#759 Savoring Mindfully

     Positive psychology defines "savoring" as "the process of learning to focus attention on positive events to increase one's sensitivity to naturally rewarding experiences, such as enjoying a beautiful nature scene or experiencing a sense of connection with a loved one." Garland EL et al. "Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement for Chronic Pain and Prescription Opioid Misuse: Results From an Early-Stage Randomized Controlled Trial." Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 2014; DOI: 10.1037/a0035798

     This differs from how I use the term mindful savoring in teaching MBSR, the central focus of which is seeing the full scope of reality clearly, as it actually is. My use of this term overlaps with the definition of "connoisseur," and may best illustrated thus:
     A wine expert (sommelier) can "blind taste" a variety of wines and with great accuracy, provide details of the type(s) of wine, type of grapes, country of origin, perhaps even the specific vineyard and year of harvest, and how well this particular vintage/winery combination represents the region. With great enthusiasm, a wine connoisseur can provide considerably more details than this, and yet actually consume little if any wine (they usually spit it into a special container), and unless the wine is actually spoiled (eg "corked"), will not indicate whether or not s/he personally "likes" or "dislikes" it. 
     Mindful savoring is based, first & foremost on intimacy - a profound openness to & interest in, a kind of love if you will - an open mind & heart - toward all wines & wine-making in general. This is qualitatively different from rigid, reactive, black-&-white judgments / personal preferences ("I hate this" - or - "I crave this").
     The important mindful aspects of savoring: non-judgmental, open / transpersonal (vs narrow / personal) awareness & psychological flexibility (vs rigidity).

     Consider the effect on your quality of life were you to mindfully savor the innumerable people & phenomena you encountered - the richness of the infinite variety of experiences is unimaginable. 

     In contrast to mindful savoring, aren't we more prone to rigidly identify with our preferences? How unlikely are we to meet people / phenomena that we rate amazingly desirable ("must haves") or that we rate terribly undesirable ("must avoids") - very seldom, right? But don't the vast majority of people / phenomena fit in between - the vast numbers of "neutrals" we hardly notice or even try to avoid, having judged them "boring"? (Remember the "inn-crowd" in high school?)
     To the extent that we fail to mindfully savor, our life is dull & frustrating,filled with wanting, striving, waiting & disappointment.

     Psychological flexibility paves the way towards de-armoring, knowledge about & intimacy with ourself, others & life in general. Rigidity, the opposite of psychological flexibility, is an armored dead-end: https://mindfulnessforeveryone.blogspot.com/2013/01/261-psychological-rigidity-i-will.html

    
     

#757 Intimacy with Oneself

Rain
No umbrella, getting soaked.
I’ll just use the rain as my raincoat.               Daito Kokushi

      "Facing yourself intimately and without judgment is like finding yourself in a sudden downpour without an umbrella or a shelter. You try to escape the cold and wet by huddling into your clothes, head down, but there’s no way to move away from the rain, just like there’s no way to move away from your own issues, sorrow, or anger. If you can just let go of trying to escape and acknowledge, ‘This is me, and this is what I’m experiencing,’ the need to escape vanishes. You are free to be truly there for yourself and others. It’s like standing in the rain with nothing to lose: your self is the raincoat that will protect you and protect your loved ones through your honesty. If you can see that you are not the world, but that the world is actually you, then you can begin to experience an intimacy with all things. The key is to train yourself to see this in your moment-to-moment life, to consciously dissolve the made-up boundaries between self and other, to appreciate that we are all linked together in this magic circle of relationship.
     This might sound rather airy-fairy, but it is what gives us freedom, and freedom is what we really want. We want to be spontaneously alive, not stuck in our old habits of body and mind. So we flow with change; we nurture awareness; we listen with open heart-minds to ourselves and to each other. We recognize our own ‘selflessness’ and our own ‘self-fullness.’
     It is the fulcrum of our relationships – with family, friends, coworkers – that can lead us to this continuous path of awakening. The key is to train ourselves to recognize how we are in our moment-to-moment lives and to honestly connect with others without fear or shame. Because, strange as it may seem, we learn more from relationships than from any other source. And they are not always easy! Buddha’s teachings tell us that suffering arises from grasping for things to be different than they are, from not meeting the moment just as it is. We’re so preoccupied with the idea of what we want, that we miss what’s really alive in the present moment. We always want to be safe and happy and to avoid any suffering, so we try to control our own lives and the lives of those close to us. We don’t feel safe enough to just let things fall apart and reassemble. We try to ‘fix’ the other people when that’s not needed, and so we create more suffering.

      It may sound strange, but even when we are struggling, we can find appreciation in the struggle itself. If we are willing to experience others and ourselves as evolving beings, we may realize that even the most disturbing insight into our self may be exactly what we need. At that moment, we can appreciate our willingness and courage to take the step into reality.”

       Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara. “Most Intimate. A Zen Approach to Life’s Challenges.” Shambhala, 2014.


     "You need not worry about your worries. Just be. Do not try to be quiet; do not make 'being quiet' into a task to be performed. Don't be restless about 'being quiet', miserable about 'being happy'. Just be aware that you are and remain aware - don't say: 'yes, I am; what next?' There is not 'next' in 'I am'. It is a timeless state." Nisargadatta

#735 Open Awareness Meditation Instruction

     "... throw out the thought 'I am meditating' and just be awake, with no trying, no agenda, no ideas, even about what it should look like or feel like or where your attention should be alighting … to simply be awake to what is in this very moment without adornment or commentary.
     Such wakefulness is not so easy to taste at first unless you are really in your beginner’s mind, but it is an important dimension of meditation to know about from the very beginning, even if the experience of such open, spacious, choice-free awareness feels elusive in any particular moment. 
     Because we need to get simpler, not more complicated, it is hard for us at first to get out of our own way enough to taste this totally available sense of non-doing, of simply resting in being with no agenda, but fully awake." 
       Jon Kabat-Zinn https://www.eomega.org/article/take-a-stand-in-your-life-by-sitting-down-to-meditate?source=ePromo.OM.FM 

Deep Contemplation

#729 Skillful Attitudes towards Meditation Practice

     “The right attitudes (towards Insight Meditation) practice are: 
• to be open, receptive, allowing, acknowledging; 
• being willing to fully experience the moment with patience, without expectations or demands; 
• being responsive, caring, interested. 

     These skillful attitudes towards practice are all the qualities of loving-kindness. Remind yourself to recognize the present moment with these attitudes of mind.”

       Steve Armstrong, Lesson 5 Practice, Introduction to the Manual of Insight - online course, Kamala Masters & Steve Armstrong, Sept 24 – Nov 12, 2016 http://learn.wisdompubs.org/academy/

#712 Curiosity, Questioning, Progressive Opening ...

     "The path opens up as soon as one's life is exposed as a question rather than a bundle of more or less interesting facts. This questioning is not intellectual curiosity. Zen speaks of it being asked through one's skin and bones."

       Stephen Batchelor. "Living with the Devil. A meditation on good and evil." Riverhead Books, NY, 2004.


 

 Photograph by P. Michael Lovas

#704 Choppy Waves AND Profound Stillness Beneath

www.elephantjournal.com

#700 Koan, Open Question, Summary?

"There is only love.
All else, repeating stories exhausting themselves."

Rashani

rashani.com

#698 Father's Day Wish

     On this Father's Day, I fervently hope - for the sake of our beloved children and grandchildren - that each and every one of us commits to living more intelligently, wisely, lovingly every day of our short lives.

     “Each of the enduring religions contains universal principles that transcend time and culture. It’s not easy to extract those values from religions that are not our own, but it can be done Huston Smith says, if we see their followers as men and women who face problems much like our own, and if we rid our minds of prejudice that dulls our sensitivity to fresh insights.”

      Bill Moyers: “The Wisdom of Faith, with Huston Smith” DVD, 2011. 

#685 Shipwrecks, Throughout Life

      An unpredictable number of complete collapses & rebuildings from scratch, of all that we understand to be true about the world & ourselves, are normal throughout life.
     How else could an innocent baby possibly come to know, accept & integrate the full range of her own, other humans' & Nature's ways & capacities?

     "For a seed to achieve its greatest expression, it must come completely undone. The shell cracks, its insides come out and everything changes. To someone who doesn't understand growth, it would look like destruction."
       Cynthia Ocelli                www.wisdomatwork.com

          Shipwrecks: http://www.johnlovas.com/search?q=shipwrecks
          and  http://mindfulnessforeveryone.blogspot.ca/search?q=shipwrecks
          and  http://healthyhealers.blogspot.ca/search?q=shipwrecks

Public Gardens, Halifax, NS

#683 Mindful Awareness - So Much More

     What do these words really mean? Obviously not daydreaming while performing activities requiring careful attention.
     But aren't there surprising similarities between the type of attention it takes to rob a bank, perform intricate surgery, watch a fascinating movie, yell at someone in a fit of anger? Could a fairly young person muster this type of attention? How about certain animals? Have you seen how quickly a crow can custom-design a simple tool? So there must be far more to mindfulness than focused attention. 
     Learning to stabilize attention on the flowing, changing content of the present moment is an important, but partial aspect. It helps us to let go of clinging to the past, the future, to stuff that never was & never will be. But replacing all that with clinging to the present doesn't help much! Everything in the present is also temporary, fleeting, can't be held onto, nor identified with - this is simply the way reality is.
     As we abandon our delusions & wishful thinking, our attention shifts from self-obsession to an open-hearted embrace of the big picture - everyone & everything - the flow of present-moment reality. And everything changes, both gradually and all-at-once.

The Biscuit Eater, Mahone Bay, NS

#678 Each Moment is Brand New & Unique - Is Your Response?

      Each moment presents an absolutely new, absolutely unique, never-to-be-repeated set of circumstances, to which we're asked to respond in an absolutely brand new unique open fashion. Can we be absolutely fresh, authentic & true to what is?

     Each moment holds incredible freedom of choice & creative potential, as long as we are the very energy of an alert, loving, spacious, open heart-mind. Can we be fully alive?

Fire juggler in front of the Basilica of the Sacre Coeur, Montmartre

#677 Beyond Black-or-White Alternatives

     Our usual way of thinking & speaking is dualistic, constantly comparing opposites: good / bad, beautiful / ugly, desirable / repulsive, etc. How does this habit make us feel? Incessant up & down mood swings, moment by moment! To try to minimize the trauma, we do our best to grab & hold onto the good / beautiful / desirable, and avoid & push away the bad / ugly / repulsive. It's an exhausting, unwinnable battle, resulting only in constant tightness and misery.
       Wordlessly opening up to and accepting what is natural, with curiosity, and even an attitude of loving embrace, brings about an ease, a spaciousness of heart and mind. And yes, if we "pick our battles", we even gain a greater facility to do something about things that can and should be changed.
     This does require letting go of puffing up our ego with incessant mind-numbing self-talk: "I like this", "I hate that", etc etc etc etc. We need to examine very carefully what such a simplistic, unexamined identity does to our quality of life. Once we see its affects clearly, we'll want to minimize it's corrosive effects as quickly as possible.

#673 Forced to Care about Others, the Big Picture

     "When China burns coal, that pollution doesn't just stay above Chinese skies, nor does nuclear radioactivity from Fukushima stay only in Japanese coastal waters. The same is true generally for humankind and the rest of the natural world: when the ecosystems of the earth become sick, we become sick. In short, the ecological crisis is also a spiritual*** crisis: we are challenged to realize our interdependence - our larger 'self' - or else. What the earth seems to be telling us is Wake up or get out of the way."
       David Loy. "Awakening in the Age of Climate Change." Tricycle, Spring 2015.                               ww.tricycle.com


     *** "spirituality ... ‘the personal quest for understanding answers to ultimate questions about life, about meaning, and about relationship to the sacred or transcendent’."
       Greeson JM et al. "Changes in spirituality partly explain health-related quality of life outcomes after Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction." J Behav Med 2011; 34(6): 508-18.

     Atheists also recognize the critical role of spirituality - see:
       Sam Harris. "Waking Up. A Guide to Spirituality without Religion." Simon & Schuster, 2014.

#672 Black-Box Life

     For most people, life is a black-box: imagined to be solid, unchanging, indestructible, impenetrable, dark, not to be looked at closely. Never mind the wise counsel that "a life unexamined is not worth living." 
     Most of us do our utmost to keep feverishly busy, precisely so we won't have to ponder the two most meaningful questions: "Who am I?" and "What is this?" Avoidance, magical thinking, dogmatism and rigidity go hand-in-hand. A quick hard response to complex questions keeps things simple & controllable - but only in fairy tales.

     Sitting still, letting go of self-talk, opening oneself, remaining as open as one can, as long as one can, to actual reality - things as they are - is the opposite of a black-box life. It's a decision to step out of a dark, boxed-in prison, into the light and openness of real life. It's a bit scary at first, but prisoners can and do become acclimatized to, and come to enjoy freedom.

#671 What Feels Healthy?

     Fear shuts us down. It makes our heart-mind, our whole body feel tight, constricted, stiff, rigid, cold, shaky, lousy.

     What do we fear? We fear constant change, aging, sickness and death. We fear having little or no control over our lives, others' lives, our stuff, our world. We fear meaninglessness.
     Fear is feeling unloved. Above all else we want unconditional love.

     What if each of us is the SOURCE of unconditional love?

     How does it feel while we radiate unconditional kindness towards anyone, anything & any activity?
     How does the above compare with how we usually feel caught up in our cravings, aversions & self-absorbtion?
     Which of these clearly feels healthy?

#670 We CAN Open Voluntarily, Intentionally

     but most of us need to undergo significant trauma before our minds and hearts will open, even for a short time. Hard nuts have to be cracked open.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

 "Anthem" Leonard Cohen                          

 

Monet's garden, Giverny

#664 Awareness & Love

     "How few understand what love really is, and how it arises in the human heart. It is so frequently equated with good feelings toward others, with benevolence or nonviolence or service. But these things in themselves are not love.
     Love springs from awareness. It is only inasmuch as you see someone as he or she really is here and now, and not as they are in your memory or your desire or in your imagination or projection, that you can truly love them, otherwise it is not the person that you love but the idea that you have formed of this person, or this person as the object of your desire not as he or she is in themselves.
    The first act of love is to see this person or this object, this reality as it truly is. And this involves the enormous discipline of dropping your desires, your prejudices, your memories, your projections, your selective way of looking ...a discipline so great that most people would rather plunge headlong into good actions and service than submit to the burning fire of this asceticism.
     When you set out to serve someone whom you have not taken the trouble to see, are you meeting that person's need or your own?"                                                          Father Anthony de Mello

#663 Open Minds Open Doors

"The greatest discovery of my generation
is that human beings can alter their lives
by altering their attitudes of mind." 

William James

WisdomAtWork.com

Akos Stiller   www.stillerakos.com

#655 Directly Experiencing What Is

     “… we have to drop our attachment to mental categories; then the true meaning can infuse us.”

     Tanahashi K, Chayat RS. “Endless Vow. The Zen Path of Soen Nakagawa.” Shambhala, Boston, 1996. 

#651 Generosity

     It takes an amazing degree of generosity to accept each and every thing that happens to us in our lifetime.
     And when we have indeed embraced all of it, with a clear, open, loving heart-mind, then we have indeed lived life well, and evolved fully ...