It’s easy to get impatient with our attempts at mindfulness. Sometimes we’re bored as we sit and meditate, and sometimes we’re discouraged because we don’t see change in our lives as fast as we’d like.
I find Thich Nhat Hahn’s two-breath practice startlingly helpful—it ties the process of meditation and transformation together.
Breathing in, I notice my heart;
Breathing out, I smile to my heart.
Breathing in, I notice this moment;
Breathing out, I smile to this wonderful moment.
Doing our regular meditation we have many, many opportunities to notice our thoughts and feelings, to notice how thoughts wander and feelings change. How many times have you been frustrated at your wandering mind? You know what your wandering mind is? A wonderful opportunity to smile. To smile at the inevitability of a wandering mind, to smile (compassionately) at the frustration of it, to smile at the opportunity you’ve just had to see again some of the things that wander into your thinking. Every outbreath is a reminder to appreciate our lives as they are and to appreciate the irony and humor of life itself—AND to be gentle, to hold compassionately our impatience and frustration and hopes.
Before long we’re also smiling at the slowly accumulating treasure we’re gathering by becoming more familiar with how our particular minds work—and at our slowly but surely improving capacity to work more skillfully with them.
This is a double transformation: we are being transformed as individual beings which then inevitably begins to change the way we engage life—which begins to transform life around us. Being conscious of this process, actually being more than just conscious of it, being intentional about it, deepens and speeds it up. Try it.
How many times a day might it be useful to you when you’re in an interesting or sticky place in your day to do this two breath practice?
Breathing in, I notice my heart;
Breathing out, I smile to my heart.
Breathing in, I notice this moment;
Breathing out, I smile to this wonderful moment.
How many times a day when we’re with others are we only partly engaged? Caught up in our own thoughts? Going with our own flow?
Breathing in, I notice my heart....
And then…we smile. And then we catch a glimpse of the near miraculous opportunity of real engagement in this present moment—of full attention to what another human being is saying, implying, wanting, needing, asking.
These are moments when ‘the Kingdom of God is at hand’ is not a religious phrase but a sudden possibility. Many moments, you realize, for instance this moment you’re participating in now, has potentials you can actually facilitate.
Try it. Practice it for yourself. Trust the process. All those wandering-mind-moments of meditation, the times we bring ourselves back with a smile, come into perspective. Oh, I see. This is preparation. Any moment of any interaction with another human being becomes, potentially, a miracle, a moment when what might not have been comes to be because of your growing understanding and intention and skill at being mindfully, compassionately present.
