Finding the Center Within: The Healing Way of Mindfulness Meditation. (14 page)

Because establishing a regular practice of meditation is so important, we suggest you spend two weeks just doing that. This is in fact only a minimum period of time, but at least you can make a beginning. 1. During week three, practice sitting meditation for at least ten minutes once a day. Then during week four, add a second sitting of the same length—for example, sitting once in the morning and once in the evening. Remember to keep it enjoyable and not struggle. 2. Every day, reread a little of this chapter to help you keep the right attitude and spirit. In this way, you can keep us with you as you take your first steps in formal meditation practice. By the end of week four, you may have read the chapter two or three times. 3. There is always a way to enter and encourage the meditative state. Experiment during this period with the different methods in this chapter during your meditation periods:

• Mantra meditation (p. 58)

• Breath meditation (pp. 59, 60)

• Remember, you are not trying to force peaceful feelings but to work with what is (“Peace Is the River,” p. 49)

• “Practice Mere Recognition” (p. 61)

• “Encourage Yourself” with coping thoughts (p. 65)

• “Use Gathas” (p. 66)

• “Dwell with a Word or a Phrase” (p. 67)

• Begin with breath, then body awareness, then awareness of thoughts and feelings (p. 67)

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• “Practice the Four Immeasurable Minds” (p. 69)

• “Go from Sound to Silence” (p. 71)

• “Go from Motion to Stillness” (p. 71)

• Practice inner light meditation (p. 71)

• “Take a Break” (p. 72)

• “Take Refuge” (p. 73)

• “Walk the Path of Devotion” (p. 74)

You don’t need to try all of these. Just experiment with those that have the most intuitive appeal.

4. In addition, try a little walking meditation (p. 72). Use it as a way to take a break from your work during the day whenever you need to. 5. Continue the moments of mindfulness practice you began in week two (p. 42).

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4

Week Five

Y O U R L I F E

o

The activity of a contemplative must be born of his contemplation and must resemble it. Everything he does outside of contemplation ought to reflect the luminous tranquility of his interior life.

—Thomas Merton,
New Seeds of Contemplation
(1961) The Dalai Lama said, “I believe that the very purpose of our life is to seek happiness. . . . Whether we believe in religion or not

. . . we are all seeking something better in life. So, I think, the very motion of our life is toward happiness.”

This is a simple but nonetheless profound truth. We are all seeking happiness, though many of the ways in which we are seeking it are dead ends or are even destructive. The reason to learn to live more mindfully ultimately has nothing to do with becoming outwardly pious. It has everything to do with becoming happy—with becoming liberated from suffering.

As you taste the peace of meditation, a yearning arises. It is a yearning to experience this peace in daily life, not just while sitting in meditation. It is wonderful to experience joy, peace, and restfulness during 79

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sitting, but the ultimate purpose of meditation is to experience peace and joy all day long.

Meditation and daily life are two aspects of one reality. As you experience more peace and joy in daily life, your meditation deepens. And as your meditation deepens, you experience more peace and joy in daily life. Once you learn how to sit for at least a few minutes in quietness and peace, it is only natural that you begin to look for ways to bring this into the daily round. The fourteenth-century German mystic Meister Eckhart wrote, “Take heed how you can have God as the object of your thoughts whether you are in church or in your cell. Preserve and carry with you that same disposition when you are in crowds and in uproar and in unlikeness.” In other words, take that state of being from the meditation cushion to work with you. Take it with you when you drive the car. Take it into every aspect of your life.

Change the Channel

Sometimes when you meditate, you switch attention from one thing to another. You may focus on your breathing, on your body, on sounds around you, or on the mantra or gatha you are saying inwardly. Once you learn to do this, the next step is “channel-changing” meditation. This is the meditation of daily life.

Imagine you are a television set or a radio, with a tuner for switching channels from one program to another. In sitting meditation, you set your tuner on your breath. In walking meditation, you set it on the soles of your feet, feeling the peaceful contact with the earth with each step. When you then go about the rest of your day, you just continue to switch the tuner to what is happening here and now. There are unlimited numbers of daily life meditations to practice. After walking meditation, you switch your channel changer to “making-breakfast meditation.” After that, you switch channels to “eating-breakfast meditation.”

Then you do something called “driving-to-work meditation.” Then comes “work meditation,” “coffee-break meditation,” and so on. Each activity of daily life becomes the object of your meditation. You do each thing with awareness, breathing in and out, deeply present to each activity, not rushing into the future, not worrying about the past. This principle is not hard to understand. But it may take a while to begin to practice it effectively. We are so used to living in a half-awake 04 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 9:50 AM Page 81

Picture a dry sponge in a sink below a dripping faucet. If you leave that sponge in this position in the morning, by evening it will be quite full of water. There will be no part of the sponge that is not fully saturated. 04 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 9:50 AM Page 82

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With our meditation and other mindfulness exercises, we are slowly saturating our lives with moments of mindfulness, till all of life becomes transformed and mindful. This process is a little difficult to initiate. But then it gains momentum. At first, if you are trying to learn to clean your kitchen more mindfully, you have to make a determined effort to slow down and come into the present. The first ten times, perhaps even the first one hundred times, you have to make a special effort to clean the kitchen mindfully. And many, many times, you will slip into worrying about the future or regretting the past. But at some point, the momentum switches in your favor. You begin to generate so much mindfulness energy, that it pulls you back into the present moment whenever you drift away. Now when you clean the kitchen, you feel the pull of mindfulness, whereas before you felt the pull of forgetfulness. Living more mindfully in daily life is a matter of slowly saturating mindfulness into all aspects of living.

Slow It Down a Notch

Haste is a bedeviling force in modern life. It is very difficult to be mindful when you are rushing. Becoming mindful is an act of conscious resistance to all the forces of unconsciousness that continually assault us, infecting us repeatedly with ideas that we cannot be happy now because there is something that we lack. The thing we lack may be the right job, the right relationship, more money, a hot tub, a large-screen television, or just about anything. The first act of resistance to all of this is to
slow down.

We say this is resistance, but that is a misnomer in one sense, for slowing down is not a struggle. Most of us do not need another issue to struggle with in our lives. We are simply suggesting that you begin cultivating an awareness of when you switch to autopilot and begin rushing about. And then when you become aware, just see if you are able to turn it down a notch.

We are so conditioned toward rushing into the future that you may wonder if slowing down is possible. “Slow down?” you may say. “I have to hurry up! I have thirty hours’ worth of stuff to do every day as it is. My only hope is to work more quickly, more efficiently, so maybe at the end of the day I can find a few moments to relax.”

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Have you ever noticed that our labor-and time-saving devices don’t always save us time? I appreciate my computer, and I would not want to trade it in. But this morning I had to check my e-mail before I could begin to write. Then my utilities program informed me that my antivirus definitions were out of date. Another message told me that my hard drive needed to be defragmented. By the time I’d done all these things, at least an hour and a half had gone by. The computer may save me time, but it is not an unmitigated gain.

A concentration on efficiency produces an energy in your body and mind that pulls you continually into the future. You can sense this sensation in your body—a tension in the neck and shoulders, a pulling, prickly feeling in the belly, a leg that jumps up and down when you sit. Speed only breeds speed. Often it is not even efficient. We get into some ruthlessly vicious cycles. Rushing around all day, our brains and bodies do not shut down so easily at night. We don’t sleep well. Because of this, we leave ourselves a minimum of time in the morning, trying to squeeze out a few more drops of precious sleep. But then we must hit the ground running to make up for the few extra moments of sleep. We calculate it so that, if we move without stopping, perhaps wolfing down a bite to eat and a few slurps of coffee over the kitchen sink, we can make it just about on time. And heaven help us if we then run into a traffic jam on the freeway! By seven thirty in the morning, many of us have been rushing for an hour or two, and we are already behind.

Of course if you take this suggestion to slow down seriously, some things will change. You might want to get up a little bit earlier, not only so you have time to eat mindfully or even to meditate, but also so that you are not fighting the battle of minutes and seconds once you are in the car. This becomes possible because as you move more in the direction of peace and ease, of taking time and not rushing, you rest more 04 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 9:50 AM Page 84

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deeply. When you rest more deeply, it is easier to move through the day in a peaceful way. There is a deep paradox here: The more we rush, the less time we have. The more we slow down, the more time we have. Rushing constricts time; moving more slowly opens time up. I think you will see that this is true.

When you have the chance, it is helpful to slow down radically. This is wonderful to do. If occasionally you can learn to move at about half speed, your mind will begin to settle into the present more deeply. However, on a busy workday morning, it is wonderful if you can slow it down just about 10 percent—enough perhaps to give yourself a sense of some small luxury—enough to eat a real breakfast in peace or spend a little while in meditation. Throughout the day, turn down the speed just a notch or two. You may discover the paradox that while speed creates speed, a more relaxed pace creates time. You make fewer errors and have to do fewer things over when you are not rushing, and in this way actually save some of the time you fear losing. For example, if you are rushing on the highway, anxious to shave a few seconds or minutes off your travel time, you are far more likely to be ticketed or to have an accident. Then you are confronted with a major loss of time, to say the least. What’s more, rushing elicits aggravation and resistance from other drivers, which slows you down anyway and leaves you frustrated. If you are trying to type too rapidly, you make many errors. Going just a little bit more slowly actually saves time by increasing accuracy. However, don’t justify slowing down because of efficiency. Slow down because it is a way to treat yourself lovingly. Slow down because otherwise you miss your life.

The pace of modern life is killing us. We are continually exposed to the toxins of stress, speed, pressure, and negative thoughts and emotions from both ourselves and others. These things are often more powerful and destructive than the environmental toxins we worry about. Slowing down is a wonderful act of subversion and resistance. It is an act of joy and a powerful practice. It is a practice to engage in with a sense of calm and ease. You can breathe in and out, and tell yourself from time to time,
“All I need to do in this moment, is breathe in
and out, and do
this
(whatever you are doing).”
You will know when you are practicing correctly because you will feel joyful and peaceful, light and calm.

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