Seeing clearly: A personal story

Last week was the third anniversary of the aortic dissection three years ago which changed my life in many ways and about which I have written many blog posts. Reflecting on what has changed, I realized that I have been making obvious and subtle decisions that are having a bigger than expected effect on my life.

In July I realized for the nth time that I have watched a lot of sports during my lifetime, a lot! My father was an avid sports fan, and so I became an avid fan, living and dying with the ups and downs of the teams and people I rooted for. As I grew older, I continued to watch a lot of sports--baseball, football, basketball, the Olympics, golf, and more.

When I got back from the Peace Corps in 1981, I had become very involved in meditation, and I began to question the amount of time I was watching sports. My wife tells a humorous story several months after we met. I had come to her house on a Sunday afternoon to watch football. I was also crocheting a baby blanket for friends who were expecting a baby. She loved the contrast of me crocheting and occasionally yelling at the TV if there was a bad call by the referees!

Over the years, I made excuses for watching so much sports. When the kids were young and I was working so hard, watching games was important down time for me. Also, my father and I had very little in common other than sports. So keeping up with the sports he loved gave us something to talk about on the phone.

My father died two years ago, and I wondered if my sports watching would decline now that I no longer needed to stay current to have something to talk about with him. But the habit was deep. I realized that the addiction to sports was as deep as the addiction to cigarettes, which I started smoking in 1965. I tried to quit within two years, but it took until 1984 to finally quit.

One morning this past July, I suddenly saw with clarity that this obsession with sports just wasn't serving me anymore. That morning I decided to go cold turkey on sports for one week--no internet or TV. I also decided to do the same thing for news--no internet or TV. For the next week, the house was pretty quiet, though I would occasionally have soft music in the background. I spent more time reading, writing, and walking. Suddenly I had plenty of time! The week went by pretty quickly and at the end of the week I thought about what I had noticed.

What jumped out quickly is that my mind was quieter during meditation. That made sense because of the stimulation of watching sports or news. However, I realized that it was more than constant stimulation. It was also constant agitation—the loud commercials during the games and the tendency of the news channels to exaggerate and catastrophize because that sells!

At the end of my reflection, I decided to "sign up" for another week. A week later, I realized that during meditation my mind wandered less and when it did wander, it didn't go as far away. After that two weeks, I experimented and found that I could occasionally check sports and watch parts of games if I was tired, and I could check the news, but just on the internet.

My decisions connect to Skillful Effort, part of the 8-fold path in Buddhism. The Buddha talked about the importance of developing and maintaining healthy habits ( like generosity, gratitude, kindness) and letting go of and preventing the arising of unhealthy habits (like drinking, getting angry, and watching too much TV). A commonly used phrase in Skillful Effort is "guard the sense doors." That is, be mindful of what you allow to come into your awareness. If I had fully known the effect of so much time watching sports, I would have let go of this activity a long time ago!

Other more subtle changes
I have noticed more subtle changes that have also had significant effects.

Partly because of less attention on sports and the news, I am able to remember more often to move more slowly when I am in the house instead of rushing, another life-long habit. More often I can feel my feet on the floor and the sense of gracefulness as I walk around the house. I am remembering to shut cabinets. My usually leaving them open has both amused and irritated my family for 40 year! I am also preparing meals more slowly, enjoying cutting one carrot at a time instead of lining up three carrots so I can make the salad in half the time. By working slowly, I am remembering my physical therapist telling me that if I stand more upright when I am preparing food, my back will ache less. I am also typing more slowly rather than as fast as I can. Now instead of a typo every sentence, it's every other sentence.

While I still have times when I am several minutes into a meditation and still haven't noticed my breath, this is much less frequent. Off the meditation cushion, I am noticing more quickly when I'm beginning to get irritated or frustrated, or having feelings of despair about the future of the country and world, or worrying when one of my grandchildren is sick.

The Buddha taught many practices which can help us to see more clearly the consequences of our choices and actions. I have written about these in my blog posts and many of the people who have come to our Mindfulness Center and to the courses I have taught have also noticed striking and subtle changes in their life. Lastly I note that such changes are not just available from Buddhist practice. It is simply the practice that has worked best for me.

Useful metaphors for mindfulness

The basic attitudes that guide mindfulness are to cultivate a curious and non-judgmental awareness toward what we are noticing. In doing this, we see more clearly, and this results in wiser actions.

There are many metaphors to assist us in this endeavor, which is both simple and complex. I share a few that I have collected or developed over the years.

Curious mind
In The Meditative Mind, Daniel Goleman quotes Indian philosopher Krishnamurti's advice to children: “You have to watch, as you watch a lizard going by, walking across the wall, seeing all its four feet, how it sticks to the wall…As you watch, you see all the movements, the delicacy of its movements. So in the same way, watch your thinking, do not correct it, do not suppress it—do not say it is too hard—just watch it, now, this morning.”

Accepting what is happening
Many teachers use the terms non-judgment and accepting when characterizing mindful attention. And many people have struggled with these two terms. I could write an entire blog post on the unpacking of these terms by various teachers. Here are two alternative terms I have found helpful:
• non-attacking attention
• non-contentious attention
Both of these terms remind us to notice when our attention feels like attacking or has a contentiousness relationship to those thoughts.

Seeing clearly
As I was on a morning walk in a forest I noticed birds disturbed by my presence often flying away. I stopped for a few minutes and many birds returned. I watched two downy woodpeckers walking up two adjacent trees as they ate their breakfast of insects. I listened to a bird singing on a branch just above my head.

This reminds me of a cartoon of two dogs sitting on meditation mats and one dog saying: “the key to meditation is learning to stay.”

Walking Down the Street
Imagine taking a walk with a friend in town where you know many people. As you are walking, someone shouts hello to you from across the street. Rather than ignoring them, you wave back and then continue your conversation. Now imagine someone interrupting you, for example, “I’ve been meaning to call you about…” You listen for a few seconds and then politely tell them that you will call them back later. And you return to your conversation.

So too with meditation. We can meet each interruption—a thought, a noise—with hospitality. If some persist, we can acknowledge being pulled away from the meditation, maintain an attitude of hospitality and then go back to the meditation. In this way, our meditation time need not be a stressful experience with expectations and shoulds, but a rather a time to simply pay attention to what is happening moment to moment.

We are not in control of our minds
Many terms have been used to describe the restless of our minds, monkey mind and puppy mind being just two.
• From Huston Smith in The World’s Religions: “I tell my hand to rise and it obeys. I tell my mind to be still and it mocks my command.”
• Another teacher likened meditation to thinking we are flying the plane and suddenly realizing that plane often does not go where we direct it to go. So who is flying the plane?
• A friend in talking about thoughts that can arise during meditation: “Hey, I didn’t order that thought!”

Mindfulness of thoughts during meditation
Many metaphors have been suggested for the attitude when we are observing thoughts. These all have the sense of witnessing.
• Imagine thoughts as clouds floating by, and noticing how they dissolve.
• Imagine thoughts as autumn leaves floating through the air, carried by the wind, but eventually landing.
• Likening the process to sitting on a train looking out the window, and not jumping out every time you see something interesting.

Molehills to mountains to molehills
When we are facing something unpleasant—a physical pain, an emotional pain, a task that we really don’t want to do—we watch the molehill start to grow and grow, and we realize that we are the ones that are making the mountain. The miracle of mindfulness is that when we stay with mindful attention, we watch the mountain begin to shrink back to a molehill and sometimes even disappear altogether.