"You Have Found the Secret of This Place"

Mindfulness is like sitting on the bank of a river perhaps with your back against a tree watching the river flow by. There are many objects that might flow down your river depending on the experiences and memories you have. You really cannot control what gets carried down the river nor can you control all of the  thoughts that flow in your stream of consciousness The objects carry emotions and physical sensations with them, pleasant or unpleasant, and you may also observe the flow of these within you. Watch as they come and go. Watch as some of these have more power than others and tend to attract more attention. 

When things seem to attract more attention and create more emotion you may do one of several things. You may dive in, grab hold of it, and either get carried away downstream or pull it to the bank with you and meditate on it. This will serve to enhance and sustain the experience. If it is an unpleasant memory, thought, feeling, sensation then you will feel distress. If the thoughts, feelings, sensations are pleasant and you attend to them you will feel pleasant. 

One may also choose to deny or avoid the object or experience, damming up the river to prevent the object from floating into our consciousness or pushing it of consciousness. If this is the choice what will soon happen is that the river will overflow and you will soon find the object sitting squarely and uncomfortably in your lap. Avoidance or denial of what is there also enhances and sustains the experience.

What we fix our attention on reinforces the power of the object. While it does no good to avoid or deny that negative, unpleasant, even perverse thoughts enter our minds, our "stream of consciousness", and create feelings and sensations in our bodies it also does us greater harm to fix our attentions on them EVEN with the intent of removing them. It is far better, in realistic humility, to admit that these things do come to mind, refocus attention toward something better, beautiful, pleasant, or helpful, and allow the thought to be there. If you do not fight the unpleasant thoughts or try to avoid them they will to flow more quickly out of our consciousness.

Meditation is a constant human activity whether we do it formally or not. It is not a matter of whether we will meditate or not, we will. The issue really is on what will we meditate i.e. repetitively and deliberately fix our attention. It may be television, a computer screen, a novel, nature, donuts, anything, but meditate we will. And even then our minds become distracted quickly and we have to pull it back. 

I often ask patients to focus their attention on all of the red objects in my office. Immediately and usually before I finish my request their eyes dart all around the room. This occurs whether or not they are in great distress and my request may come at a highly unexpected moment. I may then ask them to observe a particular shape in my office, say all the rectangles. Immediately their eyes begin to dart once again. It takes microseconds for the brain to shift attention and create an experience with "red" or "entangles" at the fore. 

I then explain that this is how the brain works. The red objects and rectangles were always there but until there was the request to attend to them the red objects and rectangles were on the periphery and unremarkable. Once the request was made areas of the brain that process “red” and “rectangles” began absorbing more glucose and emitting more bioelectrical activity.  Then, for a short time, it’s hard NOT to see "red" or "rectangles". Other areas of the brain not needed in processing red and rectangular objects grow quieter and the internal experiences-thoughts, feelings, behaviors-immediately change or begin to. 

Areas of the brain that produce a sense of well-being are reinforced by the use of mindfulness practices generally and if the intention is to increase awareness of the pleasant, good, and beautiful then areas responsible for creating that experience can also be enhanced further by meditations focused toward that end. 

Focusing on the unpleasant produces similar effects in the brain but not of the well-being variety. Areas responsible for feelings of guilt, depression, anxiety, anger, shame come on-line and the affects should not be difficult to imagine. We do not eliminate unhelpful behaviors by self-despising, fighting against them, or using energy to push them away. These behaviors rather reinforce them. Is it any wonder how we remain trapped in behaviors that violate our sense of virtue.

At the Archabbey of St. Meinrad in Indiana a female retreatant was walking along the broad walk before the beautiful sandstone buildings of the seminary. A monk sitting on a bench beckoned to her to sit with him. She shyly accepted his offer. He asked her, “Well, how do you like the place?” and then he quickly said, “No, don’t tell me. You can’t be here more than a few minutes and not like it.” Just then a bumble bee began buzzing around him prompting him to say, “It can’t be me he’s after. I’m not sweet enough.” The woman replied, “Maybe what attracts him to you isn’t so apparent.” Then he looked at her with moist eyes, “You have found the secret of this place.” 

Pay attention and you'll discover the secret of this place, whatever place you are in.