Noble Action

Living in awareness cuts through erroneous divisions the human mind makes between ‘me’ and ‘other’, ‘us’ and ‘them’. Anxiety loses its primary foothold when we learn to trust and be trustworthy. We can relax. As we come to know more of our innate connectedness to other beings, we are more considerate in how we treat them.

We incline to activities that align with our values, rather than being swayed by fads and fashions. We reflect on how we make a livelihood and the impact it has on others. We see the sense in rejecting association or involvement with destructive behaviour. When we witness mistreatment, cruelty and injustice, we more readily take a stand against them.

Taking Care of Life

Active engagement with this troublesome world is as much part of ‘practice’ as appreciating its joys and wonders. True mindful living is not reducible to watching the breath on a meditation cushion; it means being dynamically in the world, with eyes wide open.

Such a comprehensive ‘taking care’ of life is what links mindfulness organically to friendliness – the willingness to move close to, respect and connect with. To be discerning about what we consume, physically and mentally, and thoughtful about what we produce, in both word and deed, is to approach life with open hands and an open heart.

Becoming more discriminating in how we take in the world, and cognizant of what we put into it, leads to a more nourishing experience for everyone. Mindfulness takes the form of a rapport with other beings and greater tolerance of the vicissitudes of life. Whatever shows up, we breathe with it, respond intentionally, observe what happens and learn from experience.

Good Practice Guidelines

Mindfulness is rooted in an ethical foundation for living. Cultivating awareness goes hand-in-hand with freeing oneself from destructive habits and careless acts. A traditional five-fold scheme to support one’s practice is:

• To avoid harming living beings
• To avoid taking what is not freely given
• To avoid causing suffering through sexual behaviour
• To avoid speaking untruths
• To avoid indulging unmindful states through alcohol or drugs.

These are not commandments. They are training guidelines. They underscore the aspiration to live harmoniously with oneself and with others. They encourage awareness of one’s actions and the effects of these actions. For example, the point concerning intoxicants that cloud the mind is not a moral judgement on intoxicants, but a caution about their potential impact on the other four guidelines.

These five guidelines, expressed above as abstentions, also have a flipside. When lived by, they express themselves in their positive aspect, which are, respectively:

• To act with kindness and compassion
• To act generously
• To practise contentment in one’s relationships
• To communicate truthfully and recognise falsity
• To act mindfully.

Designed to foster a particular attitude to life, such guidelines are the symptom and product of authentic mindfulness practice. Interestingly, practitioners often spontaneously develop such ethical sensibilities despite having no intellectual knowledge of these traditional guidelines.

From: Mindfulness for Unravelling Anxiety, 2016.

Mindfulness Locked Down (I)

The realisation may already have dawned on you: mindfulness prepares you for the times in which you live. Pandemic or no pandemic, lockdown or no lockdown, upheaval or no upheaval, ‘practice’ means embracing the conditions of the moment with a warm heart, looking them straight in the eye and responding with as much skill and care as you can muster.

For able-bodied practitioners, a lockdown offers a legion of opportunities. A rich and longstanding tradition of prison meditation programmes attests to it. Even in the midst of disagreeable change, disruption to habits, removal of presumed comforts, escalating social panic and the freshly exposed human proximity to death, we can draw upon our compassion and intelligence to be open and awake to it all.

Start Here

This might not be easy, so where to begin? As always, start where you are. Remember, there are no hierarchies on the path of mindfulness. Prior attainments or perfect conditions are wholly unnecessary. A blissful moment in meditation has no more value than any other moment. A lockdown has no less going for it than what you might consider to be ‘normal life’. When awareness is well established, the mind’s tendency to inflate the significance of particular experiences is diminished. In its place, equanimity can flourish.

In this way, mindfulness practice is grounding. It is a natural antidote to the mental wobbling, catastrophising and forgetfulness humans are prone to when anxious. We wise up more quickly to our tendency to fixate on bad news, defend against emotional upset and impulsively stockpile goods out of fear. We let go more readily of rigid views about the future and our primitive struggles with uncertainty.

The moment we catch ourselves sliding into despair or being afflicted with the contagious panic of others, we can gift ourselves the space to breathe, to feel, and to re-orientate ourselves in this moment. Life in its fullness become possible again. At other times, feeding a neighbour, caring for the sick or mourning the dead might be the focus of our practice.

Start Now

Thanks to the concern and generosity of countless good-hearted people, there is a plethora of free online resources to guide you safely through a lockdown. Their contents vary but the underlying principles align neatly with the basics of everyday mindfulness:

• maintain and develop routines that attend to basic human needs for care, exercise, social contact, creative engagement and contact with nature. Choose wisely what you feed your mind as well as your body.
• maintain and develop a healthy balance between ‘being’ and ‘doing’. This necessitates limiting the number of activities you undertake, completing them fully, and remembering to pause before you commence new ones.
• reduce or avoid poor coping strategies, i.e. the ones that provide only short-term relief from psychological discomfort and tend to inspire dependency or excessive use in the longer term. 
• spend time listening inwardly. Let your body and heart tell you what matters, what is of value and where meaning is to be found, especially in turbulent times.
• pay attention to the ordinary and humble details of existence (or at least endeavour not to discount them). Washing your hands can be a meditation as well as physically life-preserving. Chewing a piece of food can be an act of kindness to one’s body rather than a mere stepping stone to the next morsel. Walking from one room to another can be a conscious act that enables you to arrive, inwardly and outwardly, into a totally fresh space.
  

Stay Safe

As the old saying goes: when we take care of the present, the future takes care of itself. The mental quality of mindfulness is, by nature, protective (more about this here). Just as we might socially distance from others out of care, we can do something comparable with our minds when they get sucked into vortices of worry, catastrophising and doom-mongering.

 When we are able to hold in awareness, with intimacy and without aversion, the latest horror story our minds have concocted, all the while allowing the energy of associated feelings to express itself, we are doing something powerful and profoundly liberating: being with things as they are.

Negative thoughts lose their toxic charge when we offer them friendly respect and give them space. Psychologically speaking, this is a kind of social distancing. It is a lot less painful than the attrition warfare we are prone to waging with our unruly minds. It also frees us up to act wisely and kindly.

Wise action and creative engagement with all forms of life are necessary expressions of mindfulness practice. Even in a lockdown, might we consider that the most ordinary activities, carried out with attention and intention, have effects beyond their apparent significance? When we tap deeply into our presence in the world, might the world in turn become more present to us? Here lies the innate interconnection between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ that abides regardless of whether or not we venture beyond our front doors.

Click here for Part 2

Minding My Own Busyness

Recently, I found myself in a restaurant with three other mindfulness teachers, shovelling Pad Thai down my throat at great speed and with considerable mess. We were discussing meditation between partially digested mouthfuls while repeatedly checking the time.

We were on a short lunch break during a mindfulness conference and, time- and food-wise, had bitten off more than we could chew. Rushing back to the conference, splattered in noodle sauce, still attempting to conclude discussions, I had the vaguest glimmer of knowledge that I wasn’t so much ‘walking my walk’ as stumbling around in a state of mindlessness.

Sure enough, two hours later, during a talk on the importance of a teacher’s embodiment of mindfulness, I discovered myself – partially slouched in a plastic chair, partially propped up against the conference room wall to ease my indigestion – firing off non-urgent emails on my phone.

This was a ‘good’ moment. It reminded me that mindfulness is not about where I go, what I do, who I hang out with, or what labels I attach to ‘me’. It is simpler than all of those.

Simple as in: being sensitive to the cause and effect of actions. Simple as in: being aware of the relationship between stress and response. Simple as in: taking care of body and mind. Simple as in: getting clear about one’s priorities in the here-and-now.

Action Plans

I once received a useful teaching from a car mechanic on how to handle the human tendency for doing too much. He knew his propensity for taking on more jobs than he could handle and further overloading himself by not taking proper holidays. So he would staple together certain pages of his work diary to indicate when he would take breaks from work. Crucially, he would always stick to his plan. Skilful intention, resolution, kindness and care, all manifested with the click of a stapler. Nice work.

Something I’ve been practising myself for a while is to pause when I find myself facing an unconsidered task or situation, and to inwardly pose three questions: Do I need to take this on? Do I want to take this on? What is my intention here? Momentarily stopping and checking in with myself often clarifies how best to proceed.

Of course, I can just as easily forget to do this. These are the times when I find myself biting off more than I can chew, blundering about like a nitwit, and washing off noodle stains afterwards.

The Proliferating Mind

I sit down to meditate. I commit the next minutes of my life to the practice of mindfulness of breathing. The meditation bell sounds to signal the start. A few moments pass. I notice a mild pang of hunger in my belly. An image of chocolate – its taste, texture and colour – flashes across my mind. I note this and gently, patiently, return attention to the breath.

More moments pass. Sensations in my belly continue to draw my attention. Somewhere far in the background there is a vague knowing that my mind is discreetly launching one of its advertising campaigns to convince me that the desire for food is more fulfilling than meditation. I know from experience this is not true, but I am prone to forgetting, which is what happens next.

Off to the Movies

Before I’m wise to it, the cinema screen of my mind is spontaneously manifesting assorted scenes from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. It then proceeds, for no apparent reason, to critique Gene Wilder’s performance in the lead role before tumbling headlong into a miscellany of Gene’s movies – random scenes, bits of dialogue, a hodgepodge of sound and vision. Little do I know it but my mind has galloped off to the movies and mindfulness of breathing is history…

… What an intriguing guy Gene Wilder was... Such a great face… The way he seemed to hold in all that emotion, you never quite knew what was going on with him.... I wonder how he chose his parts… I wonder what he was like in real life… That scene in Blazing Saddles when he raises his voice in that funny way of his reminds me of that weird song he sings on the boat trip in the Chocolate Factory… oh yeah, chocolate… Young Frankenstein was funny, though, wasn’t it?… What about his mate Richard Pryor’s stand-up? He must’ve been outrageous back in the day…

On and on chatters the mind.

… and how about Bill Hicks?… He was dynamite… His skit about the first Gulf War was razor-sharp… The media frenzy around that war was out of control, wasn’t it?… They used to call the Vietnam War “the first television war”, didn’t they?... That documentary on Vietnam narrated by Peter Coyote was a cut above the usual, wasn’t it?... Peter Coyote was in ET, wasn’t he?… I didn’t think I was going to watch all that documentary… But I did, didn’t I?… Ten episodes in all, yeah… It’s a pity the hard drive didn’t record half of one of the episodes… Was it Episode 3 or 4?... I can’t remember…

And on and on.

… What a shame that old Vietnam movie, Go Tell The Spartans, starring Burt Lancaster and that other guy whose name I can’t remember, didn’t get more acclaim at the time… It was ahead of its time… At least a year ahead of Apocalypse Now… Or was it two?... Burt was great… His character in The Swimmer was tragic and deluded... That last scene is kind of eerie… I remember watching that film while eating three bags of salt and vinegar crisps… That’s one bag of crisps too many, isn’t it?… I’m really hungry… Some chocolate would be nice… Willy Wonka had a factory full of the stuff, didn't he?... What an intriguing guy Gene Wilder was…

The interval bell sounds marking the halfway point of the meditation period.

Double Bill

The sound of the bell triggers a momentary retrieval of awareness, though not for long. All this mental monkeying about has gathered energy around itself. It fires up again and blasts off in a new direction…

… This is useless… I haven’t even started meditating… Why do I never learn?... It’s really simple, just watch the breath… Stop wasting your time and focus… Focus focus focus… Why has this happened to me?... Is it just me?... Maybe it’s just me!?... What if I never sort this out?... Maybe everyone can meditate, but I can’t… Concentrate, concentrate!… No, relax, don’t push, then concentrate… Gentle, easy does it… One moment at a time… I’m pretty sure it was Episode 4 that got lost on the hard drive… I definitely watched all of Episode 3… The one after Episode 2, that’s right… I wonder what’s up with the hard drive… It was a cut above average, that series… They called Vietnam “the first television war”, didn’t they?...

There comes a point when I wake up to what’s happening – the wandering, the reminiscing, the brooding. The sheer nonsense of it all. I catch the mind blundering about its virtual universe, storyboarding its own demented manoeuvres. Finally, I am awake to what is actually going on. I have recollected my intention to practise mindfulness of breathing. And, right then, the bell rings to signal the end of the meditation period!

No Refunds

If such an experience during meditation is in any ways familiar to you, know that you are not alone. Human minds are prone to conceptual proliferation. The content may vary but the process is the same. In the example above, note the webs of thought that spin outwards and loop in inconsequential patterns. Note the chains of association and petty judgements. Note the implicit self-absorption and self-referencing. Note the lack of awareness of this self-view. Note the lack of empowerment of the intention to be present to what is occurring in the here and now with equanimity. In terms of meditation, note the complete waste of time.

Conceptual proliferation is the tendency of the mind, once triggered by some perception or other, to ‘spread outwards’ into strings of thought that appear solid and real, not ephemeral and ever-changing. This gives rise to a strong sense of ‘me’ (the thinker and believer of the thoughts) that is separate from the world ‘outside of me’.

This invariably leads to a sense of tension or pressure because there is some longing for something I haven’t got or frustration at things not being the way I want them to be. Since this process is happening out of awareness, no insight is possible. Therefore, the mind learns nothing and keeps tangling itself up in its own nets. When ‘I’ finally wise up to what’s happening, at best it’s been a farce. If the thought-content is less innocuous, it may well feel more like a horror movie. Whatever the emotional impact, it’s always a waste of time.

Start Again

When you spot conceptual proliferation in action, this is a ‘good’ moment, that is, a moment of strong mindfulness. Stay attentive. Watch the show without getting lost in it. Refuse to be seduced. Become aware of emotional responses to the wordplay and imagery of the mind. Feel the feelings. Explore how emotions build themselves up through thoughts. Can you feel the restlessness of the mind in the body? Can you sense the compulsive energy to leap from thought to thought? Keep watching. Keep feeling. If you lose track, start again, one moment at a time. Ease and clarity can flourish under such conditions.

Another route out of conceptual proliferation is to track back through the chain of thought that led to the whole blossoming of nonsense in the first place. When you notice your mind has wandered off, review the thoughts that have arisen to find where they arose from. It will likely be some sort of association with a bodily sensation, sound, smell, random memory or idea. When you find what it is, stay with that, just recognising it and feeling its resonance. Just for a few moments. Then let go and return to the breath. Start again. Spending an entire sitting period ‘starting again’ is, in meditation terms, time well spent.

Mindfulness of Habits (II)

Humans are creatures of habit. This is not surprising when you consider we make countless choices every day and our routines of behaviour often help us achieve our aims. From the way we brush our teeth and how we dress to the places we go and how we get there, we operate in habitual ways.

Some of our habits tend to work well for us while others deliver negative, unintended consequences. All habits fall into one of three broad categories: the things we do, the things we say and the things we think.

Their effects also take different forms, from the external (what happens in the wider world and to other people, or physically to us) to the internal (what happens within our hearts and minds). Deliberately noticing habits allows us to become more conscious of our lived experience and to discover how we do and don’t act helpfully to ourselves.

1. Take a few minutes to consider some of your habits and write them down. Try to be objective – as if you were an interested stranger or a curious scientist making an informal study of these habits.

Make a note of three habits you consider to be positive or helpful to you. Name and describe them. Now ask yourself these questions and write down your reflections:

• What actions compose each habit?
• When and where do I tend to act out these habits?
• What thoughts, ideas or mental stories do I tend to have at the time?
• What feelings do I experience as a result of enacting this habit?
• What other effects, personally or in the world around me, have I noticed?
• Am I aware of any habitual thoughts running through my mind now as I explore this habit? 

2. Now note three habits you consider to be negative or unhelpful. List these and question them in exactly the same way as the positive ones above, using the same questions.

Explore them with the same curiosity and open-mindedness. Be gentle with them and with yourself. This exercise is about noticing, not criticising. Simply identify what composes each habit and the results they generate.

Can you note any thoughts or beliefs that tend to accompany each habit, such as fixed labels and judgments?

3. Knowing your habits is the first (and most important) step in taking the emotional sting out of them.

As you go about your day, and on into tomorrow and next week, see if you can observe your habits in detail. What thoughts, feelings and bodily sensations do you experience at the time? What results do you notice?

Click here for Part 1.

Mindfulness of Habits (I)

Our patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving can be so habitual and automatic that we barely notice them. As long as they remain outside awareness, we reinforce them.

Every moment offers a potential for change, whether it be by one small degree or an intentional and wholesale refusal to run the same tired script for how to respond to problem x or situation y.

Notice how you can make a choice, right now, to pause reading and focus your attention on something else.

Notice how you can choose to move some part of your body or click elsewhere or engage in a different activity. Notice how you might choose to decline that invitation and carry on reading. Whatever you do, it’s your choice.

Being aware of how we respond in the moment is a gateway to greater possibilities. To become adept at knowing when we are in the grip of negative habitual patterns will likewise offer us easier release from them. The effort required is no more and no less than waking up from our compulsive reactivity to the spontaneous flow of thoughts and feelings.

Lost and Found

‘Waking up’ is something to be cultivated. Otherwise we dwell in customary states of blunt attention and dull awareness.

One time, on a train, I watched a woman standing motionless and staring at the carriage wall for several minutes. She was, as the telling phrase goes, lost in thought. Her eyes wide and unblinking, she was oblivious to everything around her, as locked-in to her experience as she was locked-out to everything around her.

Then, as if released from a magic spell, her eyes suddenly blinked, her body unfroze, and she was ‘back’, looking around, visibly startled at discovering where she was.

Her experience exemplifies many of the moments in all of our lives. Each of us has the capacity to be as absent to what’s happening as we have of being present to it.

Click here for Part 2.