As we approach the end of one year and the beginning of another, we may all be contemplating what lies ahead with some degree of trepidation or at least with a sober outlook. Days of rain when in other years we might have experienced snow is one reminder that the world is changing, moving on, impermanent. Another, of course, is the approach of a change of leadership or perhaps the end of leadership and the transition to planned chaos.
I for one have looked around after the intensity and disruptions of the holidays - some of which I enjoyed very much, some of which I did not - and asked myself, where is my practice????
This morning as I got down on the yoga mat again, did stretching and PT again, sat on my cushion again, I felt the aches and pains of NOT doing that for a number of days and the discouraging thoughts about having backslid. I was getting vaguely caught up in the being discouraged, in calculating how many days it would take to “get back to where I was,” to feeling bad about wasting so many precious opportunities to practice. And that’s when I realized, this was no big deal. I was just “starting over.” I was “beginning again.”
Does that sound familiar?
Sharon Salzberg is one of my meditation teachers who counseled about “starting over.” We do it with every breath. We breathe in, we let go and release the breath. And then, we start over - we breathe in again.
Further, we pay attention to this in-breath, we pay attention to this out-breath, our mind wanders off, we drift around in thinking, planning, remembering, we wake up to the present moment, to the mind wandering, and we begin again - paying attention to this breath.
There are a number of aspects to starting over. One is that we have to let go of all the negative, discouraging thoughts that come with the waking up to ourselves and where we are. When we realize our minds have wandered, that we have back slid as I did above, we need to acknowledge where we are and loosen our grip on those habitual thoughts and self-condemnations. We can breathe and be right there, acknowledging the judgments without getting involved or caught by them. Having judging thoughts and bringing awareness to them, we can cultivate patience and resolve to begin again. With these qualities of mindfulness, patience, and resolve, the judgments will lessen.
What we may also begin to see is how our judgments, condemnations, aversions are based on false expectations. We expect that we should be able to stay present during the holidays, during bad news, during friends and families suffering reversals and misfortunes. Sometimes we can. But other times, these influences catch us up in expectations we have about ourselves, our practice, the world. For instance, as much as we have believed and embraced the climate emergency, we might still harbor a secret wish, magical thinking, that the earth will right itself, snow will return, intense heat or drought will not come to us, and so forth. We may harbor the delusion that through our practice, we have somehow gotten ahead of the world’s ability to throw us for a loop.
Phillip Moffitt’s, well known meditation teacher, has this wisdom to share about ‘starting over’:
"I first heard the phrase 'just start over' used to describe a spiritual practice some 20 years ago from the Buddhist meditation teacher and author Sharon Salzberg. During a mindfulness meditation retreat she taught at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, Sharon told us about her own struggle with learning to meditate – how she would become lost, distracted, and discouraged and would constantly second-guess herself and her teachers. Gradually she learned to pay no attention to the mental and emotional chatter and to just start over by meditating on her breath as she had been instructed. “Just start over” became her mantra, which she now teaches to her students.
"Each time Salzberg repeated this phrase during the retreat, I was deeply inspired. I realized that she was pointing to a radical attitudinal shift in which you cease to be reactive when you are knocked off your intended path. Instead, when you discover that you have lost your focus, you just begin again without getting caught up in emotional stories about why you can’t achieve your aim or judgments about how unworthy you are or why the change you seek is impossible. With Sharon as my inspiration, I set about developing 'just start over' into a daily life practice.
"Often the problem is that you don’t know how to be resolute without also being rigid in your expectations. You haven’t learned how to sail the waves of the ocean of your mind or successfully navigate those emotionally charged or intractable parts of yourself that cause the inner storms in your daily life. You have the mistaken notion that you must know why you have a problem and must get rid of it before you can act in a more self-empowering manner. Starting-over practice takes a different approach. It switches your focus away from dwelling on those characteristics that limit you and redirects it toward recognizing your strengths from which you can realize your potential.
"This shift in focus is attitudinal: You simply do what you care about as well as you can. This is a humble attitude, but it is exactly what’s needed for you to sustain your resolution. In so doing, you free yourself from your judging mind that thinks it can control results and creates the grandiose expectation that you can do more than you can do in the present moment. You become a more effective person by simply learning to use your time and energy to do what you can do right now….
"So just how do you practice starting over? Think of it as shifting your attention away from controlling the outcome and abandoning your usual reactions – criticizing, judging, complaining, and lamenting – to getting off track. You don’t deny your thoughts and feelings, and you don’t try to make them go away. Instead, you acknowledge them without making any judgments about them and with compassion for how difficult this moment is. You then follow the acknowledgment with what I call “and” practice, in which you say to yourself, “Yes, I just got lost, and now I’ll just start over.” Phillip Moffitt, https://dharmawisdom.org/starting-over/
So here we are - back to the cusp of the new year - perhaps wondering how 'starting over' will help us get through this next year. The lessons are simple. Stay in the present moment and don’t let our expectations for what we think is going to happen get in the way of our ability to be present for what is happening.
After all, every one is this mess we call life has expectations for the future. And no one’s expectations are going to come true exactly as they hope or predict. Our charge for the new year is to stay open to the possibilities, not to foreclose the future with our expectations, to have compassion for ourselves and others, and as Moffitt says, “…do what you care about as well as you can.”