Mind Moments and Hindrances

One of the experiences we may have had in our exploration of Mindfulness of Mind was how many different aspects to a single moment of experience might be available to be explored.  There are the five bodily senses of sight, hearing, sensation, smell and taste.  There are all the zillion mini-experiences of perception, cognition, understanding, confusion, exploration, inquiry, aversion, desire, energy, sleepiness, moods, emotions….the list goes on.

The brilliance of the Buddha is that when he sat in meditation, he began to see each of these fleeting experiences as mind moments in rapid succession.  Shaila Catherine, meditation teacher and author on two books on concentration Wisdom Wide and Deep and Focused and Fearless, commented in a discussion this weekend, that there are thought to be 17 mind moments in a cognitive process - a cognitive process that feels almost instantaneous.  And when the mind gets very quiet, it is within human capacity to experience these mind moments as discrete mental events.

The Buddha urged his followers to rest their meditations on an aspect of the body - mindfulness of breathing or the whole body, etc., because the body changes more slowly than the mind.  He opined that nothing changes as rapidly as the mind.  Trying to hold on to a mind experience is building our houses in shifting sand.

So when we look into our minds, we might be overwhelmed or dulled by the rapidity of changing states, emotions, experiences.  We can begin to train our awareness to see more deeply by asking, “What is happening right now?” “What is the condition of my mind?”  “What am I feeling?”  “How do I feel about this?  Is it positive, negative, or neutral?”  

While this inquiry might feel burdensome at first, with a little time and practice, it will become a wholesome habit of your practice to check into the mind and rapidly assess what is going on there.  It is important to note that no answer needs to be forthcoming.  It is enough to pose the inquiry.  The inquiry alone will prompt the mind to investigate itself.

With this kind of inquiry, the condition of the mind will gradually reveal itself to us and we will be able to tell how it is, is it well, is there some negative property presence, is the experience well and expansive.  And what about now?  And now?  And now?

This morning after some minutes spent in breath awareness meditation, I felt a feeling of calm descend on my mind.  I was awareness mindfulness was present.  And I detected a sense of joy or gladness within this calm.  Just as Guy quoted from the Buddha’s teachings, "Mindfulness of breathing is peaceful and sublime. Abiding in its happiness breaks up and calms unwholesome states whenever they arise.”  

And just to be very clear, I inquired into my mind for the hindrances.  Was desire present? Aversion? Agitation? Sleepiness? Doubt?  To each the answer was no.  I was able to ascertain that in that period of time, my mind was free of the hindrances.  That inquiry in itself strengthened the joy and gladness that was present as well as my faith in the practice.  

The Buddha had several lively similes to describe how it is to be tangled in a hindrance.  One is as follows:

Sensual desire is like being in debt.
Anger/aversion is like a disease.
Sloth-and-torpor are like being in bondage or enslaved.
Restless-and-worry are like being enslaved or in bondage.
Doubt is like being on a dangerous journey.

To be free of the hindrances is like getting out of debt, being well, being freed from bondage or slavery and arriving safely at your destination.

So it is important for us to know when a hindrance is present and when it is absent, and also to know when a positive quality is present and when it is absent.

This is one way our investigations can be forward leaning, leading onward on the path toward awakening - in this moment and in a more lasting way.

The Fourth Foundation of Mindfulness - Mindfulness of Dhammas

As we have explored the first three of the Four Foundations of Mindfulness - Mindfulness of Body, Mindfulness of Feelings, and Mindfulness of Mind - the greater weight of the instructions has been simply to be aware of these aspects of our experience.  Does our body have pain?  Pleasant sensations?  Wants or needs?  Are we attracted or repelled by some experience that arose?  When we are upset, calm, excited, fearful, engaged, can we bring awareness to the mind (read here mind/heart) that is having the experience as well as the object that triggered our reactions?  Mindfulness of our experience in all of these different arenas has been our objective.  There has been no need to do anything, change anything, alter our experience.  Simply being present has been what is asked of us in mindfulness.

And in that presence, we are asked to look inside our minds and know when a wholesome feeling or state is present and when it is absent, when an unwholesome feeling or state is present and when it is absent.  We begin to see what is in our minds and what is not.

With the Fourth Foundation of Mindfulness - Mindfulness of Dharmas/Dhammas or Mindfulness of the Way Things Are - we move into the territory of discerning what it in our minds, whether it is wholesome or unwholesome, and whether it would be skillful to take action to change what is in our minds.  We do this already with the loving kindness practice.  When we say the loving kindness phrases, we are substituting the phrases of well-wishing for whatever else is in our minds whether it be jealousy or anger, worry, rumination, or desire.

But to back up a bit, Mindfulness of Dhammas (the Pali spelling), has a number of categories - The Five Hindrances, The Five Aggregates of Clinging, The Six Sense Spheres, The Seven Enlightenment Factors, and the Four Noble Truths which includes the Noble Eight-fold Path.  Taken together they lay out the path to enlightenment.  We will explore these in the coming weeks.

The First of these categories, the Five Hindrances, we have touched on before.  These five hindrances are the most common obstacles that arise for all meditators.  When the hindrances are present, they obscure mindfulness.  In the quote above, mindfulness of breathing is peaceful and sublime - a state of happiness in which we can abide.  The Buddha practiced mindfulness of breathing through out his life and, in fact, chose to practice mindfulness of breathing when he died.  It is only peaceful and sublime, however, when the hindrances are absent.  Our task as meditators is to look into our minds and hearts to see if any constriction or disturbance is present, to identify which hindrance might be there, and to apply skillful means to keep the hindrance at bay.  

And we can do this.  We can all have periods in our meditations when the hindrances are at bay.  We strengthen our ability to abide in their absence when we see clearly when a hindrance is present and when it is absent.

The hindrances are sensual desire, ill will, sloth and torpor, restlessness and worry, and skeptical doubt.  In their simplest form, they are wanting, not wanting, too much energy, too little energy, and doubt.  

As you think about your practice, can you identify periods when wanting was present?  The desire for something?  To get up or eat something?  To know what a noise outside was? To take a nap? To have a better meditation?   

Not wanting can be a reaction to pain in the body, can express as anger or irritation (“stewing" for instance), can arise in reaction to a horror fantasy or the memory of a passage in a novel or scene in a movie.  Anytime we want something else to be happening other than what is, we are either in desire/wanting or aversion/not wanting.

Too much energy, agitation, restlessness can make it hard to settle down, to bring our attention back to our chosen object, to restrain our minds from wandering, fantasizing, getting distracted.

Too little energy can take the form of sleepiness, dullness, apathy, a sinking but pleasant comfort without a lot of clarity.  Sometimes we may simply be tired, other times we may be “bored”, but sometimes we may be resisting a difficult feeling such as grief or fear.

Some of us are familiar with doubt off the cushion as well as on - doubt in ourselves and our ability to practice, doubt in the teachers and their ability to communicate the dharma, doubt in the teachings themselves.  

The first step in working with any of these hindrances is recognizing that they are present or not, but this is especially true for doubt.  Doubt is sometimes simply the choice to believe a certain thought that arose.  “She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”  “I’m no good at this.”  “Look how much better others are.”  “These instructions are impossible to follow.”  These are all doubting thoughts that may arise - and we may choose to take on these thoughts in a split second without even being fully aware that we have done so.

There are specific antidotes to each hindrance given in the teachings but two of the main ones are mindfulness, clearly seeing the hindrance, and the practices of loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity.  

All meditators cycle through the hindrances but one of the key understandings is that resisting or ignoring the hindrance is sure to increase it.  Accepting that the hindrance is present is a critical step.  A further step is to see that the path we are traveling is not around, over, or under the hindrance, but through it.  The hindrance is not something that shouldn’t be there, but a state that arose through causes and conditions.  Can we explore the hindrance and the causes and conditions that support them, can we see how they arise in our daily lives and pull our attention into the alleyways of our minds, can we understand how these hindrances are telling us something about our lives, our understanding, our hearts?  The hindrances, as annoying and challenging as they are, are the fodder for our awakening.  

The Lessons of Children...

It appears that the local playground will occupy the high energies and equally high volume of my half nieces and nephews this afternoon.  So in gratitude for the genius of child-size zip lines and scary tunnel slides, I will be present for this evening’s session - humbled by their small, strong bodies and also by the challenges their vitality presents to my own peace of mind.  I have to keep reminding myself that these young life forces which push all my buttons of insecurity, competition, desire to be liked, desire for control, desire for “QUIET!” are only “almost three,” four, and five years old.  And, as some of you may know, the biggest trigger puller is an  “almost”  three year old. 

Late one evening as I faced the sobering realization of all this, I found Ayya Chema’s The Path to Peace and opened to the first chapter.  Venerable Ayya Chema may be best known as Leigh Brassington’s teacher.  Brassington regularly gives Jhana (deep absorption) retreats at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies.  The Jhana he teaches is considered by some to be Jhana-lite because it is accessible to a wide number of people on a 10 day retreat.  I found it a valuable experience and found Leigh to be one of the more knowledgable teachers I have practiced with an encyclopedic mind and a verve for exploration of the mind in meditation.

Ayya Chema’s lesson in that first chapter is that we come into this world with the capacity to do good and be at peace and the capacity to be highly unskillful, wrong, and be in constant turmoil.  She points out that any time our ego is touched, things go off track.  In her book, she gives a series of talks on loving kindness or metta from the Buddha’s teaching called The Metta Sutta: The Buddha’s Word on Loving-Kindness. The first line goes like this:  

What should be done by one who is skilled in wholesomeness 
to gain the state of peacefulness is this:

She points out an important truth in that first line.  Wholesomeness is possible.  But it is a skill.  We need to learn to recognize wholesomeness, learn to practice wholesomeness, learn to cultivate all the ways wholesomeness can be established in us in order to have wholesomeness become more engrained, perhaps more of a “habit” that unwholesomeness.

And further, she points out that we must do this for ourselves.  No one can do it for us.  Reading about esteemed teachers can inspire us but we still have to ask the question as she does:  “How am I going to do this?”

The answer may not come as a surprise - we need to recognize when an eruption of negative, unwholesome states occur.  And this eruption comes about through the interaction of our thoughts and feelings, through allowing negative thoughts and feelings to go unnoticed, through not understanding how much thoughts influence feelings and feelings influence thoughts.  

This is the essence of the Third Foundation  of Mindfulness - Mindfulness of Mind.  Thoughts and feelings and how they influence one another.  

The key to this recognition and bringing about change is the Second Foundation of Mindfulness - Mindfulness of Feeling or feeling tone, positive, negative or neutral.  Feeling tone arises with every contact.  Feeling tone is not the problem.  Not being aware of feeling tone is how we get in trouble.  So bombarded by the numerous “Auntie Nancy, can I have...?” or “Auntie Nancy,…” accompanied by pointing or grunting or moaning or  that “wanting" sound children make before they can fully verbalize, I was so intent on responding, on being a loving Auntie, a patient Auntie, a caring Auntie, that I was not paying attention to the rising irritation.  And when it all reached a fever pitch of yelling punctuated by occasional shrieks, I recognized the jangled nerves but tried to suppress them.  (Note to self…again:  That doesn’t work.)  So negative feeling tone leads to not wanting.  Suppressed negative feeling tone leads to more not wanting and more negative feeling tone and more not wanting.  An unpleasant spiral.  

What are we to do?  Or to ask Ayya Khema’s question, how am I going to do this?  Mindfulness is the key here.  Knowing our own reactions as they arise, allowing, holding them with awareness and compassion leads us to clear thinking and clear seeing.  And the stronger our mindfulness, the more clarity we are capable of.  Mindfulness brings us back to ourselves and allows us to find a foothold in equanimity, the highest of our emotions.  This is the way things are.  Things are not as I would like them to be.  Things are difficult or challenging right now.  And I can just be with them and with my breath and at ease in the center of the whirlwind.  

*  *  *  *  * 

This week, I learned a meditation master revered by all also suffered from painful knees.  In fact, another meditation master, Charlotte Joko Beck writes of painful knees on retreats as well so I suspect painful knees are commonplace among meditation practitioners - whether students, teachers, or masters, especially in the west where sitting cross-legged has not been as extensively cultivated.  This master I heard about this week chose not to have knee surgery because it might interfere with his sitting posture, and he preferred to work with the pain instead.  

Initially, I found myself judging his decision, thinking he was “attached” to his sitting posture at the expense of his body.  He could meditate in any posture as I have been saying for several weeks.  Taking care of the body and adjusting the sitting posture seemed a wiser course.  

But then I reflected further and began to wonder.  Didn’t my quest of surgery represent an “attachment” to the body over my sitting posture?  A wish to have the body restored to near perfection?  Actually, yes.  I found a revulsion to the injury and a wish to “fix” the body.  And underlying that was a rejection of the aging and injury of the body, a rejection that the body will grow old, and ultimately a rejection of the ultimate end of the body.

Through this lens, I could see the wisdom of that meditation master in allowing a deeper contemplation of the impermanence of the body and also a deeper aspiration to support his spiritual practice above all.  

It was a beautiful lesson.  And an “aspiration” for me, to use Gil Fronsdal’s word from his article "The Spectrum of Desire”.  

The ultimate decision is not as important as the motivation.  The important task is to bring mindfulness or awareness to the different attachments at work, to hold those attachments and see the suffering associated with them, to contemplate “letting go” of those attachments - whether a little bit, a lot, or completely.

As the great Thai forest master Ajahn Chah said: 
"If you let go a little, you will have a little peace. 
If you let go a lot, you will have a lot of peace. 
If you let go completely, you will have complete peace.”

Wholesome Desire...Part II

I was listening to a talk on desire on DharmaSeed last night.  It was by Rob Burbea, esteemed meditation teacher and author of Seeing That Frees.  As he was talking about ways to work with desire, he stopped abruptly and said, sometimes it means you have to do something.  He repeated it, sometimes it means you have to do something.  

At the time I wondered what he meant as he didn’t explain further. Then this morning I received an email which I have copied and pasted below.  The subject line was "Save Our Democracy" Special Online Event July 13 and was sent by meditation teacher James Baraz who is also one of my mentors.  

In Buddhism, desire is one of the three poisons.  And in fact, desire for worldly pleasures for the purpose of pleasing only the self is unwholesome.  But there are wholesome desires as well - chief among them is the desire for the practice.  How would we persist on the path, how would anyone aspire to enlightenment without desire?  Desire is a powerful motivating force and without it not much gets done - including our meditation practice.   

Our challenge is to learn to discern wholesome desires from unwholesome desires as Gil Fronsdal wrote an eloquent article called "The Spectrum of Desire" which I have copied below.  In it, he makes the clear distinction between desire which is craving that “undermines psychological health” leading to suffering and healthy desires which "can contribute to psychological well-being, happiness, and peace.”  He calls these wholesome desires “aspirational.”  

Here he makes the key distinction between healthy and unhealthy desires and gives us guidance on how to keep the former from becoming the latter:  

The sensitivity and awareness that come from mindfulness practice support the discovery of our healthy desires and aspirations. Mindfulness not only helps us get in touch with our aspirations, but it helps prevent aspiration from becoming craving. Even though what we might want is healthy and appropriate, if we are not careful, this desire can manifest as craving. Noticing the physical and mental tension, pressure, and uneasiness that come with craving makes it easier to distinguish aspiration from craving.

One way aspiration becomes craving is through expectation. At its best, aspiration has an openness to possibility without a need for anything to happen. This doesn’t mean that we don’t act on our aspirations, but that we don’t cling to their success. There is something satisfying and wonderful in a healthy aspiration that is not dependent on outcome.

So I want to circle back to the subject matter of the email I also attached below.  Buddhism is not passive.  The Noble Eightfold path includes Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, and Right Effort.  But such action needs to be grounded and preceded in Right Understanding and Right Thought and purified by Right Mindfulness and Right Concentration.  Fronsdal’s article gives us some guidance on how to go forward with our right action by using mindfulness to discern when craving and expectation have begun to color and distort our wholesome desires.  It does not mean we shouldn’t take action.  It simply means that we need to watch carefully for the constriction and striving that characterize craving/expectation.  If it is our wholesome desire to engage in right effort to preserve our society for liberty and justice for all, then we can be fierce in our compassionate action.  Our charge as practitioners of meditation and mindfulness is to aspire to do so without being driving by craving for the outcome.  

And as Rob Burbea observed, sometimes we have to act.

The Spectrum of Desire

by Gil Fronsdal, August 25, 2006

Desire is so inherent to the human condition that life without it is almost inconceivable. It is probably more accurate to call us “human desirelings” than “human beings.” Anyone wishing to live a wise life needs to explore deeply the nature of his or her own desire.

A number of myths about desire circulate among Buddhists. A common one is that desire is bad, and a spiritually mature person has no desires. Another is that the Buddha taught that desire is the cause of suffering and therefore all desire, even the desire to practice for liberation, is a problem. But life without desire is not necessarily a good thing: for example, one symptom of depression is having no desires. The Buddha did not teach that desire was the cause of suffering. In fact, he encouraged his followers to arouse ardent desire for liberation.

A starting point for understanding desire is to differentiate between unhealthy and healthy desire. Unhealthy desire undermines psychological health, producing what Buddhism often calls “suffering” for short. Healthy desire can contribute to psychological well-being, happiness, and peace. If we place healthy and unhealthy desire on a spectrum, at one end we have the motivations that lead to some of the worst and most horrific things people do. But at the other end, desire expresses some of the most beautiful and noble aspects of human life.

One way to distinguish the two ends of this spectrum is to differentiate between craving and aspiration. When the Buddha pointed to the cause of suffering, he used the word tanhà or thirst. It represents desire which is in some way compulsive, driven, and therefore not easy to let go of. This kind of desire is often accompanied by clinging, contraction, tension, or pressure.

Craving has its costs. People have destroyed their lives by acting on their addictions. When craving has the upper hand, it is all too easy to make poor choices. Freedom, that is, free will and the ability to choose wisely, is easily compromised. Craving takes a toll on our bodies when it expresses itself as physical tension. And it can take an even bigger toll on our minds: constant wanting can exhaust the mind. Left unchecked, craving can lead to an alienation from our self. Unfulfilled, craving can all too easily turn into frustration and anger.

One of the surprising discoveries that we make in mindfulness meditation is how pervasively and constantly the mind is under the sway of craving. This thirst is the primary reason the mind chases after its own thoughts.

An important function of meditation is to calm down the incessant churning of desire so that we can discover at the other end of the spectrum our deeper wellsprings of motivation. When surface concerns and chatter quiet down, among the beautiful things we can find are our aspirations. The etymology of “aspiration” (like “spiritual”) is rooted in the Latin word for “breath” (spirare). This points to the close relationship between breath and aspiration. Craving tends to contract the breathing; aspiration surfaces most easily when our breathing is relaxed and open. In the same way that natural breathing can’t be an act of will, so too the motivations and sense of purpose that come with aspiration can’t be willfully generated. Staying aware of our breathing can keep us close to what inspires us.

The sensitivity and awareness that come from mindfulness practice support the discovery of our healthy desires and aspirations. Mindfulness not only helps us get in touch with our aspirations, but it helps prevent aspiration from becoming craving. Even though what we might want is healthy and appropriate, if we are not careful, this desire can manifest as craving. Noticing the physical and mental tension, pressure, and uneasiness that come with craving makes it easier to distinguish aspiration from craving.

One way aspiration becomes craving is through expectation. At its best, aspiration has an openness to possibility without a need for anything to happen. This doesn’t mean that we don’t act on our aspirations, but that we don’t cling to their success. There is something satisfying and wonderful in a healthy aspiration that is not dependent on outcome.

If we want to base our lives on aspiration rather than craving, we have to give ourselves time to discover our deepest wishes. Aspiration often arises from a non-discursive part of the heart and mind. Craving and clinging are often tied to the discursive world of planning, thinking, and fantasy, while aspiration is associated with inner stillness and relaxation. Sometimes it is only during long contemplative periods that people discover what they most want to base their life on.

It is also important to respect both ourselves and our aspirations. It is easy to dismiss both our aspirations and the search for them. Believing that we are not good enough, capable, or deserving can leave us feeling unfulfilled and regretful. In the world of aspiration, it is far better to try and fail than to never try.

Buddhism recognizes many beautiful aspirations, including wishes of goodwill and kindness for others, and the desire for happiness and other wholesome qualities of mind for ourselves. Central to Buddhist practice are the aspirations for liberation and for the alleviation of the sufferings of others. However, Buddhism does not require us to desire either of these; when the heart is open and relaxed, these wishes often bubble up. Both aspirations can flow through us without egotism or craving. They can seem so natural that they appear impersonal. Just as water flows downhill, so the unimpeded heart flows to freedom and service. The healthy desire for freedom and compassion can flow like a mighty river that finds its rest in reaching the vast ocean.

https://www.insightmeditationcenter.org/books-articles/the-spectrum-of-desire/

Desire...Part I

In re-reading the PDF I sent around last week, I was struck by the description of the opposing forces of greed and aversion that exists in comparing ourselves to others.  Comparing is a relentless activity in our culture.  We laud competition in all areas of life - sports, finance, productivity at work or at home.    But it often starts with competition between siblings for love or attention when there is a sense that such love or attention is finite and one sibling’s gain is another’s loss. It abounds in youthful friendships or love relationships at all ages.  The idea that one person’s gain is another’s loss is a deeply entrench idea behind competition.

Here is how the article described it.  Remember the definition of greed can be read as desire, craving, or wanting, while hatred can also refer to aversion or not wanting.  

Greed and hatred aren’t necessarily all-or-nothing states, both occurring in varying degrees and varieties. Jealousy and envy are instructive in this regard, ranging from states of minor discomfort to that of consuming passions. Not only that but these particular forms of coveting demonstrate the invariable simultaneity of attraction and aversion. If I’m held in the throes of jealousy, that’s because I want to possess a particular object or person to the exclusion of others. I’m left suspended between the will to include and exclude, a contradiction that can’t be sustained because the two states are emotionally self-canceling.

It’s a matter of reeling in and tossing out at the same time. But jealousy and envy also point unmistakably to the source of this simultaneity, which is seen to reside in threatened identity, a protective defense on behalf of the idea one holds of one’s “self.”   If, as in jealousy, I’m distressed by the attention someone gives to someone other than me, it’s because I somehow feel diminished by that loss.

The critical possessiveness that drives me into jealousy is not found so much in the desire to possess the coveted object itself as in the manner in which the object's possession reflects on me. Which means that what I’m actually trying to protect is my idea of myself, which leaves me straining to maintain possession of the conditions necessary to support the “person” I think I am. If I’m coveting your house, job, wife, car, success, or fame that’s because I feel less of a person with them in your possession than in mine. If I can’t match or exceed your acquisitions and successes, I’m drawn into doubt regarding myself. I need what you have in order to be the person I want to be.  https://tricycle.org/magazine/three-defilements/ 

This also applies at a more elemental level - such as desire for chocolate.  Chocolate often triggers greed or wanting, the intense desire for the chocolate that is not connected to hunger.  If I think of chocolate that might be in my cupboard and suddenly want that chocolate, it may drive me to stop whatever I was doing and go get the chocolate.  I am simultaneously driven by a powerful desire to eat the chocolate and a powerful desire not to be frustrated in that desire. In other words, the desire has to be fulfilled, i.e., made to disappear, for me to be happy.

The greed and the aversion to the frustration of the greed have got a hold of me and won’t let go (I believe) until I have that chocolate.  Interestingly, the chocolate is secondary.  My desire to be relieved of the desire and the potential frustration of that desire is what drives me.  If something distracts me or if I employ mindfulness to the desire at the root and ride it out, I will discover that the desire and aversion are impermanent states that will pass away once they arise whether or not I eat the chocolate and that centered state that comes when they pass on their own without my indulging in the chocolate is a relief and even a joy.  

As with the prior examples, identification with the object of desire is at work. “I” must have that chocolate, need that chocolate.  If “I" can get that chocolate, it will make “me" happy.  Part of the relief when the desire passes away without indulging in the chocolate is the freedom from being driven by the needs of making the “self” happy.  Indeed, when we begin to let go of objects of desire and allow desire to be met with mindfulness, we begin to live from a place of greater tolerance, greater acceptance for the states of having and not having that give us more freedom in our lives.  

The great Thai forest master Ajahn Chah put it this way:

"If you let go a little, you will have a little peace. 

If you let go a lot, you will have a lot of peace. 

If you let go completely, you will have complete peace."

When we know desire and freedom from desire intimately, the choice gets easier.  

More about Mindfulness of Mind...

The Third Foundation of Mindfulness introduces us to the investigation of mind - generally taught in meditation classes as thoughts and emotions.  It is devilishly hard to turn mindfulness on thoughts and emotions and keep it there.  The mind is quicksilver and slippery to the extent that bringing the full force of mindfulness here is quite challenging.  Why?  Because we find our thoughts and emotions endlessly compelling.  This tendency has good survival value in that those who started investigating terror with mindfulness instead of running when confronted with a tiger were probably not our ancestors.

Nevertheless, there are plenty of emotions that arise that are not directly related to our survival in this moment.  But they are relevant to whether we are suffering and therefore worthy of mindful investigation.  So the first step in Mindfulness of Mind is to begin to see what is there, in the mind, in this moment.  Is there fatigue or energy?  Is the mind bright or dull?  What are you thinking about - right now?  As you read this, there is the meaning of the words, but there are also associations and interpretations, “this reminds me..” kind of thoughts, “I don’t have time to finish this right now” thoughts. Is there excitement or recognition?  Or is there boredom or impatience?  Is there distraction?

But The Third Foundation of Mindfulness is invites us to look underneath the story line, the mental conversations, the pull of images and memories, imaginings about the future to discern what is the motivating force of the mental stream.  As I mentioned last week it invites us to know if greed, hatred, delusion, or distraction are present.  And when they are absent.  Greed has a wider meaning which includes lust, craving, or wanting.  Hatred includes aversion, fear, and not wanting in its definition.

The first three qualities - greed, hatred, and delusion - are key to the Buddhist teachings; freedom from their hold over us is liberation or enlightenment.  

In the age before writing, the Buddha was a big fan of lists.  And numbers.  The Four Noble Truths.  The Eight fold Path.  The Triple Gems also known as the Three Refuges.  Here we have the Three Poisons - sometimes also referred to as the Three Defilements.   In Tricycle Magazine "What did the Buddha teach?”, this is how there are introduced:

"In his early teachings, the Buddha identified “three poisons,” or three fires, or three negative qualities of the mind that cause most of our problems—and most of the problems in the world. The three poisons are: greed (raga, also translated as lust), hatred (dvesha, or anger), and delusion (moha, or ignorance). The three poisons are opposed by three wholesome, or positive attitudes essential to liberation: generosity (dana), lovingkindness (maitri, Pali: metta), and wisdom (prajna). Buddhist practice is directed toward the cultivation of these virtues and the reduction or destruction of the poisons; practitioners identify those thoughts that give rise to the three poisons and don’t dwell on them, while nurturing the thoughts that give rise to the three positive attitudes.”  https://tricycle.org/beginners/buddhism/three-poisons/

The final sentence "practitioners identify those thoughts that give rise to the three poisons and don’t dwell on them, while nurturing the thoughts that give rise to the three positive attitudes”  is the purview of the third foundation of mindfulness.  Mindfulness of mind is the process of bringing awareness to our thoughts and identifying thoughts which give rise to the poisons as well as thoughts that support the wholesome attitudes.

In a related article, Tricycle Editors write the following: 

The first of the Three Defilements, Greed, drives us to cling to or hoard the things we want, and hate drives us to avoid and resist what we don’t want. Delusion is the folly of thinking we can get what we want to the exclusion of what we don’t want. It’s an attempt to split up circumstances into categories of our own devising. But reality is not divisible in that way, and the irony of such a delusion resides in a failure to recognize that greed and hate are psychologically one and the same.

My clinging to something I want is always in resistance to something I don’t want. My resistance to something I don’t want resides in my preference for something I do want. It’s a situation that leaves me pushing and pulling simultaneously, a matter of considerable strain. When I put myself at odds with circumstance, I’m certain to suffer just as the Buddha said I would. The tug of war set up between clinging and aversion nullifies the effective force of either. The resulting lack of inclusive receptiveness has the effect of shutting down the whole system of human exchange, confining me within my own likes and dislikes.  https://tricycle.org/magazine/three-defilements/  
(I have included the article in a PDF below.  It’s valuable reading.)

We can start with craving or greed.  What does it feel like?  When does it arise?  Can we learn to recognize it?  One exercise I wrote about last week suggested by Donald Rothberg is to do walking meditation in the aisles of Bed, Bath, and Beyond.  If Whole Foods is closer, try that.  Or Pottery Barn.  What’s your favorite store?  Do you feel wanting arising just thinking about which store you enjoy the most?  

Do walking meditation through the rooms of your house and see if you can feel the pulling in of greed.  You might also experience the pushing away of aversion.  The kitchen is a great place to feel wanting.  Any piles of bills or unsorted papers or muss might trigger aversion or not wanting.  Stop and notice how this craving and aversion feels in the body, in the mind, how it manifests as thoughts.

Getting to know wanting and not wanting is a great practice.

Mindfulness of Mind - The Third Foundation of Mindfulness

I have been promising to talk about The Third Foundation of Mindfulness for some weeks now.  So today is the day.  

Review:  To review for those who are newer to this thread of teaching I have been presenting here, one of the seminal teachings of the Buddha’s path is the Satipatthana Sutta, known to us more familiarly as The Four Foundations of Mindfulness or Four Abodes of Mindfulness.  We have been talking about and practicing with these teachings from the very outset of these pages.  This will also be familiar to those of you who engaged in the 8-week course Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction a few years ago.  The Four Foundations of Mindfulness are the basis for the Insight tradition of mindfulness and the bedrock of our practice.  

The First Foundation is Mindfulness of the Body.  Breath awareness is the foundation practice from this teaching.  Body scans, while a newer iteration, are another valuable aspect of Mindfulness of the Body.  The Second Foundation of Mindfulness is Mindfulness of Feelings.  Feelings in this Buddhist context refers to the initial feeling tone or valence of positive, negative, or neutral that arises in the first nano second of an experience to let us know whether this experience is pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral.  This is a very useful aspect of experience which can save us from burning our hands on a hot stove, stepping in front of an oncoming bus, catching Covid from an infected friend.  It can also bind us together with love and protective compassion to a tiny baby, a stray kitten, a faltering parent.  It can swell our hearts when we hear a bird call in spring or witness the first blooms of daffodils or irises we planted last fall.  It allows us to continue our day without interruption when the sound of the heat goes on and off, when a car drives by, when we brush by furniture or touch a plate.

The Third Foundation of Mindfulness:  Mindfulness of Feelings leads us directly into Mindfulness of Mind - the Third Foundation, because directly behind those initial tones of feeling toward pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral is the arising of thoughts, perceptions, opinions, mind states, memories, fantasies - either in an avalanche of mental events that can commandeer our minds and energies for long periods of time.  

Imagine an incident when someone borrowed something from you and promptly lost it, or conversely, what happens when you wander through a clothing store, a hardware store, a stationery store. 

In this imagining, you might remember a whole cascade of negative thoughts and emotions that arise from the incident with the borrower or the deluge of wanting, imagining, fantasizing that accompanied you down each aisle of the stores of abundance.  This cascade and the ongoing mind stream of thoughts and emotions is the province of the mind - and investigating this stream is Mindfulness of Mind.

We’ve touched on this territory often.  Mindfulness invites us to bring our nonjudgmental awareness in the present moment to our experience of our minds.  What are our thoughts?  In this moment?  Our emotions?  Our moods and mind states?  Are we remembering something?  Fantasizing about something?  Planning a future event or activity?  How would we describe our mind?  Bright and alert?  Sleepy or foggy?  Depressed?  Busy?  Constricted? 

The teaching of Mindfulness of Mind in the Satipatthana Sutta, instructs us to discern what is underneath the activity of our minds, what qualities are present at the root of the mental event we are encountering, what qualities are absent, and whether those qualities are wholesome or unwholesome.  Is greed at the basis of the thought about buying a new sports car?  Is aversion prompting the grumbling about an irritating neighbor?

There are eight qualities whose presence or absence are the concern of the Buddha’s mindfulness of mind.  Lust (which here refers to greed or wanting), hatred or aversion, delusion, and distraction are unwholesome states of mind.  The higher states of mind are great, unsurpassable, concentration, and liberation and refer to wholesome and more advanced meditative states.  Liberation is enlightenment and pretty advanced and wholesome.  We can have moments of these states but we’ll leave that for another time.

Back to the reality of greed or the wanting mind, hatred or aversion, delusion, or distraction.  According to Donald Rothberg in a dharma talk given at Spirit Rock in 2012 (see Dharmaseed.org), the characteristic that is common to these unwholesome states is concern for the self alone.  "I” want this.  “I” don’t want that. These are not altruistic states.  The other quality that accompanies these states is a lack of concern for consequences.  “I’ll” have that no matter what.  “I’m” going to ignore this intense pain in my leg and keep running.

Seeing a new bloom in your garden and wanting to share it with a friend is not greed at work.  Receiving a gift of dark chocolate and hiding it from company is.

I’ll end with an illustration of the astonishing power of mindfulness.  In Satipatthāna: The Direct Path to Realization, esteemed meditation teacher, author and scholar, Analayo writes, “Maintaining non-reactive awareness...counters the impulse towards either reaction or suppression contained in unwholesome states of mind, and thereby deactivates their emotional and attentional pull.”  

He footnotes the observation with a citation from a book by John Newman who writes, “…The proper approach for overcoming mental defilements is repeated wise observation.  A clinical case supporting the ingenuity of the approach is documented by Deatherage 1975, p. 40, where a twenty-three-year-old male, hospitalized for extreme periodic aggressiveness and alcohol abuse, was cured within eight weeks simply by being taught to recognize and mentally name the emotions he experienced, without even knowing that what he was doing was related to “meditation”.  Another chronic anger case-study involving awareness of mind as cure can be found in Woolfolk 1984. p. 551.”  

I have listed the book titles below for those interested.

Citation books from above:

John Newman’s 1996 book, Disciplines of Attention:  Buddhism Insight Meditation, the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises and Classical Psycho-analysis.

Deatherage, Gary, 1975: “The Clinical Use of ‘Mindfulness’ Meditation Techniques in Short Term Psychotherapy,” in Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 133-43.

Woolfolk, Robert L., 1984: “Self-Control Meditation and the Treatment of Chronic Anger”, in Meditation: Classic and Contemporary Perspectives, Shapiro, (ed), New York, Aldine, pp. 550-4.

... "little dust in their eyes"...

Last week I wrote that the Buddha refused to be drawn into an argument among his monks aout his own teachings.  Instead he asked them, when they were “arguing, quarreling, and fighting…etc.”, were they treating each other - their fellow spiritual companions - with kindness?  Were they kind to each other with their actions, with their words, with their thoughts and feelings?  Were they living according to the precepts they shared for moral behavior - not harming, not making false speech, not taking what is not freely offered, etc.?  Were they sharing whatever material goods they had - in this case, the contents of their alms bowls, their food for the day - with each other?  Were they living their lives according to Right or Wise view (the Four Noble Truths)? 

The Buddha taught that wise living starts with Right or Wise View.  If our umbrella perception of the world is incorrect, misguided, false, tinged with greed, hatred or delusion, all of our thoughts, speech, actions will be tainted as well.  And yet the hardest thing to change is Wrong View.  Sometimes our deeply ingrained wrong view is self-doubt or self-hatred.  We could search the whole world over and not find anyone more deserving of our love than ourselves.  

But there are times and this one seems to be among those times when a core value is at stake and we have real and seemingly solid disagreements with people and are convinced that we are right, that our point of view is more accurate, true, aligned with reality and that the opposing viewpoints are based less on fact.  And sometimes, perhaps often, we feel somewhat hopeless about making any headway with anyone in this disagreement.

After his enlightenment, the Buddha felt much the same way.  "For several weeks the newly awakened Buddha remained in the vicinity of the Bodhi Tree contemplating from different angles the Dhamma, the truth he had discovered. Then he came to a new crossroad in his spiritual career: Was he to teach, to try to share his realization with others, or should he instead remain quietly in the forest, enjoying the bliss of liberation alone?

At first his mind inclined to keeping quiet; for he thought the truth he had realized was just too deep for others to understand, too difficult to express in words, and he was concerned he would just weary himself trying to convey his realization to others.”

What changed his mind was the intervention "of a high deity named Brahma Sahampati, the Lord of a Thousand Worlds, (who) realized that if the Master remained silent the world would be lost, deprived of the stainless path to deliverance from suffering. Therefore he descended to earth, bowed down low before the Enlightened One, and humbly pleaded with him to teach the Dhamma "for the sake of those with little dust in their eyes.”” https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/bodhi/wheel433.html

Setting aside the high deity aspect of this, the lesson from this wise Brahman was clear.  There are people with “little dust in their eyes” who can understand the dharma, who can realize awakening and liberation, and who can go on to teach others.  

This is true for us as well.  The teaching is not saying to take on the more deeply entrenched of those we disagree with but to find those with “little dust in their eyes” and start a kind and loving conversation with them.  Perhaps sharing a meal or extended some kindness to a neighbor or friend or family member would be a great vessel for the conversation.  Or perhaps in our modern world, it’s identifying those farther away with whom we basically agree but who are not as inclined to action to support our common cause.  

Democracy is just such a cause.  We have heard again and again this week since Memorial Day the price in chaos, lives lost, and suffering that has been paid to gain and regain a system of government that continually attempts to put the power in the hands of the largest number of people within the borders of that country.  

So I’m reminded and heartened that we don’t have to convince the seemingly unconvincible.  We may not be the people to do that - because they may not be able to hear us and we might not be able to hear them.  But someone else might be just the voice they need to hear, might be just the ear they need to talk to.  And that someone else might be convinced by someone else they listened to who was convinced by talking and listening to us.  

The Buddha went back to his fellow ascetics who had given up on him when he decided to eat to sustain his health and strength to find the path to freedom from suffering.  They scoffed at him but were impressed by his calm appearance, an inner glow.  They sat and listened to his teachings and were enlightened and the wheel of the dharma began to turn.  

I have heard that when the people of Burma were overtaken by the military coup that changed their name to Myanmar, their biggest concern was that the teachings and practice of the dharma not die out.  They made other compromises to save the dharma.  

Every generation eventually has to take up the effort to learn, practice, and perpetuate that which we value the most, that which leads us to freedom internally and externally.  The Buddha’s teachings have lasted over 2500 years, have been pushed out of their country of origin or subsumed by a competing belief system, have travelled from country to country through the dedication of enlightened beings, have adapted to the different cultures and found ways to touch the hearts of new generations and thrive.

But the idea, the teachings, need to be strong, and perhaps need to be purified and re-interpreted to able to cut through the clutter of another time.  

Kindness is always possible...

The news this week of former President Trump’s 34 guilty convictions has been the occasion for a sigh of relief for many, for deepening anger and frustration for others.  While many of us will not regret the outcome and will even rejoice in it, it has not silenced divisive, rancorous voices.  And it remains to be seen whether it can lead to a coming together of people agreeing to be united in a common view point, in shared values.  

Family gatherings, visits home to parents, Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners can often play out this divide and turn into highly stressful occasions in which family members get into loud and contentious arguments.  We’ve all wondered in recent years how to turn down the arguing  and forge more caring relationships with those we disagree with.  

I heard a wise practitioner recently relate how she shifted such a dynamic with her father.  She described him as someone who likes to needle others with argument.  It had reached the point where she dreaded her visits.  Arguing and fighting is a form of intimacy, albeit exhausting and sometimes dangerous, but it takes the place of close contact when the understanding and skills for real intimacy are lacking.  

The turning point conversation went something like this:  Her father started in on whatever argument was close at hand or perhaps an old stand-by.  You can imagine differing political points of view here and feel the tension rising.  This woman suddenly said, “I don’t want to talk about that, dad.”  His reply, “Why not?  It’s important.”  Her response opened a whole new path for them, “Not between us,” she said.  “Not between us.”  

She stuck to her guns, so to speak, and their whole relationship warmed and became more heart-centered.  I could even imagine him in the privacy of his own mind wondering about her point of the view and reexamining his own.

That kind of self-reflection and reexamination won’t be the outcome of every exchange we have no matter how skillful but the chances are greatly improved when we’ve engaged and are engaging in our own process of self-reflection and reexamination.

One of the Buddha’s teachings involved the monks of a certain village who came to him because they had been “arguing, quarreling, and fighting, continually wounding each other with barbed words.  They couldn’t persuade each other or be persuaded, nor could they convince each other or be convinced.”  Not so different from today.

They came to the Buddha expecting him to resolve the argument.  After all, they were arguing about the dharma, so surely the Buddha would side with them and all would be well.

The Buddha did no such thing.  Instead he asked them, when they were “arguing, quarreling, and fighting…etc.”, were they treating each other - their fellow spiritual companions - with kindness?  Were they kind to each other with their actions, with their words, with their thoughts and feelings?  Were they living according to the precepts they shared for moral behavior - not harming, not making false speech, not taking what is not freely offered, etc.?  Were they sharing whatever material goods they had - in this case, the contents of their alms bowls, their food for the day - with each other?  Were they living their lives according to Right or Wise view?   

This last was a specific reference to the first path factor of the Noble Eightfold Path.  The Buddha - and all the monks knew this - was referring their shared understanding of the Four Noble Truths. 

The beauty of the Four Noble Truths - there is suffering, there are causes for suffering, there is an end of suffering, the end of suffering is the Noble Eightfold Path - is that it is like a pocket dictionary, short and portable and containing all the basics.  When one opens it to find quick guidance, one is drawn in deeper and deeper with each step not only leading onward, but ever inward, away from that which is unwholesome.  

Right or Wise view basically says we need to be guided by a whole overview of where we are going and how we might act.  If we think, speak, and act in unwholesome ways, there were be suffering and an unwholesome result.  If we think, speak, and act in wholesome ways, there will be wholesome results and freedom from suffering.  

And one of the basic tenets of Right View is the understanding of the Four Noble Truths.  Which contains the Noble Eightfold Path and Right View!

So the Buddha sends us back in a circular fashion as soon as we step on the Eightfold Path of the Four Noble Truths.  Remember the Four Noble Truths.  Be guided by the Four Noble Truths.  

If we imagine everyone in this country as a member of our own village, can we begin to think more kindly toward them, imagine they have reasons for believing as they do, imagine they struggle with uncertainty, fear, hardship, just as we do, imagine that they want to be happy too?  And can we begin to have conversations locally that are related to shared concerns, that are sprinkled with kind acts - smiling, opening doors, engaging in conversations about the weather, perhaps even sharing coffee and a muffin? 

Many of us are already engaged in such actions.  They spring from the natural kindness and good will in our hearts.  Perhaps thinking of Right View, that this is the View that needs to set the tone for all our thoughts, words and deeds, needs to color our perceptions, needs to spread across the skies of our minds to shed a particularly warm light on the goings on below, perhaps that view can deepen our sense of when kindness is possible.  According to the Dalai Lama, happiness comes and goes, but kindness is always possible.

Because it turns out, the content of the argument - even for the Buddha, even if it was about the dharma - was not as important as the attitude of mind.  Arguing stemming from anger is an unwholesome habit pattern.  The anger and the arguing are unskillful.  Although the Buddha understood that the realm of leaders was not the same as the realm of the spiritual life, he also understood and taught his followers, as was captured in the Dhammapada, that “Hatred never ceases by hatred, but by love alone is healed. This is an eternal law.”

The Cooling Quality of Equanimity

In the past few weeks we have been exploring the Second Foundation of Mindfulness - Mindfulness of Feelings.  We refer to this as feeling tone.  In Buddhist terms, this does not refer to emotions or physical sensations as it might in English but rather to the immediate positive, negative, or neutral response we have to any experience of the mind, the heart, and body, externally or internally.  One teacher notes that this immediate response happens in the first 10th of a second of the experience.  Some of it is hardwired into our animal systems, some of it is conditioned and therefore available to change.  And all of it leads to “downstream” experiences, each with their own feeling tone.  These downstream experiences can have the effect of considerable roiling of thoughts and emotions - with, of course, their own feeling tones - in what is known as papañca or mental proliferation, a veritable cascade of thoughts and feelings that crowd into the mind.

The Third Foundation of Mindfulness is Mindfulness of the Mind in which the Buddhist instructs us on looking into our own minds and becoming awareness of this cascade, this roiling, the crowd of thoughts, emotions, memories, fantasies, moods, images, conversations, mind states, background music - the full catastrophe as Zorba the Greek famously said.  

But before we dive into those confusing waters, it might be wise to spend a little time on considering an important quality that we might find useful in these investigations - equanimity.  The Pali word for equanimity is upekkha which means “to look over” - "the ability to see without being caught by what we see", according to Gil Fonsdale in Tricycle, “The Perfect Balance" (Winter 2005). He goes on to say that equanimity can also refer to spaciousness, seeing the bigger picture.  This allows our minds to be balanced and slightly cool, not enmeshed in the vagaries of wanting and not wanting.  

That is why equanimity is so valuable as we transition from mindfulness of feeling tones of wanting, not wanting, and neutral to mindfulness of thoughts and emotions, images, memories, etc.  Equanimity is considered by Venerable Analayo in Compassion and Emptiness in Early Buddhist Meditation, to be an antidote to craving or aversion.  If we can expand on our capacity for equanimity, these investigations into our feeling tones, emotions, thoughts, and other mental factors will be clearer, will rock and tumble us less, will allow us to recover our balance sooner when we are swayed.  

One important way we can cultivate equanimity is in relation to others - children, relatives, friends and acquaintances, people in the community, etc.  When our attachments entangle us in trying to fix other people’s lives, equanimity can find expression, as Venerable Analayo writes, “in the wish that all living beings ’take care of their own happiness’, sukkhi attanam pariharantu….the attitude evoked is not indifference, but rather a form of wholesome equanimity (or balance) that allows others to take responsibility and do what they wish to do, without attempting to interfere. But at the same time, one still wishes them happiness.” (156)

Kaira Jewell Lingo in "How Equanimity Powers Love" in Lion’s Roar says, "Equanimity is full of love. It is a face of love. What’s unique about equanimity is that it helps balance the other three aspects of love so that we don’t burn out in our caring, in expressing the other aspects of love to others. It keeps us grounded. Without equanimity, our compassion can become compassion fatigue; we can outpour to an extent that we become exhausted or overly identified with the situation. Equanimity can help keep us resourced and in our center.”

She and her Dharma teacher and Christian minister dad were reflecting on the violent assault on the Capital on Jan. 6th and how the love of equanimity can give us balance.  She quotes him as saying,  “When we see ourselves as victims, that is the separate self. When we see ourselves as beloved, that is no-self.”  She elaborates further, "When we see ourselves as beloved, full of metta, we see ourselves in everyone and everyone in ourselves, and we have a force with which to meet the ignorance, discrimination, and even the violence in others so that it doesn’t cripple us by making us hateful. When we see ourselves as beloved, we are in opposition to no one."

Papança and the Quiet Mind

Having just returned from a 10 day concentration retreat, I find my tendency this morning is to sit and stare out the window.  The morning is blissfully quiet of my little part of the world.  A bird sings softly from time to time and then falls silent.  The water on the distant bay is quiet, the air is still with just the gentlest of breezes.  Even the workmen across the green have accidentally lapsed into silence.  All of this will change shortly, I’m sure.  But for the moment the peacefulness of the morning matches my mind and we sit together - the morning and I - in perfect harmony.

That is not to say that I spent the last 10 days in blissful silence.  Far from it.  The tumult in my mind at times was deafening.  The effort of concentration was at times exhausting.  

All that was worth it for the moments of absolute stillness, of actually looking into my mind and realizing that my mind was still, even empty.  There was only one thought and it was the one I was thinking about my practice at that moment. And that one thought disappeared  and after a space another thought about my practice would arise.  

What this moment of complete stillness revealed to me was how much my mind is filled, not just with the foreground thoughts of what I’m doing, going to do, have done, but how behind all of that, was a low level morass of unconscious or semiconscious thoughts, memories, anticipations, fears, stories and fantasies, planning, mind states simmering and jumbling along like litter in a breeze, momentarily distracting or outright commandeering the thought process in a new direction.

Leigh Brassington, one of my teachers on this retreat, says that only 20 percent of our thoughts come from an external stimulus - a sight, sound, bodily sensation, smell, taste. What the Buddha called the sense doors.  The other 80 percent is what our minds do with that stimulus.  (He says he read that somewhere, as have I.  Neither of us can remember where.)  Whether the proportions are verifiable or not, we all know the experience of all that mental activity sometimes interfering with our ability to see what’s in front of us.

That’s why this initial feeling or feeling tone we’ve been talking about for the past few weeks is so important.  To review, when any experience first arises - a sight, a sound, a thought, whatever - there is an initial feeling of liking, disliking or neither liking or disliking, what we have been calling positive, negative or neutral.  And following that initial feeling tone are a string or crowd or stampede of thoughts, feelings, mind states, memories all sparked by that feeling tone.  To make matters worse, each of those reactive thoughts have their own feeling tone and stimulate other thoughts, reactions, emotions, memories which have their own feelings tones….etc.  My teacher called them down-stream thoughts.  The Buddha called this proliferation of thoughts papança (pronounced PA-PA’-N-CHA).  It sounds like a huge bag of mail falling down steps, breaking open, and scattering in all directions.  

 The stronger the feeling tone, the greater the downstream proliferation of thoughts will be.  And since these thoughts barely subside into turbulent little eddies before the next stimulus occurs, it’s a small wonder our minds function at all!

The Buddha asks us to pay attention to these feeling tones.  The proliferation is not inevitable.  It is a product of inattention.  With awareness, mindfulness, we can see the initial feeling tone and hold it in awareness.  Under the light of this shining awareness, the feeling tone is seen as just that, a feeling tone.  And the proliferation ceases.  

It’s a process however.  And one that needs to be repeated, and repeated, and repeated, until this awareness becomes more established and arises more quickly to hold the feeling tone.

The Buddha’s words as quoted by Joseph Goldstein tell us exactly what we do with these feeling tones when we don’t pay attention to them:  “Being contacted by painful feeling one seeks delight in sensual pleasure.  [Here he means pleasure of the senses.]  For what reason?  Because the uninstructed worldling does not know of any escape from painful feelings other than sensual pleasure.”  

Does this sound familiar?

More about feelings....

Last week’s introduction and overview of the second of the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, Mindfulness of Feelings, was comprehensive but also dense so I wanted to circle back and talk a bit more about this important practice.  First of all, feelings in the Buddhist context refer to the initial positive, negative, or neutral response we have to any input - physical or mental, from the external world or internally (thoughts, etc).  Emotions are more complex and, thus, are included in the third Foundation of Mindfulness, Mindfulness of Mind.

The beauty of being able to notice feelings or feeling tone (Vedana in Pali) is that we can discern the positive, negative, or neutral feeling tone before or just after the cloud of associations spring up to complicate the experience with thoughts and opinions.  Sometimes the associations spring up so quickly we get both the feeling tone and the entire “story."  This can be quite illuminating if we remember that the “story” is not inherent in the object of perception.  As an example, I love dogs.  My love of dogs is not inherent in dogs but has been conditioned by positive experiences of dogs in the past.  So when I walk in the park and a dog bounds up to me, I am happy to see them - positive vedana or feeling tone with more complex feelings of happiness and various associations arising shortly thereafter.  But if a dog starts running after me fast and coming from behind, the feeling tone is neutral to unpleasant.  I feel a note of warning and turn to face the dog and come to a standstill.  The aversion is accompanied immediately after by a memory of a dog which chased me from behind and bit me. So friendly dog approaching and dog chasing from behind will elicit two different kinds of vedana or feeling tone - both conditioned by past experience or associations.

The Pali word vedana has connotations of both feeling and knowing.  So as Venerable Analayo says in his comprehensive book Satīpatthāna: The Direct Path to Realization, “To contemplate feelings means quite literally to know how one feels, and this with such immediacy that the  light of awareness is present before the onset of reactions projections, or justifications…”  And later, “The systematic development of such immediate knowing will also strengthen one’s more intuitive modes of apperception, in the sense of the ability to get a feel for a situation or another person.  This ability offers a helpful additional source of information in everyday life, complementing the information gained through more rational modes of observation and consideration."

Of course, the stronger feeling tones will break through the background noise of all the gradations of feeling tone from positive to neutral to negative we experience.  But every experience that we encounter - internally or externally, mental or physical - will have a feeling tone.

The other important fact is that these feelings tones are conditioned.  So they can be altered by other experiences around the same stimulus.

This may be especially noticeable around traumatic or disturbing events.  My brother works on the far side of the Key Bridge in Baltimore.  He crossed the bridge to come home from work barely two hours before the bridge was hit and felled by a tanker.  Up to that point, I usually enjoyed bridges as I crossed them.  Since I live on an island, the pleasant vedana is a response to the beautiful expanse of water that appears or the sense that I am nearing home or the sail boats out on the Bay, etc.  Now I have a greater awareness that bridges are not indestructible, that they are very high up, and that they are what is between me and the water.  So something that usually is a pleasant or at least a neutral vedana has now taken on a slight negative feeling tone.  Since vedana is moment-by-moment arising with each new stimulus and the crossing of the bridge takes several minutes, the feelings tones can shift from one end of the spectrum to the other depending on what I see, hear, think, remember, etc.  So my overall experience of the bridge crossing may depend on the frequency and intensity of positive or negative or neutral feeling tones.  

As I wrote last week, the importance of discerning these feelings tones is that, without our awareness, they can condition or lead to grasping, clinging, and attachment, aversion and pushing away, or delusion.  And this can color our experience of the world.  If I think only of the Key Bridge when I am crossing a bridge, the crossing will be unpleasant and may condition the next crossing to be more unpleasant.  Last week I talked with someone who is now much more anxious about crossing bridges that they were before the Key Bridge collapse.

This kind of “conditioning” occurs in every aspect of our lives and can determine whether we look forward to parties or hate them, like to sit in silence or find silence makes us restless, listen to the news regularly or find television news too disturbing.  It can even create feedback loops in our own minds in which we have a negative feeling tone produced by a disturbing thought while we are engaged in an everyday activity and begin to fear that every day activity because we fear the negative feeling tone that arose the last time even though the experience of the everyday activity itself had been quite neutral for years.   

Mindfulness of feelings tones begins to free us from the automatic conditioning these feelings initiate.  It helps us notice when feeling tones lead  in the direction of aversion or greed and returns to us the choice to decide when moving away from or toward different experiences is wholesome or unwholesome.

Even if we miss or are unmindful of the beginning of a sequence, mindfulness or awareness of feelings tones allows us to notice when we are suddenly engrossed in a pleasant fantasy.   We might think back and realize the pleasant fantasy was prompted precisely because we encountered a painful experience minutes before either in the body or in a memory or thought.  The move toward the fantasy was our automatic reaction to replace a painful experience with a pleasant one.  This is an experience we can have during meditation or during any aspect of our lives.  

To refrain the Buddha from Joseph Goldstein’s reference last week:  “Being contacted by painful feeling one seeks delight in sensual pleasure.  [Here he means pleasure of the senses.]  For what reason?  Because the uninstructed worldling does not know of any escape from painful feelings other than sensual pleasure.”

"Vehicle to freedom..."

For the last few weeks, we have been delving into the teachings of the first, Mindfulness of the Body, of the Four Foundations of Mindfulness (the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta). We’ve explored breath awareness, awareness of the body postures, of the body activities and movements, of the compositional elements of the body (anatomical parts, the four elements of earth, water, fire, and wind), and finally the mortality of the body, the body in decay.  This last reflection prompted a number of heart-felt comments from prioritizing our family, friends, community, and social justice issues in our later years to making a binder for those we leave behind with all the information they need “when we go all dotty,” to quote one respondent.  That last bears repeating because there will come a time when someone would like your passwords to everything from your bank accounts to your facebook page and everything in between.  Facebook is littered with the unearthly remains of people who didn’t write down their passwords for those cleaning up their lives.  

Today we’ll venture into the second foundation of mindfulness, Mindfulness of Feelings.  It is the shortest of the four but packs a wallop well above its word count.  Joseph Goldstein says that, when accompanied by mindfulness, these feelings become "the vehicle of our freedom.”

I have included it in it’s entirety here from Access to Insight, translation by Nyanasatta Thera: 

II. The Contemplation of Feeling

And how, monks, does a monk live contemplating feelings in feelings?

Herein, monks, a monk when experiencing a pleasant feeling knows, "I experience a pleasant feeling"; when experiencing a painful feeling, he knows, "I experience a painful feeling"; when experiencing a neither-pleasant-nor-painful feeling," he knows, "I experience a neither-pleasant-nor-painful feeling." When experiencing a pleasant worldly feeling, he knows, "I experience a pleasant worldly feeling"; when experiencing a pleasant spiritual feeling, he knows, "I experience a pleasant spiritual feeling"; when experiencing a painful worldly feeling, he knows, "I experience a painful worldly feeling"; when experiencing a painful spiritual feeling, he knows, "I experience a painful spiritual feeling"; when experiencing a neither-pleasant-nor-painful worldly feeling, he knows, "I experience a neither-pleasant-nor-painful worldly feeling"; when experiencing a neither-pleasant-nor-painful spiritual feeling, he knows, "I experience a neither-pleasant-nor-painful spiritual feeling."

Thus he lives contemplating feelings in feelings internally, or he lives contemplating feelings in feelings externally, or he lives contemplating feelings in feelings internally and externally. He lives contemplating origination factors in feelings, or he lives contemplating dissolution factors in feelings, or he lives contemplating origination-and-dissolution factors in feelings.[12] Or his mindfulness is established with the thought, "Feeling exists," to the extent necessary just for knowledge and mindfulness, and he lives detached, and clings to nothing in the world. Thus, monks, a monk lives contemplating feelings in feelings.

The feelings contemplated here are usually called feeling tones, Jack Kornfield calls them “primary feelings.”   They are as indicated above the positive, negative, or neutral feeling tone that accompanies every experiential contact in our lives.  We smell freshly baked bread.  Definitely positive.  A jack hammer close by.  Usually negative.  Passing cars.  People walking down a sidewalk.  A street name sign.  Usually pretty neutral.  

The importance of discerning these feelings tones is that they condition or lead to grasping, clinging, and attachment, aversion and pushing away, or delusion.  

The distinction made between spiritual or unspiritual above (in other translations referred to as worldly and unworldly) is a further indication to help us discern if the initial feeling tone is likely to lead us toward or away from wholesome actions.

So it would seem pretty important to be able to detect these feelings tones when they arise.  In addition to the reason stated above - knowing what is going to leads toward wholesome actions and away from those that are not, feeling tone is the earliest arising of the series of chain reaction-type arisings that can lead to unwholesome actions.  When it encounters a feeling tone and knows it, mindfulness has the greatest possible chance of cutting off the unwholesome progression toward grasping and attachment, aversion or hatred, and delusion or not understanding what is going on.  

Joseph Goldstein writes in his wonderful book, Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening:  “Why is this important?…When you’re not mindful, pleasant feelings habitually condition desire and longing, unpleasant feelings condition dislike and aversion, and neutral feelings condition delusion - that is, not really knowing what is going on.  Yet when we are mindful, these very same feelings become the vehicle of our freedom.” (p. 82)

So mindfulness of feelings tones (the Pali word is vedana) allows us to discern what is wholesome and what is not and to dissipate the chain reaction toward the unwholesome that can ensue before it takes root.  

And yet feelings tones are subtle.  We often either overlook them or are not even aware of them before we are launched head long into a negative reactivity pattern.  The good news is that if we miss the initial feeling tone, mindfulness can still weaken the progression into the unwholesome further into the chain of reactivity.  But the earlier mindfulness can be applied, the easier it is to stop the chain reaction.  It’s a little like putting out a smoldering cigarette in a waste paper basket before it catches fire and spreads to the curtains.  

Joseph goes on to quote the Buddha in a key aspect of this chain reaction:  “Being contacted by painful feeling one seeks delight in sensual pleasure.  For what reason?  Because the uninstructed worldling does not know of any escape from painful feelings other than sensual pleasure.”

Habitually, we turn toward sensual pleasure to escape from painful feelings.  And with mindfulness, these painful feelings can become our vehicle to freedom.  

"The Deathless"

When the Buddha-to-be left his family’s palace, left behind his fine clothes and comfortable bed, delicious delicacies, music and flowers, all the pleasures the body could possibly want, and even left behind his wife and son, he went in search of answers to the realizations he had discovered that this body will age, will become sick, will die.  A wandering monk with peaceful countenance was his beacon of hope.  

He came upon and studied with the two great masters of the day until each pronounced him to have learned all they could teach and invited him to stay and teach with them.  He studied and mastered deep meditations called absorptions or jhanas.  And he practiced mortification of the flesh as the ascetics taught until his skin hung from his bones.  But it wasn’t enough.  It did not solve the problem of aging, sickness, and death.

The ancients of that day, including the Buddha believed in reincarnation.  They believed that after all the suffering they experienced in this life time - and of course it wasn’t all suffering - that they would die only to be reborn either in a better situation or worse to do it all over again.  

Imagine for yourselves how that appeals.  As much as we don’t wish to die, does the prospect of starting all over in unknown circumstances after death seem inviting?  Yes and no, with a lot of emphasis on the no.  The suffering each human endures in their individual life times is enough to give one pause - no matter how favorable the circumstances - about doing it again.  And again.  And again.

We humans, not unreasonably, experience a lot of fear and trepidation about our futures.  Things may seem good now.  But how will our death come about?  Not without suffering, we can be fairly sure.  And even if our suffering seems bearable, we have only to look around us and read the news to learn that the human condition can be pretty awful.

One of the great discoveries the Buddha made upon his enlightenment was that he had found a way "to shuffle off this mortal coil” as the Bard said and NOT shuffle back on again in another life time.  He had discovered a way to end the endless round of lifetimes and suffering.  And as I mentioned before, he called it “the deathless.”  He had discovered the path to the end of the tyranny of the “lord of death.”

But his discovery of “the deathless” did not just apply to the endless round of lifetimes, which is good news for those of us not so schooled and invested in reincarnation.  His enlightenment was a transcendence within this life time of any fear of death.  And it was marked by great happiness.  

Bhikkhu Analayo, renowned teacher, practitioner and scholar of Early Buddhism and author of many scholarly books on the Buddha’s teachings, recently wrote a book shedding some light on this state of enlightenment or experience of “the deathless” entitled The Signless and The Deathless.  As a scholarly and carefully crafted text, it is not rapid reading.  

But what he has to say has relevance for us and our practice.  First, that enlightenment is not something you can force.  It will appear in its own time when the conditions are right.  The most important conditions involve sincere and dedicated practice to developing morality, concentration and wisdom.  These three pillars are essential and stand together as the foundation of freedom from suffering. Without any one of them, the other two are not sufficient.  

Beyond that, the mature practitioner must be willing to let go - completely.  Let go of what?  Of any attachments - to be free of desire and aversion and able to see clearly what is wholesome and what is not.  This letting go means a complete acceptance of impermanence, that this body will die, and therefore, a complete letting go of attachment to the body.  

And the mature practitioner must be willing to let go of identifying with any aspect of the body and mind that are subject to death and decay.  This is the idea of "not self" we have touched upon.  If we identify with the body, taking this mortal and impermanent body to be “me,” and appropriating this body of matter, of various anatomical parts,  of the four elements as “mine," we have taken for ourselves something that will die and decay.  But if we no longer identify with the body and all that belongs to the body which includes our feelings, perceptions, habits and volitional actions, and indeed even our consciousness, if we see their inherently non-self nature, we no longer take as “me" and “mine" that which will die.  And the enlightened state of “the deathless” can take place.  Just to be clear, we do not in any way get rid of the self, we simply realize there was no solid self there in the first place!

Bhikkhu Analayo quotes Sri Lankan Buddhist scholar and philosopher Karunadasa who writes, “…an arahant (enlightened one) is completely beyond old age and death from the moment of becoming a fully awakened one, due to no longer being in any way identified with the physical body (or the other aggregates.).  For this reason, those who have gone to the ‘death-free’ place - another term for the deathless - have reached complete freedom from any type of grief.”

This is the ideal that has motivated monks and lay people alike to leave their homes or change their lives, to devote long hours to practice, to go into seclusion by taking robes or going on retreats - in order to go beyond the endless rounds of suffering inherent even in this single lifetime, to achieve “the deathless”, and to reach complete freedom from any type of grief.  

And this was the quest that drew the Buddha from his life of comfort: to discover “the deathless” and freedom from any type of grief for himself and for all of those who would listen and practice.  

By now we have explored, at least in part, each aspect of the first of the Four Foundations of Mindfulness  - Mindfulness of the Body.  We have reviewed the better known practices of mindfulness of the breath in the body, body scans, mindfulness of the body in different postures, and mindfulness of the body in daily activities, daily movement.  

And we have touched on the less well-known, perhaps more esoteric practices of Mindfulness of the 32 body parts, Mindfulness of the 4 Elements and Mindfulness of our own mortality in the form of reflections around dying, and the last breath practice. 

The practices around mindfulness of death are offered as a means to help us learn how to live, to learn how to make the most of each moment of our precious lives, and to learn to know more completely how the present moment is a refuge from our endless regretful wanderings through the past and fearful imagining about our future.    

These practices also help us realize the essential truths of our lives that the Buddha taught over and over again and in as many different ways as he could, the truths about what leads to happiness and what leads to suffering, the Four Noble Truths of suffering, the causes for suffering, the end of suffering and the path out of suffering, and the essential truths of impermanence and non-self.  Learning to view the body as impermanent, as made of matter just like all material objects, and as subject to aging, sickness, and death, separation from all whom we love, and heir to the consequences of our actions can help us to live our lives knowing that the choices we make for each moment matter.  

We often put off making certain choices into the future, thinking there will be time.  These teachings encourage us to know that time is finite and that each action we take in each moment is a choice to be a certain way, to live a certain way.

Koun Franz, a Soto Zen priest, in Thousand Harbours Zen in Halifax, Nova Scotia, writes about “The Five Remembrances” in The Lion’s Roar. They are as follows:  1) I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old; 2) I am of the nature to have ill health. There is no way to escape having ill health; 3) I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death; 4) All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them; and 5) My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.

This is what he had to say about Remembrance #5.  

Remembrance #5 is maybe the most interesting. “My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.”  This is about karma. I’ve heard it said, and maybe you have as well, this phrase, that we own our actions “but not the fruits of our actions.”  We experience the consequences, but we don’t get to have the rewards. Within my tradition, Zen, we can understand this to a certain degree as practice–verification, Dogen’s central teaching that the meaning of what we do is expressed, complete, in what we do. What we do is the thing.

My life is being expressed 100% right now. This is what my life looks like right now. There’s no backstory. There’s no other thing that you don’t see. And it’s equally true for you wherever you are, whichever part of the world you’re in. However you’re sitting, however you’re breathing, that’s you—not just a version of you but the complete you, the culmination of your life.

What you choose to do in this moment matters. There will be consequences. And while you get to choose which actions you take, you don’t get to choose what those consequences will be. It’s like aiming a bow and arrow while you’re running: you know what you want to hit. Maybe you’ll get it. Maybe you won’t. You just do your best, but you have to accept the consequences for what happens because what other option is there? So Remembrance #5 is saying that what you do matters—so live like it does.

These are important and simple words.  “...the meaning of what we do is expressed, complete, in what we do. What we do is the thing.”  What we choose to do in this moment matters. There will be consequences which are outside of our control.  And also "However you’re sitting, however you’re breathing, that’s you—not just a version of you but the complete you, the culmination of your life.”

Each moment is the culmination of our lives so far.  Amazing.  So simple.  But also monumental.

This reflection on our actions and on our impermanence can bring greater importance to some of the tasks we may see for ourselves towards the end of our lives.  One of those tasks may be to make sure our priorities are in alignment with our understanding.  Some of you are now prioritizing family and friends over previous professional engagements.  Some of you may have begun to think about the disposition of your belongings - to family, friends, organizations that want or need them, but also the important task of disposing of belongings that have value to no one but ourselves.  Some of us have updated our wills; some have yet to begin that task.  An important consideration is to leave final wishes for our bodies, our memorial remembrances, and even how we would like our last moments to be.  

Many Buddhists believe that how we are in our final moments will condition our lives after that.  Many who may not believe in reincarnation may nevertheless feel that the final moment of transition is important.  Will we die by the same tenets and beliefs by which we have so passionately lived?  Will our last moments be in anger and resentment as one of my step-daughter’s was?  Or in confusion and shock?  Or perhaps in love and peaceful letting go?  How would we like these final moments to be?  Our own final moments are also conditioned by how we live in this moment, what choices we make for this moment of life.  

As Franz says, “What we do is the thing."

And as Thich Naht Hanh said and you have often heard me quote, "This moment is the mother of the next.  Take care of the mother and she will take care of the rest.”

By now we have explored, at least in part, each aspect of the first of the Four Foundations of Mindfulness  - Mindfulness of the Body.  We have reviewed the better known practices of mindfulness of the breath in the body, body scans, mindfulness of the body in different postures, and mindfulness of the body in daily activities, daily movement.  

And we have touched on the less well-known, perhaps more esoteric practices of Mindfulness of the 32 body parts, Mindfulness of the 4 Elements and Mindfulness of our own mortality in the form of reflections around dying, and the last breath practice. 

The practices around mindfulness of death are offered as a means to help us learn how to live, to learn how to make the most of each moment of our precious lives, and to learn to know more completely how the present moment is a refuge from our endless regretful wanderings through the past and fearful imagining about our future.    

These practices also help us realize the essential truths of our lives that the Buddha taught over and over again and in as many different ways as he could, the truths about what leads to happiness and what leads to suffering, the Four Noble Truths of suffering, the causes for suffering, the end of suffering and the path out of suffering, and the essential truths of impermanence and non-self.  Learning to view the body as impermanent, as made of matter just like all material objects, and as subject to aging, sickness, and death, separation from all whom we love, and heir to the consequences of our actions can help us to live our lives knowing that the choices we make for each moment matter.  

We often put off making certain choices into the future, thinking there will be time.  These teachings encourage us to know that time is finite and that each action we take in each moment is a choice to be a certain way, to live a certain way.

Koun Franz, a Soto Zen priest, in Thousand Harbours Zen in Halifax, Nova Scotia, writes about the Five Remembrances in The Lion’s Roar.  I attempted to send you all the article last week but wasn’t successful.  Just to review, they are as follows:  1) I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old; 2) I am of the nature to have ill health. There is no way to escape having ill health; 3) I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death; 4) All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them; and 5) My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.

This is what he had to say about Remembrance #5.  

Remembrance #5 is maybe the most interesting. “My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.”  This is about karma. I’ve heard it said, and maybe you have as well, this phrase, that we own our actions “but not the fruits of our actions.”  We experience the consequences, but we don’t get to have the rewards. Within my tradition, Zen, we can understand this to a certain degree as practice–verification, Dogen’s central teaching that the meaning of what we do is expressed, complete, in what we do. What we do is the thing.

My life is being expressed 100% right now. This is what my life looks like right now. There’s no backstory. There’s no other thing that you don’t see. And it’s equally true for you wherever you are, whichever part of the world you’re in. However you’re sitting, however you’re breathing, that’s you—not just a version of you but the complete you, the culmination of your life.

What you choose to do in this moment matters. There will be consequences. And while you get to choose which actions you take, you don’t get to choose what those consequences will be. It’s like aiming a bow and arrow while you’re running: you know what you want to hit. Maybe you’ll get it. Maybe you won’t. You just do your best, but you have to accept the consequences for what happens because what other option is there? So Remembrance #5 is saying that what you do matters—so live like it does.

These are important and simple words.  “...the meaning of what we do is expressed, complete, in what we do. What we do is the thing.”  What we choose to do in this moment matters. There will be consequences which are outside of our control.  And also "However you’re sitting, however you’re breathing, that’s you—not just a version of you but the complete you, the culmination of your life.”

Each moment is the culmination of our lives so far.  Amazing.  So simple.  But also monumental.

This reflection on our actions and on our impermanence can bring greater importance to some of the tasks we may see for ourselves towards the end of our lives.  One of those tasks may be to make sure our priorities are in alignment with our understanding.  Some of you are now prioritizing family and friends over previous professional engagements.  Some of you may have begun to think about the disposition of your belongings - to family, friends, organizations that want or need them, but also the important task of disposing of belongings that have value to no one but ourselves.  Some of us have updated our wills; some have yet to begin that task.  An important consideration is to leave final wishes for our bodies, our memorial remembrances, and even how we would like our last moments to be.  

Many Buddhists believe that how we are in our final moments will condition our lives after that.  Many who may not believe in reincarnation may nevertheless feel that the final moment of transition is important.  Will we die by the same tenets and beliefs by which we have so passionately lived?  Will our last moments be in anger and resentment as one of my step-daughter’s was?  Or in confusion and shock?  Or perhaps in love and peaceful letting go?  How would we like these final moments to be?  Our own final moments are also conditioned by how we live in this moment, what choices we make for this moment of life.  

As Franz says, “What we do is the thing."

And as Thich Naht Hanh said and you have often heard me quote, "This moment is the mother of the next.  Take care of the mother and she will take care of the rest.”

This body was born...

We have been exploring the practices pertaining to Mindfulness of the Body, the first section of the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta or The Four Foundations of Mindfulness.  This seminal Buddhist teaching serves as the basis for Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and almost every meditation tradition taught with instructions and practices for developing mindfulness in all areas of our experience - the body, feelings, the mind, and the way things are. 

After highlighting mindfulness of the breath, of body postures, of all the bodily activities, we explored the lesser known practices of mindfulness of the anatomical parts and mindfulness of the four elements - earth, water, fire, and wind.  Finally we have come to the last practice offered in this Mindfulness of the Body section of the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta - mindfulness of death, of the mortality of this body.  This is the great challenge of our lives that follows upon the very first fact of our existence:  Our bodies were born and our bodies will die.  We take our first breath creating the conditions that we will certainly take our last.

Death is natural and comes for every living creature.  Change happens as well to everything on our earth - animate or inanimate.  Mountains arise and crumble and fall.  Rivers flow, are diverted, dry up or become new oceans.  Land sinks into the seas.  Water covers what was once dry land.  And for us, for trees, for animals of all sizes, when the conditions are right, our bodies are born or sprout and when the conditions are no longer right, our bodies will die.

This undeniable fact causes us a great deal of angst and leads to our worst habit patterns, our busyness, our combativeness, our competitiveness, our acquisitiveness.  If we have more wealth, more power, more friends, more food, more activities, we can stave off the specter of our own death.  Or so we think in some dark recess of our deluded minds.

The Buddha’s teaching was very simple.  Turn toward our thoughts and concepts of death, explore them, become intimate with the fact of our own impending demise.  Why?  Not to weigh us down with worry, care, or terror but to liberate us from the delusion that it has to be otherwise for us, that this body won’t die (not yet, not now, not me, maybe sometime in the far, far future) - to liberate us from the debilitating fear of our own mortality.  

Enlightenment is also known as "the deathless" precisely because it is a state in which we no longer fear the death of the body.

But the Buddha had another purpose in urging us to practice mindfulness of death.  And that is for us to wake up to the astonishing fact of our lives and, as we come to understand how fragile these bodies are, how uncertain our lifespan, we begin to use our time more wisely, to begin to practice with the beautiful qualities of mind and to let go of our extreme attachment to these perishable bodies with compassion and wisdom. 

The death reflections recommended by the Buddha help us wake up to the urgency of our predicament, just as he did 2500 years ago when he realized the nature of our bodies to grow old, sicken, and die and left the palace and his family to seek answers.  And with his example, we learn that we too can cast off ignorance and understand what leads toward happiness and freedom from suffering and what does not.

These practices can be sobering but they also can bring a sense of relief and joy as we let go of what cannot be held and relax into this single moment of our lives, this instant of awareness and discover the beautiful, peaceful states of being already there awaiting us.  

Restoring ourselves to flight...

To continue with my two parallel tracks from last week, after the first paragraph where the Buddha pronounced this teaching of the four satipaṭṭhānas or abodes of mindfulness, "the direct path for the purification of beings, for the surmounting of sorrow and lamentation, for the disappearance of dukkah (suffering) and discontent, for acquiring the true method, for the realization of Nibbana (Nirvana),” he goes on in the next paragraph to tell us not only what are the four but also with what attitude we should practice.  

"What are the four?  Here, monks, in regard to the body a monk abides contemplating the body, diligent, clearly comprehending, and mindful, free from desires and discontent in regard to the world.  In regard to feelings, a monk abides contemplating feelings, diligent, clearly comprehending, and mindful, free from desires and discontent in regard to the world.  In regard to the mind, a monk abides contemplating the mind, diligent, clearly comprehending, and mindful, free from desires and discontent in regard to the world.  In regard to the dhammas, a monk abides contemplating the dhammas, diligent, clearly comprehending, and mindful, free from desires and discontent in regard to the world.” 

With regard to all of these realms of experience, we are urged to practice mindfulness with the urgency that comes from knowing our time on this earth is finite and unknowable, with clear knowing which comes from interest and investigation, and, of course, mindfulness, which is a quality of mind that arises when we place our awareness intentionally on an object in our experience, shining the light of our awareness on how we know what we know.  Clear knowing and mindfulness support each other and each contains qualities of the other.  And we are encouraged to practice free of desire (wanting) and discontent (aversion or not wanting).  

In our exploration of the first satipaṭṭhāna or abode of mindfulness, mindfulness of the body, we have explored and will explore again, mindfulness of breathing, mindfulness while sitting, standing, walking and lying down, mindfulness while stretching the limbs, eating our meals, doing our daily routines of self-care, shopping, driving, talking on the phone - in short, mindfulness in all our activities.

More recently we explored mindfulness of anatomical parts.  This meditation was pronounced “weird” as indeed it is.  One of its purposes is for us to see more clearly what this body we inhabit and have so many thoughts about is really made up of.  And many of them are off-putting.  This view of the body as unlovely is purposefully encouraged to lighten our attachment to it and to cool off sensual passions that might arise in meditating.

The last two meditations of mindfulness of the body are mindfulness of the body as made up of elements - earth, water, fire, and wind - and mindfulness of the mortality of the body, that this body will die.  

We will explore these last two arenas of mindfulness of the body to see what they have to teach us and how they can enhance our ability to live our lives fully and well for as long as we have.

This last meditation on dying is one that leads directly into the other parallel path I have been exploring on these pages - compassion for ourselves and for others as we wend our ways through this path of living in this challenging existence.

*  *  *  *  *

I recently received this very relevant article from 10% Happier by Dr. Susan Pollok on collective trauma with her prescription of three practices for working with our own corner of the universe of collective trauma.  I wanted to highlight this wonderful quote from meditation teacher and climate activist Joanna Macy, 

“Like living cells in a larger body, it is natural that we feel the trauma of our world. So don’t be afraid of the anguish you feel, or the anger or fear, because these responses arise from the depth of your caring and the truth of your interconnectedness with all beings.”   

She urges us to relax into our sadness, our anger, to just be with our natural, human responses to the crises we see and experience all around.  Trying to pretend everything is OK when it isn’t is what divides us from ourselves and from each other.

I will write about the first of Dr. Pollak’s three prescriptions here which is walking meditation.  The importance of walking meditation, of movement in meditation cannot be over stressed.  Every meditation teacher I have ever read encourages walking or some form of movement for working with our triggered emotional states.  Thich Naht Hanh instructed his monks and nuns traumatized from the Viet Nam war to practice walking meditation.  Trauma specialist and creator of Somatic Experiencing, Peter Levine, author of Waking The Tiger and In An Unspoken Voice, stresses the importance of movement to help release our physiologies from their trauma-induced immobility response.  And in these pages, I have recently referred to Heather Sundberg’s Six Practice Points for working with collective trauma, the first of which is movement and Pawan Bareja's movement related practices one of which we have been practicing in our sessions together.   

As a reluctant practitioner of walking practice (I walk a lot, but less often do I do "walking practice"), I have come to appreciate again and again the value and importance of dedicated walking practice.  Immobility as a freeze response to trauma can build up around watching the news, checking our phones, email accounts, texts message, WhatsApp, Instagram, etc etc etc.  And despair can begin to settle in around those static avoidance measures.  Just getting up and walking up and down can be so helpful.  If you’re able to do it in pleasant surroundings, your own backyard, a nearby park, a forest or shoreline, the pleasant sensations can begin to make themselves known and soothe our furrowed brows while the motion gently rocks us into wakefulness.

Yesterday I heard a loud thump on one of my windows.  When I went out to investigate, I found a beautiful red-winged blackbird motionless on the ground near a window.  I picked him/her up and was saddened when her head flopped.  But then she lifted it upright with her beak open.  I gently lifted her up and down, up and down in the air over my head.  The gentle motion mimics flight and can begin to restore her physiological processes.  Then I attempted to put her on a branch.  She fell to the ground with a thunk, but then sat up again.  I gently picked her up and, at the unaccustomed touch, her wings suddenly fluttered and she took off, swooping low while she regained flight and then soaring up.  

This was a direct demonstration of what Peter Levine talks about when he talks about immobility-induced by trauma.  When the normal fight or flight process is interrupted by unconsciousness or hopelessness or entrapment, our animal physiology gets short-circuited.  This can be life-saving in any number of situations.  But we can get stuck in the immobility response and the trauma can settle in our tissues.  When we are encouraged to activate our bodies, as my motions did with the red-winged black bird, it encourages the body to complete the physiological response of fight or flight and thus naturally restore itself to equilibrium.

We too can restore ourselves to flight - with movement practice.

I seem to be writing, thinking on two parallel tracks.  One is compassion and resiliency, collective reactivity or collective trauma, and practices to ease our frozenness, our numbness, our freeze response (of fight, flight or freeze) or conversely our agitation, our restlessness, our inability to connect with ourselves and others.  

The other track is delving into the practices of the foundational Buddhist teaching called The Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, otherwise known as The Four Foundations or Abodes of Mindfulness.  After the customary introductory paragraph stating where this teaching was first offered, the teaching begins with these words of the Buddha’s:  

“Monks, this is the direct path for the purification of beings, for the surmounting of sorrow and lamentation, for the disappearance of dukkah (suffering) and discontent, for acquiring the true method, for the realization of Nibbana (Nirvana), namely, the four satipaṭṭhānas.”  

This statement gives some idea the regard with which the Buddha held these mindfulness teachings.

We’ve been exploring some of the practices from the first satipaṭṭhāna, Mindfulness of the Body.  We’ll continue that exploration tonight.  

*  *  *  *  *

This week I spoke with some fellow meditators about time and our perception of time.  One theme resonated throughout the group.  When we are suffering, time seems to stretch out forever.  A minute of acute pain for instance feels like an eternity.  Getting stuck in the security line at an airport when the scanner breaks down can trigger rising agitation.  When I am caught in reactivity, there is a strong impatience with the present moment of suffering.  Another word for that impatience is aversion.  The present moment in those instances becomes intolerable and the sense that something must change arises.

Our group noticed how this manifests during meditation - periods of restlessness and agitation may arise during which the minutes pass slowly.  I’ll check the clock and be aghast that only 3 minutes has passed and wonder how I will manage to sit through the intended 45 minutes.  At other times, periods of deep calm pervade during which I am unaware of “time” and emerge at some point later surprised at how much “time” has passed.  

Noted meditation teacher, Rob Burbea wrote in Seeing that Frees, “ ...the sense of time becomes more prominent when there is a greater degree of craving or aversion to something... Conversely, when grasping and aversion are relaxed the sense of time becomes much lighter.” (p. 350)

As the group pondered this changing relationship with time, we examined instances when time became burdensome and when it lightened.  Finally, one person said in epiphany, “There is no time!  The connection is everything.”   We all nodded in understanding.

When we are in connection - either with our deepest selves or with others - in genuine connection, not just superficial or unsatisfying conversations, time recedes into the mists as the flow of that connection nourishes our spirits.

And this is where the conversation around resiliency becomes rich and illuminative.  When we find ways to soothe and nourish ourselves through our mediation practices or through our connections/interactions/mutual assistance with others in friendships, support groups, community events, volunteer work, etc., we strengthen our core values, we become more fluent in conversing with ourselves, and we forge bonds of connection, mutual support and understanding with others.   

This slide came from a course of on "Transforming Climate Trauma" offered by James Baraz and others.  

As you peruse it, one thing becomes clear. We need each other.  We can’t do this alone.  

And we need to be in alignment with ourselves.  We can’t do it without being in deep connection to ourselves either.  

On Compassion...again and again...

Last week I reviewed the six practices for working with collective reactivity/collective trauma introduced by Heather Sundberg and Manuela Mischke-Reeds.  The fifth practice was that of compassion.

The need for compassion in our lives is pervasive - whether in our individual struggles with our thoughts and mind states, sadness, worry, or anxiety about our selves or our friends and family, or, more often than we can even bear, on the world stage.  This week’s news out of Russia of the Alexei Navalny’s death pierced people around the world with sadness and anguish.  At the same time, often in the same news cycle, the attack on and closure of the hospital in southern Gaza with a single line that some patients had to be left behind was the latest event in the ongoing horror of that war.  We are all affected by the suffering of others.  These two examples highlight collective trauma.

There is great wisdom in just admitting there is suffering.  We want happiness so much for ourselves and others that it is sometimes hard to stop and say, this really sad, or this is heartbreaking.  And yet this is exactly the point where compassion and freedom from suffering begins.  Compassion starts with the first noble truth - there is suffering. 

Suffering is not a failure.  Let me repeat that.  Suffering is not a failure.  But we sometimes treat it that way.  We can get entangled in the myths of happiness in our culture that we come to believe that it’s our fault if we’re not happy.  So just admitting there is suffering, this hurts, puts us in intimate relationship with our own experience at the same time it allows us to be in relationship with the huge community of others who are also suffering.  

Compassion has an uplifting quality to it.  As soon as we have turned toward our suffering and allowed compassion to arise, we may feel a subtle release from that suffering.  Compassion is one of the good guys riding to the rescue.  

I was reminded recently of the three steps of compassion - 1) turning toward the suffering with the thought, this hurts, or this is suffering, 2) recognizing the community of fellow human beings walking this planet who are also suffering (and deeply understanding that there is no hierarchy of suffering that says one person has more of a right to suffer than another), and 3) offering ourselves active compassion - in a hug or caress, in whatever words resonate comfort, “This is hard.  There, there.  It’s OK, sweetie.  This too shall pass.”  We can also soothe ourselves with poetry, with an offer of compassion or a period of meditation, with a cup of tea, with a brief period of meditation on our breath, or by bringing ourselves into relationship with nature by gazing at birds, trees or clouds in the neighborhood, or immersion in a nearby forest or nature preserve.

The second step is often overlooked but it is critically important - that of recognizing the community of people, known or unknown, who are also suffering.  This opening our hearts to ourselves and to others in a similar state eases the debilitating sense of loneliness that can accompany suffering and the sense of harsh self-judgment that can be present.

This sense of aloneness can also be a collective one.  Sometimes we’ll hear in an televised interview with someone caught in an attack the anguished question, why didn’t someone come?  Does anybody know what’s happening here?  Where is the rest of the world?  

I want to end with this story from Mr. Rogers, of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood:

"When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, 'Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping. ‘“  Mar 24, 2020

"To this day, especially in times of 'disaster,' I remember my mother's words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers—so many caring people in this world," he wrote in "The Mister Rogers Parenting Book.”"

So perhaps, when we are suffering, we can remember that somewhere - close by or far away - someone else is suffering and looking for a helper.  Can we, out of the compassion that arises from our own suffering, become one of those helpers?