Category: Mindfulness

The ability to use our awareness consciously is the gateway to rich spiritual growth.

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Knowing the Rightness of the World

My morning ritual usually has a quiet portion where I let things settle and be with myself in contemplative space. I try to set my small, ego self aside while I sit with my higher self, my true essence. It can come quick or slow, skimmingly or in fullness, or not at all. But when contact is made and I fall in, reality opens with a hush. The sky, the window, the table, my body, everything I had assumed to be complete, absorb their own images and become ten times more real.

It can start as a line running down the center of my chest, just under my breastbone, a live current, moving in the same channel as my breathing; cool air coming in, exchanged for the warm breath going out, utterly physical, sensory; then growing to fill my interior, flowing to my arms, hips, legs, my attention merging with my body like water overflowing a cup. I am alive and I know my aliveness. The quiet is unforced, thoughts dropping, drifting as leaves on the surface of water. Sweeping the room, my line of sight stops at the light glinting off a glass vase, shades of gold mirroring the sun rising through the window beyond. The flowers look wild, impossible, as if I am seeing pink and red for the first time.

Alongside this realness comes a sense of rightness, a knowing that the world is sound, doing what it was designed to do, that underneath there is an order, that all will be well. This rightness of the world brings a sense of peace, which is calming to my soul but confusing to my mind.

How can the world be right when children die by violence? How can all be well when war is waged as blood sport? What does rightness mean if goodness seems overwhelmed by malice? Valid questions, but not ones that abide by logic, which by its nature must stay within straight lines and arrive at proofs. Logic leads my thinking to questions that circle themselves: Could there be a world where children do not die? Would I remove from human will the choice for cruelty, and so also banish the choice for mercy? These lead to interesting arguments, but not to answers that satisfy me. I have to seek alternative ways of knowing that are not limited to the lines of logic. The rightness of the world allows that there is something bigger going on, deeper than my opinions and preferences, a basic goodness that outlasts all tragedy, genocide, wars, all suffering, and even death. Because my sense is authentically felt but not provable, it is hard to understand or articulate at the level of the thinking mind.

The rightness of the world contains a promise that the world is good. To the thinking mind, this is an audacious assertion in need of proof. But when I am in contact with my essence, expanded beyond my normal depth, the world revealing itself in multi-colored dimensions, the validity of the promise becomes self-evident. At my core, running directly through my heart, is a fiber that tells me when things are true. I trust the promise because when I tell myself the world is good, the fiber sounds and sustains. If I contemplate a world where we are doomed to cycle through endless swings of power between brutal factions, where we make no progress toward our betterment, where goodness is a fiction, the fiber in my heart recoils.

I also trust the promise because I see sparks of goodness constantly working to show themselves, to break out of the soil and sprout. Perhaps you do too. Each time you give or receive, or even witness, an act of kindness, the fiber in you sounds. When calamity strikes any portion of the globe, whether natural disaster or human catastrophe, people’s desire to rush with aid is irrepressible. The note sustains.

These are more than separate acts of compassion, they are part of a reciprocal drive between Spirit and the world. The Sacred requires our participation to flower, and our participation immerses us in goodness. We are invited into the continuing work of fulfilling the promise. As we each awaken more and more to our essence, I feel the connective tissue of the fiber growing stronger.

Photo by Greg Rosenke on Unsplash

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Living From My Heart

Things look different when I hold them in my heart instead of letting them roll and roll across the landscape of my mind. My worries, for example.

I worry about the state of the world, whether we are headed toward global conflicts that will engulf us; I worry about the economy and people’s jobs; I worry about the money in my IRA; I worry about my children’s future, will they fashion lives that make them happy; I weep for our democracy and wonder if we will come to blows in civil violence; I worry that our lives are already doomed by the spiraling climate; I wonder whether artificial intelligence will save the day, or run us into the ground.

I’m a mental person. My normal mode of operation is to think things through by turning them over in my mind. But the whole backdrop shifts when I settle into my heart. I literally allow my awareness to descend from my head to my chest. My heart becomes the center of gravity of my consciousness. Dropping into my heart doesn’t void my reasoning faculties (I don’t go into a trance), but my thinking mode is joined by other faculties, fresh channels of sensation and information. I start to feel my body, which I had forgotten entirely – its pulsing warmth, the pace and volume of my breath, the aliveness of the currents running through, from, and around my body. My heart is bigger than my head. Much bigger. Given room, the tired fragments spinning in my mind have a chance to come to rest.

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The Instant After Mindfulness

I love my wakeful moments, when awareness interrupts my train of worries. I take a step back from the minutiae of activity, and a different world comes into view. It’s like a static you don’t notice until it stops, and you realize silence has been waiting underneath. The contrast between mindfulness and mindlessness is startling. Objects gather weight and texture when I really see them instead of glancing past. People gain warmth and nuance. I notice myself more fully. I seem more real, more me. I feel excitement, but also a twinge of shame that I was caught by the static. I want to be mindful, I don’t want to be mindless.

It all happens in a snap – the flash of awareness, the dropping static, the appearing silence, the brilliant seeing, the finger-wagging, the desire for one, the aversion of the other – they don’t come in sequence but arrive in a clump, which makes the decision point hard to see. The instant after mindfulness, there is a pull I am not mindful of. I am drawn to the richness of my wakeful self, so obviously superior to the contraction of my smaller, mindless self. It feels like a switch. I go from flat to full, from vacant to vivid. Internally. I feel myself turning to enter a different room, one that is less worried, more calm. I want to stay here.

But to turn toward something is to turn my back on something else, a subtle rejection of the room I am leaving. I want to be awake, but something is amiss if it leaves the taste of judgment in my mouth. In the mindless me, there are countless pieces I criticize and avoid. If I have a wakeful moment while scrolling my phone, I feel like a wino caught in the alley. Judgment only pushes him further into the corner.

I have recently started to notice this hidden decision point and am doing something different. Instead of turning and entering, I expand. I don’t try to enter more deeply into awareness, I try to stay where I am and include everything, my excitement and my shame. I welcome all the pieces. After all, acceptance is the first and perhaps the ultimate step in loving. And to be loving is what I want too. The pieces that are petty, impatient, worrisome, are not what keep me from paying attention. They are pieces craving my attention.

If my larger aspiration is not to be more mindful, but to be more mindful and more loving, then I should use them both to amplify each other, two strands entwined for strength. The wakeful moment is my opportunity to come more fully into a stance of loving. Living from a stance of love can be cultivated, just as living mindfully. I can mold them together, waking into a truer sense of me.

Photo by Go to Karolina Grabowska on Unsplash

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Our Basic Goodness

I see the trouble in the world and I’m worried on so many levels. We thought war was declining, but we see it is on the rise, causing unnecessary devastation and suffering. Extreme weather and rising sea levels show that we’ve been ignoring the warnings of a changing climate for too long. We thought we had progressed against prejudice and bigotry, but loud voices shout to pull us backward. Democracy itself is buckling under the strain of authoritarian governments.

Perhaps most troubling of all, I’m worried we are losing faith in our underlying goodness, which is the power we need most to meet the trouble.

The troubles are powerful. Feelings of despair are understandable. It’s easy to think that goodness is a fickle choice, a sucker’s game, too weak to counter the forces we are facing. But don’t be fooled. That is just the frightened voice of cynicism, looking for an escape from our responsibilities. When I stop to listen, I realize that voice is the one that is weak, too shallow to be true. The fundamentals of our nature have an energetic signature that enters our bones and turns our head. When I am in step with the force of our basic goodness, I feel grounded in something powerful, flowing, alive.

What is my evidence for this conviction? The fact that we are inspired at the sight of kindness, and recoil from acts of cruelty; the fact that there are millions who rise up, offer aid, counter cruelty, work to heal, whose efforts are not motivated by individual gain, but from a desire to help; the fact that the energy of selfishness and fear, which is centered in separation, can never exceed the energy of wisdom and compassion, which is grounded in our connection.

Connecting to this essential goodness, acting from this goodness, seeing this goodness in others even when they don’t see it in themselves, is my crucial step in moments of despair. When I touch this power, it amplifies. The signal strengthens as it goes, calling others, who see something in me that draws them toward the goodness in themselves.

You have felt this too, the uplift every time you brush against goodness. Every brave act of kindness reveals the core that makes us human. It is more than an individual moral choice – it is action aligned with a fundamental, a first cause. When you look, really look, into the eyes of another, you see the glinting light of that fundamental. The world softens and we advance another step against the trouble.

For an uplifting story about the power of seeing the goodness in another, watch this two minute video of Jack Kornfield.

Photo by ‪World Central Kitchen

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Spirit in the World of Form

I sometimes wonder if we are fallen angels, emissaries bringing spirit into form, enrolled in a vast experiment to see if our vibration can sustain itself within the density of matter, and whether, given conscious choice, we humans would destroy ourselves or save ourselves.

It would explain a lot. We seem to be constantly expressing two contradictory forces – one coming from our base elements centered on the needs of our small, egoic selves, and another from a higher source centered in the larger context we are all embedded within.

I recognize these two forces in myself. Life in the material world has real consequences. Like every living thing, I share the primal urge, honed over hundreds of millions of years, to preserve my physical well-being. The survival instinct is self-centered, protective, ever fearful of pain or loss. When aroused, it will fight for what it wants without mercy, capable of great power and unthinking cruelty. I cringe to remember the times I have hurt others out of reactivity or selfishness.  

But life as a spiritual being has real consequences too. There is within us, as primal as our survival instinct, a natural impulse for empathy and connection. We have the capacity for profound acts of kindness, compassion, and forgiveness, even in the face of cruelty. When the power of love is aroused, we are capable of sacrifice, foregoing our individual interests in service to something greater. I have felt this urge too, and have been guided at times by the better angels of my nature.

For a long time, I’ve viewed these forces as being in opposition. I hate the cruelty, I want to increase the compassion. I believe that this is where the experiment is taking us, and I want my choices to help it along. I’ve shaped my spiritual practice around this effort, training my perception to see when I am operating from ego and reorienting toward spirit. Each has a distinct energetic signature. In moments of awareness, I can feel the switch happen. I see my small self and I do not want to participate in his fears and addictions, his petty grievances, and I move away, glad to leave the lower and gravitate to the higher.

Recently, a growing intuition has been whispering that this isn’t quite right. Moving toward one means turning my back on the other, a subtle rejection of the parts of me that most need my attention. It is a type of escapism, a retreat from the very premise of the experiment. It’s not bringing spirit into form, it is substituting spirit for form.

This insight has brought a new sense of self, with its own energetic signature. I still recognize the forces of ego and spirit, self-interest and common good, separation and interconnection, but they feel joined, more closely aligned, traveling together. Now, in moments of awareness, I don’t experience it as a switch, it is an expansion that includes both. My awareness settles in place. The flavor is ordinary, fresh, accepting. The whole of me is fuller.

I am playing with this new multifaceted, unrejected self as I go through my spiritual practice and my daily activities. It feels more honest, less driven by perfection. The tension on the tug-of-war rope has eased. Surely this points to the heart of the experiment – can I learn to live in the world of form, with all its brutal requirements, and bring my higher vibrations of wisdom and compassion to each occasion, embracing all, abandoning none.

Photo by Ahmed on Unsplash

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Attention and Addiction

Attention is my most precious gift. It is how I ride the waves of consciousness, calm or windy, deep swells or lapping at the shore. It is the window allowing light; the door opening to every room; a vehicle for travel; the place where experience lands and insight visits; the backdrop where the movie of my life plays out.

You would think I’d guard this gift carefully, but I allow it to be taken easily, spilled out and drained away. Attention seems to be a reservoir, an endless supply I can always tap. And while that’s true, it misses a vital point: attention is made to be used in the present moment, not saved for later. The gift is the tapestry it brings right now. Once this moment has passed, there is no rewind button. The size of the reservoir can make me complacent. Habits form, their roots take hold and fall to default. One unconscious moment becomes a thousand, crowding out my capacity to concentrate, to recenter in the act of conscious choice.

My phone is an addiction, and it drains my attention like a hole in the boat.

My phone is beautiful, feels lovely in my hand. It does so much. It takes care of me. It satisfies my wishes at a whim, which no other part of life seems capable of doing. It is indispensable. More than utility, it offers to soothe my jangled nerves. The tiny screen comes on and I am welcomed into a small flat world that smooths out all my wrinkles. My inbox may have something for me; someone may be reaching out; some danger in the news may need my worry; my curiosity has a question that needs research. And the shiny games are blinking, mildly entertaining but dangerously absorbing. Posts, opinions, songs from my youth, clips from old movies. What is the concern? My inbox hurts no one. My research questions are valid, the games harmless.

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Tears

Recently, I find tears come to me easily. I’m not sure why.

Maybe it was the passing of my parents two years ago. A broken hip and pneumonia, a broken heart and dementia, a numbing fog in and out of hospital rooms. In eight months, they were both gone. Or maybe it’s the background hum of an unstable world that seems to grow darker every day. Or maybe it’s my advancing age, and the realization that my remaining sunsets have a finite number, making each beautiful and horrible thing so precious, I can’t afford to let it pass unnoticed.

I’m in the sanctuary of the Monastery of Santa Cruz in Coimbra, Portugal. I’ve been sitting for an hour, sitting with my thoughts, sitting with questions in a place people have come for centuries seeking answers, or at least solace. I’m wondering why we are continually confronted with impossible questions. It can’t be that we expect clean answers, a formula with algebraic precision. It’s more like the tangents of a wicked geometry, the curve of my mind measuring whether the points are coming together or falling away.

At the heart of our wondering, I think, is the desire to know we are living a moral life, and that can only be known by walking through the brambles of impossible questions and making choices. We look for a source of wisdom to lay the question against, see where it fits, where the corners stick, and take guidance as best we can. Over time, we find that some sources of wisdom serve us better, or are more suited to our nature, or grow with us as we walk. Wisdom shows us truth in glimmers, as light through a moving curtain, and something in our soul remembers and points our steps in one direction or another.

How does this philosophizing help me with my questions? Why did my parents’ deaths unfold the way they did? How do I hold the country I love even as it transgresses the bounds of evil? Do I give or refuse the man begging change outside the bottle shop? Is my life significant beyond the people I touch in this small flicker of time?

When I am still for a time, a frame of mind can come where my thinking slips to the back and a fuller presence comes forward. Under the quiet of the gothic vaults and blue-white tiles of the sanctuary, I let go of myself. The space absorbs me, my inner and outer indistinct. I feel large but empty, a weight floating at the top of my chest like a bruise. It wants to move but can’t find a way out.

A father wanders through, his young daughter, a tassel of curls, holding his hand. At a side chapel, she leaves him and moves toward a stand of votives. I watch her gaze into the candles and then hurry back to take his hand and place her head against his hip. An ache rises in my throat and my eyes spill over. What is this glimmer? A pair of strangers and their tender moment, a source of wisdom.

Photo by Steve Sphar

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The History of a Thing

Hemingway believed a reader could sense the essence beneath his writing, glimpse a world over the horizon of the page. He compared it to an iceberg. His experience at sea, watching marlins mate, harpooning and losing a sperm whale, the stories retold in the fishing villages, were all imbued in him and would permeate the sparse words that hit the reader’s eye.

His writing was describing something that was of one piece, and if the writer and reader were in sync, showing a slice would reveal the whole. In Death in the Afternoon, he wrote,

“If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader … will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.”

Thoreau had the same thought. Walking in the woods past the tumble-down homes of former inhabitants, overtaken by roots and brambles, he felt he could know something of their lives and what they had added to the place. The true sense of a thing was felt beyond first sight. He wrote in his journal,

“A fact stated barely is dry. It must be the vehicle of some humanity … It must be warm, moist, incarnated — have been breathed on at least. A man has not seen a thing who has not felt it.”

These two intuitives are inviting us into the perceptive world of writers and philosophers, where it is possible to know the history of a thing beyond the surface of its appearance. Our usual way of seeing is a passing glance, a flash of pattern recognition, an assumption by first impression. When I am racing past my life, I don’t see my life. What fuller shape of perception is available if I pause to collect myself, settle the dust of my anxious movement, and look? Can I detect the craft of the carver working the blade against the wood, or the seasons of sun and rain that built the rings beneath the bark of oak? When I make this effort, or better said, when I let the effort go, there is always more arising, more to fathom.

How much more so with people. Isn’t familiarity a kind of veil, an interpretation I conjure up that cheapens the brilliance they present in this moment? If I become porous, can I perceive the history of a person – their hardships, heartaches, longings and regrets, their celebrations, delights, and triumphs? Perhaps I can loosen my fixed idea of this unique soul before me and allow the river of their life, the floating curls of leaves and eddies and sediments, to be absorbed in me.

There’s an experiment I sometimes do when I’m with someone, where I let all knowledge of them fade, as if I am a foreigner, or an alien, and I see what wants to appear, every impression a first impression. It’s not an exercise in analysis, just a way of being with. What comes forth is always richer than what I had imagined.

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Simply Notice

Tension has seeped into my musculature and made itself at home. It’s a hidden force that sits along the ridge of my shoulders and neck, like an army occupying the high ground awaiting an attack. The grip is silent and unnoticed until I place my attention there. Once seen, it’s advantage shrinks, and the tightness starts to dissipate like slow air from a balloon. I continue watching, take a long breath, adjust my posture, and exhale. Simply noticing my body causes things to ease.

I can be gripped by the nonphysical too, thought loops rolling across the musculature of my mind. Ruminations manufacture whole scenarios, embellished stories about the past, or fantasy futures I am wishing for or against. Placing my attention on these mental fabrications can deflate them, too. In some ways, thoughts are stickier because they’re not concrete and can slip by unquestioned. Thinking carries a false authority until we see that not all thoughts are true. Some, maybe most, are working drafts to occupy a mind prone to worry.

The first step is to notice. A world of benefits follow, but it’s hard to get there if I don’t cultivate the foundational skill of noticing. This requires a stepping out and a looking at; pushing pause on the movie of my life and peeking behind the camera. Often, I’m so caught in activity mode that the images rushing by create a convincing reality, when in truth, my perception has narrowed to a slim range. When I push pause and look deeper, reality becomes much, much bigger:  I recognize my muscles are tense, holding a pain I did not realize was grief; I sense my thoughts are racing, but they lose their speed and urgency when I give them my attention; even the sprouting tulips are more red, more fragile, once I truly see them.

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The Danger of the Familiar

It’s easy for me to think I know what’s about to happen. The routine of my morning meditation lulls me into assuming things will unfold the same as they did yesterday, or last week. Familiarity presents a danger, because instead of experiencing the moment, I am experiencing my memory of a moment, a shallow, mental image that fogs the window. I am not fully here, I’m a tiny step removed from the current of my life; literally, the current moment.

“Danger” may seem an exaggeration. After all, we can’t avoid feeling the familiarity of things. But there is tangible loss when the familiar fools me into thinking I know this space. When I zone out, I miss out. If I stay curious about what is here, my perceptions sharpen. Noticing the tension in my shoulders, I start to sense the fibers and connective tissue inside the muscle. Grounding attention where I touch the floor, I feel the bones in my feet and whether the ligaments are tight or loose. Subtle emotions appear under my breath; sensations without names knock at the window. The quality of my attention alters, gathering itself, becoming finer, more spacious, attuned to the currents moving through me.

The river of experience is always moving, always opening to more. This may not be apparent in the moment, when it feels as if I am fully open to awareness as it is, that what I see is the observable limit. But then the fog clears, the horizon extends, and I’m invited to travel further on.

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