Mini-Lessons for Contemplative Practice, Lesson One

Lesson One:

This week, the daily snippets will be about the Buddha - some of his teachings, some of the things I find interesting about his life and practice, and how we might use his teaching in our practice, whether or not we identify as Buddhists. Many of the Buddhist teachings are so delightfully packaged into brief bullet points or numbered lists.

Today, the Four Sights and the Four Noble Truths:

The Buddha was very sheltered as a child, as his father wanted to ensure that he would become a great and powerful king and not an enlightened one. The sages had predicted that the child would grow up to be one or the other. The Buddha grew up enjoying every luxury and distraction that his parent's wealth could buy. When he finally was able to escape this cloistering, he saw four things that he had been protected from: an old man (revealing the suffering of age), a sick person (revealing the suffering of sickness), a dead body (revealing both suffering an the impermanence of all things), and an ascetic (revealing that there were those who were searching for ways to end suffering). These sights led the Buddha to his search for a path to end suffering, and his realization of

The Four Noble Truths:

1. Life brings about suffering. (To quote The Princess Bride, "Life is Pain.")
2. The origin of suffering is attachment or desire.
3. The cessation of suffering is attainable.
4. The way of cessation is by following the Eightfold Path.

 

The hunter and the exquisite noticing

Mary Oliver's "The Fourth Sign of the Zodiac", first cycle:

Why should I have been surprised?
Hunters walk the forest
without a sound.
The hunter, strapped to his rifle,
the fox on his feet of silk,
the serpent on his empire of muscles -
all move in a stillness,
hungry, careful, intent.
Just as the cancer
entered the forest of my body,
without a sound.

The moment I received the cancer diagnosis, which came, for me, right out of the blue, I had the distinct feeling that the film reel had run out. The movie was running just fine a moment before and then ... nothing. No more sound, no more picture. I waited for the projectionist to splice the film back together again so that the movie could pick up where it left off or maybe start again from a few frames forward, but those of us watching would figure out what we had missed and would just carry on again like before, blissfully consumed by the action on screen.

The projectionist didn't come.

After days of cocooned haze, life did start to roll again, but the film was different. Everything was more vivid, more painful, delicate, and tender. We had stepped into Oz. Each interaction was so very precious and fleeting that it caused real pain. I was holding on to things - just regular things - a coffee cup, or a book, a TV remote, my phone - so tightly that my hands started to ache. And every time I looked at my children, or at the leaves changing to their autumnal hues, I started to weep.

I was holding on to things inside, too, holding things together, memorizing everything that happened, cataloguing it and filing it and remembering. I was doing this so ferociously that my insides started to ache, too. My chest felt like it would break apart from the pressure of holding everything in so greedily.

This time of exquisite noticing lasted forever - through medical exploration and hunting of the cancer, through fine-tuning the diagnosis and planning treatment, through the treatment itself. It was a time of being brutally, tenderly, excruciatingly awake.

People said I was being brave and strong, but I did not feel strong. I felt delicate, translucent, porous, and raw.

This is what we are talking about when we discuss waking up through the practice of meditation. This is why meditation is not for the faint of heart, as Jon Kabat-Zinn says, and why we are warriors when we are brave enough to go inside and face what truly is happening around us and within us. Warriors go inside and let their hearts rip open with the intensity of their own pain so that they can offer compassion to others more readily and more fearlessly.

We practice because it is the only way through our own suffering and the suffering of others. We all begin from wherever we are. We all have a chance to begin again with each moment. We all can wake up at any time.

A Novel in Pieces: A Consuming Fire, Chapter One

When thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned; neither shall the flame kindle upon thee.” - Isaiah 43:2

Another November gray day. Somehow it seems like it’s always November in this place. This gray day is broken up by wind; wind is plucking off the few remaining leaves a handful at a time. Sara sat at home, as always of late, occasionally breaking up her time staring at the fire blazing in the fireplace by staring out of the windows at the front of the house. Gray sky and bare brown tree limbs, the trees getting ready for their long winter slumber. Sara knew that she could feel it in the autumn when the trees went to sleep, a long, lonely feeling of arboreal abandonment. Much more pleasant the sense of the trees awakening in the spring, the quickening of sap running again beneath their rough cold skin.

That vivid imagination again. Friends and family had always told Sara that she imagined such things, that she could not really feel them. When she was very young, her heartfelt and openly shared perceptions were considered cute. When she got older, they marked her as quirky and maybe a bit strange. But none of those judgements ever changed what she felt.

She turned away from the window and went back to her chair by the fire. Now that the kids were grown and had moved out, she had placed a favorite old wingback chair very close to the fire, facing the fire, so that she could have an easier view of the flames while supported in the chair’s loving embrace. The golden floral upholstery shone in the fire light dancing nicely in her vision with the warm honey wood of the fireplace mantel.

She allowed herself to sink deeply into her chair, and her eyes found the glowing embers. She sat and breathed and felt that the house breathed with her and melted into the curves of the chair. And then, suddenly, she was flying low over a river in the nighttime, just a foot or two above the surface of the black water. The river gave the impression of being slow and cold and sluggish, though she did not reach down to touch it. She was in a long nightgown that fanned out behind her as she flew; the gown flowed like seaweed glimpsed roiling under waves. Flying like this was surprisingly effortless. As she flew, she stared into the depths of the water and could only see blackness, no light penetrating the surface. She turned her head to see the trees lining the river, each one dressed in distinctive autumn finery, golds and peaches, reds and purples and oranges. And the city skyline behind. She recognized the backdrop and so now could place her dreamy night flight in Boston, along the Charles River.
Turning her face back down towards the black water and gliding faster, gliding lower, so that her nose almost dipped into the water, she was close enough now that she could feel the water’s cold chill rising up toward her. She glided under a bridge by steering her upper body just so to make it under the arch, and then she saw the first shape under the water. She slowed down her glide as she realized that there were many shapes under the water, white, jellyfish-like shapes just under the surface of the water. The river was filled with them; they were stacked on top of each other, endless ghostly white shapes floating with the slow drift of the water toward the harbor. She slowed her glide more. She didn’t know how she did this, it just happened as she put her awareness to it. She slowed more so as to look more carefully at the shapes. Now she was hovering motionless just above the black surface, looking down at the ghostly jellies. She could see human faces gradually emerging from the mass of shapes, human ghostly shapes floating under the water looking up at her. As soon as she made them out, they seemed to notice her in return, some raising ghostly arms up to point, and opening ghastly mouths in silent screams.

The water ghosts started moving up toward her, jostling each other, pushing in upon each other to move closer to Sara, suddenly very aware of just how near she was to this wakening mass of wraiths. Sara gasped and tried to start gliding again but now she did not go anywhere, she could not move, she could not even move up away from the surface of the river. She had forgotten how to fly. She was frozen, inches above the water ghosts, their hunger for her living flesh palpable in the cold night air. Her nightgown had fluttered down into the water by her feet in her stillness, it no longer was supported in its loose flowing flight, and she could feel tugs on its cloth like fish pulling at the end of a fishing line, pulling her with increasing strength down towards the cold water. The cloth of her nightgown wicked water up from the river. Her frozen body started to tilt in response to the tugging, her toes now breaking the surface of the water. She opened her mouth and began to scream. She was slapping at the ghostly shapes now. She was crying and screaming and flailing when she woke from the dream.

She was back in the living room, again staring into the fire. The morphine the doctors had prescribed for her made her dreams and waking blend in a way that reminded her of childhood, when it was sometimes hard for her to tell if she was awake and alert or asleep and dreaming. She took a moment to separate from the dream, to feel her weight pushing down into the warm fabric of the chair. And after only the briefest moment in the present, her mind was pulled back toward a recurrent childhood dream of being called by God. The priest at her church, Father Joe, enthusiastically endorsed this dream and gave her books to read about Joan of Arc. “Joan of Arc also was called to serve, and she did so brilliantly and saved her people,” he would tell the young Sara when the two would discuss the dreams and Sara's calling.

“But Joan of Arc was killed, and she was very young!” Sara responded. She, herself, was very young, only about eight or nine.

“Yes, well, many of the saints were martyred. We never know why we are called, but, if we are faithful, we follow God when he calls,” Father replied.

Young Sara would go looking for Father Joe after her Sunday school lessons each week to talk about her dreams of being visited by an angelic messenger and to discuss the idea that she could devote her adult life to service of God per the messenger's command. Father Joe listened wholeheartedly and fed the young girl stories of nuns and convents that fit neatly with her ideas of the nun's life, based completely around her annual viewing of The Sound of Music on TV.

Father Joe became much less enthusiastic when Sara told him that the angel of God who visited her in dreams now was asking her to bear the son of God. The angel specifically said that this should happen before Sara turned 18 years old. She had just completed her first communion, still dressed in her resplendent white “Bride of Jesus” wedding dress, when she first told Father about this dream. They were at a celebration following the first communion mass in the parish hall across the parking lot from the church. The room was full of other brides of Jesus, second grade girls bedecked in wedding gowns and veils, their male counterparts dressed richly in black suits. Proud parents and grandparents and extended families rounded out the crowd. Little boys in black suits ate donuts covered in powdered sugar and got reprimanded for messing up their nice clothes. The sugar on their dark suit coats looked like snowflakes.

“Father, I had another dream about my calling,” Sara began earnestly, as she got in between Father Joe and the large communal plate of donuts at the reception.

“Yes, Sara? And what happened in this one?” he responded with a smile.

“The angel descended from heaven on wings of golden fire. His face was serious and stern, and I was frightened.” Sara said.

“Stern? You always use such big words for such a little girl, Sara. What happened next?” Father Joe sat in a nearby chair so that his bold brown eyes could more easily meet Sara’s green ones. With the priest seated, the two were nearly face to face.

“It was dark outside. I was running in the woods, and I was scared. I was running from something. I could feel its hot, wet breath on my back. The low tree branches pulled at my dress and at my hair and whipped my face. And then I came to a clearing. The sky was dark, no stars, and I was so tired. I could not catch my breath. I fell to my knees there, and I knew I would die. I knew the thing that I was running from would get me, so I turned my face up to the sky to pray for help. And I saw a falling star there.”

“I wished on that star as it fell, but instead of falling to the side like falling stars usually do, this star seemed to be coming straight for me and getting bigger and bigger. And as I sat there praying and wishing, I could tell that the thing that was chasing me was afraid. I could feel its fear, and I could feel it retreating into the cover of the woods. I was safe as long as the star was there. But as the star kept falling toward me, I started to see that it wasn’t a star at all but an angel, beautiful and terrible. His face was smooth like a statue but with that stern, serious look, like I was in trouble. And his wings blazed with fire. He was all white except for that fire, white robes, white skin, white hair, and white eyes.”

“And did the angel speak?” Father Joe asked. In his eagerness to hear her story, he seemed to have forgotten the donut clutched in his hand, suspended halfway between the donut plate and his mouth. Powdered sugar snowed down onto his black pants. He noticed then, and, raising the donut to his lips, took a bite.

“Oh, yes. When the angel’s feet nearly touched the ground, he stopped, and he hovered. He looked at me with those white eyes and that stern face. He said, ‘Sara!’ and his voice boomed louder than anything I have ever heard, but he was not yelling. His voice filled my ears and my head and my whole body, and it hurt. ‘Sara! You must not be afraid. I come from heaven with The Word of God. You are to bring forth the next Messiah, the next Savior. This must be done before the day of your birth in your eighteenth year.’” Sara paused in her telling, and looked at Father Joe. He looked surprised. “Father, do you think that means before I turn eighteen or before I turn nineteen?” Sara asked, earnestly.

Father Joe finished chewing the bite of donut that was in his mouth, holding up one finger to indicate that he needed a moment to do so before responding. Then he said, “Have you told your parents about this dream?”

“Yes, Father,” Sara answered, “But they still think it's just a dream. That they all are just dreams. They say callings don’t really happen to people, not callings from God. They say that they are made up like all the other stories in the Bible.”

Adult Sara chuckled at this remembering. Her parents were always at odds with the church, and they were always chagrined that, as a child, Sara believed everything the church and the priests told her as if it were the gospel truth. Her dreams and visions, her callings, completely flummoxed her new age parents, who really only went to church to keep their own, more traditionally faithful parents, happy.
Her reverie broken, she noticed the sound of Mike whistling in the kitchen and banging around, the sounds of him hunting for something to eat. He was home from his most recent business trip. Since she was eating less these days, and since the kids were gone, their meals together had become very informal. She would sometimes sip some soup while he ate whatever he had made for himself or picked up on his way home from the office. It was good to have him here. It helped ground her in the real world, even through the haze of the meds. He whistled his way into the living room holding a small plate with a sandwich on it, and he took up a place on the couch near the fire.

“It’s cold out there today, that wet chill that comes this time of year and runs right through you,” he said, pulling a nearby blanket onto his lap with his free hand, then setting his plate on his lap. "You should be glad you didn't have to go out in it." He added, and Sara noticed the briefest ghost of guilt pass over his face, like he wished he had not pointed out her invalid state.

She chose to ignore it. “What did you make?” she asked.

“Oh, nothing special,” Mike replied, looking down at his creation. "Just some hummus and cucumber and tomato slices on that bread you like. I mean, that you used to like?” He shifted uncomfortably.

“I still like it. I just can’t eat it.” Sara said, maybe a little sharply. She pulled her wrap tighter around her frame. She was shrinking from not being able to eat, and she found that she could sink more completely into her old wrap that she had knitted back when the kids were in elementary school. She had had it that long. It had been used for playing pretend way back when. Which one of the boys used it as the ocean of his pirate ship? Its blue undulations of chunky purl rows and knit rows made fantastic waves for an ocean. And one of the other boys – maybe the same boy? – slept with this wrap when she got sick the first time, when she was in the hospital. Family memories knitted in with the rows of wool.

“How was work today? Sometimes I feel like you are my only connection to the outside world anymore,” Sara said.

“Oh, same old, same old,” Mike replied. “Trying to save the world. What did you do today? Did you start reading that book I left you?”

Before this last trip, Mike had given her a copy of The Bluest Eye. She had read it shortly after they started dating, and she spoke so passionately about it then that he thought it would be good for her to reread, to revisit, and to maybe find some of that old passion now.

“I cracked it open, read a few pages, fell asleep. It’s hard right now. The drugs are making me so tired, it’s hard to finish a thought. And I read the same paragraph about fifty times to try and get my mind to focus. They say its cancer brain. Sometimes it seems like the cancer is eating my brain, even though it isn’t in there yet. I swear I can’t finish a sentence sometimes. And I lose my thoughts from one moment to the next.”

"You still have those vivid, storybook dreams, though, don’t you?” Mike asked, and he looked away from his sandwich to look at Sara’s face, to look into her eyes. She loved the way his hazel eyes never looked the same from one moment to the next, reflecting light, and picking up the colors behind and around them in almost a magical way. In this moment, they were gold at the core moving out through an emerald green mantle and a dark brown crust. His eyes today were like a model of the earth she made in middle school earth science class.

“Yes,” she answered. “I think I will always have those. I’m having them more now. I think it’s the pain medication.”

“Anymore dreams of God? Or angels? Have they shown up again?” he queried.

Mike knew about her dreams of being called. They had stopped when she was still a teen, leaving Sara feeling abandoned. She had felt guilty that she had not produced a child for God, and there was still a part of her that wondered if the dreams had deserted her, if her faith and her God had deserted her, because she had not lived up to that calling. But even though the dreams had left her, and she was no longer visited by the angel with the fiery wings, she remembered the dreams, and she longed for them with a burning in her belly. She had told Mike about the dreams one night early on in their college years, during one of those long walks with lots of hand-holding and secret-sharing. He enthusiastically listened and asked many questions. He claimed to be an atheist, and he loved to think about how other people develop faith. The idea that she had truly believed that she had been called to this purpose as a child blew him away.

“No more God or angels, no.” Sara sighed.

“You miss them, don’t you?” Mike asked.

“I do. I do miss them. And I feel like I need them now. I would like for them to come back. Remember when Mom was dying? Her hospital room filled with the angels and saints and the spirits of people who had gone before. At least she could see them there. I want that to happen for me, but I’m afraid it won’t. I’m terrified I’m going to die alone.”

“You won’t die alone. We will all be there, me and the kids. And besides, you’re going to beat this thing again. I just know it. You did it last time. You'll do it again.” He took a big bite of sandwich, indicating that he was finished with this thought. Mike didn’t like to discuss her dying. He never had. He usually changed the subject in some way or another.

“I’m not sure I want to beat it,” Sara said. “I’m tired. The kids are grown and gone. We all have to go sometime, right?” She looked over at him pleadingly, needing an answer that she knew he would not give her. Needing permission to let go.

He finished chewing and said, “Nope. It’s not your time,” with a finality that made her sigh and rest her head back against the chair, closing her eyes. This line of conversation was over for now. They had lived together long enough that she could tell that any further queries in this direction would be fodder for argument, and she did not have the stomach for it right now.

With eyes closed, her thoughts turned to the fiery angel from her dreams. Father Joe had a discussion with her parents after her heartfelt talk with him at her first communion regarding her dreams of being called, but he did not mention the dream about the new messiah. Sara's mother had very clearly told the priest that he would no longer encourage her in this direction. All talk of being called to service of the Lord would cease. They threatened to leave the church if the priest did not actively discourage Sara from her belief in these dreams.

And with young Sara, her parents explained to her over and over that the stories in the Bible and stories about such people as Joan of Arc were not real. That they were propaganda for perpetuating the religion on illiterate peasants so that the priests and bishops and popes could make more money. Sara cried and hated her parents. She didn’t believe them. It was even worse than when she had learned that Santa Claus was not real. But when she tried to talk to Father Joe about it, he turned her away with a gentle but firm redirect.

“Your parents do not want us to talk about callings anymore, or about your dreams, Sara,” Father Joe told her. She had not been able to see the priest on her own since her parents had gone to have their talk with him. This was the first time she had been able to catch up with him to ask him a question. “And, further, they were very clear that they do not believe that little girls are called to service by God.”

“But what do you believe, Father?” Sara had asked him.

“Sara, I believe you can have a calling. And if the Lord wants you to be in his service, your parents will not be able to stop it. What do you believe, Sara?” At this point, another congregant squeezed past Sara and dragged Father Joe off to talk about some adult concern. Adults always thought their concerns to be more imperative than those of children.

When Sara told her parents of her dream of the fiery angel and of her calling to bring forth the new Messiah, they were shocked. And her mother looked scared.

“See? I told you we shouldn’t make her go to church just to please our parents,” her father had said. “She’s just so damned impressionable and sensitive, too damned sensitive.”

Her mother shook her head and said, “Sara, honey, you don’t actually believe the things they say in church, do you?”

“Well, yes.” Sara stated simply and honestly.

“Oh, honey. Those are just stories. Please promise me that you won’t try to get yourself pregnant just because a dream told you that you should. Oh, Jesus.” She said, rolling her eyes. “I can’t even believe I have to say that to you,” she added.

“The dreams are very believable.” Sara retorted. “It’s hard to tell if I’m awake or asleep. That’s how real they are. They are as real as this talk we are having right now, Mom.”

“Well, they aren’t real. It’s just the combination of that incredible imagination of yours and the stories that the church has had centuries to tailor to get just that kind of response out of its followers,” her father said with the fatherly finality that meant that the discussion was over for now.

Sara rested her mind on the face of the angel, which, even after all these years, decades, she could still see as clearly as the day she first saw it. Whose face was it? Its sternness had a quality of her father’s face, but it was not his face. Its marble smoothness resembled the face of Jesus, crucified, from the statue hanging above the altar at the church she went to as a child, but it was not his face. That Jesus’ face was covered in blood and anguish, gory and horrible. The fiery angel’s face was beautiful and smooth and unblemished even through its sternness. She focused on the face and all other thoughts burned away, even the sounds of the room died down, diffused to nothingness. Just the angel. Would he come back to her in her time of need? Could she call on him now? In her mind’s eye, just the angel’s face, his eyes closed to her, the stern expression she remembered from her childhood replaced by a deep and profound sorrow. The smooth alabaster unfurrowed but expressive all the same. The strong jawline and prominent brow, aquiline nose. She imagined touching his face with a tentative hand, feeling the coolness of his cheek, but as her dream hand rose up, she felt a shock of pain running up from her palm into her heart, and a feeling of utter shame blooming in her chest. He was not for her in this earthly way, not for her flesh.

How could she wake him? Her eyes lingered on his perfect face as she felt her body relaxing again towards sleep. His hair fell in waves, framing his face, and he was utterly, completely still. Her heart ached to ease his pain, to comfort him in his sorrow.

And then she was running in the woods in the dark again, being chased again, the hot breath of the animal hunter on her back, terror prickling the surface of the skin at her neck. Running, stumbling over tree roots, a million unseen brambles pulling at her skin, her hair, her clothes, running blindly over the mossy, soft, soundless ground. She was hunted but also hunting. She had to find her way back to the field where she first met the angel. She knew this. But she was weak and tired, older now. She did not know if she could make it. And somewhere she heard a baby crying, one of her babies. The hunter behind her heard it, too, and stopped chasing her. She had to find the baby before the hunter did. She cried out and woke herself from her dream. She was sweating. She blinked and looked around at the room and saw Mike, almost finished with his sandwich, looking back at her.
“Hmm. Must have been dreaming,” she said, by way of explanation.

“You looked anguished. I thought about waking you, but," he gestured at his sandwich by way of explanation. "What were you dreaming about?” Mike asked.

“Running. One of the children was in danger. Typical,” she replied. She didn’t want to tell Mike that she had been looking for the angel. It seemed like a secret she should keep tight this time, which she found curious.

The Throat Chakra (Vishudda)

Many of you know that I was recently diagnosed with tongue cancer. I will have surgery this week to remove a "halo" of flesh around the tumor on my tongue to try to ensure that the cancer cannot come back. The prognosis seems pretty good, assuming there are no surprises uncovered during the surgery.

There has been a lot of waiting and not knowing during the past month since the biopsy found the cancer. There was a lot of waiting prior to that, when I knew something was wrong but my doctors and dentists would not listen to me. I have known that there was something going on with this area of my body for about a year. The doctors could not see the sore on my tongue that I could feel for a few months, then the doctors were just certain that the sore that they finally could see was from me biting my tongue or rubbing it against sharp parts of my teeth in my sleep. I tried to believe them, but there was always this nagging knowing in the back of my mind.

Just so you know, if you ever have a sore anywhere in your mouth that does not go away after two weeks, you should get it checked. Oral cancer is a rare but aggressive cancer, and the prognosis is usually not as good as it is in my case. If you catch the cancer early, you have a chance. 1 in 4 people who get oral cancer have absolutely no reason besides bum luck for getting it. In other folks, it is sometimes from heavy drinking or smoking or from HPV.

Eva Grayzel has fought this battle already, and she speaks beautifully and blogs about it a fair bit. She's even made a rap video. I will speak and write about it, but I promise now that I will never make a rap video about it.

During all of the waiting and not knowing how bad things were going to get, there was a lot of fear. I was afraid of leaving my children motherless, most of all. I was afraid of disfigurement. I was afraid of losing my voice forever. These are all very real possibilities with this particular brand of illness. I did not realize until this illness and this fear showed up how much I rely on my voice and how much I want my voice - for teaching, for parenting, for self-expression. I have spent the last couple of years working on learning to sing, and the joy that I got from that brand of newly-discovered and hard-fought self-expression was going to be greatly missed if lost so quickly after gaining it.

Through this time of waiting and not knowing, good things happened as well. My family and I have been overwhelmed by the good intentions, love, and support shown to us by our communities - our neighborhood, our friends and families, and our online communities as well. The outpouring of compassion has surprised and enfolded us and brought us strength when it felt like we were losing our will and our way.

It is interesting how the entire family is affected by Big Things like cancer. My kids are brave little ones who want to help and take care of me even when they are hurting and scared themselves. There is a beautiful blog about this by Dana Jennings, titled, appropriately, "When the Family Gets Cancer". We have been lucky, or blessed; this is the first Big Thing that our family has had to face. I am surprised and empowered by the resilience of my children. They amaze me with their compassion and strength every day. My spouse is incredible as well, but he also is very shy, so we will leave it at that.

Yoga practice and meditation have both been sustaining and absolutely necessary during this time. There have been times when I have been so worried and scared and angry that I have struggled, and in those times, the practice of lovingkindness has been a healing nectar. There have been times when, wracked with anxiety, there was nothing that could help but wrapping myself up in restorative yoga and breathing slowly and deeply. Other times, the need to do something, anything, to fight back, even though there was nothing that could be done, required a strong, physical asana practice. When my circulatory system was shot through with radiation, and I had to hold still inside a PET scanner for a very long time, I was able to tap into my practice to use that time for a surprisingly peaceful and not at all unpleasant meditation. If you do not practice yoga or meditation, there is no better time to begin. There are so many avenues to bring the practice into your life even for short bursts when you have time. Steady, regular practice, even for short durations of time, can change your life and give you the skills you will need to get through times like these. In an unabashed act of self-promotion, I can highly recommend Yoga By Numbers as one way to get started today. I lead a few asana practices and guided meditations on that app that are accessible for just about anyone.

This is the very short version of this story. Get your regular dental checkups. If you have a sore that does not heal after two weeks, get it checked. And listen to your body. When you know there is something wrong, find someone who will listen to you and who can help.

Compassion Practice is Integral to Mindfulness Practice

“Be full of kindness toward yourself. Accept yourself just as you are. Make peace with your shortcomings. Embrace even your weaknesses. Be gentle and forgiving with yourself as you are at this very moment. If thoughts arise as to how you should be such and such a way, let them go. Establish fully the depth of these feelings of goodwill and kindness. Let the power of loving friendliness saturate your entire body and mind. Relax in its warmth and radiance. Expand this feeling to your loved ones, to people you don’t know or feel neutrally about – and even to your adversaries!”

- Bhante G., Mindfulness in Plain English

 

In the West, many teachers and proponents of mindfulness work with the belief that all mindfulness practice inherently includes a compassion component, therefore compassion does not have to be taught. I maintain, however, that compassion practice should be taught directly during any mindfulness training, particularly in the West, and especially with beginners. Without direct instruction in compassion and in particular self-compassion, mindfulness loses one of its most valuable ethical anchors, and vulnerable students can get lost in self-doubt, feelings of unworthiness, or failure. Without kindness, mindfulness could even become dangerous.

In an effort to make mindfulness easier to mainstream, in an effort to get more people onto cushions and into the present moment, some of the ethical and moral guidelines of the practice have been left behind. Jon Kabat-Zinn defines mindfulness many ways, but often with these basic phrases: “moment-to-moment, non-reactive, non-judgmental attending …” (p. 286). I feel that this focus on a non-judgmental attitude is incorrect – that mindfulness is not non-judgmental. Rather, there is a filter of gentleness, of kindness, of reverence that must be present for mindfulness to arise. Mindfulness practice separated from befriending, from gentleness, loses some of its potential to affect positive change in the practitioner’s life and in the world at large. I agree with Ed Halliwell, who recently wrote that “Mindfulness just isn’t mindfulness without kindfulness … Mindfulness is just not neutral noticing. There are a clear set of attitudes which underpin the practice, and compassion may be the most important.”

Compassion and lovingkindness are two of the four heavenly abodes taught by the Buddha along with sympathetic joy, and equanimity. “Heavenly abodes” is the most common translation from Pali, but, according to Nyanaponika Thera, another translation is “sublime states of mind.” They are called abodes because the mind should, with practice, come to reside in them more often than not. It is recommended in the teachings that practitioners use these sublime mindstates as “… principles of conduct and objects of reflection but also as subjects of methodical meditation.” (Thera). In other words, these desired states of mind require practice in order to manifest.

The modern mindfulness movement in the West largely owes its existence to Jon Kabat-Zinn’s groundbreaking work in bringing mindfulness to the masses through his Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program. In designing that program for use in the medical community, Kabat-Zinn sought to remove any potentially-limiting religious undertones from the traditional vipassana, or insight, meditation practice. There are some that feel that this streamlining of mindfulness has led to “McMindfulness” – a repackaging and repurposing of the rich practices steeped in Buddhism and centuries of moral and ethical study for the more fast-paced, impatient, grasping West. Jon Kabat-Zinn discusses his decision not to include lovingkindness as an explicit practice in his MBSR programs. He feels that “…all meditation practices are fundamentally acts of lovingkindness, and when taught and practiced that way, obviate the need for a single practice claiming that orientation.” (Kabat-Zinn, p. 285).

As a beginning meditator, and, in fact, for several years of practice and of studying Kabat-Zinn’s books and methods, I personally did not understand that the awareness that was being cultivated was to be of a gentle or loving nature, and because of this, I found that it was difficult to sustain practice both in length of an individual sitting and in trying to maintain a daily practice over weeks or months or years. With my default mode naturally turning toward self-criticism, the practice of mindfulness was just another place where I practiced critical mind states: I did not feel good enough, or I felt like there was something lacking in my practice that made it not worth the effort to maintain. Simply put, over time, I felt like I was not meditating correctly, and perhaps I was not cut out for the practice. With time and with a better understanding of lovingkindness, practices, however, my practice has flourished.

In reviewing some of the prominent texts on mindfulness, I have found that different teachers choose to approach the subject of teaching mindfulness in different ways. Jon Kabat-Zinn, as we have seen, feels that the practice of mindfulness itself contains lovingkindness, and so the focus, especially with beginners, can be placed firmly and exclusively on the mindfulness practice. He states: “… my biggest reservation in regard to teaching formal lovingkindness practice was that it might be confusing for people who were in the early stages of being introduced for the first time to the attitude and practice of non-doing and non-striving that underlie all the meditation practices … The reason for my hesitation was that in the instructions for lovingkindness meditation, there is an inevitable sense that you are being invited to engage in doing something, namely invoking particular feelings and thoughts and generating desirable states of mind and heart.” (p. 285-286)

In the newest edition of his influential book Mindfulness in Plain English, Bhante Gunaratana (known as Bhante G by his students) has added an afterward that explains metta practice. Bhante G explains how he translates the word metta: “The word metta comes from another Pali word, mitra, which means ‘friend.’ That is why I prefer to use the phrase ‘loving friendliness’ as a translation of metta, rather than ‘loving kindness.’ The Sanskrit word mitra also refers to the sun … Just as the sun’s rays provide energy for all living things, the warmth and radiance of metta flows in the heart of all living beings.” (Gunaratana, p. 181)

Bhante G splits off a bit from Kabat-Zinn in describing the focus of learning mindfulness. Here Bhante G seems to be describing learning the two practices – mindfulness and loving friendliness - in unison and practicing them together: “Without loving friendliness, our practice of mindfulness will never successfully break through our craving and rigid sense of self. Mindfulness, in turn, is a necessary basis for developing loving friendliness. The two are always developed together …” (p. 177)

Christopher Germer, a clinical psychologist who uses mindfulness and compassion-based psychotherapy in his work, describes three levels of mindfulness practice. One starts with focused awareness, usually on the breath, then moves on to choiceless awareness or open monitoring, where attention is granted to whatever sensations or thoughts arise in the moment. From there, the practitioner moves on to lovingkindness and compassion practices. (Germer, p. 16-22) Each of these aspects of practice can be a point of meditative focus and study in its own right. As Germer describes it, focused awareness is how most mindfulness practices begin, bringing attention to the breath or other bodily sensations over and over again for a duration of time. By contrast, in open monitoring, “… conscious attention moves naturally among the changing elements of experience … open monitoring cultivates equanimity in the midst of random and unexpected life events. Technically, mindfulness refers to the skill of open monitoring.” (Germer, p. 18)

Germer describes loving-kindness practice as “the quality of mindful awareness – the attitude or emotion – rather than the direction of the awareness.” (p. 19) Lovingkindness brings “… tenderness, soothing, comfort, ease, care, and connection. These qualities are particularly important when we’re dealing with difficult emotions that constrict our awareness and activate our defenses.” (p. 19)

My practice has only gotten deeper with greater attention to lovingkindness and less focus on sustaining focused attention on sensory details. In my practice and in my students’ practices, we have found that using the breath or sensory input as the only anchors can be limiting. Some of us have a natural tendency to be too tuned in to sensory input already. For instance, some of my students with asthma and other respiratory ailments find that focusing on the breath evokes anxiety. For some, physical pain is constant and debilitating, and so practices that are relaxing for others, such as guided relaxation or body scans, only serve to turn up the volume on their pain perception. For some with Asperger’s, the work is in turning down sensory input rather than turning it up. In my work in yoga therapy, I have found that difficulties with being still particularly plague those who are experiencing anxiety, panic, hyperactivity and even more run-of-the-mill daily stress.

With anxiety and stress, the mind and nervous system can feel as if they have been hijacked by the fight, flight, freeze response. In this state, being present to bodily sensations or to whatever arises in the field of awareness is challenging to say the least. There are other mind states that do not lend themselves to mindfulness practice, as well, at least in the beginning of learning how to sit. Kristin Neff is a leading contemporary scholar of self-compassion who currently is working to understand the efficacy of self-compassion in wellness and to spread the practice of self-compassion in a way that mirrors Jon Kabat-Zinn’s work with mindfulness. She states: “Intuitively, it would seem optimal to learn mindfulness before self-compassion given that mindfulness is needed for compassion. However, for people suffering from severe shame or self-criticism, they might need to first cultivate self-compassion in order to have the sense of emotional safety needed to fully turn toward their pain with mindfulness.” (Neff, in press, p. 26-28) Contradicting himself a bit, Jon Kabat-Zinn seems to agree that explicit instruction in self-compassion is sometimes necessary for individual practitioners dealing with particular mindstates: “…these practices can sometimes serve as a necessary and skillful antidote to mind states such as ferocious anger, which may at the time of their arising be simply too strong to attend to via direct observation unless one’s practice is very developed. At such times, formal lovingkindness practice can function to soften one’s relationship to such overwhelmingly afflictive mind states, so that we can avoid succumbing completely to their energies. It also makes such mind states more approachable and less intractable.” (p. 287)

Interestingly, metta as a practice originally was offered by the Buddha as a way to deal with anxiety and fear. The Buddha sent monks to meditate in a forest occupied by tree spirits. The spirits tried to expel the monks, and, indeed, the monks were afraid and ran back to the Buddha, begging to be sent somewhere else to practice. The Buddha sent the monks back to the same enchanted forest but with the protection of the metta practices. “This was the first teaching of metta meditation … it is said that the monks went back and practiced metta, so that the tree spirits became quite moved by the beauty of the loving energy filling the forest, and resolved to care for and serve the monks in all ways.” (Salzberg, p. 25)

            In my teaching, I have found that children delight in this story of the forest monks, and they tend to love the idea of having a meditation practice that can help them to dispel fear. The book Buddha at Bedtime by Dharmachari Nagaraja has a beautiful metta meditation for children that is a favorite of the youngest yogis with whom I practice. The metta phrases suggested there are “May I be happy – may I be really happy from my head right down to my toes. I love myself dearly” with the focus first on the self, then on friends, teachers, and neighbors, then on all beings (Nagaraja, p. 137).

Salzberg (p. 39-40) describes the beginning steps of the metta practice for adults, where one gently repeats phrases of goodwill for ourselves and then for others. First, practitioners sit comfortably and reflect on good things about themselves or on their wishes for happiness. Then practitioners choose phrases that express what they most deeply wish for themselves and they repeat these phrases, coordinating this repetition with the breath or just resting on the phrases themselves in turn. As I have been taught, these phrases are some variation of: “May I be safe, may I be happy, may I live with ease.”

As a word of warning, Salzberg notes: “There are times when feelings of unworthiness come up strongly, and you clearly see the conditions that limit your love for yourself. Breathe gently, accept that these feelings have arisen, remember the beauty of your wish to be happy, and return to the metta phrases.” (Salzberg, p. 40) In a formal metta practice, these phrases are then turned outward to focus on a dear teacher, a difficult person, adversary, or enemy, and then the universe at large or all sentient beings, each in turn. Interestingly, another guiding teacher, Narayan Liebenson, suggests that the difficult person, or enemy, might be oneself.

As we can see from all of these teachings, these practices of befriending begin with a focus on the self, making self-compassion the very basic seed of the formal practice of lovingkindness. Typically, one begins the practice by wishing love and good things for the self. Neff’s definition of self-compassion has been incredibly useful in my own practice and teaching. She describes three interacting components of the self-compassion practice: “…self-kindness versus self-judgment, a sense of common humanity versus isolation, and mindfulness versus over-identification when confronting painful self-relevant thoughts and emotions.” (Neff & Germer, p. 28) It is useful to look at each of these three components of self-compassion - self-kindness, a sense of common humanity, and mindfulness - separately.

In the West, we put great value on being kind to others, but, either directly or through messages from the omnipresent media, we are often taught to be harshly critical of ourselves. Imagine, for a moment, if you were to direct your own harsh self-talk toward a loved one and actually gave that self-talk voice. We can be cruel to ourselves in ways that we would never tolerate if we directed that cruelty outward. Neff (in press, p. 5) explains self-kindness as working to be “… supportive and understanding toward ourselves. Our inner dialogues are gentle and encouraging rather than harsh and belittling. This means that instead of continually punishing ourselves for not being good enough, we kindly acknowledge that we’re doing the best we can … instead of immediately trying to control or fix the problem, a self-compassionate response might entail pausing first to offer oneself soothing and comfort.” (Neff & Germer, p. 28)

Common humanity, the second basic tenet of self-compassion, involves recognizing that, as human beings, we suffer. This is one of the primary philosophical building blocks of Buddhism. For some, when difficulty arises, there is a sense of isolation, a sense of “Why me?”, or a general feeling that everyone else is somehow better off, somehow immune to suffering. Instead of seeing suffering as a basic human trait, it is easy to find oneself feeling singled out. “Self-compassion connects one’s own flawed condition to the shared human condition, so that features of the self are considered from a broad, inclusive perspective … When failures and disappointments are experienced as an aberration not shared by the rest of humankind, people may feel isolated from others who are presumably leading ‘normal’ happy lives.” (Neff & Germer, p. 29)

The idea of commonality of suffering is another founding principle of the Buddha’s teachings. The Buddha stated this fact as part of his Four Noble Truths: “The first Noble Truth of the Buddha’s teachings is the centrality, universality, and unavoidability of dukkha, this innate suffering of dis-ease that invariably, in subtle or not-subtle-at-all ways, colors and conditions the deep structure of our very lives. All Buddhist meditative practices revolve around the recognition of dukkha, the identification of its root causes, and the description, development, and deployment of pathways whereby we might each become free from its oppressive, blinding, and imprisoning influences.” (Kabat-Zinn, p. 127-128)

In contrast, in the dominant U.S. culture, we tend to avoid suffering at all costs. After all, one of our nation’s founding truths is the right to the pursuit of happiness! We stay busy to avoid looking at suffering, we run from it, push it down, medicate it away, cover it up with gloss and glitter, and distract ourselves from it with our various entertainments. Further, it is a common part of our identification as fiercely individualistic that we act alone, and when we suffer, we often are taught to suffer alone and privately, putting on masks of positivity for the outside world. In our culture, asking for help – or even acknowledging to oneself that one might need help - can be seen as weakness. Common humanity asks us to see that we are all connected, that we all suffer, and that we all need compassion and help (even from ourselves) during times of suffering. “With self-compassion … we take the stance of a compassionate ‘other’ toward ourselves, allowing us to take a broader perspective on our selves and our lives. By remembering the shared human experience, we feel less isolated when we are in pain … Self-compassion recognizes that we all suffer, and therefore fosters a connected mindset that is inclusive of others.” (Neff, in press, p. 5)

In the West, another limit is often placed on self-compassion by prevailing cultural thought. Here, we share the idea that we are flawed from the beginning. Steeped in our traditions of original sin, we are taught that we are flawed from birth (or maybe even conception). Because of the sins of our forbearers, we need to be fixed, and our traditions teach that this fixing can only come from some other – a priest or preacher, from God, from outside of ourselves. In contrast, in the Buddhist traditions, it is taught that basic human nature is pure and that answers come from within:

Traditionally, Buddhists are reluctant to talk about the ultimate nature of human beings. But those who are willing to make descriptive statements at all usually say that our ultimate essence or buddha nature is pure, holy, and inherently good. The only reason that human beings appear otherwise is that their experience of that ultimate essence has been hindered; it has been blocked like water behind a dam. The hindrances are the bricks of which that dam is built. As mindfulness dissolves the bricks, holes are punched in the dam, and compassion and sympathetic joy come flooding forward. As meditative mindfulness develops, your whole experience of life changes. Your experience of being alive, the very sensation of being conscious becomes lucid and precise, no longer just an unnoticed background for your preoccupations. It becomes a thing consistently perceived. (Gunaratana, p. 170).

The Buddhist teachings tell us that we all have Buddha Nature, or the embryo of the Buddha, tathagata-garbha, within us. We are all born whole and pure, embodiments of the Buddha nature, and we all have the capacity within us to reach enlightenment. In some Buddhist traditions, we can do this immediately, in this lifetime, and in others, it is the effort of many lifetimes. This Buddha Nature at our center can give us something very beautiful and innate to tap into when looking for ways to learn to practice self-compassion, ways to learn to love ourselves once more.

Further, many of us feel that we only can love ourselves if we are worthy of love. This is the difference between self-esteem and self-compassion. Self-esteem has conditions attached to it, for example, “I will love myself if I get that big bonus during my review at work tomorrow,” or, “If only I could lose ten pounds, then I would be able to love myself.” Self-compassion is loving yourself simply because you are. To overcome potentially a lifetime of learning that we only are worthy of love under certain conditions, practicing self-compassion must be just that – a practice.

There are moment-by-moment ways to practice self-compassion in everyday life as difficulties inevitably arise: self-soothing and giving oneself comfort, recognizing the commonality of suffering throughout the human experience. There are more formal ways to practice as well. Neff has aspired to boil down the broader practices of metta to just self-compassion and to simplify and systematize these practices so that they can be experienced by a broad group of people in the general public and in clinical populations. Neff also aspires to have her work be quantifiable so that the outcomes and effects of the practice on the various populations can be observed and reported on. To that end, she has developed a program called Mindful Self-Compassion, or MSC. In Neff & Germer (p. 30-31) she describes the particulars of this program as follows:

The structure of MSC is modeled on MBSR, with participants meeting for 2 or 2 ½ hours once a week over the course of 8 weeks and also meeting for a half-day meditation retreat … MSC teaches both formal (sitting meditation) and informal (during daily life) self-compassion practices. There are experiential exercises and discussion periods in each MSC session in addition to homework assignments to help participants learn how to be kinder to themselves. The goal is to provide participants with a variety of tools to increase self-compassion, which they can integrate into their lives ... The program also teaches general skills of loving-kindness, which is a type of friendly benevolence given to oneself in everyday situations (compassion is mainly relevant for situations involving emotional distress) … The program makes it clear how judging oneself when things go wrong tends to exacerbate emotional pain, while self-compassion helps to alleviate that pain …

In place of the traditional metta phrases, in Mindful Self-Compassion, practitioners are taught these phrases: “May I feel safe, may I feel peaceful, may I be kind to myself, may I accept myself as I am.” The final phrase, “may I accept myself as I am” may prove to be the crux of the self-compassion practice, and, indeed, the crux of mindfulness as well.

Kristin Neff has shown that Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC) “… is effective at increasing self-compassion, mindfulness, compassion for others, and other aspects of wellbeing. Moreover, the benefits of MSC appear to be enduring, lasting at least 1 year after completion of the program.” (Neff & Germer, p. 40) This study measured participants’ perception of increases in the following aspects of well-being: mindfulness, compassion for others, and life satisfaction while also measuring participants’ perception of decreases in depression, anxiety, stress, and emotional avoidance. Further, Neff found: “…the more MSC participants practiced formal meditation, the more they increased their self-compassion levels. Similarly, the degree that participants practiced informal self-compassion techniques (e.g., putting a hand over one’s heart in times of stress) in daily life also predicted gains in self-compassion. This implies that self-compassion is a teachable skill that is ‘dose dependent.’ The more you practice it the more you learn it.” (Neff & Germer, p. 40)

It appears that healthy early childhood experiences and relationships may lay the groundwork for the development of self-compassion. “Research supports the notion that self-compassion is related to the care-giving system and early childhood interactions. People who lack self-compassion are more likely to have critical mothers, for instance, come from families in which there was a lot of conflict, and display insecure attachment patterns, while the opposite is true for those with higher levels of self-compassion.” (Neff & McGeehee, 2010) Even though early childhood experiences play a part in developing healthy levels of self-compassion in an individual, self-compassion skills can be taught, as Neff shows in her work with MSC.

One limitation of Neff’s work so far is that most of her study participants had prior mindfulness experience, but she (in press, p. 18-19) addresses this, “… it might be that practices taught in the program are only effective for those who already know how to meditate. On the other hand, the fact that MSC participants increased in wellbeing even though most had prior meditation experience suggests that MSC offers tangible benefits over and above mindfulness meditation alone.”

Neff continues to research MSC practices in settings comparable to those that Kabat-Zinn has used to quantify the effects of MSBR. Neff is showing that: “Overall, research findings so far suggest that self-compassion may be a stronger predictor of depression, happiness, life satisfaction and psychological wellbeing than mindfulness alone.” (in press, p. 23) She describes situations where one can be mindful without being accepting, and any meditator who has practiced for any length of time will be familiar with this scenario:

Feelings of self-kindness and common humanity may often accompany mindfulness of painful experiences, of course, so that self-compassion may automatically co-arise with mindfulness itself. The two do not always co-arise, however. It is possible to be mindfully aware of painful thoughts and feelings without actively soothing and comforting oneself, or remembering that these feelings are part of the shared human experience. Sometimes it takes an extra intentional effort to be compassionate toward our own suffering, especially when our painful thoughts and emotions involve self-judgments and feelings of inadequacy. (Neff, in press, p. 20)

Metta or lovingkindness or loving friendliness is a powerful practice that deserves to be experienced fully on its own with dedicated practice. It is my belief that it should be taught alongside mindfulness both as a way for practitioners to support themselves in the practice of meditation and as a way for practitioners to bolster themselves in the face of difficulties that may arise on the mat or cushion. This is particularly important for beginner meditators, for child meditators, and for meditators raised on the prevailing cultural belief in the West that the individual is inherently flawed. Lovingkindness, particularly its seed practice of self-compassion, can be a powerful antidote to difficult mindstates for those whose experiences on the cushion include anxiety, stress, self-doubt, fear, and other big emotions or nervous system activation. “Ironically, we yearn for an intrinsic happiness that has been our birthright all along. It has proven so elusive and so ephemeral because we have been so lost in our own minds’ desires, by virtue of having, to one degree or another, lost our minds and forgotten our hearts.” (Kabat-Zinn, p. 597). Lovingkindness and self-compassion are the map back to our hearts, to a deep, lasting, and loving connection with ourselves and to a deep, lasting, and loving connection with all beings.

 

References

Bhante, Henepola Gunaratana. (2002). Mindfulness in Plain English. Boston, MA: Wisdom Publications.

Germer, Christopher K., Ronald D. Siegel, Paul R. Fulton, eds. (2005). Mindfulness and Psychotherapy. New York, NY: Guilford Press.

Halliwell, Ed. (2014). “The Power of Kindness (and One Surefire Way to Know If You ‘Get’ Mindfulness).” Retrieved from http://www.mindful.org/mindful-voices/the-examined-life/.

Kabat-Zinn, J. (2005). Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World through Mindfulness. New York, NY: Hyperion.

Nagaraja, Dharmachari. (2008). Buddha at Bedtime: Tales of Love and Wisdom for You to Read with your Child to Enchant, Enlighten, and Inspire. London: Watkins Publishing.

Neff, K. D., & Dahm, K. A. (in press). “Self-Compassion: What it is, what it does, and how it relates to mindfulness”. To appear in in M. Robinson, B. Meier & B. Ostafin (Eds.) Mindfulness and Self-Regulation. New York: Springer. Retrieved from www.self-compassion.org.

Neff, K. D., & Germer, C. K. (2013). A Pilot Study and Randomized Controlled Trial of the Mindful Self-Compassion Program. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 69(1), 28-44. doi:10.1002/jclp.21923

Neff, K. D. & McGeehee, P. (2010). Self-compassion and psychological resilience among adolescents and young adults. Self and Identity, 9, 225-240. Retrieved from www.self-compassion.org.

Salzberg, S. (2004). Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness. Boston, MA: Shambhala Publications, Inc.

Thera, Nyanaponika (1994). “The Four Sublime States: Contemplations in Love, Compassion, Sympathetic Joy and Equanimity.” Retrieved from http://accesstoinsight.org/lib/nyanaponika/wheel006.html

Mindfulness in Children: An Overview

“Your children have important lessons to learn, but even more important ones to teach. What can they teach? How to pay complete attention. How to play all day without tiring. How to let one thing go, and move on to another with no backward glances.”

-       Shakta Kaur Khalsa

 

The wooden lotus flower glows with cinnamon warmth in a sunbeam spotlight descending through the skylight. My eye traces the contours, petal after petal, breath after breath, and around again, for minutes, for hours as I sit at Cambridge Insight Meditation Center. There is a memory here, too, and my mind traces around its edges as I witness. Sitting in a church distant in time and miles from where I am now: were they the same eyes that traced the contours of the crucified wooden Jesus, bloodied brow, open wound at the ribs, emaciated, hungry, face a frozen grimace forever and always? Around and around his outline, every Sunday for years and years.

Today, my adult self realizes that, as a child in that church, I was meditating. I did not understand much of the ritual going on around me, but I knew that I was expected to pay attention, or at least look as if I were paying attention, and so I fixed my eyes on Jesus and breathed. I did not understand the words of the scriptures or the chants. But I knew that this stillness felt good, peaceful, and that I could lose myself in the finest details of Jesus on the cross while the adults attended to adult things all around me.

            I had a similar focus somewhere near the teacher during years of elementary school. The lessons were boring and monotonous, but if I focused my thoughts on a spot on the chalkboard, I could find the same peaceful stillness that I found in church. And on the ball fields during gym class, where we were expected to run and run and run, in my chunky little body that was not in any way built for speed, I could find the same stillness, even in movement, if I paid very close attention to my breath. This in breath, this out breath, and now this in breath, this out breath.

            And now, as an adult who teaches yoga and mindfulness to children, I have found that many children hold a surprising amount of insight into and interest in sitting and being here in the present moment. Somehow I had forgotten how close to the present moment I was as a child, how effortlessly I could fall into awareness then. I began formally teaching mindfulness to children with the assumption that I would be bringing all of my years of practice and wisdom to the children with whom I work. Instead, I have found the roles reversed more often than not: I am the student, and the children are the gurus.

            I began teaching mindfulness to children on my birthday in 2013. My children, then aged 8, 8, and 6, decided to begin sitting with me daily as my birthday gift. They asked my spouse to join us. We began sitting together nightly as a family, at first only five minutes a night, due to the age of my youngest child, but soon the children were begging me to let them sit for longer and longer periods of time. We built up to fifteen minutes per meditation session, always in the evening before bedtime. This practice was easily built into the bedtime routine, which at our house has always been very set, bathing, brushing teeth, and my partner and I taking turns tucking in each child.  

            I found that the practice of meditating as a family was deeply quieting and settling and comforting for all of us after what were often very hectic school and work days spent largely apart. Sometimes the sitting itself was not easy for us individually or as a group, but always, when it was over, there was a greater sense of calm and ease in each of us individually and collectively. We tried a variety of different styles of meditating, from seated, traditional sitting to chanting to guided relaxation to mindfulness in restorative yoga postures. The children wanted to guide the meditations, so each child began taking a night to lead. They were learning meditation at school, and sometimes their guidance sounded familiar - their take on words I recognized as my own. Sometimes their guidance was completely new, either borrowed from a teacher at school or something completely new and original.

            I once paraphrased Jon Kabat-Zinn’s (p. 260-261) metaphor of being up in a tall building looking down at the traffic on the street below, the thoughts being the cars flowing past. My youngest son, C*,  added, “Your mind will start on the car, the thought, in front of the traffic, and then it will travel from car to car until it gets to the biggest or newest fear or worry or sadness or joy or excitement, whatever is pulling on it most. And then your mind will fall into that car and get driven away by it until you catch your mind again.”

            C once guided meditation by saying that the breath is an anchor, and the anchor drops down to keep the boat of your thoughts from drifting away. He added that the waves are also your thoughts, because your mind is like the ocean, and sometimes the waves of thoughts keep pulling at the boat even though the anchor of the breath is dropping down and rooting you to the stable ocean floor. C practiced “listening meditation” at school one day and was so excited to share that experience with us that he could hardly wait until practice time. He pointed out that you can hear so many things during listening meditation when everything is silent. C says meditation “focuses my body on my thoughts. It focuses my body on my emotions. It gets me really calm.”

After we practiced C's “listening meditation” together, A shared that he heard a buzzing sound in his ears. I asked him what he thought that was. He said, “It’s my body working. It is the electricity that runs my brain and my muscles, just like how you can hear the electricity in the big power cables above the street.” A says meditation is “sitting still for a long time and not letting your thoughts run away. I like just sitting still.”

            Sometimes it is hard for one of the children, B, to sit still. This is something that he works on at school and at home as well, and sitting in meditation does not make it miraculously disappear. It is as if his body is constantly moving - big, bold body movements. Sitting on a chair, he might be curling up into a ball and twisting around and around, spinning on his bottom. Standing, he might be twirling and twirling or flopping as if his bones and joints suddenly cannot support his weight. Even sleeping, he prefers to be weighted down with the sand bags and other props I use when I teach restorative yoga. So for him, approaching seated meditation in the supported postures of restorative yoga is useful. He lies on the floor with his legs up on the seat of a chair, and I place a bolster on his belly to weight it, a sandbag on each shoulder, and an eye pillow on his brow. Sometimes, B prefers that I wrap him up tightly in a blanket, a “burrito”, so that he feels arms and legs pulled in and still. The stillness is difficult for him to accomplish on his own, but so supported, he finds the stillness comforting and quieting. He does best at meditations with open eyes where we focus on a candle flame, so sometimes we practice those in addition to mindfulness meditation. B says that meditation is “the relaxation of the body through mental focus – the focusing of the mind on a single thought at a time, not letting your thoughts stray all over the place.”

            For B, a perfectionist who can be terribly hard on himself, self-compassion work has become important. Sometimes we repeat the mantras of lovingkindness as described by many of my teachers: “May I be happy. May I be healthy. May I live with ease. May I accept myself as I am.” Sometimes we simply say, "I love myself dearly." This can be done silently or aloud and can be done for the entire course of the practice time or for only a part of it. We all find this useful at times, in addition to the quietness and the stillness.

            I also teach meditation moments to children in my children’s yoga classes four times a week and longer mindfulness meditation sessions with my adult classes twice a week. I believe that many children have a more direct route to the present moment than most adults. Perhaps this is because children, having less memory, experience, and learning to draw from, spend more of their time in direct experience and less of their time in storytelling mode. With roots placed firmly in direct experience, children are not unlike Hansel and Gretel in the forest; they have breadcrumbs marking the path through the underbrush of storytelling into the direct experience of the present moment. Adults have lost the trail in years of meaning-making. Jon Kabat-Zinn (p. 78) says, “That knowing of things as they are is called wisdom. It comes from trusting your original mind, which is nothing other than a stable, infinite, open awareness. It is a field of knowing that apprehends instantly when something appears or disappears within its vastness. Like the field of the sun’s radiance, it is always present, but it is often obscured by cloud cover, in this case, the self-generated cloudiness of the mind’s habits of distraction, its endless proliferating of images, thoughts, stories, and feelings, many of them not quite accurate.”

Since my first moments teaching formal sitting practice to children, I have been working on understanding the very apparent differences in how children and adults approach the present moment. I addressed this idea in a journal entry on September 11, 2014:

Have you ever walked on a familiar trail or path with a young child? You have walked this path a thousand times before, and maybe you saw this path, felt this path, experienced this path the first time or the first few times you walked it, but I bet you have never fully known this path until you walked it again with a young child. With a young child, you stop to explore every crack in the sidewalk, every rock on the trail, every bug that flits by or gently spreads its wings out in the dappled sunlight. When the sun comes through the leaves overhead just so, illuminating the forest with a dramatic shaft of light, the child will let a gasp of wonder escape her lips and will point and run gleefully towards the light until she, too, is illuminated. We adults feel that we have so much to teach children, but how much can we learn from them about being fully present? … Lying in bed with one of my sons just three nights ago, I was remembering to him how much fun we had during the day and thinking at him what we had to do to get ready in the morning, and he interrupted me and said, “Yes, but mom? Let’s just think about what we are doing right now. Isn’t that better?” and he snuggled in closer and pressed his face into the crook of my neck, warm and soft, and squeezed me tightly.

Jon Kabat-Zinn (p. 119) also speaks of how easy it is for adults to move out of direct experience and into story-telling mode:

Much of what we actually know, we know in a non-conceptual way. Thinking and memory come in a bit later, but very quickly, on the heels of an initial moment of pure sense contact. Thinking and memory can easily color our original experience in ways that distort or detract from the bare experience itself … Bare perception is raw, elemental, vital, and thus, creative, imaginative, revealing. With our senses intact and by way of awareness itself, we can attend in such ways. To do so is to be more alive.

When my oldest son found out that I like to go to Cambridge Insight Meditation Center for four hour mini-retreats when I get the chance, he said, “I could never sit still for that long.” My youngest son said, “Our school day lasts six hours; we sit for most of that. Meditating is much easier than sitting still at school!” We spoke about what was different between sitting at school and sitting in meditation. The children felt that school would be much more interesting if they could sit in awareness rather than sitting and paying attention. My oldest son said that paying attention feels like it takes a lot of force and control, but awareness just happens. Our experiment together, now, is for the children to try sitting in “awareness” at school rather than “paying attention”. We have not gathered any results from this research yet, but we all are looking forward to the process.

*I changed the children's names here, in honor of their privacy.

References

Kabat-Zinn, J. (2005). Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World through Mindfulness. New York, NY: Hyperion.

Kaur Khalsa, S. (2008). Radiant Child Yoga Level 3: Heart and Soul Work with Children. Herndon, VA: Shakta Khalsa.