The Naked Monk

Archive for the ‘Mindful Reflection’ Category

I’m just back from a symposium on Mindfulness and Psychotherapy at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Diversity in Counselling and Psychotherapy. Alone among psychologists, analysts, social workers and academics, I nevertheless found myself quite at home. Almost all were meditators, some with decades of practice under their belts. There’s a natural affinity between Buddhism and psychology; both are concerned with the human mind’s tendency to avoid the real world by creating its own reality, and to get to the root of angst.

In spite of reminders that mindfulness is rooted in many traditions, Buddhism kept popping up as a principal source; politically incorrect perhaps, but hard to avoid. The Buddha’s teachings explore, explain and map introspective practices with a breadth, depth and precision that’s the envy of other traditions, as well as a growing body of scientists.

Discussion centred upon mindfulness in therapy, but there was also the issue of proving it in clinical settings. The problem is measurability — coming up with the facts and figures needed to loosen purse strings in hospitals and other public institutions. Since 1995 Jon Kabat-Zinn has created credibility among researchers, academics and clinicians for his Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, but that’s only one method; full acceptance has a long way to go.

Riffle through the scientific literature and you’d think the clinical study of mindfulness is proceeding at full steam. One of my students recently found 3,540 ‘meditation’ studies on PsychInfo, a database of psychology research. Some findings trickle down into mainstream publications like Time, where you might have seen pictures of fMRI scanners wired to the heads of Tibetan monks, measuring brain activity and spitting out hard evidence. Measurable evidence like this is easier to find in long-time than short-term meditators; so far it’s come down to asking, ‘So how’s it going?’

Even the question, ‘How much do you meditate’ is impossibly murky. Is quietly sitting still necessarily being mindful? In an hour, how much time is mindful, how much distracted? How about that hour-long conversation with your spouse when you were unusually open and soul-searching — does that count as mindfulness practice?

It’s not just that the questions are so subjective, they’re also tough to answer. In my last meditation session, for example, was I focussed more than ten percent of the time? More than forty? I’ll answer, but not with great certainty. Lots goes on in my head, even when I am focussed. How about the big picture? I think I’m happier and more stable than I was as a young man but, as keynote speaker Dr. Tony Toneatto pointed out, that could just be the process of maturity. He’s got a point, though maturity certainly isn’t guaranteed. It’s my observation (purely subjective) that people who take no time in life to work on themselves tend towards a cranky old age. There’s nothing inevitable about learning from our mistakes; facing or turning away from them is a conscious choice we make every day. I count my practice successful if I face more than I avoid, and particularly if that ratio increases year by year — no scratch that: decade by decade. We fall back too, sometimes for longer than we like to admit. And how about that horrible meditation session when you saw just how much your thought processes are guided by narcissism and self-righteousness? But wait a minute, isn’t that insight, with all the subliminal power to shift attitudes?

In the world of scientific measurement, subjective data is unreliable, to say the least — and yet the Buddha developed mindfulness as an empirical practice. The Dalai Lama has pointed out that Buddhist practice and science share three qualities: a commitment to the empirical method, belief in universal cause and effect and a distrust of absolutes. Both favour outcomes that can be duplicated — scientific research by replicating results in different laboratories and Buddhism by guiding people to the same state of awakening. However, although you and I can chat fruitfully about our meditational experiences, there’s no way to compare them brick for brick.

Without hard evidence, a forward-thinking activist working in a hospital, say, is hard-pressed to sell his or her vision to budget administrators. She’s asking them to commit scarce resources to an untested — indeed, so far untestable — new approach to stress.

But of course it’s not new at all. It’s been around for twenty-six hundred years, morphing in that time from the teachings of an itinerant iconoclast (Siddhattha the Buddha) to the monolithic traditions of austere Theravadins, anti-rational Zenners and magic-wielding Tibetans. Keynote speaker Ana Bodnar raised the question of why interest in mindfulness has grown so explosively in recent years. I see two reasons: these practices come into the hands of secular Westerners just as we’re being drowned in the attention-fracturing synthesis of fast-changing technology and knee-jerk consumerism. We’re also dealing with the indigestible materialism that’s left over from the rejection of our parents’ religion and the growing realisation that the baby’s gone with the bathwater.

How are we now to take such ancient practices? Many people, as I once did, embrace one or another of these foreign cultural forms, and adapt. Others, like those who come to my Quiet Mind Seminars, have no interest in delving into that cultural baggage and just want the goods — to understand their own minds and to be more awake. In short, we all see the practices as a form of therapy — which brings us back to the symposium.

Anyone who’s practiced meditation knows at first-hand the benefits of sitting quietly and letting the mind find its own balance. Delve deeper with an experienced teacher and you begin to uncover some of the illusions that underlie daily stress. Long-term meditators are motivated by their own experience and don’t need facts and figures. Then there are the committed practitioners, driven by the Buddha’s extraordinary promise of a permanent end to stress — hard to believe, but equally hard to refute, especially once you see stress as a subjective response, and not ‘out there.’

Who knows how plastic the mind can be?

Those who’ve benefited from mindfulness generally wish the same benefits on others, especially when they’re part of a religious tradition that urges kindness and compassion. Psychologists are healers, and want the best for their clients. How difficult and/or practical is the use of mindfulness across the board? Time will tell. Hopefully, they will tell.

Hello? Is anybody out there?

I was sure my blog post Spiritual Life would bring in a flood of comments; so was Caroline. True, it wasn’t that profound, but we thought it was at least provocative; while it did express some of my thoughts I was more interested in yours, dear reader. I guess mine just weren’t radical enough.

Or, could it be that I make so much sense that you all just agree with me? God, you’re not just being polite, are you? In either case, I feel that I’m preaching to the converted, and that’s too close to religious conformity for my liking.

In that post, I used a word that I usually avoid religiously: spirituality. Let’s face it, it’s a highly unspecific blanket term used more by those who want to believe what they want than by those genuinely investigating their own minds. I suspect that most of the latter, like me, don’t actually consider themselves religious at all. The best word I know to describe the decision to slow down, get to the root of consciousness and uproot stress, is practical.

This is what the Buddha was all about. He rejected the establishment of his day — the Vedic teaching that ritual, not self-development, was the way to salvation — and sat under a tree to see what he could figure out for himself. After he died, of course, Buddhist orthodoxy began to paint him as perfect. Most establishment Buddhists today are horrified by the suggestion that we might ourselves reach the same level of accomplishment as the Buddha himself — but clearly, they’ve got issues. If we’re to believe anything about the man Siddhartha Gotama, it’s that he taught so that others could find the same peace of mind as he. That was really, really nice of him; it’s just plain rude to suggest that we can’t do what he did.

Anyway, all this provocation is probably falling on deaf ears. None of you are hard-core Buddhists or you wouldn’t be reading The Naked Monk — unless my old teachers have set spies upon me — so you won’t take umbrage at my little sacrileges.

Hmm … how can I stir things up?

People are sometimes surprised to hear that I take my exercise at a local gym. Shouldn’t I—a former Buddhist monk and teacher of mindful reflection—be a dedicated yoga practitioner? Actually, I did practice yoga for many years, and also tai-chi, which I particularly loved. These days, however, I frequent the noisy, unassuming, weight room of the Hudson Racquet Club.

There seems to be a general consensus that yoga is spiritually superior, but I’m not of that mind; I hate the very notion of spiritual superiority. More to the point, neither yoga nor Buddhism are innately spiritual; nor are churches, mosques and temples for that matter; not even the most magnificent Himalayan sunset. If the word ‘spiritual’ means anything at all, it’s a state of mind. A calm, loving state of mind—right? Well … I’m not so sure of even that.

To me, spiritual is the opposite of material, and materialism is faith in the happiness-producing effect of stuff, which means anything that seems graspable. To be spiritual is to withdraw your hopes from those things, turn your attention to the grasping mind itself, and train it not to go where it doesn’t belong. That may eventually produce calm, loving states of mind, but in the meantime, there’s work to do.

I began weight-training for two reasons. One was a response to the horror of osteoporosis, which seriously deprecated my mother’s last decades and which I swore to fight—lifting weights grows both muscles and the bones they’re attached to. The other was to cope with the anger over my separation and divorce. The strenuous routine absorbed the physical symptoms, leaving my mind the space it needed to process the change in my self and my life. It was profoundly steadying.

Still, there are things I dislike about the gym; for a start, it’s almost impossible to work out in silence. Once again, if I want to concentrate and internalize the experience, you’d think a yoga studio would be more suitable, no? Well … no. In those havens of dim lights and soothing music I find myself drifting away in a semblance of meditation that’s really more like tuning out than in. Years of meditative retreats left me with a deep and, I must confess, inflexible attachment to peace and quiet; I become irritable when I can’t have it, even anti-social. How spiritual is that?

So, I try to forgive those people who chatter away instead of working out, and deconstruct my annoyance with loudspeakers that pump out loud, offensively predictable pop music. Now I’m in a quandary, because I’m convinced that mind-numbing, thump-thump music deepens automaticity, accellerates entropy and discourages mental growth. As the years go by, I don’t want my mind to grow rigid any more than I want my bones to go brittle.

So, should I give into my attachment to the quiet of yoga, zone out and let my brain deteriorate—or should I expose myself to the sound pollution that goes in the name of ‘pump-up’ music and let my brain deteriorate? Is the spiritual life really supposed to be this complicated?

“We’re all in the same boat. Born as we are in this human body, we can’t escape the blessings and tortures of the human brain. From our first breath, we yearn for love and understanding in the most complicated ways imaginable. We find it most satisfyingly as we learn to give it. The ability to do this comes from acceptance of our frailties. By understanding the conditions of our own lives, we accept the conditions of others. Compassion is not condescension, but a leveling of the playing field, a recognition of yourself in others and an acceptance that their stress is your stress, that their happiness is your own. The gulf between us all is imaginary, born of insecurity and fear.”

—It Begins with Silence (Chapter 9)

It was warm today—a full, balmy six degrees Celsius—and the squirrels were out in the melting snow as I drove up Côte-Saint-Charles. In fact, one of them almost dashed under the wheels of my car—after which I was much more attentive. I like squirrels. More to the point, I hate running them over; but there’s no way around it—when it comes to crossing the road, they don’t come any dumber.

As my driving became more attentive, I got to thinking. Attention is the key to mindfulness; and ‘mindfulness,’ like ‘meditation,’ is becoming ridiculously misunderstood. As I watched out for squirrels I realized that it came at a cost—my attention to other things on the road, like fallen branches, pedestrians and other vehicles. I couldn’t be equally attentive to everything. The more I tried to look, the more I realized just how much I had to choose. This applies not just on Côte-Saint-Charles on a balmy winter’s day, but in all situations. I recalled the Buddha’s instruction on mindfulness—it’s very specific.

The popular take on mindfulness has become, “being in the moment,” which sounds really cool but doesn’t by itself mean a damn thing. The point is that ‘attentiveness’ is transitive—you’re attentive (or not) of something. The sort of practice that leads to awakening doesn’t just let go of annoying thoughts and groove on sensory perception, but actually attends to the three marks of existence: inconstancy, stress and emptiness. This is a lot more substantial, and a lot less airy-fairy. It’s not what people want to hear—which is perhaps why it disables wishful thinking so effectively.

For meditators who seek value for their investment of time and effort, mindfulness brings a) insight into the nature of existence, and b) a letting go of the illusions that keep us committed to cyclic existence. By seeing every breath, every thought, feeling and sense perception as inconstant, stressful and empty, we develop an intuitive sense of urgency, and are shifted from the theoretical realm of good ideas to the immanent one of good sense, here and now. It’s how we become happy.