What’s the speed limit?

You’re driving on the highway, paralleling the New England seacoast on a busy summer weekend. Traffic is congested and still flowing. Most drivers have adopted a roughly common speed, going a touch over the speed limit. Cars enter and exit with little disturbance to the flow.

And there’s that one car you encounter every few miles. The driver is darting in and out, switching lanes frequently, moving faster than the rest, braking and accelerating all the while. You feel your fingers grip harder, your jaw and gut tense, and your foot touch the brake, as that person in such a hurry quickly injects into the small opening between you and the car you’re following. Senses are heightened and at least to some degree frightened. You see other drivers jiggle, slow down or speed up to make room for the oncoming driver.

Chances are high that you’ve also been this driver at some point, perhaps even recently. If you can, bring to mind what that felt like. For me, it is similar to the encounter I described above, except consistently so. I’m driving completely tensed up, for the long haul. I’m on the greedy lookout for any advantage, not interested in the overall sense of everyone getting where we need to, each in our own good and safe time. Having unconsciously adopted the stance that it’s all about where and when I need to get, I’m just sufficiently engaged with the sense of the other cars and people around me to stay relatively safe, but not properly so. It’s pretty much all about me.

Now consider the speed you’ve adopted around just about anything you’ve undertaken recently. Maybe it’s the apartment you are searching for, or the project you’re involved with at work. Maybe it’s the 20-minute trip into the grocery store last night, start to finish. Whatever you’re doing, you are doing with a certain speed limit assumption. Fast is going to be perfectly appropriate when you dash to grab your toddler before he steps into the pool; is it necessary when you’re asking the next person in your retail establishment for their order on a busy day? Where other people are part of the flow of the project or transaction’s traffic, do you sense into what the speed is overall, and enter and exit accordingly?

If you’re operating over the appropriate speed limit, it’s going to be a bumpy ride. Slow down and pay attention, for all of our sakes.

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

Productive Discomfort

My friend Amanda, whose family has run and owned a NH auto dealership and service organization for four generations, recently introduced me to this potent business concept, Productive Discomfort. They’re using it to speak about a business stage they’re navigating, as they move toward an important and unusual new way of workplace culture. I’ve noticed that it gets at one of the critical elements of meditation as well. Anyone who has signed up to keep learning and growing will recognize this stage. When you first start a new activity, parts of it can feel unnatural. As adults, we forget this feeling because we’ve mastered so many of the basics. We’re usually traveling around, masters of speaking, walking, e-mailing, driving, etc. So with taking up a new skill, the experience of stumbling, reflecting, trying again and integrating learnings can feel predominantly like failing. Nobody likes to fail.

In practicing meditation, one of the first things to get comfortable and even skillful with is a BOATLOAD of “failing” practice. Because what you’re teeing up to do is to direct attention, moment-by-moment, on a chosen element of focus, and because your attention is relatively untrained, it’s highly likely that you’ll experience a high rate of mind-wandering, especially when you first start. Your reaction to all of this mind-wandering may be to feel like a failure, with all its attendant discomfort. Well and good. This is the place to launch from.

The act of meditation is a holistic act. The intention is always to learn to receive perceptions into the field of awareness, and to learn to do this more and more universally. So, the very discomfort of feeling like a failure can be perceived. Perceiving this is precisely within the scope of the practice. Therefore, there is no moment of failure. The more you can see what arises, whether that be your attention resting on the chosen object for a given session of meditating, or becoming aware of attention sliding away, or becoming aware of having been lost and drifting in a mind fantasy having nothing to do with the here and now, the more productive your meditation practice becomes. Being curious to the physical sensations and emotional moments of failure, while holding a sense of never really failing, is the great sleight-of-hand you learn, by allowing yourself to “fail” and “fail” and “fail.”

Some meditation traditions actually make a big deal out of setting up discomfort, in order to get at this lesson quite energetically. I’ve found that there’s plenty of discomfort just in walking around; I never needed to set myself up for much extra. It’s hard enough to sit on my cushion and stay still through urges to squirm, itch and get up to shoot the breeze with someone.

Staying steady through discomfort gives you the chance to choose a response rather than the usual straight shot to the reactive itch or squirm. If your typical way to handle failure is to back away or storm off somewhere, what would happen if you started sticking it out sometimes, as an act of productive discomfort?  It might have profound implications over the long haul. It might give you a brand new range of moment-by-moment choices that are a lot more comfortable and effective. That’s the kind of outcome I find vastly productive.

Thanks to Grappone Automotive for the title for today’s post. I recommend you learn about their forward-thinking business culture, and even better, stop by and see it in action.

~Margaret

Endless Fascination with the (mostly) Trivial

This Friday evening through Saturday evening has been designated National Day of Unplugging. According to their site, “We increasingly miss out on the important moments of our lives as we pass the hours with our noses buried in our iPhones and BlackBerry’s, chronicling our every move through Facebook and Twitter and shielding ourselves from the outside world with the bubble of ‘silence’ that our earphones create.” My 23-year-old daughter, a social media professional, advised me of this a couple of weeks ago. She’s taken the pledge to unplug for those 24 hours. Since signing on, she has been working to structure her digital life in advance for this step away, I presume to avoid getting fired or something equally dire. (Here’s the Unplug link she sent me, please visit!)

Next, let’s consider the game Phone Stack. With this digital convention, friends out to dinner together put their phones in the middle of the table and agree to unplug for the course of the meal, or pay a penalty. Our Kempt online author puts it this way:

…..As the meal goes on, you’ll hear various texts and emails arriving… and you’ll do absolutely nothing. You’ll face temptation—maybe even a few involuntary reaches toward the middle of the table—but you’ll be bound by the single, all-important rule of the phone stack.

For my own part, nothing beats Facebook for a go-to, all-purpose time and attention vortex. It’s so easy to peg my activity there in terms of connecting, gathering information about the world’s interests or causes, and cheering my mentors and friends on. Of course, that lasts about 90 seconds. After that, whatever there is that I call “Me” is gone, lost down the drain of never-ending posts.

Social media, via the vast array of devices that keep us plugged in from room to room, moment to moment, is the very latest in Opiate for the Masses distractions. Do the billion bits of intriguing, charming, alluring ephemera have you in their grip? When your addiction begins to degrade your social connections, when you are unable to resist urges despite knowing the consequences, if it makes you feel unbearably anxious to stop, then it’s time. It’s time to step back, feel the burn of withdrawal and reflect on the bigger picture. The world misses you. The world really needs you to pick up your gaze and get in the game.

And yes, in case you are wondering, we’re still holding hands with our friends practicing Lent.

~ 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

Begin Again

You may be taking the turning of the year, a somewhat arbitrary annual moment during our planet’s trip around the sun, to reflect and resolve on how to be in the coming days. Every one of us has taken an occasion at some point in our lives to set a new intention. A few of these might have stuck, and likely a bunch more didn’t take. Giving yourself a tough assignment once every 365 days, within the context of the many distractions, temptations, pressures and personal habits that will come into play over that time, is surely a tall order. In choosing one achievable wish to extend to you for 2013, I offer this:

an orientation to awakeness 

This is a simple yet pervasive kind of wish for you, and really for all of us. It’s not a demand that we all get it together or smarten up. I’m not asking you to grimly, forcibly push yourself into anything. There’s no need to knock yourself on the side of the head when you suddenly notice that you slipped out of being in touch with yourself and the world. This is a simple, conscious orientation, a choice to turn toward. It’s a preference to be awake, to be present to life.

I grant you that that awakeness is easy to lose track of. You’ll have noticed this, if you’ve done any formal meditation or just informally noticed what it’s like to try and hold your attention on a given element of your world. We’ve grown ourselves a complex, swirling, driving situation here and our attentional capacity matches that. So it takes some doing first to admit to this, then to try countering that situation by choosing simplicity and practicing concentration, ultimately to see why it might be a fantastic idea to develop this as an available way of being.

It’s easy to be lost in the mix and swirl. Fortunately, awakeness is just as easily found and re-found. Unlike many resolutions people will make, there are a vast number of opportunities every day to apply your intention to be present. It’s not like exercise, for instance; you don’t need to suit up and get all sweaty to be awake. You just allow yourself to remember, to pay attention to that momentary invitation that whispers, “notice that you’re alive and having an experience.” You do this over and over. The funny thing is, you’ll see that whenever you catch yourself saying “I’m lost,” you’re not. That was a moment ago, and now you’re here, knowing something about the difference between lost and awake. Now becomes the moment you commit to begin again, persistently, with kindness and good humor, honestly knowing you’ll slip away a thousand times. Return simply to this orientation, a gentle turning with profound potential. Begin again.

Here’s to the new year, and to whatever you’re orienting to these days. Let it begin with awakeness, again and again.

This year’s first sun, from a typical New Hampshire back porch,

A+

Around two years after I started reading about meditation and all the unusual and amazing things one could discover as a result of learning to pay attention, it became abundantly clear that in order to really learn, I would have to do. Reading about meditation is pretty much like studying cookbooks: great for whetting your appetite, useful for discovering new and practical information you’ll need along the way, and no good for satisfying your true need.

Sitting still and quietly came easily to me, once I had made the decision to get on with it. I bought a kitchen timer, set it at five minutes the first day, and kept notching it up one minute each day to build up my tolerance level. When I would hit a point of impossible discomfort, I would dial my timer back a minute for a few days, and then try adding to it again later on. I built up to 45 minutes after a few weeks, and learned a whole lot about myself for having done so. Starting a meditation practice under your own steam is fantastic work. Teachers later told me it’s brave and rather rare. I didn’t know anything about that at the time.

Soon enough, with all of that sitting and noticing, I realized that I wanted a teacher. Those books and all their intriguing, often baffling teachings had whet my appetite for knowing what those authors had come to know. Enter Norman Scrimshaw. Norman is my teacher. Like the meditation teacher you might love to picture, he’s a wise, gentle man who lives on top of a mountain a distance north of here. Norman told me lots of things, but more importantly he lived out what I went to him to learn. He never asked me to believe anything, just offered what he knew for my consideration and investigation. I want to tell you about one of his teachings today. It goes like this:

Everyone is always doing the best they can.

This is a profound hypothesis that took me a while to consider, let alone realize at some level for myself. My mind had a lot to say about how wrong that had to be. Maybe right now you are able to watch your own mind arming for the battle against this outrageous statement. Perfect. One of the main ideas with meditation is to become familiar with the causes and effects of believing the thoughts you believe. This becoming familiar produces a deeply beneficial, and also different set of causes and effects than have been available previously, without your having to make a big project out of attaining anything. I could stop here for today; you’ve got your assignment, for the week, maybe for life.

I’m going to continue, however, and tell you about another teacher, from another tradition. A few years later, I decided to add to my meditation experiences by learning to teach Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR.) I happen to be fantastically lucky in this regard; I live a short 90-minute drive from the Center for Mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. My first teacher there was Zayda Vallejo, and during the very first class we all had with her, she gave us this same teaching, in a sweet and subversive way.

You all get an A+ in this class, she told us with a smile. Lots of people exchanged glances and chuckled. Good course, the pressure’s off! we thought.

It was only after following the instructions for this fantastic meditation intensive-in-life called MBSR that I saw what she had really given us with this A+. Zayda had invited us to see that we are all doing the best we can, all the time. All of us, all the time, meaning the big ALL. This was her shorthand for Norman’s teaching. And how amazing that simply learning to pay good-hearted attention to life, under the guidance of someone who lives and breathes A+, and thereby to really see what’s happening, that this gives you access to this profoundly relaxing, healing and ultimately liberating truth.

I offer my deep gratitude to Norman and Zayda, and to all the teachers who I continue to learn from. You can find out more about Norman’s teachings through his ongoing spiritual community, Awakening Connections, at  http://www.awakeningconnections.org/index.html

Zayda continues to teach at the Center for Mindfulness. To find out more about Zayda and the Center, please visit: http://umassmed.edu/Content.aspx?id=42408

Identify, Include, Expand

One of the most dicey bits to get your arms around, mindfulness-wise, is the act of accepting what you discover. For today, let’s define mindfulness as knowing what’s happening as it’s happening, within you and around you, without making a problem of any of it. If you take that definition in for consideration, you may notice some resistance to it. It’s that last phrase that sticks in the craw. I can hear it plenty loud right between my own ears, as I sit here typing. “Not making a problem of any of it?! Lady, you must be blind, because there are all kinds of problems we’re working with here.”

Without further ado, I hereby stipulate to all the world’s problems.

Now, if we can return to today’s exercise, please. Our endeavor becomes more interesting, if perhaps more subtle. Everything we can identify, we are knowing at some level. Everything we see, hear, taste, touch, smell, we can know. Every reaction we have, every thought, emotion, sensation, we can know that we’re having them. We can identify that they are happening. With this recognition, with identification completed, we can look further with curiosity. When we identify what is here and if we immediately add “problem” to what is known, what is this about?

The best way to answer this question is to pause and find out for yourself. If you’re like most of us, it shouldn’t take long… I’ll wait right here for you.

If you did in fact step away, or even just look away, you probably found some unwelcome element, in your locale or in your own body or brain. What I’m predicting you noticed with this “problem” bit is some form of resistance.  This might include cognitive resistance, like the thought “I don’t like that.” It might include physical resistance, such as physical guarding or turning away, or a facial expression that communicates rejection. You can perceive that you separate, you draw back or pull away. As soon as you label something as “problem,” you separate from it. It’s out, whereas you are in. Problem is other, it’s a reject, it’s not okay, it’s wrong. It’s as though long ago we were given a big old-fashioned rubber stamp labeled REJECT and we’re running around whumping it on various things, often with alarming frequency, and also often with little consistency. We stamp people, ideas, nations, fads, fashions, statements, weather systems, political parties, behaviors, land features, and the pile of unanswered mail on your desk with the REJECT label.

What happens to your day if you replace the REJECT stamp with one that marks everything INCLUDE? Conditions can remain the same. You continue noticing the same people, facts, thoughts, weather patterns and piles of mail. These elements are. They simply are as they are, and you include them. Now what happens to your relationship to all that you notice? How do you meet that pile of mail? How do you respond to the world, by including the world arising around you and the world arising within you? How do you meet the very elements that previously held the label REJECT?

Spoiler alert; here’s what happens in my experience, at least: Things expand. Your mind widens. Options that were hidden become available. You bring more information into conscious awareness. Your body relaxes. You move differently, and what you meet responds differently right back at you. The world becomes more expansive, that same world in front of your eyes right now.

Try it out, over and over and over. Identify, include and expand. Remember to include your own resistance, as it arises, without making it a problem. Identify, include, expand. Rinse and repeat. And see what happens.

That Good, Clean Feeling

I had some disappointing news this week. The story behind it started this past spring. I had approached two of my colleagues, mindfulness teachers in the New England area, about submitting a proposal for a conference. With a little encouragement, they agreed. We worked hard, electronically, by phone, and for one day in person, to flesh out our idea and submit for consideration. A few days ago I heard that our proposal had not been accepted. It was my job to convey this news.

In composing the email to my partners, I hesitated, looking for the right word for what I was feeling. As I sat pondering, I tried to fit some of the words that flashed into my mind against the particular brew of sensations I was experiencing. Have you noticed this about emotions? There is a specific, multi-faceted and multi-dimensional complex of sensations that tells you whether a given moment is filled with giddiness, delight or mirth. In this case, I was looking at a different set of possibilities. As I sat at my keyboard, I tried on “frustration.” Frustration suggested that there was something that “ought” to have happened and hadn’t. I couldn’t find where this was the case. My team had put our best effort forward. I felt the conference selection committee must have done the same, working on prior knowledge of this conference’s offerings. No, frustration wasn’t right, and by association, neither could anger or annoyance be.

I went through a similar review against the possibility of feeling regretful, embarrassed or mistreated. Thoughts of having roped my friends into a futile exercise filtered through. Vows to never try such an unlikely scheme again attempted to take hold. A fist of righteous indignation attempted to raise itself. Nothing would stick. Everyone had done beautifully and the world was just as it was, no better or worse than it should have been.

The way I eventually described this moment to my friends was one of “clean disappointment.” There had been a hope, a desire. That desire would not be fulfilled, at least not right away. With no one having behaved in any way other than they could or should have, I could give myself over to an unencumbered emotion: simple workplace-oriented disappointment, a mildly unpleasant feeling that lasted very briefly when given its’ due. It was soon followed by appreciation in remembering all the good that had come of spending this time. I learned a great deal about what I had studied up on, in writing the proposal. I had enjoyed the connection with two wonderful teachers. I looked forward to closer ties with these two people as a result. I found myself starting to think about this very blog post. The ever-variable unfolding of life had moved me on.

I would define a clean emotion as one you’re willing to have all by yourself and all by itself. You own it. You let it own you. It requires no one else to be held accountable, to carry any of the burden or to remedy it for you. One of my favorite former managers would say, “it is what it is.” Because it’s clean, it’s not muddied up with extraneous, non-productive bits that tarnish the future, the past or your perceptions of others.

If this sounds intriguing to you, see if you can notice a “clean” emotion today, of any kind.