by Mark Coleman
By bringing direct awareness to any aspect of experience, we can develop clarity and insight. This, in essence, is the deeper purpose of mindfulness — to help us understand and know experience, ourselves, and reality just as they are. The wisdom that arises from this can facilitate a freedom from a painful contention with life. We will explore this theme extensively in later chapters.
How does this work in practice? Take an everyday scenario: being stuck in traffic. Whenever I drive to work in the San Francisco Bay Area, I often encounter traffic, which can threaten to make me late. If I’m aware, I can sense the tension in my gut and shoulders as soon as I see the cars ahead slowing down. I can also observe my self-judgments, such as critical thoughts over why I didn’t leave earlier or anticipate the morning traffic. I may notice that my anxiety and tension increase as I anticipate the frustration of my clients if I’m late for our meeting.
These inner reactions just compound my stress. However, if I remain unaware of these reactions, they are more likely to grow, and I am likely to feel even more burdened. Instead of just being late, I will arrive at the office anxious, irritated, and ill-prepared to work with anyone. However, if I become aware of being triggered — of the tension in my body, of my racing thoughts and worry, of my impatience and self-judgment — I can make wiser choices about the best course of action. Mindfulness does not make the traffic go away, although we wish it would. Instead it provides tools to recognize stress and reactivity and to find skillful ways to work with them. And the good news is this skill is immanently portable. We can practice it anywhere, even in our morning commute!
Another useful analogy is to think of mindfulness as a gatekeeper. In the same way medieval towns had a sentry who prevented harmful forces from entering, awareness helps us guard the mind from unwholesome or painful states. In this case, the main thing we are guarding against is ourselves, from our own reactivity, judgments, and negativity.
Like traffic, everyday life is full of innumerable things we don’t like or don’t want to have happen. Our children may suddenly get sick, or we may hear about some injustice in our national politics. Our boss may suddenly dump a difficult project on our desk late on Friday afternoon, or a loved one may receive a troubling medical diagnosis. Whatever the reason, out of the blue, unexpected events may trigger resentment, panic, despair, and overwhelm. But with awareness, we can recognize when such difficult states overtake us. That clarity creates a pipeline of information that helps us understand how best to handle such eruptions.
As with traffic, that knowing does not necessarily keep reactivity from occurring, but it allows us to recognize it and find space in relation to it. This clear awareness gives us the opportunity to choose a healthy response. Such “wise action” might be to release a painful habit of anticipating the worst outcome, like Jenny did, or it might be to simply stop resisting an unpleasant reality, like traffic, back pain, or a child’s illness, and do whatever is necessary or constructive to cope with it.
Being mindful means that, over time, we become less tossed around by our reactions or resistance to the things we dislike and don’t want but have no control over. This allows us to not waste so much energy fighting the things we cannot change. This supports the stabilizing quality of equanimity, since we learn to be with experience just as it is, whether we like it or not, with a nonreactive attention.
For instance, consider another example, this time of a positive experience: When I get up in the morning, I love to meditate and listen to the dawn chorus of birdsong. Sometimes, though, rather than simply listening, I become gripped by a longing for the beautiful singing to go on forever, or I become irritated when the noise of the garbage truck drowns out the sweet melodies. Either way, my pleasure is replaced with frustration.
However, when I’m aware, like the poet Blake, I enjoy the song while it lasts and remain at ease when it goes or when something interrupts it. Mindfulness allows me to be present to the sweetness of the chorus and the sour sounds of traffic. This awareness helps me avoid contracting in negativity against unwanted noise, which I can’t do anything about anyway. This simple but subtle shift in attention is a key principle to how we relate to all experience — and it allows us to release the struggle to either hold on to or resist anything in life, the ups and the downs, the joys and the sorrows.
The following story from Karen, a meditation student from Virginia, further illustrates how this practice of mindfulness helps develop wisdom in the midst of the messiness of life, no matter how hard it gets:
Like many others I have had very dark moments with a difficult divorce, being a single mom, and also having a strong idealistic tendency to think I could somehow find a perfect state of “happiness.” Over the years I tried a variety of spiritual practices and teachers, but nothing really seemed to help me cope with my patterns of reactivity, which still played out and brought me deep frustration and unhappiness.
When I discovered mindfulness practice, it seemed as though I had finally found something that did not set me up to search for some ideal state. Instead it showed me a depth of awareness in which I could be kind, happy, and at ease in my ordinary life under any circumstance. Therein lies the peace and happiness I have longed for all my life. The pain of the divorce didn’t magically disappear. Neither did the challenges of being a single parent. However, mindfulness did give me the capacity to be present, accepting, and patient with whatever life threw at me. That has been an invaluable gift.
In each of the four sections in this book, I explore the full breadth of mindfulness, which includes bringing a close attention to four key areas in our life: to our body, our mind, our heart, and the world we live in. I will discuss how, through the arc of practice, we learn to bring awareness to these key facets of our experience. As we practice this over time, we slowly discover how mindfulness is a vehicle for insight and wisdom that helps free us from suffering and to live with genuine well-being and peace. Each chapter is always followed by a practice, a way to implement and cultivate the specific quality or aspect of mindfulness being discussed. Many of the practices contain more information to augment and illuminate the chapter contents.
• PRACTICE •
Mindfulness of Breath
Perhaps the simplest, most commonly known, and most accessible way to cultivate mindfulness is through awareness of breathing. Mindfulness of breath is for many the easiest and most readily available practice, since it can be done anywhere, anytime, with minimal instruction or experience. Yet it is also a meditation that can have profound depth and subtlety.
The breath is a barometer for our inner emotional and physical life. By attending to the movement, depth, or tension in the breath, we gain a sense of our inner experience. We can observe how the breath changes in subtle ways depending on what is happening in our mind, heart, and environment. Touched by a moment of joy, we gasp. Overcome by fear, our breath is held tight. No matter where we are, we can learn to attune to the breath as a support for staying in our body in the present moment.
Begin by establishing a posture where you can sit with ease, one that is upright and yet relaxed and alert. Close your eyes and become aware of your body and its posture. Then shift attention to your breath. Try to let the body breathe itself, which it does quite naturally without our interference. Then simply attune your attention to all the various sensations of the inhale and the exhale. Stay curious where you feel the sensations of breath most clearly, like the movement of air in the nostrils, the tickle of air in the back of the throat, the expansion and contraction of the upper chest and ribcage, and the gentle moving in and out of the diaphragm and belly area. Notice how each breath is subtly different from the one before. Be aware of the changing sensations of breathing as well as the stillness of the pause between breaths.
Naturally, your attention will become drawn to other experiences, like sounds and physical sensations, and to other thoughts. When that happens, acknowledge those things and then shift attention back to the breath. No need
to judge or become disheartened when you become distracted, even when this happens many times. Mindfulness practice is training, a discipline to develop present-moment attention. Little by little we become more focused and attuned. Continue to let your awareness become absorbed into the sensory experience of breathing, receiving each breath with curiosity, as if you were feeling it for the first time.
After about ten minutes or so, bring the meditation to a close and notice the impact of the practice. Observe what was interesting and where the challenges were in staying present. Know that this is a practice, to be developed over time, with patience and curiosity. Eventually you can extend this meditation to twenty or thirty minutes to support a deeper concentration. Remember, you can take this practice anywhere, since the breath accompanies you in every instant.
• • •
• SECTION 1 •
FINDING PEACE IN THE BODY
Chapter 1
Living with Embodied Awareness
There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.
— FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
I still remember the first day I stepped foot into a meditation center in East London back in 1984. I walked in clumsily, with my white mohawk, my gaudy post-punk disheveled attire, feeling out of place and not knowing what to expect. There I was, a figure of agitation, not comfortable in my own skin, restless and impatient. What I saw stopped me in my tracks. It wasn’t as if anyone was doing anything special. People were simply going about their day: arranging books in a library, sweeping the meditation hall, and preparing flowers in the entrance way. However, what took my breath away was the quality of presence in which they moved. There was an air of grace or dignity in how they went about their activities. They exuded a sense of relaxed ease that was quite unfamiliar to me. I didn’t quite know what it was, but I knew they were on to something, and I wanted to experience it myself.
The scene felt so ordinary I could have easily overlooked it. In retrospect, I realize that part of what I was witnessing was embodied presence. People who are at home in their own skin, who are connected to themselves and their physical experience, embody a sense of ease, groundedness, and connectedness. The appearance of my over-caffeinated, anxious, angry self in that meditation center was like a storm meeting a serene ocean. It has taken me many years to begin to grow my own way into that beautiful, embodied quality.
One of my favorite pastimes is to watch modern dance. I relish how trained dancers move in their bodies, turning their bodies into living dynamic sculptures. Their movements are artful expressions of living with mindful embodiment. It’s as if their bodies are filled with presence, which of course they are. Even seeing a dancer simply walk across the stage can be spellbinding because of how present they are within their own skin. They are poetic reminders of how to move, live, and breathe with an embodied presence that is alive, graceful, and vibrantly here.
Of course, we don’t have to be a trained dancer to discover this. Anyone can learn to inhabit the body with awareness. Right now, as you are reading, what do you sense in your body? Become awake to every physical sensation: of your skin against your clothing, of your body against your chair. Can you sense the warmth of your belly and feel moisture on your skin or the wetness of your eyes? With mindfulness, we can be present to our ever-changing inner landscape and its shifting tides. We can sense the fluid energy of the body, which can be experienced as vibration, tingling, expansion, contraction, spaciousness, or pulsing electricity. One of the mysteries of embodied attention is that as soon as we call to mind a particular part of our body, it comes alive with sensory stimuli.
Our bodies are a canvas upon which emotions, feelings, and moods are painted. Emotions are physiological phenomena; we feel them in the body. Right now, attune to the radio broadcast of your body’s mood. Can you name what you are feeling? Can you feel the impressions that emotions make in your body? Take a few moments to become intimate with your heart’s terrain and where you may feel particular emotions in your chest, belly, or other part of your body.
As well as being host to a whole panorama of beautiful feelings like joy, love, and awe, our bodies also contain emotions that are not so easy to be with, like anxiety and sadness. As much as our bodies can be a source of delight and pleasurable sensory experience, our bodies also hold painful and difficult sensations, which is why we so often tune out from our somatic landscape. However, even if what we feel is unpleasant, with mindfulness we can bring attention to it and stay curious, exploring whatever may not be easy to be with.
Unfortunately, in today’s world, our attention is often scattered, distracted, and anywhere but in our bodies. We are less like modern dancers and more like Mr. Duffy, the protagonist in James Joyce’s short story “A Painful Case,” who “lived a short distance from his body.” Smartphones, computers, and video games keep us lost in our heads. We focus on screens and digital devices that often seduce and mesmerize us, taking us away from the physical sensory present. This makes the practice of mindfulness even more necessary, as well as more challenging, because in its fullest sense it is an embodied awareness that requires us to inhabit our bodies.
I luckily had access to a sense of embodiment early in life, as many kids used to. I was born before the computer revolution, and as a child, though I enjoyed Space Invaders and TV, these were no competition for playing outside. I had the good fortune to grow up near the woodlands and seashore of my native Northumberland in northern England. I remember a childhood of skinny-dipping in streams in summertime, swimming in the cold North Sea breaks, and lying in the middle of vast golden fields of wheat, engulfed by the warm smell of grain and the buzz of flies. From an early age, I learned that nature invites us into our physicality and into the pleasure of opening one’s senses to the richness of the natural world.
Nature still remains my daily portal to an embodied presence. Every day I make sure to go outside, whether to gaze at the morning sunrise, to kayak on the San Francisco Bay, or to hike among redwoods and eucalyptus groves, inhaling their fragrant scents. The physical sensations of being outdoors — warm air on my skin, soft ground underfoot, bright sunlight on the water, rich smells of sea air — help me inhabit my own body. This is the reason I do so much of my meditation outdoors and why I lead people on nature meditation retreats. Inhabiting our senses is a natural, accessible support for embodiment.
Our bodies are home to trillions of cells, with nerves and exquisitely refined sensors that can attune to an infinite variety of sensory experience. These sensations always reside in the present, which is why our bodies are perfect portals to mindfulness. By becoming aware of any one of our five senses, our attention immediately orients to what is happening in this moment. To appreciate the dawn chorus of birds, the sunset, the taste of a strawberry, or the tingling of fear in our belly, we must connect in an immediate way with our surroundings and physical body.
Not surprisingly, there is a growing body of research on the impacts of mindfulness and its relationship to the body. In a 2008 study, researchers found that, after only eight weeks, participants in a mindfulness course reported a heightened ability to observe sensations in the body. So the good news is that even if you feel disconnected from your physical experience, anyone can develop this skill.
The body with its refined sensory apparatus also improves our ability to handle difficulties, so that we can stay aware and connected even when we feel pain or are under duress. The following story from Anne, a meditation student of mine, illustrates this. Anne’s husband, Tom, was diagnosed with lung cancer and a massive brain tumor. Tom had surgery to remove the tumor and underwent intense chemotherapy. Though he was miraculously spared from death, he still has cancer and requires routine tests to monitor its growth. Anne shared with me the anxiety she feels before getting his test results: “The sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, heart racing, gulping in breaths, dizziness, and thinking that I might be losing my mind.” However, rather than run from these feelings, Anne h
as been practicing embodied awareness, which has helped her cope. As she wrote, “These feelings still come, but I’m not afraid of them anymore.”
Here’s how she describes the experience of traveling with Tom to get his results:
We are on the bus, and Tom interlaces his beautiful strong hand in mine. I sense the warmth in his fingers. I notice all the places where our bodies are touching as we sit side by side. We are hip to hip on this bus journey and always heart to heart. I close my eyes. I breathe deeply into this feeling of connectedness and then that becomes the emotion. Love. The anxiety has subsided and it has been replaced with love. How did that happen?
It happened because I leaned into the discomfort. I allowed myself to physically feel it. Not the story (the catastrophizing and the “what ifs”), only the feeling. That’s the thing with emotions. They must be felt…in your body. If you avoid, numb, or block them, they don’t go away. That clenched stomach, the sweaty armpits, the racing heart — I have learned to embrace them. Stay with it. Don’t rush to move on. When negative thoughts try and break in, gently come back to the body, to the breath, to the feeling itself — not the story. Then there’s a shift. There’s always a shift. That’s how this whole mindfulness thing works.
Our body is like a fine-tuned instrument, but it requires our attention to fully realize its potential. Mindfulness is our ally here, in that we learn to turn toward our physical experience, lean into it, and feel from within this ever-changing topography. The body is also a source of intuition and emotional information that can serve us in the choices and decisions we make. But to optimize that capacity, we have to attune to this inner knowing, which often whispers its secrets and perceptions to us as subtle sensations in the gut or to our heart. Sadly, if our heads are swirling in thoughts, lost in past conflict or future worries, this knowledge will go unheard.