appreciate your life
We savor our life just as it is, messy, littered with abandoned to-do lists and unfulfilled expectations. We appreciate our life now, we’re not just managing it.
When asked about the fruit of meditative life, the 13th century Japanese monk Dogen Zenji replied: “enlightenment is intimacy with all things.” Mindfulness allows us to intimately see a flower, or watch a sunset, or eat a mango, with nothing in between us and the experience.
Breath by breath we deepen our connection with life as it is. We are more present for the beauty and the challenges we encounter. We discover a new dimension to life, as described by Emily Dickinson:
Life is so astonishing; it leaves very little time for anything else.
But it’s not this way when we start out.
stuck in overwhelm gear
As our day to day life becomes more complicated, with a ridiculous number of choices facing us, we get stuck in overwhelm mode. Our system is simply bogged down, flooded with sticky, uncomfortable memories or body sensations triggered by the media.
Many of us are are overwhelmed by feelings of inadequacy when we compare ourselves to some impossible corporate avatar of a slim, attractive, work and family balancing, confident and together human.
stuck in the judging, evaluating and comparing gear
But when we set aside time on the cushion for a little respite, we often struggle with all this judging, evaluating and comparing. Even our most intimate thoughts seem untrustworthy at times.
We don’t construct the comparisons in our mind. We learn them from the messages we are exposed to 24/7. I mean, we even take our cell phones to bed with us!
This judging mind, that meditators are so familiar with, takes us far away from this intimacy that Dogen mentioned.
tapering
One strategy for working with an overwhelmed mind, following our medical theme, here is tapering. Just by taking the time off to sit quietly, we taper our exposure to the mental toxins we absorb in our day to day life.
In his early teachings, the Buddha spoke a lot about these mental toxins at the root of the struggle in our lives. He called them the three poisons of greed, hatred, and delusion.
respite from the toxins
This tapering gives our brains a respite from these poisons and a chance to detoxify a little.
As a nurse, I am trained to make quick assessments of patients, starting from the ABCs: Is the Airway clear? Is the Breathing unlabored? Is Circulation robust? If we are clear on the basics, we move on to finer level assessments.
In our meditation practice we work with a different set of ABCs:
the ABCs of meditation
Awareness is simply the capacity to dispassionately observe the present reality, moment by moment. You try not to control your thoughts but just observe and acknowledge them without judgment.
Being with is simply extending this awareness over time. You observe your thoughts and feelings by fully being with your present moment experience.
You redirect the mind back to the awareness of the breath or the body when uncomfortable thoughts come up. And you try not to indulge in the comfortable ones, either
a non-judgmental space
You just allow the present moment’s content to unfurl within a non-judgmental space. Moment by moment.
Awareness and Being With leads to our C-word–conscious Choice. By creating this non-judgemental space, you are no longer compulsively reacting to the culture’s thoughts. You are in a position of power to challenge your conditioning and make your own choices.
titration
Continuing in our medical mode, we also introduce titration. As we get better at settling the awareness on the breath, for example, we broaden the scope of meditation by spreading awareness throughout the whole body.
The toxins are titrated as there is now a bigger pool of awareness for them to splash around in.
a spoon of salt in a freshwater lake
The Buddha used a well-known analogy to describe this. He said a spoon of salt mixed in a glass of pure water makes the whole very salty, whereas the same spoon of salt mixed in a freshwater lake hardly changes the taste of the water.
This bring us to our last set of ABCs.
a bigger container
The late American Zen teacher Charlotte Joko Beck, in her book Everyday Zen, called this widening of the scope of awareness, so we can no longer taste the salty toxins in the spacious lake of our own minds,
creating A Bigger Container.
As we practice these ABCs of mindfulness meditation, we relish this “intimacy with all things” Dogen mentioned at the top.
We savor our life just as it is, messy, littered with abandoned to-do lists and unfulfilled expectations.
We appreciate our life now, we’re not just managing it.
