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