Mindfulness practice as embodied in meditation cultivates unconditional friendliness towards our own experience. It involves the radical practice of just being, without trying to do anything about how we are. To simply be with our own experience on a moment-by-moment basis and to treat it with a friendly attitude - this is the essence of mindfulness. It is a discipline, a skill, an art, a game, an endlessly fascinating pursuit with the potential to pervade every moment of life, awake and asleep.
RADICAL AWARENESS
The simplest proposition is also the most radical: that our basic nature is open
space infused with pure awareness. Beyond all our constructs and beneath all our
holding, each of us is no more and no less than spacious awareness - the capacity
to know, pure and simple. This "empty essence fused with luminous knowing"
is our absolute true nature, shared by all sentient beings.
Buddhist psychology
is rooted in this fundamental capacity for consciousness, this pure potential
inherent in all beings. When we recognise this seed of awareness at our core,
we realise that there's no need to embroider upon the fundamentally pure qualities
within us. It's not a question of self-improvement, of somehow making ourselves
into a "good person." Rather, it's simply a matter of releasing the
temporary obscurations that block us from manifesting our pure nature. Simple
but profound, this shift in attitude changes everything. We stop struggling with
our own nature, trying to make ourselves into something that we are not. We stop
identifying with the steady flow of conceptual thought that normally fills our
mind, and start identifying with our essence. Rather than constantly trying to
actualise ourselves, we wake up to our own actuality.
For most of us, this
is not an overnight event, but the gradual result of study, investigation, and
meditation practice, preferably under the guidance of an accomplished spiritual
teacher. In the Dzogchen tradition, the nature of mind is directly "pointed
out" to qualified students by a master who transmits his or her own realisation
in that moment. Even if we lack the opportunity to receive such teachings, simply
allowing for the mere possibility of enlightened essence can be psychologically
liberating. The need to try hard, to improve the self, to struggle for perfection,
is so deeply ingrained in the way we treat ourselves. Natural perfection is a
radical doctrine, subversive in its simplicity.
A traditional Buddhist metaphor
compares our essential nature to the sky, and the disturbing emotions we experience
to clouds. In truth, the sky is always there behind the clouds, whether or not
we see it -- the sky, in fact, accommodates the clouds, without being the least
bit disturbed by them. Our mind is the same, in its capacity to remain fundamentally
pure as it accommodates these endlessly arising emotions and thoughts. The Tibetan
yogi Milarepa said a thousand years ago:
In the gap between two thoughts
Thought-free
wakefulness manifests unceasingly.
When this understanding is applied to our
own inner being, we begin to relate to our problems from the spacious awareness
that is our basic nature. We learn to embrace the ongoing process of life with
a degree of calmness and acceptance. Problems become somewhat less tight knots
to be struggled with, and somewhat more intriguing phenomena arising within our
field of awareness. This is not to say that we pretend to like painful situations,
or that we paste a smiley face over our very real pain. Rather, through patient
practice, we somehow find we can allow space for our dislike, our suffering, and
our confusion - our actual and own experience.
And here is the incredibly
hard part - we start to drop our addiction to knowing, to analysing, to working
things out in our heads. Resting in mindfulness shows how all of these strategies
are simply masquerades for the fundamental need to be in control. It's not that
conceptual thinking is bad, so much as it is irrelevant. It clutters our innate
spaciousness, chopping up our intrinsic awareness into little bits.
All too
often, we simply get in our own way. We ornament our innate awareness with concepts,
and soon these concepts become a confining prison - a prison we forget we ourselves
created. Thinking is a vital skill, intelligence a saving grace. But used without
attention to what the heart or the body or one's larger awareness says about the
truth of a situation, cerebral intelligence becomes unskillful means.
Letting
go of concepts doesn't mean we drop our ability to discern. Far from it! Freed
from the fixation of judgment, we find ourselves keener observers, able to recognise
the more nuanced aspects of reality and to respond to circumstances in a more
flexible way. Discernment doesn't require us to solidify our experience by holding
onto concepts about something. We can let go of concepts and take in our experience
in a direct, fresh way: the blue vase on the windowsill, the squish of rain-soaked
leaves underfoot, the cap left off the toothpaste (again - and here a concept
interjects itself).
Relinquishing judgment also doesn't mean we passively
accept everything that comes our way. We can still hate the experience of the
capless and crusty toothpaste tube created by our thoughtless partner. We can
be fully aware of our aversion, and consciously decide how we are going to respond
to the situation, rather than automatically reacting to it. Cultivating awareness
doesn't mean we turn into a bowl of mush. It does mean we have more tools at our
disposal. We are fine-tuning our perceptions, a process which can be painful,
but which over the course of time results in a more accurate experience of reality.
In the state of choiceless awareness that is mindfulness, we find the ability
to just let things be, regardless of our like or dislike of the situation. This
discovery can be remarkably liberating. Over time, it opens us up to a larger
sense of trust. We are cultivating the ability to see through all the busy clutter
of our lives to the core: to the bottom-line truth that our essential nature is
awareness, pure and simple, and that this pure and simple awareness has its own
healing energy, its own path and power.
Here's another popular misconception:
that mindfulness practice means detaching from one's feelings. Again, this is
far from the truth. If anything, we find ourselves feeling more intensely, once
we've scraped away the overlay of neurotic angst that formerly filtered our experiences.
Feelings most definitely arise within a state of mindfulness, as strong and clear
as ever. And they pass away, just as they always have. The goal here is not detachment,
but a full and free experiencing of whatever arises in the moment, unobstructed
by conceptual judgment. So often we hold ourselves back from our own experience,
subtly freezing it into constructs and thoughts. This pulling back from the flow
of life is itself the essence of suffering.
In my own life, it's an ongoing
process - I sometimes want to say "struggle" - to apply this knowledge
to my everyday experience. Although I'm privileged to witness the transformative
power of awareness first-hand as a psychotherapist, this doesn't mean I always
apply it gracefully to myself. But I do have the conviction, based on personal
experience, that the practices of mindfulness and compassion have an enormous
power to relieve suffering and generate healing.
Much of this I learned the
hard way. My husband and I awoke on a rainy March morning in 1993 to find our
15-month-old son dead in his crib, victim of an illness that should not have been
fatal, but was. The shock, the horror, the enormous guilt that I immediately locked
away because it was too much to bear - it was all too much to bear. The event
shattered my defenses utterly. That night, I laid down in a haze of grief and
exhaustion and sensed a very fine pain at the core of my heart, like a straw had
been inserted in a subtle channel deep inside. Heartbreak, it seems, is a literal
experience.
I had to get through the days and weeks and months that followed;
I had to somehow survive. Killing myself to escape the pain was not an option,
though I certainly entertained the notion. But we had a four-year-old daughter
to take care of, and I had an intuition that physical death would not resolve
the situation; that I would wake up on the other side and find my disembodied
grief a hundred times worse. I had to take care of myself in a way that I'd never
done before. I had to be present for my own experience and somehow contain it
without trying to control it, because my control mechanisms had been blown to
bits.
I dragged a cushion into Nick's room, and sat there every day with my
grief, anger, and pain. Whenever I felt the waves coming up inside, I'd sit and
be with my feelings with a ferocious intensity. Somehow the awareness took off
some of the pressure. It let the waves flow in their own rhythm, battering the
shore, then receding for a few hours. I learned that if I could just be present
for whatever emotions arose, if I could just embrace them as fully and completely
as possible, the storm would pass more easily.
I began to practice tonglen,
the Tibetan meditation on 'sending and receiving,' in which you imagine yourself
taking in the suffering of others with every inhalation, and with every exhalation
send them all your happiness, all your joy, all your strength. This worked like
nothing else did to ease my own suffering. In some mysterious alchemical fashion,
the pain in my heart melted when I connected with the pain of others. I didn't
stop to think why this might be so, or how it worked. I simply sat and took in
more, grateful for even a few breaths of relief.
Grief took away my life energy
in the way that serious illness does. Those first few months, I'd wake in the
morning to find my body lying peacefully in bed -- then remember what had happened,
and feel the physical weight of irreversible loss descend upon me like a ton of
bricks. In the middle of the tempest, though, I found a sort of peace. Seated
in the eye of the hurricane, emotional currents swirling all around, I experienced
a steady sense of grounded presence that alone helped me bear the grief. It became
clear that this awareness was not going to run away, though I at times might choose
to. It was always present, spacious and accommodating, despite the awful turbulence
of my emotions. It was as if uniting with the seed impetus of those emotions allowed
them to unfold as they would, unencumbered by the added pain of resistance. It
was an awareness that was larger than thought, larger than emotion, an awareness
that preceded and contained both of these.
MINDFULNESS: THE PRACTICE OF AWARENESS
Staying with our own experience as it unfolds moment to moment can be the hardest
thing we'll ever do. Painful feelings are avoided or repressed for good reason:
they hurt. Facing the emotional traumas embedded in the body requires intention
and a great deal of courage -- the kind of courage that doesn't deny the presence
of fear, but rather acknowledges the fear and does it anyway, with consideration
and kindness for one's own pain. Spiritual practice is where the "Big No"
-- our basic rejection of experience -- meets the "Big Yes" -- our compassionate
awareness.
It can take only a few weeks of self-investigation to reveal the
suffering that arises when we freeze and contract around our own pain - a reaction
which creates a whole new layer of suffering on top of the original pain. One
could say it's the essence of neurosis, the places where we block ourselves from
letting in life.
Presence-centered psychotherapy works with these frozen feelings,
thawing them into fluidity through the patient heat of our attention. So often
we run away from our own experience. We avoid being present because we are so
unhappy. Yet we only make ourselves unhappier through clinging to stories and
concepts that further alienate us from what is going on in the moment. The key,
the turn-around moment, is in just giving our own experience the space to exist:
in paying attention to it and actually experiencing it rather than compressing
or contracting or running away, rather than attacking or rejecting or judging
it, rather than drugging ourselves numb against it or exaggerating our reaction
into hysteria. Each of us has a virtuoso repertoire of negative responses to undesirable
experiences. And life provides us with endless opportunities to realise that ultimately,
none of them work.
Our fear, our disbelief, says, "What's the point?"
It believes that paying attention to painful things only leads to more pain. Obsessing
or fixating on painful matters certainly does creates more pain -- but open awareness
is a different matter entirely. It's the difference between being squeezed in
a closed fist and resting lightly on an open palm. Held in the open palm of awareness,
painful experience has a chance to decompress and expand, to gentle itself into
its own true nature. So much of the pain we experience is in the contraction,
rather than the original wound.
The key, again, is asking the simple question:
"What's going on right now? What am I experiencing in this moment?"
Turning inside, we check out our experience at the inner level of felt bodily
sensation, not the cerebral level of what the head says, yammering away. To be
mindful is to be fully present in the moment, relinquishing the urge to control
our experience. Just being aware, just noticing: the ache in my right shoulder,
the breath going in, the hiss of a car moving down the rain-slicked street, a
catch in my throat, a flutter of fear, a tightening in the lower back. Underlying
this never-ending process, we subtly notice that which notices. Just noticing,
just being aware.
The essence of this process is direct experience: noting
what arises, and staying with it as it unfolds. Slowly we discover that it's our
resistance to our own experience that makes certain situations so painful, more
than the experience itself. Even overwhelming emotions like grief can expand and
blossom in the moment-by-moment attention to what is happening, and the commitment
to stay with the experience for just one more breath. We learn to open to the
actual quality of the feeling, the pure painfulness of the pain, rather than trying
to control it or reject it. And it is in this precise attention to detail, this
exquisitely scrupulous awareness of exactly what is happening, that the knot unties
in space. We learn to ride the waves of emotion, to move with them rather than
struggle against them. Emotions are inevitable; they exist to the point of enlightenment
and no doubt beyond. Spiritual practice in the Dzogchen tradition does not involve
suppressing our emotions or overcoming them, but simply allowing them to flow
freely through us, without grasping. The same applies to psychological health.
When we practice mindfulness, we are cultivating a deliberate vulnerability. As
Ron Kurtz, the founder of Hakomi, succinctly sums up: "Mindfulness is undefended
consciousness." It is an exquisitely poignant process of dismantling our
armor, our expectations, our efforts to control; a bittersweet unfolding of the
pleasure and pain inherent in every moment. And this fuels the therapeutic process
with some very high-octane energy. When we open up to our own inner process, we
open the gates of self-exploration and new discovery.
Psychologist Eugene Gendlin
has found that the single determining factor in a therapy's effectiveness is how
well a client is able to stay with his or her own experience. The type of therapy
practiced, the duration of the work, even the particular therapist, did not matter
nearly as much as this basic ability to simply experience what one is experiencing.
And this ability, Gendlin notes, is seldom taught in therapy (though he developed
his Focusing technique around this very point). It seems that the client walks
in the door either with it or without it, and flails away valiantly regardless.
By bringing aspects of mindfulness meditation into the therapeutic process, we
tap into the potential to go beyond superficial cognitive-behavioral solutions
to the deepest roots of body, mind, and psyche.
APPLIED COMPASSION
Chogyam
Trungpa Rinpoche uses the term "fundamental sanity" to describe the
solid and clear ground of our basic nature, our birthright as human beings. Dharma
practice is meant to bring us back to this place of our original essence. It seems
to me that we Westerners have developed a particularly imaginative repertoire
of ways to cut ourselves off from this basic state. Apart from our superb collection
of distractions, we can choose from addictions, denial, busyness, workaholism,
rationalisation . . . the list of accredited, socially approved ways to flee our
ourselves goes on and on.
One pattern I see quite often is how we give absolute
credence to the ghost in the machine, the neurotic soundtrack that accompanies
our lives, unleashing its negative commentary as our life unfolds. This superficial
narrative cuts us off from our own complexity and depth. We believe the voices
in our head as they unreel in a devastating commentary on our own self: "You're
too this, too that. Too shy. Too fat. Too needy. Too ugly. Too stupid. You never
do that. Screwed up again, didn't you? Who do you think you are? Why bother, it's
always going to be like this." And on and on, endlessly.
It's difficult
to argue with these voices, because they are primed for debate. Apply the clarity
of aware emptiness to this scenario, however, and gradually it starts to dissolve.
Embrace it with compassion for the suffering involved, and it melts like the Wicked
Witch. Rejection can't hold a candle to compassion.
Awareness or mindfulness
on its own, however clear it may be, is not enough to support deep change. Love,
in the sense of basic warmth and compassion towards ourselves and our own experience,
is also necessary. These twin qualities, self-awareness and basic kindness, are
inseparable. In the Tibetan tradition they are called wisdom and compassion, or
"warmth and wakefulness," as Trungpa Rinpoche phrased it. Compassion
is said to be an intrinsic quality of the nature of mind, radiating automatically
and effortlessly from the empty, aware essence that is our basic nature.
Compassion plays a major role in psychotherapy as well, though it isn't a subject
taught in schools or discussed in seminars. Emotional healing requires a warm,
receptive, attentive listener; someone who is willing to take in our own experience
and feel it fully. The power of this "suffering with" - the root origin
of the word "com-passion" -- cannot be overestimated. It extends far
beyond the unburdening we experience when we talk about our problems with a sympathetic
friend. That kind of conversation often concludes with a bit of well-meaning advice
or an attempt to cheer us up. That is different than exploring our difficulties
in the presence of another who is open, relaxed, and aware; someone who is willing
to completely be with us without having to change our situation in any way. In
some mysterious way, being fully seen and understood by another, even if that
understanding is entirely wordless, can support us in understanding ourselves.
It's as if awareness is contagious. By being fully present for our difficult feelings,
yet not needing to manipulate reality in any way, the other models self-compassion.
This unconditional loving presence provides the context for deep emotional healing.
It is profound, fundamental, open-handed love, with no expectations and no judgment.
Compassion provides non-egocentric nourishment. It's the kind of unconditional
positive regard we all need as children, yet we don't always get. However late
it comes, it is always a most welcome experience. It creates the space in which
we can unfold ourselves and grow.
Loving kindness applied to ourselves helps
us fully experience our own feelings, however negative or difficult they might
be. Breathing in, we embrace our pain with compassion. Breathing out, we stay
with our present experience as it unfolds in the moment. It's that simple. Over
time, this process of compassionate attention heals our restless need to struggle
with reality, to strive for something better or different or more. Eventually,
it heals our separation from our own selves. To be able to stay with our own experience
and allow it to be just as it is - this is the practice of awareness and compassion
combined. Presence-centered psychotherapy uses these as tools for awakening and
deepening. Through cultivating awareness, we create a container for our experience.
Through cultivating compassion, we open this vessel to the world.
Awareness
and compassion are thus two key elements of spiritually oriented psychotherapy
- skillful means for the heart and soul. Unlike so many external goals we strive
for, they are intrinsic to our nature. Unlike so many pop psych fads, they are
grounded in millennia of actual practice. They manifest as regularly, as inevitably,
and as naturally as the breath itself.
Presence-centered psychotherapy blends
the wisdom of meditation and psychology. Psychotherapy uses the presence and awareness
of the other - the therapist - to hone self-awareness. In meditation practice,
we refine the application of awareness on our own. Quietly seated by ourselves,
we become aware of the faintest aspect of the breath, the subtlest movement of
the mind. Therapy happens once or twice a week: the rest of the time, you might
reflect on the hour and muse a bit, letting the resulting awareness percolate
through your system. Meditation can happen any time, any place, but again, the
process of letting the resulting awareness filter through the body/mind is as
important as the practice itself. The precise methodologies differ, but the goal
is the same: to immerse ourselves fully in the flow of life by embracing our awareness
of our own experience.