Tag: Mindfulness at the Rubin

• Outside and Inside

  It feels different to be outside than to be inside. Knowing this distinction seems so basic to consciousness that doctors might ask patients coming out of a coma this question: “Do you know where you are right now? Are you inside or outside?”

  And yet we forget. We forget we have been given bodies and hearts. We forget we have been given capacities to sense and feel. We forget that life is offering itself to us. This why it is important to put ourselves in different circumstances—to go outside in nature, or to meditate–so that we can experience ourselves as more than a brain on a stick. Meditating means remembering that we are not just a story in our head, urgent and dire as that story may seem. We are alive and part of a much greater story.

  Sitting down to meditate with others is a quietly radical act. Even if we don’t consciously know what we are doing, something inside seeks to re-root ourselves in life, even if just for a moment. We want to remember the essential truth of our lives. We want to remember how it feels to be here, alive on the earth.

  Even if nothing great seems to be happening, sitting down to be still, making the effort, helps us cultivate a different kind of inner intention towards ourselves. It helps us let go of our endless battle with reality, trying to fix ourselves and gain something, and avoid pain. When we let ourselves stop and be still, we remember that we are part of a greater story.

  Henry David Thoreau:“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately.”. People debate about how cut off from civilization he really was in his tiny cabin at Walden Pond. Someone once posted on Parabola social media that Thoreau’s mother did his laundry. He also had visitors. But his intention was true. He wanted to move from the surface to the depths of life, not to waste his brief time on earth“living what was not life.”

  Meditation is a way of manifesting this intention in the middle of an ordinary life. Even only for a few moments every day, we can sit down and be still, or walk outside, creating a clearing in which we can  remember that we are more than we think we are. We really do contain multitudes.

  August 13, 2019

  A Greater Story, Mindful Writing, Mindfulness at the Rubin, Mindfulness Meditation, Nature, Thoreaux, Tracy Cochran

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• Holy Swiss

  Anything can happen at any time. This is the truth of impermanence. Last Sunday, some of us experienced this in a delightful way. Swiss, a one-year-old Service Dog in training, came to sit with us as we meditated. Recently, I was talking about dogs and there she stood, a one-year-old half Golden, half Labrador Retriever.

  Sometimes when I give meditation instructions, I encourage people to bring the attention to the body with an attitude of gentle allowing, as if it was a good dog. Swiss, who comes from a litter of puppies named after different cheeses (Is there is a little Munster in training?), is a good dog. This means she is peaceful and loving by nature, sensitive and responsive, naturally inclined to want to participate in life. We can feel this in her fresh furry presence, and also when we close our eyes and sit. At moments, we emerge from the shadows of thought and feel sheer joy at being here.

  Being young, Swiss also sometimes manifests puppy ways, a brief impulse to cuddle with someone, or poke her nose into the bell in case there was food in there. This too, is just like the body. And just like the body, she came back to the main purpose of the evening, to sat quietly and keep us company. Just by sitting here breathing, she reminded us of the basic goodness of being alive in the moment. She helped us remember that we are part of a greater wholeness.

  Anything can happen at any time. We see this when terrible things happen: tornadoes, war, mass shootings in schools, in the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida. We see the stunned look on the faces of those who lost loved ones without warning. We see the survivors who can’t fathom what happened. Nothing can be said at such a time. No practice or imparted truth can soften or distance the devastation that comes from watching loved ones and innocents taken by violence. And yet into that great suffering…comes comfort dogs.

  A week before Swiss came to sit with us, I described watching a video clip of a brigade of gentle, highly trained, mostly Golden Retrievers (and possibly Retriever Labs), being led into a center full of survivors of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando. They came to help just by sitting down and being with people, breathing, sharing their warm dog presence. The dogs wore little jackets like Swiss, inviting people to pet them and hug them. Many of the dogs were veterans, having shown up in Newtown, Connecticut, and other places of national tragedy.

  Even when people seemed immured in pain, these gentle dogs leaned in, literally leaning on people and sitting on their feet. Think of how comforting that gentle presence would be, the sides of a soft, furry golden dog body rising and falling, soft dog eyes patiently looking at you. Those dog eyes were free of judgment and opinion and valuation. That whole gentle dog presence was just plain present.

  Our own body can be a comfort dog. It can be a refuge and support. I gently encourage you to try this sometime: give your loving attention to your own body. Silently or when you are alone say to yourself (listeners may not understand), “good body, thank you for being there for me.” Think of all your body has been through, all those cigarettes or punishing diets or overwork Shut your eyes and register how loyal the body is to you, quietly breathing and pumping blood, and walking from here to here. Sense how eagerly it responds to the gift of your own attention. It can practically bring tears to your eyes, the generosity and loyalty of this poor, sweet body, the way it forgives you for all those years of neglect, the late nights or drugs and alcohol or myriad other forms of mistreatment.

  As long as it breathes, the body comes when you call. Even when it’s tired or doesn’t feel particularly good, it responds to the touch of the attention. Imagine the love and kindness you would feel for an actual dog this loyal. You wouldn’t dream of criticizing its hair or pointing out that it could stand to lose a few pounds. You would express simple love and gratitude and joy at being with this good dog.

  So what do think would happen if you turned this kind of loving accepting attention on your own body? When we sit down to try, a new kind of feeling begins to blossom, a feeling of being present and alive. Even if life feels completely parched and stranded when I start, my brain choked with thought and care, I have a moment when I remember that life is good. I remember that I am part of a greater wholeness, that I am supported and sustained by forces and resources beyond my reckoning. I remember that even on my worst day, I am loved.

  “This is the first, wildest, and wisest thing I know, that the soul exists, and that it is built entirely out of attentiveness.”

  –Mary Oliver

  “Man has no body distinct from his soul, for that called body is a portion of soul discern’d by the five senses, the chief inlets of soul in this age.”

  –William Blake, from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

  May 3, 2017

  Allowing, Awakening, Buddhism, Comfort Dogs, Dogs, Four Foundations of Mindfulness, impermanence, Meditation, Mindfulness, Mindfulness at the Rubin, Newtown, Orlando, Parabola, Pulse Nightclub, Service Dogs, Tracy Cochran

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• Soft

  The root meaning of heal is to make whole. It doesn’t mean to be made new. Healing often leaves a scar. Illness and mishap and even great tragedy can lead us eventually from the pain of isolation to a greater wholeness. There is such a powerful tendency in our spiritual aspiration to climb up out of the mess of our lives. But what if awakening involved sinking down instead of climbing up, softening and surrendering instead of striving to get somewhere better than we are right now?

  In Newtown, Connecticut, a new school is about to open to replace the Sandy Hook Elementary School, where on December 14, 2012, twenty children and six adults were senselessly shot and killed. How can a building help heal such an unspeakable tragedy? In the upcoming issue of Parabola, “Ways of Healing,” architect Barry Svigals, whose firm designed the new school, speaks of beginning the design process by inviting the community in to share memories and pictures of what they loved about the town and school. “There is a kind of remembering that is about the past and there’s a kind of remembering that is about the present,” says Svigals. When people speak of what they love, others feel it. This kind of remembering brings people back together individually and collectively after fracturing, as does remembering nature. “It’s so elemental, to be fully human.”

  Sati, the ancient Pali word for mindfulness means to remember the present moment. Also in the up coming issue (it’s on my mind), beloved author and poet Mark Nepo describes the journey a successful trial attorney to this elemental place. As this ambitious and well-equipped man climbed a legendary peak in Mongolia, he was stripped of all he thought he was. “All that was left was the bare fact of his own existence, the fact of his breath connecting him to the fact of all existence.” This stripping brought the wisdom that Whitman conveys in Song of Myself: I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood./ I see that the elementary laws never apologize.

  The path of awakening is not easy. But it may be comprised of moments of softening, moments of remembering that we are alive in the most elemental sense, breathing, a part of life living, a creature in a greater creation. In the midst of great turbulence and uncertainty, we may step outside on a summer morning and feel the warmth of the sun. We may suddenly remember, really literally re-member or feel in the whole of ourselves, the fact that the sun is the source of our life and all life on this planet.

  Or the moment can be lighter. The other day, I taught mindfulness meditation at the Rubin Museum in front of the image a beautiful cloud goddess or apsara. Do you remember what it is like to lay on your back and watch clouds as a child? Remember how fluid and marvelous and soft they were? Remember that as children we could feel a kinship with them and with all of life. And we still can, literally in moments of stillness, in moments of what Wordsworth called “the bliss of solitude.” At such moments we remember that under all our endless striving and worry and these big, sometimes tricky personalities we carry around, there is an essence that simply wishes to be part of life, that is open to receive.

  July 8, 2016

  Awakening, Awareness, Letting Go, Mindfulness, Mindfulness at the Rubin, Mindfulness Meditation, Parabola Magazine, Soften Up, Stillness

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