Day89: Potential, Part II

Once I understood that, not only did my aversion to sitting meditation decrease significantly, but I began, slowly slowly, to recognize all the ways in which I had been, at hugely important times in my life, attending with care and attention to the present moment, on purpose, without (and this has always been my struggle) judgment.  And with, as I came to understand later, compassion for myself in my struggle.

When I realized this in my mid-thirties, I immediately recognized that I’d been using mindfulness to manage a difficult relationship with a colleague.  Little by little, instead of reacting to hostility engendered by something I’d said by apologizing and trying desperately to make her like me, I had learned to recognize the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that drove me to fix it at all costs.  That didn’t stop me at first from trying to fix it, but little by little, the practice of awareness had begun to give me space.  And in that space, I could give myself the gift of time to decide – did I really do something wrong?  And if I didn’t, what would I like to do to respond to this difficult moment, instead of trying to survive it?

Mindfulness.

And once I saw that, I saw that my practice dated back even further.  To the way that I learned to watch the nerve pain in my leg, rising and falling and changing, without attachment to how it felt ten minutes ago, or how it might feel ten years from now.  Noticing that allowed me to see all the fears and stories I’d attached to that pain, and to see them for what they were – fears and stories that also rose and fell away.

Or the way I’d finally learned to manage lifelong insomnia.  From my early teenage years on, going to bed involved hours of lying awake while ruminating and fretting, worrying over what I should have done differently, or what I was going to do when the next crisis hit me.  In my thirties, mindfulness (not that I called it that at the time) allowed me to notice when I’d headed down those rabbit holes, and to kindly and gently call my attention back to my breathing.  (Note: for anyone who wants to have a sitting practice, I don’t recommend using this exact trick to fall asleep – to this day, I have to fight drowsiness when I sit in meditation, I think largely because of the neurological connections I built at this time.  I’m laughing again – the mind is a funny, funny thing!)

Dating back even further.  To when my first daughter was an infant, and I was driving back and forth across the Bay Bridge to visit my husband’s grandmother.  Thanks to his engineering class, I learned that, in the event of an earthquake, a portion of the eastern span of the bridge was meant to fall into the bay, to prevent the entire thing from pulling itself apart (this is good engineering, by the way).  And I obsessed over what I would do if that happened while I was on the bridge.  I calculated how fast we’d be going when we hit the water, and that, unfortunately, we were likely to survive the fall.  Which meant drowning, unless I could get a window cracked before we hit the water and the electronics shorted out, so the car could fill and equalize the pressure so I could open a door and get us out.  I imagined the whole thing in my head again and again and again. And again.  And again.  It was awful.  And then I read about neuroplasticity, and about the ability of the brain to rewire itself, and I decided I was going to get off that superhighway of bridge-collapse-drowning despair and rewrite the neural connections.  But to do that, I had to notice when I started down the story so that I could step away from it.  Which I did.

Mindfulness. 

I could go on and on.  But what this all means is that, as I have begun to come to realize, I have long had a robust mindfulness practice.  One that has given me deep insight into my mind and its inner workings, as well as into the fundamental interconnectedness of all beings (the realization of which is, in itself, yet another essay).  A practice that did not, in spite of my flirtation with meditation in my twenties, rely in any way on sitting meditation.

And yet, to this day, when people talk about their years of mindfulness practice, I have trouble claiming the depth of my own, precisely because it was not a silent sitting practice.

And isn’t that interesting.

My reading and talking to other people suggests that I am not alone in this.  That being able to complete long sits, and, especially, long silent retreats, are considered some kind of gold standard against which all other practices are held.  This strikes me as a limiting and limited way of assessing and judging practice.  Totally aside from the problematics of assessing others’ practice, when assessing our own, is it really productive to judge it on the basis of: I sat for X hours, or Y many days in a row, or Z number of retreats this year?  As a friend recently asked me when I spoke with her about going on retreat (and I should say here that I am not against retreats in general, and that my retreat experiences have been intensely valuable in my overall practice, and that I’m looking forward to finding the time and money to go on another one):  in aid of what?