Eating the Menu or the Meal? (5)

Pieces of the Whole Storyis a blog about the return to wholeness of our self and world, both of which we tend to see as broken, isolated, and wrong. I draw on the world’s spiritual traditions, therapies of psyche, soma, and spirit, poetry, folktales, and the epiphanies of everyday life to bring us into awareness of the whole story.

The map is not the territory is the old saying.
I offer a variant: the menu is not the meal.

Following a path of mindfulness means choosing to see what you experience when you let go of your grip on the mental concepts you get from reading the menu, the mental description of experience internally being recited by your mind.  Instead, you choose to taste the meal of your life, directly. With a literal meal this means being moment by moment available to the tastes, smells, textures, subtle sounds of cutting, biting, chewing, and the visual forms and colors of, let’s say, butternut squash made golden in butter with sautéed red onions, shell pasta, fresh sage, and a little cream with ground pepper, umm! Not being with those words but with how the actual meal tastes at this moment, not the last time you had it. Extend that to the meal of your whole life, and it means dropping the concepts of what an experience means (how it gets languaged) in preference to being with the feelings and sensations of the experience as you choose to allow the experience to permeate you entirely. It means you can choose to not hold back from Life; you can choose to let go of what you believe you already know, and instead risk being freshly present with what is.

One of the great lightbulb moments of discovering the power of mindfulness comes when you notice the difference between what you THOUGHT an experience would be, and what you FEEL (with all of the senses) the experience actually is. This is the primordial moment of fresh learning. Ah, so all attractive people aren’t going to shame me! Or, I can feel anger fully and not act it out in a terrifying way (like Dad/Mom/my ex- did)! That gap perceived by noticing the difference has a flavor of freedom about it. You remember you are more than your thoughts. A friend once told me that for him the essence of James Joyce’s Ulysseus was real quite simple (despite the thick complexity of all the layers of meaning in the text). Joyce was just calling out to us: Come on in! The water’s fine!

In truth our experience isn’t purely of the map or of the meal, but some blend of the two. As you try practicing to see how much you are willing to let go of the menu and just be with the meal, you may notice that any moment has a dimension of depth to it. You can stay on the surface, and, as it were, read the labels on the passing boxes of your experience. Or you can slow down the conveyor belt and drop into the box of the moment to feel its depth. This is an action of relaxing, of willingness, of opening oneself fully.

So I leave you with these three metaphors as invitations:
 

• let go of the map and enter fully into the territory
• quit chewing on the menu and eat the mystery food
• slow down the conveyor belt and drop below the box label into the depth of experience.

Lost (& Found) in Thought (4)

Q. - What is the mind full of in mindfulness?
A. – It is full of awareness.

When I began to explore mindfulness, noticing-where-I-am, I noticed there were many times when I wasn’t actually aware of where I am. Where was I when I wasn’t aware? I asked myself. Aren’t I always here?...
              ...But it seemed that I was coming back to being here by asking myself, Where am I? So, where could I have gone off to when I was away from here?

Where I was was lost in thought. What can bring me back to here is touching in with “the body” (perception with the five senses) rather than going off into thought (which in Buddhism is understand as a sixth sense). This recognition of how frequently I can be lost in thought can lead those of us interested in knowing “here” to mistrust thinking. But thinking is just another place I can be. Thinking is such a compelling “place” to be that I can lose awareness of where I am. Mindfulness can be a means for discovering where I go off to in my thinking. And this becoming aware can help so much with our suffering. (We'll explore this much more later).

Let me give you one (in a series) of images I’ve come up with to help me understand the power of choosing to be mindful, choosing to be aware. By choosing to pay attention in the present moment without judgment, mindfulness allows the veil between what is conscious and what is unconscious to get thinner and to back away (as it were), so that we glimpse more of what had been unconscious. Picture a large ocean liner anchored off a coast. All that we can see of the boat from a distance (let’s imagine standing on the shore) is the conscious mind. From that distance, there seems to be a sharp division between the visible part of the big boat, and the invisible parts below the water line. Mindfulness, in this analogy, would be approaching the big boat in a small craft that we can propel with a little effort. Making only minimal effort allows the water around our small boat to not be too stirred up. Still, some effort needs to be made. That effort is the sincere desire to know our self truthfully and fully. As we approach the big vessel and allow our self to coast in the water, we notice that we can see a lot of the boat that is below the water line. What we now see is neither perfectly clear nor completely hidden. Much of our unfolding and awakening occurs through our curiosity about that perception of what is there, between the conscious and the unconscious. We are entering the twilight zone!

Everything Unfolds in the Present Moment (3)

"Pieces of the Whole Story" is a blog about the return to wholeness of our self and world, both of which we tend to see as broken, isolated, and wrong. I draw on the world’s spiritual traditions, therapies of psyche, soma, and spirit, poetry, folktales, and the epiphanies of everyday life to bring us into awareness of the whole story.

Therapy and coaching are sometimes contrasted in terms of their primary temporal focus: therapy is said to be more concerned with the past while coaching directs our attention more to the future. In this (over-simplified) perspective, therapy helps uncover the roots of current distress in unconscious strategies developed in the past, strategies that no longer serve who you are now. Coaching puts more attention on what you want to make happen in the future and how you will manifest your intentions. Yet both approaches to change must ultimately be concerned with the present: Everything unfolds (or doesn’t) based on how one engages the present. No matter what happened in the past and what future you’d like to create, it is this precious present moment where one can find freedom to act freshly rather than just react.

Developing an intimate and transformative relationship to the present is what I call mindfulness. Mindfulness is such a critical element of all that I do, that I thought I would devote a string of posts to this topic. For this first post in that series, I want to consider mindfulness as a way to allow unfolding in the present. Then in later posts, I’ll take the term mindfulness into conversations about stuckness, judgment, meditation, the unconscious mind, sensuality and the superego, portals between worlds, and who knows what else! I will start with the current common understanding of mindfulness, but later inquire into some of the premises of that understanding.

In an oft-cited definition by Jon Kabat-Zinn (founder of Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction and a researcher who has done much to establish the importance of mindfulness for integrated human healthcare), three modifiers are delineated to describe mindfulness as a particular way of “paying attention.” Mindfulness, he writes, is paying attention “…on purpose, in the present moment, and non judgmentally.” We will look at the notion of non-judgmentally in a later post. For now let’s just consider the combination of the other two terms: “on purpose, and “in the present moment.”

The “on purpose” part of this definition is what makes mindfulness a practice. It is a practice because left to our normal habits we don’t much pay attention (especially not “non-judgmentally”) to the present moment. We are so preoccupied that we are not even aware of our habitual lack of attention. We are not aware of how we pay attention; rather, our attention is just captured moment by moment by what our drive for survival decides is important to attend to. Since we are not normally aware of how and where our attention is, we may not even be aware of how rarely we are fully present, and how little we are interested in just being directly with the present moment rather than keeping it at a distance through judgment. Beginning to notice where our attention is will allow us to know our own mind, and to begin wondering what is driving our mind away from the present. There is much to discover when we begin to be aware of where we are, where our attention is. Tuning in to where we are now is the simple gateway to allow all-of-who-we-are, with our past conditioning and our intentions for a future, to unfold into fullness.

Learning to Listen (2)

"Pieces of the Whole Story" is a blog about the return to wholeness of our self and world, both of which we tend to see as broken, isolated, and wrong. I draw on the world’s spiritual traditions, therapies of psyche, soma, and spirit, poetry, folktales, and the epiphanies of everyday life to bring us into awareness of the whole story.

So, you know you’re stuck, and you have some sense of at least one particular area of that stuckness in which you guess you’ve got more to learn so as to get unstuck? If that’s the case, then how do you learn to listen? How do you learn to listen to the divine discontent I spoke of in the prior post? ...to the symptoms, the ache, the confusion? How do you learn to hear the excluded parts of your story? (This post is directly in response to the first comment I received about the first post “Hunger for the Whole Story.”)

Here are two inner actions that can open up that conversation: (1) Holding the question, and (2) Welcoming the stranger. I’ll just give a brief description of both of these here and then develop each of them in separate posts.

Holding a question begins with a willingness to not know. That may seem simple, but don’t forget all the years when “knowing the answer” meant to be “loved” (acknowledged-approved-recognized) by teachers, who, for most of us, were our second sources of love. To be willing to not know is to allow yourself to be open to the world and ready to receive and be changed by new experience. That’s a position that can feel powerless and vulnerable (but is it?).

Holding a question may sound like something done primarily with the mind, but it’s not. Holding a question is different than just thinking a question. Holding a question (as with all other holding) is done in the heart and the body as well as the mind. You can begin by sensing into your immediate presence and seeing how and where the lack of knowing plus the urge to know shows up. Scan your inner space to sense where you can feel that lack and urge. Give it breath and space. Ask yourself if you are willing to let it be there. That willingness to allow yourself to live with the question – to live with the admission that there is more to know and with the yearning to become aware of that more – that willingness readies a space like preparing your home for a guest to arrive. Not a known guest, but a stranger.

Welcoming the stranger means to extend a friendliness to whatever shows up. That friendliness begins even before you have much of a clue as to what will show up, so the friendliness precedes the showing up. Such an attitude of welcoming is necessary if that which has been hiding from you will be willing to let itself be known. How would you sit in a meadow if you wanted the wild creatures to approach? The “wildness” is that of being rejected, shamed, and disowned. That which most needs to be listened to is that which got excluded when your personality was being formed. I know of no better expression of this friendliness than in Rumi’s poem, “The Guest House."

Hunger for the Whole Story (1)

"Pieces of the Whole Story" is a blog about the return to wholeness of our self and world, both of which we tend to see as broken, isolated, and wrong. I draw on the world’s spiritual traditions, therapies of psyche, soma, and spirit, poetry, folktales, and the epiphanies of everyday life to bring us into awareness of the whole story.

Whatever state you are in right now, it is organized by some story, a relational story about you and others, you and life, and the expectations that characterize your relationships and the parts you play. The story is made of images: images of self and others, and the ways the various images interact. That story is possessive and does a good job of excluding from your awareness other possible stories that are also true, have been true at other times and could even be true now. If the story is, for example, one of you being lost and confused, then that story will try to erase all memories of times when you were clear and knew what you wanted and how to find your way.

That whole portrait I just painted of you and your state and the stories that organize it… well, it’s certainly not the whole story! Another story is that something else in you is not settled with the current story, and like the sand in the oyster, the irritation it contributes allows something to grow in you that is very valuable: I think of it a divine discontent.  That divine discontent can show up as symptoms: a climate of restlessness and worry, poor sleep, over-eating, moods that show up like some severe weather system that just parks over your psyche, moods of irritability, of despair and hopelessness, of frenetic thinking. If you learn how to listen to these symptoms, they can give you clues as to what stories, what of your many parts, have been excluded from your current understanding of self, others, and life. One topic I will be exploring in this blog is how we can listen to and dialogue with our discontent so as to allow ourselves to get free from our stuckness and unfold. For we hunger for wholeness, for an ease that comes when nothing is excluded, and everything belongs.