Sticky Thicket

We’re in the second week of a 6-week meditation series I teach in the workplace, and I just received an email from one of the students who started out with us. She can’t continue the class. Things are too busy in her office, they’re short-staffed, they need her, she just can’t afford to get away. She’s very disappointed and hopes to do the class the next time it’s offered.

I understand, of course.

I can’t know what’s going on in her life, at home, with her office. Every one of us working stiffs is going to go through periods where we need to draw all our resources together for the hard push. I’ve been through those events: mergers, major contractions of the business line, lay-offs, software conversions. There is no way I would have attempted the radical act of sitting still in the middle of any of that. And that’s too bad, for Past Me. She could have used that.

Here’s the rub with meditation. You have to stop. You have to be willing to stop. You might even have to fight for your right to stop. For this particular class, that means you can find yourself one day into a 6-week series and the epic battle begins.  You’ve committed to structuring 15 minutes into your life 3 times between now and the following week’s class meeting. Think Prince Charming and the forever-bramble forest he has to slash through to get to Sleeping Beauty’s tower. Only the brambles are your boss, your kids, the dirty dishes, your running shoes, book club, 5 email accounts, “what’s for dinner?,” your co-workers, employees, clients, and the heap of health insurance and charity solicitation and monthly bill paperwork that’s spilling off your kitchen counter. In fact, it’s not really any of these. It’s your adherence to them, literally. The bramble consists of an utterly sticky tangle of unexamined entanglements, and their priority above what is most essential for a human life. This is the stickiest of thickets.

If you can slash through all of that and be still, for 15 minutes, or even just truly breathe without agenda for 20 seconds, you might actually find the awakened beauty called You.

When you insist to the world that you will discover and honor that, the thicket falls away. And Nothing stands in your way.

Bigger on the Inside

I have to admit, my family and I are enjoying a nice little binge into the current revival of the British television show Dr. Who. If you’re anything like me, you love this particular combination: a little time travel, intergalactic drama, constantly refreshing romantic interest and an infinite range of period costumes. One of the recurring bits in this show involves the phrase, “it’s bigger on the inside.” I won’t ruin the joke, but it got me thinking recently that this is also a fairly accurate statement about the mind.

Of all the reasons people report to me when they show up to learn meditation, the most common involves something like getting the mind to quiet down, or to out-and-out shut up. Frankly, this makes perfect sense. In my observation, we’re living in a world that is generating more complex, rapid-fire, high-stimulation thought streams every day. The rate of increase seems to be rising as well. It’s almost impossible to catch a short break from the relentless mind, or to approach anything like decent rest. Who doesn’t relish the idea of being able to produce quiet mind on demand? But forget about making the mind behave itself. Hands down, the worst meditation instruction you’ll ever hear goes like this: To begin, quiet your mind. You may, if you’re lucky, enjoy a very brief interlude of clear sailing. After about 3 seconds, the mind kicks back on line, you call yourself a failure, quit, and get back to more important things like writing blog posts about what a flop you are at  meditation. This is a real loss. Because of a little imprecision in instruction, aspiring meditators don’t stick around for the reasonably short period of time necessary to get the chance to experience the subtle qualities of the mind.

The trick with the mind is to leave it be. I mean, really leave it alone. It’s like how you handle a sidewalk hawker, that guy who is going to keep up the sales banter to get you to pay attention.  Untrained, your mind is like this guy, producing long strings of narrative, discursive, slightly or not-so-slightly unsatisfied chatter. Even just catch his eye, and he’s got you on the hook. If you give anything to the 98% of your mind’s output that requires exactly zero of your attention, you just encourage more of same. Meanwhile you miss the vaster domain of mind available beyond the accustomed. Back on that crowded sidewalk, you turn your attention toward the crowd, the sky, you smell the scents and take in the sights all around you, and soon enough the hawker’s sales pitch is fading into nothingness. With a chattering mind, it’s the same. Let it go on, as it certainly will; it has a certain momentum it needs to spool out. Meanwhile, there’s an interesting array of sensations, smells, feelings, sounds within you and around you in the actual world of your experience. Choose one of these to orient to, and just smile and shake your head politely in a “no thanks” to the mind’s dwindling strategy to get you to buy.

And, be patiently ready for that view into the quiet mind when it appears soon enough. It’s like nothing you can anticipate, not possible to understand by virtue of someone else’s feeble description. It’s a lot like the Tardis. It’s bigger on the inside.

~ Margaret

The Best Way Out

Robert Frost famously included, in a long piece entitled ” A Servant to Servants,” the bit that

…the best way out is always through.

The most useful thing I’ve learned from meditation is to see how much of life I end up tossing out or avoiding because of a moment of pain. One little jolt of disapproval from even a relative stranger, and I might go spinning off into some drawn out dance of fix-it-fast-to-keep-everybody-feeling-comfy-most-especially-ME. This is avoidance, and to spin into that path is to just spin and spin, going nowhere. The trick to going “through” is to stick right with the jab of nausea and the fake smile, and to know these as simply momentary off-ness and reactive artifacts. These discomforts last practically no time, send up a little flurry of thought-based falsehoods, which when allowed to clear themselves lead to a perfectly fine follow-up moment that contains all manner of viable possibilities.

As a meditation teacher, I most often find myself simply offering people invitations to see what they don’t like. The face burn of shame, the throat-fist of anger, the heaviness of despair…If you can see it, you can tend to it. If you tend to it, then it gets handled, without unnecessary drama. Soon enough, then, you and it make peace and/or go on your merry ways. If you spend your life doing everything but see it, you and it’ll be stuck together for the duration.

What is it you’re working so hard not to see your way through?

~ Margaret

Restrain Yourself

Some cultures have a commonly agreed time and mechanism for cultivating an essential skill every human will need from time to time: restraint. Here in the northeast corner of the US, there will be a good handful, but still a minority of folks, who are being encouraged to choose something to refrain from for the next 6 weeks or so of Lent. Fasting is a common practice among many spiritual traditions, including meditation communities. I hope it’s okay with my Catholic friends if we borrow and follow alongside their tradition, adopting this particularly powerful tool for cultivating awareness.

I could make the argument that meditation is simply the mother of all 12-step programs,  for the unconsciously addicted. You might have noticed that it’s hard to quit habits, even those that aren’t serving you in any way. Practicing meditation, I cultivate the capacity to pause, to notice automaticity without acting on it, to feel the discomfort of unsatisfied urges without doing a thing about them, and then to choose how to proceed from an awake stance. This sequence, repeated over and over with commitment and with a kind heart toward myself, unbinds me from conditioned habits right at the root, and creates the opportunity for the new and creative to become available. In that sense, sitting meditation is one grand overall experiment in restraint. When I sit, I “fast” from all kinds of things: eating, yes, and also moving, talking, reading, entertaining myself with work or chatter, or generally filling up the time to keep from feeling life just as it is, for good or ill.

Practicing restraint by sitting quietly for a committed time each day develops consistency and patience in a formal way. This sets you up, then, for a more broad-based approach for cultivating awareness. You’re ready to pay attention, as you walk around in life, to whatever warrants seeing. Once you can see, you can choose what to partake of and partake in, and what to pause in front of without immediately engaging with. This is another level of restraint.

There’s no need to dive into rigorous asceticism. Most important is to undertake restraint in a way that’s doable. You might try to establish a sitting practice of 5 minutes per day to start, if you don’t do this yet. If you have a sitting practice, you might try refraining from broadcast news, or speaking sarcastically, for a few days. If you choose something that’s  doable, you’ll get the opportunity to see something valuable. Setting the bar too high will quickly turn your effort into just one more fantastic, soon-gone resolution.

I once decided to undertake, as a deeply courageous act, to refrain from shading the truth at work. Wow. The amount of times I found myself toying with the truth just that little bit to make myself appear smart or on top of things was astounding. About 2 days in I was astonished, and after about 4 days I was laughing at myself almost non-stop, watching the little dances of deception. This was deeply humbling, and I’m thankful that I found my way to laughter that quickly. I could just as easily have gone into depression.

Is there something you’d prefer to do without? Rather than setting chocolate or your evening cocktail aside for the next 6 weeks, why not try refraining from what’s useless?

~ Margaret

Show Up

Jon and I have been writing to you all for about a year now. We agreed with each other early on to show up each week for whoever stopped in. Some weeks one of us has to email the other to check up on a “late” post, based on our deadline of Tuesday morning. You can see, for instance, that this week I’m running late. Yes, the world has continued rotating on its axis. Still, I don’t like being late, mostly because I made a commitment to show up.

There’s a basic instruction that I’ve been re-iterating over this past year, in different ways, via different forms, possibly until you’ve gone blue in the face. This week, let’s cut to the chase and boil it down to two words: Show Up.

Show Up is about commitment, and it’s about following through. It’s a simple thing. You determine to keep your eyes clear and your heart open to what’s actually happening right now in this place. And you just do it and do it and do it.

An important part of basic training in meditation is learning how to Show Up, and how to do it well. Interestingly, the tricky element of this involves learning how to accomplish a great big ol’ bunch of NOT Doing. This you must paradoxically begin one step prior to Not Doing, simply by discovering the many, many things you usually do other than Show Up. This can be a rocky road. It requires a huge heart of self-compassion to Show Up to your very current and human self, in order to see your own habitual snarky retorts, habitual puffed up or self-denigrating reactions, your habitual recoiling from the messes you don’t enjoy and your running off toward some habitual escape mechanism or other. Usually we’re very busy seeing how everyone else does these things, which is much easier than observing the same thing in ourselves. Seeing your own habit of focusing on others’ faults is another major part of learning to Show Up.

To put it simply, a proper start is to Show Up to all the ways that you yourself avoid Showing Up.

Just committing to Show Up in this way begins a beautiful alchemical process by which you begin to Show Up more and more, and you naturally start to do less and less of the old not-Showing Up-type activities. Critically Important: You don’t try to stop these thoughts or behaviors; that would be getting ahead of yourself and it’s actually a big step backwards in the Showing Up game. So you don’t try to stop doing anything, you just keep Showing Up. For instance, in a situation of frustration, you might have some old habitual thoughts of escaping or blaming, but you start to notice them in this new way, to really Show Up to seeing this kind of reaction as it is, maybe even feeling like you’re observing someone you’re truly seeing for the first time. Soon enough you start to notice that although these types of thoughts and reactions are still happening, you’re not acting on them. You do nothing instead, and simply show up to the habitual reaction itself. Now you really get to see habit for what it is. You may notice an insane argument against unchangeable historical facts arising in your mind. You might feel words of blame, derision, or self-recrimination rising up to your tongue. You’ll notice a lot of uncomfortable body sensations, like muscle tension or heat. And you do nothing. You just stay with Show Up. You let the internal insanity run its course. And then, something, something brand new, just appears. This is where it gets really interesting.

Having a solid meditation practice where you sit still on a cushion or a chair for a while each day is invaluable for this whole process. I’ll tell you why: if you don’t stop and Show Up, it’s really difficult to see any of this in the first place, and if you don’t give yourself time to do nothing, that moment of the brand new just flies by without your being able to catch onto it, and you find yourself falling back to the old stand-by habitual reactions. This stuff is all flying by so fast, it’s a lost cause unless you agree, you really commit, to slowing down enough so you can actually learn to Show Up.

I could simply say, Show Up, and if you were to follow that precisely and wholeheartedly, then literally, the rest will take care of itself. So I will.

Show Up.

~ Margaret

Moment by Moment Pie

 In my house, on some magical weekend in the fall, Sunday night dinner consists of a piece of warm apple pie and a chunk of cheese. It always happens after an afternoon of apple picking. Such was tonight’s dinner. Because the plate would hold just that small amount of food, I decided to undertake a sustained awareness of eating practice at the moment when I walked into the kitchen to finally dive into our freshly baked delight. Coming in the doorway from our living room, I noticed that the aroma of baking pie had normalized into my nostrils for the past two hours. Retrieving plates and flatware, I heard the clink of their coming together, and the crump of the cupboard closing.

Now, at the stove, I punctured the top of the crust at the center, and heard the crispy crack. There was more shattering crust, and clack of knife on glass pie pan, along with steam and a fresh wave of pie smell. The juicy slice slid onto the lifter, and across to the plate. I noticed that I rushed to cut cheese and put the block back in the refrigerator. Hurry, hurry: there’s pie! I noticed that my stomach suddenly felt empty and ready for food. I felt grateful that I had been busy and had let myself actually get hungry before eating. This is not always the case.

Pie by Margaret

Even with every intention to eat and be aware of eating, and with all the time I would have wanted, that pie was gone too soon. I did enjoy the flavors of pie-spice and the warm, oozy mouth textures. I noticed an almost-too-hot bite, and adjusted to blow a bit before the next forkful. I registered the back-and-forth of sweet pastry and salty dairy fat, and noticed how I naturally alternated between the two, without much thought or intention. I felt food land in my stomach, and a sense soon after of my body responding to nourishment: a little livelier, a little “sugared-up” if you will. I heard the fork scrape the last bits off the plate, and realized I had “missed” the last few forkfuls. What was I doing instead? I can’t tell you. I know I was glad that I was (mostly) “here” to eat that piece of pie I had worked so hard to make from scratch. It was a pleasure to have my husband join me in the practice. We had a lovely meal together.

~Margaret

Unmake a fist

I will never forget the moment when I found out about chronic physical tension. I had arranged to attend a six-day silent retreat at Garrison Institute with my teacher’s teacher. This kind of adventure is designed to show you what you haven’t been capable of noticing otherwise. Setting aside conversation, media and all the basic “doing” distraction of life means you have a whole lot of time to find out about what’s under your usual radar, including your own habitual ways of operating. This process of noticing is equally valid, by the way, whether you’re inserting 3 minutes into your workday or 3 months into your mid-adulthood. The aim is the same. Yogi Berra put it perfectly for us: You can see a lot just by looking.

One day in the middle of this retreat I found myself sitting in the lunchroom, half-filled plate before me. Nothing special, I was just eating and listening to the percussion symphony of flatware on dish ware and the low moans of heavy chairs being scraped backward. Sitting, chewing, sometimes tasting, mostly listening to the inane monologue silently nattering on inside my head… and then I noticed as I chewed that my hands were in little fists on my lap. I just felt them there, under the table out of sight. How curious; why would they need to be tight like this right now? And then my hands softened. Fine. I returned to the plate, to another mouthful, back to a little tasting, a lot more inane chatter… and again, tight fists. Okay, now this was weird… what is it with the tight fists?

I decided at that point to slow lunch down and really look at this phenomenon. What else did I have to do, after all? On retreat you have all the time in the world! It became a question, an investigation, to find out about tension: to determine what was tense, how much physical tension there was, and to determine the specific location(s) of tension.

Three days later, since lunch turned out to be the merest beginning of this particular investigation, I had the preliminary report. Finding: there was a LOT of physical tension built up in this habit-body of mine, and it extended well past my fists! Physical tension was almost as established a personal way for me as breathing. I would say it was my body’s unquestioned belief system, to be constantly tensed for… well, for what purpose I can’t really say. I have enjoyed a safe, mostly conflict-free existence for the vast majority of my adult life. Nevertheless, there seemed to be some kind of residual armament against an old, long-resolved situation. The origin didn’t even feel particularly interesting to find out about. It was enough to know that I could feel this unnecessary tension, and in the noticing of it, somehow it softened of it’s own accord. Unconscious tensing, awareness of same, responsive release: the physical build-up of unneeded muscle tension started to unwind itself, bit by bit. This process continues as needed, depending on the pace and quality of my days.

Sitting at your desk, waiting at a stop sign, watching the lunchroom microwave count down while last night’s leftovers warm up, these are good opportunities to ask yourself, with friendly curiosity: Is there tension anywhere that’s not needed? You can let the rest take care of itself.

~Margaret

Feel Your Bliss

Joseph Campbell was a highly regarded 20th century teacher of mythology. I’m betting that a lot of you know his work well. (If you haven’t bumped into his work yet, I’d recommend you read The Hero with a Thousand Faces as a good starting point.) You could say that of any person, he put mythology back on the map. Campbell famously gave us the life instruction, “Follow your bliss.” In his own words, “If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are — if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.”

Like any good idea, “follow your bliss” has been quoted, misinterpreted and hijacked by clever marketing folk. I attach the investment company ad from the back cover of my college alumni magazine as Exhibit A.

Madison Avenue wants you to tie your bliss to your retirement account balance, owning your dream car, or the moment when you eat the perfect dark chocolate nugget. Our common understanding of the experience of bliss, even without the immediate help of the media, is likely related to some decadent dish or a particularly fine vacation moment. Campbell has something very different in mind. When was the last time you felt the quality of bliss that Campbell’s words evoke? How about (gasp!) at work? If you’re scratching your head right now, I think you’re in good company.

Before you can follow your bliss, you’re going to have to know it for what it is. Because logically, if you can’t feel your bliss, how can you follow it?

With apologies to Campbell for any error of shortchanging, here’s what I recommend keeping an eye out for. Look for episodes of connecting with other people over a shared purpose or value. It ought to involve real eye or heart contact, and an appreciation of what’s happening as it’s happening. Watch for assignments that make your heart pound a little, or a lot. Whether it’s out of fear or excitement, there’s something worthy for you at the heart of it. (Side note: Take those assignments!) Feel the work you are drawn toward, that which gives you a sense of fulfillment in the doing of it.  See what you invest yourself in, with gusto. Be aware of sensations of glad-hearted empowerment, lightness, engagement. Notice feelings of gratitude for enjoying the privilege of engaging in this particular work.

If you’re not finding anything like this happening in your work life, that fact is equally valid to become aware of.

What are you after?

This week I gave an interview to a writer who is pulling together an article on contemplative practice and communication. He ruefully explained at the outset that he will be working with a 100-word limit. Fantastic! This is a meditation teacher’s best constraint. Concise, precise, coherent teaching is the most effective way to convey what meditation holds out to those who sense the potential.

My interviewer got to the point quite quickly. He asked what I know about why people come to the practice of meditation. Now there’s a question that could generate a lifetime of answers!

Here’s how I responded: For most people, something feels “off.” It’s the kind of off-ness that is not responding to the known array of solutions. The something could be about handling a difficult condition in life: physical pain, trouble with the boss, overburden in general, a feeling of missing out, anger, compulsive behavior, depression, generic edginess.  This off-ness can just as easily manifest as a curiosity about the possibility of “something more.” Somehow, even with the expansive selection of life strategies and experiences we all have access to, there is a sense that when we add it all up, there’s still something important missing.

Most people who make it in the door stick around to listen and learn even a little bit, and for whatever the draw, their “something off” responds to meditation. There is a common, compelling response to what is inherently available, this very human quality of being, that arises through the cultivation of good-hearted attending to moment-by-moment experience. With a realistic mix of such nuances as skepticism, confusion, and certainty, that common response, in a nutshell: Yes!

Now, I turn this question right over to you, dear reader. Today, you chose to read this post. Why? This is a blog that asks you to ask yourself that kind of question, and to receive what comes with curiosity and an open heart. What are you after, as a first-time reader or months-long follower of this microscopic meditation form? This is an important question, mostly for you yourself. Please take this moment, right now, to pause, consider, and give yourself at least 20 seconds, to notice any and all answers that show up.

Having a good-hearted space to ask such questions and be with whatever answers arrive is maybe enough for you. Perhaps you found new information to take in, or to act on, or questions of your own to contemplate. I wish you all the best with what you discovered. And, if you’re willing to post a response, a phrase or a longer reflection, you may inspire another reader in a way they hadn’t known. Lastly, Jon and I can take what is given and use it to craft this form more precisely, concisely and coherently for our intrepid band of readers. As always, we invite your comments…

~Margaret

Could I have a moment?

If there’s one thing I love, it’s a guarantee. So I want to offer you one of my all-time favorite, virtually guaranteed Microwave Meditations. It exists in the form of a simple question. It’s  useful in a multitude of situations. You can use it by yourself or in interaction. And it goes like this:

Could I have a moment?

Thanks to Flickr for the photo

Now, precisely what this meditation guarantees you is something you’ll have to find out for yourself. Still, I want to offer you my guarantee, as the purveyor of this particular practice. I hereby guarantee you that the answer, one way or another, is always “yes.” You can always have every moment you’re willing to actually have, every one that you’d really like to have. Asking yourself this question gives you the real chance to have the moment. Asking someone else the question performs the same function. All we have is moments, after all, so why not go about actually HAVING them.

And, once you are actually having your moments, what you can and will discover through this practice, within it, is boundless.