CALMNESS

CALMNESS

Lately we’ve been reflecting on the promise that mindfulness will make you all calm and peaceful. I’ve been reminding us that this is just nonsense. Mindfulness does not make you anything.  We do not act mindfully so we can get or be something. Its not like lifting big heavy weights which produce muscular enlargement or like studying French so you can speak a new language.

We are already fully capable of being attentive. We do it, more or less, in every single moment of our lives. The quality will vary depending on the susceptibility we have to distraction, to narrowing and to self-deception. Mindfulness is not acquiring anything new. In Indian language, it is a bhavana, that is how we cultivate what we are. This is an apt description because like cultivating an appreciation for Greek food or Country music, it is an expansion of our self-imposed limits to benefit from a wider and richer version of our already present experience and ability. When we cultivate a garden we begin with what we have and we work it, feed it and care for it so we can harvest what grows in these conditions. When we cultivate our attention, we similarly work it - we practice earnestly, we try new forms, we feed ourselves, and the harvest is a richer, deeper awareness of these moments of our lives.

The other point we return to with the promise of calmness is that when we set ourselves up to expect calmness and reject ourselves when we do not experience calm, we are just continuing the same discriminatory, non-accepting mind states which bring us so much distress. Both calm and agitation will arise in our practice, for the simple reason that they will arise in our lives. Neither is the real us, and the other some aberration. As our practice deepens, we will generally experience less agitation and more peace through the stability and flexibility and non-discrimination we have cultivated. This does not mean we have made ourselves calm. It means we are experiencing ourselves as calm without any fabrication, imposition or rejection.

When you come to your space of mindfulness, don’t  kid yourself that this is some magic space that will make you all calm, peaceful, spiritual or anything. We engage in practice to connect at our deepest level with who and how we are in that moment of our experience. The promise of calmness as a product is a reflection of our consumer culture where we see ourselves as missing something, what has been called a “sense of lack” or “scarcity”. This mindstate is the trap which ties is to a cycle of consuming to fill some imagined vacuum. Through our practice we are invited t experience that there is nothing missing. We are whole, complete and ever-changing. Calm may come but it may go as well. We sit to experience this from a place of attention and non-judgement.

Yours mindfully,                           
Ray