Stillness

This morning I woke up already feeling behind. So much to do--so little time. I did what I usually do: walk the dog, exercise (a little!), make tea, read something that feeds the soul.

But through it all there was still a nagging sense of pressure. Too much left undone--so many worthy things. And a conviction--a  hunch--a duty--a feeling--that if I only worked smarter or faster or harder or more skillfully I'd be able to do more stuff and do it better--and get the monkey of 'things left undone' off my back.

But (probably influenced by reading something that feeds the soul) instead of simply believing the storyline in my head, I stopped. Breathed. Prayed. Listened.

And listening deeply it was pretty easy to see what a bunch of crap my sense of Optimized Living was.

I kept still for awhile. Then wrote a few things down to remind me what my saner soul was hearing. During breakfast I opened Mary Oliver's book, A Thousand Mornings (I try to read one Mary Oliver poem 3 or 4 mornings a week).

What a lovely corresponding voice in the poem whose turn it was to be read today. What a blessing. Thank God for M O.

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Today

Today I'm flying low and I'm

not saying a word.

I'm letting all the voodoos of ambition sleep.

The world goes on as it must,

the bees in the garden rumbling a little,

the fish leaping, the gnats getting eaten.

And so forth.

But I'm taking the day off.

Quiet as a feather.

I hardly move though really I'm traveling

a terrific distance.

Stillness. One of the doors

into the temple.

Growing in Listening

Lively interactions with others is one of life's treasures. How many times a day do we find ourselves in conversations? How often in those conversations do we find ourselves completely tuned in? 

Steady listening is a rare thing. Staying tuned in to the person in front of us is really hard. But we can get better at it. And as we get better, life gets richer and richer.

The following is from Susan Chapman. Her most recent book is The Five Keys to Mindful Communication.

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Learning how to switch out of defensiveness into a more humorous, receptive state of mind is a big deal.

By shutting down the channel of communication, we put up a defensive barrier that divides us from the world. In our mind, we justify our defensiveness by holding on to an unexamined opinion that we are right. We undervalue other people and put self-interest first. In short, our values shift to "me first". Closed communication patterns are controlling and mistrustful. We see others as frozen objects that have importance only if they meet our needs.

In-between is a place we normally don't want to enter. We find ourselves there when the ground falls out from beneath our feet, when we feel surprised, embarrassed, disappointed, on the verge of shutting down. At this moment, we might feel a sudden loss of trust, an unexpected flash of self-consciousness. Learning to hold steady and be curious at this point is critical to the practice of mindful conversation.

The in-between state of mind is where we gain both compassion and insight. It is not only where we witness ourselves closing down, but also where we notice the miracle of opening up again. Why and how does this happen? What exactly is it that makes us stop caring about being right and begin taking an interest in another person's point of view? Mindfulness makes us more curious about this turning point, both in our communication with others and within ourselves.

Don't Worry...

We may not have evolved to be happy. Natural selection, the process that guides our evolution, favors adaptations that help us reproduce successfully. This means surviving long enough to mate, snag a partner, and then support our children's survival. Evolutionary forces don't particularly 'care' whether we enjoy our life--unless this increases our survival for mating potential. And they really don't 'care' about what happens to us after our child-bearing and protecting years are over.

But we care. While most of us think the survival of humanity is a good idea, we would also like to be able to enjoy our lives while we're here. It doesn't seem like a lot to ask.

Thinking and planning, wonderful and useful as they are, are at the heart of our daily emotional distress because, unlike other tools, we can't seem to put these tools down when we don't need them.

They keep us worrying about the future, regretting the past, comparing ourselves to one another in thousands of ways, and forever scheming about how to make things better. This makes it very difficult to be truly satisfied for more than a brief time. Our constant thinking can make it impossible to wholeheartedly enjoy a meal, or listen to a concert, to fully listen to our child, or to fall back asleep in the middle of the night.

Mindfulness developed through thousands of years of cultural evolution as an antidote to the natural habits of our hearts and minds that make life so much more difficult than it needs to be. Mindfulness is a particular attitude toward experience, or way of relating to life, that holds the promise of both alleviating our suffering and making our lives rich and meaningful. It does this by attuning us to our moment to moment experience and giving us direct insight into how our minds create unnecessary anguish.

--Ronald Siegel, The Mindfulness Solution

Getting to Cape Hatteras Without Taking the Ferry

Choice. Options. The freedom to pick what we want. What a blessing.

And yet...also...a bit of a curse.

We've evolved to 'love' choice. It's natural for us to 'choose' what we prefer. And what we tend to prefer is what has kept us alive across millenia. Choosing quickly, almost instantaneously, has been a key to our survival.

The curse of picking what we want (nearly instantaneously) is that in the world as it is now we often want what we don't need, even what's harmful. As Paul of Tarsus groaned, "The very thing I want I don't do. I wind up doing the very thing I don't want!"

Slowing down, sinking down, into that quieter place where we can get centered, we find a different kind of choice--an ability to choose what we really want--to prefer something other than what we have tended to prefer.

Think about that word, prefer. It comes from the root word for ferry, which is both a noun and a verb. To be ferried is to be taken across a river or a bay or even part of an ocean. Have you been ferried? It's an adventure for most of us, especially those who don't grow up on a coast or an island.

Here in North Carolina we often take a ferry from 'Down East' to Okracoke--and then from Okracoke to Cape Hatteras. Wow. I've done this maybe three times. Never been the same journey. Rained one time. Rough sea once. Calm. Windy. Gray. Blue.

The other part of prefer, pre, means before. To prefer literally means to choose before. To already like one thing, want one thing, count on one thing before we get to the thing itself--to come to something new with an old mindset, something fresh in a canned way. To pre-fer can mean something like getting to Cape Hatteras without the richness of taking the ferry. .

Try this sometime. When you're with somebody who matters to you and you're trying to decide something together and you're about to go with the same old same old: Sink down into that quieter place in you, that place where time slows down and intuition pops up.

Take a few seconds to feel what it feels like to PREfer whatever it is you often prefer. Just feel whatever it is that inclines you to stay on automatic pilot. After feeling the push of that feeling, do your best to let it relax.

Then picture yourself at a dock, a landing, a ferry port. Don't PRE the ferry. TAKE it. Walk down together to the ticket window. Look at the options--the routes--the sailing times. Take joy in considering the possibilities.

Life is full of options and routes and sailing times. We so often have choices we miss, neglect, ignore. We so often wind up doing what we want instead of what we really want.

It's not that hard to get out of this habit. Don't PRE the ferry. Take it.

What We Need Is Here

I've experienced nothing in my life any more helpful than getting into the habit of pausing--hitting a kind of reset key that refreshes body, mind and soul all together. What follows is a short re-do of an older post about what this is and how can work.

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In the Wendell Berry poem below we can sense his deep sense of the sacredness of Life--something always available, always possible, always potentially sustaining:

What We Need Is Here

Geese appear high over us,

pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,

as in love or sleep, holds

them to their way, clear

in the ancient faith: what we need

is here. And we pray, not

for new earth or heaven, but to be

quiet in heart, and in eye,

clear. What we need is here.

The poem also reminds us we don’t really have to go anywhere to get to a sacred place. 'What we need is here.' This doesn't necessarily mean we stop taking retreats and making pilgrimages--heaven forbid! It just means that life, in a strange and wonderful way, can be just as rich in our ordinary 'here' as in any extraordinary 'there'.

By cultivating a habit of a Sacred Pause, over time we prove to ourselves this is so. A Sacred Pause is not complicated. It can be as simple as breathing in and breathing out, letting go of whatever we’re doing, whatever we’re holding to, or gently slipping out of the grip of whatever has a hold on us so that we can slip into being ‘quiet in heart, and in eye, clear.’

When we stop our usual down-pat ways of 'doing’ life and start making room for ROOM--open, patient, playful, curious, kind--we get reoriented over and over to what matters most to us. If we cultivate these Sacred Pauses our experience of freshness and openness and possibility begins to happen consistently enough that we can't help but begin to trust the process. Practice builds trust. Trust sustains practice--a gracious spiral into sacred space.

Poem of the One World

Jesus clearly reaffirmed what is central: Love God with our whole being; love our neighbors as ourselves.

I want to grow to love my neighbors as much as I love myself. And I want to grow to count the natural world as my neighbor. At best we tend to ignore what we don't love. At worst we misuse or abuse it.

We humans don't have long to learn this. We misuse the natural world so 'effectively' these days, and there are so many of us now, that we are on the brink of effectively destroying what sustains life. Really.

So many of us love Mary Oliver poems. May we learn to love them more! And differently--to hear them like bells across cities not only calling us to joy and insight but also to prayer and growth.

                    Poem of the One World, Mary Oliver            

This morning

the beautiful white heron

was floating along above the water

and then into the sky

of this the one world

we all belong to

where everything

sooner or later

is part of everything else

which thought made me feel

for a little while

quite beautiful myself.

The Gift of Drudgery

William Blake famously invited use to see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower. How about getting a pinch of bliss doing chores--and a sense of joy in drudgery?  Karen Madden Miller has some good advice for us below. 

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I have a garden in my backyard, and even if you don't call it a garden, you do too. In the fall, the broad canopy of giant sycamores in my yard turns faintly yellow and the leaves sail down. First by ones and then by tons. A part of every autumn day finds me fuming at the sight of falling leaves. Then I pick up a rake.

Tell me, when I'm sweeping leaves till kingdom come, is it getting in the way of my life? Is it interfering with my life? Keeping me from my life? Only my imaginary life, that life of what-ifs and how-comes--the life I'm dreaming of.

We don't just struggle with a shirt in a Zen koan. We struggle with the shirts in our hampers. With the pants, the blouses, the sheets and the underwear. Laundry presents a mountainous practice opportunity because it provokes a never-ending pile of egocentric resistance. Its not important to me. It's tedious. I don't like to do it!

If we're not careful, this is how we approach mindfulness: as an idea, one we rather like, to elevate our lives with special contemplative consideration, a method for making smarter choices and thereby ensuring better outcomes. The problem is that the life before us is the only life we have. The search for meaning robs our life of meaning, sending us back into our discursive minds while, right in front of us, the laundry piles up.

Transcending obstacles and overcoming preferences, we have an intimate encounter with our lives every time we do the wash. Its nothing out of the ordinary, but no one turns their nose up at a clean pair of socks.

With only a slight change in perspective, the most ordinary things take on inexpressible beauty. When we don't know, we don't judge. And when we don't judge, we see things in a different light. That is the light of our awareness, unfiltered by intellectual understanding, rumination, or our evaluation. When we cultivate non-distracted awareness as a formal practice, we call it mindfulness meditation. When we cultivate it in our home life we call it the laundry, the kitchen, or the yard--all the places and ways we can live mindfully by attending without distraction to whatever appears before us.