CHOICELESS AWARENESS - AND OPENING TO THE FLOW OF LIFE

CHOICELESS AWARENESS AND OPENING TO THE FLOW OF LIFE

I spent many years trying to get somewhere in meditation, I tried to be calm, I tried to feel good, I tried to have only positive thoughts. I tried very hard to get rid of all my "bad" feelings and have only "good" ones and I tried get into higher states of consciousness. God loves a trier they say, but it didn't seem to be doing me much good. Then I came across a teaching called Choiceless Awareness and I was intrigued. I was intrigued mainly because I was trying very hard to "choose" my experience and it didn't seem to be bringing me much calm and joy.

Choiceless awareness is the way of mindfulness and effortlessness. That doesn’t mean to say it is easy. It is a way of opening to experience rather than trying to control it. When we “practice” choiceless awareness meditation everything about ourselves is allowed to arise and to pass away in its own time and in its own way. It is a way of sitting loose to ourselves rather than frantically trying to manipulate and control our experience into what we want it to be, or how we think it should be.

What I realised by bringing choicelessness  into my mindfulness practice was  that I was aligning myself with the natural way of things. The natural way is for all things to arise and to pass away. What I had been doing for many years in meditation was to deny this natural flow that is life. I realised I was frightened of life. Life isn't something we can hold onto, and if we attempt to do this it creates stress and suffering, because we are denying a simple but profound fact of life – what arises, passes. We could say that meditation is waking up to the facts of life...that what comes into being will eventually pass away, but we don't want to hear this. We want to think that we are a fixed and separate being and not part of life, but a-part from life, even though we long to be at one with it. Our efforts go into maintaining this sense of a fixed and permanent entity and it uses up a lot of energy often leaving us exhausted.

We not only want ourselves to be fixed and unchanging (even though paradoxically we want to change) we want all that brings us pleasure and comfort in life such as possessions and reputation to do the same. When we hold onto things emotionally the result is pain because the law of nature is what appears also disappears. When we grasp after pleasure the possibility of pain is alway there. It is like picking up a stick - you pick up one end and the other end comes with it. You cannot have a stick with only one end. It is the same with pleasure and pain. If you attach to pleasure you will get pain too. However, if we can welcome pleasure and indeed enjoy it without grasping then pain does not arise. This is something we all have to work out for ourselves in our own experience - this is the stick with only one end - amazing isn’t it!!!

I remember for years how I used to have a view that to be happy and peaceful I had to keep any unhappy thoughts and any un-peaceful feelings out of my experience. What I was actually doing was repressing energy and aspects of myself that wanted to follow the flow of life, to arise into consciousness and pass away. Fortunately I came across teachers who had been through the same process and were kind and wise enough to pass on what they had learned.

What I realised is that peacefulness isn't something that I can create through choosing what to experience. I had to have the courage to open to all of my experience and to let it be. Letting it be means to allow it into awareness. It means to feel what I may not want to feel because I have a view that it's bad for whatever reason. Letting things be isn't passive. It means being gently curious about what is happening in the body, feeling all the tensions, all the tight areas, it means feeling the open and expansive parts too. We bring things into awareness and that's all we need to do. We cannot trust that life will always be what we want it to be, but we can trust in awareness of it. 

We cannot open ourselves in a flash - it takes patience, kindness and sensitivity toward ourselves. But if we are willing to be choiceless more and more as time goes on we will see a change. We realise that the peace we were striving for by trying to control our experience happens when we don't need to control our experience anymore. We can come to see that who we are is not limited to the contents of awareness but we are also the very spacious awareness in which they appear. 

We all intuitively know that there is something about us that is boundless, limitless and joyful. However, when we turn back to our experience we certainly don’t experience ourselves as boundless, limited and joyful. Often our experience is just the opposite. We experience ourselves as very limited and unhappy. However, the unlimited and joyful has not gone away, but has been covered over by views, desires and fears that we spend our time sometimes following and other times battling against. The unbounded and joyful is our true nature and is not a thing in itself.  It is like the sky, the sky exists but is not a thing in itself – it is the absence of things - but yet it exists. 

You cannot grab the sky and put it in your pocket nor can you bottle it, but it’s there.

The intuitive sense of boundlessness and at the same time the experience of pain and limitation is often referred to as the holy war. The more we open and listen intuitively to the call of the unlimited the more it manifests in our life. But we must also work with the limited. We must face the fears, desires and anxieties that we have as humans on this earth. This is where being choiceless is helpful. When we practice choiceless awareness we let go of any object or focus of meditation. We observe anything and everything as it arises. We observe any judgments and opinions and let them go by like clouds in the sky. We watch and listen to any uncertainty and doubts about how we are doing. We notice thoughts and bodily sensations as they arise into awareness and watch then change too. In other words we are choiceless about what we give our attention to. 

There is nothing that is given attention because we want more of it as in pleasant feelings or that we want to get rid of it as in unpleasant sensations. However, if the urge to get rid of something unpleasant arises that too is given space and allowed to follow its course. The practice of choicelessness is the opening to nature’s way. Nature’s way is that life appears in certain forms for a while changes and passes away. As this arising and passing away becomes clearer to us we see that there is no permanency to any of our experience and that none of this really belongs to us – it just happens. Just like the heart beats, the blood flows and the body breathes without any effort on your part.

Mindfulness allows us to sit at ease with the flow of emotions, thoughts and images that pass through our being. We see more clearly natures’s law – that all is changing moment by moment. But we also see something else that we had ignored all our lives – we begin to notice space. 

When I walk into a room what I notice are objects in the room. I notice curtains, carpets, chairs and maybe people. I notice the walls with pictures hanging and I notice the ceiling. What I don’t notice is the space. What I immediately do when I enter a room is to scan the objects. It is the same with my mind. What I notice about my mind are the objects - thoughts, images and memories. If I learn to notice the space of my mind which is the purpose of choiceless meditation it brings with it a sense of ease. This is because we begin to realise that there is “something” other than thoughts that we can rely on. It may not be something tangible like a chair or a house – which it must be said aren’t always that reliable – but is definitely there. This is an intuitive awareness of space. We can sit and think about this spaciousness for decades and we will still be no nearer understanding it. Once we begin to trust this spaciousness - which is our natural intelligence – we then start to loosen our attachment to thoughts and this is one of the greatest blessings we can experience.

Have a go at this:

Take a seat and allow all thoughts to enter your awareness. Observe all your judgments and opinions about them - more thoughts. Notice how some make you tense, some carry you away. Some may make you feel good and some make you feel bad. Be honest here and acknowledge all that is happening. Being choiceless doesn’t mean not having reactions to whatever happens it means being honest enough to admit what is going on. It is only through this honesty that we create the right atmosphere and be at ease with passing thoughts.

www.mindfulnesscic.co.uk

The Zen master, the cleaning lady and the vase.

A STORY: The old Zen master Hakuin the abbot of Kukai monastery decides to go visit his old friend Shotsu. They have been friends for over 60 years and he is looking forward to spending a week together. Just before Hakuin returns Ami, the little old cleaning lady decides to clean his room so that it would be ready and prepared for him. Ami adores Hakuin who could be very very kind but could also be very very fierce when necessary.

She moves her way around the room vaccuming and dusting the shelves and book cases. She gets to his desk and decides to pick up his favourite vase to dust. This vase is a lineage heirloom - being handed down to him from his master, and from many masters before. Hakuin would at times just sit and look at the vase in wonder at its beauty.

As she is dusting it she drops it and it smashes on the floor into a thousand pieces. Just at that moment Hakuin returns from his vist away, Ami turns towards him with horror and fear on her face. Hakuin looks directly into her eyes and says, "Don't you worry me dear, I got that vase for pleasure not for pain." He walks over to old Ami and bends down and helps her pick up the pieces.

I really love this story and I was reminded of it only this week. I got my partner a new iPad and found myself playing on it and really liking it. Then of course I realised one iPad wash't enough for our household so I bought myself one. 

Anyway my partner took hers to London and when she returned I could not find her iPad. I thought she had left it on the train. The next morning however she knew exactly where it was. 

I realised two things here. The first is that I did not respond as graciously as our friend Hakuin - I was a little peeved that she may have lost it, but all this was going on in my head, she hadn't lost it at all. The other thing I realised is just how pain is the shadow of pleasure. Whatever is a source of pleasure, in the blink of an eye - or in the belief of a thought - can become a source of pain. This does not mean that we don't possess the objects of the world but we need to look closely at our relationship to them.  

The image of a stick came to mind. There are always two ends to a stick - you cannot have a stick with only one end. Pleasure and pain are similar. It seems to me that they are like the two ends of a stick - you pick one end up and the other comes with it. They seem inseparable. 

I realised the best I can do is not carry the pain longer than I need to - what I need to do is to learn to let go of it again and again and again.

www.mindfulnesscic.co.uk

Mindfulness - Never Turn Away

All of us to varying degrees have aspects of ourselves that we either don’t like, are ashamed of, or are afraid of. If you think you don’t then you are either very spiritually mature or you don’t know yourself very well. 

Normally we keep all these parts of ourselves well hidden from ourselves and others. However, they leek out in various ways. It may be covert behaviour, sneaky remarks, gossiping, or anger that we don’t want others to see. We keep these hidden because we have a view of ourselves and these aspects don’t fit in with that view. I had a view of myself as a generous person, and indeed there is that aspect, but when I was on meditation retreats – and I was leading them – I would notice how obsessed I could become when queuing for the meals. I would stand there hoping that the guy in front wouldn’t get the large piece of pie that was left, or would worry that there wouldn’t be enough porridge left for me if I wasn’t at breakfast early. I realised that although I am capable of generosity I am also capable of being greedy and obsessive. At this point I began to recognise not just the aspects that I liked but also the parts that I didn’t. I started to bring into consciousness all those banished energies/parts that I viewed as unacceptable either because I was uncomfortable with or frightened of them.

This led to a very different way of practising mindfulness meditation. I found that instead of trying to control my experience so that I could feel good, I would bring curiosity to my experience. I would intentionally look for the very parts that I was previously running away from. This led me to face myself in a way I had never before, and it’s been the best thing I have done.

This is now how I teach mindfulness meditation. Instead of controlling and running from their experience I encourage people to turn toward whatever it is that is upsetting them or are afraid of. This is a way of bringing love and acceptance into meditation rather than control and being judgemental. Mindfulness in this way is a way of truly loving yourself, it is saying to all those hurt parts “I am not abandoning you any longer, it may take me a while to accept you but I am going to do my best.” And our best is all we can do, it is not about heroic endeavours but more about little ways we are willing to stay with uncomfortable sensations and feelings instead of zipping off to use the internet, phone a friend or eat more cheese. Sometimes we may even reach something that just feels too much right now, and that is accepted too. As well as curiosity we also need patience and kindness.

I am occasionally asked - Why do this? Well either you are drawn to wanting to heal your life or you are not and I have found that mindfulness practised intelligently does work. 

When I meditate nowadays I rarely turn away from myself no matter what is present. I know that I am a good person, and I know that I am capable of some pretty nasty things. The difference now is that I am aware of them and mostly I don’t act them out. One of the main benefits of healing in this way is that we become more comfortable with ourselves and other people. Once I stop demonising parts of myself, I stop demonising that very same behaviour/trait in others. Mindfulness is a path to liberation, love and happiness but is not without its trials on the way. 

So I urge you to never turn away from your pain but to gently turn toward and even greet it. Treat it like a hurt child and give it space to feel as it wants to feel and to reveal itself to you. This is not analysis or trying to work out why we feel like this, but more like simply being with whatever is hurting. We tend to have a view that if we keep bad feelings out of awareness we will be well, not so. They stay around and often rebel in the form of negativity or illness. What we often fail to see is that if we have anything inside that feels sick, ill or uncomfortable we can turn toward it and breathe. Let it be felt. This is the way it can release and transform into what it needs to. This is the way of compassion and compassion to oneself is compassion to the whole of life.

Try this
Sit down and bring to mind something about yourself you find difficult. It may be violent or sexual thoughts, maybe dishonesty or secrecy, it doesn’t matter. Notice your reaction to this and how it makes you feel. Give it space and breathe. Notice the thoughts about this part too. Stay with this for a few minutes then just drop it into your heart. Don’t be scientific about it, “where’s the heart”? The intention is enough. The heart always receives and forgives without judgement. If there is judgement that is not the heart, but then drop the judger into the heart too. This is an act of love.

www.mindfulnesscic.co.uk

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