Resources for Working with Collective Trauma

Meditation teacher Heather Sundberg and Manuela Mischke-Reeds, psychologist, who have collaborated to develop somatic practices to counter Collective Reactivity and Collective Trauma, developed these Six Practices for restoring resiliency.  These are as follows:  1) Remember to move when any sense of overwhelm or reactivity is sensed.  Even when or especially when sitting in meditation, you can bring subtle movements into the body.  We practiced with placing the hands on the thighs and gently pressing each finger down in turn.  So movement doesn’t have to be large or gross or disruptive to the meditation but enough to bring us back to our bodies and interrupt any movement toward the freeze mode of fight, flight or freeze or numb out or disassociate.  2) Turn toward the water element in the body.  This means bringing awareness to wetness in the mouth or eyes or the way water moves in the torso in response to the breath as the lungs expand. 3) Bring awareness to your perception of aliveness in the body.  This might be found in the internal tingling, resonances, movements found in the hands or feet or perhaps movements in the torso, or sensations in the skin and muscles of the arms and shoulders.   4) Bring Mindfulness to bear to recognize, accept, and investigate your experience - perhaps checking to see if one of the hindrances are present (wanting, not wanting, agitation or restlessness, sleepiness or torpor, doubt).  5) Offer Compassion to yourself by a self hug or caress, by murmuring to yourself, “This is hard.  May I have compassion for this suffering. May I accept myself as I am.”  This directly activates awareness of the First Noble Truth - There is Suffering.  And 6) Savoring the Pleasant.  When we become aware of a pleasant experience, looking at a sunset or bright day, enjoying a moment with a friend or family member, pet, or child, enjoying a concert, all of these and more can soothe and restore our minds.  So the idea of this practice is to savor the pleasantness rather than nodding briefly to it and stepping over it looking for the next problem.  These practices can become a part of your resiliency tool kit and can travel with you anywhere.

This weekend I attended a one day, on-line workshop/retreat with Pawan Bareja called "Rejuvenation, Relaxation, and Resiliency” offered through Spirit Rock Center for Mindfulness in California.  Pawan Baraja works with trauma on both an individual and collective level.  I first became acquainted with her as she offered practices to counter reactivity and freeze in a course on resiliency in the face of environmental emergency/crisis.  

On Saturday she talked about how we can increase our resiliency through practices supporting letting go, gratitude, and forgiveness. Tonight* I’ll share a body practice she offered that is a great preparation for sitting practice but also for easing reactivity and also for general relaxation.

And I’d like to dip into a practice offered in the Sattipathana Sutta. This is one of the foundational teachings of the Buddha that I introduced briefly last fall.  You may recognized it as The Four Foundations of Mindfulness.  The four are as follows:  Mindfulness of the Body, Mindfulness of Feeling Tone (positive, negative, or neutral), Mindfulness of the Mind which includes thoughts, emotions, mind states, and Mindfulness of the Dharma which translates as both the way things are and the teachings of the Buddha.  If you’ll recall, mindfulness was one of the path factors of the Noble Eight-Fold path found in the Fourth Noble Truth.  (I repeat this often to help make these terms and teachings a bit more familiar to you.) The practice I want to touch on tonight is another way of practicing Mindfulness of the Body called Mindfulness of Anatomical Parts.  This practice might fall under the heading above of practices for letting go and heightens awareness of aspects of the body as individual parts to foster a more curious and dispassionate relationship to the body thereby loosening our attachment and/or our aversion to our bodies.  

* The class referred to in these pages is Mindfulness Meditation for Stress Reduction, a free on-line class offered Monday evenings at 5:30pm through Innerlight Center for Yoga and Meditation. https://www.innerlightyoga.com/

On Collective Reactivity or Collective Trauma

Last week I mentioned collective trauma in this space and in the brief teaching during the meditation hour.  One brave individual to whom I am most grateful asked what did this mean - this collective trauma.

To bring it back to language with which we are more familiar, "collective reactivity” - "collective trauma” - is becoming more widely recognized and acknowledged in the meditation and mindfulness world.  Earlier practice and our experiences of the world were held in a more individual way.  We examined our individual experiences of our five senses and our minds without much reference to what others were experiencing except to say that we often had similar experiences.  We might see a sunset and be compelled to stop and stare, hear a bird and delight, hear a jack hammer and be annoyed or stressed.  We might feel restless on the cushion and work with our own restlessness reassured that others also sometimes felt restless.  It was the way of the mind.  Watching our mind jump around was such a common experience that it was given the name “monkey mind” and considered an achievement to become aware of it.

But it was still our individual experience world that we were examining, reacting to, learning from, practicing with.

The pandemic changed all that.  We all became much more anxious about this disease that was affecting everybody.  No class of people, nation, neighborhood, socioeconomic plane was safe from the scourge.  Doctors and nurses weren’t safe, couldn’t go home for fear of infecting their families.  Even government officials were getting it.  

Dr. Judson Brewer, author of “Unwinding Anxiety” and researcher into the brain and mindfulness, gave 5 minute daily talks on unwinding that anxiety.  In one of his more illuminative talks, he said our anxiety was contagious.  Just as we could sneeze on somebody and give them a cold,  we could “sneeze” our anxiety on to others and infect them with our anxiety.  I witnessed this first hand a number of times before I caught on - as I would anxiously recount statistics or hospital news to a friend and see them become more anxious.  We were all so anxious that we would begin to boil over with a little prompting from somebody else’s anxiety “sneeze.” 

Thank heaven for the burgeoning of on-line practices groups, retreats, talks.  This very group formed in July of 2020 out of our common need to come together for support, solace, practice, meditation, and calming.

I listened to a talk today by Heather Sundberg whom I mentioned last week in connection with the Six Practices for restoring resiliency in the face of collective reactivity.

These are mindfulness and somatic (body centered) practices that were developed by her teacher and colleague Manuela Mischke-Reeds and others at the Hacomi Institute.  Hacomi is a an alternative therapy that uses mindfulness and somatic practices to restore balance to people suffering from collective trauma, PTSD, and other more elevated forms of dis-ease.  

This is Manuela Mischke-Reeds definition of collective reactivity - collective trauma: 

 “Collective reactivity or collective trauma – is an experience which affects the psychological health of the whole of the society.  And it tears apart the previous fabric of what we know to be true and real.  These experiences happen over time and are ongoing.  They can create a crisis of meaning.  They can also influence large scale change of societal norms or even collective identity.”

On the short list for situations that produce collective trauma or reactivity are wars, natural disasters, pandemic, collective unrest, and climate change.  We currently are experiencing the overlapping of all five of these conditions with wars in Ukraine and Israel-Gaza, wild fires, atmospheric rivers, huge storms, the Covid pandemic, the polarization of our politics here and around the world, and the escalation of global warming.

As the meditation path progresses, we may have cycles in our practice of this tearing apart of the previous fabric of what we know to be true or real. This is one of the many definitions of insight, direct experience.  So we have some experience building that resiliency. 

So it may become increasingly important for us to learn to recognize and acknowledge for ourselves how we are affected by collective reactivity and to practice ways of calming ourselves so that we can bring our best selves to bear when confronted with these increasingly common anxiety producing events and so that we can share these practices with others and contribute to increasing collective resiliency.

Poem from Stephen Levine

Today I am reminded of this poem by Stephen Levine:  

If prayer would do it

I'd pray.

If reading esteemed thinkers would do it

I'd be halfway through the Patriarch.

If discourse would do it

I'd be sitting with His Holiness

every moment he was free.

If contemplation would do it

I'd have translated the Periodic Table

to hermit poems, converting

matter to spirit.

If even fighting would do it

I'd already be a black belt.

If anything other than love could do it

I've done it already

and left the hardest for last.

                                    ~~Stephen Levine

As we contemplate Right View, Right Intention, and Right Action, perhaps we might consider putting love, compassion, kindness right up there at the top of our list of qualities to foster and reflect upon.  And perhaps we might even consider putting ourselves at the top of the list of those to whom we would offer our love, compassion, and kindness.  And, of course, not stop there.

Now more than ever.  

From January 18th: Intentions and Right View

At the beginning of the year, I wrote about intentions and how this beginning of the new year is a good time to reflect on our intentions for ourselves - both long and short term.  Our intentions can act like a moral compass - helping us orient to what we perceive is the best and highest aspirations for ourselves and our lives.

However, right intention is the second factor in The Noble Eight-fold path.  The first factor is Right View.  Right View is about knowing on a deep level how the world works, how our minds work, and especially what leads to happiness and what leads to suffering.  As Bhikku Bodhi says in my favorite The Noble Eight Fold Path, the Buddha saw no single factor “ so responsible for the arising of unwholesome states of mind as wrong view, and no factor so helpful for the arising of wholesome states of mind as right view….no single factor so responsible for the suffering of living beings as wrong view, and no factor so potent in promoting the good of living beings as right view."  He further writes that our view of the world “governs our attitudes, our actions, our whole orientation to existence."  Whether we fully understand what our views are, they are shaping how we approach and act in our world.

It is of supreme importance that our views and our intentions - whether or not we fully understand them - condition our actions.  This example comes from “The Noble Eight Fold Path: Right Intentions” on the Contemplative Studies website.   

"Intentions are the drivers of actions. They involve thoughtful directions to produce wholesome outcomes. The simplest way to look at 'Right Intentions' is as the aspiration to create greater happiness, wisdom, and well-being, and relieve suffering in ourselves and others. This is where 'Right View' comes in and provides the wisdom to discern which aspirations are likely to produce wholesome outcomes. We may start the day with the intent to help others in need and discern that donating an hour of our time to volunteer work at a homeless shelter would likely produce greater happiness, wisdom, and well-being, and relieve suffering. This is right intention at work, derived from 'Right View' and producing 'Right Actions.' It is critical that the intention is wholesome. The same action, donating time, might be motivated by a desire to appear kind and generous to others, to obtain a tax deduction, or to impress a romantic interest who also volunteers. All of these are intentions governed by desires and are not part of the path. So, the action is important but only to the extent that it is motivated by a 'Right Intentions.’”

By this example, we can see immediately the importance of motivation.  Actions motivated by greed, hatred or delusion (or any of the other softer ways of expressing wanting, not wanting, and confusion) serve to further our own worldly benefit and are not part of the spiritual path.  Actions motivated by generosity, loving kindness, renunciation reflect the “right view” of what leads to lasting happiness in this world and what doesn’t.

So as we spend time with “Right View,” “Right Intention,” and “Right Action,” we may find that it’s OK to plan a trip to lie in the sun and play in the surf in a warmer climate.  But we may also find more heart and more lasting happiness in a trip planned to see family and strengthen connections or to visit a sacred site or to engage in activities that ease the burdens of others through volunteer work or other projects.

This is, I’m sure, a contemplation many of you have already engaged in.  And as our lives progress, this contemplation becomes more and more important as a key part of the art of living the best life we can with the time we have been given.  

The key contemplation is what leads to suffering and what leads to the end of suffering.

Not self versus No Self versus a Healthy Sense of Self

Just a little more clarity and paths for further exploration about this important but confusing topic of “not self:”

Jack Engler, well known psychologist and meditator who died in March of this year, famously said, “You have to be somebody before you can be nobody.”  (see excerpt from a Tricycle article below)  From the psychological point of view, we need to have a healthy sense of self before we can understand and integrate the teaching of not-self.  

The teaching is more clearly understand as saying “not self” as in thoughts are not self, emotions are not self, the body doesn’t contain a self that it’s control of everything.  The Buddha was not denying our existence as “No self” implies.  But the investigation into how we appropriate things around us as me and mine - turning feelings, processes, people, and events that are not under our control into aspects of our own egos for the purpose of lifting ourselves up or tearing ourselves down - can lead to greater freedom from the burden of carrying all of our selfing around with us and having to live up to it. 

Importantly, according to Sally and Guy Armstrong, "This means, in part, we should not use the teachings to deny a sense of self or the importance of healing past wounds and trauma.”

Tonight there will be a little time for questions and comments about non-self or any other aspect of the understandings and practice of mindful meditation in the Insight tradition.  

From The Tricycle Obituary, by Joan Duncan Oliver, March 21, 2023:

 Clinical psychologist Jack Engler, PhD, widely acknowledged for his seminal work in linking Buddhist practice and Western psychology, died on March 12 in Framingham, Massachusetts. He was 83. 

Armed with a PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Chicago and intense study with the Theravada Buddhist masters Anagarika Munindra and Dipa Ma, Engler had a long and storied career as a psychotherapist in private practice and an instructor at Harvard Medical School, as well as a Vipassana practitioner and occasional meditation teacher with strong ties to the Insight Meditation Society (IMS) and the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies, both in Barre, Massachusetts. In bridging the worlds of Western psychodynamic thinking and Buddhist practice, Engler will forever be remembered for his pithy summation of the development of the self and its relinquishment: “You have to be somebody before you can be nobody.” 

No mere throwaway line, it emerged from his clinical work as a therapist and his experience teaching Buddhist psychology and Vipassana meditation. He first included that observation on self and non-self in an article published in The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology in 1984. After the article was reprinted two years later in Transformations of Consciousness: Conventional and Contemplative Perspectives on Development, a book Engler co-authored with Ken Wilber and Daniel P. Brown, the “epithet,” as he later called it, became a trope. His thesis on what he saw as “two great arcs of human development”—one leading to the individuated self, the other to a contemplative or transpersonal stage beyond it—garnered “a fair amount of criticism and notoriety from friends and colleagues for its developmental position,” he later acknowledged. His response to his critics and an effort to clarify his meaning was “Being Somebody and Being Nobody: A Re-examination of the Understanding of Self in Psychoanalysis and Buddhism,” a chapter in Psychoanalysis and Buddhism, edited by Jeffrey D. Safran and published in 2003.

Three Marks of Existence...

We’ve come a long way in exploring the truth of the Buddha’s teachings.  And now we’ve come to the foundational practice of Vipassana or Insight meditation.  In Insight Meditation, as taught at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre MA, Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, CA and in hundreds of smaller Insight Meditation centers around the country, and which is one of the foundations of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), the purpose of our practice is to discover the truth of the three marks of existence, the three characteristics that are inherent in every experience we have, every phenomenon we can perceive.  These marks or characteristics are impermanence, suffering, and non-self.  It is this exploration that leads to wisdom and freedom.

In order to go forward, I want to go back to an email I sent in May 2023 where I quoted at some length from Bhikku Bodhi’s treasure of a book -  The Noble Eightfold Path - Way to the End of Suffering.  I often find it uplifting to read some of the teachings multiple times.  This quotation is one such teaching.  

According to Wikipedia, "Bhikkhu Bodhi, born Jeffrey Block, is an American Theravada Buddhist monk, ordained in Sri Lanka and currently teaching in the New York and New Jersey area.”  He is well-known as an author but also as an editor and translator of Buddhist teachings.

He wrote this in his chapter on mindfulness.  

“The Buddha says that the Dhamma, the ultimate truth of things, is directly visible, timeless, calling out to be approached and seen.  He says further that it is always available to us, and that the place it is to be realized is within oneself. The ultimate truth, the Dhamma, is not something mysterious and remote, but the truth of our own experience.  It can be reached only by understanding our experience, by penetrating it right through to its foundations.  This truth, in order to become liberating truth, has to be known directly.  It is not enough merely to accept it on faith, to believe it on the authority of books or a teacher, or to think it out through deductions and inferences.  It has to be known by insight, grasped and absorbed by a kind of knowing which is also an immediate seeing.  

“What brings the field of experience into focus and makes it accessible to insight is the mental faculty called in Pāli sati, usually translated as “mindfulness.”  Mindfulness is presence of mind, attentiveness or awareness.  Yet the kind of awareness involved in mindfulness differs profoundly from the kind of awareness at work in our usual mode of consciousness.  All consciousness involves awareness in the sense of a knowing or experience of an object.  But with the practice of mindfulness, awareness is applied at a special pitch.  The mind is deliberately kept at the level of bare attention, a detached observation of what is happening within us and around us in the present moment.  In the practice of right mindfulness the mind is trained to remain in the present, open, quiet, and alert, contemplating the present event.  All judgments and interpretations have to be suspended, or if they occur, just registered and dropped.  The task is simply to note whatever comes up just as it is occurring, riding the changes of events in the way a surfer rides the waves on the sea.  The whole process is a way of coming back into the present, of standing in the here and now without slipping away, without getting swept away by the tides of distracting thoughts.

“ It might be assumed that we are always aware of the present, but this is a mirage.  Only seldom do we become aware of the present in the precise way required by the practice of mindfulness.  In ordinary consciousness the mind begins a cognitive process with some impression given in the present, but it does not stay with it.  Instead it uses the immediate impression as a springboard for building blocks of mental constructs which remove it from the sheer facticity of the datum (NB: Facticity!  Great word!) The cognitive process is generally interpretative.  The mind perceives its object free from conceptualization only briefly. (my Italics) Then, immediately after grasping the initial impression, it launches on a course of ideation by which it seeks to interpret the object to itself, to make it intelligible in terms of its own categories and assumptions.  To bring this about the mind posits concepts, joins the concepts into constructs - sets of mutually corroborative concepts - then weaves the construct together into complex interpretative schemes.  In the end the original direct experience has been overrun by ideation and the presented object appears only dimly through dense layers of ideas and views, like the moon through a layer of clouds.  

“The Buddha calls this process of mental construction papañca, “elaboration,” “embellishment,” or “conceptual proliferation.”  The elaborations block out the presentational immediacy of phenomena; they let us know the object only “at a distance,” not as it really is.  But the elaborations do not only screen cognition; they also serve as a basis for projections.  The deluded mind, cloaked in ignorance, projects its own internal constructs outwardly, ascribing them to the object as if they really belonged to it.  As a result, what we know as the final object of cognition, what we use as the basis for our values, plans, and actions, is a patchwork product, not the original article.  To be sure, the product is not wholly illusion, not sheer fantasy.  It takes what is given in immediate experience as its groundwork and raw material, but along with this it includes something else: the embellishments fabricated by the mind.”  

It is thought that what occurs in our minds is about 92% our embellishments (I mistakenly wrote this the opposite way round in the original email) which leaves a very small percentage for the raw experience of the original perception. Whether the percentage is correct, it’s clear that a great deal is add-ons, proliferations of our minds made up and scotched-taped on, reflecting what we want, what we don’t want, and otherwise how we are deluded.

"The embellishments fabricated by the mind” are not just random and without purpose.  We face a great uncertain certainty in our lives.  That which is born will die, that which arises will pass away.  This is an inescapable truth and yet we live our lives in the delusion that it won’t happen to us, won’t happen to those we love, won’t happen to things we possess.  

The delusions we live with and with which we embellish our experience are the delusions that things are lasting, that happiness can be found in attaining what we want and avoiding what we don’t want, and that there is a solid self to whom all of this is happening.  These delusions can be gradually dispelled as we practice.  A foundational part of our practice is to see that all experience, all phenomena are impermanent, within each experience is suffering (often the suffering that things are impermanent), and that there is no solid self in any of it, not our bodies, not our minds.  These are known as the three marks of existence, or three characteristics of all phenomena - the truths of impermanence, suffering, and non-self.  

What may seem counterintuitive is that learning the truth of these teachings is the path to liberation from suffering.  In its simplest, least explicable form, if there is not a solid self to whom all of this is happening, there is no one in control, no one creating suffering and no one to suffer.  Life unfolds according to causes and conditions, uncomfortable experiences can be held with kind attention as simply the way things are, that good and bad experiences alike are impermanent, are suffering only when we hold on to them, cling to them, and are void of a solid self to whom all of this is happening.  

The self in psychology and in Buddhism is a mental fabrication we create over and over again to give ourselves the illusion of that things are permanent, that suffering can be avoided, and that we are in control.  Freedom is available to us in the fading of those delusions.    

As the Buddha once famously said, For whatever one imagines a thing to be, the truth is ever other than that. 

We’ll delve more deeply into these teachings in the coming weeks.  

Lessons from "The Dance of Connection"

A number of years ago I read a couple of books in Harriet Lerner, Ph.D.’s bestselling series The Dance of… as in The Dance of Anger, The Dance of Intimacy, etc.  This story from The Dance of Connection has been showing up over and over again for me in the past few weeks. 

Two little kids are playing together in a sandbox in the park with their pails and shovels.  Suddenly a huge fight breaks out, and one of them runs away, screaming, “ I hate you!  I hate you!”  In no time at all they’re back in the sandbox, playing together as if nothing has happened.

Two adults observe the interaction from a nearby bench.  “Did you see that?” one comments in admiration.  “How do children do that?  They were enemies five minutes ago.”

"It’s simple," the other replies.  “They choose happiness over righteousness.”

Over the last couple of years this simple story has surfaced and wandered around my memory, its very simplicity giving it an immediacy and relevance to a couple of connection-disconnection scenarios I was witnessing.    

It goes like this.  With long time relationships, family, friends, or colleagues in a shared endeavor, it is inevitable that occasionally someone screws up big time and/or a series of small mishaps and larger decisions get reinterpreted and mis-interpreted and boom!  there are hurt feelings, lack of communication, people saying things they wish they hadn’t and not asking the right questions they wish they had, making assumptions about what the other person or people want.  As a country we may be caught in such a quagmire.

There is anger, fury even, righteous indignation (remember that phrase?), separation, not speaking.  The silence of cutoff, uncoupling, sulking, licking of wounds, and then the endless babble of self-justification, spinning thoughts, replaying the event and always coming to the same conclusion in a sort of comfortable/uncomfortable trap.  

But something happens over time.  Anger is exhausting because it continually needs to be refueled, restored.  It doesn’t have an organic coherence of its own that self-propels and grows after the initial mushroom cloud is spent.  Especially if mindfulness is present.  

Out of these ashes a memory surfaces of the friendship that was like a shoot of grass, Oh, yes, we had a great conversation in the cloakroom of this restaurant, or Oh, that person offered me an opportunity to that changed my life, or We used to have such a good time, toasting each other with a glass of wine.  And these memories are fed from a vast ground of love, kindness, friendship that was the relationship before the blow out.  How the climbing back into the sandbox occurs is a mystery but it must start with a softening of the mind and heart and find its way into some invitation.  Sometimes there is a mediator who plants seeds and opportunities and keeps the welcome mat out for all.  Sometimes there is just a realization that life doesn’t give you endless supplies of dear friends and relatives. 

And eventually the ground of good feeling towards the other that was always there rises up and the anger disappears as if it had never been.  This is a good sign for the universe.  And clearly it’s not as straightforward as that on the world scene, but the fact that it occurs at all can give us hope and renewed intentions for our practice.  This is one of the freedoms we yearn for - freedom from anger and hostility, freedom to care and have compassion for ourselves and others, freedom to delight in the good fortune of others.  And this freedom to move in the direction of love can bring us peace and equanimity.

Of course, we see many examples when the harm caused is greater than what can easily be overcome. We have learned to send loving kindness and compassion to all those caught in these devastating circumstances.  And we look for ways to help when we can.  

But even as we may feel relatively safe in our daily lives from those more destructive conflicts, our daily lives are the arena we can practice in.  We learn to turn our attention to the inner workings of our minds and hearts, to care for our own hurt places, to begin to recognize pride and ego and when we might have acted unskillfully or out of misinformation.  We also learn to wait, give space to others while events unfold or soften or whatever that mysterious process is when anger begins to give way to the underlying current of caring.  And we can learn from our past missteps and learn to step up sooner and perhaps even more fiercely for what we believe.

And yes, larger losses are inevitable.  And the possibility exists that unskillful thoughts and actions will lead to irrevocable harm.  

So we practice with the wish and the intention that the wisdom that grows from our practice will guide us and those around us through these difficult patches with as little lasting harm and as much healing as possible.   We learn to climb back in the sandbox when we can - with perhaps the spirit of inquiry and investigation, letting go of anger and especially righteous indignation.

Equanimity...the balancing state of mind...

And finally we come to equanimity.  We’ve touched on this state of mind in the past.  It’s a quality of mind we would most like to have and which seems the hardest to attain whether we are in the midst of the confusions and distractions of daily life with teenagers or spouses, pets and houses, mishaps while traveling, or whether we’re encountering the more serious vicissitudes of life - the loss of loved ones, health issues, and the decline of the body through aging.  When things go wrong, our carefully cultivated equanimity seems to fly out the window.  

Equanimity is the fourth of the sublime states or Brahma Viharas after Loving kindness, Compassion, and Sympathetic Joy.  The Pali words are metta, karuna, mudita, and upekkha.  The late meditation teacher Ayya Keema calls them “our highest emotions” and “the only ones worth having.”  She said, "We’re all looking for an ideal world, but it can exist only in our own heart, and for this we have to develop our heart’s capacity so that we learn to love independently.” ~~ “What Are the Four Brahmaviharas?” Lion’s Roar , Nov. 2019

Equanimity is the balancing emotion of the four.  We cultivate loving kindness towards ourselves and others.  When loving kindness encounters suffering, it engenders compassion.  When it meets joy, it responds with sympathetic joy or joy in the good fortune of others.  Equanimity balances them all so that loving kindness doesn’t constrict into attachment, so that the compassion doesn’t overwhelm us with grief or sorrow, and so that we don’t become giddy with joy for another.  It helps us attain the quality of limitlessness so that loving kindness extends to all - not because they are deserving but because they are living beings. We train our hearts in these emotions so that we can extend them to all beings.

Jack Kornfield writes that “To find equanimity and peace requires an acceptance of the mystery of life itself.”  We are formed out of the elements of the universe and that process had many turns and unfoldings.  Kornfield quotes cosmologist Brian Swimme who says, ‘Four and half billion years ago the Earth was a flaming molten ball of rock, and now it can sing opera.’”  

As we appreciate how far the universe has evolved to support all our human and non-human lives, we can begin to appreciate that this unfolding inevitably occurred with setbacks, with dangers, with harm to living creatures.  So it is part of that mystery and that unfolding that we too encounter hardships and difficulties - and will inevitably encounter the end of our existence on this earth.  That breeds a lot of uncertainty.  Human beings - not surprisingly - don’t like uncertainty.  

Kornfield continues, “ When we realize things are fundamentally uncertain and learn how to relax into this uncertainty we come to trust in the unfolding of our individual lives within the vastness of all time and space.  As Zen master Suzuki Roshi says, ‘When you realize the truth that everything changes and find your composure in it, you find yourself in Nirvana.’”  ~~Jack Kornfield, A Lamp in the Darkness:  Illuminating the Path Through Difficult Times

Equanimity is not indifference or withdrawal.  And neither is it dependent on bad things going away and good things prevailing.  It is our ability to be steadfast and peaceful of mind, open to caring and concern for ourselves and others, in the face of the changing conditions of our lives.

So this is perhaps our greatest challenge on this earth - to learn to live with the uncertainty, with the setbacks, with the inevitable suffering of so many, and to come to a place of acceptance, of deep caring and compassion, and of calm abiding, to come to equanimity.  

Making space for joy....

I’d like to turn to Muditta, the third of the four Brahmaviharas  (Pali for divine abodes or dwelling places).  Muditta or joy/sympathetic joy is probably the most overlooked or neglected of these sublime abodes.  As I’ve often said, we’re hardwired to look for trouble and, especially recently, trouble abounds.  That is precisely why this emotion is so important.

Recently, I ran into a woman in the grocery store whose husband had a scary cancer.  She was able to report he qualified for a particular kind of surgery, had had the surgery and was doing great.  It was easy to feel her joy and reflect that back in my own.  This is sympathetic joy - rejoicing in the good fortune of others.  Many of you know this well.

But there are many occasions when such joy is not so easy to share.  When someone is favored over us, receives some good fortune that we wished for ourselves, then our own lack comes to the surface in jealousy or envy and we may find it hard to share in their joy.  In such cases, joy as a practice is a wonderful thing to cultivate.  It can be done with phrases much as loving kindness and compassion can be cultivated.  The traditional  phrases are these:  “May your good fortune continue, May your good fortune increase, May your good fortune never cease.”  These phrases can be directed toward ourselves, toward others or towards a group, towards those we naturally rejoice with as well as those for whom we may find rejoicing a bit more elusive.  

One thing that such practice can bring to light is where we feel competitive, where there is comparing and we inevitably come up short, or perhaps where we interpret our good fortune to affirm that we are better than someone else.  The practice reminds us that we really are glad for the other person’s good fortune, we don’t really wish them ill.

The beautiful thing about the muditta practice, according to Tuere Sala, a meditation teacher who has earned the right through her own hardships not to feel joy, is that we increase our own joy when we can share in the good fortune of others.  She looks around for people to rejoice with because as well as adding to her joy and the joy of the other, it increases the amount of joy in the world.  Sort of like those 2 for 1 offers we see all the time.  Sympathetic joy is definitely a 2 for 1 proposition - or even 3 to 1 or more.

But you may ask, or you have already asked, how can I feel joy when so many are suffering?  The Dalai Lama is reported to be one of the happiest individuals on the earth.  But he is not happy all the time.  When he comes into contact with suffering - his or someone else’s - he responds to that suffering.  He may be sad at loss or feel compassion for someone else’s suffering.  When he listened to his monks recount their suffering at the hands of their Chinese captors, he responded with appropriate emotions, disturbed by their story of suffering, compassion, gratitude for their escape.  In other conversations about good fortune or with friends, he responds with joy or good humor or any number of other emotions.  He lets the world in and lets the emotions go through him without grasping for one emotion or resisting another.   

This is the skill we practice - learning to find joy when and where it arises, letting sadness or anger or jealously or other difficult emotions go through us, seeing them clearly, not grasping after the pleasant ones and pushing away the unpleasant ones.  When we can maintain this kind of balance, we are open to the small joys and the larger ones when they arise.  Perhaps as simple as hearing the sounds of birds quietly whittering to each other, coming across an unexpected bloom or a gentle breeze - being open to the wonders of the world and letting them in, this is a foundation for experiencing joy when and where it arises.  Even in the midst of the sad and disturbing news of climate change and the destruction of ecosystems and animal species, nature is still capable of tossing up a beautiful day, and we too are capable, out of nowhere, of experiencing a momentary happiness, a surge of gentle joy.  

Reinforcing our own access to joy is so important, it was addressed in some of the Buddha’s teachings.  And Spirit Rock Guiding Teacher James Baraz wrote a book called Awakening Joy: 10 Steps That Will Put You on the Road to Real Happiness and designed a course around it which has been ongoing since it started.  

Joy comes naturally.  And joy needs practice.  

We need to let it in, let it flower, nurture it, and understand that joy is a human emotion, part of our precious human lives on this earth, and worthy of our support even in the darkest times of our individual and collective existences.  

"...stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach..."

It’s been an unbelievably challenging week in the news.  This week continued and even upped the challenge of last week as more and more horror seeped out of Israel and more and more unseeable and unforgettable images made their way to television screens.  I wondered more than once how the newscasters, how world leaders including our own, how the diplomats looked at - made themselves look at - the images that most networks wouldn’t even show on the air.  And how that seeing changed them.  There were tears in the eyes of many on television this week, family and friends of victims and the kidnapped, for sure - but also the news people themselves and their highly placed and knowledgable guests.  And diplomats and spokespeople looked either haggard or also close to tears.  The shock from last week took on different dimensions.

And throughout the news there were examples of reactivity and fury, decisive decisions that moved toward disaster for millions of people, and also examples of mindfulness of consequences, of rational consideration, of those walking a decisive path of fierce support balanced with compassion and realism.  For those on the scene - anguished survivors and families desperate to be heard, the news casters were sometimes the only ones listening to their stories as their leaders prepared to defend and redress the attack.  For those in this country, an amazing leader who lived through unimaginable loss himself choose to listen and listen and listen to the stories and outcries from anguished people.

And what is compassion if not that ability and that willingness to find a quiet spaciousness within to listen and listen and listen?  In the talk I played last week by Koshin Paley Ellison, he talked of listening as the 9th of The Noble Eightfold Path.  (Actually Wise Speech includes non-speech, wise listening.)  Famed Catholic priest and author of The Wounded Healer, Henri Nouwen writes in Reaching Out, “…healing means, first of all, the creation of an empty but friendly space where those who suffer can tell their story to someone who can listen with real attention.  …But listening is an art that must be developed…It needs the full and real presence of people to each other.  It is indeed one of the highest forms of hospitality.”

This listening is hard to do.  Compassion means to tremble with, to be willing to accompany another into the depths of their grief, to share the burden, not to view from afar with pity, but the see the common humanity, the “there but for the grace of God go I…” of their circumstance.  And it hurts to be with such hurt.  

So we need to respond to our own pain as well as the pain of others.  To the extent we have plumbed our own depths of vulnerability, pain, and despair and learned to have compassion for ourselves, we are able to be with others and listen, listen, listen…

This week I have seen my own limits rising and falling, responding with compassion and listening at times, and turning away, turning off, protecting my own wounds at others.  Does this sound familiar?  And can we hold ourselves in a vast compassion, in that friendly spaciousness that invites us to be with what we can’t bear?

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph.D., American poet, psychoanalyst and post-trauma specialist, says in Letter to a Young Activist During Troubled Times, "One of the most important steps you can take to help calm the storm is to not allow yourself to be taken in a flurry of overwrought emotion or despair – thereby accidentally contributing to the swale and the swirl. Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach.

"Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul, to assist some portion of this poor suffering world, will help immensely.

"It is not given to us to know which acts or by whom, will cause the critical mass to tip toward an enduring good. What is needed for dramatic change is an accumulation of acts – adding, adding to, adding more, continuing. We know that it does not take “everyone on Earth” to bring justice and peace, but only a small, determined group who will not give up during the first, second, or hundredth gale.”

The Cycle of Hatred Continues....

The news of the sad and disturbing events over the weekend with the attack on Israel landed with a sickening resonance in my life in the midst of a reading on the Buddhist precepts, first among them to refrain from harming living beings.  

Having a moral foundation is the first task of Buddhist meditators.  The reason for this is simple.  If we are behaving in immoral ways, we will suffer because of our actions either directly or indirectly.  And thus, we will not be able to meditate or concentrate too well.  In spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, human beings are not happy when they behave in immoral ways.  Their minds - our minds - are not clear when we have harmed another living being.  

In Buddhism there are three supports for the life of freedom from suffering.  Sila, samadhi, and pañña are the Pali words - ethical behavior or morality, concentration or serenity, and insight or wisdom in English.  The first among these is sila - morality.  The initial and oft repeated act of monks and nuns then and now, and also retreatants throughout the world is the taking of the precepts.  The first precept is to refrain from harming living beings.  The next four include not stealing, not lying, not spreading malicious gossip, and not imbibing in consciousness-distorting substances.

We start with just the first precept - to refrain from harming living beings.  The chapter I was reading listed some of the questions that arise with this precept.  If we eat meat, should we become vegetarians?  How do we relate to all the small creatures that seek to invade our homes?  Paris is freaking out about bedbugs.  We might feel the same.  If our pet is sick, do we put them down?  

And then the question came that rocked me:  “What if your country is invaded by hostile forces?  Do you support your country’s military in defending itself?” *  Suddenly I was seeing the attack by Hamas on Israel through a long lens.  This lens only goes back as far as my awareness of the issues though.  I remembered why the Hamas was formed - out of the rubble of a town called Hamas flattened out of existence by Israelis in revenge for deadly acts emanating from that town.  I remembered the ’67 Six Day war and the taking of the Gaza strip and the West Bank by the Israelis and the subsequent population of some of that territory by settlements at the behest of the Israeli government, remembered reading how the Palestinians were crammed into a smaller space with no room to grow and no resources, a perfect fermenting ground for anger, resentment, desperation right next to the newly formed settlements.  Maybe my historical and geographical rememberings are off here and there and there is lots more before I became aware and in between.  But the pattern of pain, desperation, hardship, and grief leading to violence has been played out on both sides of the conflict.  Over and over again….

And yet the instinct is alive to defend one’s country, one’s friends and family, one’s neighbors.  Of course it is.  And the momentum builds up and countless beings are swept up in another round of horror.

Sharon Salzberg tells a story of a king surveying the wreckage of the battlefield with the Buddha.  Bodies of men and animals, blood, battle equipment everywhere.  And a lone monk softly picking his way through the battle field stopping here and there, a peaceful expression on his face.  The King asked the Buddha about this monk.  The Buddha replied that as a King he had to make different decisions from the monk but there was much he could do to ward off the possibility of such carnage in the future - namely sharing the resources of the kingdom more equitably, and listening to grievances of his subjects, so that people were treated fairly and knew they were sharing in what was available.  The King listened thoughtfully and went off and did exactly that.  Peace and prosperity reigned during his lifetime.

Now with burgeoning populations and resources more and more scarce, fear, grief, trauma, blaming falsely or in truth, the incapacity of the planet to absorb our excesses more apparent, our conditions may appear more extreme.  Passions run high - fueled by increasing desperation in more and more people.

And yet the Buddha’s directive to refrain from harming living beings is piercingly obvious in its simplicity.  How else are we to co-exist in this world?  How else are we to find solutions to insoluble problems?  To share the dwindling resources?  To live in peace?

But equally pressing, how are we to live with the pain inflicted by others, the pain inflicted by ourselves?  How are we to hold our own grief, sorrow, anger, frustration, desperation?  

We can only start with ourselves - with mindfulness, with compassion, with loving kindness, with forgiveness, cultivating and sharing this heart abundance.  The sublime qualities of loving kindness, compassion, joy and equanimity are, as described in the suttas, "abundant, exalted, immeasurable.”  

And we can begin to widen our world so that it becomes our shared world, our shared resources.  Our families and friends and neighbors connect to all families, friends and neighbors.  Our compassion extends to all beings caught in this terrible conflict.  No one escapes suffering.  All need our compassion.

“It is compassion that removes the heavy bar, opens the door to freedom, makes the narrow heart as wide as the world.  
Compassion takes away from the heart the inert weight, the paralyzing heaviness; it gives wings to those who cling to the lowlands of self.”  

~~Nyanaponika Thera.

First we begin.  And then we continue.

And finally we come to the 8th path factor of the Noble Eightfold Path - Wise Concentration.  This may seem like familiar territory and, to some extent, it is.  

Most meditators, and indeed most meditation techniques, begin with concentration.  In the west, the object of concentration is most often the breath.  The Pali words for Wise or Right Concentration are sammā samādhi.  Samādhi refers to a particular kind of concentration.  While one might know concentration in various ways, sammā samādhi is exclusively a wholesome one-pointedness, concentration that arises in a wholesome state of mind not engaged in craving, aversion, or delusion.  And only intensified concentration arises from ‘a deliberate attempt to raise the mind to a higher, more purified level of awareness.”   ~~Bikkhu Bodhi The Noble Eightfold Path

We will touch on what is meant by “intensified concentration” at a later time.  For now, the important point to know is that concentration can be practiced with any number of objects - including the breath.  There are 40 included in the Buddha’s teachings.  Different masters and abbots would assign different objects to the monks depending on what was needed.  Meditation objects included the 32 body parts which supported letting go of sensual desire and non-identification.  Monks were often assigned to sit in the charnel grounds where bodies were taken to be burned in order to know the truth of impermanence.  Other meditation objects included the four elements of earth, water, fire and wind, the colors blue, yellow, red, and white, and various others that were more or less abstract or subtle.  

There is one set of meditation objects that we are familiar with although not in this context.  And that is the Four Brahmavirharas or Sublime States of Being - loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy (joy for the good fortune of another), and equanimity.  The Pali words are metta, karuna, mudita, and upekka.  We will begin to dive into these practices in the fall.  

They all support the arising of a sense of warmth and kindness in our practice that Westerners in particular are in need of.  In all cases, kindness towards ourselves and others is an important part of practice.  And these practices remind us of those qualities while at the same time serving as effective objects of concentration.   

So as we all move toward the fall, reminding ourselves of these sublime states of mind and bringing their contemplation into our practice is a worthy use of our time and effort.  

As we stand in the middle of The Fourth Foundation of Mindfulness, with its welter of five hindrances, the five aggregates, the six sense doors, the 7 spiritual factors, and the 4 Noble Truths, let us reflect on how we got here to get a better sense perhaps of what is happening in this Fourth Foundation of Mindfulness.

We began several months ago with The Four Noble Truths - there is suffering, there are causes for suffering, there is an end to suffering, and the Fourth Noble Truth, the path to the end to suffering - the Noble Eight Fold Path.  So we started bravely down the Noble Eight Fold Path encountering wise View, wise Intention, wise Speech, wise Action, wise Livelihood, wise Effort, and here at the seventh path factor, wise Mindfulness.  Wise Concentration is the 8th path factor.  In wise Mindfulness, the Buddha taught how to practice mindfulness through the Four Foundations of Mindfulness - mindfulness of the body, feeling tone, mental events and finally, this, the Fourth Foundation of Mindfulness and its veritable grab-bag of lists.  

But the Fourth Foundation of Mindfulness takes us on a little journey within the larger journey.  As soon as we begin meditating, the hindrances arise.  We may not recognize them or even know about them for some time but eventually we begin to see the wanting or craving behind jumping off the cushion to get a cup of coffee, a snack, or  indulging a “very important thought.”  Or we begin to see how we lose our concentration because we are drowsy or our knees or backs hurt.  Or we get discouraged because we’re convinced we don’t know how to do it or the instructions are flawed or the teacher talks too much. 

So our first task is to learn to recognize and work with the hindrances.

The next two categories - mindfulness of the aggregates and mindfulness of the sense spheres - are different models for looking at our own experience.  And the contemplation of experience through these two lenses helps us begin to loosen our grip on identifying with our experience.  To take the model more familiar to us, mindfulness of the sense spheres, we can begin to contemplate our experience of sight, hearing, sensing, cognizing without all the add-ons of our thinking, conceiving, and appropriating minds.  In the seeing is just the seen.  In the hearing is just the heard.  In the sensing is just the sensed.  In the cognizing is just the cognized.  The “I” is extra.  Not inherent in the experience.  The I, me, and my-making is how we attempt to control our experience.  With mindfulness of the senses, we begin let go of inserting our add-ons and to see more clearly.  

The seven factors of awakening - mindfulness, investigation, energy, joy, tranquillity, concentration, and equanimity - are qualities we have all experienced.  They begin to arise more obviously as we see more clearly.  Here we are asked to recognize when they have arisen and what supporting factors helped them arise so that we can enhance their arising and not support conditions that subvert their arising.  Important to remember that we can’t make them arise, but we can create the conditions for their arising.  Our habits of striving and achieving are useless here - except perhaps as markers of identification.  

So the arc of the Fourth Foundation of Mindfulness is sort of a practice map - noting and working with the hindrances, practicing with the aggregates and the sense spheres to see more clearly and weaken our identification with experience, recognizing and supporting the awakening factors.  

This is the beautiful arc of practice and to ground this arc, the Buddha reminds us why he and we are here in the first place.  The Fourth Noble Truths.  There is the truth of suffering - physical, mental, psychological, individual, family, community, global - there is suffering.  There are causes for suffering - internal, external, and both internal and external.  And because there are causes, there can be an end to suffering.  The Buddha offers us this pathway out of suffering - The Noble Eight Fold Path.  

It was out of his immense compassion that the Buddha offered these teachings.  He went in search of the truth out of his own suffering, his own shock at the suffering of sickness, aging, and death.  When he awakened and achieved his own release from suffering, he at first despaired that anyone would understand these teachings.  But, as he began to teach his old colleagues, he saw that the teachings were helping them gain freedom as well.  And his confidence grew that just as he had found freedom, so could others, his monks and nuns.  And so could we.  

So can we.

So this Fourth Foundation of Mindfulness is a sort of road map within a road map.  A road map of specifics about the hindrances, the awakening factors, and two models for seeing experience more clearly.  And this map is inside the road map of the Noble Eight Fold Path which in turn is the Fourth Noble Truth.

The Refrain:   “In this way, in regard to dharmas {the teachings and the way things are}, [the meditator] abides contemplating dharmas internally…externally…internally and externally.  She abides contemplating the nature arising… of passing away… of both arising and passing in dharmas.  Mindfulness that 'There are dharmas’ is established in him to the extent necessary for bare knowledge and continuous mindfulness. And she abides independent, not clinging to anything in the world.” 

First you start, and then you continue.  

The Fourth Foundation of Mindfulness: MIndfulness of the Dharmas

And finally we come to the Fourth Foundation of Mindfulness.  This foundation is often referred to as Mindfulness of the Dhammas in Pali, or in Sanskrit, Dharmas.   The word “dhamma” or “dharma” has two foundational meanings - the first is the body of the Buddha’s teachings.  The second is the way things are.  

And its refrain begins to hint at the wisdom of this teaching.  “In this way, in regard to dharmas, [the meditator] abides contemplating dharmas internally…externally…internally and externally.  She abides contemplating the nature arising… of passing away… of both arising and passing in dharmas.  Mindfulness that 'There are dharmas’ is established in him to the extent necessary for bare knowledge and continuous mindfulness. And she abides independent, not clinging to anything in the world.”  from Joseph Goldstein’s Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening, translation by Venerable Analayo.

There is much in that paragraph but for now, it is enough to read it and begin to wonder at it.

There are five aspects to the dharmas/teachings and perspectives on the way things are.  This is a cursory look.  The first is the hindrances which we have touched on before - the five hindrances that interfere with mindfulness and meditation.  There are sensual desire (wanting, greed, craving), aversion (or not wanting), sloth and torpor (too little energy), restlessness and worry (too much energy), and doubt (doubt!).  Just becoming aware of these hindrances is a significant achievement.

The second and third sections in the Fourth Foundation are different lenses through which we can view the totality of our experience.  We are more familiar with the six sense spheres - seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, sensations, and the mind and mind-objects which includes everything else.  The other is the lens of the aggregates of clinging - material form, feeling (feeling tone), cognition, volitions, and consciousness.  

The fourth section teaches about the seven factors of awakening - mindfulness, investigation of dharmas, energy, joy, tranquillity, concentration, and equanimity. 

And the last is the Four Noble Truths - the truth of suffering, the truth of the causes of suffering, the truth of the cessation of suffering, and the path out of suffering g - the Noble Eight Fold Path. 

And with each of the teachings above, the Buddha encourages us to know when a factor has arisen whether it’s a hindrance, a sight or sensation, an awakening factor such as mindfulness or energy or joy, or whether suffering is present or absent.  And further the Buddha encourages us to know when a factor that has arisen, ceases, what are the causes for its arising and what might prevent its arising.  

The Buddha assured his monks that if they practiced these four foundations of mindfulness - mindfulness of the body, of feelings, of mind and of the dharmas, they would achieve the fruits of partial or full awakening.

This may seem like a tall order but many of us have tasted of these experiences, struggled with the binds of clinging, aversion, delusion, and reveled in the freedom of release and understanding.  And these fruits are available to us all.  They can be gleaned and refined by looking at our present moment experience with mindfulness, by cultivating our sensitivity to our experience through our practice, and by following the two most important instructions:  First you start.  And then you continue.

The Buddha assures us that if it could not be done, he would not encourage us to do it.  

In Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening, Joseph Goldstein quotes Sayadaw U Tenjaniya on the importance of Mindfulness of the Mind which is the Third Foundation of Mindfulness:  “One thing you need to remember and understand is that you cannot leave the mind alone. It needs to be watched constantly.  If you do not look after your garden it will overgrow with weeds.  If you do not watch your mind, defilements will grow and multiply.  The mind does not belong to you, but you are responsible for it.”

The Third Foundation of Mindfulness asks us to look into our own minds and contemplate two aspects - the contents of the mind and the nature of the mind.

Feeling tone is one of the movements of mind we became aware of in The Second Foundation of Mindfulness.  Now we widen the field to bring awareness to anything happening in the mind that we can catch hold of - thoughts, moods, feelings, emotions, memories, fantasies, plans, stray images.  This is slippery work as we tend to get caught in the content of a thought and get carried away.  And our thoughts arise about practically everything going on in our minds.  If we feel anger or pain, our mind rises up in protest and a dust storm of thoughts and feelings can clog our minds for hours - unless we take a step back and look at the dust storm itself.  We may or may not halt the progress of the dust storm and that is not as important as simply holding it in awareness and allowing it, without pushing it away, encouraging it, or judging ourselves for having it.  With patience, we will realize the dust storm was, like all storms, impermanent and passes out of the mind.

The other key practice instruction is to bring awareness to our mind’s tendency to identify with the dust storm as “my dust storm”, that “I created”.  It’s simply a dust storm kicked up by the arising of anger or pain and our aversion to them.  It didn’t arise because we engineered it or instructed it to.

As we look at these contents of the mind, we notice the connectivity of thoughts.  Each thought arises out of a thought and leads to another thought in what appears to be an unbroken progression from one fantasy or thought to another fueled by desire or aversion or confusion.  There may be an initial thought - that might have arisen from an external events or a bodily sensation - that triggers the progression and there may be an apparent halt to the thinking as a new external event intervenes or awareness arises and periods of calm ensue. 

As we step back from our thoughts, we can begin to discern whether this thought or emotion or mind state is wholesome or unwholesome.  And that is what the Third Foundation of Mindfulness asks us to do.  It asks us to discern as we practice whether our minds are in a state of wanting or lusting or craving or whether they are free from wanting or lusting or craving. Similarly, are our minds in a state of anger or free from anger? Distracted or contracted? Deluded or free from delusion? and other qualities along the path to freedom including whether the mind is liberated or un-liberated.

As our minds settle in mindfulness and concentration, we naturally begin to discern if we are identifying with these states or not.  Are we the creators of these mind states?  Did we decide to have them?  Or did they arise out of causes and conditions without our orchestration?

And then as our practice deepens and we become aware of more and more subtle movements in the mind, we may begin to discern that these mind states arise and pass away moment by moment - a breath, a sound, a thought, a sensation, a pain, a relief, a joy, another breath.  And beyond that, we begin to see that these mind moments are passing more and more rapidly as we discern smaller and smaller units of change until we begin to see the mind movements as a continual process, moving and changing, shifting, arising and passing away in a flow of activity not under our control.  

We approach the understanding that our minds operate both as waves of activity and as a series of discrete particles (mind moments) arising one after another.  According to Cynthia Thatcher’s article in Tricycle, “How Long is a Moment?” (Winter 2006), a practice moment is around 1 to 3 seconds long.  However, a unit of consciousness is considerably faster than that - millions of times faster than that.  As we practice, we begin to discern some of these flashes of consciousness within the space of one breath or one step or one movement of the hand toward the door handle.  

And with these flashes, we begin to approach the nature of reality and long with it the perception of impermanence, the unsatisfactoriness, the impersonality.

As Bhikku Bodhi says in The Noble Eightfold Path, as “mindfulness becomes clearer, it remains intently aware, watching its own process of becoming…[dissolving] into streams of [mind moments] flashing into and out of being, moment by moment, coming from nowhere and going nowhere, yet continuing in a sequence without pause.”

On the First and Second Foundations of Mindfulness...

Recently, we’ve been exploring the first two Foundations of Mindfulness - Mindfulness of the Body and Mindfulness of Feeling Tone (Vedana).  This every day, on-going miracle of our body has always been how we know our world so it’s not surprising we take it for granted.  Much of what we expect from our bodies is not what’s happening in the present moment. 

So mindfulness of the body allows us a deeper exploration of what is true in our bodies and what our experience is actually like.  But when we sit in meditation, we regard and explore this body with our minds - something much more amorphous than our bodies.  And our mental experience is different from our bodies.  It doesn’t conform to the shape of our bodies, it is not bound by form or shape, it doesn’t restrict itself to bodily sensations, it layers on thoughts, images, emotions, mind states, wanting and not wanting.  

So when we place our awareness on our bodies, we are observing our bodies through the lens of our minds - a lens we also take for granted and merge with what we’re observing but which has completely different characteristics and yet still allows us to experience our bodies.

As our mindfulness deepens and we become aware of more and more subtle experiences, we begin to notice that along with a physical sensation or a thought arises an immediate liking, disliking or overlooking.  We like this, we don’t like that.  This smells or tastes good, that doesn’t.  The vast majority of sensations are relatively neutral so we don’t pay attention to them.

These subtle feelings tones are the heart of the Second Foundation of Mindfulness - Mindfulness of Feelings.  

 Bhikkus Bodhi points outs in The Noble Eight Fold Path that “Feeling acquires special importance as an object of contemplation because it is feeling that usually triggers the latent defilements into activity.  The feelings may not be clearly registered, but in subtle ways they nourish and sustain the dispositions to unwholesome states.  Thus when a pleasant feeling arises, we fall under the influence of the defilement greed and cling to it.  When a painful feeling occurs, we respond with displeasure, hate, and fear, which are aspects of aversion.  And when a neutral feeling occurs, we generally do not notice it, or let it lull us into a false sense of security - states of mind governed by delusion.  From this it can be seen that each of the root defilements is conditioned by a particular kind of feeling:  greed by pleasant feeling, aversion by painful feeling, delusion by natural feeling.”  

To be clear, these feeling tones lead to or trigger the wanting, the rejecting or the over-looking but are not the same as the feeling tones. Those are separate mental events - subtle but separate - and can be discerned when mindfulness is strong.  Thus, when held in awareness, these feeling tones don’t have to lead to unwholesome events.  

Since this all occurs in nano second time frames, it takes a bit of sitting in stillness and letting the mind settle to become aware of these more subtle movements of the mind.  And this investigation is critical because this is the chain of cause and effect that can lead us to one action versus another, toward suffering or liberation in this very moment.  

Below are the first two tetrads of the the Sixteen Steps of Mindfulness of Breathing contained in two separate teachings of the Buddha.  The first tetrad corresponds to Mindfulness of the Body, the second to Mindfulness of Feelings (or Vedana).

The Sixteen Steps of Mindfulness of Breathing

1. Breathing in a long breath, I know I am breathing in a long breath. Breathing out a long breath, I know I am breathing out a long breath.

2. Breathing in a short breath, I know I am breathing in a short breath. Breathing out a short breath, I know I am breathing out a short breath.

3. Breathing in, I am aware of my whole body. Breathing out, I am aware of my whole body.

4. Breathing in, I calm my whole body. Breathing out, I calm my whole body...

5. Breathing in, I feel joyful. Breathing out, I feel joyful.

6. Breathing in, I feel happy. Breathing out, I feel happy.

7. Breathing in, I am aware of my mental formations. Breathing out, I am aware of my mental formations.

8. Breathing in, I calm my mental formations. Breathing out, I calm my mental formations.

https://stillwatersanghamn.wordpress.com/2017/02/13/the-16-steps-to-mindfulness-of-breath/

"As the Buddha declared in the Anapanasati Sutta, 'When mindfulness of breathing is developed and cultivated, it fulfills the four foundations of mindfulness. When the four foundations of mindfulness are developed and cultivated, they fulfill the seven factors of enlightenment. When the seven factors of enlightenment are developed and cultivated, they fulfill true knowledge and deliverance.’”  ~~ Shaila Catherine, Lion’s Roar, Aug. 2022. https://www.lionsroar.com/all-you-need-is-breath/

The First Foundation of Mindfulness: Mindfulness of the Body

In the past few weeks, we have been talking about the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eight Fold Path contained in the Fourth Noble Truth, the path out of suffering.  The seventh path factor is Mindfulness.  

The Four Foundations of Mindfulness
Tonight we’ll begin our exploration of one the Buddha’s major teachings which falls within this path factor of mindfulness known as the Four Foundations of Mindfulness.  It has also been referred to as the four abodes or dwelling places of mindfulness.  

The Buddha made a rather bold assertion here.  Bhikku Bodhi writes in The Noble Eightfold Path that these four foundations form, according to the Buddha, “the only way that leads  to the attainment of purity, to the overcoming of sorrow and lamentation, to the end of pain and grief, to the entering upon the right path and the realization of Nibbana.”  

The First Foundation: Mindfulness of the Body
The first Foundation of Mindfulness, Mindfulness of the Body, explores our experience through the most tangible or gross (gross as is large or most obvious) aspect of experience - our bodies and physical form.   The other three Foundations - feeling tone, mind and mental events, and the dharmas which means both the truth of the world and the Buddha’s teachings - explore the more mental and progressively subtle experiences.  We’ll look at those more deeply in coming weeks.

There were several practices that the Buddha introduced to his monks for Mindfulness of the Body.  

Breath Awareness Practice
The one we know the best is breath awareness, mindfulness of breathing.  The Buddha taught this practice in sixteen steps starting with the investigation of whether this breath is a long breath or whether it is a short breath.  As practitioners learned to discern the length of the breath, they learned to observe the breath without attempting to change it - simply allowing it to arise and noting the length of the breath.  As their practice deepens, they observe the breath over the entire length of the breath as we have been practicing.  Sometimes teachers call this the four stages of the breath - from the in-breath to the pause/change to the out-breath to the rest at the end of the out-breath.  Then practitioners use this practice to calm the bodily function, progressively allowing the breath and all the processes associated with it to become more subtle.  Steps five through sixteen direct the practitioner toward more advanced and subtle practices with breathing that calm the entire body and mind and allow for progressive letting go and liberation.

Other Mindfulness of the Body Practices
Other practices of Mindfulness of the Body include investigating the 32 body parts - a practice designed perhaps for the wandering minds of monks of teen and young adult years whose fantasies might drift toward young women.  The 32 body parts promotes a dispassionate look at the composition of the body including all the various bodily fluids with the idea of interrupting the fantasies and breaking the enchantment with the body in the young monks.

A practice we are familiar with involves practicing with the body sitting, standing, walking and lying down.  These four postures encourage practicing with the body in all of its activities - encourage continuity of practice.  

Another practice involves contemplating the body in terms of the four elements to discover how like the entire world the body is - composed of the earth element, water, wind, and fire.  

The Body Scan 
The Body Scan is not included in the Buddha’s original teachings of Mindfulness of the Body.  Many people ascribe it to Jon Kabat-Zinn who developed Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR).  However, it is thought that it originated either from a Myanmar master U Ba Khin or he preserved it from earlier teachers.  https://www.buddhismuskunde.uni-hamburg.de/pdf/5-personen/analayo/buddhistantecedentsbodyscan.pdf

Nevertheless, the body scan has been extensively studied by various researchers and has been found uniformly to be one of the most effective practices for relieving tension and reducing stress. "Time spent engaging in the Body Scan was associated with increased psychological well-being and greater levels of two components of mindfulness—non-reacting to stress and observing thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations." https://ggia.berkeley.edu/practice/body_scan_meditation

More on the Sixteen Steps of Mindfulness of Breathing
For a taste of how the practice of Mindfulness of Breathing deepens through the sixteen steps and leads progressively toward enlightenment, you might want to try some of Bhikku Analayo’s guided meditations on breath awareness.  I found them very enlightening up through the fourth guided meditation.  Beyond that they are interesting and enlightening but pretty dense.  They can be found here:  https://www.buddhistinquiry.org/resources/offerings-analayo/breathing-audio/

The other resource you might find of interest is Larry Rosenberg’s Breath by Breath which explores in depth the sixteen steps of the breath awareness practice taught by the Buddha as the “only way that leads…to overcoming sorrow and lamentation.”  The sixteen steps are divided into four tetrads (four lines each) with each tetrad corresponding to one of the Four Foundations of Mindfulness.  

I have included the first tetrad from the Buddha’s teachings here.

1. Breathing in a long breath, I know I am breathing in a long breath. Breathing out a long breath, I know I am breathing out a long breath.
2. Breathing in a short breath, I know I am breathing in a short breath. Breathing out a short breath, I know I am breathing out a short breath.
3. Breathing in, I am aware of my whole body. Breathing out, I am aware of my whole body.
4. Breathing in, I calm my whole body. Breathing out, I calm my whole body.  
https://stillwatersanghamn.wordpress.com/2017/02/13/the-16-steps-to-mindfulness-of-breath/

As Shaila Catherine writes in The Lion’s Roar Aug. 2022, 
"The practice of mindfulness of the breath gradually exposes all areas where attachments might fester—to the body or meditation object, mental functions, mind, or insight knowledge….
As the Buddha declared in the Anapanasati Sutta, 'When mindfulness of breathing is developed and cultivated, it fulfills the four foundations of mindfulness. When the four foundations of mindfulness are developed and cultivated, they fulfill the seven factors of enlightenment. When the seven factors of enlightenment are developed and cultivated, they fulfill true knowledge and deliverance.’”  https://www.lionsroar.com/all-you-need-is-breath/

Transitions...

This week has been a sobering transition of sorts.  Due to an unusual weather pattern, smoke from wildfires plagued us last week from Nova Scotia, a part of Canada we never imagined on fire.  Homes were lost and people displaced.  Resources were expended immediately to combat those fires.  

Then Monday night, the weather pattern changed again and smoke from even more horrendous wildfires in Quebec descended toward the east coast in billows and plumes, white skies obscuring blue in the mornings, thin sunshine with pallid shadows emerging and disappearing during the day, a red ball seen through grey smoke in the afternoon one could directly behold.  We exchanged numbers on the air quality index with friends and family around the east coast as we watched the index soar into the unhealthy to very unhealthy ranges.  Pictures in the news showed New York City disappearing from New Jersey in a dense orange haze, the AQI topping out at 414 - hazardous, the lurid purple of the end ranges of the index adding to the sense of the disaster.

And we learned that the worst of the fires were uncontrolled, occurring in uninhabited forest land - places that were difficult to get to.  

So we all woke up to a new reality - one that we thought was confined to the west and midwest with only mild inconvenience to our way of life here.  We learned once again that we are not separate, that what happens in one part of the country, one part of the world, makes its effects apparent elsewhere, even here, where we live.   And we grapple with the knowledge that the fires continue, only the shifting weather patterns have spared us their fierce and deadly reminder.  For now.

How do we as meditators relate to, respond, live with these events, this stark evidence of our changing world?  

On one level, just like everybody else - with growing fear, horror, anxiety.  Or the false comfort of denial.  We can perhaps relate to climate deniers a bit here.  Or passive resignation and hopelessness.  These are very human responses to this increasingly terrifying world.  As Wendell Berry wrote (quoted in Elizabeth Drake’s excellent book Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore), “It is the destruction of the world in our own lives that drives us half insane, and more than half.”

I met with a group of dharma friends this week - windows and doors closed, dehumidifier and air purifier running full on.  One of our members was not present, having at long last entered Hospice for her final transition.  Our sadness, hidden behind everydayness, emerged over the hour as we talked about our friend, how her illness had progressed and how her practice progressed with it, how one of us assisted her on a retreat as she adjusted to her confinement to a wheelchair, how she waited patiently in this wheelchair at the bottom of the endless ramp to the meditation hall on a different retreat for someone to push her when she tired, what a gift it was to arrive and give her that assist,  how her courage and good will and loving kindness were grounded in her fierce independence, and how in recent days as she began to accept more and more help, she came to understand on a deeper level, at her core, just how loved she truly was.  

Stephen Levine’s Healing into Death and Life chronicles just such a journey into grace.  And we as her dharma friends came to glimpse what a gift accepting help can be to those offering, what a privilege and an acceptance into intimacy being allowed to help can be.  

One of our group joined us from her shift as a volunteer at a Hospice facility many states distant from our friend, the atmosphere of the Hospice - murmured conversations of love and condolence - permeating our zoom room with a kind of whispered sanctity.  And over the course of our time together, our grief merged with our love and a rich joy suffused with sadness grew in each of us.  We felt blest by our coming together, by having one window open to the caring and transitioning of the Hospice, by having the darkness surrounding each of our separate windows filled with the presence of our transitioning friend, our gathering giving each of us the courage to come into direct experience of all that we were feeling, all that was unfolding.

In Rising, a student of the author sends her a poem in the voice of God. It goes like this:

What do you expect me to do

I am not human

I gave you each other
so save each other.

After a period of travel, I found one of the books that grounded me was Bhikku Bodhi’s The Noble Eightfold Path: Way to the End of Suffering.  I’d been reading it on-line and thinking it was just an on-line book.  But after returning home, I began clearing out books, reorganizing and re-discovering in the process.  I found that I already owned it in book form!  

According to Wikipedia, "Bhikkhu Bodhi, born Jeffrey Block, is an American Theravada Buddhist monk, ordained in Sri Lanka and currently teaching in the New York and New Jersey area.”  He is well-known as an author but also as an editor and translator of Buddhist teachings.

I want to take some time and space to share what Bhikku Bodhi says about mindfulness both as a practice and as the 7th path factor of the Noble Eightfold Path.  I found this exposition illuminating and I think will help give a context for practice.  

“The Buddha says that the Dhamma, the ultimate truth of things, is directly visible, timeless, calling out to be approached and seen.  He says further that it is always available to us, and that the place it is to be realized is within oneself. The ultimate truth, the Dhamma, is not something mysterious and remote, but the truth of our own experience.  It can be reached only by understanding our experience, by penetrating it right through to its foundations.  This truth, in order to become liberating truth, has to be known directly.  It is not enough merely to accept it on faith, to believe it on the authority of books or a teacher, or to think it out through deductions and inferences.  It has to known by insight, grasped and absorbed by a kind of knowing which is also an immediate seeing.  

“What brings the field of experience into focus and makes it accessible to insight is the mental faculty called in Pāli sati, usually translated as “mindfulness.”  Mindfulness is presence of mind, attentiveness or awareness.  Yet the kind of awareness involved in mindfulness differs profoundly from the kind of awareness at work in our usual mode of consciousness.  All consciousness involves awareness in the sense of a knowing or experience of an object.  But with the practice of mindfulness awareness is applied at a special pitch.  The mind is deliberately kept at the level of bare attention, a detached observation of what is happening within us and around us in the present moment.  In the practice of right mindfulness the mind is trained to remain in the present, open, quiet, and alert, contemplating the present event.  All judgments and interpretations have to be suspended, or if they occur, just registered and dropped.  The task is simply to note whatever comes up just as it is occurring, riding the changes of events in the way a surfer rides the waves on the sea.  The whole process is a way of coming back into the present, of standing in the here and now without slipping away, without getting swept away by the tides of distracting thoughts.

“ It might be assumed that we are always aware of the present, but this is a mirage.  Only seldom do we become aware of the present in the precise way required by the practice of mindfulness.  In ordinary consciousness the mind begins a cognitive process with some impression given in the present, but it does not stay with it.  Instead it uses the immediate impression as a springboard for building blocks of mental constructs which remove it from the sheer facticity of the datum (NB: Facticity!  Great word!) The cognitive process is generally interpretative.  The mind perceives its object free from conceptualization only briefly.  Then, immediately after grasping the initial impression, it launches on a course of ideation by which it seeks to interpret the object to itself, to make it intelligible in terms of its own categories and assumptions.  To bring this about the mind posits concepts, joins the concepts into constructs - sets of mutually corroborative concepts - then weaves the construct together into complex interpretative schemes.  In the end the original direct experience has been overrun by ideation and the presented object appears only dimly through dense layers of ideas and views, like the moon through a layer of clouds.  

“The Buddha calls this process of mental construction papañca, “elaboration,” “embellishment,” or “conceptual proliferation.”  The elaborations block out the presentational immediacy of phenomena; they let us know the object only “at a distance,” not as it really is.  But the elaborations do not only screen cognition; they also serve as a basis for projections.  The deluded mind, cloaked in ignorance, projects its own internal constructs outwardly, ascribing them to the object as if they really belonged to it.  As a result, what we know as the final object of cognition, what we use as the basis for our values, plans, and actions, is a patchwork product, not the original article.  To be sure, the product is not wholly illusion, not sheer fantasy.  It takes what is given in immediate experience as its groundwork and raw material, but along with this it includes something else: the embellishments fabricated by the mind.”  There’s more but I’ll save it for next time.  

It is thought that what occurs in our minds is only about 92% based on our experience of the outside world.  Whether the percentage is correct, it’s clear that a great deal is add-ons, made up, scotched-taped on proliferations of our minds reflecting what we want, what we don’t want, and otherwise how we are deluded.

So this mindfulness becomes a critically important practice in beginning to ground our own minds in the truth of the way things are, to see clearly.

The Noble Eight-Fold Path

The truth of the Fourth Noble Truth is this:  The Noble Eight-Fold Path is the way out of suffering.  

The Noble 8-Fold Path is composed of the following:

Right view

Right Intention 

Right Speech

Right Action

Right Livelihood

Right Effort

Right Mindfulness

Right Concentration

In case you’re wondering about the word “Right” which sounds a bit judgmental and clearly calls its opposite “wrong” to mind, another word that could be used is “wise.”  Wise View, wise Intention, wise speech…etc.  This allows the invitation that is extended here to investigate and see for yourself what leads to suffering and what leads to freedom from suffering.  

But to be clear, sometimes “right” is exactly what is meant versus “wrong.”   When the Dalai Lama first heard the phrase “self-hatred” from Western scientists, he simply couldn’t understand it.  When it was finally translated to him in a fiercely whispered exchange with his translator, he looked up at the assemblage of scientists and declared with energy, "That is just wrong view!”

This teaching, as are all the Buddha’s teachings, is an invitation to come and see for yourself.  There is nothing to believe, no doctrines to memorize.  The truth is what you discover in your own hearts and minds, in your own experience.  These teachings are like the finger pointing to the moon.  Do not be confused by the finger; look in the direction the finger is pointing and see the moon for yourself.

Thich Nhat Hanh says it so eloquently: 

"Bhikkus, the teaching is merely a vehicle to describe the truth.  Don’t mistake it for the truth itself.  A finger pointing at the moon is not the moon.  The finger is needed to know where to look for the moon, but if you mistake the finger for the moon itself, you will never know the real moon.

"The teaching is like a raft that carries you to the other shore.  The raft is needed but the raft is not the other shore.  An intelligent person would not carry the raft around on his head after making it across to the other shore.  Bhikkhus, my teaching is the raft which can help you cross to the other shore beyond birth and death.  Use the raft to cross to the other shore, but don’t hang onto it as your property.  Do not become caught in the teaching.  You must be able to let it go." 

― Thich Nhat Hanh, Old Path White Clouds: Walking in the Footsteps of the Buddha

The path factors of the Noble Eight-fold Path are divided into three groups - the Wisdom factors, the Moral or Relationship factors, and the Mental training/discipline factors.

They are, nevertheless, inextricably linked.  Suffering cannot be eliminated if one is stealing and harming no matter how blissful the meditation.  And by the way, the meditation (mindfulness and concentration) will not proceed well if the mind is disturbed by unwholesome states of harming - whether to self or to others.

The Wisdom Factors are Wise View and Wise Intention.

The Moral or Relationship Factors are Wise Speech, Wise Action, and Wise Livelihood.

The Mental Training/Discipline Factors are Wise Effort, Wise Mindfulness, and Wise Concentration.

A quote from Bhikkhu Bodhi’s The Noble Eightfold Path: The Way to the End of Suffering (1999):

To follow the Noble Eightfold Path is a matter of practice rather than intellectual knowledge, but to apply the path correctly it has to be properly understood. In fact, right understanding of the path is itself a part of the practice. It is a facet of right view, the first path factor, the forerunner and guide for the rest of the path. 

One of the delights and surprises for me in looking more deeply into the The Four Noble Truths and The Noble Eightfold Path is how, as one teacher said, like a hologram it is.  The Noble Eightfold Path is contained in the Fourth Noble Truth.  And in turn, the Four Noble Truths are contained in Right or Wise View, the first path factor of the Noble Eightfold Path.  

As the we begin to explore the Noble Eightfold Path, we’ll see the worlds within worlds it contains.