don’t let the mind become a lonely hunter
You have all you need. The bounty is already laid out at your doorstep.
(The title here steals from Carson McCuller’s remarkable debut novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, published in 1940 when she was only 23.)
Our mind can easily turn into a lonely hunter when it thinks there is something to get or achieve in meditation.
When we eat breakfast, can we just eat? Just taste the oatmeal or the cereal or the fruit?
Can we relish the wisdom of our senses as they taste and smell toast and jam, and not give way to the push and pull of the mind?
Yes, we have thoughts, we are not trying to become mindful robots.
But can we be there for the forming of language? And equally there for the arising of thoughts of liking and disliking, catastrophizing and fantasizing?
Let’s see.
- 1. As you are making breakfast, you hear a ping sound and as you check out a notification on your phone you …
- 2. notice the toast is burning.
- 3. The thought arises: my morning is ruined.
Can we simply hang there a second in the space that sees the thought “my morning is ruined?”
As the late Thai meditation master Ajahn Chah remarked, if the house is flooded, can we just have a flooded house, and not also a flooded mind?
Can we for just a brief second notice what the mind is up to? Can we name it?
The Zen teacher and poet Norman Fischer observes, “naming a soup salty or spicy or vegetarian is different from experiencing it on the tongue, on the lips, drawing it from the spoon.”
Our mindfulness practice exposes the conditioned guts of our own mind.
But there is nothing you need to go hunting for, it will all show up with just a little patience with the simple instructions of our mindfulness practice.
All that is necessary is for us to show up
… on our cushion, or in the moment as we notice what the mind is up to while paying a parking ticket or shopping for groceries.
And as we show up again and again, our practice matures; we can see more of this conditioning arise and pass away. We let go more easily and naturally.
We just show up to dance with our sense impressions.
And what an exhilarating, mournfully jubilant and spontaneous dance!
The dance of our life!
Ajahn Chah described this practice as committing to “taking the one seat.”
As his student Jack Kornfield describes it:
Just go into the room and put one chair in the center. Take the seat in the center of the room, open the doors and the windows, and see who comes to visit. You will witness all kinds of scenes and actors, all kinds of temptations and stories, everything imaginable. Your only job is to stay in your seat. You will see it all arise and pass, and out of this, wisdom and understanding will come.
It’s just this simple. Don’t make it complicated. And don’t let your mind talk itself into becomg a lonely hunter.
You have all you need.
The bounty is already laid out at your doorstep.
