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
No comments:
Post a Comment