Meditation, mindfulness and the mystery of the human spirit

by DRM

 

The over­crowded mind can lead to an unset­tled soul.

Over the years I’ve learned to trust my tech­niques for qui­et­ing my mind. I let my con­scious­ness float, drift into an unde­fined space that sus­pends the for­ward momen­tum of thought, qui­ets down the chat­ter and waits for a struc­ture to form. Even as I wait the process out, I can mea­sure the costs of the crowd­ed­ness in my life: inat­ten­tion to the phys­i­cal rou­tine of well­ness, less clar­ity in how I express myself, a ero­sion of my pre­sent­ness in the day to day.

This over-crowdedness is a con­se­quence of par­tic­i­pat­ing in mod­ern life. It’s also a con­se­quence of being human.

Every day we are exposed to the equiv­a­lent of more than 100,000 words of infor­ma­tion, accord­ing to work done by a team of researchers at UC San Diego. That’s more than 11 hours of information.

The amount of infor­ma­tion con­sumed by Amer­i­cans in 2008 totaled 3.6 zettabytes and 10,845 tril­lion words, accord­ing to a report released Dec. 9 by researchers at the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia at San Diego (UCSD), “How Much Infor­ma­tion? 2009 Report on Amer­i­can Consumers.”

For an aver­age per­son on an ordi­nary day, this rep­re­sents 34 giga­bytes of data and 100,500 words.

When I went to school with the monks, they tried to show us the power of qui­et­ing our mind through prayer.

At Easter, the entire school would par­tic­i­pate in a day-long fast on Good Fri­day, a day of con­tem­pla­tion on Holy Sat­ur­day and a cel­e­bra­tion of the Easter Vigil on Sat­ur­day night in the win­try dark­ness of the church por­tico, look­ing out over the ink-black bay.

One year Father Anselm, who would later lose his voca­tion to the lure of lay life, tried to teach our entire class the mys­ter­ies of incan­ta­to­r­ial focus. He’d implore us to empty our mind and dis­cover the mys­ter­ies of God.

That was a hard task for an ado­les­cent boy. My par­ents gave their own twist to the med­i­ta­tive state by bring­ing a Tran­scen­den­tal Med­i­ta­tion yogi to our house to ini­ti­ate all of us — a fam­ily of 8 — into the world of meditation.

My ini­ti­a­tion cer­e­mony took place in the back room on the first floor. The yogi burned coconut shav­ings around a small votive alter and whis­pered my secret Mantra in my ear. Some 30 years later, I remem­ber the word, and still haven’t told anyone.

These mem­o­ries of med­i­ta­tion states flooded back when I read a research brief in Sci­ence Daily.

The power of med­i­ta­tion was being her­alded as a won­der drug, the con­se­quence of a study that trained a group of peo­ple how to med­i­tate for a 20 minute stretch each day. The impact on their behav­ior was almost instan­ta­neous. And, the tech­niques weren’t par­tic­u­larly sophis­ti­cated. Accord­ing to the arti­cle, “psy­chol­o­gists study­ing the effects of a med­i­ta­tion tech­nique known as ‘mind­ful­ness’ found that meditation-trained par­tic­i­pants showed a sig­nif­i­cant improve­ment in their crit­i­cal cog­ni­tive skills…after only four days of train­ing for only 20 min­utes each day.”

The med­i­ta­tion train­ing involved in the study was an abbre­vi­ated “mind­ful­ness” train­ing regime mod­eled on basic “Shamatha skills” from a Bud­dhist med­i­ta­tion tra­di­tion, con­ducted by a trained facil­i­ta­tor. As described in the paper, “par­tic­i­pants were instructed to relax, with their eyes closed, and to sim­ply focus on the flow of their breath occur­ring at the tip of their nose. If a ran­dom thought arose, they were told to pas­sively notice and acknowl­edge the thought and to sim­ply let ‘it’ go, by bring­ing the atten­tion back to the sen­sa­tions of the breath.” Sub­se­quent train­ing built on this basic model, teach­ing phys­i­cal aware­ness, focus, and mind­ful­ness with regard to distraction.


The term “‘mind­ful­ness’” is so decep­tively sim­ple. There’s your mind, and you know it’s there.

It’s like that moment where you sud­denly are con­scious of your own breath­ing. But instead of pan­ick­ing because you can’t draw another breath, you’re able to con­trol your thoughts because you’re keep­ing a watch on your mind.

A psy­chol­o­gist that I’ve known for a long time reduces the mind-body sep­a­ra­tion to this: the body is a beast that seeks to carry the mind around on its big back, pur­su­ing plea­sure and avoid­ing pain at all costs. The chal­lenge, she believed, and the focus of all her ther­a­peu­tic engage­ments, is to help  patients change their behav­ior so that they can lis­ten more clearly to their mind, and be less of a slave to their beast.

That is the essence of mind­ful­ness. The path to it is as var­ied as our con­stantly shift­ing point of view.

One thing that we all agree on, but rarely share with each other, is that we wish we had more self-control. The word “abstemious” is such a tease for an organ­ism that despite all of its aware­ness of its exis­tence is unable to exert con­sis­tent con­trol of the impulses of the self. Accord­ing to one pop­u­lar per­son­al­ity inven­tory, self-control is the low­est rank­ing trait among the major­ity of peo­ple who take the test.

It would make sense then that we would chan­nel our focus around inno­va­tion to help humankind mas­ter the art of mind­ful­ness then. We don’t, though, and in fact, prob­a­bly don’t see need to, since the act of clear­ing the mind is a pretty sim­ple, although elu­sive, task.

It just takes ‘mind­ful­ness’.


One recent report shared news of biofeed­back tech­niques that alert the sub­ject when their mind is stray­ing. The report shared a tidy fable about ‘mind­ful­ness’: it needs its space, and the mind­ful indi­vid­ual has to be always on the look out for the dis­trac­tion that will make mind­ful­ness an impossibility.

It makes me think of a story that Sayadaw U Pan­dita told when I was med­i­tat­ing at his monastery in Ran­goon in the early 1990s. He said mind­ful­ness has to—he was actu­ally talk­ing about the word satipathana—and he said it has to be very quick. Think of it like this, he said: you go to an event like a con­cert and there are no assigned seats. So you want to make sure that you get in there quickly and sit down in the best seat before some­body else sits down in it. Your mind­ful­ness should be like that. You have to get in there and put mind­ful­ness in that place before some­thing else sits down there. So by doing it in the way that we are doing it now and report­ing in real-time, there isn’t any pos­si­bil­ity for any­thing else to sit down there. I had no time for my mind to wan­der while I was report­ing to you just now.

Per­haps you are sen­si­tive to the para­dox that mind­ful­ness embod­ies. To be mind­ful requires con­cen­tra­tion, yet to achieve mind­ful­ness, we need to empty our minds. It is like the first les­son of jug­gling: to see the balls you can not look at any sin­gle one. You look through the balls, and in doing that you see each one.

One year Lent, the monks intro­duced our lit­tle com­mu­nity of 150 ado­les­cent boys to hesy­chasm, a form of med­i­ta­tive prayer that helps the pen­i­tent achieve the expe­ri­ence of God. Hesy­chasm is derived from a the Greek word for still­ness, or a rest­ful quiet.

We read each day a pas­sage from a monas­tic mem­oir. The author, tor­mented in his quest for an under­stand­ing of God that would give mean­ing and cast doubt from his life, turned to the Jesus prayer as his med­i­ta­tive anchor.

Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

The instant of rev­e­la­tion filled the priest with eupho­ria and under­stand­ing. The story was very pow­er­ful to me, a teenage boy with a rest­less mind and a desire to feel the pres­ence of a greater being that could give form to the mean­ing that I could feel life had.

In the decades since, I’ve wit­nessed less of the peace­ful focus that comes with the true med­i­ta­tive state and more of the with­er­ing las­si­tude that accom­pa­nies the life absent of mindfulness.

The peace that comes with the sim­ple, open mind takes con­stant effort. Our nature is not drawn to the divine, no mat­ter how much we are inspired by it.