by Bill Morgan
My attention is sharper when I make effort, but soon this leads to tension and irritation. But when I invite more relaxation, I just drift a lot and can’t seem to get motivated to arouse energy. How do I find a middle ground here?
This is a common pendulum swing. Either we make effort to focus and get things done, or we collapse in front of the TV. We alternate between hyperarousal and exhaustion. The same polarity shows up naturally in meditation practice. I have found memory imagery very helpful in finding a middle ground between these extremes and supportive of balancing energy and relaxation. A spirit of playfulness also helps; that is what we will explore together next.
6
PLAYFULNESS AND DELIGHT
RECENTLY I WAS WATCHING MY SIX-YEAR-OLD NIECE play on the beach, running toward the water when a wave receded and running back toward me howling when the next wave crashed on the shore. Her sheer delight was palpable and infectious, and I was fully present, riveted on what was happening. In this moment of clarity, I closed my eyes and wondered why this sense of vibrancy and joy was not somehow encouraged in meditation instructions.
Not long after the beach experience, I had occasion to ask a colleague why he struggled to meditate regularly. He said, “Because it’s not fun—that’s why!”
Even though we all claim to understand the importance of play to our well-being, somewhere along the way our inner playful child gets lost in the shuffle. A sense of play is certainly absent in meditation, which in my view is a major cause of frustrating, uninspired practice.
Playfulness and its accompanying sense of delight are vital qualities of the inner holding environment needed for meditation. Our cultural inclination is to be overly serious about most things, including meditation. Meditation instructions can conjure up the imagined need for serious, brow-furrowing effort, with a sense that there is an ideal or “right” way to practice. They often include directions such as “focus the attention,” “bring the mind back,” “label,” “dis-identify,” “concentrate,” “tame the mind,” “overcome obstacles,” “establish moment-to-moment attention without censorship.” These words of guidance are dry and uninviting for most people, and those such as “sit still” and “pay attention” dredge up unhappy home or schoolroom memories. “Sit still, pay attention, and eat your green vegetables,” my mother would admonish. (Soggy green vegetables from a can with added sugar and dye. Tasty.) A less familiar definition of “pay” may be appropriate in this context: “to seal the deck seams of a wooden ship with tar to prevent leakage.” Perhaps we are sealing the deck of our minds with mindfulness in order to prevent leaking thoughts! In any case, it sounds like a sobering enterprise. I am convinced that negative associations are stirred up for many Westerners by the taming-and-controlling emphasis in many classic meditation instructions.
Participating in any activity that is foreign but supposedly good for us is reminiscent of having to take that really bad-tasting cough medicine as a kid. I still remember the time I had strep throat and the disgusting taste of liquid antibiotics. My mother’s reassurance, “That’s OK; it’s good for you,” just didn’t fly. I needed something sweet.
Relaxation and delight add a spoonful of sugar, a sense of comfort and sweetness to the inner milieu. I suggest putting these first in meditation, rather than viewing them as mere by-products that may arise later in our practice. We want to feel good as soon as possible. This is the best possible enticement for learning and continuing with meditation.
The Buddha encouraged this spoonful-of-sugar approach by introducing calming concentration practices to his students. These stabilizing techniques were clearly prerequisites for mindfulness practices, leading to deeper understanding and insight. There are many descriptions of the sweetness, the sukha, of concentrated states of mind and how they are more deeply satisfying than sensory pleasures.
Westerners have trouble accessing sukha in this classic manner, because it takes us hundreds of hours of formal practice in a retreat environment to begin to access these states. We can, however, with far less practice and some creativity, begin to consciously experience some degree of relaxation and delight without external support. Learning how to create a sense of lighthearted ease within a few minutes can be a simple act of self-care in meditation.
D. W. Winnicott, who introduced us to the notion of the holding environment, saw play as a central aspect of the healing relationship: “Psychotherapy takes place in the overlap of two areas of playing, that of the patient and that of the therapist. Psychotherapy has to do with two people playing together.” 1 In much the same way, meditation is concerned with a healing relationship with oneself, and inner play is essential to that.
We know the enlivening potential of play, but somehow in adulthood it is separated from the serious business of living, the same realm in which meditation itself has been cordoned off. Meditation can be promising and even profound without being “serious business.” We have enough of that in our lives, which is another reason we don’t meditate. Wouldn’t it be a relief to know that not only is it acceptable to bring play into meditation, but that it is essential? Playfulness is an integral part of the internal holding environment for meditation. No skipping the play step. Doesn’t that already make meditation more inviting?
To facilitate this, we will again utilize the process of accessing memories explained in chapter 4. Because it is difficult to arouse playfulness or delight if mind and body are tense, we first establish a basis of relaxation (see chapter 5). Once fully relaxed, we can follow the steps below to bring to mind a memory of sheer delight, whether from childhood or more recently.
Accessing Playfulness and Delight
A few preliminary tips about practicing the technique that follows:
1. Remember to allow yourself to feel settled, letting the breath be soothing.
2. Typically, the initial images that come to mind are not clear or steady and at times may seem random and disconnected. Remember, however, that the imagery that arrives is simply a gateway for allowing the joyful feelings associated with the memory to arise. This is what matters, not the precision of the memory or image.
3. You cannot fail at this exercise! Remember: this is a practice. Sometimes delight will arise; sometimes not. Often it will arise fleetingly, and you might try to get it back using control, which creates tension. Delight cannot be coerced; focus on relaxing and allowing the feelings to return or not.
PLAYFULNESS EXERCISE
1. First, establish some degree of relaxation and ease in the body and breath, as if you are sitting in a warm and comforting bath, feeling the small knots of tension dissolving, letting go, more and more, with each breath. Take your time to relax.
2. When you feel relaxed and your breath is easy, allow a memory of a happy moment to arise, one in which you were filled with delight and the energy that brings.
3. Continue to allow your breath to be natural and relaxed; stay with any flow of images and perhaps sounds associated with this memory scene.
4. As the memory unfolds, bring attention to how you felt during that experience. Let yourself savor the delight or joy or exuberance. Allow these feelings to spread throughout your body and mind. Let an inner smile form as you feel them.
5. As the sense of delight strengthens, let go of the imagery, sitting and breathing in this atmosphere of playful ease and relaxation that has been created. If tension creeps in or the mind gets carried off in a thought stream, simply return again to the flow of imagery of this uplifting scene.
6. When you are ready, return to a normal waking state, continuing to enjoy the feelings.
We are drawn to feeling relaxed and lighthearted. If we elicit these core qualities at the beginning of meditation practice, meditation will become a less intense, more upbeat part of our repertoire.
Ambivalence about Joy
Part of learning a new skill set involves looking at the cultural and personal messages that might interfere with the practice. These early conditionings need to be
understood and set aside, or they will be roadblocks to the unfolding of the practice. I have identified three major areas of potential blockage regarding playfulness and joy.
Guilt
I worked with a client, John, in cultivating joy in his meditation. One day in the office, after the guided meditation, he shared the following insight:
The meditation is becoming very light and joyful, and I never realized that this was possible, that I could experience this much joy, that I could create it by myself. But there is a part of me that thinks I shouldn’t be experiencing too much of this. It reminds me of the messages I got as a child, that somehow self-created joy is selfish.
John’s experience was an example of an early internalized message around self-pleasuring, and the guilt associated with it.
Unworthiness
Often we hold a deep-seated notion that we don’t deserve to be happy, that we are not worthy or will only be worthy when we have “proven” ourselves. Messages from caregivers around conditional acceptance can instill this belief. Not to mention the pressured and competitive environment we live in. Not to mention the negativity bias that keeps us more focused on the things that are not going well. We all have it, this thread of unworthiness running through us. Recognize the ways this shows up for you when you approach meditation practice.
Doubt
I can’t tell you how many times I have heard people say, “I can’t meditate.”
Most of us develop skills early on in life, and we stay away from our weaknesses. In graduate school I taught a statistics class to psychology students. I was surrounded by talented thinkers and empathic clinicians who were convinced that they were no good at math. My job was to help them understand the resistance that this belief caused, so that they could open to the possibility of learning anew. I was able to offer these clinicians a corrective math experience, but only after we understood and set aside the roadblocks that they had been carrying since high school.
More recently, I worked with a client who wanted to run a five-kilometer road race, but who could not motivate himself to get to exercise even minimally. He was a somewhat overweight intellectual who had been teased in high school and told he was the “anti-athlete.”
Identifying “the next step” is crucial in any journey. Having located the source of his resistance, I asked him to download a fitness app and count his steps on a daily basis. Slowly he increased the number of steps to ten thousand per day. Two years later he ran his first five-kilometer road race.
This process is applicable to eliciting qualities of mind central to the meditative holding environment. If you find it difficult to access playfulness and delight, for example, check in with yourself to see what might be keeping you from experiencing these qualities. We all have implicit rules of engagement in our families of origin. Was play discouraged in yours? Were you told that to get ahead you had to be serious? Understanding your personal obstacles further paves the way for you to have a corrective meditation experience. If you are new to meditation, doing this will help create a sense of fresh possibility. Of course you can’t meditate! We are all incredibly restless and distracted by nature. This is a new training. One step at a time. Easy does it.
It might be helpful to say to yourself, in your words, something like this at the beginning of a period of meditation:
Time to give myself a break here. I have been down on myself, I have self-critical voices, but I am learning something new and beneficial here, something worth practicing. May I take one step here. I could use a little refreshment in the midst of this busy life. Let me orient toward that during this session.
Can You Come Out and Play?
After you have noticed what your obstacles to feeling delight are, try the exercise to access playfulness and delight again, to feel the uplifting energy and the exuberance associated with the memory. Review the instructions for the exercise. Then settle back and stay open to the memory that floats up to you. Is it the same or different this time? Take it slow. This is not about getting somewhere. It is melting in place, thawing out, dropping down. Give yourself the chance, finally, to open to delight in this way. You deserve it.
QUESTIONS FOR CONSIDERATION
I get excited when I recall most early childhood playful memories, which brings even more restlessness and agitation into meditation. How can I manage that?
The good news here is that you have no trouble eliciting feeling through the use of imagery. This will be good to recall when you are struggling with sleepiness in meditation! The next step for you is to search for a memory that activates a more contented kind of quiet joy. It might be a more recent memory. The good feeling that comes from engaging in a random act of kindness may be an example. Even as we aim to elicit delight, it is important to do this in a playful, exploratory manner, until we find one or more suitable distilled memories.
One memory always leads to a train of associations for me. I hit this home run when I was a kid, and when I first envision that, I feel uplifted. But then I am thinking about how I didn’t make the team the year before, because the coach wanted his son on the team, which wasn’t fair because I was much better, and the feeling of uplift is replaced by irritation.
This is part of the art of using imagery in a mindfulness context. We are storied beings. No memory is an island; each is embedded in context. Practice savoring that home-run moment: the pitch, the swing of the bat, the arc of the ball, that sweet second when you realized it would not be caught. Replay it more vividly, in slow motion and vibrant colors. When distracting or upsetting thoughts arise, imagine they are floating away like bubbles. Or maybe you hit them over the fence!
7
GRATITUDE AND WONDER
NOW THAT WE HAVE ESTABLISHED ease and delight, it’s just a small step to invite spacious and tenderhearted qualities into our holding environment. Relaxation helps set the stage, and playfulness mitigates the intensity that most of us bring to meditation. Accessing a sense of gratitude and wonder further deepens the nurturing qualities of the holding environment for meditation.
Strengthening Emotional States
An important tenet of Buddhist psychology is that we can strengthen not only qualities of mind, but emotional states as well. This has far-reaching implications for our capacity to experience emotional flexibility and equipoise. In the West, few of us have been exposed to the notion that we have the ability to sculpt and shape our inner landscape. We just know that we like what we like and we don’t like what we don’t like. It doesn’t occur to us that we can actually cultivate interest in an experi-ence that we previously found uninteresting. Or when we are irrit-ated by certain sounds, we can learn to experience these sounds as neutral or even pleasant. For example, I am writing in a library at the moment, in a supposedly silent area, and a group of people are speaking. Mild irritation led to the thought of either speaking to them directly, or to the librarian. Instead I allowed the sounds of their voices to drift into the background and experienced a moment of delight in being able to make this seamless transition in less than a minute. We tend to think that we don’t have much choice about our emotional responses. They are what they are, and that’s that.
What Do You Want to Strengthen?
We are what we repeatedly do.
—Aristotle
In every moment, the mind is making choices about some aspect of experience—how to react to it, whether to accept or reject it—and through those choices (carefully considered or otherwise), we continuously assign a quality of positive or negative reactivity.
This truth leads to a mindfulness principle that is both simple and profound: what we practice grows stronger, and we are always practicing, and thereby reinforcing, some mental or emotional pattern.
A natural question arises from this principle: What emotional qualities do we want to experience regularly? Agitation or contentment? Appreciation or resentment? Focus or distraction? Glass half full or half empty?
The truth of the power of practice and the c
hoice about what we are practicing opens great possibilities for us to shape our emotional lives. However, that rests on one imperative: that we be mindful of what we are practicing. Once we have touched a hot stove, we don’t want to repeat it. Similarly, when we see that (the practice of) obsessive or catastrophic thinking leads to more of the same, strengthens that habit, and encourages those tendencies to arise more frequently, we won’t want to touch that stove! If we worry consistently, we will just get better at it. On the other hand, if we practice relaxation, lightness, and ease, those will grow in us. Although this reality is simple to understand, most of us don’t act on this understanding or believe that we can do much about it. The following exercises are simple applications of this mindfulness principle.
EXERCISES: TRANSFORMING YOUR EXPERIENCE
TRANSFORMING NEGATIVE INTO POSITIVE
1. Look at something that you find unappealing. If you are in a comfortable spot, find the corner that is cluttered or unattractive.
2. Move physically closer to it.
3. Close your eyes for a moment and take three easy breaths.
4. Open your eyes and begin to notice subtle details of the object or area.
5. Reflect on the uniqueness of the object and encourage a sense of appreciation to come forward. Take your time.
6. Notice how your perspective on the object has shifted.
TRANSFORMING YOUR RESPONSE TO SOUNDS
1. Notice a sound in your environment that you find slightly annoying. It could be the hum of an air conditioner or the sound of traffic.