A New Name

I am happy to announce that Monday Mindfulness has a new name: On Purpose: Stories & Insights from Mindfulness, Dharma and Waking Up Each Day. The blog is now hosted on my website, www.heidibourne.com and is linked to its own Facebook page of the same name, On Purpose...

You will continue to receive an automatic email whenever a new piece is posted as the email address you provided when you subscribed has already been transferred to the new site. If you feel like you're not getting the post, please go to www.heidibourne.com and re-subscribe, though this is very unlikely. Also, all of the archives from Monday Mindfulness are on the new site and available any time. 

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me anytime at heidi@heidibourne.com.

Be well,

Heidi

Showing Up

Today I want to pick up where I left off earlier this month when I wrote that true mindfulness does not afford us the luxury of camping out within the gated privacy of our own hearts and minds. Mindfulness invites and requires us bit-by-bit, to take in the full range of our experiences from the beautiful to the painful. All of it, every little bit. Joanna Macy says we’re not required to be hopeful or hopeless; we’re just required to show up.

A lot of people showed up this weekend in New York City for the People’s Climate March, more than 300,000. I imagine some were hopeful and some were not. But they were there, there demanding action on climate change, willing to see things as they are. Most of us who weren’t there also know how things are. In California, we’re in a horrendous drought and fires are burning throughout the state. The rivers are drying up which means the fish will die. Hopeful or hopeless? Just show up? I have to choose hope and show up. It’s just much too frightening to be hopeless and hide.

The Buddha taught that Right or Wise Action is action rooted in non-harming of ourselves and others, and this includes our environment. If you’d like the five specific guidelines that support non-harming, check out the post from August 30th, Ferguson. Lately, I’ve especially been thinking about the last guideline; maintaining a clear mind by not using substances that cause heedlessness. Does this include fossil fuels? Or the way we use water? Does it include the media? How about the food we eat? How does what we take in and what we use affect our thinking, decisions and actions?

I don’t know how to stop using fossil fuels. Everything needs to change in order to do that; our entire orientation to our lives, our habits and understanding about the consequences and impact of our actions. That will require a seismic shift. But I can try. And I can stop letting the water run down the drain while I brush my teeth. I’ve done that for years. I can also stop watching the news, checking Facebook or reading the New York Times first thing in the morning. All three cloud my mind with tragedy, violence and greed leaving me scared and sometimes numb. They do not support my well-being which certainly affects the well-being of those around me.

A guideline from the Buddha that does support my well-being is “What when I do it will be for my long-term welfare and happiness?” I love this question because it lets me access my innate wisdom and take wise action. I choose to believe that given a choice, most of us will not make decisions that intentionally cause harm. It takes a lot of mindfulness to keep this question alive, and it makes me hopeful.

The Fond Good-Bye

Last week when I ran into a friend at the Farmer’s Market, she said “Wow, I haven’t seen you in such a long time. Where’ve you been? Some other country?” I said I had just returned from visiting family in Wisconsin. We spent 10 days in a small town along Lake Michigan rated in June by Business Insider the most conservative town in the state. If you know anything about Arcata or Humboldt County, Calif., then you just might think Wisconsin is, indeed, another country.

It’s a lovely setting; the cottage at the end of the wooded gravel road sitting just a few steps from the beach, the lake’s vast horizon, the endless color changes and the perpetual gentle shushing of the water on the shore.  Summertime family dinners on the screen porch are the norm, often with at least ten of us at most meals from grandchildren to grandparents along with any neighbor wandering by. 

The conversation commonly includes the latest news of friends, the varying health ailments at the table, the on-going efforts to maintain some semblance of a beachfront in the face of unstoppable natural forces, and always and eventually circling around to politics, tenderly avoiding the galaxy-sized black holes between our views.

                                 

During dinner on the day of our arrival, my mother-in-law, sitting at the head of the table, made a very matter-of-fact comment about “Skin-Heads” in Idaho. And I, in-turn, said I thought there were also a lot of Libertarians in Idaho. And without skipping a beat, my father-in-law reared back from the opposite end of the table and said “Hey! Wait a minute! I’m a Libertarian. So you think I’m a Skin-Head?” Oops. “That’s it!” said my mother-in-law in her incisive let’s-keep-the-peace voice, instantly putting a stop to the conversation. And that really was the end of it, until about five days later.

It was a perfectly lovely morning walk along the paved cattail-lined path, ponds on either side, and in the distance the biggest American flag imaginable waving high above everything; each stripe alone was 13 feet wide. I’d never seen anything like it. 

My father-in-law was talking with my husband about the growing Muslim population around the community, Islamic laws and customs, and the general culture of fear spreading far and wide. I decided to keep my mouth shut, enjoy the scenery and just listen. I saw it as an opportunity for a little walking meditation. Just walk and listen, I thought, walk and listen.

After a while, and I will admit feeling proud of myself for keeping quiet, my father-in-law turned to me and said “And you called me a Skin-Head the other day.” In a heartbeat, I felt myself take a breath, feel my feet on the ground, and step into the morass. 

I started by apologizing for giving him the wrong impression with my own leap from Skin-Head to Libertarian and assured him that I in no way think of him as a White Supremacist hate-monger. I was relieved when he accepted my apology with a tip of his head and slight smile, and then asked me if I knew that Webster’s defines him as a heathen – as someone who does not believe in God. I said maybe he didn’t have to believe in Webster’s. Now I got a bigger smile.

As we walked and he talked more about Libertarianism, the Constitution, lobbing some challenges to other ways of thinking, it was clear that neither one of us really wanted to cross the great divide onto the other’s side of the galaxy. But this is my husband’s father, my children’s grandfather, a man I’ve known for 30 years, and I love him. 

So I stopped, looked him in the eye and said “You know, we’re so loyal to our opinions. How would it be if we suspend our loyalties long enough to ask ‘Would you be willing to tell me what you mean by that?’ Can we talk with each other with curiosity and let our knee-jerk assumptions go for the moment?” He said that of course he and I can do that, but the rest of the world can’t. Well, I said, let’s just you and I try. And in that moment, something between us shifted, leaving both of us feeling a little triumphant.

For the rest of the visit we didn’t really talk politics or about anything else too controversial. On the quiet early morning of our departure as we said good-bye, this lovely man of 82 looked at me, gave me hug and said “We did good, didn’t we?” 

Ferguson

It’s so easy to limit the definition of mindfulness to an avenue towards finding inner peace and well-being. While that’s true, it doesn’t end there.

The requirement of true mindfulness does not afford us the luxury of camping out within the gated privacy of our own hearts and minds. It requires us to include what’s happening outside of ourselves, and little-by-little, that means everything.

So today I am writing about the difficult and painful, about a different kind of climate disruption. Think of Michael Brown, James Foley and Trayvon Martin, that so many marginalized people only have access to the worst food, the dirtiest water, substandard education and healthcare, run-down homes (if they have homes at all), that our prisons are bursting with unprecedented numbers of young African American men, the militarization of our police, that racial profiling is real, and I cannot leave out the polar bears, butterflies and bees.

When I think about the myriad causes and conditions that were present for Michael Brown to have been killed in Ferguson, I can imagine the fear, pain, distrust, anger and resentment that created a big gaping wound of profound suffering. As I’ve watched the footage of the protests, the wound is obvious and palpable. No imagination is necessary. When we see this kind of pain, really take it in, we cannot unsee it. How it got there is probably ancient and not such ancient history; traceable and untraceable, knowable and unknowable.

In light of these terrifying and deeply disturbing events, I want to talk about morality from the Buddhist perspective. This perspective gives me hope and it gives me something I can do. It helps to transform my sense of helplessness and restores my balance. I’m not giving you a lecture in morality, I promise.

In Buddhist practice there are lists for everything. The Paramis, translated as the Perfections of the Heart is one such list. Generosity is the first and Morality is next. Morality is also addressed directly through Wise Action in the Eightfold Path, another foundational list. The bottom line is that we’re asked to live a life of non-harming, but how we define non-harming is different from one person to the next, from one community to the next, and from country to the next.

Here are the five guidelines the Buddha taught for lay practitioners like us that define non-harming, and set the intention for living a moral life.

1.       Protect life by not killing anything that breathes

2.     Be generous with our resources and do not taking anything that hasn’t been freely or directly given

3.     Respect our bodies by not using sexuality in a way that harms or exploits ourselves or others

4.     Take care in how we speak to others, guiding our language to be kind, truthful, useful and appropriate. Having good timing may be the most crucial of all. How many times have we said something truthful, useful and kind, but our timing was so off that what we said had nowhere to land or caused unintended consequences?

5.     Maintaining a clear mind by not using substances to the extent that it causes heedlessness

What I appreciate about these guidelines is that they’re offered as a practice. Perfection is not required. The Buddha also points out through these guidelines that by protecting myself, I protect others and by protecting others, I protect myself. This, too, is a practice that’s worth thinking about.

I am under no illusion that by trying to live a moral life that violence, racism, and poverty will end. But if I end it in me, and you end it in you, we’ll have a little more peace.

Rules of the Game

Nearly 20 years ago my nieces Zoe and Marlee came to visit us in rural northern California from their home in suburban Chicago. At the time they were little girls, ages 5 and 3, and our kids were 6 and 7, so it was a full house of fun little kids. One night as we sat down for dinner I asked everyone to put their napkins in their laps. I’ll never forget the look on Zoe’s face, age 5, when she looked me square in the eye and stated clearly and emphatically “We don’t put napkins in laps in my neighborhood!”

* * * * * * *

Last week I played a new card game with 34 other mindfulness teachers and facilitators. We split into seven groups of five. At the outset each group was given the rules of the game, which included playing in silence, though gestures and drawing pictures were allowed. After each round of five hands, those who’d won and lost the most hands moved onto other predetermined groups, and play resumed with the newly assembled groups.

It wasn’t long before big waves of gesturing and lots of looks of confusion and annoyance filled the room. And then the muffled laughter began to ripple out as we all realized that each of the original groups had been given varying sets of rules. The collective knowledge was unnerving, confusing, frustrating, challenging, intriguing and because it was a game, comical. One person even stood up in the middle of her group, incredulous, hands on her hips and said “They changed the f*#%@^g rules!”

We all know that everything changes, that life is challenging for everyone, and on some level we understand that everything depends on everything else. But until we’re forced, we don’t really know it in our bones. A sudden or serious illness, the death of someone we love, an unexpected loss of a job, or the fires burning northern California this summer, these get our attention and we begin to get it. Hardship brings it close, much closer than when things are going well.

The card game brought us all to the edge of our comfort. Issues of fairness, equality, communication, competition and culture were right there, palpable and sticky. Who was right? Was anyone wrong? How do we proceed when there is no level playing field?

We think we know the rules, the social and emotional norms of our families, communities, and those of the wider culture.  Imagine being the only person of your skin color, heritage or gender in a crowded room with others who not only look nothing like you, but know the world from entirely different sets of guidelines. What is that like? We cannot possibly know what it’s really like for anyone else. And what about varying rules around language, money and education?

If it were only as simple as what to do with our napkins.

Five Dollar Bills

Six or seven years ago I heard a story on the radio about a woman who saved all of the $5 bills she received in tips from her waitressing job. At the end of each shift, she dutifully put the bills in a special place for safe keeping. In the beginning, her intention was to simply save enough money to buy a CD and earn some interest in a safe and predictable way. It didn’t take her too long to buy her first one, and she realized she enjoyed the self-imposed savings challenge and that it would actually pay off. So she kept it up.

When the first CD matured, instead of cashing it in and enjoying the added bonus of the interest it earned, she reinvested it all into a new one. And, she continued to buy new CD’s as her stash of $5 bills grew. She kept up this savings plan for a five years, and at the end had saved $12,000.

I was so inspired by this story that I decided to take up the challenge and start saving all of my $5 bills, too. But I’m not a waitress and don’t receive cash as part of my regular compensation, so I knew my savings would be a lot smaller. When I began this savings plan, I found a special secret place in my house to keep the bills, did not tell my husband where it was, and much sooner than I expected, I had $100. 

I will admit that over my own five years of savings, I did not invest in CD’s and turn the original $100 into $12,000. I used the money for special things like my now beloved red reading chair, airplane tickets to visit my kids, and spending money for travel.

And then I heard the story about a woman who on her way to Berkeley from the East Coast was given a fat sealed envelope by a friend just before she left. The envelope was stuffed with $20 bills. The friend asked the woman to give the money away to the homeless people she passed on the street.

I started to imagine what it must have been like to give those bills away, the look on people’s faces, the feeling in the hearts of both the giver and the receiver at the precise moment the money was given, whether or not they could look into each other’s eyes in recognition of their shared humanity.  And I started to think about my $5 bill stash and whether or not I could give it away.

The Buddha gave some very pithy instructions about generosity, instructions that have really sunk into my thinking. He said generosity brings happiness in three ways: 1^st, in the initial thought to be generous, 2^nd, in the actual giving, and 3^rd in remembering our generous acts.

As I thought about whether or not to give the $5 bills away, I decided not to think about it for too long. My initial impulse to give the money away just felt right, and over the next couple of months I gave the bills to people on the street. While some moments were a little uncomfortable, I found it one of the more directly satisfying ways of expressing generosity. 

My stash is gone now and I have not yet replenished it, but when I think about the experience of handing an unsuspecting person a five, it does make me happy.

Despite All Odds

Today, I wanted to write about peaches, mostly the unnamable pleasure and luxury of eating a melt-in-your-mouth drippy sweet peach. I wanted to write about peaches and raspberries and blueberries and strawberries and pie and sunflowers.  About the things of summer that fill my heart. I wanted to write about sweetness and joy, and the human being’s astonishing capacity to care and love, despite all odds.

Today, I read about Gaza, Israel and Palestine, that the Colorado River Basin is drying up, that tornadoes are blazing trails through the Midwest, about the refugee crisis at the Texas-Mexico border, and the unprecedented numbers of hungry children in the US. About the other things that fill my heart.

And today, I am reminded of the utterly reliable way mindfulness helps navigate this perpetual stream of joys and sorrows. Through increasing awareness, curiosity and the willingness to be with the complex, intricate and incomprehensible, the beautiful and tragic, we expand our tolerance and capacity to show up for it all.  

Sitting down, feeling my feet on the ground, the breath coming and going without my interference, being with exactly what is as it is, knowing I cannot end war, fix or change the climate or the crises of social justice. But I can be courageous enough to see it. And today, that is enough.

“The biggest gift you can give is to be absolutely present, and when you're worrying about whether you're hopeful or hopeless or pessimistic or optimistic, who cares? The main thing is that you're showing up, that you're here and that you're finding ever more capacity to love this world because it will not be healed without that. That is what is going to unleash our intelligence and our ingenuity and our solidarity for the healing of our world.” 

― Joanna Macy

Summer Splendor

I've just returned from a few days backpacking in the Russian Wilderness, a spectacular area of the Klamath National Forest. In lieu of writing this week, here's a photo of where I've been. 

Big Duck Lake

Just Like Dogs

This past weekend, I went to a dog trialing event called Mondioring. It’s a sport that combines obedience, agility and protection. Most of the dogs were Belgian Malinois, an incredibly strong, smart, agile, and protective breed. It was amazing to watch the intensity of focus in both the dog and the handler, and it occurs to me that dog training, mindfulness and meditation have a lot in common. All three train us in present moment awareness for the purpose of clear, skillful and appropriate response.

My German Shepherd Dog, Olive, teaches me this every day. If I don’t keep up on her steady regular training and practice, she gets rusty and sloppy which she demonstrates beautifully by ignoring my commands. It’s a lot like my mind. When my meditation practice loses momentum or gets off track, my general level of mindfulness gets sloppy and my mind seems to ignore my commands, too!

Just like the dog obedience basics sit, stay, heal, and down, there are basic components of mindfulness and meditation that support our practice.

Zeal and Passion – the drive that brings us back to practice over and over again. With something as fundamentally difficult as training the mind, focusing the attention, and developing skillful response, we need zeal and passion to keep us going.

Energy, Courage and Persistence – mindfulness and meditation practice have their normal cycles. Sometimes it’s easy, accessible, peaceful, insightful, rejuvenating and invigorating. And sometimes it’s just plain impossible, inaccessible, painful, boring, and exhausting. Finding the energy, courage and persistence to stick with it is essential to cultivating the long-term benefits of practice.

Patience, Return, Begin Again – truly the way it is. The mind pulls us in thousands of directions and the practice is to return, again and again. It certainly requires patience, and beginning again is a relief. It doesn’t matter where we’ve been; we just come back, take a breath and begin again. The shining gem of practice is this very precise moment when we notice we’re someplace else. It’s in this moment of knowing that we are absolutely present. And then we lose it. Give yourself the gift of patience by opening the door to come back and the gentle permission to begin again.

Investigation, Curiosity and Creativity – the fun part. Without curiosity and creativity, practice can be utterly flat. Wherever we are, whatever we’re doing, whether in meditation, or work, or doing the dishes, when we bring curiosity or investigation to the task, we open the doors to a wider experience. Be creative with your practice, whatever it is. Experiment.

Some traditions have specific rules for practice. But within the tradition of mindfulness meditation there’s a lot of flexibility; noting emotions, naming thought patterns, focusing on the breath, the body or sounds, investigating whatever arises, resting in open awareness, or even metta practice. Like dog training, find a way that works for you and do it. Just sit down, breath and watch your mind.

"Wisdom arises with practice

Without practice, it decays. 

Knowing this two-way path for gain and loss

Conduct yourself so that wisdom grows."

The Buddha, The Dhammapada, verse 282

 

Explosion

Just a few days ago I was filling my tank at the gas station, the kind with two parallel banks of pumps with two pumps each, and enough space for eight cars at a time. I was on the far outside of one bank with another car on the other side of this same bank. A man in a white car on the far outside of the other bank was just finishing filling his tank when another man pulled in towing a large boat behind an even larger pickup truck, and happened to be smoking a cigarette.

Everyone was outside of our cars when sparks started to fly. The man in the white car began yelling at the man with the boat to put his cigarette out. And, with his lit cigarette hanging loosely between his lips, the boat man thoroughly and completely ignored the yelling as it got louder and nastier, replete with extremely crude one-sided name calling. It was a fiery explosion of fury.

I felt a bit scared by this escalating outburst and got back into my car wondering what, if anything, I could do to help. Call the police, try to calmly intervene, or do nothing. I did nothing, when suddenly the irate man slammed his door shut, pealed out of the station squealing his tires and honking his horn at the precise moment the other man slowly, deliberately and silently put his cigarette out.

This is a perfect illustration of last week’s discussion of the teaching of the Two Arrows. To recap, the Two Arrows teaches that the everyday difficulties and challenges of living a life are akin to being shot by an arrow. We all get shot and it hurts. But how we react or respond to this pain determines whether or not we shoot the second arrow, or the third, fourth or the fifth. And this in turn determines whether or not we manage our pain and difficulty skillfully or spread it around like a contagious infection.

Who knows what was going on with these men. The anger and fear underlying the one man’s outburst were probably about a lot more than a man smoking at a gas station. And what about the silent arrows shot by the smoking man’s stubbornness? Both shot a whole quiver of arrows.

Here’s an excerpt from a beautifully poignant short story by Alethea Black.

You, on a Good Day

“You don’t give the finger to the black pickup truck that tailgates and passes you aggressively, then let go of the wheel to give it two fingers when you see a rainbow-tinted peace sticker on the bumper. You do not call the friend – the one who was in the hospital a few weeks ago, and whom you did not visit or call – you do not call her today because today you need something from her. You do not consider dousing your refrigerator with gasoline and setting it on fire because of the sound its motor makes while you’re trying to work…You do not conjure up, in as vivid detail as possible, every time anyone has ever wronged you in any way…You do not wish that your hairdresser would stop talking about her near-death experience and start focusing on what she’s doing with the scissors. You do not care more about your bangs than you do about the life of a sister human…

“You do not, you do not, you do not…

“Not on this day. On this day, you wake up and remember the sight of your four-year-old nephew aiming all of his fire trucks at the television during the coverage of the California wildfires because he wanted to help. On this day, you think about the afternoon you heard a famous poet thoughtfully, gently, lovingly answer a deranged question from an audience member who was mentally ill. On this day, you think about the day the woman in the ATM vestibule heard you crying on the customer service phone because you’d pushed the wrong button and you needed access to that money right away because that check was all the money you had and she had reached into her wallet and handed you a twenty. On this day, you remember Anne Frank’s little scribbled words – or, you don’t so much remember them as you see them floating before your eyes because you’ve got them taped to your wall on a scrap of paper – It’s a wonder I haven’t abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.”

There’s much more to this story. To read it in its entirety, you can order it from One Story, one-story.org.

Pain & Suffering

So often, mindfulness is defined as the non-judgmental, non-reactive awareness of our present moment experience. But non-judgmental and non-reactive awareness need to be defined.  

When I watch my own judgmental mind and notice just how fast it tells me what’s good or bad, or what’s right or wrong, I am amazed at what I’m willing to believe without connecting those thoughts and opinions to my actual current experience. 

Mindfulness asks us to develop awareness based on our direct experience, not the stories we tell ourselves from old conditioned beliefs that may not be accurate or relevant to our present experience. The willingness, curiosity and courage to suspend these opinions long enough to really see what’s happening is how mindfulness defines non-judgmental. It’s an effective way of developing the discerning mind that leads to skillful decisions and wise actions. It’s the mind that has good judgment.

From a mindfulness perspective, reactivity is understood as the compulsive grasping and clinging or rejecting and pushing away of whatever our experience may be. Being non-reactive doesn’t require us to like what’s happening. It asks us to loosen our grip on how we think things ought to be, again suspending our opinions long enough to respond wisely and effectively. 

Working with our conditioned judgmental and reactive minds is difficult, and developing mindful awareness expands our tolerance and increases our responsiveness.

Here’s a wonderful story from the Buddhist tradition, the Teaching of the Two Arrows. 

All of us, no matter who we are, experience pain, challenge, difficulty, anxiety, stress and suffering. This is the First Noble Truth; life is difficult for everyone, period. In this story, the difficulty of living a life is akin to being shot by an arrow. We all get shot and it hurts. How we react or respond to this pain determines whether or not we shoot the second arrow, or the third, fourth or the fifth.

Shooting the second arrow is up to us and it comes in all sorts of ways; arguments with people we love after being stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic, unkind comments to customer service people because we’re not getting what we want, killing a skunk because it sprayed the dog, or any kind of harmful retaliatory actions that stem from our own pain. Do we perpetuate the pain and anger by firing back or do we have the skill, discipline and restraint to recognize and manage our own discomfort? Mindfulness gives us a choice.

Recently I was having a conversation with a 91 year old man struggling with the natural physical degradations of being 91. After talking about mindfulness and sitting in meditation together for a bit, he asked “Do you think if someone has a terminal illness it’s still possible to be happy?” I wonder if ultimately this is the only question there ever really is.

How, in the face of sure suffering and sure death, can we find happiness? For me, I want to remember to notice beauty, to say ‘thank you,’ and not to shoot the second arrow.

Work is Real Life, Part 2

I hope you found last week’s practices useful and helpful. While these are suggestions for managing our work-lives, they’re really applicable anywhere. Here are two more practices you might try.

Mindfulness in Conversations:

Coming back to our common desires, we want clear and kind communication so we know we've been heard and recognized. 

The language and the tone of voice we use, choosing good timing, telling the truth in a useful way, being clear about our intentions, and listening with curiosity and patience are vital components of effective communication. And it takes a lot of mindfulness and a lot of practice to get it right. A few ways of working with this are:

• Keep your intentions and motivations in mind. What is the purpose of the conversation?
• Listen completely. Notice if you’re rehearsing your response before the other person has finished speaking. If so, you've stopped listening.
• Tune into the needs of the other person. Ask yourself what this person needs. When you do this, your responses will be more accurate and effective. It’s a great way to develop empathy.
• Think kind thoughts and use kind words. This really works. It changes the tone of the conversation, even when it’s difficult.
• With conflict, notice if you’re making assumptions. Ask yourself “Am I sure? Is it true?”

Cultivating Well-Being at Work:

At the beginning of the day, set an intention for how you’d like your day to go and what you can do to enjoy yourself. At the end of the day, think about the best moment of the day. Let it be something that made you feel happy, something that gave you real satisfaction. Think about it for a few minutes, visualize it. Maybe even tell someone about it. 

Try doing this and writing it down every day for a month. At the end, you’ll have thirty days of satisfying moments at work and tangible reminders of your well-being.

Work is Real Life

Lately I've been thinking about the nature of work and how we often view of our work-lives as separate from our “real” lives. But work is just like life. It includes everything, the full range of our thoughts, feelings, and emotions. Wherever we are, however we are, the entirety of our lives is always with us. It informs who we are, how we see the world and how we act.

For most of us, we hope our work sustains us in ways beyond our economic needs and desires. Whether we are owners, managers or staff members, we are all trying to manage ourselves and our relationships at work as skillfully as we can. 

We typically want the same things from our jobs regardless of our title: respect, trust, recognition, care, empathy, clear communication, a sense of community, and the freedom to creatively use our minds in ways that access our skills. 

Managing our jobs and our businesses with mindfulness at the core creates a healthy and dignified work environment for everyone. But what is it really and how do we bring it into our work lives?

Mindfulness is the process of steadying, training, and quieting the mind to see what is actually happening around us and within us, in our minds, hearts and bodies. As our awareness develops, we’re more able to step out of the center of our own stories increasing our capacity for curiosity, expanding our tolerance and resilience, and decreasing the mind’s habitual patterns of unhelpful judgments and internal criticism. 

By training the mind and body to notice and pay attention to what’s happening, the tension in the mind and the stress in the body often decrease. This gives us more access to our innately clear minds, our naturally kind hearts and our discerning wisdom which in turn lead to skillful, wise action and effective response.

It’s important to recognize that mindfulness is not about becoming a better this or that. It’s about becoming fully aware of whatever is happening, whether we like it or not, whether it’s pleasant or painful, and finding some ease even with difficulty. In essence, mindfulness increases our capacity to manage the day-to-day challenges and joys of life wherever we are.

Quick & Easy Practices:

You can use mindful awareness practices anywhere, anytime and they are especially effective at work. Here are a few practices you might like.

Mindfulness of the Body:

Anytime you feel stress, anxiety or fear, see if you can feel the bottoms of your feet on the floor. If you’re sitting in a chair, try getting a sense of your bottom in the chair. Try it now. Notice what happens. What do you feel? What are you thinking about? 

What happens when you do this, is that it immediately stops the mind-chatter about other stress. It doesn't solve the problem, but it re-directs your attention and brings the nervous system back into balance while you focus on these sensations. This works because the brain will not advance two story-lines at once. Try that, too. See if you can focus on the sensations of your feet touching the floor while you think about the cause of your anxiety. You probably can’t do both.

Mindfulness of the Breath:

Taking a deep breath is a powerful and immediate way of calming the nervous system and letting us see a situation with a little more clarity. Try to get a sense of your breathing. Just feel your breath coming and going. Notice how breathing happens on its own without you controlling it, though you can certainly change its rhythm and depth. 

Placing attention on the breath functions similarly to noticing the feet on the floor. It re-directs the attention from whatever is happening in the mind and allows both the mind and the body to quiet.

Busyness at Work:

We all know what it’s like to have too much on our plates. The pressure and expectations are high. We want to do well, and it feels impossible to keep up. When you find yourself in this situation, try to slow down. Do one thing at a time. The brain does not naturally or effectively multi-task, even though we sometimes pride ourselves on how much we think we can do at once. Being thorough task-by-task is ultimately much more efficient and effective.

These practices are a beginning. Those that focus on how we talk to one another, how we talk to ourselves, and how we cultivate well-being at work are also vitally important. Stay tuned for more one this subject. 

When we develop and integrate mindfulness into our work environments, it becomes a way of being individually, with our co-workers, bosses and customers. It defines the culture of the work environment itself.

Snake Oil

Next week I’ll be attending a retreat focusing on the Buddha’s teachings on Wise Speech. The Buddha taught that wise speech is truthful, useful, kind, appropriate, and avoids gossip. In anticipation of this retreat, I’ve been thinking about the enormous power of language and its effect on our lives, and in particular, the consequences of stretching or distorting the truth, and outright lying.

Emerald City Laundry is a big busy neighborhood laundromat in Arcata, the town where I live in northern California. It’s the kind of place that buzzes with action every day; lots of people with lots of laundry. As one of the owners of the store, it’s my job to keep the store in top operating condition, and periodically we replace large numbers of washers all at once. This takes a lot of organization and coordination to remove old machines and install the new ones with as little disruption as possible.

On our most recent washer replacement day, everything was in especially good order. It was a Wednesday (our quietest day of the week), the weather was beautiful, and the extra staff we’d hired was ready to work. The truck arrived right on time from Los Angeles, about a thousand miles away, unloaded eight large heavy washers, and promptly left. As soon as we uncrated the first one, we realized the shipment was not the one we ordered.

Many phone calls ensued to the long list of people involved in this purchase and delivery. Tempers were short, no one knew how such a big error occurred, and no one wanted to take responsibility. We just wanted to know when the trucker would return to pick up the mistaken load and deliver the correct one.

Sometime during the day, we found out that the equipment company dispatcher knew the wrong machines had been loaded on the truck, allowed them to leave the warehouse and be transported and delivered to our store so very far away. This same dispatcher also had the correct washers loaded on a different truck slated for delivery the very next day, but without telling anyone. We looked at each other is dismay.

After coming to the obvious conclusion that there was nothing we could do about this fiasco, I sat down at my desk to get some other work done. In my email was a slick full color solicitation from a person offering business development seminars. Among the many things this program promised was “delirious contentment.”  What a fabulous oxymoron! I tried to imagine being delirious and contented at the same time.  Snake oil. 

When I got home at the end of this same day there was a particularly large black glossy envelope in the mail. I was intrigued enough to open the package, and it turned out to be yet another credit card solicitation. Inside and across the top of the sleek black invitation it said in large white letters “Luxury without Limits.” More snake oil.  

The day seemed like a joke. Eight incorrect commercial washing machines shipped a thousand miles on purpose, the promise of delirious contentment and luxury without limits. I think the Buddha would just slowly shake his head.

Wise speech asks us to find the courage to tell the truth even when we’re embarrassed. It also reminds us that just because something is enticing and promising, it may not be all it’s cracked up to be, and it certainly won’t last forever.

"You should know that kind speech arises from kind mind, and kind mind from the seed of compassionate mind. You should ponder the fact that kind speech is not just praising the merit of others; it has the power to turn the destiny of a nation."

 - Zen master Dogen

Temporarily & Unexpectedly Precious

My husband, Bill, and I recently spent a couple of weeks hiking in remote areas of southern Utah, a starkly beautiful, nearly silent ancient desert landscape almost entirely off the grid. The magnitude of the natural forces that continually shape and carve the multi-colored sandstone and slickrock landscape is hard to comprehend, the sheer power of wind, water, erosion and time. 

On one hike we stood under a 165 million year old massive sandstone natural bridge. Unspeakably and profoundly small in comparison, we were awestruck at just how short a time we’re here in this life, that we’re just guests passing through.

After a few days of acclimating to the altitude, sleeping on the ground, convincing ourselves that the backpacking food was really delicious and being generally grimy, we set out on what would be a particularly fabulous day. The sky was a patchwork of cerulean blue and low-lying white billowy clouds, and the temperature was mild with a light breeze to keep us cool.  

It was a long hike, about 11 miles, and we were in no hurry. The trail was both challenging and comfortable, included sand and dirt, required climbing up, down and around big boulders, through a short slot canyon and across fields of fragrant sage brush amid the explosion of  desert wildflowers at the peak of the springtime bloom; yellow, pink, white, purple, red and orange. Really a perfect day and we were relishing it.

It was our last day before going back to town to load up on groceries, check in with our families and head out into the next remote area. Towards the end of that perfect day I had a peculiar feeling that the next day we would get some bad news.  It came out of nowhere. And when I told Bill about it, he rolled his eyes. It was a fleeting thought, and I let pass as quickly as it came.

While traveling the next morning, we turned on our phones and they both lit up with plenty of voice and text messages, not so unusual for being away for a week. But the messages were indeed bad news, the kind of news that changed our bliss to sadness in a moment. It brought us back to the true nature of our lives, the true nature of all of our lives. 

Everything changes. Life is difficult for everyone. And things happen because other things happen. It’s not personal, it just happens. And it’s really true that without experiencing sorrow, we cannot understand joy, or without the light, there’d be no dark, and pleasure and pain rub up against each other constantly. Life includes everything.

I recently heard a story about two elderly women living their last days in assisted living facilities. Both had lost their ability to speak with the exception of three words. One woman had two words, and the other had one. The words were temporarily, unexpectedly and precious. What a great description of our trip and our lives. What if we choose to live our lives knowing how temporarily and unexpectedly precious this life truly is? I think it could change everything.

Sipapu Bridge, Natural Bridges National Monument, Utah

Let Peace Come to You

I know I said I wouldn't post anything until the end of May, but I came across these beautiful meditation instructions and want to pass them along. They come from Sujato, a well-loved Buddhist monk and teacher from Australia.

When you meditate, just relax.

Don't try to control your mind.

Don't try to stop it going here and there.

Just be peaceful.

Don't watch your breath. Just breathe.

Be at peace when your mind is still. Be at peace when your mind is wandering.

Don't judge one state as better than the other. It is just how the mind is.

Let mindfulness settle down with the breath.

As you stop judging, stop trying, and stop controlling, peace will come to you.

Welcome it.

Ethics in Action

This is the last post until the end of May. If you get hungry for a little mindfulness, check out the archives. Every post from the last year is available anytime. Today’s post is adapted from a previous one.  I wish you a wonderful month.

The thought manifests as the word
The word manifests as the deed
The deed develops into habit
And the habit hardens into character
So watch the thought and its ways with care
And let it spring from love
Born out of concern for all beings

This is one of my favorite pieces of wisdom from the Buddha because I think it’s really true. I know that when my mind thinks caring and kind thoughts, my speech and actions will likely follow suit. I feel clear and at ease. Or if my mind is caught in contention and my thoughts aren’t so kind or caring, I hope I’ll have enough awareness to keep from acting them out and have the restraint to keep my mouth shut.

In the classical Buddhist teachings of the Noble Eightfold Path, Wise or Right Action are those actions that are rooted in harmlessness. The Buddha gives specific guidelines in the form of precepts, a code of ethical conduct. Really, they aren’t so specific to Buddhism; they’re simply the moral, skillful and harmless way of living. You’ll recognize them.

1.      Abstain from taking life; don’t kill

2.      Abstain from taking anything that has not been freely given; don’t steal

3.      Abstain from the misuse of sexuality

4.      Abstain from using harmful or false speech; don’t lie

5.      Abstain from the use of intoxicants to the degree that the mind becomes clouded and causes heedlessness

At first glance, these precepts seem quite obvious, but in actuality they may be more difficult to carry out. 

How far do we take not killing? What about the ants carrying aphids to the artichoke plants or string beans in the garden? What about that magazine on the table in the waiting room at the dentist’s office that has an article you’d like to read? And how do we express our sexuality and in what environments? How about the time we said something in public that was told to us in confidence and caused a friend humiliation? And, the consequences of drinking too much or using other intoxicants are well-known.

Our actions really do have consequences, whether in the immediate or somewhere down the line. This is the law of karma. In fact, karma translates as action. 

I remember a difficult time in my life many years ago when I was struggling with an unhealthy relationship, doing everything I could to make it work. It took me quite a while to see that nearly every encounter I had brought me pain, seemingly endless pain. It was like sitting in a chair with a broken leg. Each time I sat in that chair, I fell on the ground and injured my tailbone.

The Buddha taught that our happiness and unhappiness are dependent upon our own actions, not on anyone else’s wishes for us. This is what it means to be the heir to our own karma. The truth that we really can and do directly influence our lives through our own actions is a profoundly liberating statement. When our motivations and intentions come from harmlessness and goodwill, we are likely to act skillfully and wisely.

I find that when I really pay attention, I am my own best guide.

“When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. That is my religion.” 

                                                                      Abraham Lincoln

Internal Disarmament

Spring is in full bloom in northern California. The rhododendrons, azaleas, viburnum and flowering cherry trees are bursting with flowers. It’s gorgeous.

I spent the morning rowing on Humboldt Bay with two dear friends in perfect conditions; flat water, no wind, sun shining and so much birdlife. Even the seals were curiously poking their heads up alongside our boats to check us out. Mornings like this are full of connection and belonging. They’re the threads that weave and bind us to ourselves, to our families and friends, and to our communities and the natural world. It’s the stuff of spiritual practice.

In our meditation groups, we show up week after week to sit together, to practice together. None of us could do this without the other. Our practice depends on it. We could actually say that our lives depend on it, because they do. I depend on my weekly groups as one of the core supports for my life. 

Whatever our practice is, whether it’s in a formal setting, out in nature, reading a book, listening to music, talking with a friend, making a meal, it feeds our spirits and we can’t do it alone. We might we think we can, but for practice to really flourish, we need each other.

Each week in class our meditations include both mindfulness/insight practice as well as metta, the practice of intentionally inclining the mind and heart towards goodwill and kindness. But they’re really not separate practices.  Mindfulness is inherently kind, and being kind is by nature mindful. 

I don’t think we can be kind without being mindful. It just doesn't work because the intention is ultimately the same; to settle the mind, open the heart, and cultivate a soft resilience that allows us to be engaged in our lives skillfully and wisely without rancor or contention. In fact, the Dalai Lama talks about these practices as “the process of internal disarmament.”

Mindfulness and kindness are intimately and inextricably linked, and the outcome is a clear mind and a loving heart. When we intentionally infuse our lives with kindness and awareness, our connections deepen and our sense of belonging grows.

A Rabbit Noticed My Condition

I was sad one day and went for a walk;

I sat in a field.

A rabbit noticed my condition and

Came near.

It often does not take more than that to help at times-

To just be close to creatures who

Are so full of knowing,

So full of love

That they don’t

-chat,

They just gaze with their

Marvelous understanding.

-St. John of the Cross

My Daughter Fell Off the Trampoline

My daughter Sarah had a beautiful butterfly stroke. She was eight years old and swam with fluidity, strength and desire. I loved sitting in the bleachers watching her swim, marveling at her ease and determination. Sometime that year, her father set up a trampoline in our back yard. The kids were overjoyed and I could feel disaster looming.

One day after school the kids were having a great time on tramp. I was in the kitchen making dinner when I heard Sarah scream. I looked out the window and saw her crumpled on the ground holding her arm and her brother running in to get me. She had fallen off of the trampoline not while jumping, but while trying to sit down on the edge and missing the rim with her outstretched arm, falling to the ground arm straight palm first. She’d fractured her elbow.

What does this have to do with mindfulness or meditation? Lately I’ve been thinking about what brought me to practice, why I practice and what sustains me. Sarah’s elbow fracture was really bad. It took lots and lots of physical therapy and many months to heal. It was the end of that beautiful butterfly stroke. 

One day Sarah and I were talking about what sort of activity she thought would be fun and she suggested yoga. Not long after that, she and I took an Introduction to Yoga class series where my meditation practice crept back into my life and really took hold.

So when I think about what brought me to practice, it was my husband buying the trampoline and my daughter falling off of it. I can’t say that I’m grateful for the trampoline accident. We got rid of it not long after, but I am grateful to my daughter for choosing yoga and allowing me to go to class with her. 

I was lucky enough to have a yoga teacher who integrated meditation quite naturally into her teaching, and the same teacher for introducing me to a book written by Sylvia Boorstein, who is now one of my primary teachers and mentors.

Why I practice and what sustains me are two sides of the same coin and are mutually supportive. Mindfulness practice both in formal meditation and daily life help me live a kinder, more compassionate and wise life through cultivating clarity and patience. 

I don’t always get it right, but practice supports and sustains these intentions, and keeps me on track. And when I do get it right, I know why I practice. It really works.

What brought you to practice?

Why do you practice?

What sustains you?

Why do you read this blog?

“We know what is proper, especially in difficult situations, from the wisdom arising out of contemplation.”

           Confucius

Closet Cleaning

After last week’s discussion on the nature of thoughts and how they condition our moods, our emotions and our actions, I serendipitously came across this poem. It’s so funny how the right piece of wisdom can pop up just when we need it.

The mind is ever a tourist

Wanting to touch and buy

New things then throw them

Into an already full closet.

                              Hafiz

Does your mind ever feel like an already full closet? Mine does. And sometimes it feels like it’s full of clothes that don’t fit, worn out shoes, and piled up dust-covered junk on the top shelf that hasn’t moved in years. That’s how it feels when my mind is trying to accommodate way too much, with its insatiable propensity to think about, dream about, and figure out about.

And that’s the nature of the mind. It makes thoughts. Sometimes these thoughts fit and serve us well, sometimes it’s just clutter, and sometimes it’s like taking stuff out of the garbage that’s already been thoroughly processed and does not need to be recycled yet again.

I’m very grateful for meditation practice. It calms, sorts through, and clarifies my mind. Here’s a practice you might try when your mind feels too full and it’s hard to see one clear thought through to the next.

Wherever you are take a breath. Whether you’re in the car, in the line at the grocery store, on the phone with customer service because your flight’s just been cancelled, or sitting on your meditation cushion, take a breath. Really notice the in-breath and the out-breath; its length, its depth, let the breath be felt.

At the end of the out-breath get a sense of your feet, especially the bottoms of your feet. If you’re standing or sitting in a chair, see if you can feel them on the ground. If you’re sitting on your cushion, just get a sense of the soles of your feet. Imagine breathing in and out of your feet for the next minute.

You’ll notice that if you really stick with the breath, it instantly changes the mind’s focus and cuts whatever storyline it had going. The mind will not advance two storylines simultaneously. I find that re-directing the mind from the thought clutter to one simple palpable focus calms everything and lets me see more clearly.

Once I’ve settled, I like using an image of the full moon over the ocean at night resting on the horizon. I imagine standing on the beach while the moonlight shines towards me across the water. It reminds me of this poem.

Let my doing nothing

When I have nothing to do

Become untroubled in its depth

Of peace like the evening

In the seashore when the

Water is silent

                              Rabindranath Tagore

Thoughts are Just Thoughts

Recently in one of our sitting groups, we were talking about what we've individually found to be a benefit of mindfulness practice as well as what we've experienced as obstacles.

One man came in a few minutes late, gently apologized for the interruption, got himself situated on his cushion, and began to weep as he joined in the discussion. He was overwhelmed with relief and gratitude for just being able to show up at all. He shared that mindfulness in general, and meditation specifically allow him to be with the pain of the unexpected loss of a close relationship, his tender heart, his fear, anger and sadness in a way that also allow him to hold himself with a modicum of love and compassion through which he can feel a bit of ease and sometimes even some joy.

At the end of the sitting, he came up to me and said “You know, I just realized that all thoughts are neutral. It’s everything I do with them that cause the problems.” It was a beautiful moment. He experienced the profound insight into the link of pleasant-unpleasant-neutral thoughts and how they condition our emotions and actions. We talked about how in-between the awareness of a given thought and our response, there’s a space. And it’s in that space, often completely unnoticed or traversed in a nanosecond, we have great power and choice.

Sometimes I’m asked “why mindfulness, what’s the benefit?” Simply stated, mindfulness allows us to see what’s what with curiosity and acceptance. It is the practice of uncluttering and tidying up the mind. When we see what’s what, the volume is turned down on reactivity, we develop patience and resilience, and we have more access to our innately clear minds, our kind hearts and our discerning wisdom.

It’s important to recognize that mindfulness is not about becoming a better this or that. It’s about becoming fully aware of whatever is happening, whether we like it or not, whether it’s pleasant or painful, and being at ease even with difficultly. Difficult circumstances do not automatically mean despair or unhappiness. They mean difficult circumstances. Being at ease in the midst of difficulty is not fatalistic, giving up, or sticking one’s head in the sand, but rather it’s the solid rich fertile ground out of which positive change can occur. When we stop being in contention with our circumstances but recognize them as they are, we can make skillful deliberate choices about how to proceed. Mindfulness is the awareness of our direct experience stripped of inference and the stories we tell ourselves about what’s happening.

Using mindfulness to hone our awareness and sharpen our concentration for the purpose of becoming better at our jobs is fine, but I believe it is not the foundational intention of mindfulness. It is not to become a better soldier, a better teacher, a better grocer, a better nurse, a better politician, a better corporate executive. It is to become kinder, more compassionate and wise, and live a life that accommodates all of the joys and sorrows, the twists and turns that comprise being human without harming ourselves or anyone else. And in the process, we just might become better at our jobs, too.