of breath meditation to working out with very heavy weights.  If you want to build muscle quickly, you do as many repetitions as you can with the heaviest weight you can.  Mindfulness of breath is like the heavy weight, precisely because it is boring as hell.  The breath is with us so constantly and effortlessly that it is very difficult to maintain attention on it.  This makes it easy to drop, and once dropped, easier to notice that we’ve lost focus.  This is why we don’t call watching television “meditating” – it takes no effort. 

When simple breathing takes effort, however, then meditating on it gets much easier.  It stops being boring when you feel like your lungs will never get the oxygen they need.  It stops being boring when you can’t sleep because you can’t breathe.

The surgery was supposed to fix all this.  Unfortunately, by 5 hours after the operation the packing they had inserted into my sinuses has filled with blood completely closing off all air.  This makes swallowing impossible, as the suction needed to swallow creates tremendous pressure and pain in my sinus cavity.  I stop eating and drinking.  It hurts too much and I seem to be immune to the high-powered pain medicine they gave me.

I arrange the easy chair to try to sleep while allowing draining.  The problem is that although I can breathe a little from one nostril when awake, as soon as I fall asleep and relax the soft palate at the back of the throat, it closes down what little air passage I have and I wake up because I can’t breathe.  This means that I sleep in one-second intervals all night.  I do a lot of meditating on the breath, or lack thereof.

What is more annoying, however, is watching what my mind does.  Rather than simply note what is, it pays attention to every little change that seems worse and makes me worry.  Any time things ease up, it ignores that.  I have been told that I should take my narcotics before getting the packing removed the next day because the process is so painful.  Thinking of that keeps me awake.  I keep changing the blood-soaked bandages under my nose, not being particularly grateful that one side is clearly getting better.  By 4 am I am draining so little that I believe I can transfer from the chair to a bed.  I’ve never been able to sleep sitting up, so I am hopeful that I will finally get some of the sleep I desperately need.  Unfortunately, I still can’t breathe at all once I relax control over my throat.  I am not good at mouth breathing, and that seems especially unpleasant given that I had a tube stuck down my throat for the three-hour surgery.  So I continue to drift between daydreaming, resting, and focusing on every tiny change, generously remembering to wake myself up with regular thoughts of not only how much the packing hurts now, but how much it will hurt to remove.  Doing tonglen does little to settle me.  Feeling grateful that I am privileged to have medical care of this quality helps more.

By the afternoon of the next day, I am getting seriously dehydrated because I still can’t swallow.  The pain is reduced but I’m pretty shaky.  Having the packing removed hurts less than I expect.  Nonetheless, the nurse kindly wipes the tears off of my cheek with gauze.  After all the cleaning out is complete, I can feel so much air going through my sinuses that it almost hurts.  I haven’t breathed like this in months.

Unfortunately, within minutes (really, only minutes!) I am already ignoring the breath.  Once it has become easy again, it disappeared.  No more am I aware that I am breathing in long, or short, or laboriously.  Mind is a fickle a**hole.  It is already off wondering whether the lab tests will come back next week showing cancer.

Image sources: HERE and HERE - This was first posted on the Interdependence Project blog.

Why every experience you have is 99% wrong

I sat outside on a lovely early summer morning. The sun played hide-and-seek with the clouds, who in turn were playing chase with the breezes. The garden had turned a rich green from the recent rains, and the strawberry flowers whispered of treats to come in a couple of weeks.  I set my meditation timer for 24 minutes, and set an intention to be aware of the arising and passing of sensations.

As the sun came out, I felt my skin warm.  As the breeze played tag, I felt my skin cool. Birds of many types sang from unseen places, although sometimes they passed before my eyes. A male and female cardinal eyed me suspiciously as they considered the bird feeder nearby. Their suspicion proved well-founded once they realized there was nothing in it.  The sound of cars arose and passed. I tasted my coffee, and savored the bitterness tempered by the teaspoon of sugar I had added. I noticed the heat of the coffee through the cup, and also saw the feeling of dislike arise as the heat felt like a threat.  I quickly put the cup down, but later picked it up again just trying to feel the arising of heat without judging it as aversive. I watched my thoughts sometimes follow my experiences, and sometimes lead them.

Perhaps this sounds like a "good" meditation session. What surprised me was the thing I called "my experience."  I was aware of each of these aspects of life's flow around and within me.  How disappointing.  I was aware of each of them.  One.  At.  A.  Time.

This thing we call our experience is only a tiny slice of what we are actually experiencing.  When noticing the breeze upon my skin, I wasn't also noticing the birds or the color of the grass.  In fact, I wasn't even noticing the breeze upon my skin - I only noticed it on certain parts of my skin where I focused my attention.  I was actually feeling it on my whole body, but only attended to how it cooled my legs or chest. Once it passed, I noticed the sound of some bird, but just that one - not all the other sounds, such as the wind in the trees, the myriad birds farther away, the sound of my heart beating, or the strawberries flowering. Tasting my coffee clouded all awareness of sights, sounds, feelings. Yet, all of these experiences were occurring at once.  Why do we believe experience is singular?

Attention is like a spotlight - it can focus on only one thing at a time. Worse still, it's a very narrow beam of light.  It can pick up only about 1% of what is happening at any given moment. To put it another way, that means that our understanding of what is occurring at any moment is 99% wrong! And still we persist in the belief that we are always right and know what's going on.

How would it be if we could truly experience the emptiness and multiplicity of experience, without the constant narrowing, labeling, and solidifying?

Singing the Song of Being

Beginning a mindfulness meditation practice is difficult.

You worry whether you’re doing it right.  You want to know what you’re getting into, but it’s hard to know what the benefits will be.  It is hard to know whether it’s worth the effort.  It often isn’t as relaxing as you imagined.  It’s hard to know how your path through the practice will be similar to anyone else’s.  It is perhaps because of these difficulties that many of the classical Buddhist teachings are in the form of similes, stories, and metaphors.  We can’t tell you exactly what will work for you or how to go about it, but we can hint at it.

One arm of the Eightfold Path that is particularly difficult to describe clearly is the one about Right Effort.  How much and what kind of effort is “right?” (I tend to prefer the terms “skillful” or “appropriate” rather than "right.")  The answer to this depends partly on your intended goal and the path you want to take to achieve it.  The classic story about skillful effort is from the Sona Sutta, about a monk named Sona who was trying too hard to achieve enlightenment.

According to the story, Sona had been practicing walking meditation so hard that his feet were bleeding and he became despondent and considered giving up his life as a monk.  To paraphrase, the Buddha knew that Sona had been a skilled vina player prior to being a monk (a vina or veena is an ancient Indian stringed instrument that is played by plucking it).  Buddha asked him, “when the strings of your vina were too taut, was your vina in tune and playable?" to which Sona answered “No.”  Buddha then asked him, “When the strings of your vina were too loose, was your vina in tune and playable?" to which Sona answered again “No.”  Buddha concluded by saying that in the same way, when we hold our minds too tightly we become restless, and when we hold them too loosely we become lazy.

Although this part of the story is fairly well-known, the sutra continues at some length.  Apparently this instruction was beneficial for Sona, because he figured out the right amount of effort and achieved enlightenment.  From this point on, however, the sutra gets weird (my opinion only).

Sona seeks out the Buddha apparently to show off how enlightened he is, and seems to brag about his achieving liberation and his dedication to only six things: “renunciation, seclusion, non-afflictiveness, the ending of craving, the ending of clinging/sustenance, and non-deludedness.” He continues by saying that having achieved this imperturbability, when his experience includes powerful forms, sounds, smells, tastes, feelings, and ideas, “his mind is neither overpowered nor even engaged” [emphasis added].

What strikes me as odd is that I doubt that these are the goals most modern American Buddhists have.  Some of them sound great – I’m all for ending ignorance/confusion, not being afflicted, and not being driven by cravings.  I even like the idea of being imperturbable when things get nutty.  Nonetheless, I don’t really want to be secluded from others or disengaged from my life and the powerful experiences that occur. I want to be deeply involved and moved by my experiences, without being controlled by them.

Perhaps this sutra is designed to be a model for those entering the priesthood and not for householders.  Perhaps it has lost (or gained) something in the translation.  Perhaps I am simply misunderstanding its deeper meaning, but maybe there’s another way to consider this story without it seeming so stark.

  

Instead of simply asking the question about what allows the string to be in tune and playable, what if we asked the question about how we can make music?  Even once the string is tuned properly there is no music.  If we simply hold the string we get no music.  If we space out and pay attention to something else we get no music.  It is only by a process of placing and releasing our fingers on the strings that they make a sound, and we must return constantly to the strings to play the next notes of the melody.  In a like manner, if we try to hold our minds or our breath too steadily, we are not allowing ourselves to breathe and feel naturally – to sing the song of our being.  If we space out and chase our thoughts, we similarly are not fully engaged in our lives.  It is only by constantly lightly touching our experience with awareness and returning it to mindfulness that we feel and sing the living song of our being.

_{Picture sources: Here and here.}

Were you free to make a choice you didn't know you had? Where free will begins.

In a previous post, I asked you to consider the example of someone insulting or offending us, we get angry and immediately think of things we would like to say or do in response.  What would our motivation be for saying or doing any of them? Although you could spin it in several directions, such as to clarify the others’ mistake, to defend yourself, to get back at him/her, to put the other in his place, to just hit him, etc., they actually have one thing in common – they are motivated by the feeling that they will make you happier if you do it. 

Now here’s the funny thing – if you were to examine the motivation behind why the other person said or did whatever it was that he did, it’s exactly the same reason.  He thought it would make him happier.  In this respect, you two are always on the same wavelength. So one way to work with the negative feelings is to recognize that there is no fundamental difference between either of your perspectives. The problem is that our perspective usually does not include the other’s perspective. 

Humans suck at seeing another’s perspective.  There are many reasons for it, but a lot of it is just how the human brain works.  There is a cognitive bias that is so basic to all human thought that it is called the Fundamental Attribution Error.  When someone does something, especially something annoying, we tend to attribute the causes to something internal and/or essential about that person - he is just a jerk. In contrast, when we do something that could be annoying, however, we tend to attribute the causes to external situations.  We had no other choice, or we're in a hurry.

It's interesting to note that to ourselves, we always have a “good” reason for why we are doing whatever selfish thing it is we’re doing.

The corollary to the fundamental attribution error is what might be called the fundamental self error – that we relate everything to ourselves as if everything is a personal affront or benefit. The other part of a fundamental self error is that we believe there is a fundamental self – something unchanging at the core that things happen to. If we’re a stable permanent thing, then any changes that occur are from the outside happening TO us. We get to pretend constantly that we’re the victim, even of our own feelings. For example, how often have you said, “That thing you did MADE me mad,” or “I fell in love with you because you’re so sweet?" We interpret even our own feelings as something that happened to us because of external circumstances.

The irony is that we take no responsibility for our own actions and reactions, but we call this freedom.

Wouldn’t true freedom be the ability to not feel controlled by the situations and our emotional reactions? Wouldn’t true freedom be the ability to see all the perspectives?  If we believe that free will is the ability to make our own choices, when our perspective is so narrow that we can’t even understand the choices available to us, how can we have any free will? Were you free to make a choice that you didn’t even know you had?

Psychologist Roy Baumeister said, “Self-control counts as a kind of freedom because it begins with not acting on every impulse. The simple brain acts whenever something triggers a response: A hungry creature sees food and eats it. The most recently evolved parts of the human brain have an extensive mechanism for overriding those impulses, which enables us to reject food when we’re hungry, whether it’s because we’re dieting, vegetarian, keeping kosher, or mistrustful of the food.” 

So freedom begins when we STOP acting, or at least slow down the reacting. This is also the first step to being open to seeing other perspectives.  As long as we continue to act in our habitual ways, getting into the same arguments over and over again, continuing to believe that we're right, we will never be free.

This is where meditation can be such valuable training. One technique that can help us begin to slow the automatic processes of reacting down is called Urge Surfing, which can be read about here and there is a nice short guided example available here.

Image sources: Here and here.

Cooling the Fire of Anger with Rain

Although humans like to believe that we’re rational cognitive creatures, we're actually fundamentally very emotional creatures. You might expect that we would be good with something that we have had experience with our whole lives. Yet one of the great ironies is that we are really pretty bad at relating to our own emotions, despite all this experience.

Unfortunately the process of socialization requires that we put artificial limits and layers of “should” all over our children’s emotions as they grow, so that by the time we are adults, we have very complex relationships with our emotions. So in this post, I’m going to describe an approach that can help us have a more honest and direct relationship with our emotions.  This is a technique that we can put into place immediately and right at the very moment that we’re having a difficult time with something.

 

It’s very easy for us to get caught up by our emotions, either by getting lost in our conceptions and story about what is going on, or by "amygdala hijack," where our emotions literally rule our behaviors without our having much freedom to direct the action.  Actually, in both of these scenarios we have very little freedom, as both our cognitive and emotional reactions tend to be conditioned by past experiences.  So how can we start opening up a door to let some new air in, or maybe even give us a new path to walk down?

When you first recognize that you are getting triggered or that you’re caught up in a cascade of thoughts, you can do the RAIN technique. 

Recognize – Pause long enough to recognize what you're feeling and label it (it may be more than one thing); Recognize the situation you’re in, the reactions you may be having, your habitual reactions, etc.

Allow - Accept that this is how it is right now, so there’s no reason to try to pretend otherwise. A complex history of causes and conditions have come together to get to this point, and it has momentum.  It is as it is, and fighting it will be wasted energy, so allow it to be for the moment.

Investigate - Investigate what and how you feel your emotional reaction in the body, what it brings up, where it comes from, what it makes you feel like you “should” do to change the situation, etc. What beliefs do you have? Investigate with an intimate and kind intention.  You are not trying to find where you made mistakes, but to understand what you believe you want or need, and how you experience that in your body.

Non-identification - This is the tricky one.  In one sense, it is a natural outgrowth of the first three, but it can also be enhanced with intention. We usually believe our thoughts and feelings are who we are, and that things are really happening to us - we usually take everything very personally. In fact, we are part of a much bigger fabric or things co-emerging. The situation is in constant motion, and we can step back and let things emerge without our feeling an immediate need to have to do something.  The goal is to separate what we are feeling from the sense of it being a personal attack - we are much more than just the bad feeling we're having right now. We are actually much more stable than this momentary feeling of instability. If we can find that point of balance in the middle of the swirl, we can see it for what it is without taking it as a personal attack.

The RAIN approach allows the situation to unfold with a little more space, where the habitual reactions can be slowed down and examined.  It can allow us to find the “gaps” between feeling and craving, and between craving and grasping (to put it in 12 Nidana terms).  There’s a freedom that is found when we discover the space that is available to us at all times, especially when it feels claustrophobic, like you’re about to be overwhelmed, or like you get stuck.


Image sources: Here, here, and here.

The Two Arrows

I've been thinking about how relationships, mindfulness, and meditation work.  All of them seem to share a striking characteristic.  When everyone is happy, they all seem to flow easily.  But when someone is feeling a strong emotion (e.g., anger, fear, jealousy, sadness), they all seem to get harder. This is perhaps one of the real benefits of working on mindfulness in a supportive group - it's not like we're leaving the world behind.  We bring it with us all the time.  Meditation offers us an opportunity to practice the hard things in a little simpler and safer way, so that then we can practice them in the "real" world more easily later.

So, this is one of the goals of mindfulness: to allow us to go through the ups and downs of daily life with a sense of ease, to gain clarity into what is actually happening so that we can act skillfully and thereby make problems better rather than adding fuel to the fire.  In this spirit, the next several posts will examine aspects of dealing with relationships skillfully, even when we're in the middle of a difficult emotion.

To start, consider this question: How often do we say “You did this to me!” when what we really mean is “I didn’t get what I wanted?"

There is a classic Buddhist parable of the two arrows. In brief, the idea is that most people, when hurt, add to the hurt. If shot with an arrow, we spend a lot of effort focused on wondering why we got shot, how we didn't deserve that, how the person who shot the arrow is a  jerk, what we are going to say when we get in front of him/her, etc.  It's like being struck by a second arrow - the first one is physical and the second is mental.  In contrast, if we are able to maintain our mindfulness and not spin off into a story about our pain, we only get struck by one arrow. (For the geeks, here is the original Sallatha Sutra).

I might even go further than this - once we start down the story road, we not only make ourselves feel worse (the second arrow), but then we are more likely to do something that makes the situation worse.  This is a third arrow!

We need to take responsibility for our emotions. We need to stop thinking that something outside us will make everything better. All you can work with is yourself, and this is true even for recurring situations. If you have a difficult boss who makes your life difficult, it is unlikely that you can change your boss. You can, however, change your reactions, your work habits, or even your job.

If we look a little deeper into any interaction, we will notice that whenever someone does something to you, you are at the same time perceiving it.  To quote Ethan Nichtern's riff on the classic Zen koan, "If a person is an ass and there's no one around to see it, is he still an ass?"

We expect that our perception and our point of view is accurate and that any other observer would agree with our perception. This is called the False Consensus Bias, where we assume that whatever we think/feel, most people would agree with.  The classic study (Ross, Greene, & House, 1977) had people read stories that included a conflict and asked them which solution most people would pick, which one they themselves would pick, and what people who pick each of the two sides would be like.  In general, people estimate that most people would pick the same choice they themselves would, and rated them more positively than people who would pick the other choice.

Attention is a narrow spotlight - look at something in your room right now.  As you focus on that 5% of the room, you can't pay attention to the other 95% of what is actually happening now. Your perception is therefore always 95% wrong, and your memory is even worse (especially once you start telling yourself a story about what just happened). So although we can’t overcome the false consensus bias, we can start to recognize that we never have all the information, and that from the other person’s point of view, maybe you’re the ass. 

In truth, usually no one is the ass. We actually just have different perspectives, attention to different aspects, different goals, different motivations, and different approaches.  But because we assume that everyone else must have the same perspective, goals and approaches, we then decide that anyone not following our script must be being difficult.

If we can begin to see that we are very changeable based on what we pay attention to, it may give us the space to pause before we shoot ourselves with the second arrow.

The Brahmaviharas: Unselfish Joy

People often believe that Buddhism focuses on suffering and all the depressing things about life. Even if that were true, the fourth Brahmavihara clearly balances out the picture a little better.  Mudita, sometimes translated as empathetic or unselfish joy, focuses on how we can share in the joy that is all around us.

Some writers think that mudita is a foundational aspect of the Brahmaviharas - that it's difficult to feel compassion or loving-kindness toward someone until you can first find something you appreciate about them. I tend to think that it's actually the hardest of the four, because it's the one we have the least practice with. Most people already have lots of experience with feeling loving towards others, including starting with little of that feeling and watching it grow over time.  We have lots of experience sharing other people's sorrows and feeling some compassion for them. I think that most people have far less experience sharing someone else's joy without feeling competitive, envious, or jealous.

Many years ago I went to a university department faculty function and was asked by one of the main faculty members what was new? I had just been invited to edit a book by a publisher, and that was what was new, so that's what I told her. She said, "Well, the only reason they asked you is because they couldn't get someone good."

I thought this was a pretty funny response. Despite the fact that my success was actually good for the whole department (and therefore also good for her), she couldn't share in the joy. I don't know if she was threatened, or jealous, or what, but this response was a classic example of what we usually do when we hear about someone else's good fortune--we turn it around and look at it from our own limited perspective. We make it about us, even though it's clearly not about us - it's about the other person.

Mudita is often referred to as an antidote to envy, jealousy, competition, or resentment. So when you are feeling one of those types of emotions, we can try to do a mudita meditation to reduce it. The traditional phrase to offer is "May your joy and good fortune not diminish," or "May this good fortune continue, return, and increase." Traditionally we would start by offering this to a friend, remembering a time when that friend got something he/she really was hoping for, and then offering the phrase. After this, you can extend the offering to a loved one, a neutral person, a difficult person, and all beings.

Although the traditional meditation practice doesn't usually begin with focusing on the self like many of the other Brahmavihara practices do, there are practices to help us begin to find joy without feeling competitive or envious. One is to find the joy in all the little things that happen in a day that we tend to overlook. Children are an excellent teacher for mudita. Everything they are doing is so interesting and joyful to them that we call it "play." It's really nothing more than them living their lives, but because they approach it with joy in the execution we soon differentiate it from "work." Yet, what is the difference?

This is training we can do all day long - train to notice that almost whatever we're doing has some joyful aspect to it. The key is to be present, fully connected with whatever is happening in this moment and noticing the details of ordinary life. We have the opportunity to rejoice as we take care of ordinary things: our dishes, our clothing, our work, our hair. When we are taking care of something that needs care, we can express appreciation for all of the things that have come together to make it possible. To take out the garbage, for example, means that you had enough money to buy the things that you enjoyed before throwing the useless parts away, and that you are healthy enough to carry the bag out to the garbage can. These are no small joys.

Pema Chodron says (in The Places that Scare You, p. 85), “Rejoicing in ordinary things is not sentimental or trite. It actually takes guts. Each time we drop our complaints and allow everyday good fortune to inspire us, we enter the warrior’s world. We can do this even at the most difficult moments. Everything we see, hear, taste, and smell has the power to strengthen and uplift us.” This is the first stage in learning joy – learning to practice seeing it in our daily lives. This stage is made greatly difficult because we have years of practicing doing the opposite – complaining about every little problem.

The French writer Collette said, “What a wonderful life I’ve had! I only wish I’d realized it sooner.”

Mudita uncovers the truth of our abundance. 


In the Mangala Sutta, the Buddha is asked what the greatest blessing in the world is. This sutra is funny because it's almost like he couldn't make up his mind. He lists about 37 different things and says they're all the greatest blessing! I think this is the truth...we are blessed in so many directions (family, home, skills, friends, values, etc.) that we don't even notice them.

It is certainly possible that as we practice the four divine abodes that we feel ourselves rebelling – why should I be sending all this joy, compassion, and love toward other people when I need it so much for myself? This is misplaced selfishness, because it is through cultivating these that you will receive them, and mudita is the clearest example of that. As I noted in a previous post, we expect and want others to "make" us happy, which is generally inappropriate. Other people can make you happy – when they are happy, you can share in it. You don’t need to manufacture your own happiness or theirs…just allow their happiness to pervade you. 

Whenever some happiness comes to others, you don’t need to feel it the same way they do. You can just be glad that a ray of joy has pierced their life at this time, especially when we all struggle in so many aspects of our lives.

Sharon Salzberg notes several challenges to mudita in her book Loving-Kindness : Judging, comparing, prejudice, demeaning or belittling, envy, greed, and boredom.  We might recognize a need for mudita when we find ourselves criticizing or feeling resentment. Criticism is often an expression of jealousy. Jealousy is an expression of insufficiency.  We tend to cover that neediness with criticism, sarcasm, snarkiness.  Another way we may notice the lack of mudita is that it creates a sense of territorialism.

Salzberg also notes how mudita helps us to not be overwhelmed by the sadness of compassion. “Compassion balances sympathetic joy and keeps it from degenerating into sentimentality or ignorant optimism. Mudita keeps compassion from degenerating into brooding over the enormous breadth, depth, and duration of suffering in the world. It gives solace to the compassionate so that we do not feel flooded or overwhelmed by pain…. And because mudita energizes us, it also helps compassion to be active. We can take the joy of mudita and use it to help translate our inner experience of compassion into an outward act of service in the world.” (p. 132)

Ultimately, each of the four Brahmaviharas are balanced by and need the others.

The Brahmaviharas: Equanimity

Meditation sometimes gets discussed as if it can fix everything.  One reason this is inappropriate is because each meditation technique focuses on specific goals.  If we desire full enlightenment (which I define as being able to live in one's life fully), most of us need to use multiple techniques.  As described previously, Mindfulness Meditation focuses primarily on familiarizing ourselves with our minds.  Once we've achieved some measure of stability, tranquility, and clarity through Mindfulness Meditation, we can be more effective using meditation techniques that focus on cultivating some positive aspects of ourselves.  In this post, we begin discussing Brahmaviharas, or the Four Heavenly Abodes, the Four Immeasurables, or any of about a dozen other translations into English, all of which basically mean that these are four qualities that help us live with a sense of peace, well-being, and joy.

These are four qualities we already have, at least some of the time.  The goal is to cultivate them through a number of meditation practices, and they help to change our habitual reactions to be more open and caring, as well as providing antidotes to difficult emotions.  Specifically, the four are:

• Metta: Loving-kindness - the antidote for selfishness, anger, fear, and negativity.
• Karuna: Compassion - the antidote for frustration and hatred.
• Mudita: Empathetic joy - the antidote for envy, jealousy, and resentment.
• Upeksha: Equanimity - the antidote for both clinging attachment and aversion.

Traditionally these are taught in approximately this order, but I like to start with equanimity, because (1) it is the hardest, and (2) it is necessary for the other three.

By Equanimity, I mean the sense of freedom and balance when we're not reacting to things and wishing they were different.  There are several common questions and misunderstandings about it, however, that should be addressed:

1. Is this the same as being resigned or indifferent?  There is real social injustice in the world, and I don't feel like I should just accept that.
• No, it is not resigning yourself or withdrawing.  There is indeed real injustice, and equanimity means first accepting that it exists.  Then the goal is to be alert for it, being mindful.  This will allow you to see when there is an opportunity to take some action to help.  But once you've taken the action you can do at the moment, then you have to let go of needing a particular outcome.  If you hold on too tightly to your desire for one outcome, then you'll likely miss the next opportunity to take action.
2. Once I achieve equanimity, does that mean that everything is smooth and easy?
• Bad news - No it doesn't.  We'll still have troubles and traumas in our lives.The difference is that we can be fully engaged with them, being completely alive, rather than trying not to experience what we're really experiencing.  This ironically allows us to not be overwhelmed by them.
3. What about when people do harmful things to me?  How can I have equanimity about that?
• A common misunderstanding of equanimity is that it means that we're supposed to adopt an attitude that "It's all good."  No, it bloody well is not!  People do terrible things sometimes.  Evil actions happen.  It is definitely not all good.  When someone is harmful to you, equanimity means that you get angry, you feel your hurt, and then you take some action to try to help the situation.  That might mean you get away from that person.  It means you don't spend your time blaming the perpetrator, nor do you blame yourself.  You understand that bad things happen all the time to all people, and that you can use this opportunity to connect with the pain that all beings feel.  But don't just keep being a doormat. As Thanissaro Bhikku notes, "There's a passage in which the Buddha taught the monks a chant for spreading goodwill to all snakes and other things....Strikingly, the chant concludes with the sentence, 'May the beings depart.'  This reflects the truth that living together is often difficult.

We usually get too caught up in our stories about things, or by wanting to control things, or by wanting only one specific outcome, that we fail to realize that things are really ok most of the time, even when we’re not getting what we want. 

Pema Chodron relates the story about the Zen master who, whenever asked by his students how he was, would respond, “I’m okay.”  Finally one student said, “Roshi, how can you always be okay?  Don’t you ever have a bad day?”  The Zen master answered, “Sure I do.  On bad days, I’m okay.  On good days, I’m also okay.”  We usually get so caught by the detail of whatever specific good feeling or bad feeling that we miss this broader truth that we’re actually basically okay right now.

There’s a Pali term, papañca, that means complication, proliferation, objectification (See the Madhupindika Sutta for details).  It is the tendency of the mind to proliferate thought after thought, to spin out the story.  This takes away our equanimity.  What should we do instead? In the moment that we notice that we’re caught, we can start by naming what’s going on.  Then after loosening the hold the thoughts have on us by recognizing them as thoughts, notice how it feels in the body.  This sounds simple, but what often happens when we try?  We get pulled away by papanca, because we are stuck in the trance of wanting to control experiences rather than just feeling them.  We feel that thinking about something gives us control.  We have practiced this so much that we believe it.  

One approach to helping to overcome this is a useful phrase:  Real, but not True.

You can work with this phrase both in meditation and in your daily life as soon as you start having a reaction to something.  What you are feeling is real.  The story that you are proliferating about it ("I don't deserve this! I can't believe you would say something like that! That person is a jerk!" etc...) is not True.  We have such a limited view on the world, that nothing we think about it can accurately represent what was really happening. Our perspective is real, but not true.  In meditation, you can bring to mind a difficult situation, focusing on the feeling you had, the series of thoughts you have about it, the story that you like to tell yourself about it. Focus on this until you can actually feel in your body the emotional reaction you have to it.  Then notice that the feelings you are having right now are real, but none of the story is accurate at this moment.  None of it is happening now.  The minute that we begin to create a story and make judgments, we solidify what is in reality a constantly shifting and changing set of feelings, thoughts, circumstances, causes, conditions, etc. What is happening to you now is caused by the vast set of interconnected causes and conditions, what Buddhists refer to as Dependent Arising. 

As noted in this post about how we view our "self," we have a very limited idea of what our self is.  We usually only consider voluntary actions of which we're conscious to be our selves.  Therefore, almost everything in our experience "happens to us," rather than the more accurate description that we are happening.  We don't even feel our body is ourself, that we are beating our hearts.  We see our lives as if we are rushing around, bumping into various semi-random experiences, having conflict with some of them, going along with others.  Alan Watts noted that if we looked into our bodies with a microscope, what would we see?  We would see lots of individual cells and proteins, rushing around, bumping into each other, fighting with each other, etc.  But at our normal level of perception, our body is working as a remarkably harmonious whole.  So, which level of magnification is right?

This is another way to cultivate equanimity.  Our normal level of perception of our lives is similar to that of our cells under a microscope.  We perceive our lives to be full of difficulty and conflict and stress.  At a broader level of perception, however, we're getting along remarkably harmoniously with each other and the world.

Consciousness evolved like a radar system, constantly looking out for trouble.  It therefore pays little attention to the things that are constant or that are generally going well.  We scan the environment, but only pay attention to what we think is likely to be trouble.  Constants are generally safe.  We therefore focus on the negatives, and in fact, we make so much of it that we come to identify our selves with the radar system.

But you are more than this scanning system.  You are in constantly shifting relationships with the external world that are, on the whole, extremely harmonious.  Our happiness is not dependent on things being just one certain way.  Once we cultivate this view, then we are free to be happy with all of our life.

One classical way to train in equanimity is to meditate on the phrase, "All beings are inheritors of their own karma.  Their happiness or suffering depend on their actions, not on my wishes for them" or any of several other similar phrases. Traditionally it would go through seven steps, first focusing on a neutral person, then a benefactor (someone who has helped you in the past), then a loved one, then someone with whom you have difficulty, then yourself, then all five of you together (neutral, benefactor, friend, enemy, self), then all sentient beings.

The goal of these types of practices is to learn to be able to sit in balance, being able to participate in all aspects of your life without being overwhelmed, and therefore able to take appropriate action when there is a chance. Sound like something you want? It just takes years of practice, that's all.  

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.

The Golden Rule Makes Us Golden Fools?

There is a Chinese proverb:

Once, when a seabird landed outside the capital, the Marquis of Lu escorted it to his ancestral temple, had the music of the Ninefold Splendors performed, poured out a cup of old wine, and spread before it a feast of beef and pork.  But the bird became dazed, and it pined away, refusing to taste meat or wine.  In three days it was dead.

This was treating the bird as the marquis would have liked to be treated, not as the bird would have liked to be treated.  Had he done so, he would have let it roost in the deep forests, play among the islands, swim in the rivers and lakes, feed on mudfish and minnows, fly with the rest of the flock, and live any way it chose to. (Translation by Stephen Mitchell)

We have all been taught the "Golden Rule," that we should do unto others as we would have done unto us.  This is a valuable basic teaching when we are immature, but by adulthood we should get past it.  By trying to treat others as we would be treated, we are not actually being mindful of them or their wishes.  The problem is that it works well a lot of the time, because many of the basics are generally true - we do want to be listened to, to be accepted, to be treated with respect.  But the devil is always in the details, and these are rarely the same for two people.

For example, I was in a relationship with a woman who liked to be left alone when she was ill.  So when I got sick, she would leave me alone all day.  The problem is, I really like to be babied when I'm sick.  So when she got sick, I would make a fuss over her and try to take as much care of her as I could.  Needless to say, we both always felt unappreciated, no matter which role we were playing.  I was treating her as I would like to be treated, and was annoyed that she didn't appreciate it, while she was annoyed that I wasn't leaving her alone.  When I was sick, I felt abandoned and neglected because she was treating me as kindly as she could (from her assumption that she should treat me how she would like to be treated).  We were both being so kind to each other and couldn't see how following the golden rule just made us golden fools.  

Needless to say, the relationship ended badly.

Recall that the Buddha is said to have taught many different teachings to different groups, based on their level of spiritual development.  It is likely that Jesus did too.  His teaching that we should do to others what we would like done to us (Matthew 7:12) seems to be an entry-level teaching - it's a great place to start.  But it sets us on a path where our assumptions and past knowledge dictate our behaviors, rather than being open to the unfolding new situation with a person who isn't you.  

Image sources: Here and here.

Letting Go is Not Giving Up

At my meditation group last night, we discussed “letting go” in the context of painful memories, anger, disappointment, frustration, and injury.  I found myself intrigued by what seem to be two different meanings – a conventional cultural one and the Buddhist one.

I’m sure most of us have had the experience of being told by well-meaning friends and family that we should just “let go” of our feelings about some injury or heartbreak we have suffered.  In fact, we’ve probably said the same thing to ourselves (or to other people) once we feel that the suffering has gone on long enough.  Letting go seems from this perspective to have a meaning of getting beyond the feelings, forgetting them, or giving them up.   This seems to be a very difficult thing to do, at least in the short term.

In contrast, I take a Buddhist perspective on letting go to mean something much simpler and more possible in the short term.  By bringing mindfulness to the situation at hand, we may be able to recognize that there is nothing to be done at this moment about our anger, frustration, etc.  Therefore, we can let go of the need to ruminate at that moment.  This approach recognizes that the painful feelings are honest – it validates the fact that we still feel them – but it also recognizes that the situation does not require action from us.  If the situation does require action at that moment, we would hopefully recognize it and take the needed action.  In my experience, however, most of the time I’m feeling some angst, it’s me telling myself a story from the past or about the future.  The feeling may be honest, but worrying about it at that moment isn’t helping me – it’s usually hindering my ability to be fully functional in my life.  Therefore, letting go is very useful.  I know the feelings may come back, but hopefully at a time when I can use them skillfully.

This approach is summed up nicely thus: “Letting go is not a one-time decision. It’s something we may need to do repeatedly. But the more we practice, the easier it becomes to come back to the present moment.” [Editor's note: I have finally tracked down the author of this quote - Lori Deschene, founder of TinyBuddha.com, from her e-book on Letting Go of Difficult Emotions]

Many teachers emphasize that this is one major goal of basic breath meditation – to teach us to recognize when we are not present and to let go of whatever thought or feeling took us away.  Practicing this little letting go on the cushion can help us to do it with larger feelings when we’re off the cushion.

I would be interested to hear whether people have found this to be true in their experience.

Sources: Quote, photo, photo. This was originally posted on the Interdependence Project blog.

What Do You Mean, "You're Welcome?"

I was recently in France and Spain, trying pathetically to at least speak the bare minimum of niceties in each country’s language.  This brought me face-to-face with some of the differences in phrasing, and potentially some differences in meaning.  In America, we’ve all been taught to say “You’re welcome” when someone thanks us for something.  In fact, most of us have learned this polite response so well that it’s almost a nervous tic.  We say it automatically, with little thought other than perhaps a vague feeling that we should say it.  Yet, it is a surprisingly remarkable phrase, especially when contrasted with the equivalent phrase in other languages. 

Buddhism teaches us to examine the routine aspects of our experience, especially those we do habitually or automatically.  It also teaches us that our intentions matter, which become especially interesting to consider for habitual responses.  Do they even have an intention once they’ve become automatic?

When we say “you’re welcome,” it can be perfunctory, with no intention and little attention, other than to complete a ritual or to be perceived as gracious and polite.  Yet at its core, this is a profound statement of intention.

In many other languages the corresponding phrase is dismissive.  “De nada” in Spanish, “Ne rien” in French, “Nincs mit” in Hungarian, “Bú kèqi” in Chinese, and even “No worries” in Australian all basically mean “It’s nothing, don’t mention it, it’s no problem.”  This approach can certainly be gracious, but it also seems like it could be taken as not paying attention.  It ignores what might have taken genuine effort - It doesn’t acknowledge intent.

In contrast, “you’re welcome” demonstrates intent.  It offers the other person freedom to act.  If I welcome you to my home, I am setting you free in it. I am giving you access, and am not guarding or protecting or clinging to it.  This seems to me to be a profound intent to let go, to allow, and to honor the other beings.  It doesn’t cling to the idea of a certain outcome.  In this way, “you’re welcome” seems very different from “It’s nothing.”  Although we often say it with very little intention, we could change that.  With a small amount of effort, we can pay attention to this little letting go with compassionate intent.

Examining the differences between these meanings, however, is only one approach to consider.  How are these ways of saying it similar?  They all seem to demonstrate an understanding of emptiness (shunyata) and non-self.

De nada.  It’s nothing.  I see the gap.  There is no necessary action required.  There is no outcome needed.  There is nothing to cling to (even if I have an intention of lovingkindness).

No matter which phrase we use, it expresses an openness to whatever is occurring and will occur, without worrying about what I need to do next.  I am not feeling indebted to you, nor do I expect something from you.  When we say “it’s nothing,” “no problem,” “you’re welcome,” can we see the emptiness we’re pointing toward?  Can we have the intention to allow the moment to unfold without our control, trusting in the inherent fecundity of the emptiness?

(This article was first published on the Interdependence Project Blog.  Image sources not by the author are here and here.)