Thursday, June 23, 2016

Blog #5 Mindfulness: The Skinny

Whether I enter my kitchen from the north or the south door, perched above each door-frame is a 4 x 6 note card, with the word CHANGE. Trying to understand change has been a persistent occupation ever since I was a child. I always wanted to change something, whether it was trying to be a better kickball player or a cooler guy altogether (Pointier black shoes? Longer hair?). I would also note changes in confidence and attitude, like when I slipped from being a 1st section trumpet player to being a denizen of the third. I was blessed with a stable family life, but schools and their concomitant circles of friends kept changing, which kept my radar highly attuned to “What is this now? Who am I now?”

As I look at those questions posed as a 10-year-old, I see that they aren’t really so different from my adult concerns. There are many things I still desperately want to change and things I don’t want to change...so my conclusion is that I am obsessed with change. I’m not sure that this logic is true for everyone, but what is true is that most of us want more happiness, which, by and large, means that something has got to change.

While many of our thoughts about change tend to revolve around relationships and finances, our most secret thoughts are about change from within. With the popularization of self-help, meditation, and therapy, we’ve certainly become much more sophisticated and optimistic about our potential for change; after all, what was once the province of the weird has now become highly visible and well-substantiated through research. We may have previously intuited that yoga, meditation, qi gong, and eating whole foods would lead to positive changes, but now we have scientific proof! (Finally…the great meditation masters can breathe a sigh of relief, knowing that science has now proven their favorite pastime isn’t pointless!)

One of the more popular vehicles for change in recent years is the practice of mindfulness. Since the practice of mindfulness was born from the meditative tradition, there have been a lot of questions about its value as a freestanding discipline versus its value as a practice to be embedded within a larger constellation of practice, study and motivation. There are still unanswered questions on both sides of the mindfulness debate, and more long-term studies are needed to raise it to “irrefutable” status in the scientific and educational community.

Because of the many points of view surrounding the mindfulness question, there are various ways it can be taught. It can be taught very simply – completely sanitized of all its Hindu and Buddhist trappings; it can also be taught very traditionally, as in Tibetan Buddhism where the word “meditation” is shorthand for the interwoven practices of learning, contemplating and meditating – a lengthy and multi-disciplined approach to personal and societal change.

Spokespersons from both sides of the debate can be critical of the approach of their colleagues on the opposite side, but in my teaching experience, I’ve seen both approaches taught skillfully, and I’ve seen the value and wisdom of both.

The only shortfall I see occurs when the more challenging and sometimes painful aspects of mindfulness practice are not addressed, because to be perfectly honest, change is directly coupled with mindfulness. Change runs parallel with increased mindfulness. Here’s the thing: the tricky part of mindfulness is that it makes you…well…mind-full. It sparks curiosity and awareness. Mindfulness practice is deep; it is not cosmetic. Yes it can make you look and feel better. Yes there are many positive benefits – reduced stress, reduced levels of cortisol, increased levels of serotonin, and greater appreciation, overall, of the world around you and your place in it. But when you practice mindfulness, you can’t help but be aware of that which undercuts your mindfulness. The more training we do, (spoiler alert!) the more mindful we become of our shortfalls – you know, the things that could use a little bit of change.

What we have here is the old Yin and Yang – two sides of a coin, each very powerful. On one side of the mind-full equation, we become mindful of our goodness and well-being. We might even notice that our mindfulness is inherent; it is already our gift, awaiting further exploration. On the other side, we can’t help but be mindful of what I refer to (with great empathy and humor) as our terrible badness. If we are truly mind-full, we can’t help but acknowledge both our positive and negative tendencies. Oddly enough, it is not just our negative attributes, shame or self-loathing that we avoid copping to; for many of us it is just as difficult to acknowledge our virtues, our gifts and our natural intelligence.

To see all of this – not just how we highlight the positive and downplay the negative – is our gift. When we are courageous enough to unwind our habits, by first seeing them and being mindful of their existence, these elements conspire to produce the very best, most curious questions. These questions are far more interesting and are far more fertile than any treasury of answers we hope to unearth.

The best questions turn out to be those we avoid looking at, and cover up with our most clever justifications – questions that can open up our self imposed limitations; questions about how we do what we do, and why we do them; questions about how we hold back or how we deflect mindfulness. These embryonic questions rate far higher and deeper than the simple shortcuts we call answers. These questions are the jeweled treasure of mindfulness – maybe a little rusty and covered with dust, but precious, once uncovered.

As we are awakened by these questions, we come upon the verge of change. These questions allow us to finally score with mindfulness practice. We’re not just trying to enjoy ourselves more; we’re trying to be more awake – the true expression of mindfulness.

It has been noted that, for centuries, in the Buddhist tradition, there might have been an over-emphasis on the suffering that change brings us. More recently, in the Shambhala Buddhist tradition there has been more emphasis on the good news, such as our own inherent wealth and goodness; but I think it’s okay to revisit to the darker side of human psychology that comes out of the mindfulness-meditation tradition. The darker side tells us that all the very best, most profound questions arise from our difficulties, our pain, and our cognitive dissonance that begs and hollers for an answer.

As a pre-requisite to the answer, we need to have good questions, high-quality questions that we can chew on. With mindfulness practice, we become aware of all that we have not been paying enough attention to. All our goodness and all our terrible badness has been crying out for change, or tugging at us gently, but we just haven’t given it our full attention.

For our own benefit and for the benefit of the world, we must be fully awake and ready to face our darker, more obscure side – our self-deception. We have to. We must. We look at Orlando, Sandy Hook, rapists on campus, child molesters on airplanes – and we can’t just wince and turn away. As they say, We Are Orlando: our inability to face ourselves, for good or for bad, is rooted in the same inability as any perpetrator, with the blackest heart, that we see in the evening news. When I look at the video on YouTube of the guy with 264 rounds of ammunition, an AR 15, and a Glock easily hidden behind his shirt pants and pocket, I know we need to look at that which we don’t want to look at – our fear, our pain, even our horror.

Change comes from fearlessly recognizing our innate, indestructible goodness; change comes from fearlessly recognizing our terrible badness. Hopefully, our pursuit of mindfulness will not lead us towards ignoring either of these.

© 2016 Alan Kent Anderson

Wednesday, June 15, 2016

Blog #4 Every Name We Call, We Own

It is spring 2016, and here in America, we are deep into the season of passion and aggression. Earlier this week, close to 50 people were slaughtered at Pulse, the gay dance club in Orlando, Florida. That is certainly enough tragedy for one day…oh, except for the other 148 people that were killed by gunfire across America the very same day. Two hundred eighteen…that’s how many Americans were killed by gunfire that day.

And of course, it didn’t take long for the name-calling and finger-pointing to begin. But, that’s what we do, isn’t it? We assign blame. We want to identify who the enemy is, although the enemy is never “us,” it seems. Why is that? The vast majority of us are marked by passion; we are marked by aggression; we are marked by ignorance.

Our aggression may show up as nothing more than calling out “asshole” when someone cuts us off in traffic; it may show up as nothing more than pronouncing someone a “bigot” on Facebook; it may show up as nothing more than thinking, “Jerk!” when the guy across from us in the airport is talking way too loud on his cellphone while we are trying to read.

But wait...who are we directing our anger towards?

I didn't make up these examples. I have done all these things. I have that experience. I am an expert. I have been frustrated; I have been angry; I have been a bigot; I have been inconsiderate; I have been manipulative; I have been aggressive; I have been ignorant. And yes, I have much goodness in me also – I'm not just beating up on myself, but I am not blind to my own negative actions. I am unhappy with myself when I do thoughtless things.

When someone else does these same things, I get annoyed and think their actions are so much more unacceptable than mine. I dislike them with even more negative energy than I direct towards myself in similar circumstances. Why do I temper my own anger towards myself? Because I know that in the end, I have to take care of myself and minimize whatever damage I inflict. The question is, why am I not as aware of that need for self-care in others? I am not completely sure, and I need to remind myself to be more aware of my actions of body, speech and mind. What I am sure of, is that the reason I so clearly and precisely identify others' aggression, is because I have experienced that aggression in myself. It turns out that I am my own research model in my experiment to understand aggression.

A favorite saying from one of my favorite meditation teachers, Fleet Maull, goes like this:

"One of the greatest psychological insights that human beings have ever come up with is that the stuff that bothers us in other people is the most accurate and direct window into our own stuff that we can ever possibly want. So when somebody else is irritating us or doing something that we think is untoward, there's a good chance that if we turn the mirror and look at it the other way, that it's actually our stuff, or at least it's a strong correlate. Otherwise it probably wouldn't bug us very much. At any rate, that's where the juice is, that's where the learning is."

His and my teacher, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, tells us that when we are brave enough to look at our own foibles, we won't find answers, but what is far better is that we allow ourselves to meet the questions we need to understand ourselves and to better interact with the world around us. What are those questions? Who am I? What are these strange things that I do? Why do I do them, and what compels me to keep doing them?

These questions soften us up so that wisdom can enter our beings. As my friend, Melissa, suggested, they break up our addiction to certainty, because if there is one thing that drives our aggression, it is certainty. Extreme religious zealots are overflowing with certainty. I wish Omar Mateen could have lived with less certainty.

If we follow Fleet's lead, we might notice the parallel world of aggression: We might recognize that Rush Limbaugh’s vitriol undoubtedly starts with himself. We might recognize that Omar Mateen didn’t just hate gays, he hated himself for being gay-curious and then cranked that up into horrific violence. And then of course, there are are the Christian pastors who condone the killing of gays while citing scripture…and we all know what is in their hearts – yes; aggression and self-hatred. We know that because we know our aggression and self-hatred – hopefully not as extreme – but we know what it’s like, because none of us are wholly free from aggression.

We know quite well that we can’t fix others’ aggression; we can only work on our own. That is not terrible news, because it means that we are fully capable of opening up our own intelligence. We can allow the necessary questions to arise. We can see who we are. With the help of friends, acquaintances, therapists and/or meditation instructors, we can learn to absorb genuine feedback and take ownership of our own thoughts, words and actions.

We can grow the seed of our intelligence. According to Trungpa, we can take that seed of aggression and all the intelligence required to maintain it, and expand it outwards. That small dot of intelligence that labors so diligently at self-protection, can expand like a nuclear chain reaction.

A quick story.

A week ago, I was in a school gymnasium trying to exert some measure of control over the class I was about to perform with, and a huge, nonstop-talking, ninth-grader started to imitate me and make fun of me. As much as I wanted to make a wisecrack to put him in his place, I acted with decorum (even though I was rattled emotionally). I thought, “Well done!”

But that's simply not enough. As I thought about Trungpa and Fleet, I thought about the amazing intelligence that young ninth-grader possessed. He was extremely skillful at being noncompliant, as well as putting me down. One could say that he was masterful at what he sought to achieve. (And I should add that I have seen that same mastery in a third grader!) None of us welcomes or appreciates that kind of disrespect, but man! – it is crafty and it is intelligent!

My take away on that occasion? Instead of adding aggression to aggression, I need to recognize and acknowledge the fertile soil of intelligence in each individual, regardless of how it shows out. Rather than expressing anger, I could help others recognize the energetic brilliance that fuels their self-protection—even when it shows up as dullness or passive-aggressiveness. The bottom line is that aggression and ignorance is misspent intelligence. It is trapped intelligence, but it can be freed if we can learn to become more comfortable with uncertainty.

Truly dynamic intelligence is rooted in goodness, and self-acceptance. When not recognized and nurtured, it can cause us to die inside – and can potentially cost many innocent lives, as we saw in Orlando and across the USA last Sunday. When we, as a society, are unable to own up to our own aggression, we foment further aggression. And when that aggression is extreme and goes out of control, we need the resources to treat it professionally lest we create further suffering. Sadly, it's not likely to change, here, in this unending season of passion and aggression.

I am so sad for the victims and families in Orlando. I am so sad for us when our ignorance and aggression won’t allow us an opening to see ourselves, and we do and say mean things towards each other. Every name I call, I own. To remind me, I listen to Stevie Wonder sing Sting’s tune, How Fragile We Are.

If blood will flow when flesh and steel are one
Drying in the colour of the evening sun
Tomorrow's rain will wash the stains away
But something in our minds will always stay
Perhaps this final act was meant
To clinch a lifetime's argument
That nothing comes from violence and nothing ever could
For all those born beneath an angry star
Lest we forget how fragile we are

© 2016 Alan Kent Anderson