stillness

Find stillness

August 29, 2012

Things keep changing. The clock ticks, the day unfolds, trees grow, leaves turn brown, hair turns gray, children grow up and leave home, attention skitters from this to that, the cookie is delicious but then it’s all gone, you’re mad about something for awhile and then get over it, consciousness streams on and on and on.

Many changes are certainly good. Most people are glad to put middle school behind them. I’m still happy about shifting thirty years ago from single to married. Painkillers, flush toilets, and the internet seem like pretty good ideas. It’s lovely to watch grass waving in the wind or a river passing. Fundamentally, if there were no change, nothing could happen, reality would be frozen forever. I once asked my friend Tom what he thought God was and he said “possibility.”

On the other hand, many changes are uncomfortable, even awful. The body gets creaky, and worse. We lose those we love and eventually lose life itself. Families drift apart, companies fail, dictators tighten their grip, nations go to war. The planet warms at human hands, as each day we pour nearly a billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere. Countless species go extinct. As William Yeats wrote: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”

And change itself is often – maybe innately – stressful. When you really open to the fact always in front of our noses that each moment of now decays and disappears in the instant it arises – it can feel rather alarming. Life and time sweep us along. As soon as something pleasant occurs in the mind’s flow we reach for it but whoosh it passes away right through our fingers leaving disappointment behind. Inherently, anything that changes is not a reliable basis for enduring contentment and fulfillment.

Yet it is also true that some things remain always the same. In their stillness you can find a refuge, an island in the stream of changes, a place to stand for perspective and wisdom about events and your reactions to them, a respite from the race, quiet amidst the noise. Perhaps even find a sense of something transcendental, outside the frame of passing phenomena.

How?

Stillness, a sense of the unchanging, is all around, and at different levels. Look for it, explore its effects on you, and let it sink in.

For example, it’s not the ultimate stillness, but there is that lovely feeling when the house is quiet and you’re sitting in peace, the dishes are done and the kids are fine (or the equivalent), and you can really let down and let go. In your character, you have enduring strengths and virtues and values; situations change, but your good intentions persist. In relationships, love abides – even for people who drive you crazy!

More subtly, there is the moment at the very top of a tossed ball’s trajectory when it’s neither rising nor falling, the pause before the first stroke of the brush, that space between exhalation and inhalation, the silence in which sounds occur, or the discernible gap between thoughts when your mind is quiet.

In your mind there is always an underlying calm and well-being that contains emotional reactions, like a riverbed that is still even as the flood rushes over it (if you’re not aware of this, truly, with practice you can find and stabilize a sense of it). There is also the unchanging field of awareness, itself never altered by the thoughts passing through it.

More abstractly, 2+2=4 forever; the area of a circle will always be pi times the radius squared; etc. The fact that something has occurred will never change. The people who have loved you will always have loved you; they will always have found you lovable. Whatever is fundamentally true – including, ironically, the truth of impermanence – has an unchanging stillness at its heart. Things change, but the nature of things – emergent, interdependent, transient – does not.

Moving toward ultimate matters, and where language fails, you may have a sense of something unchangingly transcendental, divine. Or, perhaps related, an intuition of that which is unconditioned always just prior to the emergence of conditioned phenomena.

Wherever you find it, enjoy stillness and let it feed you. It’s a relief from the noise and bustle, a source of clarity and peace. Give yourself the space, the permission, to be still – at least in your mind – amidst those who are busy. To use a traditional saying:

May that which is still
be that in which your mind delights.

When things get too much, change the channel

August 10, 2012

Rick Hanson PhD

on practice

Sometimes a person just can’t find any stillness anywhere. Maybe you have epilepsy or chronic pain, or are wildly worried about a child or other loved one, or have been rejected in love or had the bottom fall out financially. In other words, as a wise therapist, Betsy Sansby, put it, like there’s a nest of bees in your chest.

Sometimes the inner practices fail you – or at least aren’t matched to the pickle you’re in. You’ve let be, let go, and let in. You sat to meditate and it was like sitting on the stove. You tried to be here now and find the lessons – and wanted to whack the person who told you to do this. You still feel awful, overwhelmed, angry, afraid, inadequate, or depressed. Now what?

Sometimes it helps to change the channel, to take some kind of action. Watch TV, eat a cupcake, ask for a hug, get out of the house, something (not harmful) to shake things up, distract yourself, tune out, burn off steam, etc.

At some point you still have to engage the mind directly and do what you can with your situation. But there is certainly a place for respite or pleasure in its own right, plus these help refuel you for challenges.

Plus, changing channels has the built-in benefit of taking initiative on your own behalf. This helps counter the natural but harmful sense of helplessness that comes from tough times, and it supports the feeling that you and your needs truly matter.

How?

For starters, give yourself permission to change the channel. Sometimes people get stuck in a situation, relationship, or feeling and think it’s more noble, awake, open, mindful, accepting, or therapeutic to stay with it, even if it hurts like crazy and isn’t getting any better. Sure, let’s not err on the side of suppressing feelings or running from the first hint of discomfort. But let’s also not err on the side of running laps around a track in hell.

Then do something. It doesn’t need to be ambitious. Usually the simpler, the better.

Try physical pleasure – which helps calm down the stress machinery of your brain. Run water over your hands. Roll your head around your neck. Smell an orange. Look at a flower.

Treat your body well. Eat some protein. Take a nap. Go for a walk. Do vigorous exercise if you can. Remember your vitamins.

Broaden your perspective. Look out the window. Consider your situation from a bird’s-eye view, a more impersonal angle. Consider how someone (real or imagined) who deeply loves you would look at it. Think about it amidst seven billion other humans, or in the sweep of history. (Of course, not to diminish, dismiss, or shame your own pain.)

Entertain yourself. See a movie, listen to music, go watch a show. Look at Red Bull stunts, concert videos, amazing pong shots, or rock climbing on YouTube (alright, some of my faves) or whatever you like.

Set something in order; exercise control somewhere. When I feel depressed, I make my bed. Keep it simple: fold one pair of dish towels, separate the big forks from the little ones, straighten one shelf of books.

Connect with others (as long as you don’t feel overwhelmed by it). Call a friend. Pet your pet. Sit in a coffee shop full of strangers and enjoy the bustle.

Go somewhere that feeds your heart. Maybe sit under a tree, or by a stream, lake, or sea. Perhaps a church or temple. Or a park with children playing, a museum, or a garden.

Every life is hard sometimes, and some lives are terribly hard all of the time. Do what you need to do. It’s OK to change the channel.

Five ways to do nothing and bring stillness to your life

August 9, 2011

Saddhamala

on practice

We live in a world filled with input from television, radios, the Internet, social networks, email, news broadcasts, newspapers, magazines, white papers, books, Kindles, movies and more.

Our society is fast paced and we are proud of our ability to multitask. We begin our days by listening to the news as we get dressed in the morning. On the way to work or school, we listen to the radio in the car and use ear phones to listen to music or talk on our cell phones.

Our days are filled with talking, doing, accomplishing, gathering, spending, earning, and accumulating facts, relationships and material things. We are fast becoming human doings rather than human beings. All this doing is exhausting and it depletes us of our energy and leaves no time for wonder.

It is possible, however, to find stillness, no matter how busy our schedules are. By taking time for reflection, by being silent, we can find the stillness of inner peace.

Take a moment to recall what it is like waking up on a winter morning after a night of snow falling on the earth. Without even looking outside, there is a palpable stillness – it is so delicious, so full of wonder.

If you have ever been in a kayak or canoe when the water is smooth, the air is fresh and the sun is warm, or skiing along a snow covered path in the woods, you know about stillness.

We can bring that same stillness to our lives by taking time to meditate and reflect, to quiet the mind and listen to the language of the heart.

Pablo Neruda says: “If we were not so single-minded about keeping our lives moving and for once could do nothing, perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves and of threatening ourselves with death. Perhaps the world can teach us as when everything seems dead but later proves to be alive.”

Here are five ways to “do nothing” as we “prove to be alive”:

1. Before getting out of bed in the morning, take a moment to listen to what surrounds you. Perhaps it is very early and the only sound you hear is the ticking of the clock.

2. While eating breakfast, do not talk, but enjoy the taste and texture of your food.

3. While on your way to work, do not put on the radio or listen to a CD.

4. Take a day to do only one thing at a time, silently, a “no multitasking day”.

5. Before you enter your house after a long day, pause in silence to leave the work day behind and bring an open heart to your family.

Try bringing stillness to your life and experience its benefits.

How to stop your mind from wandering

July 24, 2011

Saddhamala

on practice

The mind is made to wander – just take a few minutes to sit quietly and watch the mind flit around like a butterfly going from flower to flower.

With all that thinking, worrying, justifying, wondering, story telling, imagining, assuming, compulsive activity – it is a wonder we actually get anything done in a mindful way. But there is hope. There is a way to stop your mind from wandering.

Meditation and mindfulness are two buzz words that nearly everyone is familiar with. In a world where multitasking is considered a positive trait necessary for working, it is fascinating that there is so much interest in meditation and mindfulness – which are the opposites of multitasking.

We think that when we work on more than one task at a time, we will save time and get more done. That may occur, but it is more likely that we will get more done, more accurately and creatively, when we concentrate on just one thing at a time, with mindful attention and one-pointed energy.

More times than I would like to admit, I have rushed through projects only to find many mistakes and problems necessitating the project to be looked at again and corrected. When I take my time and focus my mind on one project at a time, I am much happier with the results.

This happens at work and at home. When I am multitasking – baking blueberry muffins, sorting the mail and ironing a shirt to wear the next day – the blueberry muffins often end up on the shall-we-say crispy side.

When I focus on just making the muffins, just sorting the mail and just ironing the shirt, each action becomes a meditation, my mind stops wandering and I am in the flow of attending to what is waiting for my undivided attention.

Have you ever been at a restaurant with a friend who is looking around the room as you are talking to him or her? That situation is a visual representation of a wandering mind. The person is distracted from what you are saying because he or she is not focused – his or her mind is wandering – “hmmm I wonder who just came through the door” or “I wonder if my boss realizes I’ve been at lunch for an hour and a half”.

The next time you find yourself and your mind multitasking, appreciate that awareness, take a few deep breaths and focus on one thing at a time – write one email at a time, mindfully drink your cup of tea, drive to work without a cup of coffee in hand – and you will have found the way to stop your mind from wandering – and have perfectly baked blueberry muffins.

Aldous Huxley: “Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle…”

April 10, 2008

Bodhipaksa

quote of the month

If meditation practice leads to the cessation of desire, then how are we to pursue spiritual goals? Are there good and bad kinds of desire? Can desire be spiritually helpful? Bodhipaksa explores a saying by Aldous Huxley in an attempt to shed some light.

“Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength.” – Aldous Huxley

When an American university asked me to give a talk on Buddhism and mysticism I was, well, mystified. Buddhism, for me, was an immensely practical and mostly logical approach to the problem of living a satisfying life, while I understood mysticism to consist of an escape from day-to-day living and a retreat into a realm of sometimes confused and confusing inner experience. I’d no idea what I was going to say.

But then I decided to look up the dictionary to find out what mysticism was, and to my relief found that it directly overlapped with my understanding of what Buddhist practice entailed. The definition I came across was something like:

Mysticism: the belief that the spiritual apprehension of knowledge unavailable to the intellect may be attained through contemplation.

While Buddhist practice is indeed very pragmatic and involved with the minutiae of how we respond to our moment-by-moment experience, it does of course involve meditation, and meditation is a very practical way of changing our experience so that we can come to a deeper understanding of our lives. In other words, through “contemplation” we come to the “spiritual apprehension of knowledge.” Furthermore the insight we achieve through meditation, while it can be directly perceived through the intellect, can’t be completely understood by the intellect alone. For example, I can know intellectually that all things are impermanent, but it’s only when I sit quietly and observe the impermanence of my experiences, my thoughts, my emotions, even my body itself, that the truth of impermanence starts to sink in at a deeper level.

So Buddhism was, I found rather to my surprise, a mystical religion.

…we absolutely must wish passionately to be Enlightened if that’s ever going to take place

Of course there are different varieties of mysticism. Huxley saw mysticism as being the way to experience God directly through one’s experience, rather than through one’s intellect. I don’t believe in the existence of Huxley’s God and in my own mystical practice I pursue a different goal. Or perhaps what we experience is the same, but we interpret that experience in different ways, Huxley calling it “God” while I call it “Reality.”

But Huxley’s quotation is not primarily about God anyway. It’s about different kinds of desire, and how they can help or hinder us in our quest for direct experience of Reality (whether or not that Reality is understood as involving a God).

What Huxley is saying, in effect, is that you need to have a desire for the realization of spiritual experience, but that the wrong kind of desire will actually get in the way of that experience. So what’s the right kind of desire and what’s the wrong kind? How do we tell them apart? How to we make sure we cultivate the right kind of desire?

The difference is not in intensity. Huxley describes the unhelpful kind of desire as “hunger” and “thirst” while the necessary kind is experienced “intensely” and “with all [one’s] heart and mind and strength.” One can passionately wish to be Enlightened. In fact we absolutely must wish passionately to be Enlightened if that’s ever going to take place.

The difference lies, most fundamentally, in the quality of consciousness that is doing the desiring. On the one hand we have unhelpful desire, which is like “hunger” and “thirst” in that it’s a relatively primitive kind of desire. It wants to grasp and possess. It sees something it wants and it tries to appropriate that object to itself. It thinks of itself and the thing desired as separate and real entities. Its grasping is a kind of survival mechanism; it thinks that its own perpetuation will be made more likely by having appropriated the object of its desires.

In Buddhism you sometimes get the image of trying to catch a feather on a fan.

On the other hand we have the spiritually helpful kind of desire. This is the opposite of grasping. It involves, in Huxley’s words, “stillness,” and it must be receptive (Huxley says “passive,”which has unfortunate connotations) as well as active. It might be useful to have a metaphor here.

In Buddhism you sometimes get the image of trying to catch a feather on a fan. Now obviously if you make a vigorous effort to catch the falling feather with the fan (if you have a “grasping” attitude) you’ll simply push the feather away and achieve the opposite of what you intended. To catch a feather on a fan you have to be subtle and intelligent. There has to be activity, so that the fan gets into the right place for the feather to land on it. Then there needs to be stillness, so that the fan can approach undisturbed. There has to be receptivity; you have to let the feather come to you. This combination of activity, stillness, and receptivity allows us to achieve the goal.

Likewise, in approaching mystical states of mind we have to make an effort. We have to want to approach the goal. And the desire must be intense. But it also must be intelligent. It must lead to the still point where we have done what has to be done (and no more) and where we are positioned to simply wait, with openness and receptivity, for the feather to land.

At different times different approaches are needed. At first we might need to take relatively vigorous action, holding ourselves back from grossly harmful actions and working to pacify the unruly mind. Desire itself, as Huxley says, must not be “uncontrolled.” We need to grasp the fan of the mind. We must move it decisively yet gently to intercept the path of the feather of reality. We need to intelligently observe how our own actions affect the feather’s course — observe how the very act of meditating can distort our ability to experience reality — and make increasingly subtle movements to compensate. At last as the fan becomes perfectly positioned we can become still, and we need simply to wait.

Both activity and receptivity need to be blended. When we have activity towards a goal without also having receptivity we are in the grip of mere “hunger,” while activity intelligently blended with receptivity leads us down the path of practical mysticism and, ultimately, to the direct apprehension of reality.

Sit still, why don’t you?

November 30, 2003

Wildmind Meditation News

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The Age, Australia: Stressed? Of course I’m stressed. Even when I’m at ease, I’m tense. So when I take a meditation class at East Kew’s Life Development Centre, I try to clear the mind of preconceptions of something practiced by hippies in the hazy aroma of incense and candlelight.

Meditation has gone mainstream. Once the domain of left-wing guru-seekers, the art of relaxation has moved into the business world and is now sought out by well-heeled executives and upper management as a way of clearing the pressures of the working week. Even Harry M. Miller meditates.

The Tuesday morning class in Kew is a…

The fine art of doing nothing

January 25, 2003

Wildmind Meditation News

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Simran Bhargava, Financial Express, India: Sit back, close your eyes and relax. Allow any thoughts that surface to pass through your mind like clouds floating in the sky. Simply watch them come and go, without getting hooked into them.

This simple act of doing — well, nothing at all — is one of the most potent tools yet discovered to banish stress from your life. Doing a little bit of “nothing” every day can, over time, change the texture of your life. It can also significantly bring down blood pressure and according to some doctors, reverse cardiac disease.

Meditation is such a humble little technique that for years no one took it seriously at all. Much too flaky, hardcore medical practitioners said, leave it to the yogi types.

Since then, meditation has come a long way. After politely refusing to study the impact of Transcendental Meditation on blood pressure in 1968, the Harvard Medical School, as well as dozens of other medical schools, now include alternative medicine — also known as integrative medicine — in their curricula.

More recently, Dr Dean Ornish’s landmark research found that diet and lifestyle changes-including daily meditation-could actually reverse heart disease. So significant was this study that for the first time US insurance companies agreed to cover costs of patients learning these lifestyle strategies: this was good business because a high percentage of patients who were candidates for angioplasty and bypass surgeries were actually able to avoid it.

And last month, Time magazine’s annual issue on the latest advances in health and science put “How your mind can heal your body” on its cover. It quotes well-known US cardiologist Dr Mehmet Oz who, although trained in western scientific techniques, now also relies heavily on the ancient eastern technique of meditation to help steer patients toward recovery. Why? “Because it works,” he says.

And so something 2,500 years old is new again. Signed and delivered with a seal of approval from some of the highest medical authorities on the planet.

How did meditation become mainstream? Perhaps our suffering — rampant heart disease, hypertension, strokes — caught our attention, with every man over 35 now carrying around with him the very real fear that such an event could happen to him at any time. Perhaps it was just too many people facing too much stress. Perhaps it was the growing voices of meditation converts all around that couldn’t be ignored any longer. And so, many people, including doctors who wouldn’t have earlier given it a second look, said: “Okay, let’s give it a try.”

And what do you know, it works.

Meditation is simply a route to stillness, a way to create a calm centre in a chaotic universe. It is an antidote to the feeling of being overloaded. If mental stress can lead to irritability, anxiety, heart trouble, hypertension, then holding the reverse feeling in the system — mental calm — would lead to wellness. Makes sense doesn’t it?

Too much stress floods the body with the stress hormone cortisol which, unrelieved, can turn toxic — and dangerous. The old ways of dealing with stress didn’t seem to work because the mental noises followed everywhere. To work, to a party, even into sleep. You could take a vacation to get away from chronic stress — only to find that wherever you go, there you are. Alongwith all the excess baggage in your head.

Meditation is a way to regularly defuse the steam. There are many ways to meditate: from Buddha’s 2,500 year old Vipassana to Mahesh Yogi’s TM to Osho’s active meditations to the Mindfulness practices of Thich Naht Hanh to the whirling of the Sufi dervishes which symbolise a still centre in a turning universe.

It doesn’t matter which vehicle you board to reach a stillpoint. All work on the same principle of emptying the mind of its overload: the noises within become a blur — and slowly fall away, leaving a feeling of inner quiet.

According to the Harvard doctor and hypertension expert Herbert Benson triggering the relaxation response in the body is remarkably simple. All it requires is four factors: One, a quiet environment. Two, a short word or mantra which you repeat over and over to row you back to centre when your mind wanders. Three, a passive attitude, which is the most critical element for meditation. And four, a comfortable position. Start with a few minutes and build up to about 20 minutes a day. That’s it.

Several people find sitting still difficult and practitioners say that the mistake they make is trying too hard to shut out the mental chatter. The key is to accept it — to let all thoughts simply pass through the mind. It means also reversing the old programming of “Don’t just sit there, do something” to the new one of “Don’t just do something, sit there.”

Meditation isn’t a quick fix. Its effects are long-term. If you do it regularly, you may begin to notice subtle changes. Earlier an inner restlessness went with you everywhere, now perhaps an inner calm does. Maybe you react with less annoyance at what other people do. Perhaps you sleep better. Perhaps you have sudden clarity on a problem that had you befuddled before. Perhaps there is a lot to be done and you do it — calmly.

And perhaps the doctor straps a blood pressure monitor on your arm and says: “Surprise, normal.”

That’s pretty life-changing.

The spiritual recovery programmes like Alcoholics Anonymous — which have helped millions — suggest regular time for both, prayer and meditation. They say prayer is asking whatever higher power you believe in for help. And meditation is listening quietly for the answers. You may be surprised at some of the answers you get while meditating.

Others say you should ideally meditate for half an hour everyday. And when you can’t find the time to do it, you should do it for an hour. That’s usually a signal that you are overloaded and need to de-stress.

Chances are that, by now, pretty much everyone is convinced of the benefits of meditation. The more important question is: How many actually do it ? Knowing counts for nothing, doing for everything.

The most important words I ever heard on the subject were from a meditation teacher who said that this simple practice is so powerful, that done regularly, it can change your life. You close your eyes and sit still and nothing seems to have changed. But each time you meditate, it’s like putting a drop of blue into a glass of clear water. You don’t even notice it in the beginning.

And then one day the water turns blue.

Simran Bhargava has been a writer and editor for several years. She writes a weekly column on the business of life.

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