A Padded Wicker Chair

Sweet, heavy smell of rain on the wind.

Heavy blossoming and greening dogwoods, young tender leaves quivering.

Mountains, some covered in early morning clouds, both rising 

In clear sight. 

Birdsong. Dozens perhaps. Lyrical, sharp, deep, excited, playful.

From this porch, in this padded wicker chair. 

Two teenage girls in running attire running, at least one of them, the other walking and adjusting her technology to better shut out something, the outside and maybe also the in. 

Landscapers with trailers draped in mowers and trimmers and tanned workers sleepily going to there somewhere. 

The earth is awake and so am I. 

From this porch and this padded wicker chair. 

Feelings emerge from nowhere or somewhere triggered by something or nothing. Cling to them, they remain. Release them and release them and release them. Some drift on easily. Others, well...yes, they do too. 

Sensations on the skin or inside deeper.

Peace, agitation, softness, heaviness, darkness, light.

Holding to one or the other for one or more moments. Appearing, returning and dissolving into the next.

Always a return to breath or birds, or blossoms, or green, or sunlight dappling through trees or thick clouds. Back to the breath, to home.

A ceaseless but sometimes quiet ebb and flow. 

Sitting on a front porch in a padded wicker chair. 

Put it all Down

“When your past calls, don’t answer. It has nothing new to say.”

Our pasts haunt us, especially those of us who tend to experience depression. It is the nature of the brain to remember. It is also the nature of the brain to predict so there are those of us just as haunted in the present by the future. Anxiety is the territory of those lost in prediction. Neither directional focus, however powerful, represents reality accurately. 

I remember a scene from my distant past. My twin brother and I, at age 5 or so, were sick. It was influenza according to my memory; the “old-fashioned” kind with respiratory problems and body aches. Fortunately there were two parents. My mother was tending to Frank and I was sitting on my father’s lap. I remember us being in the kitchen. I remember myself feeling exhausted but warm and safe wrapped in Dad’s bear-like arms. There was a fireplace in the kitchen and I was facing its glow; not too close, not too far. Just right. I remember the back door opening and my paternal grandparents entering just for a minute so as not to be exposed too much. They carried teddy bears and I eagerly clung to it, resting against my father’s strong chest, gazing at the fire…

…except there was no fire or fireplace. There was a space heater. 

Our minds fill in blank spaces in our memories and there are many, many of them. Our memories are not accurate in all their details. We may embellish the details of our memories either with things that are more comforting, beautiful, soothing, ideal or the opposite. My patients have nearly all experienced some form of abuse and if not actual abuse then real and equally destructive neglect. But the details? Not all of the details are remembered accurately. In these cases the negative “fillers” can be even more destructive than the facts. 

The accuracy of the details is not that important to me in the therapy office (I am not a detective) but often, as the therapeutic process develops, stories begin to change. For some who could not remember anything positive about their pasts, now positive memories arise. For some, the horrors of their memories are moderated or softened. Some simply learn to accept what they remember and release it so they can live.  Whichever path is taken the fact remains--The narratives of our lives can dictate our feelings in the present and our expectations of the future. 

A princess once came to ask the Buddha for meditation instruction. She had brought with her fine sandalwood incense and rare jewels and other stuff that she thought would make an appropriate offering to such a famous teacher. She wanted to present all of this to the Buddha personally, so instead of having one of her servants carry it (which is what she normally would have done) she carried all of it herself.
When she came to the Buddha she had both arms full of these expensive and exotic goodies. The Buddha looked up at her and asked her why she had come. She said that she wanted him to teach her how to meditate. The Buddha then said simply "Put it down." So she put down one arm-load of her offerings - right at the Buddha's feet. Then the Buddha said again, "Put it down." So she put down the rest of her offerings at the Buddha's feet. Then the Buddha said "Put it all down."

To expand the thought a bit further there was a famous Korean Zen Master named Seung Sahn - he was very fond of this teaching phrase "put it all down." He said it all the time. Sometimes it seemed like it was all he ever said! One time a student asked Zen Master Seung Sahn, "But HOW do I 'put it all down'?" Zen Master Seung Sahn replied, "Put THAT down, too."

How do we “put it all down”? Simplistic sounding isn’t it? And I suppose it really is. Many times what we would desperately like to put down and never pick up again simply won’t stay down. Perhaps we struggle to put it down because we have been trying to avoid it. Avoiding facing things is a great way of ensuring that it won’t go away; like trying to ignore an elephant in the living room. Perhaps we have been engaging the thoughts, feelings, sensations, and experiences in a fight to the death! Well, that is a sure-fire way to NOT let go of it.  Perhaps we need to explore it some more and allow our brains to integrate what we have been fighting or avoiding so it may lose its power. And the latter is really the trick here. 

We cannot put things down by pushing them away or wrestling with them. We can really only release them, paradoxically, if we approach them and open ourselves to the experience. This does not mean that we want to do or become the thing we have been fighting. It simply means that our observing mind can lose its fear and anger towards what we perceive as the enemy. And that the treasure hidden often in our worst moments, the good desire that got conscripted by an impulse for clinging or aversion or a false narrative, can be uncovered and accepted. Often, the attempt to avoid or fight memories of experiences we do not like, becomes a fight against something in ourselves that ought to be redeemed. 

Carl Jung said it very well:

“The acceptance of oneself is the essence of the whole moral problem and the epitome of a whole outlook on life. That I feed the hungry, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy in the name of Christ -- all these are undoubtedly great virtues. What I do unto the least of my brethren, that I do unto Christ. But what if I should discover that the least among them all, the poorest of all the beggars, the most impudent of all the offenders, the very enemy himself -- that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness -- that I myself am the enemy who must be loved -- what then? As a rule, the Christian's attitude is then reversed; there is no longer any question of love or long-suffering; we say to the brother within us "Raca," and condemn and rage against ourselves. We hide it from the world; we refuse to admit ever having met this least among the lowly in ourselves.” 

― C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

So how to set things down? By first picking it up courageously and compassionately…whatever it is. 

This we don’t simply do with our minds. Our bodies must also engage in the acceptance and release. This can be accomplished by opening our bodies tight and tense with anxiety, as if we are going into or are in a fight, by consciously relaxing the muscles as if there ISN”T something to fight.  We may have to do this over and over and over until we finally get it. At this point when the thought or feeling returns, and it will most likely, it will not hurt so much or stay very long. Observation, acceptance and investigation if needed, responding with compassion, and physical release is not a recipe but a process to work through. Mindfulness and meditation can be essential to the process. Eventually you might just find that you may become free just with the paradoxical notion that to be truly free we should not try to be. That is what it means to put down even the process used to become free. We can even put down the process of putting things down. 

In this way we may effectively live relatively free from hatred of the past and fear of the future. Not completely free but free to surf the tides of changing thoughts, feelings, and sensations. And this is freedom indeed. 

Observing Mind, Thinking Mind

“Between stimulus and response there’s a space, in that space lies our power to choose our response, in our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

Victor Frankl

There once was a young man who lived with his wife and two young children out in the country. His wife was a nurse and had to get to the surgery suite early that day so he was responsible for getting his 6 year old daughter and 18 month old son up and ready to go. The little girl would go to her first grade class in the nearby town.  The toddler would go to his sitter’s home in a town some 30 minutes away in the other direction while he then went to work in the same town as he.

 The morning was not going according to plan. And he would be late to work regardless. It got later and later. 

The children, being children and necessarily attention-challenged, were not terribly interested in the schedule of events for the morning. Instant packages of oatmeal did not appeal to them. Wearing clothes at all was not the boy’s preferred attire even on a good day. Today, as far as he was concerned, he would go very casually. For some reason the pony-tails (a mystery to our hero) would not line up just right and red and purple, at least these shades, did not match. Not that the dad cared that much whether the pony-tails were perfect or that the clothes matched but he knew that his wife would.   So, they struggled and he got angrier and angrier. His words were not entirely inappropriate for children but his tone made up for that. 

“Hurry up! Eat your oatmeal! Put your shoes on! Get your teeth brushed! Etc, etc.  And by the time it was all done, as well as it was going to be done, and the children were safely secured in their car seats in the brand new used Dodge Caravan (which he in his great wisdom purchased without his wife’s input) he breathed a sigh of relief. But, as he pulled out of the garage into the rain he quickly noticed that the right front tire was flat! 

He put the van into park, jumped out of the minivan, kicked the tire, and shouted a few inappropriate words. Aaaargh! He stomped and fussed and grimaced. Just then his daughter rolled down the window and calmly said, 

“Daddy, if you’re late to work will they fire you?”

And then,

“Daddy, if I’m late to school we’ll just tell them we had a flat tire.”

And then,

“Daddy, tires get flat…you just fix them.”

It took a matter of moments for the little girl to do therapy on her daddy and I proceeded to take the children into the house and calmly fix the tire. (She loves when I tell that story.)

Normally, we humans act on automatic pilot based on previous experience. This acting on impulse can be a very efficient, effective and helpful use of energy and cognitive power…if you’re dodging bullets or a Mack truck. If, however, the matter before you is more complex, such as the one above, perhaps a more subtle response would be in order. 

The fact is there were a variety of possible responses available to our hero. The one he initially chose was an impulse based in fear/anger. The impulse was strong, the physiological flow of adrenalin and corticosteroids required some reaction or response, but my behavior, while automatic, was not inevitable. A six year old child short-circuited it for heaven’s sake. But thinking before we speak and act requires the development of the ability to pause between stimulus and action. That we CAN do this does not mean we will.  

There are a variety of theories used to explain this phenomenon, ranging from the ridiculous to the sublime. Some are religious e.g. we are “sinful” people or it was the result of a demonic being. Some are philosophical i.e. the problem of evil. Some are scientific i.e. an imbalance among limbic, prefrontal, and higher cortical functions or perhaps introjected aspects of the family system. Regardless of which view you espouse there is a scientifically based solution and it is adaptable to any religious or philosophic tradition. Practicing in any form, secular or religious, leads to the same neurological results. 

The mind has two overall general functions. These are often called, again very generally, the “thinking mind” and the “observing mind”. The former we know quite well and live in it more often than not. The “thinking mind” judges, analyzes, reasons, constructs scenarios, tells stories, and attempts to make sense out of things. The “observing mind” simply watches. It does not engage in judging, analyzing, story telling, etc. It is simply aware. With nurturance we can become better at it but our mind resists staying in this mode. The “thinking mind” is our default mode. 

Mindfulness builds the power of the “observing mind” as one practices simply watching. From there one can begin to develop the mind/brain in one’s preferred directions, but it is necessary to begin here. The benefits are numerous emotionally, psychologically, and physiologically. For one, there is ability to step back, pause, and consider the consequences of one’s behavior before acting. My daughter agrees. 

"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. 

The State of Things

The day broke like many others. The sky was azure blue with wispy cirrus clouds high above full of shimmering ice crystals. We had driven into Cadiz, KY in the middle of the night having been awakened by the news that Jenny’s mother was being taken to the hospital. My father-in-law had found her unresponsive in her recliner. Her health had been failing for many years due mostly to her having smoked for many, many years. She had stopped about 10 years or so before but the damage was done. Congestive heart failure, COPD, and the various medical problems that accompany medical treatments for such diseases was her lot. At this stage the side effects of one medication created problems that other medications were placed on board to remedy. The doctors were doing a delicate balancing act. As we drove we heard a number of conflicting messages from family members—she would be ok, she would not survive—keeping us emotionally off balance.  As usual I slipped into my expecting the worst because eventually, well you know…

She died during the night, a quiet, peaceful death, as her heart simply stopped. It was a great loss to all of us but it was tinged with a sigh of relief. The roller coaster ride was over for her, for us, for now.

That morning we alerted my family and several would come. I am fortunate to have family on both sides that actually very much like each other. Two of my cousins came! But rather surprisingly my father would be unable to attend due to illness. Odd indeed. My father was a strong bull of a man with the gentlest spirit imaginable. He would not miss this unless it was absolutely necessary. But miss it he did.

One month later my father developed the voice of one who had breathed helium without benefit of that element. It was funny, briefly, but soon would not be.  Finally he went to the doctor, underwent several tests, and then we received the dread news. He was diagnosed with thyroid cancer and not the usual, easily treatable, kind either; it was an anaplastic carcinoma, aggressive, and almost always fatal. Only about 4% survive but he was determined to try to be in that number.

He suffered through radiation which burnt his throat and swelled his esophagus so badly that he could not swallow. He did not eat again except for a little custard now and then. Finally they inserted a feeding tube into his side so he did not have to starve to death. (The doctor apologized with tears in his eyes for not having done this sooner.) He suffered intensely I could tell from the expressions and his eyes but it didn’t take much to see it.  He learned mindfulness, practiced assiduously, often in the Christian modes and never complained that I either heard or heard about. He was able to attend his granddaughter’s wedding in late July but he was weak and in pain. They began chemotherapy in early August. He was dead by the 12th in the year 2007.  The most beautiful tragic thing I have ever been witness to…and sad, poignantly but meaningfully sad. 

He had written on a tablet during this time. No one saw it until his death but it was full of sentences and phrases about approaching his pain as a spiritual adventure; like the Christ’s ascension of the cross. He opened up to everything that occurred as best he could offerring compassion and kindness and a ready smile to whoever visited him.

“I’m hungry,” he wrote in one brief sentence. “Help me to see this as hunger for Your righteousness.” 

Live long enough, say to age 8, and then tell me life is Disney World. There will be something that hurts. Disappointments, even catastrophic ones happen early-- deaths, disease, rejection, failure, natural disasters, losses of all kinds happen to everyone. Life is painful and transient but fortunately as Thich Nhat Hanh wrote, “…that is not all there is”. Life is full of beauty as well.

Mindfulness allows us to open to the transient before us, even our eventual illnesses and deaths because they are inevitable. They will happen but they still are transient. It also allows us to open to the beautiful and pleasant as well, even at the same time, diminishing our suffering and bringing us some peace and joy. I didn’t say happiness (which is a topic for another day).

“There is no way to happiness. Happiness is (itself) the way.”

Thich Nhat Hanh

This is the state of things, like it or not and there is no reason to like the painful. Live with it nobly, yes, if one knows how. But there is a vital difference between pain and suffering that must be explained. They are not the same, for if they were there would be nothing we could do. A Zen saying is:

“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”

I agree. Here is the difference.

While pain is what we cannot avoid, like illness, storms, lightening, flood, death, etc Suffering arises from how we approach our pain, how we react psychologically to it. Suffering, however, is not “in your head”. The brain doesn’t feel a thing. Suffering affects us physiologically and piles more pain high on top of what was already there. It is one thing to experience losses such as I wrote above. It is quite another to then approach them with thoughts like:

“Such things should not happen.”

“I can’t live without my father. I’ll never enjoy another day.”

“I should have seen his symptoms earlier and insisted he go to the doctor.”

“I should have done more.”

“I didn’t love him like I should have.”

“I was just a disappointment to him.”

“I could get cancer too! That would be horrible! I couldn’t do that!”

Pain arises from the facts of existence. Suffering arises from opinions about the painful events.  The former cannot be avoided and, while the latter may happen automatically, they are only opinions and are therefore subject to change. How helpful is it to believe that bad things cannot and should not happen to me? How unrealistic. Of course they will. It hurts to think otherwise.  But beauty and its benefits are ever-present too in innumerable ways.  We can become receptive to the beauty that streams all around—in sunlight, rain drops, clouds, the ground under our feet, the wagging of a dog’s tail, the smile on  child’s face—if we know how.  Look around with your senses! Beauty is there.  Just as pain is inevitable so is beauty and the one great advantage that beauty has over pain is that if we look around us at nature, and inside of us, and toward others, beauty is always there…if we know how to see.   

This is the state of things.

Practically Speaking

What is mindfulness? I like the definition of Jon Kabat-Zinn:

“Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way; On purpose, 
in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally.”

It really is as simple and as difficult as that. Why is it difficult? Because our minds are geared to search and create stories, it is our default mode neurologists say, and we easily get lost in our stories about the past and the future; about others, the world, and ourselves. And I do mean stories and we typically live in them as if they were reality. In point of fact our memories are not completely accurate and our thoughts abut things are often skewed since our information is necessarily limited and our minds most often are protectively and negatively skewed; details are lost and we fill in the blanks with whatever fits our prevailing narrative. Most often, unfortunately, we fill in the blanks with negatives and many of us have plenty of negatives to fill the blanks in with! Our thoughts about ourselves, about others, about the world generally are most often negatively toned but if our pasts are full of hurtful events it is all the easier to be negative. All of us have the desire to protect ourselves from possible hurts and form remembering past hurts. .

Mindfulness is paying attention to the present moment. By this I mean what is “real”; what we can see, touch, taste, smell, and touch. Try this just for a moment and see how quickly your minds drift off to the laundry, your children’s schoolwork, your financial troubles (or windfalls), your next evaluation, that conversation you had earlier that did not go as we wanted, when we can retire, etc. It really happens in a matter of seconds. And when it does (WHEN IT DOES) we are to gently return our minds back to the focus of attention. This is the exercise.  But there are two other components of mindfulness that are essential if its benefits are to be realized.

Acceptance of whatever happens in the moments during our exercise is principle number 2. Whatever thoughts, emotions, physical sensations, events occur (unless it absolutely requires our immediate attention that is) we simply observe and accept that they are what they are and observe them as they are there and as they change.  And principle number 3. We purpose to not react to our impulses and to remain where we are, sitting still if possible. The only responses there should be are those we choose to do deliberately and if, perhaps, it should be to scratch an itch we do it mindfully i.e. slowly, being aware of every movement and he changes in sensation when we do it.

We can strengthen the attention function of our brain by the exercise of attention. As I wrote earlier, it is an exercise. There is nothing automatic about it.

So here is a simple attention exercise:

Mindfulness Meditation—Sitting

  

1. Find a quiet and comfortable place where regular practice may be established.

2. Sit in a chair or on the floor with head, back, and neck straight but not stiff and the shoulders relaxed.

3. Use your breathing as an anchor to the present. Watch the breath as it enters and leaves. Focus on the physical sensations forcing nothing.  Notice at the end and beginning of each breath is a pause.  Pay attention to that place of rest.

4. Watch thoughts come and go and when you get distracted gently take note of where you went and bring your focus back to the breath. Again simply observe without fighting anything. The only effort is to bring the focus of attention back to the breath.

5. Watch as feelings come and go. Some feelings will be comfortable (peace, joy, compassion etc.) and some will be uncomfortable (sadness, fear, anxiety, guilt, irritation). Observe all these also without fighting or repressing them and return your focus back to the breath.

6. Bring an attitude of curious acceptance to everything that happens including thoughts, feelings, and sensations.

7. During this time do not react to your experiences. Observe them and accept that they are there. Remain seated and return your focus to the breath as often as distraction occurs.

8. Begin with a reasonable time limit but one that requires the effort of refocusing when distraction occurs.    

Please remember this however. Mindfulness can focus on anything; it is not just about watching the breath. It about being aware of anything that “is”. The breath here is the focus of attention for the exercise to build the power of attention. There are good, solid scientific reasons for breath-focused exercises and, if you are religious, your particular system probably has good, solid theological reasons for this as well.  The latter is a topic for another occasion and a worthy one.  

Moreover, these formal exercises are like going to the gymnasium of mindfulness practice. We could call this meditation proper, but there are a myriad of ways to practice informally, wherever you find yourself and whatever your condition. We can call this mindfulness (generally) and we will talk more about this later.

If you want to begin a practice the above might be helpful.