Category: Coaching

I had my morning tea on the back porch today. I sat, not yet awake, looking at nothing, really. My first conscious thoughts were about feeling tired, which is how I assume waking up feels.  Then the weather, which is how I assume my day will feel.  As I slowly came to, I noticed the length of the grass in the yard, the tired declining fence, the tangled woods beyond, and the ugly electrical wires on a pole leading back to the house. I was subtly judging, even correcting, things.  I was automatically comparing my experience to imaginary circumstances before I had even become conscious. This commentary comprised of almost thoughts, glimpses and suppositions lay barely audible in the background of my experience.

I think we’re all a bit like this. We wake up most days assuming a blanket of unexamined thoughts that stem from dysfunctional character studies in the novellas of mind. Today’s complaints must have come from an author who’s protagonist is a loser, incapable of correct choices, living in the wrong place, at the wrong time. He employs great acumen to prove the inadequacy of his experience.  His intellect is so sharp it cuts at the core of his confidence. His brain is like a hot sauce so caustic it dissolves the food its meant to enhance. He is left waking up into a litany of complaint.

I had another sip of the tea.

And then, I remembered to pay attention to now.  Remembering is the fruit of mindfulness training. We can be grounded in the reality of our situation by simply remembering. I am not my thinking. I am especially not my thinking before I’ve had my tea. I remembered this is what mind does. Its a habit, and only that. Its a way of preparing for the day by complaining about it in advance. But, in remembering the game I play in these precious preconscious moments, came the magic of release. In opening to the moment, I regained control over my life experience.

That’s when I saw the baby deer hidden in the dense overgrowth. It was like being allowed to peer into an intimate and gentle part of my world I had not seen before. I was allowed to see something precious and wonderful right from my own porch. I relaxed further. Within a few moments I began to make out the family above the baby. An ear here. A leg there. Pieces of a puzzle of the amazingness of ordinary life. I realized the forest behind my house was alive.   I remembered that life is happening now.

I had another sip of tea and noticed the tea was quite good. This tea had been good for some time. My life, it seemed, had been happening all along.

Mindfulness training allows us to become available to our world. We are open to noticing the world, and being woken up by it. In order to readily remember that life is happening NOW, we can train in becoming aware of some aspect of the four foundations of mindful experience in the body, the heart, the mind, or life.  The power of meditation lies in remembering.  Hence, meditation training is training the mind to remember to come back and open to our present experience.

An interesting aspect of meditation in action is that as we become aware, we self-adjust. Awareness is the true depiction of events, as opposed to a projected idea of what we want those events to be. It is devoid of judgement. When we become aware of imbalance or misalignment, we simply – automatically – adjust.  We have been trained to react to worldly occurrences automatically. If a car enters the road in front of us, we automatically adjust. We don’t berate ourselves. We simply turn the wheel. We have been trained to be mindful of driving and aware of the road around us, so it is natural. When mind meets life, life becomes workable.

With mindfulness practice, we can also become mindful of somatic and psychological experience. When we become aware of tension in our body, the body will automatically relax into alignment. When we become aware of feeling ill at ease, if we can relax into the anxiety, the tension will simply release. When the mind recognizes deeper layers of our psychology, experience that is often unconscious to us becomes seen and the energy relaxes. When mind meets body, body sits up straight. When mind meets emotions, the energy subsides and the heart relaxes.  But, a particularly magical encounter is when mind recognizes mind.

When we encounter the mind, and see its behavior, we automatically relax away from self-obsession into clear space. Mind meeting mind is mind waking up.  If we can train ourselves to slow down enough to see the steps, we can see the choice points,  and learn to open into nowness. This is learning to wake up. And, we can do it now. We can do it right here. We need not travel cross country into retreat, lose weight, become vegan or complete so many mantras. We need only remember. If we employ a gentle and persistent approach to waking up, we can actually rest in the ground of appreciation.

At least until the next wave of doubt and discouragement ensues. But then, seeing that, we can remember to come back and open. Notice, remember, come back and open.  Eventually, we will pass through layers of doubt like veils of experience and rest for a moment in the non-thinking, wordless, but extraordinarily awake state of our life, already in progress.

Mindfulness is becoming a popular idea. This is mostly a good thing. Mindfulness, as a label, is akin to yoga a decade ago. It has become a buzzword, of sorts, appropriated by many traditions, methods and modalities. I am looking at Mindfulness from the point of view of the Shambhala Tradition, where Mindfulness is a precursor to Awareness. Which is to say, mindfulness is the initial contact we make with an object for the purposes of stabilizing the mind.

 

Interestingly, mindfulness stems from the same processes as “clinging, grasping, and fixation,” which actually occlude awareness. Mindfulness of a perception leads (ideally) to a greater sense of contextual space (meditative awareness). Grasping an object closes down the space, disabling context and understanding. Although, both of these processes stem from the part of the mind that hold to a perception, mindfulness implies an openness akin to acceptance. Grasping, on the other hand is closing itself off from contact with the object in favor os its judgement of the object. This keeps the mind at a safe distance, continually dissociated from life. Mindfulness opens into awareness. It leads to connection and communication, while grasping leads to disconnection and projection.

 

The developmental aspect of mindfulness practice is to become aware of the choice points in our behavior, so that we can eschew patterned responses, for a more direct and spontaneous interaction  with  life.

 

Let’s unpack this process.

 

Once we’ve perceived an object, successive functions of mind come in to play to help define, describe and utilize that information. The mind trained toward mindfulness will hold long enough to see, but then let go into the immediate experience and gain understanding from its context. The unexamined mind will grip to the event and identifying as itself, almost immediately compare mental perception to databases of past experience, and acquired learning.  All of this informs, but also distorts, the initial perception.  If unchecked, we are actually no longer paying attention to the actual perception, as much as to ideas instigated by the perception.

 

Should this data retrieval activate an emotional response, any number of sub-functions may occur, including a need to grasp on to – what has now become the idea of – the object.  And, as trauma lies deeply embedded within the fabric of our psychology, if this impulse is unchecked by mindfulness, we could very well trigger negative feelings initiating fight or flight reactions, or any number of fixations that link the present perception to a negative past history. In this way, we have lost the mindful aspect of knowing, and simply grip to stories about the object, or our associated feelings and past history, provoked by the perception.

 

This base level programing is NOT the basis of our NATURAL mind, but the basis of our CONDITIONED mind which is, nonetheless, deeply embedded in our psychology.  This conditioning is ideally adaptive and responsive to the environment. However, all to often it is maladaptive and reactionary.  In any case, it is reflexive and not aware, so we have no control. While, much of this programing is well intended, many of our basic self-protective mechanisms trigger inappropriate reactions to everyday responses. As fear is the basis of this conditioning, we are rendered slaves to patterning that keeps us avoiding pain at all cost. Many of us have lived lives asleep at the wheel rather than look more closely, and objectively, at our experience. This is why the awareness born of mindful attention to life takes the MANUAL support of daily practice.

 

MINDFUL OF OUR FULL HUMAN EXPERIENCE

When we receive, we do so in three major ways. The body the Mind and the Emotive or Energetic Felt Sense are primary spheres of intelligence and experience.  Generally, we are programed to live in our heads, and remain unconscious of the deeper spheres. But, “unconscious” is a lazy term. It is actually a blanket for that which we chose to ignore. But, when we are relaxed, we can more of our experience. At some point, we can actually feel into places the mind cannot think itself into. As we contact the iceberg below the surface, we open to a new world of experience. With further meditative stabilization we slow the game down, so to speak, allowing for deeper levels of  investigation. We begin to see the mechanics of our occlusion and, in time, come in contact with distinct choice points.  Once we see the choice points, the decision to wake up becomes our own. In short, awareness is power.

 

With the application of mindful awareness, less and less territory remains unseen. We have greater access to the totality of our psychological experience. As we gain more and more access to our experience, we gain more and more agency in our life. In order to access the deeper strata of mind, we must forgo telling the mind what is it experiencing, and employ the yang mind gently to place observation on an event, and then open to yin mind to receive the information on its own terms.

 

THE FOUR FOUNDATIONS OF MINDFULNESS PRACTICE

The body has its own needs, which are different than the needs of the mind, or the heart. This is true as we progress around the hologram. Each sphere is different. Yet, each has the power to affect the other and to support, or ‘infect’ its information streams. The mind can never accurately asses if the body is compromised, or in need. However, should we address its physical needs, the body is able to relax and support the investigation.

 

In so doing, we are able to calm and relax the heart.

 

When heart and body are open, aligned and relaxed, the mind can settle and doing what it does best, simply see the world with clarity.

 

Then we find deep synchronicity with life. Connecting on any of these levels. We can have a physical connection to life. We can pick up intuitive sense feeling about life. We can see life clearly. In all of these gates we can come in contact with our world. Thus we become mindful of our life.

BODY – The base brain.

SPIRIT – The felt senses are an large category we comprising “Emotions”  “Sprit”  “Life Force” . It refers to the childlike experience of our mammalian mind.

MIND – Cognition and higher brain function.

LIFE – Our interface with conscious reality.

 

DEEP SYNCHRONICITY WITH LIFE EXPERIENCE

The more the mind speeds up, the less it sees. Sometimes, when we are triggered, and we think we have to have a response NOW dammit! we are actually closing off access to yin mind, or the knowing mind. The harder we search for a way out of our Chinese finger trap, the more experiences closes in. Eventually, we are so cut off from a reasonable alternative, we can only fall back on the ineffective strategies we’ve employed in the past. When the mind dis-engages from its moorings, we spin into the same old patterns. Awareness practice trains us to remember Mindfulness. Mindfulness brings us back to the present. Awareness allows us to open into Yin mind and receive the information of the body, the and the heart, so the mind can rejoin them with openness.  In this way, we reconnect to the earth, to the present and to the natural flow of our mind, and can deeply synchronize to the rhythm of our life.

In this way, we can connect to life with balance and openness. We can assert ourselves in a direction and then learn to let go, and let life help us. At least, we become an equal partner with life. We can reduce the antagonism of mind, as we increase our awareness of life.

Therefore, we need not focus our practice entirely on negatives. Along with understanding how the unexamined mind allows tension, discomfort and dis-ease within the mind / body system, it is equally valid – and perhaps more effective – to turn our practice to the positive results of being mindfully aware. And more importantly, we can rest in the fruit of the practice, which is the freshness of the experience of life itself devoid of judgement and the infusion of old tapes.

Mindfulness is stabilizing the mind with an object of meditation. We can use the body, the mind, the heart and any aspect of our life as the stabilizing point, as long as we realize the point is to stabilize the mind to release its natural clarity.

In contemplative traditions, Mindfulness refers to paying specific attention to a moment, event or object within the context of meditative awareness. “Meditative awareness” differs with each application, but in the Shambhala Tradition, we see mindfulness as enabling “nowness”, or awareness of the environment around the singular moment. Meditation Master Chogyam Trungpa, referred to “Mindfulness / Awareness as a practice that balanced specific attention to a general sense of knowing. The relationship is reflexive. Being present in the general sense allows us to connect more readily to mindfulness, while being specifically mindful allows the mind to relax into awareness. Awareness places mindfulness in a contemplative context. As opposed to simply “paying attention” in the conventional sense, we are retraining the mind to pay attention, and then open to its environment.  With mindful awareness we employ precise contact in order to gently relax into awareness, allowing intuition, mental clarity and the environment to inform our understanding.

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MINDFULNESS and AWARENESS

Mindfulness is the awake (or, knowing) part of the mind that holds to an object and opens into a deeper awareness. For instance, when we look at something of interest, mindfulness holds it in our short term memory long enough for us to determine what it is. Awareness is the conscious environment (or clarifying space) around mindfulness that allows us to see the event in context. We are mindful of the breath, and we understand that this an important process for settling the mind.   We are mindful of the notes we are playing, and aware of the reaction of those listening.  We are mindful of the correct steps in our dance, while being aware enough not to step on our partner’s toes. Mindfulness is connection to the moment. Awareness is communication to the environment. Mindfulness is looking and awareness is seeing. Mindfulness is acceptance and awareness is understanding.

Mindfulness and awareness are symbiotic. When we are mindful of details we are connected to a greater sense of our life-environment. Awareness, in turn, allows us to know when to apply mindfulness. We are aware that we are not paying attention, so we remember to return to the present, tethering to the earth, by a practical application of mindfulness.

This is because mindfulness is NOT identified with the self and hence able to see, connect and expand into understanding its environment. Grasping, on the other hand, is fused with the self and therefore, likely to not see beyond self-interest and defensiveness. Instead of space being the reference point for clarity, our sense of me-ness becomes a fixed point for reactivity. Ironically, the more we solidify me-ness the more we actually abandon connection with ourselves.  In a panic of losing our moorings, we fixate on that which we reflexively feel will bring happiness. The un-investigated mind will clutch for random straws, and in so doing, lose its compass. Once we dissociate from our innate wisdom and intuition, we abdicate authority over our life. Devoid of conscious volition, we become lost in the momentum of habit and mental patterning allowing the “winds of Karma” to blow us where they will.

Mindfulness is the moment we take back our life. It is the moment we wake up and remember our true nature and return from the dream into awareness of the present.

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MINDFUL AWARENESS PRACTICE

Buddhist texts and tradition speak of a state of enlightenment where the mind simply finds its way to a stabilized openness. They refer to this experience as realizing NATURAL MIND. But, most practitioners of mindfulness travel a spectrum of awareness from being wakeful of the specific details and their meaning, to occlusion of many aspects of our experience, to overly reactive and defiled understanding, to simply reacting in blindness to external stimuli. This seems to speak to the stages of evolution. We drop from the apex of human consciousness, through primal mammalian reaction, to the binary options of our amoebic precursors. When we are threatened, we crawl back to the blindness of the swamp. From those murky depths, awake is a vague remembrance. But, as this is not our true nature, we will always be stirred and reminded. Once we remember, we can choose to take the assertive action of being mindful of whatever moment in which we awake. Mindfulness is the assertive application of waking up, and awareness is the recognition of our natural state. However, this takes re-training the mind away from its defensive tendencies, and this takes time, love and patience. We are literally changing lifetimes of avoidance patterning.  Whether “lifetimes” refers literally to rebirth and reincarnation, or figuratively to programming inherited through evolution, there is a lot of work to do.

An important aspect of mindfulness then, is its practical application.

We can use the application of mind that holds to an object, to gently REST on an object, repeatedly, in order to stabilize the mind.  Then we can train the aspect of mind that compound information, to  OPEN into stages of awareness.  The training is to assert knowing and then let go of the tendency to grip. This takes precision and gentleness. Bravery and compassion.

Mindfulness alone will bring numerous benefits to wellness, such as stress reduction and attention enhancement. Mindfulness practice demonstrably increases our ability to concentrate, reduces cortisol, and engenders confidence born of paying attention to the practical aspects of life. It also allows us to gain tangible access to the present moment, by learning to become mindful of the body, the breath, or aspects of our present experience.  In the Tibetan Buddhist traditions, we also incorporate mindfulness of the felt senses and the physical reality of our being, which enables a comprehensive understanding of the present.

But, mindfulness alone is a bit dry and uncompromising. Awareness expands into the world, our spirit, and our process of self discovery. Awareness gives mindfulness a container to find meaning, and as it is a bridge to connecting us to our world, offers inspiration in our everyday life. It becomes easier to practice if we are becoming more aware of life, and gaining more access to our experience.

In any case, daily practice is training the mind to “PLACE” itself on the point of contact. This is known as developing precision. We are paying acute attention to the moment. However, this “precision” can be aggressive if not tempered by the gentleness of acceptance. Aggression – even in subtle applications like competition or self-improvement – is counterproductive as it is likely to engender resistance, evasion or defensive reaction. Gentle precision is open and non=invasive, while being accurate and on point.  So, we refer to placing the mind, gently and precisely on the object.

Awareness, which is the successive stage of expanding understanding, is achieved by training the mind to “REST” with the experience long enough to boycott patterned reaction and remain awake to the actual experience. This is best achieved if our precision is applied with gentleness. Gentleness allows the mind to expand naturally into awareness without triggering the defensive reactions of our base programing. This is not easy. Again we are working against mountains of defensive and evasive training.  So, the daily practice is training in resting the mind on openness by gently returning from evasion or defensiveness in the mind, back to practical contact with the breath in the body.

So, the practice is to gently and decisively contact the object of meditation and then rest there in body spirit and mind. Awareness comes from that. It can’t be manufactured. But mindfulness creates the ground for the mind to settle and allow awareness to dawn. The “practice” is applying the precision of mindfulness to the breath and relaxing into a deeper body and heart connection to our understanding. When, as will happen, the moment of conditioned mind causes griping, evasion or aversion, we train to 1) notice, 2) release ourselves gently from the grip,  3) fall back to contact with the breath and 4) deepen our connection to the present.

In this way, we are repeatedly breaking the momentum of the conditioned mental stream. This creates a distance between us and our thinking by de-fusing our identity from 0ur  thoughts. We begin to see the patterns of our thinking more clearly when we boycott being immersed in thoughts. In fact, we will begin to see and advance “echo” of the thinking as it occurs, or is about to occur. Sakyong Mipham refers to this process of mind as the “spy” who is on the lookout for gripping mind. Thus awareness of our process begins to dawn. Very naturally we believe less about who we are, and begin to see HOW we are. In this way, we can learn to work with how we are.

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THE IMPORTANCE OF PRECISION

Ideally, mindfulness “practice” is the act of replacing secondary, or tertiary automatic functions of mind with an inquisitiveness that allows the mind to rest with, or open to, the event of perception. Which is to say, rather than being consumed by our past experience and carried away on a flood of feelings and information not necessarily germane to the moment, we release this grasping tendency and return to the moment of contact. This takes great precision.  We are training the mind to be awake.

In practical reality, these successive functions of the mind happen very quickly.  So, in meditation practice, we catch the drift well past the event. What we are usually letting go of may not be the initial moment of grasping, but the fixation and thought immersion that follows. However, if we are dedicated to the process, we will begin to calm the mind, releasing if from the exhausting preponderance of thought that obscures our connection to the present.  In time, the practice of mindfulness helps slow down the process so that we can begin to FEEL the moments that lead to grasping. Working with that moment, we begin to see that in these subtle sub-moments, that we are actually CHOOSING to grasp. And hence, when we are choosing to check out into distraction or fixation.

When we train the mind to actually rest on the moment of choosing grasping, fixing or distraction we are in charge of a fundamental choice point in our lives. We are also very close to opening to the moment of clear perception, or direct contact with our life. However, because of the amount of training we have given the mind in grasping and fixating, a training sadly supported by society and our lives, we may not stay in synchronization with these choice points very long. So, mindfulness practice implies some heavy lifting. The more we train the mind to rest in the present in our practice, the more the mind will be inclined to remain in a relative sense of “presence” in everyday life. The more we encourage the mind to remain present in life, the easier precision in our practice becomes.

But, precision can seem invasive to the mind. It can make us very claustrophobic. And, as the process of holding the mind to an object is so close energetically to grasping (only nanoseconds away), it is important to learn to FEEL our way into the process with great care.

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THE IMPORTANCE OF GENTLENESS

The practice of meditation allows us to unwind the ever tightening reasonings of the mind. Each time we boycott thinking, we train the mind to release its grasping. The work of a meditator is to simply rest the mind on an object without the extremes of fixation, or distraction. This takes a dedication to precision, that is infused with gentleness. This is so much more effective than an assertive application of mindfulness, which militaristically holds the mind in place and lies dangerously close to the aggression of clinging and fixation.

Should we employ gentleness and receptivity to our mindfulness practice, we find that rather than holding on to an object, we are opening to it.  Eventually, instead of the cloud of conceptuality that surrounds the present, we have trained the mind to allow a space of awareness. When we drift off, we find there is no where to go. We reduce the distance between there and here. We increase the possibilities of here. So, mind  easily – and gently – settles into body, sensations and feelings.  When we are relaxed in body, mind and spirit, we can actually rest the mind in place.

In most traditions, a neutral object is selected specifically to diminish potential psychological investment and its attendant grasping and fixation. Like many, I use the breath as the object of meditation, as it is reliably neutral, boring and mundane.  Ironically, our breath is one of the most intimate, amazing and important functions in our life.  While simple breathing may seem boring to a mind conditioned to keep us off balance by searching for and acquisitioning objects it finds provoking, deep attention to the breath ultimately frees the natural flow of the mind.

In order to find this deep synchronicity, the mind must settle.  The body is a perfect tool for this. The FELT connection to the body connects us to the earth. As we FEEL our way in to a somatic experience of the breathing, we calm the frightened animal mind and are able to rest into our body, and through the breath, into a direct experience of the present.

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YIN AND YANG MIND

Mindful Awareness employs two processes: an active placement and a receptive understanding. While it is important to place the mind with precision, if we employ gentleness, we can also enable the mind to receive the attendant information. The process is that the mind goes to a place and asks the local authorities for an update. Then that information is brought back to headquarters. In the case of conditioned unexamined mental processes, the mind is telling the outpost what it expects to hear, and then filters the information to suit an agenda based on past occurrences.  In this regard, the information is seriously compromised.

With Mindful Awareness, we are training the mind to FEEL into situations and RECEIVE information more clearly. We are employing what in Daoist culture is referred to as “YANG” and “Yin” principles of mind. When we are employing Yang mind, we are actively placing the mind. If we do this aggressively, we are moving with too much force to remain aware. But, with gentle application of Yang assertion, we can position the mind to open into Yin mind. Yin mind allows the unimpeded flow of information into awareness.

Yang mind tells us what to do, where to go. Yin mind tells us how we feel, and releases an intuitive sense into our awareness. The combination allows a greater understanding of our experience.

Conventionally, we are always telling ourselves what to do, where to go, what to think. We are placed at the front of our brains pushing ourselves into the next compartment. If we don’t wake up to this process, we will disengage from the present, and live a life one step behind our intentions, constantly trying to catch up. With Mindful Awareness we are trying to find deep synchronicity with the present. In this way, Yin mind – which aligns with awareness – opens us to the environment and reminds us to reconnect to the earth of our mindful experience. Once we reconnect, we can open into our felt experience.