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December 2018

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Choiceless Awareness — A True Story

December 26, 2018

One focus of attention in mindfulness meditation has no specific focus at all.   Termed “open attention” or “choiceless awareness”,   the instruction for this kind of practice is simply to open the field of awareness to include mindful noticing of whatever arises.  

Following a session of sitting practice we had shared, I good-naturedly teased a friend about his mismatched socks.   “What’s up with that?”, I asked.    Without missing a beat he answered:  “Oh, that’s just choiceless awareness from the bottom up”.

Dickens’ Spiritual Allegory

December 17, 2018

In Charles Dickens’ story The Christmas Carol,  the old miser Ebenezer Scrooge experiences visitations from the ghost of his former business partner Jacob Marley and the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come.    As a consequence of these visions,  Scrooge is transformed into a kinder, gentler man.  

We can think of The Christmas Carol as a parable about the experience of “waking up” in life and its importance in the transformation of human suffering.   The Christmas Carol is a kind of spiritual fairy tale.   As we engage the story, we are carried along into a deep imagining of how spiritual awakening might feel.   In Buddhist terms, we see an example of how greed, hatred and delusion can be transformed through the powers of insight and compassion.  The timeless appeal of the story is that Scrooge is able to achieve what we all deeply long for: to transcend the structures of personality that keep us trapped in our own misery. Scrooge discovered the transformative joy of giving.

Mindfulness of Conversation

December 12, 2018

Mindfulness of Conversation: The Dance of Speaking and Listening

December, 2018

Since we spend a large part of our lives talking to people, engaging in conversation can itself be a dynamic and fully engaged mindfulness practice.  Just as we can explore the internal world of the body and thoughts in sitting practice, we can explore the external world of language in vocalized words, gestures and spoken interaction.   This focus of attention helps open the senses, heart, and mind to receive the present moment more fully.

Mindfulness of conversation begins with the embodied experience of speaking and listening. However, far more than simply denuded  ‘present moments’ of mindful awareness, there are many other layers of the experience of conversation that reflect what is happening in the ‘relational moment’.  Some of the layers have to do with what is being conveyed— communication— and others with the how— the connection between us conversation.    In the framework of Buddhist meditation practice, all of this falls under the heading of relational mindfulness.  

The experience of conversation provides a window into the relational moment, a stage for observing the theater of the mind.   Mindfulness of conversation allows us an up-close and personal experience of basic psychological phenomena and relationship patterns enacted in real time.   We can observe how we show up in the relational world and we can discover a great deal about who we take ourselves to be.  We can investigate what we enact with others (and what they enact with us);  we can inquire into the psychological sources of those relational patterns; and we can reflect on the narratives we use to frame our experience.  In all of these ways, we can gain understanding of our relational dynamics:  our interpersonal reactions and their emotional roots*.

Each of these dimensions provides a variety of opportunities to observe how we relate to others in the dance of conversation.  We can observe what happens at the intersubjective intersection:  the intimacy or distance we experience moment by moment; our comfort or discomfort; whether we lead or follow;  the energy, tempo, and flow of what we say.

In addition to the interpersonal domain, we can mindfully observe the conversation that takes place within our minds.  Inner speech may manifest in words or phrases that catch our attention; at other times, it can be elaborated into ideas we want to express.   We may notice replays of actual conversations we have had with others.   Our minds may host soliloquies or arguments, or fantasize entire interactions.     These narrative themes shed a lot of light on our actual interactions with others.

To summarize, there are at least three interwoven strands in mindfulness of conversation: communication with others, our inner narratives,  and the felt sense of our symbolized experience.     Through mindfulness of conversation we can discover many different voices, many different layers of knowing and cognizing within.   There is value in becoming aware of the entire process.

Most importantly, mindful attention to the process of communication entails potential for change in both participants.  This is especially true because communication reflects the underlying stories we tell ourselves (consciously or unconsciously) about self and other.  It provides an opportunity to observe both our biases and our intentions.  And, it creates an opening to practice the Buddhist principles of wise speech.

One of the most exciting aspects of the dance of speaking and listening is the realization that communication is a generative act;  no one knows in advance what will transpire.  It is as much (or more) an event that happens to us as it is something we ‘do’.  Conversation invites something to “emerge” between ourselves and another.   This potential is what the writer Ursula Le Guin “the calls beauty and terror of conversation, that ancient and abiding human gift.”

 

A longer version of this essay appears in Wise Brain Bulletin,            vol. 12.5:     “Speaking and Listening:  The Intimate Dance of Communication”.                                                http://www.wisebrain.org/tools/wise-brain-bulletin/volume-12-5.

REFERENCES

** Schuman, M.  (2018) Mindfulness-Informed Relational Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis:  INQUIRING DEEPLY

Picture credit  Edgar Degas,  The Conversation.

 

 

 

Emotional Equanimity

December 3, 2018

Emotional equanimity is much more than the ability to feel serene in the here and now. It is about the ability to open to and accept our emotional experience; the  commitment to meet painful emotions with awareness. 

Emotional equanimity benefits from a clear understanding of how emotional life is organized in the mind.  It is based on emotional intelligence: the ability to recognize, understand, and manage feelings. Maintaining emotional equilibrium is not a simple technique but rather a multifaceted psychological function which lives in multiple layers of both body and mind, including innate temperament, biochemistry, and early trauma history. Except perhaps for the lucky few people who were effectively parented in early life, emotional equanimity requires a lot of inner work.  

The basic way we understand emotional experience is by consciously feeling our way into it. This may be likened to the process of locating a splinter: first we have to probe the inflammation to find out what is sharp and psychologically painful. What is often insufficiently recognized is that many emotions are inherently inchoate; early nonverbal experience tends to be unformed and it cannot be expressed in words.  To get the messages conveyed by our emotions, we need to be sensitive to their idiom of expression, and to develop an understanding of how they function within us. Deeper knowledge surfaces when we open to what is expressed in body sensation and images, metaphors and narratives.

  Example: Trying to discern why she was feeling depressed, a woman found herself with an unexpected image of Londoners in World War II sending their children off to relatives in the countryside. As she reflected on what this image was telling her, she realized that her depression was providing a zone of emotional safety, a respite from the bruising forces in her daily life. [Ex adapted from Karla McLaren, The Language of Emotion]   

 Unresolved emotions lie at the heart of every psychological problem. Cultivating emotional equanimity is not only about training the mind to attain states of calm; it is about learning to use our emotional challenges as opportunities for growth. Bottom line, our feelings reveal what we are unwisely holding onto and where we need to grow. Finding the wisdom in these experiences is beautifully expressed in the metaphor of a lotus in a pond, its roots in the mud below, its flower orienting towards the light above.    

No mud, no lotus.