Category: Everyday mindfulness

Be Yourself. Everyone Else is Taken

May 26, 2020

Busyness, Choice, Creating intention, deep listening, Everyday mindfulness, Intention, Simplicity, Slowing down, Uncategorized

Bluejay in Appletree, Photo by Celia

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” ~Heraclitus

“And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.” ~Haruki Murakami

“Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.” ~ Khalil Gibran

Dear Friends,

I hope you are all well and enjoying this spring. It’s hard to believe that we had a snow squall a few weeks ago seeing the apple, peach, and cherry trees in bloom. In Connecticut we are starting to cautiously re-open businesses. I’ve seen a traffic jam on the major highway and full tables at open-air restaurants. Life can seem normal, by which I mean, pre-COVID, and sometimes it can seem very not-normal as I find myself never wanting to touch a doorknob with an ungloved hand ever again, or harboring a mistrust of lettuce. One thing which is true always but seems more dramatic and novel is that none of us has been here before. This changing time in the world is new for all of us.

And, there’s lots of advice…so many things to read. I have well-meaning friends who send me articles from different viewpoints about the “best” strategies we should take, about the failings of the government to keep us safe and how to keep ourselves safe. One person tells me about herd immunity and that we should be emulating Sweden. A medical doctor tells me I need to stay isolated…another medical friend says, “no we don’t need to do that, only certain people do.” A practitioner sends me a sign up for another webinar. I am told to treat this time as a retreat…Meditate four hours a day…Garden…Play your flute…Make a commitment to write each day…And when all else fails—bake.

In Zen, we have gathas, practice poems to keep us anchored to our intentions as we go through the day. Several years ago when I began graduate school online, I was overwhelmed with anxiety around the technology, the updates, the daily check-in on the school platform…all of it stretched me thin with worry that I would miss out. Entering the online world, I would get swept up in anxiety and find myself holding tension in my shoulders and in my mind. I was afraid I wouldn’t see a critical piece of homework; I’d post a reply in the wrong place or I couldn’t open the attachment from the teacher, my computer would crash, the internet would go down…and so many more. During my time as an online student, all these things happened—and I managed to survive.

After a few semesters of computer aversion, I wrote a gatha that I taped to my computer keyboard. Turning on my computer, many voices are calling to me. I promise to listen to myself and remember that caring for my body and mind is my highest priority. I aspire to be a presence of compassion for myself and everyone I encounter. While this reminder was not an instant cure-all for my feeling of overwhelm, it was a reminder that I could choose how I wanted to respond. Remembering that I had a choice allowed me to prioritize what was truly important to me.

When I remembered what my priority was, not being perfect, but taking care of my true home, my body and mind put things in perspective. I could take breaks. In one class, my teacher sent the class a link to the lying down desk which made my body so much happier for long hours of keyboard work. I worked when it was the right time for me. I listened to what was right for me…and I respected my capacity.

When we listen to how we are and what we are looking for we can create our own path. We can make our practice our own. Our practice does not look like everyone else’s. Even for those who live in a monastery and follow the same schedule of sitting, walking, eating, and working…their practice is not simply transferred to them from an outside source. Spiritual maturity requires we take responsibility for our own practice and make it our personal.

What I have found to be true is that our practice is made of what we do…and how we do it. It is a patchwork of our honest looking at our habits, the hurts that have healed and those which are still raw, our willingness to try and make mistakes, our ability to find soothing in our distress and our willingness to sit up with ourselves and hold our own hand when we can’t be comforted. It is made of celebrations when we don’t do the same thing, when we take a risk, are brave and vulnerable and we can see we have changed. Our true path is stitched together from all our woundedness, our celebrations, our ability to choose, authenticity, and failure…all of it create the path and the way we walk it. The two are not different. Our practice creates our practice.

The energy we invest in looking and clear seeing creates the foundation for how we practice. The essential ingredient is you. How do you want to be? What are you willing to do to commit to your own awakening? No one can answer these questions for you, nor can anyone do your practice for you. When we recognize that living with our own truth is more powerful and transformative than looking like a good practitioner following form without differentiation. We can start to make our practice our own. This is when things get exciting. This is when the practice of stopping and deep looking, making space for all our emotions can become integrated and truly support our life. This is not a dress rehearsal. As our teacher Thay says, This is it.

May we all trust our light,

Celia

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The Body is Always in the Present

December 18, 2019

Everyday mindfulness, Everyday practices, Mindfulness of feelings, Mindfulness of the Body, Uncategorized

Barkhamsted Reservoir, Photo by Celia

“Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the world earth revolves – slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future; live the actual moment. Only this moment is life.” ~Thich Nhat Hanh”

“As soon as we wish to be happier, we are no longer happy.” ~Walter Landor

“Suffering usually relates to wanting things to be different than they are.” ~Allan Lokos

“The best way to capture moments is to pay attention. This is how we cultivate mindfulness. Mindfulness means being awake. It means knowing what you are doing.” ~Jon Kabat-Zinn

Dear Friends,

As we move closer to the holiday season and the coming year, life can seem to speed up. We are already making doctor appointments for the new year and planning, planning, planning. This is an essential part of taking care of ourselves, but planning can also interfere with our ability to be present. Whenever folks ask me how to practice present moment awareness, how to stop their minds from cartwheeling into the past and the future—the answer I give is always, start with the body.

For most of us, we have fluid patterns of opening to the time continuum. We may be driving, shopping, listening to someone else, meditating, or reading these words and our thinking self is leaning into the future, planning as a way to stay safe and protected, or leaning into the past working furiously to shift the experience of the past and develop more protection and understanding to apply to similar situations in the future. All this mental activity centers around our primary goal of staying safe. We can see that this thought process comes from the basic need to care for ourselves and our loved ones. It’s rooted in the beautiful desire to save ourselves from suffering, but the price of this activity is exhaustion. All these maneuverings don’t really do the trick. In my lifetime, I’ve spent hundreds of hours preparing defenses to debates that never happened. All these hours of mental strategizing seemed crucial at the time but in retrospect, these are hours I’ve been absent from my life.

When we come back to the body, we have the opportunity to stop what Thich Nhat Hanh calls NST, or Non-Stop Thinking. If you go to a Plum Village monastery, something extraordinary happens every fifteen minutes. A bell rings and the entire community pauses and comes back to their breath. When we do this practice of consciously stopping and settling, noticing the body, the breath, and the mind, we are in the present moment. Basic practices include stopping and breathing in awareness three times before answering the phone, or before emailing or texting. I’ve made it a practice to breathe consciously three times before beginning to drive. We can build these pauses into our day and although this practice may seem simplistic, it has a profound cumulative effect upon the relationship we have to our body and to our ability to be present.

The body responds to being remembered and attended to. The mind and feelings are constantly asking to be seen and known. In only three breaths we can bring kind attention to the body and mind. In my own practice, I’ve added an element of self-care into these three breaths. When we stop and bring this warm accompaniment to ourselves, it’s like pouring out water from a full cup, releasing the buildup of stress that we unconsciously accumulate during the day. With the first inhale, I track the phenomena in the body. As I exhale, I image all tension leaving with my out-breath, flowing through the soles of my feet into the Earth which can hold everything. With the second inhale I investigate the quality of my mind and the emotions, accepting whatever is arising. As I exhale, I acknowledge this mental state silently with “of course,” or “I understand.” With the third inhale I say silently, “here,” and with the exhale, “now.” This practice encourages the body to release physical tension and lets the emotional states know they are understood without trying to change or manipulate them away. Remembering that we are here now, reconnects us with our power to be present with the vast experience of living our lives, leaving nothing out. We learn that we can trust ourselves to care for all our feelings, the pleasant, as well as the difficult. As we work with these practices that include the body, we can extend our periods of awareness and actually do that thing called “being present.”

Another way to give ourselves the gift of presence is to create a small window of time using an hour or less to give ourselves completely to the task at hand. We can even set a timer if it helps us focus. Creating this small circle of time, we give ourselves permission to wholeheartedly do one thing whether it’s washing dishes or seeing patients. We allow ourselves to fully inhabit this window of time in our bodies, attending to what’s happening in and around us.

As we work with embodied awareness and come back to this moment, we can be playful with our attention. I enjoy asking teens what the texture of the body is at this moment: is it smooth, bubbly, spiky, sharp, soft, grainy, or rigid? And what is the color: gray, aqua, red, yellow, or purple? I’ve heard some very interesting responses and each one is unique to the person experiencing it. This type of inquiry and noting can teach us to be more stable and aware of our body’s singular vocabulary.

This body is a marvel of sensory processing. Coming back to the body means we can be alive to all our senses. We can feel the texture of the sheets as we lie in bed, the weight of the body touching the mattress, the head resting on the pillow. We can rest in the awareness of the colors of the sunset, taste the food we are eating, listen to the sounds of life all around us, smell the coffee before we drink it. When we turn our attention to the body, we automatically become present since this body is incapable of holding onto the past or projecting into the future. Doing things wholeheartedly, with our body and mind in the same place creates a source of stillness and restfulness that transcends schedules and gives us refuge even in busyness. Granting permission to focus, staying with our experience, bringing warmth and compassion to all of our experience is the path to a greater and greater capacity for presence.

For the holidays, please give yourselves the gift of your own attention and care. The more we are able to listen to ourselves without running, the more we become fluent in the language of our lives. We learn to stop leaning, to straighten and find the center where we can be with the whole of our lives, just as we are right now. The gift of acceptance, of compassion, and understanding can give us the strength to inhabit our lives fully, as they are, at this very moment.

May we all trust our light,

Celia

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The Guardian of Myself

August 6, 2019

compassion, Creating intention, Equanimity, Everyday mindfulness, Healing our society, Healing Ourselves, Loving Kindness, Meditation, Metta, Mindfulness, Neuroscience of compassion, Transforming emotions, Uncategorized

Venerable and friends, Bantam, CT. Photo by Celia

“Strive at first to meditate

Upon the sameness of yourself and others.

In joy and sorrow, all are equal.

Thus be guardian of all, as of yourself.”

~Shantideva, The Way of the Bodhisattva

Dear Friends,

I was saddened—to see my former classmate and mindfulness colleague on the news this week. He’s the Police Chief in Dayton, Ohio and when he’s on television it means there’s a tragedy—and according to the New York Times, the Dayton shooting was the 32^nd mass shooting this year. As I watched the reports of the three major shootings this week and read the news, I felt an overwhelming weight of pain and collective suffering. I remembered what contemplative neuroscientist researcher Tonia Singer said in her Ted talk, “watching suffering, [ie.] the news, activates the limbic system.” The limbic system is the emotional enter of the brain responsible for the sympathetic nervous system and the fight or flight response to stimuli. It is also activated by trauma and watching the news can give us vicarious or secondary trauma from contact with images and accounts of violence and hostility.

We are processing and receiving information all the time and we unconsciously take on the emotional state of others.

Researchers compare the activity of the brain between those who are suffering and those who are witnessing the pain. In fMRI scans display the activation of the insula, the locus of the pain activates when we witness someone who is suffering. Contemplative neuroscientist, Tonia Singer tells us that this emotional response is “unconscious, the insula fires in a millisecond—we are processing every second of our lives. We unconsciously go into emotional resonance of others.” This is the emotional resonance of empathy, or the ability to understand what another is feeling. This feeling of pain and despair is part of the response of empathetic contagion. In the face of so much collective suffering and loss, we can be thrown off-center and become paralyzed and powerless in the face of hatred and destruction.

Neuroscience researchers Tonia Singer and Olga Klimenki wanted to study the different qualities of empathetic contagion and compassion. Using distressing film footage from the BBC news, they found that participants who focused on the pain of those they viewed reported negative feelings of hopelessness, despair, and depression, agitation, and frustration, while those who trained in compassion, the wish that suffering is relieved, experienced feelings of solidity, of reward, and even happiness faced with the same news that others found so distressing.

Neuroscience learned from monks who individually have over 40,000 practice hours of compassion meditation, that encountering suffering, these monks fully comprehend the pain of the other and shift into the practice of compassion. The neural circuitry of compassion activates the body’s own powerful analgesic system connected to oxytocin and opiate production for relieving pain. The monks practicing compassion reported feelings “positive affiliation, love, reward, of concern, strength and warm feeling” according to Singer.

Thich Nhat Hanh reminds us that “compassion is a verb.” Compassion is the desire to remove suffering and the impetus to do so. Compassion is doing something.

In loving kindness meditation, there is the intention to transform suffering. This intention is an action. Neuroscience shows us the dramatic shift that can arise from changing our thought pattern. Using fMRI technology, the intention for others to be well and happy completely shifted the neural connectivity and the emotional state of the practitioner.

When we are steady and balanced in our lives, we are capable of meeting the suffering of others. In neuroscience this is called the caring affiliative system—Singer explains the importance of this system in bringing about the end of suffering in oneself and another, “If a child cries, the mother cries, you know the child will cry even more. This caring affiliation system what it does naturally is soothing the child, getting calm and pouring out this concern and love.” Research demonstrates that the same person who experienced empathetic distress at another’s pain, and experienced suffering and distress could activate the care and affiliation circuitry after compassion training. The evidence is very clear, and Singer acknowledges, “We need compassion—which is the system of affiliation and love—the positive feeling of strength and concern for others.” This shift in our mind creates resilience and the ability to transform our own suffering and when we can show up with a calm and balanced presence, we have much more capability for wise and sustained action.

This week my compassion prayer is, May I not close my heart to my suffering. May I not close my heart to your suffering. This is how it is right now–for both of us. May I remain balanced and at ease in the middle of things. May you find peace in the midst of this and may all of us realize the end of suffering.

May we all trust our light,

Celia

Calligraphy by Thich Nhat Hanh

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The Monastery of Family Life

February 18, 2019

Awakening where we are, compassion, Everyday mindfulness, Families, Householders, Making our practice our own, Uncategorized

Stream in winter. Photo by Rick Errichetti

“Each person is different. Freedom does not come by imitating others.” ~ Ajahn Chah

“You may not be perfect, but you are all you’ve got to work with. The process of becoming who you will be begins first with the total acceptance of who you are.” ~ Bhante Gunaratana

“Live your life. Do the dishes. Do the laundry. Take your kids to kindergarten. Raise your children or grandchildren. Take care of the community in which you live. Make all that your path and follow your path with heart.” ~ Dipa Ma

“In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity” ~ Albert Einstein

Dear Friends,

We are imperfect and relationships don’t follow rules. Families and children can create unimagined tests of patience and endurance. Our lives can become consumed and seemingly hi-jacked by the urgent needs of another and we are left feeling like a shell of ourselves, all our desires thwarted. And this is the monastery of family life.

The hardest role I have in my life and the one that has taught me the most about love, renunciation, diligence, humility, and equanimity is parenthood. Meditation teacher and psychologist, Jack Kornfield writes “Parenting is a labor of love. It’s a path of service and surrender and, like the practice of a Buddha or a bodhisattva, it demands patience and understanding and tremendous sacrifice.” A great part of this sacrifice is learning to let go over and over. Before my kids were born, I thought I was calm and freed from much of my reactivity—then I had kids and my enlightenment date got pushed way back. How could these small people, turn me from a mellow sage into a neurotic parent I would not want to sit next to on a bus?

Our culture is driven by success. We want to look like we are able to cope with our lives, but sometimes our children can provide us with challenges that we cannot overcome. My first child had colic, which meant she cried about seven hours a day and woke up many times during the night. If my success and happiness as a new mother was measured by my ability to soothe my child—I was a terrible failure. If my daughter was born twenty years earlier, I would have read about letting her cry and not picking her up. But she was born in the time of attachment parenting and I read that the best, kindest thing to do was to pick up the baby whenever she cried. So that’s what I did, with the result of being exhausted and totally resentful and she didn’t stop crying. When she was older, I was advised to parent according to the Myers Briggs personality traits and be firm and decisive with her, set strong limits and distance myself. Whenever I followed the directions from a book written by experts, it hurt my heart. Instructions written by someone who never met me didn’t allow for my own authentic way of relating and I ended up feeling like a fraud.

Our brain’s ability to analyze can pull us into the path of self-doubt where we distrust our own instinct and abandon our internal sense of truth for the cookie-cutter actions of experts. We are flooded with self-help books from experts in all fields. We have been told to eat like a Mediterranean, a Californian, and a cave-person. I’ve lost track or what we’re supposed to eat; I believe food is out and we are supposed to subsist on Kombucha. We can get seduced by the world of pretend perfection and invulnerability we see on social media. The beautiful houses and the how-to blogs can create the obsession of correctness and competency. There’s the expression, “fake it ‘till you make it,” meaning to just do the thing to create the habit and confidence to make it our own behavior. But what if we fake it and it stays fake?

What I came to embrace in parenting is the practice of authenticity and respect—of looking into my own heart and letting my children know how their actions affected me. I stopped being a superior being exercising my legitimate authority and set my intention to care for me and for them without sacrificing either of us on the altar of social approval. I learned to pause and sense my body and emotions before responding. I would ask my kids how they would handle the situation if they were the parent. I didn’t become an equal or a friend. I became someone who respected themselves and allowed themselves to make mistakes because I trust that we can figure it out. We are designed as a species to be in relationship and when we make missteps we can have the confidence in our ability to make repairs.

Monastics entering the life of renunciation learn to give up comforts and to endure hardship, not sleeping, living in arduous conditions and often being in contact with those who they would rather avoid. Renunciation is also part of parenting. There is the relinquishment of sleep, comforts, projects and plans, showering and preferences. Parenthood anchors the focus of attention on a small helpless being. When we learn to see that householder life can be a pathway to practice, we learn to stop trying to make it free from pain and let it teach us how to stay with grace in the midst of pain and things that aren’t the way we would choose. Zen poet Gary Synder wrote, “It is as hard to get children herded into the carpool and down the road to the bus as it is to chant sutras in the Buddha Hall on a cold morning. One is not better than another. Each can be quite boring. They both have the virtuous quality of repetition.”

Weekdays, I wake before sunrise and begin my sandwich meditation—this includes waking my teenaged son up, waking him up again, making his lunch—seeing he has something in his stomach before ejecting him from the house so he can meet his bus. I feed two cats and two dogs, clean two litter boxes, wash some dishes, drink coffee and then sit in meditation. I have a choice. I can think about everything I do before sitting meditation as an obstacle, or I can see all my actions as a continuous stream of meditation. When I look at my life without compartmentalizing, my everyday acts transcend the mundane and become acts of devotion. All of our life can be an act of dedication and respect for ourselves, our time and talents, and for those close to us.

This week, I invite you to look at your routine and roles in a new light, as sacred acts. How much love is in our hands as we clean the toilet, or put gas into the car? Can we know the end of suffering as we pet a cat or wash our hair? Can we respect all of our time and leave nothing out? There are no throwaway experiences or times when we are off the clock of practice. The Buddha directed his monks to have clear comprehension and awareness when sitting, standing, walking, putting on robes, using the bathroom—in short, paying attention with the same amount of care, to all of our lives, even what isn’t formal practice. With attention and respect—doing the dishes, folding laundry, tending our lives—it is all a path to awakening.

May we all trust our light,

Celia

2 comments on The Monastery of Family Life

Category: Everyday mindfulness

Be Yourself. Everyone Else is Taken

The Body is Always in the Present

The Guardian of Myself

The Monastery of Family Life