Guest Post: My Guest House

By Jane Coburn

(My friend Jane has a fresh and wise perspective on mindfulness, mothering, and welcoming Life. I asked her if I could post this. She said, Yes--something she's been saying in many contexts lately!)

“This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival…be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond”

Reading The Guest House by Rumi for the hundredth time and it still gets me.  It still strikes me right in the face how this being human is so temporary - an honor and a blessing.  Thoughts and feelings visit briefly if we pay attention to them…real, honest attention to why they are here.  If not, they linger and fester.

Before I started meditating, I thought it would be impossible to stop thinking and just be still.  Like most Americans and every mother I know, I spent my life as a whirling dervish multitasking my way through the day.  If I was not actively doing something, I felt lazy, bored, or guilt ridden about what I SHOULD be doing.  If I did try to relax, my mind missed the memo and kept running.  I thought meditating meant you could not have a thought. If your mind was not completely clear then you were doing it wrong.  So, I didn’t try often and when I did try, I gave up quickly when thoughts arose as they always did.  It turned my attempts at meditation into failure giving my guest house yet another visit from guilt and frustration.

I watched or heard of others meditating and I was distrustful.  Meditation seemed silly or self righteous and I never truly believed these people weren’t faking it.  I began searching spiritually, as I suspect most mid-lifers do and I started reading about Buddhism and other Eastern spiritual practices.  Later I was overjoyed to find teachings about the Christian tradition of meditation, a much overlooked part of our history. These writings spoke to me and I realized that the thoughts that arise while trying to quiet my mind are simply thoughts.  I can see them, I can reflect on them or let them pass.  As Rumi said, I have begun to learn how to welcome them as guides.  When meditating, I feel safe to notice a thought and ask myself, “Why am I having this thought?  What does this say about me?”

In time, I have learned that meditation is not just something you do in quiet or on a mountain top.  My meditation practice is helping me pause at any given moment and welcome a feeling, experience it for a few moments, be truly honest with myself about what that feeling is saying about me and then with some deep breaths I can let it go.  A friend of mine told me he thought meditation was too passive and not helpful in dealing with his problems.  In my experience, meditation has been quite an active way to welcome my feelings and reactions to life, pause, be still and listen helping me to learn and adjust my emotions or behaviors based on what these guests teach me.

It is not easy to be honest with oneself.  Realizing that when I snapped at my child out of anger or frustration it was really about my own fears and feelings of inadequacy can be a  tough lesson to welcome. Those feelings or thoughts may return to my guest house in an hour, a day, or a week, but they are often quieter and have a shorter stay.  The more I pause and practice, the fewer and farther between the visits and my mind is opened up and empty, ready for more guests.

The Quality of Awareness: Clarity

When I walked the dog early this morning, Venus and Jupiter were just above the eastern horizon--bright, clear, sparkling. Usually we have valley fog summer mornings, but the humidity is low today. It was also unusually cool, about 50 degrees. Something about 'clear and cool' that refreshes the soul.

If I was in charge of the weather, it would be clear and cool a lot more often.

Sogyal Rimpoche, the displaced and cultured Tibetan scholar and teacher who lives in France, the author of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, says (like most Tibetan teachers) that it's very helpful when we meditate to keep 20% of our focus on the breath. It's very helpful--but, he says, it's not enough. He strongly advises that we keep 20% of our focus on the breath, 60% on the contents of consciousness--and the remaining 20% of our attention on doing it right!

Part of the human brain is dedicated to assimilating familiar daily mental activities into automatic processes so that the main part of our conscious minds can attend to hunting and gathering, looking for mates, passing on our DNA, protecting our clan, and other 'essential' mammalian stuff.

So even our regular attempts at being alert while meditating can be taken under the wing of our trying-to-be-helpful evolutionary brains. But...the thing about consciousness is you have to be conscious! Dulled focus doesn't lead to clarity. This makes Clearness another vital thread in the quality of mindful Awareness.

Unfortunately some of the words we use to highlight this particular quality of awareness can sound TOO effortful. If we say to ourselves "Stay vigilant!" most of us would shift into something too stressful to be helpful. Maybe "Keep alert," without an exclamation point is better. Yet the very word alert is a military word that comes from the Italian "All' erta" which was a military term: "To the watch tower!"

Nevertheless, without ALERTNESS, contemplative practice, while perhaps relaxing, will rarely be enlightening.

Like so many things outside the small self, the strand of clarity in meditation is a both/and thing--a restful vigilance, an un-pressured watchfulness. The origin of the word vigilance is the Latin 'vigilare,' which simply means 'keep awake.' That's a common and reasonably good way of saying what mindfulness is--to be awake.

When we do our formal practice, we can cultivate a habit of keeping awake, of bringing our wandering attention all' erta!--"To the watch tower!" As we do, we see stuff we'd never see otherwise. And seeing, we begin to understand. Understanding, we get a little wiser. Being wiser, we're in a better place to recognize what to keep in life and what to let go of, which 'stuff' is fruitful which 'stuff' is weedy.

As always, what we cultivate privately, interiorly, we also experience outwardly in community. We get better at being attentive to what others are saying, feeling, hoping and meaning. We also become more receptive to the grace and power of everything else--the practical, the spiritual, the natural.

At certain times in the year, every morning just after dawn geese fly over my house--some years 3 or 4 geese, other years as many as 12 or 15. The fly just to the east, coming from the same place in the sky where Venus and Jupiter were rising this morning. I assume these geese rest here in Jackson County for a couple of weeks on their way south in autumn and north in spring.

Both they and I are up about the same time. I'm usually studying or meditating when I hear them. And even if I'm doing 'formal' practice, the second their honking becomes clear, I jump up and run outside. Being 'formal' can go to hell--I'm not gonna miss the sacrament of pilgrim geese!

Every now and then I have a smaller but similar experience when bringing my attention back into formal practice. If I can continue bringing this same kind of joyful, receptive attention to my life, inside and out, I will see stuff, learn stuff, be fed and be blessed.

So--when you do your formal practice, do it right! Weave clearness into each breath cycle. Do it vigilantly--and gently. Strain to be watchful--in a completely laid back way. Grit your teeth--and chuckle. Jump up whenever attention is dull and bleary and feast your eyes on whatever is sweeping across your world.

Clarity is both a practice and an outcome of mindful work. When we focus more purposefully we see more clearly.

The Quality of Awareness: Tolerance

Tolerance is not one of most people's favorite words. To tolerate something is to endure it--to sit through a boring performance--or hang in there through ten days of an antibiotic that wrecks your digestive system.

In awareness practice, however, tolerance is a beautiful thing. It's a growing ability to see, to recognize, to accept and to work with things as they are (in contrast to how we wish or perhaps fear they were). The more we cultivate and appreciate tolerance, the more the quality of our AWARENESS expands and deepens.

At some point, we begin to understand why Rumi, when he finds a 'pack of sorrows' on his porch, 'meets them at the door laughing!'

But first we have dues to pay, work to do, a soul to stretch.

If you're a beginning meditator--or someone who can't yet quite imagine EVER doing meditation--perhaps first you'll grapple with the antsy-ness of sitting still, of being bored. Or the disappointment of discovering how random and petty and unfamiliar human brains can be--especially our own!

If you're an intermediate meditator, you've surely already come to experience many things knocking at your door that have seemed intolerable. Some of those things you've tolerated, made room for, welcomed. Some of those things, well, maybe not yet.

Mary Oliver, in The Summer Day, writes:

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed...

We're not used to being 'idle' and being 'blessed.' We're so much more accustomed to being idle and being bored--or feeling guilty. And we're not inclined to tolerate boredom or guilt. 

Tolerance, in mindful practices, is the art of being idle and being blessed. Literally, we begin to cultivate this very thing, allowing the mind to idle, to be in neutral like a car's transmission, letting the world come to us--the world of thoughts, images, sensations and feelings.

In formal meditation, it's OUR thoughts and images and sensations and feelings. Out and about it's OTHER PEOPLE'S thoughts and feelings, words and actions, we learn to 'tolerate'--to receive neutrally, to welcome, even to bless. 

It's really helpful, right at the start, to realize that in cultivating tolerance we're engaged in re-wiring our brains, developing a fresh and marvelous new skill.

Sometimes tolerance will bloom into a mindset that just naturally meets a pack of sorrows at the door laughing. At some point the practice of mindful tolerance will feel like a stroll in a meadow, collapsing in the grass, noticing and savoring flowers and grasshoppers and spider webs.

Ah, the blessedness of 'idling' and being blessed.

At other times, in good faith we'll try to tolerate, make room for stuff that scares the hell out of us--or leads to painful sorrows or long-smoldering rage. Etcetera. Etcetera!

These times will feel nothing like a stroll in a meadow. How strange that TIOLERANCE, that heretofore drab word, would be one of the main portals to Life's Grand Adventure.

Slow down, friends. Be idle and be blessed. Welcome whatever comes.

And hold on!

The Quality of Awareness

Seems to me these days there's nothing I want more than to be 'open' to Life. I want to love it, experience it as fully as possible, savor it, be blessed by it and add my blessing to it. It also seems that simple awareness is the key that opens 'me' to this 'thing' I want.

"Simple" should be set in quotes. "Simple" Awareness is woven of many threads. It's only simple as we become weavers.

Blaise Pascal, a wise soul and a great writer, supported himself by writing pamphlets--basically magazine or popular blog posts of his day. He once famously said to his publisher--"Sorry this one is so long...I didn't have time to make it short." Simplicity is a learned skill, and both learning it and practicing it takes time and intention.

Every time we purpose to be aware we see the many things that distract us. The many processes of our 'automatic brain' are a wonder of our evolutionary minds. They enable us to do a pretty good job of navigating life on automatic pilot. The only downside is that being on automatic pilot is the opposite of being CONSCIOUS.

Ah, but it's so natural to be on automatic pilot. It's effortless! Effortless, continual, familiar, habitual--and our brains come with all the wiring already in place to run automatically. But once we taste LIFE we begin to realize automatic life is not what we most deeply want. And what keeps us in the game of cultivating a life that opens to LIFE is Awareness.

So...wanna be deeply happy? Yes! says my soul, even as massive areas of my brain cry, Ow! This is hard--we're not wired to run this way!

And it's true. Awareness Practice rewires our brains. Slowly. And not all that effectively. Our 'Aware brains' will never run as effortlessly or as fast as our auto-brains.

And our auto-brains will never bring us to the peace, wisdom, and joy that Awareness will.

So...it's worth cultivating awareness (slowly, patiently, relentlessly)--the rich and deep kind of awareness that opens us to LIFE. God willing, over the next week I hope to note some of the qualities of awareness, the threads we learn to weave together, so that AWARENESS becomes more natural, more effective, and just plain more fun in our everyday lives.

Batter My Heart

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt continues to confound and thrill me with his "Happiness Hypothesis." If you're somebody who wants to be happy--and wants to grow in depth and breadth, wholeness and wisdom,  The Happiness Hypothesis is a great read. He grounds his 'hypothesis' in both ancient wisdom and current research in social psychology.

Though he's not a 'God person' his findings are very consonant with major spiritual traditions--so much of what he values relates to how we can work with our small or false selves in order to live more fully in our Big or True Selves.

And like most spiritual traditions, his vision of the small (or evolutionary) self can be jarring.

Consider:

"The consistent finding of psychological research is that we are fairly accurate in our perceptions of others. It's our self-perceptions that are distorted because we look at our selves in a rose-colored mirror.

We judge others by their behavior, but we think we have special information about ourselves--we know what we are "really like" inside, so we can easily find ways to explain away our selfish acts and cling to the illusion that we are better than others.

When comparing ourselves to others, the general process is this: Frame the question (unconsciously, automatically) so that the trait in question is related to a self-perceived strength. Once you find a piece of evidence, once you have a "make-sense" story, you are done. You can stop thinking and revel in your self-esteem. It's no wonder, then, that in a study of 1 million American high school students, 70 percent thought they were above average on leadership ability, but only 2 percent thought they were below average (94 percent of college professors think they do above average work!).

If the only effect of these rampant esteem-inflating biases was to make people feel good about themselves, they would not be a problem. In fact, evidence shows that people who hold pervasive positive illusions about themselves, their abilities, and their future prospects are mentally healthier, happier, and better liked than people who lack such illusions. But such biases can make people feel that they deserve more than they do, thereby setting the stage for endless disputes with other people who feel equally over-entitled.

It just seems plain as day, to the naive realist, that everyone is influenced by ideology and self-interest. Except for me. I see things as they are.

If I could nominate one candidate for "biggest obstacle to world peace and social harmony," it would be naive realism, because it is so easily ratcheted up from the individual to the group level: My group is right because we see things as they are. Those who disagree are obviously biased by their religion, their ideology, or their self-interest."


---


Seeing our small/false/habitual selves 'truly' hurts. It's...disappointing. Disorienting. 


It's also necessary if we want to be happy, whole, wise and kind.


After reading this bit of his book, I found myself thinking about John Donne's poem (which follows). Whenever I catch a glimpse these days of my 'self' as "biggest obstacle to world peace and social harmony" I often smile (right after I grimace) and open up and turn toward wholeness--and do my best to welcome with open arms the process, the work, the Spirit that makes Us Whole. 

Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town to'another due,
Labor to'admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly'I love you, and would be lov'd fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy;
Divorce me,'untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you'enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me

Cat Karma

When my daughter Ruth said she wanted to move back home recently, she said she also wanted to bring her new dog and cat with her. I wasn't sure if I wanted either, so I told her I'd have to think about that. She's often not around (I often am) so if her little cat and pup moved in, I knew I'd be involved in their lives.

I thought about it a couple of weeks and then said yes. They're both cute and sweet and smart. Easy to love.

The cat, Ruth named her Bartholomew (even though it's a female), was an inside cat who spent much of her time sitting in the window looking (longing to be) outside. I convinced Ruth it was worth the risk to give her more freedom--even though we've lost cats to 'something' outside in the past.

Bartholomew 'embraced' her new freedom--exploring, hunting, lolling in the sun. Made friends with some of the other neighborhood cats. Even a feral cat--I often saw them sunning together in the front yard.

A couple of weeks ago Ruth told me she thought Bartholomew might be pregnant.

What?! She hasn't been spayed?!!!

I thought all cats were spayed these days. But it's obvious that Bartholomew is now great with child. And soon we'll, O joy, have a litter of kitties.

Lately I've been humming Jimmy Buffet's song, Wasting Away in Magaritaville. Particularly the part, "Some people say there's a woman to blame--but I know it's my own damn fault." My fault. My karma.

Kind of.

Most of us in the West have a pretty sketchy understanding of what karma is. We tend to think of it as destiny or as a kind of pre-ordained future. But karma is simply "We reap what we sow." And the plural way of saying it, like I just did, is important. WE reap what WE sow. Karma is a team sport.

Which is to say we're all connected. For the poor souls who died in the Twin Towers, personal karma had almost nothing to do with their deaths. Nothing was preordained for them. Bad things can happen to good people--and collective karma is big-picture reality.

Ruth's and my cat karma wasn't preordained either. We'll both be pretty much reaping what we both sowed. So there's no reason for me (after I cool off and hear what wisdom is saying) to blame Ruth for anything. I thought it over before I said yes--I missed something in my thinking--some particular something I'll never miss again!

Because karma is a team sport, none of us can control our future. Yet each of us can influence it. We can never guarantee our future. Yet we can always 'seed' better possibilities for a better future.

Every choice and action is a seed. Plant weeds, get weeds. Plant vegetables get vegetables--and weeds! (Karma is a team sport--people are always sowing weeds--us too).

But also, ALSO, Wisdom and spiritual formation are always coaxing us to plant more good seed and less bad. And reminding us how it works. Mindfulness helps us be aware of what we're planting RIGHT NOW. Which will significantly affect what we'll be reaping sooner or later. We can't control what others sow--yet we can influence, at least a little, what others sow. Kindness often begets kindness. Anger usually begets anger. Un-spayed female cats usually beget kittens.

A mature, realistic understanding of karma leads to a mature and realistic experience of life. We don't complain as much. We don't blame as much. We don't pout as much just because our 'now' is not what we expected. As we plant less complaining/pouting/blaming we reap more peace and more joy.

And almost certainly fewer unplanned kitties in the Hudson household next year.

Gratitude Therapy

A long time ago a mentor challenged me to learn one of life's sweetest and hardest ironies. He said, "Love's not a feeling, it's a commitment."

I took it to heart and have worked with that challenge two-thirds of my life. I've found it astoundingly trustworthy. I 'love' it when 'love' swells in me and seems to just overflow. But life is full of so many other moments when love is needed and I 'feel' no love at all.

The same is true for gratitude. It's wonderful when gratefulness wells up. But for most of us humans, those times are rather rare.

I'm so grateful that the Buddhists are teaching us Christians systematic ways to practice what we preach! They have 2500 years of learning how to make a habit of the qualities we value most.

Here's an example. It's from Jack Kornfield's The Wise Heart:

In Japan there is a form of Buddhist therapy called naikan that emphasizes gratitude as a way to heal depression, anxiety, and neurosis. In this approach we are asked to slowly and systematically review our whole life and offer gratitude for each thing that was given to us. A similar approach worked for a man named Bob, a practitioner who had been homeless for a year and was now living at a nearby mountain Zen center. Because of his memory of sleeping in the park, lying half awake every night in fear that someone would try to rob him or stab him, Bob was afraid to sleep. He had a history of family trauma: he had left his addicted father and stepmother for the streets at age fifteen and had used drugs himself. In his life he had been a carpenter and a mechanic.

When Bob went to the Buddhist center, he was trying to put his life together. The Zen teacher could feel his anxiety and mistrust. To help him soften this state, the teacher instructed him in a simple practice of gratitude. Bob began offering thanks for whatever food, clothing, and shelter he had for the moment, living, as they say in AA, one day at a time. He was taught to stop and surreptitiously bow in gratitude ten times a day, wherever he found himself. Bob took to bowing. He bowed to his kitchen mates and to their shared breakfast. He bowed to his morning depression and to his feelings of unworthiness. He bowed to the carpentry tools he used in the shop, to his anxiety, to the afternoon sun, and to the noisy tractor in the nearby field.

A second instruction was given to Bob as well: to look beyond his suffering. Bob slowly began to notice moments of well-being, surprising breaks in his inner struggles, small periods of blessing. He loved being in the temple garden. He walked among the live oaks and mulch piles by the garden path, framed by sturdy redwood posts and delicate fortget-me-nots and orange daisies. Bob described how his mind became quiet for the first time in years. The suffering he carried was still like a weight, but the vast silence was bigger. One day the temple bell rang for dinner and his heart was pierced. His pain and longing were swept over by a sublime wave of gratitude for just being alive. Bob was returning to life.

---

Love. Gratitude. Peace. Kindness. These 'things' are too precious to leave to the randomness of our feelings. Especially when it's possible to cultivate them.

Cultivation starts with trusting the possibility of cultivation. It continues through a commitment to practice doing it. Mercifully, the doing confirms the trust. It 'works.' Gratitude practice opens us up to many, many more experiences of being grateful.

Etcetera. Etcetera. ALLELUIA, Etcetera.