Mindfulness and opening the second door.

Imagine there is a room with two doors. Door A is always open door B is normally closed. Imagine also there is a queue of people at door A entering into the room. The people never stop entering, the queue is moving constantly, so as you can see at some point it starts to get over crowded. At some point it gets very claustrophobic and sooner or later even the walls come under strain. I wonder what happens next in your scenario? 

As you may have guessed the room represents ourselves. The open door A represents life and life never stops happening that is why the people never cease entering the room.  The closed door B is our unwillingness to experience life as it is. I am talking here mainly of the more painful emotions such as, fear, anger, sadness grief etc. We close door B because we feel life is too much or that there is something is with feeling like this. 

Mindfulness Meditation is not about trying to close the first door so we don’t feel anything unpleasant, it is opening the second door. All experience wants simply to be experienced for a duration then allowed to pass away. This is healthy and brings an ease of being and a joy to life.  However, we tend to make a problem out of emotions that seem threatening. We don’t like to feel sad for example because we may appear weak, or it seems to point to something being wrong and life not going our way. So what we do when they show their little heads is to try and shove them back down again, we close the door on them. If we keep closing the door on our emotions at some point the “walls” will come under strain and – well we know what may happen next. 

We open the door by turning toward our emotions and allowing them space and keeping the door open so they can pass on.  Sadness for example is a natural response to some events in life and actually “season our soul.” Sadness opens our hearts to allow others to enter. Through experiencing sadness it connects us to others because the wisdom of experience shows us that we all suffer sadness. Sadness and pain are not some sort of mistake, they are essential - if they was no pain and sorrow they would be no connection and compassion.

They reveal our common humanity. If we close the door on sadness we remain locked away in our own little experience of life and experience emotional claustrophobia as a result. 

When we shut out sadness and other experiences we also shut out something else, and that something else is joy and happiness. Most people think that if they keep hurtful or sad feelings out of awareness that they will be well, but this is not the case. To experience the joy of being we need to be able to experience the sadness of being to. The beautiful words of poet Kahlil Gibran, say this much better than I ever could, "Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.

And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.
And how else can it be?
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter's oven?
And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?
When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.
When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight. 

Some of you say, "Joy is greater thar sorrow," and others say, "Nay, sorrow is the greater."
But I say unto you, they are inseparable.
Together they come, and when one sits, alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed. "

So as the poet says, we cannot have joy without sorrow - they are inseparable. Our work with mindfulness is firstly to observe how we turn away from painful emotions and allow the thoughts to run rampant. We can then take our attention away from the thoughts and into the felt experience of the emotions in the body. Opening the door means to experience life moment by moment whether it be joy or sorrow - because they are the same.

www.mindfulnesscic.co.uk

Mindfulness and unacknowledged Sadness

Unacknowledged Sadness

Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.
And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.
And how else can it be?
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter's oven?
And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?
When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.
When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

Some of you say, "Joy is the greater than sorrow," and others say, "Nay, sorrow is the greater."
But I say unto you, they are inseparable.
Together they come, and when one sits, alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.

Verily you are suspended like scales between your sorrow and your joy.
Only when you are empty are you at standstill and balanced.
When the treasure-keeper lifts you to weigh his gold and his silver, needs must your joy or your sorrow rise or fall.
Kahlil Gibran – The Prophet

When I was teenager crying came quite easily to me. It didn’t take much to set the “water works” going. A sad movie or an animal in distress touched me. I was a sensitive young thing. I remember walking around a local market with my mum and seeing this lovely old gentleman sitting behind his stall doing absolutely no business whilst all other stall holders seemed to be doing plenty. My heart went out to him and I was on the verge of tears just seeing this and feeling sad for him. I really had no idea what the situation really was for him but I knew how I felt.

As time went on and I get older and probably not wiser something changed, I am not saying it’s good or bad but something changed. I noticed I was not as sensitive as I was when a teenager. I didn’t seem to “feel for” people as much as I did. Once I reached my early 30s I think the taps were very much turned off. It took a lot to set me to tears then.

That was until I went on a solitary meditation retreat. It was my second solitary and I was alone for two weeks in a lovely remote hut in the Welch countryside. I had no idea that things were going to get interesting. I was meditating for around 4-5 hours a day. Along with that I was doing very little reading and taking a few walks. After about the 4^th day I started to feel unsettled and couldn’t quite understand why.  I started to feel sad but kept up my routine of sitting and walking. During an evening meditation something inside shifted and the tears started to flow. It wasn’t exactly painful but the tears were flowing. I didn’t know why, but intuitively I knew I didn’t need to do anything. I have often trusted my intuition in situations like that. I know that I have to just get out of my head and let it happen. 

For the next few days the tears came and went, and so did the sadness. In between bouts of sadness I actually felt very light and happy. Then the sadness would flow again but I was getting kind of used to it and just let it flow the best I could. I wasn’t unsettled by it now in the way I was at the beginning. The sadness slowly eased over the next few days and I felt very light as a result.

During the last day or so it dawned on me that the sadness that I felt was emotion that I had been carrying around for years. It was the hurt of childhood and the hurt of loved ones leaving me.  It was the hurt of my dad spending many months in hospital with burned feet when I was about 6 years old. In a nutshell it was what I called unacknowledged sadness. It was sadness that I had ignored because I didn’t want to experience it for various reasons.

The fact that this happened then and in the way it did didn’t really surprise me - though it did a little too. After all I knew enough about meditation to realise that to release blocked emotion was one of its benefits. What was surprising is that I didn’t realise I had “all that sadness in me.” It makes perfect sense now of course as I hope I am just a little bit wiser.

I often recommend to people who may be ready to do a solitary retreat. It allows you to feel and express things that are difficult whilst living our often busy lives. Some people I will advise starting with a weekend, others I may say just jump into a week or more. Yet others may be better talking to a friend or a good therapist.

In my teaching and the leading of retreats I see unacknowledged sadness a lot. We have all had experiences that have been painful and left their mark, and if we don’t allow ourselves the space to “work through” and release these experiences they remain lodged in the body.

That is why I emphasise awareness of the body when teaching meditation. Sensing into the body and feeling the sensations are of paramount importance whilst sitting. It’s so easy to spend the sitting time lost in your head fantasising, or trying to control your experience so that you don’t feel any uncomfortable emotions.

When I talk about unacknowledged sadness almost everybody nods their head in agreement, we all know that it exists.  

But most of us understandably so are quite wary of touching and experiencing it. But to be happy and free we must do just that. It may not be mindfulness that does it for you but if you sense that you have unacknowledged sadness than I encourage you to befriend it in the kindest and safest way possible. It will make a huge difference to your level of happiness. If we don’t attend to it, it can in some cases lead to depression. The human body seems equipped to deal with a certain amount of held emotion but the threshold level varies between individuals.

How we approach this whole issue in meditation is crucial to whether we heal our lives or not. We can meditate for many years and we may have been better off “practising our swimming stroke.” This is because we haven’t actually engaged with ourselves and our pain. We have been too busy trying to get out of our experience trying to have a “better” one.

When we meditate there is one crucial element that is often overlooked and that element is curiosity. When we meditate we need to be curious. We take our place and we ask “what’s happening?” This question, this curiosity helps us to remain present with our experience. We may notice a tickle on the top lip, or a sensation of tingling in the hands. We may notice the sound of birds singing, or the patter of rain. If we remain curious we come into the present moment and are alive to it. If you are willing to do this you may even begin to sense some unacknowledged sadness and to experience this little by little is to heal your life and give happiness its rightful place.

In meditation, curiosity has two elements. One is the obvious being curious - wanting to know what is happening. Through this element of curiosity we discover sensations, sounds and thought patterns that we may previously only been dimly aware of. The second element is being curious enough to stay with a sensation/feeling so as to allow it to unfold. This is where it gets very interesting, and often what a lot of us don’t want to do, or don’t value because we have an agenda to change ourselves, rather to be aware of ourselves, and trying to change ourselves doesn’t work!

If we remain with a sensation (A tightness, a heaviness or whatever) and stay curious we begin to sense new things about it. We may notice it tighten, or loosening and relaxing. We may notice an image associated with it. Perhaps we sense an emotion connected with it and feel flushed or a little nervous. How it unfolds is slightly different for each of us. But the healing happens if we stay there with gentleness and kindness. The key is - wanting to know a little more about it. Tears may begin to flow.

Most of the sadness that we meet in our practice is personal, meaning that it arises out of the events of our own life. However, there is another level of sadness that is not really personal at all. It has nothing to do with how you have lived your life. This is what we could call generational sadness or generational pain, as it’s not confined to sadness. This is the pain and sadness passed down through previous generations. This is pain that has not been resolved by our parents, grandparents, and even earlier ancestors. It may also be cultural and social pain that a society has not come to terms with. We may have had parents or ancestors that suffered from alcoholism, or were abused. We may have had grandparents that suffered during the terrible world wars. The list of why’s are endless of course and we don’t need to know why.

What can be interesting is that as children we start out as 100 watt bulbs, full of love, warmth and enthusiasm. But if the family as a unit are shining at only 40 watt than the child has to shrink in wattage to fit it – and the child must fit in. This shrinking down however can be the cause of great pain and sadness in later life as some of us know from our own lives.

There are various therapies for dealing generational pain one of the best that I have come across is Family Constellations pioneered by Bert Hellinger. You can Google it and find a practitioner if interested.

Sadness is not of course the only thing that meditation is concerned with. Its main purpose is to awaken us from spiritual ignorance. In other words it is concerned with clarifying how we see ourselves and the world – because how we see the world is how we experience it!!!

www.mindfulnesscic.co.uk

Stirring the Porridge - in Praise of the Ordinary.

Often in life we look for the special and exciting. We often don't want to be with the ordinary and simple everyday things like, washing the dishes, vacuuming the house and waiting for a bus and sending emails. In Zen Buddhism the highest of practice is not experiencing the glories or higher states of consciousness, not sitting at the side of the Buddha of golden light or experiencing god-like bliss but stirring the porridge.

There is no glamour or glory in stirring the porridge except maybe if you make it especially nice so people will compliment you, but that's as good as it gets. Stirring the porridge is really about bringing alive the mundane and simple aspects of life, which we often see as getting in the way of living.

These mundane aspects are the everyday activities that we all have to do, but quite often we resist, which leads to tension and distress. Our mindfulness practice is about noticing how we are with activities like, walking up the stairs, tying our shoelaces, talking to an employee, buttoning our shirt. It can mean observing how we are when cleaning the toilet, sweeping the floor, sitting in a meeting or eating a cheese sandwich.

Do we notice how we want to be doing something else? Do we observe when we are present with the activity we are engaged in? Being in the NOW is the buzz term nowadays, but do we know what it really means? It has very little to do with white lights and feeling cosmic bliss, but is more to do with stirring the porridge.

I remember my days of training in Buddhism when on retreat. We always had work periods and I really didn't like it. I would curse and resist like hell. “I don't want to do this sort of work.” This was my view, but slowly the penny dropped and I came to see that everything is practice.

Our practice when engaging in these activities is to notice when the thinking, dreaming mind takes us away. We say a gentle but firm “no” then return back to the activity at hand, return back to the present moment. We don't need to judge ourselves for thinking about a million and one things, but simply to notice and return back to the body and the activity.

It is good to know the consequences of indulging in certain kinds of thinking. Most of it may seem innocuous little day dreams but these distractions are the way ignorance maintains its hold over us. If the thoughts are charged with strong emotion such as anger or revenge we know that indulging these can lead to harmful behaviour. We observe it all and turn to the present moment, which means stirring the porridge, listening to a friend or doing a business deal.

But however much we tell ourselves that we want and should live in the present we don’t. We see ourselves time and again off on some day dream or regretting some past actions. Why is this? It is because we are not really interested in stirring the porridge or putting out the rubbish bag. We do these things physically but emotionally we just aren’t interested. We would rather fantasize about our latest boyfriend, play with our latest gadget or dream about what we are going to have for dinner. 

Conversely we may find ourselves worrying about the future and what it may bring. This is because we all have a self-image and this image exists only as a belief in the head. The image maintains and reinforces its identity through unconscious thinking. If you notice who is at the centre of all the chatter that rattles through your brain you will notice that you are. Much of the thinking is about protecting ourselves from hurt by either going over past hurts or making sure we don’t get hurt in the unknown future.

In times of happiness and pleasure it is quite easy to be aware of the present. When we are happy our self-image is much more fluid. Our mind is undivided and whole and we are at peace. However, when pain arrives it is quite a different matter and it doesn’t really matter whether it’s physical or psychological. We don’t like this. The mind then becomes separated from experience and goes into conflict with the pain. It may use its usual strategies of trying to get rid of it, condemning it, or even shutting down. It is only when we see clearly that these strategies don’t work that we stop employing them. We stop trying to do something to the pain – we learn to accept it as part of life and we mature as a consequence. 

Learning to come back to the presnt moment even in the midst of pain is what matures us as human beings. We are not being martyrs here, we are not looking for pain but if it is there we stop pretending otherwise. There are two ways to suffer. Either we suffer with awareness and learn from it and let it season and mature us or we just resist by any method we can. Those methods may include, over drinking, over work, keeping busy, running away from responsibilities. Blaming others is a very common way of not experiencing our own pain.

When I first started practicing Buddhism in the early 1990s I had a lot of fear inside me. I used various strategies to get rid of the fear but none of them really worked. The fear was still there most of the time. I knew the theory of meeting fear and had the read the books but didn’t understand it until I had a dream whilst on a solitary meditation retreat. In the dream I had to go into a room in a house. As I approached the room I realized there was a raging fire inside it. I of course did not want to enter and stood by the doorway wondering what on earth to do. At that moment a friend in the dream came by and pushed me into the room and I awoke with a start.

On waking I knew instantly what the dream was telling me. It was showing me that I must enter into the fear – into the fire. Only by entering into it completely would I understand what fear is and be at peace with it. I realized that by struggling against fear was a way of generating more fear. To be free from pain we need to stop separating from it. When we do this time and again we see that the only real possibility is to be with the pain just as we can be with pleasure. We need to learn the art of coming back to both the pleasant and the unpleasant in life. This as one good teacher called it is the wisdom of no escape.

Stirring the porridge then is being with the whole of life without separating from it. It is allowing the joy to dance and the pain to sing. Our work is to create a big space in which it can all happen in its own beautiful way.

If you wish to learn mindfulness please see our website www.mindfulnesscic.co.uk

  

Mindfulness and the Jewel in the Ice

Imagine there is a large block of ice, inside is a jewel, a beautiful sparkling, and glittering jewel. We cannot always see this jewel, but we know it is there. We have felt it, seen it, been taken to moments of wonder by it. This jewel has always existed and always will. No matter how hidden it is, it always remains a jewel. Even if coated with dust and grime by decades of neglect all this jewel needs is a little attention to sparkle again.

The jewel is the jewel of a joyful life. It is the jewel of a life lived with meaning and fulfilment. It is a life where angst and confusion have been replaced by ease and clarity. This jewel exists within us all and is our birth-right.

We may sense this jewel inside ourselves and wonder how we can enjoy its presence in our lives more than we do. It may seem like our life is not blessed with this jewel that sparkles. How can we experience this jewel of joy when we have a mortgage to pay, possibility of losing our job, or somebody we love leaves us? This jewel may seem to us at other times that it doesn’t exist at all – that it is just a fairy story.

The clue to why we don’t experience this jewel fully in our lives is in the fact that this jewel is embedded in the block of ice. Now if we have something in a block of ice how do we go about getting it out? If this jewel were buried in rock then we would have to smash the rock to release it, and damage the rock in the process. However, to release something from ice is a very different matter. We just put the ice in the sun; we allow the sun to melt the ice and whatever it is that lives within it will at some point be revealed to us. This is similar to the process that we must engage in for us to experience the jewel of joy more fully in our lives, and it is what mindfulness is all about. Mindfulness is like the sun, it melts and heals what it shines upon.

If this ice is what is stopping us from experiencing the jewel of joy then what exactly is it and how do we melt the ice through mindfulness.

The ice is basically our resistance to how life is in any moment. The ice is made up of our rigid views and judgements that life should be a certain way and should be free from pain. For example, when somebody criticises us what we tend to do is to go over and over what they said and go into blaming them for how we feel, or perhaps blaming ourselves for not being good enough. This is one way we build up the block of ice. In this scenario we are reluctant to experience our own hurt. The moment we let go of our blaming thoughts and tend to the feeling of hurt the ice begins to melt. The mindful experiencing of sorrow itself melts the ice. Of course we may also decide to say something to that person but if we are willing to work with our anger then what we say will be much more considered.

Another way we build up the block of ice is to try and keep away any painful feelings from the past. For example, we may feel sad about something that has happened to us, but because we feel uncomfortable about feeling sad we “freeze” out that experience. I have met many people in my work who think that feeling sad (or any other difficult emotion) is bad, for whatever reason. They believe if they feel sad it means there is something wrong with them or their life. However, sadness is a natural human emotion and is there to be experienced. If we don’t learn to turn toward our emotions with mindfulness and kindness we distance ourselves from the jewel and experience only the ice. 

A joyful life does not mean we don’t experience pain. Paradoxically, pain is a facet of the jewel, but we make it into ice by trying to deny it, trying desperately to make it go away or by taking it personally. What we tend to do is to experience pain which is a facet of the jewel and then create suffering – the block of ice surrounding it.

So to melt the ice and allow the jewel to bring you more joy we can notice our rigid views such as: “I don’t want this to be happening.” “Life shouldn’t be like this.” “My life will never be the same again.”  Learn to let them go and come into the present moment which is simple and never complicated. Turn toward your experience as it is, hearing, tasting, smelling, seeing and feeling without your mental and emotional overlay and you will be slowly melting the ice that keeps you from living a stress free, joy filled life.

To learn mindfulness with an experienced teacher see our website

www.mindfulnesscic.co.uk

Mindfulness and living life backwards

In Zen there is a law called the backwards law. What this means is that when you try to stay on surface of water you sink, when you try to sink you float. There is very little effort or indeed no effort in staying afloat, all you do is fill your lungs with air...easy really. When you try to hold your breath, you have lost it. If you want to breathe just don't interfere with nature. There is a saying in Sufism "if you want to save your soul, then lose it." 

But what does this have to do with mindfulness meditation? Well we all find ourselves in a bit of a pickle about life. We find ourselves feeling afraid, confused and insecure. We may prefer to keep these "beasts" at arms-length or better still just pretend they are not there. Another way out of the pickle can be to find the opposite. So our lives become a pursuit to feel ok about life, to blot out the anxious, insecure tremble we feel. We may try to get a "job for life", we may make sure everyone we meet likes us and is nice to us. Or perhaps we make sure we have a pension, and surround ourselves with things who people who make us feel secure and good. 

Another way we may tackle this problem is one of turning to philosophy or religion in order to make sense of this "strange old world."  We may take on certain beliefs, maybe that there is like after death, or that this is it and when we die there is nothing. Both are beliefs and these beliefs can be a comfort to us for a while but to be utterly free we must move beyond mere beliefs into the realm of uncertainty, and this is where most of us don't want to go. However, trying to feel secure by merely  taking on beliefs will in the end make very little difference. The cause of insecurity is that our efforts go into finding security...and there is no security. THIS IS IT - THERE IS NO SECURITY AND TO REALISE THIS IS THE ONLY SECURITY (Before I go on, I am not saying that a good job a pension and taking up religion are bad, just that we don't get from them what we really want) 
We may try endlessly and ingeniously to make intellectual sense out of life. Thinking through this way, thinking it through that way, but in the end hopefully we realise that thinking is limited. It is of a dimension that cannot comprehend reality, because reality includes thought, includes the rational but cannot be contained and understood by it. It is like trying to tie down water with string, it is futile. We can tie ourselves in knots trying to figure it all out. For some of us this intellectual pursuit becomes the reason for living...but in the end leaves us vulnerable and afraid. 

Imagine a flowing river. We wake up (self-consciousness) and see that we are afloat in this river and we are terrified. All our efforts go into holding onto rocks, which in turn are torn apart and dislodged by the river. We intuitively know this but so try ever harder to hold on, because we don’t know what else to do. What we hold to are, people, careers, self-identity, being nice, or not nice, being a rebel or conforming and reputation. Our rocks may be trying to get rich or rationalising that money is dirty. It doesn't matter because all the rocks in time will be wiped away out of our grasp. 

The way out of this dilemma is the way in. In other words we need to allow ourselves to experience the uncertainty. We can start with small things. For example, when you want something to eat just ask yourself, "Am I hungry?" I have realised recently that so much of my eating has nothing to do with being hungry and more to do with insecurity. To know this in the head is one thing but to stay with it whilst it's happening is something completely different. We can also notice when we get defensive about ourselves. If someone criticises you, notice your response and be brutally honest with yourself. "Goodness, I want to punch this person right now for saying that." Hopefully we don't of course, but it's this honesty and spaciousness that allows us to experience the insecurity, the rage we feel toward life. In meditation allow yourself to feel what you feel, joy, hatred, misery, bliss, sadness. When you allow things to be, something that is not of the ordinary mind begins to flow into our lives. It is wisdom and total security, or rather it's the capacity to allow the insecurity to be there and not be dragged into the story we create around it. In other words security comes by seeing deeply that life is 100% insecure. It is by becoming friends with this truth that we become comfortable with it and becoming comfortable with it is wisdom.


So remember the reverse law. If you want to catch a deer lay down in the grass and it may come out and kiss you on the nose. If you want enlightenment don’t chase it just drop your opinions about it, and if you want security then head straight for insecurity.

To learn the wonderful art of mindfulness see my website Mindfulnesscic.co.uk