Mindfulness!

The Module on Mindfulness: 

What is mindfulness?

We all have some idea of what it is. We’ve all heard the word. We hear it quite a bit, don’t we? It might have been one of the things that drew you to this webinar. Most of us have been to workshops where the leaders used some version. Most of us have tried to understand and practice it to some degree.

So what is it?

Questions and responses. (Is it possible to have a whiteboard and a “scribe”? LOL. We're getting the assumptions and previous learning out there.

Is it meditation?

Is it a process you do to prepare for an exercise, a visualization, or something else?

Is it a breathing exercise?

Is it religious or spiritual?

Is it a visualization?

Is it Buddhist?

If it is Buddhist, what are the sources of the practice?

Does it take long to learn? Or can you ever really learn it?

How is it different from a “normal” or ordinary state of mind, our normal walking around attitude and habits?

The answer to most of these questions is halfway correct, and they provide a great jumping-off point. But, and this is a big caution, the term mindfulness is fairly recent, and it’s taken on several new meanings and understandings depending on who is using it and in what context. It is not static. Modern neuroscience has added something to our knowledge and insight.

But in our rush to make it scientific, we've also cut out some elements that seem religious or prescriptions of behavior. We may want to be spiritual rather than religiously Buddhist. I have no real objection to the inquiry, but it also might have eliminated a few critical elements, or that is my suspicion, so I’ll briefly review its history before we dive in.

The source is the relatively early Buddhist text, the Satipatthana Sutta, originally in Pali, associated with what is known as the Elder Tradition, the oldest Buddhist school. The oldest text is two thousand years old, though it certainly existed as oral instruction for monks much earlier. These instructions were passed from one generation to the next as oral teachings. They were memorized word for word. It is a relatively short text. Even today, especially in Sri Lanka and Myanmar, which used to be called Burma, most monks and many laypeople know the entire text. They’ve memorized it. I’ve met them.

The Satipatthana Sutta is translated as “The Foundations of Mindfulness.” Sati, the Pali term translated as “mindful,” simply means “remember.” So, it is not an exact translation. There is not much Buddhist philosophy. The emphasis is on specific exercises for purifying the mind, including even how to count the breaths correctly.

Although associated with meditation, the practice of sati itself is not a meditation. It is sometimes done while you meditate, but it can also be done while walking, standing, or even sleeping. It should not be confused with vipassana meditation (which it often is). Vipassana is known more widely in the West as “Insight Meditation.” Mindfulness practice and Insight Meditation made their debut in the West when two, Joseph Goldstein and Jack Kornfield, stayed in Asia when the Conflict in Vietnam was raging, shaved their heads, and spent several years doing formal study as forest monks. When these men returned to California, they took off their robes and began to teach what they called Insight Meditation. They also taught sati practice. It attracted the attention of several clinical psychologists, who started to use various adaptations in therapy. Neuroscientists have also found that the practice can have remarkable effects on the synapses of the brain. (some have made incredible claims, but extraordinary results are new; in the two-thousand-year-old text, at the end, is a list of expected results from anywhere between seven years and two weeks of practice, and yes, they are all remarkable. Some things never change).

And you’ve been promised some remarkable results if you practice some form of Mindfulness.

Before I tell you to just be present and count your breaths, let’s examine the practice in detail and see what might be required. I am trying to opt for the non-religious or meditative version of the practice, but ironically, the earliest Pali texts give us the clearest introduction regarding the steps involved, the actual practice, and the overall understanding.

Starting point:

We are not creating a new way of thinking or believing. Mindfulness is not a new state of mind. It is not something you might get from a pharmaceutical intervention, like taking LSD or Ayahuasca.

It has to do with the ordinary day-to-day working of your mind. A concise answer about what it is might be to rule out specific definitions or descriptions of what to expect. We are not trying to change our minds or adopt a more helpful, different way of acting or behaving. If we discover something that appears new, better, or more exciting, we can be sure that it was already there and we just weren’t seeing it.

Even if I were to say that we are trying to learn a new way of seeing what’s happening, I would be wrong. So why don’t we see it? (most people who practice mindfulness do see and understand things that they previously not been aware of)

We get distracted. Human beings all get distracted. Almost anything outside our minds can be a distraction from what’s happening in our minds. A smell can trigger a memory; a single word can trigger an emotion related to something that happened in the past; a gesture reminds us that we were attacked one dark night. So this is an actual, normal reaction of our minds and something helpful; we may want to buy what smells good, we may want to avoid the person or situation that was triggered by the emotion, we may turn around and run from a situation that might become dangerous and not turn out well.

But these mental clues might also be false alarms, confusing a critical part of regular brain activity and giving us incorrect information. Have you ever heard that in a dangerous situation? You have to calm down, breathe deeply, and look around you to see what is really going on.

We are not necessarily in a life-or-death situation learning Mindfulness Practice, but the first piece of advice is the same--breathe. Count your breaths, 1 to 10. Start each count on the inhalation and end it when you breathe out. If you lose count, go back to 1 and start over. Keep it very simple. There is already a lot going on.

Then, we become aware of our bodies. How are we holding ourselves? Where are the strains, the tensions, the actual pain? What does it feel like? It may be the same as that night you were attacked, but right now, you are just sitting comfortably in a chair. If you pay attention to that area, does it disappear? You just allow your attention to go where you feel the contraction and rest. Does it change?

Then, we may start to see that the person you are at this moment is not the same person who was scared on the night you were attacked. So, just notice who is doing the breath counting and being aware of his or her body right now, not back then.

This is Mindfulness Practice. It might differ from how you usually experience your breath, thoughts, body, and idea of who you are, but it is not alien. It is just deliberately turning your focus inside your mind for a definite period. It helps us focus and train our attention so that we do not get distracted by everything happening outside ourselves.

When we first start doing this, we may experience discomfort. We will want to stop, but that is OK. I recommend that you start with five—or maybe ten-minute periods. It is called “Practice.” You may notice that your concentration improves, and you are less jittery or anxious. I cannot predict what will happen for you, but most people notice definite results over time.

Practice period (Probably 5-8 minutes, lots of silence).

Notice how you are sitting. Just make sure that you are going to stay awake. We will only be doing this for a bit longer than 5 minutes. Notice how uncomfortable you feel if you are uncomfortable or anxious.

Begin counting your breaths, 1 to 10; begin counting on the inhalation and end it on the exhalation. If you can't get to ten, simply go back to 1 and begin again. It is normal to lose track of the counting. This is not a contest.

Notice the quality of your breaths. Again, don’t try to change anything. Just notice if you are breathing deely or shallowly, rapidly or slowly. Is your breath labored?

2-3 minutes in silence

Do you notice any pains or tensions in your body?

Scan quickly from the top of the head to the toes. (3-4 minutes)

See what happens when you direct your attention to the part of the body that is tense or painful.

Who is doing all this?

Silence for 3 to 4 minutes,

Open your eyes, see where you are right now, see the room, readjust to the screen and the other Zoom participants.

Intimacy in the Temple Courtyard

Last night, my friend Kumar asked me to share what I understood about “intimacy.” I immediately understood him to be talking about more than just a concept, a feeling, the interrelationship of the lines and colors in a design, or even an attribute of human love. One might be able to base the concept of intimacy on feelings, relationships, or even the elements of design and still miss the point.

I love Kumar deeply and know he is going through a creative crisis as he formulates the final project for his degree at a prestigious design college. My immediate instinct is to help him in any way I can, but I know all too well that he is the creative genius and source of his own inspiration. Trying to be helpful might block him. I can point in a direction or share my own experience, but I cannot cancel the dilemma.

I mumbled something about my experience of intimacy being connected to my meditation practice. “Yes,” he said, “I’ve heard that meditation is connected. Can you tell me more?” He’s a young man with different sleep needs, so I begged off and said good night.

When I woke up, I found my mind flooded with memories of that period when I was trying to solve my first zen koan in the meditation hall. I can’t count the times that Aitken Roshi would try to soften the blow of my frustration and disappointment of a failed response with his gentle pointer: “Not intimate enough.” It became my mantra that I would carry back to the meditation hall. If I tried to forge an “est” business-like plan to achieve deeper intimacy, of course, that didn’t help, but it didn’t stop me. When I tried to figure out what “Intimacy” really meant linguistically, that was not much help either. Recalling instances of deep intimacy, usually sexual, leads into a deep thicket of regret and failed relationships. A feeling of intimacy, or a memory of that feeling, was not the key I needed.

I've spent long hours in the meditation hall. Oftentimes, it’s felt like a long, tough haul with very few rewards. But somehow, I was able to keep sitting. When I learned that sometimes, or often, or perhaps all the time, seeking the rewards of discovery actually stands in the way of practice, it helped enormously. The reinforcement of an opening is usually such a surprise; it is so rare and hard-won it’s almost like an archeological excavation on Mars digging for the lost continent of Atlantis. If handled well, such as Doris Lessing's writing about the Representative of Planet 8, it might bear fruit. But this is not for mere mortals. We have to deal with what we’re given, and eventually, I did have a profound insight into what I have been given, which I will perhaps talk about at more length another time.

But it’s the exploration of intimacy, with no agenda, that I want to pursue.

Sometimes, actually often, these few words, “Not intimate enough,” kept coming back, a deep refrain in all my meditation. And they still do.


I’ll turn to another koan (Case 37, Mumonkan): “The Chestnut tree in the Temple Courtyard,” “庭前柏樹子.”
A monk asked: "Compared to what was the intent of the ancestral founder coming from the west?”
Joshu (Zhou) said, "In front of the hall, a cypress tree.”

I was at the Angela Center in Santa Rosa for a long sesshin. I can’t recall if I was having an easy time or experiencing a lot of pain in my meditation; that really doesn’t matter, but I do remember exactly where my seat was, back in the far northeast corner of the hall, far from the offering table with the Buddha’s statue but right next to the main door. I had gone into Tarrant Roshi’s room twice a day, and my response became clearer and clearer. I will not speak of any “correct answer” or give away something about time-honored practice, but after I responded, he just nodded and asked if I was ready to move on. Something inside said no that there was more there for me to experience. A koan can keep lots of mysteries locked up inside.

So I went back to my seat. After dinner on the third or fourth night, we sat for another long period of meditation and then the usual closing ritual. In that moment, my mind was having a lot of difficulty staying tightly focused, something that I usually enjoy during long periods; I thought, well, it’s the end of the day, why don’t I give myself a wide open field?

Suddenly I was back at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor attending the opening of an exhibit that honored a gift of a wonderful collection of illustrated books to the Museum’s collection by Reva and David Logan, parents of my friend Jon Logan. I was wandering through a series of small rooms, every now and then edging my way through to the front of the crowd to catch a glimpse of a wonderful illustration. The collection was rich. A sampling: Joan Miró’s À toute épreuve by Paul Éluard, Pablo Picasso’s Le Chant des morts by Pierre Reverdy, El Lissitzky’s Dlia Golosa by Vladimir Mayakovsky, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Umbra Vitae by Georg Heym. But the attention required to make out intricate designs on relatively small book pages induced a kind of narrow, tight focus.

I rounded a corner and had to look down to pay attention to the few short steps into the main hall, but when I looked up, in front of me, an entire wall of Matisse’s paper cutouts. The onslaught of bright color and form took my breath away. These were not framed posters you bought at Ikea, not the lavish prints that I’d treated myself years ago at MOMA in New York. These were the actual shapes that Matisse himself cut out and arranged on larger pieces of paper when his hands could no longer hold his brushes steadily enough to paint. There he was, an old man, holding his pencil taped on the end of a long stick to etch the lines of leaves, slowly, carefully, but freely, with the skill and care of a practice that traced back hundreds and hundreds of years. I traced their roots back to that legendary tree in the temple courtyard.




It was of course a kind of illusion, what zen meditators call makyō, and usually something to be handled with caution, like dreams. John was just leaving the hall after the service, and I reached out and touched his shoulder. He grabbed my hand, and we returned to his interview room. He asked me what had happened, and I blurted out a bunch of words. Then he asked me to show him the chestnut tree in the temple courtyard, and yes, really, there it was.

Thank you, M. Henri Matisse, for getting so intimate with your colored paper, your pencil, and your scissors. Thank you, David and Reva Logan, for your generosity. Thank you, Bob Aitken, for just pointing to where I might find intimacy, Joshu, for pointing to the chestnut tree, and John Tarrant for grabbing my hand as I was about to wander off. And thank you, Kumar Abhishek, for asking me about intimacy and then letting me fall asleep in your arms. May you shape your design faithfully, lightly, and freely.

Words cannot describe everything.
The heart's message cannot be delivered in words.







at February 22, 2021

Raksha Bandhan

Tradition bids me tie a ribbon on your wrist 

To say that you and I are related,

And it will always be

No matter what

What husband, what wife, 

what daughter, what son,

What lover, what friend,

May kisses, caresses

Abound.

May wounds be few.

No matter,

There will be love.

What prizes and honors won, 

Include the ones you lost,

What joy, what laughter, 

what grief, what loss,

What trouble, what pain, 

what fear, what tear, what discovery, 

Embrace it freely.

In this moment

You are my world.

We are blood and yet so different

It makes no difference

What barrier, what fence

What wall, what boundary.

Cross, venture, explore,

A postcard now and then might be nice.

Calls are also cheap these days,

But neither is required.

I know there are only so many 

Seconds, minutes, years granted to us.

Use them as best you can.

As best we can.

I will try.

Make mistakes,

I will join you.

We are forgiven in advance.

You are encouraged to make as many as possible 

Unharmed or even injured.

Try to stay safe.

Continue please. 

You encourage me.

Forgive me if I have hurt you.

It was not intentional.

I know that I can be blind and careless.

You are also forgiven.

The world as we find it

Is a blessing.

You are part of my world.

Sounds trite

But it’s true.

Reflections on the Feast of the Assumption

Mary, Mother of Jesus, Mother of God, pray for me, a sinner.

The traditional vow days in the Jesuits are feasts of the Virgin Mary, today, August 15th, and September 8th, her birthday. I took my simple religious vows on September 8th, 1968. It was common for most young Jesuits to take Mary as their “vow’” name. So I might have said, “I, Kenneth Maria Ireland, vow to your divine Majesty, before the most holy Virgin Mary and the entire heavenly court, perpetual chastity, poverty, and obedience in the Society of Jesus.” I asked to keep my given name, and it was granted. 

As far as my Marian faith goes, I am a pretty stripped-down basic gospel kind of guy. Some of this can be traced back to my Calvinist heritage; my father was a Yankee free thinker, and there was some rebellion against the rigid Irish nuns who taught the Baltimore Catechism by rote. I have zero desire to make a pilgrimage to Fatima or Lourdes. Apparitions are far too spooky for my rational mindset. I’ve always held that Mary's “Dormition” is far more palatable than her bodily transportation to the Gates of Heaven. I prefer myth when it comes to such matters. The infallible pronouncement of Pius 12 happened when I was 8 years old; even then, I wondered how something this momentous could be hidden and unrecognized for such a long period of time. I said the rosary every day when I was in a Jesuit house of formation. We all did. I liked the repetition of the words of a simple prayer and the contemplation of the mysteries I took to be more like visualizations of scenes from the stories told in Matthew, Mark, and Luke (John is a bit too gnostic). 

By Erik Cleves Kristensen - House of the Virgin Mary

When Ashish and I visited Ephesus, after tromping through the amazing Roman ruins, we took a small jitney several kilometers high up into the bluffs overlooking the ancient harbor to what is known as Mother Mary’s House. According to legend, Saint John, the gnostic one, took Mary to the small community that Paul had founded in that Roman colony after the death of Jesus. She was to spend the rest of her days protected from the turmoil of James’s Jerusalem Church. Of course, her presence also legitimized the ascent of the Jesus congregations of Greeks and Romans who were not observant of Jewish law and customs, but I will leave that side for polemicists to hash out.

When I got on that small, rickety bus, it had been more than 35 years since I left the Jesuits and 30 years of practicing Buddhist meditation. I’m just giving some background about the mindset of the guy who headed up Mt. Koressos (Turkish: Bülbüldağı, "Mount Nightingale") to the place that Saint Anne Catherine Emmerich had seen in visions as Mary the Virgin's last earthly abode.

It fit the parameters of a place that I could envision for the house of Mother Mary. Being there was wonderful and peaceful, with a genuine feeling of the Transcendent. No throngs of the faithful seeking miracles, no massive basilicas commemorating a Saint’s vision, no sellers of Marian trinkets and memorabilia. There were perhaps a dozen religious women, maybe less, quietly tending simple gardens and very austere shrines. We wandered wherever we wanted and stopped when we felt the urge. No one exhorted us, telling us what to believe or how to pray. There were few votary candle boxes like the ones I remember from the Irish parishes of my youth in front of Saint Mary’s statues. There was only one donation box near the exit.

I felt a real sense of freedom when I boarded that rickety little bus for the scary ride back down to Selçuk. I had been in the presence of the Virgin, and my mind was allowed the space to take whatever tack was appropriate for the time and place.