Day 88: Potential, Part I

I've been thinking a lot about that realization I had the other day that I'm not writing about (some of) the things that are on my mind the most, because I really want to get them right.  So, in the spirit of letting go of that a little, here's a short series on something that really has been occupying a lot of mental real estate lately.  Imperfect, but out there.

“Mindfulness is awareness that arises through paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally.”  - Jon Kabat-Zinn

I don’t think it would be an understatement to say that mindfulness has saved my life.  At the same time, it is also true that I have often felt, and still feel, alienated from and resistant to mindfulness. 

I know.  It’s complicated.

I’m not even sure where to start.

I think that, because I am a linguistic anthropologist, it’s perhaps best to start with the ways that words like meditation and mindfulness are used, and the prototypes that build up around those uses.  Of most interest to me is how those prototypes exclude certain practices and people, in ways that are actually antithetical to the practice of mindfulness.  In ways that rob mindfulness practice of its potential to radically transform social structures and relationships. 

In my twenties and thirties, living in Berkeley and even after moving down to Southern California, I knew lots of people who engaged in what we might think of as present-oriented activities, especially yoga and meditation.  In that context, my exposure to meditation often came from people who talked about how hard it was.  Especially when talking about sitting for long periods, or going on meditation retreats, from which they would come back talking about excruciating physical pain, mental and emotional storms, and, at the end, a fantastic feeling of peace and oneness with everything that, inevitably, they would describe as “wearing off”.  From my perspective, I could go for a hard workout, work on my dissertation, and drink a glass of wine with the same effects, and with a lot less expenditure of time and money.

More seriously, I felt (and still do feel) a very deep resistance to the idea of putting myself into a situation that causes extreme physical pain, just for the opportunity to watch that pain mindfully.  As someone who has lived with chronic nerve pain, and who had survived several bouts of deep depression, I just could not, for the life of me, discern the need to create more pain for myself.  It felt unkind.  And also limiting, in the sense that it seemed like a practice that couldn’t be open to everyone.  I knew people, myself included, who just physically could not sit for ten hours a day.  To do so would be to ignore the very real limitations of my body.

Unfortunately, in some settings and with some people, to say that is to show, not discernment, but resistance.  And the prescription is to get on that cushion and suck it up.

I tell this story in conjunction with the definition of mindfulness above, to point to the ways in which mindfulness practice, in the West, has come to be identified almost solely with sitting meditation, and with the project of self-knowledge and self-improvement.  And I want to suggest that, while the self-knowledge gained through individual practice has been one of the greatest gifts of my life, I feel strongly that by limiting our understanding and practice of mindfulness to that, we also limit its radical and transformative potential to the transformation of the individual. (The assumption being that that is sufficient.)

My resistance to what I perceived to be a potentially damaging practice caused me to avoid sitting meditation entirely (even though I had had a sitting practice in my twenties).  I have come to see that as a form of wise discernment.  Even as I was avoiding sitting meditation, however, that same wise part of myself knew that mindfulness, and the Buddhist tenets upon which secular Western mindfulness is largely based, had something important to offer.  In seeking out information about the practice of mindfulness, I also continued to carefully watch and attend to my aversion, exploring its causes and conditions, noting how it felt in my body, and what stories attached themselves to it.

And I’m laughing at myself right now.  Because even though the next part of this story is about how I came to realize that I’d been practicing mindfulness for more than two decades before I allowed myself to call my practice “mindfulness”, I had not, until the moment of this writing, realized that, in all of the careful ways that I recognized and attended to my aversion to sitting meditation as it was being offered to me, I was practicing mindfulness. 

That is funny!

Two books changed everything for me, slowly slowly, but surely.  The first was the wise little book Buddhism Without Belief, which not only gave me permission to practice secular Buddhism, but also brought me to an understanding of non-attachment which let me – a parent who could not imagine feeling non-attachment to my children – begin to recognize the Four Noble Truths, and to explore the practices offered by each one.  That is the subject of another essay.  The second book was called The Mindfulness Revolution; it is a collection of essays about the practice of mindfulness, gathered together in one place.  In one essay, the author said something along the lines of: we don’t sit in meditation to get better at sitting or breathing, or even to get better at meditating; we sit in meditation to strengthen our ability to be present in our day-to-day lives. 

What?

Nothing I’d heard from anyone I knew who sat in meditation had led me to believe that the practice that took place on the cushion was meant to be a practice that continued off the cushion.  I literally thought that the goal of meditation was to create a peaceful feeling that lasted for a while after the practice ended, and then wore off and had to be renewed.  And I couldn’t make that make sense to me.  But this – this made sense.  I understood it in my mind to be like going to the gym.  At the time, I hated exercise.  So when I exercised, god knew it wasn’t to get better at exercising – it was to be strong for picking up my daughters and swinging them around, for grabbing all the bags of groceries in one trip in from the car, for going camping with my dog and my family.  In other words, I exercised so that all the muscles I built up in the gym were available to me in my real life.

You mean meditation works that way?

Turns out, the answer is yes.