'Me' and My Shadow

I'm continuing a lovely, slow stroll through Ron Siegel's book, The Mindfulness Solution. As a therapist and teacher (Harvard for more than 20 years) his experience of life is a lot different from a priest or rabbi or Zen master. I'm appreciating his perspective (below).

Wise words follow...

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Carl Jung described the parts of our personality that we don't acknowledge because they don't fit our conscious identity as our shadow. We all have one, made up of everything we don't like about ourselves.

By illuminating how we construct our identity, mindfulness practice helps us recognize and accept our shadow moment by moment. Every desirable and undesirable feeling, thought, and image eventually arises in meditation, and we practice noticing and accepting them all.

We see our anger, greed, lust, and fear along with our love, generosity, care, and courage. Seeing all of these contents, we gradually stop identifying with one particular set and rejecting the other. We eventually see that we have a great deal in common with everyone else, including those we are tempted to judge harshly. We see for ourselves why people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.

It has been said that mindfulness practice is not a path to perfection but a path to wholeness. We don't wipe out the aspects of our personality that don't fit our desired identity, but rather make friends with these elements. This is humbling but also freeing.

By simply practicing awareness of present experience with acceptance, we can see ourselves and others more clearly, not distorted by the desire to see ourselves in a certain light. Despite all our attempts to distinguish ourselves from one another, we share so many human foibles. We naturally start to relate to others with compassion when we see they're just like us. We also come to appreciate that we are unique--just like everyone else.

Practicing PRESENCE

Anne Lamott says, “My mind is like a bad neighborhood—I try not to go there alone.” But our minds are also rather like grammar school playgrounds—it’s not wise to leave the kids unattended. Seeing both of these metaphors as shrewd and potentially helpful invites us to cultivate them both. Go often to the playground and regularly to the bad neighborhood—but never go alone. Vaya con Dios, go with God, with Presence—whether our idea of Presence is “He walks with me and he talks with me, and he tells me I am his own.” Or our idea  of Presence is “Being Itself.” Or our idea of Presence is the quality of mindful awareness we cultivate and do our best to bring into any moment—focused, non-judging, kind, and curious. Go often. Vaya con Dios.     

Below are 3 rich reflections about Presence.

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With every breath I fill with God. And my life is a table where I offer God to the world.

–Thomas Aquinas

"There is need for awareness that the mountains and rivers and all living things, the sky and its sun and moon and clouds all constitute a healing, sustaining sacred presence for humans which we need as much for our psychic integrity as for our physical nourishment. This presence, whether experienced as Allah, as Atman, as Sunyata, or as the Buddha-nature or as Bodhisattva; whether as Tao or as the One or as the Divine Feminine, is the atmosphere in which humans breathe deepest and without which we eventually suffocate."  --Thomas Berry

Flickering Mind

Lord, not you,

it is I who am absent....

I elude your presence.... Not for one second

will my self hold still, but wanders anywhere,

everywhere it can turn. Not you,

it is I who am absent.

You are the stream, the fish, the light, the pulsing shadow,

you the unchanging presence, in whom all

moves and changes.

How can I focus my flickering, perceive at the fountain's heart

the sapphire I know is there?             --Denise Levertov

Welcoming Anxiety

I dove into mindfulness practice because I needed a better way to work with raw family tensions. My daughter was 16, I was worried about her, and my worry--though coming from deep love for her--was too often expressed in ways that felt nothing like love to her. Getting better at working with my own anxiety about her showed me over and over how to better embody my love for her.

Of course we're still working with our stuff--anxiety, frustration, communication, even as we continue to find ways of anchoring love in day to day life. Still, it's not a stretch at this point to say it's been a game changer.

Our lectio for this morning's mindfulness group was about working with anxiety with growing skill. Wise words follow....

Oh the house of denial has thick walls

and very small windows

and whoever lives there, little by little,

will turn to stone.

--Mary Oliver, A Thousand Mornings

Fear is our mind and body's ancient, hardwired response to every perceived threat, no matter how subtle. We are therefore frightened much of the time though we often don't think about it this way.

All worry is anticipatory. Even in terrible current circumstances, our worry is about what is going to happen next, not about what is happening right now. Since mindfulness practice cultivates awareness of present experience with acceptance, it tends to bring our attention out of the past or future and into the current moment. And the present moment is usually safe.

Mindfulness oriented approaches to anxiety involve sitting with experiences (however disturbing) and letting them run their course rather than trying to change them. When we do this, it interrupts an important mechanism that maintains anxiety, since we're no longer generating fear of the anxiety itself. This approach also frees us to make intelligent or skillful choices. Welcoming anxiety is actually a powerful way to develop courage.

                                    --Ronald Siegel, The Mindfulness Solution

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.