Timeless truths for modern mindfulness a practical guide to a more focused and quiet mind by arnie kozak

Copyright © 2018 by Arnie Kozak All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 Skyhorse Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes Special editions can also be created to specifications For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or info@skyhorsepublishing.com Skyhorse® and Skyhorse Publishing® are registered trademarks of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.®, a Delaware corporation Visit our website at www.skyhorsepublishing.com 10 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file Cover design by Rain Saukas Cover photo credit: iStock Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-2802-8 Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-2803-5 Printed in the United States of America For all my students, past, present, and future Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Section I: Appreciating Mindfulness Chapter A Brief History of Mindfulness Meditation: Starting Wherever You Are Axiom: Separate efforts from results Chapter Why I Practice Mindfulness Meditation: Getting into Your Meditation Seat Axiom: Problems don’t have to be problems Chapter Buddha 2.0: The Buddha Wasn’t a Buddhist Meditation: Following Sounds Axiom: Thank you; No thank you Chapter Mindfulness and Your Religion Meditation: Get Curious about Your Mind Axiom: There is no goal for mindfulness meditation practice Section II: How to Practice Chapter How to Pay Attention Meditation: Breathing 101 Axiom: Every burden is also a teacher Chapter Demythologizing Practice Meditation: Getting Intimate with Your Body (Body Scan) Axiom: Investigate the energy underlying the story Chapter The Buddha’s Top Five Obstacles to Practice Meditation: Walking Axiom: Unwanted visitations don’t have to be proliferated Chapter Meditation and Daily Life Meditation: Informal Practice Axiom: You are permitted to drive the speed limit Chapter What You Can Expect from Practice Meditation: Intentional Breathing Axiom: Not every problem can/should be fixed Section III: Mindfulness in Action Chapter 10 Operating Instructions for Your Brain Meditation: The Breathing Body Axiom: Your rational brain has a different agenda than your emotional brain: know the difference Chapter 11 Evolution Meditation: Working with Your Stress Cues Axiom: What’s the best way to take care of myself in this moment? Chapter 12 Overcoming FEAR Meditation: AIR—Appreciate, Inquire, and Revise Axiom: Calibrate your GPS: Get some rest, put things in context, start again in the next moment Chapter 13 Embracing Adversity Meditation: Embracing Adversity Axiom: Actions are preferable to interpretations Chapter 14 Undoing Trauma and Pain Meditation: Metabolizing Trauma Axiom: Mindlessness never takes a vacation Chapter 15 Dealing with Equanimity Lapses Meditation: Forgiveness Axiom: Grief is the admission price to the present moment Section IV: Going Deeper Chapter 16 Changing the Way You See the World Meditation: Open Presence without Agenda Axiom: Hope is not the same thing as confidence Chapter 17 The Buddha’s Revolutionary Project Meditation: Finding Joy, Rest, and Peace Axiom: Vulnerability is simply what happens to embodied beings who live in a world subject to the laws of physics and evolution Chapter 18 The Buddha’s First Teaching Meditation: What Does the Mind Want? Axiom: Don’t believe anything you think Chapter 19 Who’s Running the Show? Meditation: Mind Scan Axiom: Two words that make all the difference: “This is happening” versus “This is happening to me.” Section V: Going Even Deeper Chapter 20 Mindfulness with a Capital “M” Meditation: Breathing through Resistance Axiom: We are human becomings who take form through an impetus toward interest, joy, and care Chapter 21 A Value-Driven Life Meditation: Opening the Heart Axiom: We are not to blame AND we are responsible Chapter 22 Making the World a Better Place Meditation: Working with Chronic Pain Axiom: The “point” of life is to negotiate the laws of physics in ways that are sustaining, and where possible, graceful, joyful, and significant Chapter 23 Inching toward Awakening Meditation: Sitting Still Axiom: Perfectionism is a cheat against impermanence Chapter 24 Moving from FEAR into the Vast Meditation: Mindfulness of Music Axiom: Sovereignty is nothing other than telling shame and death to go f*%# themselves Chapter 25 Unconditional Happiness Meditation: Emptiness Axiom: Take care of meaning and happiness takes care of itself Core Principles Epilogue Acknowledgments any minds (and hands) touch a book in the process of its writing My agent Grace Freedson got the attention of Susan Randol who acquired the book for Skyhorse Publishing Michele Rubin took over from Susan and helped to bring the book to completion I am particularly grateful for her interest in mindfulness and her helping to make this work more accessible to the reader She has breathed air into this manuscript, much like we in mindfulness meditation My friends and readers, Erik Sween and Richard Pinckney, contributed insightful edits to the final draft Dr Pinckney was one of my first mindfulness students many years ago and his edits were particularly helpful Practicing mindfulness for almost three decades, I’ve indebted myself to many teachers, colleagues, and, of course, students My dogs, Harley and Sumi are not only constant companions but great teachers on the potential of mindful (and mindless!) living M belong to you and that you don’t have to identify with—it doesn’t determine the shape of your life, doesn’t make you well or not well, doesn’t determine whether you can be happy or not It’s just energy, and when you bring the power of your mindfulness to it, you can strip away the thoughts, the negative feelings, and even the labels to just be with it as it unfolds in every moment, different, waxing and waning, expanding, and contracting Axiom: The “point” of life is to negotiate the laws of physics in ways that are sustaining, and where possible, graceful, joyful, and significant As far as I know, there is no universal accord on the meaning of life Each of us endeavors to figure it out on our own Some find it through religion, others through philosophy, but for many the question isn’t really a priority Yet here we are, occupying this third planet from a minor star in the Milky Way galaxy In order for life to exist here, serious Goldilocks conditions had to prevail—not too close to that sun and not too far away—as well the composition of the atmosphere and countless other factors Whatever your beliefs and whether these include some version of an afterlife, mindfulness requests that we make the most of this life, right here and now As we move through this mysterious world with our fantastic brains and their fifty million miles of wiring, we must endeavor to survive—priority one Once that has been satisfied, we can then direct our attention to playing out this life with grace, joy, and meaning From this perspective, there is no point to life other than enjoying it This is not a call to hedonism because we know that the anticipation of pleasure is greater than the actual having of it We know too that the relentless pursuit of pleasure is not sustainably fulfilling Instead, enjoyment is more the delight that comes from attending to our experience mindfully—the rich impression of the senses, the joy of movement, the resonance of voice as it speaks in the world To be embodied is to be more graceful It is moving with awareness To attend to the process of “becoming” creates a new space It sets aside the tendency to take ownership of the self Rather than possessing what happens, you can just ride the joy, as long as “me” isn’t along for the ride This is not some aimless wandering through the world pushed and pulled by fleeting enchantments The very projects of life can be the source of joy when attended wholeheartedly Of course, the route to grace, joy, and significance sometimes goes through awkwardness, doubt, and failure In a sense, the task is to become more childlike, to embrace the wonder with youthful eyes that have more space, free from preconception Before language calcifies the mind with concepts, the child moves in timelessness Before imagination creates worlds removed from the immediacy of the moment, the child lives in eternity We can reach back to that innocence, knowing that it is not fully apprehensible yet is something we can approximate C HAPTER 23 Inching toward Awakening he metaphor in this chapter title is a bit misleading To inch toward something suggests measurable progress toward a defined destination It is true that awakening is a goal and a dignified one at that However, this path is not a straight line; I’m not even sure it’s a curved line A better metaphor might be relaxing into awakening This is not just any kind of relaxation; it would have be relaxation in conjunction with a great deal of preparation In this chapter, I will talk about the possibility of awakening or what is most often referred to as “enlightenment.” Awakening is possible and difficult It’s probably different than you imagine The Buddha’s version of awakening certainly contrasts with the notion of enlightenment from my earlier spiritual practices These mystical Hindu practices were not that dissimilar from the Brahmanic practices of the Buddha’s time Here, enlightenment was conceived as reuniting the body-bound soul with the infinite, absolute consciousness of the universe This notion of enlightenment assumes that there is some unchanging self-essence, a soul, if you will My current understanding of enlightenment is very different from where I started decades ago What I experienced then was the very start of my awakening process because I had already committed myself to meditation, self-inquiry, and opening my heart Picture the image of the Buddha, sitting serenely in the lotus posture, a half smile on his face, imperturbable He is surrounded by an iridescent halo He seems more like a celestial deity than a human being This image, while common, is an obstacle for making progress on the path toward awakening The Buddha may have indeed been like this (minus the halo of light) Yet, he was flesh and blood like the rest of us No doubt, he was an adept—a meditation prodigy from a young age Enlightenment for us probably won’t come in such an illuminating, dramatic fashion but more subtly, perhaps, and incrementally Sudden insights occur These are known as kensho in the Zen tradition Japanese Zen has long been divided into two camps—the slow and the fast Likely, a mixture of both are necessary Flashes are facilitated by steady practice and in turn give new energy T to ongoing practice In my experience and that of the Buddha, highs, flashes, and peak experiences are powerful, conducive, and compelling, and they are not the same as awakening In fact, they can become obstacles because we may start to crave their reappearance This keeps us from getting to where we wish to go Like everything else, the process of awakening is not exempt from identification and ownership There is a paradox here—it is only by letting go of expectations that we can fulfill our desire for awakening Rather than imagining progress along a path to a destination, it might be more fruitful to think of the awakening process as a conversation—one that goes between the skillful and the unskillful, the expansive and the contractive, and visitations and absences It is probably not possible to get there in one Herculean effort When we listen to the Buddha’s story, there is this sense of a dramatic, intensive, and rapid breakthrough Whether it actually happened that way, we won’t know Like much of his biography, it is likely allegorical, romanticized, and fabricated If it did happen suddenly, bear in mind that he had been working non-stop for the prior six years If he popped, he had prepared himself to so For most of us, the spiritual life will unfold like the aforementioned conversation We go back and forth between being asleep and waking up, much as we in our daily lives We go from a state of forgetfulness to a state of remembering, and neither will persist Sometimes, meditation can feel profoundly good—blissful, rapturous, and serene We want the good stuff to last forever, and the sense of awakening these feelings seem to promise is no exception Those subjective feelings seem like validation—that we are now legitimate meditators and should be taken seriously We are getting a taste of what the Buddha mastered in his own life However, awakening will always come on its own terms, and those stipulations are likely to be much slower and less glamorous than we would hope When I sit, I tend to identify “real” meditation as the kind of experience when I feel a shimmering of energy throughout my body—as if its boundaries have dissolved—it’s all energy, scintillation, and possibility This experience is intensely pleasurable, and there’s not much of “me” in it When I don’t feel that way, which is most of the time on the cushion, it seems like my meditation is inferior in some way That self-judgment is simply misguided All meditation experience is valuable It’s probable that the less luminous experiences are more instructive It’s one thing to get high; it’s another to have wisdom This is not to put down the preferred, pleasurable experience There is a lot of value in it because it speaks to farther reaches of awareness But the hazy, agitated, stuttering struggle to stay focused is a working through, an untying of knots It’s neither sexy nor pleasurable, yet it is creating the very space that will be experienced in the next shining sitting session Again, all meditation experiences are valuable, and all value will be undermined by a sense of preference, an attachment for things being one way or another Awakening comes into and out of focus When I can stay in the conversation, I am inching toward it Meditation: Sitting Still This practice is derived from a meditation I call the “Obstacles to Perfection.” In this practice, you are encouraged to sit as still as you possibly can By doing so, you create a crucible for investigating some of the energies that can knock you out of the present moment—impatience, boredom, restlessness, and discomfort Each of these states has an embodied component—you can feel it as energy in the body Each of these states also has a conceptual overlay All of them are “unpleasant” and motivate avoidance, distraction, or a wish to make them stop Think about what happens when you move in meditation You can start by analyzing an itch When an itch arises, there is a reflexive tendency to scratch it You don’t have to think about it You don’t have to choose to scratch—it usually happens by itself Likewise, when discomfort arises in the body, there is a tendency to move without thinking Automatic Your legs may fall asleep, and there will be a wish to relieve that pressure You don’t have to worry about the pins and needles, however While uncomfortable, they aren’t harmful for the period of the meditation The goal of all mindfulness practices, and this one in particular, is to bring awareness to these automatic, reflexive tendencies You can sit with the discomfort of the itch rather than to mindlessly relieve it Zen practice emphasizes precise sitting On the one hand this could be seen as rigid, and on the other hand, it speaks to something important To sit straight-up without moving requires intention, discipline, and vigilance against the automatic tendencies of the mind It also provides a container that can help to guide the mind away from distraction You don’t want to get caught up in a disciplined posture too early in your practice By now, though, since you’ve been practicing for a while, you are ready to give this a try Get into your meditation seat See if you can make an intention to sit as still as you can for as long as you can, up to an hour (or longer if you wish) Your physical posture creates a crucible for investigating the difficulties and joys that will arise Start by placing your attention on your breathing, and settle into the body with a brief body scan, sweeping attention throughout the body After you’ve been sitting for a while, keep an eye out for any signs of impulses that want to move you from your spot It might be something as simple as an itch or a sense of discomfort in your legs Bring your attention to these sensations like a microscope, getting as close to them as you can, scrutinizing them with fascination Whatever arises—be it boredom, restlessness, or impatience—bring the same type of interest Observe the phenomenon for its location and its physical properties: pressure, movement, and temperature Strip away the stories of why you are bored, restless, or impatient to investigate the underlying energies As you make contact with these energies, your sense of time may dissolve After all, a sense of time can only be sustained by marking the present with thoughts about the future and the past—how much time has passed already? How much longer? The longer you sit, the more discomfort, boredom, restlessness, and impatience will “scream” at you, and at the same time, the more chance you’ll have to experience the pleasure of the root energies that give rise to each of them When you make it through an entire hour, congratulate yourself on your accomplishment The goal, of course, is not to notch hours on your belt but to work through the energies that move you from your spot Axiom: Perfectionism is a cheat against impermanence There are many reasons why people are perfectionistic All of them have to with trying to have some measure of control over things Ultimately, it boils down to feeling a need to be in emotional command, or at least to have the appearance of it in any given situation—including the entire fabric of one’s life The control that perfectionism seeks is an attempt to cheat impermanence, to sidetrack uncertainty and to establish terra firma beneath your feet Sometimes it seems like it works, yet in the long run, it doesn’t work because impermanence can’t be cheated There is no work-around for it, and with mindfulness practice, there is no longer any reason to fear it Impermanence can be embraced Life is impermanent not only because things are always changing Impermanence also includes uncertainty, ambiguity, and the big and small traumatic insults that happen every day Nothing is permanent, not even self Things are changing whether we recognize it or not If we get philosophical for a minute, the floor under where you are sitting right now probably looks pretty solid, and of course, at the level of conventional Newtonian reality it is For the most part, you can rely on it to hold you as you walk across However, if we went inside the atoms themselves, we’d find a world of shifting energies and spaces—unpredictable quantum mechanics Even without having to resort to subatomic physics, we can’t see most of the change that is happening all around us at any given moment If I look out at the Green Mountains, they look noble, still, and firm Yet, they are shifting all the time They are also wearing down Our bodies are like this too They are nothing other than constant change Think of all the processes going on in your body right now, few of which are under any sort of your control Your brain is processing vast amounts of information from your senses, millions of bits of information in any given second The gut digests, the heart beats, countless chemical reactions occur All the atoms in our bodies change over every year or so We are in constant exchange with our surroundings At the microscopic level, it is hard to know where me stops and the rest of the world begins Perhaps we are all part of one fabric, one cloth of energy, space, and time Physicists tell us that this is so, and it is something the Buddha recognized We are always being affected by and affecting—we are nothing other than interdependent exchange in every moment Given these situations of change, it seems a conceit to think that we could exert control over them Instead, we can dive right into the very uncertainty of existence, and if we bring that sense of curiosity, then we’ll be fine There is no other way to be than fine when we relinquish ownership of what is happening C HAPTER 24 Moving from FEAR into the Vast onsidering the vast spaces of life can serve as metaphor of awakened freedom Vastness is, yet another, antidote for storytelling My concerns are small—insignificant—in the larger scheme of things My stories live in a much greater context This is not to suggest dismissing our personal concerns but rather to see them in the broader vision of life and the cosmos All of this will eventually change into something else The sun will die and along with it probably us too The universe is vast beyond comprehension Vastness is creation itself—the birth of the universe in the explosion that became stars and space We find the vast all around us if we are willing to slow down and look Instead of just seeing the ocean, consider how it spreads farther than you can imagine If you stop to look at the night sky, the stars call to a more staggering kind of vastness, infinity itself (or close to it) The blackness of night invites a suspension of my individual story The mountains on the horizon call for a grander vision of what is possible As we’ve already discussed, the vast also exists within our brains—the staggering number of neurons, connections, and millions of miles of wiring This vastness is impossible to see, yet whenever we turn our gaze within, we are getting a glimpse of this stupendous connectivity The vast also resides in our bodies Science is now discovering the extent of the microbiome that lives in our gut, with its trillions of microorganisms, weighing to pounds, outnumbering our own cells 10:1 There are also vast spaces within each atom that comprises our bodies and all other material of the world and the universe What seems solid—even the hardest steel—is hauntingly hollow If we somehow removed all the space from all the atoms in the entire universe, we’d have something about the size of a bowling ball Stories are compelling, addicting, and habitual They are distractions Perhaps, too, we ignore the vast because it can be dangerous—larger than our story, larger than our small self, and it doesn’t care about that small self The vast reminds us of our vulnerability, precariousness, and aloneness Just imagine being shipwrecked in the middle of the ocean On the ocean, we are always on the edge of being or not being amidst the forces of the tide, waves, and depth, as well as its creatures beneath C In other words, impermanence is made plain by the vast When you commit yourself to mindfulness practice, it will open you to wisdom, and help you to appreciate the vast presence of the world and your place within the cosmos Meditation: Mindfulness of Music Shinzen Young is a world-renowned meditation teacher and also my friend He is a brilliant, wise, and visionary soul (as you will find when you read his book, The Science of Enlightenment) Some years ago, Shinzen invented a new meditation practice designed to reach disadvantaged kids The idea was to use something they were already doing—listening to music—as the basis for the meditation In this way, these kids didn’t need to “learn” to meditate, they only had to learn to listen to their music in new ways A lot of the time, we have music playing in the background, accompanying us as we go about other activities In this practice, however, we put the music front and center to attention Shinzen teaches four different way to attend to the music: Get into your meditation seat Focus on rest Listening to music can be pleasurable and is one way to facilitate feelings of rest in the body (see the Meditation: Joy, Rest, and Peace for more details) As you listen to music, find the places that feel pleasurable in your body You might want to choose a piece of music conducive to pleasure, whatever that might be for you Focus on feeling Listening to music also gives rise to other feelings beyond pleasure You can also appreciate the sensations in the body that arise while listening Whatever these feelings are, focus your attention on them the way you would with a body scan Focus on vanishing Music, like all experience in life, is constantly changing You can attend to these changes quite easily in music as the particular sound of a musical instrument stops and another begins Attend to the changing patterns of music that emerge through time You are listening for variation, change, and absence As always, absence is followed by a new presence Focus on sound You can also focus just on the sound of the music, in other words, be mindful of the music as an ever-changing experience in the present moment This is my preferred way for practicing Ever since learning to mindfulness meditation, I’ve enjoyed going to concerts (chamber music, in particular) and meditating on the music The sound is my chosen object for anchoring attention, and I keep returning to the sound itself whenever my attention wanders away By being fully present to the music, it becomes more intensive, rich, and clear I listen with my entire body Of course, as attention becomes saturated with the beautiful sound, feelings of rest and other pleasurable sensations arise Axiom: Sovereignty is nothing other than telling shame and death to go f*%# themselves In 1988, when I first started graduate school in clinical psychology, I coined my first axiom Admittedly, it was crude, yet to the point Shame and death are major points of vulnerability—to body and mind If we can be unattached to both, then we have the ultimate freedom Nothing can touch us This, I think, is what the Buddha was saying, although he didn’t employ an expletive in making his point Much of his teaching points in this direction Because everything is impermanent, it doesn’t make sense to anchor our well-being on changing things To be unattached in this case, doesn’t mean that you don’t care It simply means that you will not take ownership of it You will not make okayness the status of the body and mind All life comes to an end We may be the only creatures capable of appreciating this fact ahead of time and getting neurotic about it as a consequence That eventuality does not have to diminish life and can, in fact, enhance it Death is not really a big deal, even though we think that it is All life is food Eventually we return to the earth The mind operates similarly—its contents, stories, and feelings are likewise impermanent There is no essential self that can really suffer anything Shame is not the only painful emotion, but it is emblematic of the problem of identification and ownership— liking and disliking, pushing and pulling Shame is akin to the threat of death of the physical self It is as if the self has been indicted, exposed, and judged unworthy—shrinking from oneself and the world Without contingency, there is nothing for shame to take hold of, nothing for fear to grasp You are free C HAPTER 25 Unconditional Happiness appiness is a concept when we think about it as a general way of being, rather than a state in the moment “Are you happy?” requires abstracting from the present to contemplating life in general Whatever the result of that assessment, happiness always happens to a “me.” Joy, elation, and pleasure, on the other hand, can happen to any furry creature No self to own is required Think about what a dog can feel Can dogs be happy? I don’t believe they can in the same way that we can My dogs can be content in the moment, excited, exuberant, ebullient They seem to be in a happy state whenever there is a reunion after an absence My dog Harley’s whole-body tail wagging is the telltale sign He doesn’t think, “I am happy now.” He is just happiness or excitement or elation with no selfowning of that experience For him, there is no sense of self standing outside that flow of emotion He can’t seem to think, “Yes, I feel pretty good now, but I’ll probably get shortchanged at dinner again I know that he’s going to keep leaving the house ” I know that he and my other dog, Sumi, are capable of some forms of thinking, and research has shown that dogs are capable of a rudimentary theory of mind They think a lot, and without language it’s hard to imagine what they are thinking about However, I’m pretty sure there is no sense of “I,” “me,” or “mine” in there, even when Harley is demonstrating clear signs of jealousy When happiness is defined by the culture and is heavily influenced by television, advertising, and other media, we get a version that is materialistic It is focused on relieving every possible inconvenience, discomfort, or deficit Instead of letting Madison Avenue dictate happiness, let’s look at it broadly to include a sense of peacefulness (equanimity), acceptance, and even a touch of wisdom This more introverted version of happiness means that you aren’t always jumping for joy, smiling exuberantly, and celebrating Instead, it is the abiding sense that you are okay no matter what has happened, is happening now, and will happen in the future It is the uncoupling of your well-being from conditions both internal and external Therefore, it is possible to be happy even when you are sick, in pain, or experience a loss Unconditional happiness means that you can be happy even when H you are in a bad mood, even when you are anxious, sad, or stressed You don’t need all the trappings of a “happy” life in order to be happy Embracing unconditional happiness is not a permanent fix Like awakening, it is a conversation You may find yourself miserable—under the duress of conditions—and then, in the next moment, you can extricate yourself from this place and move back toward the unconditional This is what you’ve been working toward with your mindfulness practice First, you must recognize that you’ve gone off track, down the rabbit hole of contingency Next, you reorient yourself to the wisdom that you’ve learned There is no one to be unhappy Now you can redirect yourself through mindfulness to dismantle the FEAR that has taken hold of you Some simple revisions are in order The rule that has been weighing upon you can be released The notion that “I should have” becomes less compelling For instance, as I am writing these lines in the summer of 2016, there are a number of conditions that have the potential to impact my happiness My back hurts I’ve been feeling under the weather I haven’t been as productive as I would like There are a number of situations going on: complications with a car repair, difficulties communicating with my aging mother, and frustrations with a general contractor On top of these things, I am getting older, and a good friend of mine has died (months ago but the inexplicable sense of loss continues) Donald Trump may be elected President of the United States (and, in fact, was) Any one of these things by itself or in combination with the others can hijack my happiness—my sense of well-being It is easy to feel stressed and sorry for myself When I notice stress, self-pity, or self-sabotage occurring, I remind myself that I have a choice—I can continue down this path of feeling self-pity, or I can move toward equanimity It’s as if I find myself dancing with an undesirable partner Now that I notice I’ve become entangled, I start to disentangle myself I step back to take a good look at how I abandoned myself to these “awful” conditions Everything I am dealing with is simply that—everything that is being dealt with The universe did not select me for these misfortunes; it’s not picking on me It is not personal I have the resources to effectively cope with all of these situations These problematic issues are far outweighed by the positive, wonderful, and privileged aspects of my life A bit of gratitude can go a long way toward creating separation from these conditions Anguish can only happen to “me,” and me is a story—a narrative constructed by my mind I reject the notion that happiness is only reserved for the blessed—those free of inconvenience, discomfort, and misfortune When I am dealing with a situation, I don’t reject the story of me but relegate it to a more subservient function I endeavor to be a self that is full of flowing energy, a constellation of ideas, feelings, and imaginings, capable of compassion, appreciation, love, and equanimity I am self-aware, able to observe and intervene with the functioning of my mind I can recalibrate the exceptions, assumptions, and rules that have taken hold by questioning their necessity “Why is this so?” “Who says so?” “Is there another way to look at this?” “What would happen if I chose self-forgiveness over self-condemnation?” Asking the questions might be enough to shake off the anguish Often, though, it takes more than intellect These ideas have gained a foothold in my mind, and I must work my way through them When I enter into meditation at these times, the stories I’ve been pulled into flood my body with hormones and neurotransmitters I feel anxious, restless, and a sense of foreboding Then I redirect my attention to those rivers of energy in my body and observe them with keen curiosity—where they flow, their intensity, and frequency Meanwhile, the stories have abated for a moment and the outpouring of chemicals along with it I go back and forth like this for a while, until the stranglehold of those stories starts to release The ratio of story to body shifts in favor of the body I start to feel a sense of peace and move from “this is happening to me” to simply, “this is happening.” I am living the wisdom of my own axiom (see Axiom: Two words that make all the difference) Without the story, there is nothing for the anguish to hold onto, nothing to keep it going I know that my life changes its configuration in every moment, and I can abide with that and my best to cope with each moment The result will be some admixture of failing and succeeding, and with practice and time, the successes start to outweigh the failures Notice that mindfulness is not some panacea It’s not some magic tonic that makes everything okay Recall that mindfulness is the translation of sati—literally meaning “recollecting,” and I remember that I can relinquish my stories in any given moment Again, it’s not that I deny, dismiss, or denounce the stories Rather, I take away their power, recognizing them for what they actually are— fabrications of mind This is a powerful insight These stories don’t own me They may serve me at times, but they are not absolute truth I come back to the inevitably of dukkha Life is rigged against us We are embodied beings subject to the laws of physics Seeming randomness prevails This is just the way things are I’d prefer it was not this way I’d rather that the world was predictable, stable, and nice at all times, but the order of the day is that life is traumatic and Traumatic It includes the little ticket frustrations, disappointments, and vulnerabilities along with the big-ticket items of sickness, aging, death, and loss Okay No problem I was built to handle this mess I have evolved extraordinary means to cope I am an adaptive machine Bring it on On top of all the inevitabilities of life, I also remind myself that while pain is inevitable, suffering is optional and always self-inflicted The sense that we are entitled to a care-free life is an illusion—if not delusion—created by a materialistic, idealistic, and comfort-seeking culture No one promised us anything It’s a miracle that we are here at all That there is life on this planet at all is improbable We mostly ignore when things go well and only focus on when they don’t Even a difficult life has more going right than going wrong Adversity is a teacher, and all the struggles of life can become the fuel for spiritual development With the attitude of mindfulness, adversity can deepen our experience of being human rather than diminish it Now that I’ve taken (actually retaken) stock of the shape of my life, I can make sure that I proceed in a way that isn’t going to make things worse I notice how my stories push and pull and complain and protect They look forward and back but never right here to things just as they are I fix that by giving my attention to the moment My breathing leads the way I can rest here in its simple movement and that can be enough Now, I go from being consumed by annoyance to getting micro hits of awakening Each moment of cessation of FEAR is a taste, glimpse, brush (choose your metaphor) with nirvana—life unconstructed, nonfabricated, and raw, as raw as it can get The stories will return I won’t be permanently enlightened, and I will repeat this process countless times throughout my lifetime, even in the span of a day! Each taste of nirvana leaves a wisdom residue, a good taste in my mouth, if you will Even though I am still prone to compulsively liking and disliking, I know that it is not really the way things have to be In a sense, I come home to myself Meditation: Emptiness This meditation practice builds on the mind scan and can be a continuation of the mind scan practice if you have the time to that Emptiness, here, refers to the absence of any agenda To this practice, you’ll be stable in your meditation seat and attend to whatever arises in the mind In the mind scan, you did this in an organized way, moving from one source of the mind to the next Here you’ll let the mind come to you and attend with the same impersonal, curious, and focused attention This practice is sometimes called “bare attention” or “choiceless awareness,” and both of these terms capture the intended scope of the practice Bare suggests not adding anything—no expectations, assumptions, or rules Choiceless suggests not having a preference for one type of experience over another and a sense of passivity You don’t go after certain kinds of mind experience, they come to you—and they will! You don’t have to go out of your way to conjure anything You can think of emptiness as a natural state of the mind when it is successfully disengaged from the default mode network In that moment, it is highly attuned to the body and its senses Like the mind scan, this practice is an advanced one in the sense that it requires a higher degree of concentration not to get pulled into stories Get into your meditation seat Settle your attention on breathing until it stabilizes Now, spend a few minutes doing a body scan sweep from the top of your head to your fingers and toes Feel how the entire body participates in breathing After grounding yourself in the body, you can now let go of all instructions other than to stay with your experience without trying to anything with it Observe everything that arises with curiosity Keep your attention keen, and if it waivers bring it back Be fascinated by everything in your experience without getting involved with it If you prefer to give it a quick label, “thought” or “emotion,” that’s fine but no more involved than that See what it’s like to have no agenda, no craving, no desire for anything in particular Appreciate this moment, as it is, unadorned Axiom: Take care of meaning and happiness takes care of itself We evolved as a species solving problems The size of our brains, the dexterity of our hands, the opposable thumb—these traits arose as problem-solving adaptations We are restless by design Industry is a positive manifestation of that restlessness, and through it we have built civilizations, art, and science There is the classic teaching parable of the man who has died and finds himself in a luminous place, greeted by an elegant woman in a white suit He is informed that, in this place, he can have whatever he wants—any desire fulfilled, anything he could imagine was his for the taking He was delighted, excited, and began tripping over himself with requests After some time of wearing the fanciest clothes, driving the most luxurious cars, and traveling to the most exotic places, he started to get restless, even a little bored Vexed, he found the white-suited woman one day and asked her for a job “I need to get my hands dirty All this stuff is fine and good, but I need something to do.” The white-suited woman looked at him and said, “I’m sorry, work is the only thing you can’t get here.” Flustered, the man says, “Well, if that’s the case, I might as well be in hell!” She smiled at him, “Where did you think you were?!” Considering the question of meaning is important, obsessing over it is not helpful It’s not as though we can, in a vacuum, figure out the “meaning of life.” Some balance between considering the question and living one’s way into it is best It’s also not helpful to aim directly for happiness The question of happiness almost always yields to the question of how to live life in a meaningful way Once that purposeful project or calling has been found, happiness emerges naturally As the teaching parable suggests, very few of us could be content to live a purely hedonistic lifestyle with no overarching quest for meaning Happiness is elusive and overrated If you can take care of meaning, happiness will take care of itself You’ve completed your journey into learning mindfulness with its axioms and practices Let’s review with a summary of the core principles that have been covered and share some final thoughts Core Principles H ere are five core principles that have been covered throughout this book Experience is fabricated No one owns experience You can choose not to identify with experience The mind can be trained Happiness is noncontingent If experience is fabricated, then we appreciate that what we see, hear, taste, smell, touch, and think is not absolute reality We can become more pliable, wieldy, and lighter without needing to take what happens with grave seriousness If no one owns the experience, then there is no one to suffer Things happen, situations occur, responses must be mounted, yet these can all happen without burdening someone—namely, “me.” If we can choose to not identify with experience, then events can occur without that sense of ownership Ownership and identification go hand-in-hand Without identification, it’s hard to assume ownership, and without a sense of ownership, it’s hard to identify with something If the mind can be trained, which we know that it can, then change is possible Everything that we’ve discussed in the book is predicated on this principle Finally, if happiness is noncontingent, then the path to happiness is noncontingency itself We can be happy, okay, even brilliant regardless of our conditions, circumstances, and situations Such noncontingency is the ultimate freedom Epilogue indfulness is sati—to remember I remember that my self is a convenient and functional fiction that helps me get through the world, and that it is really a shifting pattern of energy through time I participate in the dynamic flow of energy and events that comprise the cosmos I remember that I am part of something larger than my own story I remember that whatever is happening now is changing and will change into something else The Quebec motto Je me souviens (I remember myself) is not narcissistic; the self, free of identification and ownership, becomes an agent of goodness My self, stripped of story, yields to compassion, openness, appreciation, and peace My self, released from self-preoccupation is now full of love and light This person smiles, dances, and sings This person plays in the waves of life, swimming in gratitude, grace, and bliss I remember that I have forgotten I remember that I have a choice—I can extricate myself from habit I don’t have to be beholden to my evolutionary programming I can hack that code and swim against the stream Upstream, I will find a uniquely human way of being-in-the-world: one of self-awareness, agency, and goodness I remember I remember I remember It is okay that I forget You will forget too, more than you’ll remember We all Remembering and forgetting is a life-long conversation, a back and forth dance of attention It is important to remember that forgetting is inevitable There’s no need to beat yourself up over it There is no need to place undue pressure on yourself to be in a state of mindfulness all of the time Such a rule is not particularly conducive to mindfulness! The next moment is always the next opportunity to remember This next breath is always available for salvation from forgetfulness The next moment is always ready to set aside reactivity, to start again fresh, new, and original The next moment is always now M ... born again as animal, human, or god The actual person of Siddhartha Gotama (Gotama is the historical Buddha’s family name; Siddhartha was a designation that came long after he was dead) is more. .. than as a shield against its darkness I want to offer mindfulness as a path to maintaining a sense of peace, balance, and stability The world needs us to not turn away, but rather to turn toward... mindfulness as part of a radical selftransformation process By transformation, I mean changing the fundamental way you relate to yourself, others, and the world By radical I mean an abrupt departure