#758 Towards Stillness ...

     Mindfulness practice gradually leads us from feeling uncomfortable in our own skin, distractions & mindless compulsive activity, towards stillness, peace & seeing things as they are, clearly, right here & now, and appropriate responses.

     “… meditation practice can show you how helpful the practice of restraint can be. You sit … and you don’t move. If you’re uncomfortable, you remain sitting still with the discomfort for an entire half hour. You do not move. You don’t get up after five minutes just because you have an odd thought; you stay with it and see what happens.
     When we hold still, we create a field of clarity for ourselves. We learn restraint. Yes, there are parts of the self that resist that clarity, and then the body jumps into movement to cloud the field: we scratch our nose, rearrange our limbs, and shift our attention. And we miss the moment of holding still, of clarity and readiness. Doing this practice for many years, I find that learning restraint in this way is especially valuable for people like me who jump around from one thing to the next. The restraint of holding still allows me to enter a state of presence and intimacy that I wouldn’t get otherwise. Without it, I might embarrass myself by getting up and walking out of the meditation room!
     But learning restraint is much more important. In terms of sex, anger, and greediness, restraint can be the key to compassion and skillful action. When we’re ready to do something really unskillful, suddenly a little shadow of awareness comes up in our minds, and we don’t abuse, we don’t yell, we don’t grasp; we just stay still. In that moment of restraint, we can discover our own strength, our own integrity.” Pat Enkyo O’Hara

#491 Holding Things Lightly in Awareness - Observing Change

     Meditation is often said to be "simple but not easy." When we first start to meditate, we're advised to sit still, yet we notice that we often suddenly move to scratch ourselves or make our legs more comfortable. Initially we tend to (mildly) rebel against this instruction & rationalize our not following it by arguing that one simply has to move, because ... Then quickly we may suddenly conclude "I'm no good at meditating."
     So even this tiny, initial fragment of sitting meditation practice provides a fascinating mirror by which to observe ourselves. Yet this mini-challenge, along with everything else, will change.
     The trick is not to struggle against it (against yourself), but hold it all lightly, in awareness.

Elena Shumilova  http://www.flickr.com/photos/75571860@N06/11874722676/

#391 Comfort-seeking Moves and our Full Human Potential

     Sitting meditation is an ideal laboratory for studying ourselves. Under these controlled conditions of (external) stillness and relative (external) peace & quiet, we clearly observe a stunning array of inner activity.
     We see how we're continuously exerting energy to seek comfort. This constant automatic striving shows the pervasive dominance of the brain stem reflex. 
     The most obvious sign of this during meditation is the inability of most people to sit completely still for even short periods of time. They feel that it's impossible. As soon as they become uncomfortable, they "have to" move to a more comfortable position. When their nose gets a tickle, they "have to" immediately scratch it to become more comfortable. They assume that there's no choice in these matters - if one feels discomfort, one immediately has to react - brain stem reflex.
     A less obvious, but equally pervasive sign of this constant automatic striving towards comfort is the compulsive habit of "living in the past" or future. A large part of the time when we're (supposedly) awake, we're actually in the past - dreaming of the good old days, or wallowing in some miserable past experience; or in the future - fantasizing, or catastrophizing. Wallowing and catastrophizing are less obviously comforting than daydreaming about positive experiences, but these nevertheless do seem to provide something that's hard to let go of. 
     Perhaps the present moment is never perfectly comfortable - physically or emotionally (hedonic concept of happiness), and therefore our brain stem judges it unacceptable to inhabit continuously. So escaping the present moment is reactive, automatic (brain stem reflex) rather than a conscious decision.
     There are huge reasons for choosing to be fully conscious: to explore, embody & enjoy our full potential as evolved human beings (eudaimonic concept of happiness); and to avoid repeating & try to repair the horrors (wars, genocides, ecological devastation, Ponzi schemes, etc, etc) we've been inflicting on each other, animals and the rest of the universe in our long history of behaving far below our potential. See: http://healthyhealers.blogspot.ca/2013/09/hedonism-eudaimonia-important-concepts.html
     Sitting still in meditation, observing our urge to move, scratch, or otherwise react to a wide variety of mild discomforts, we practice accepting these without acting on these primitive urges. As surely as steadily practicing a musical instrument invariably produces a competent musician, meditation practice gradually and progressively rewires our brains so that we become less & less reactive, and increasingly conscious wise human beings.
     

Balzac's Cafe, Toronto, Distillery District, 2013