Three Breaths

I woke up, again, at 3:30 in the morning. Outside in the Eucalyptus trees a pair of Great Horned Owls called across the chaparral. The stillness wrapped the world like a blanket. But inside my mind there was anything but stillness.
            It’s not that I wasn’t exhausted – it’d been another tough week, and I was only halfway through it. Deadlines, challenges, and a thousand expectations loomed ahead in the darkness. How was little old me going to meet all those lofty goals? Was I even the right guy for the job? Who did I think I was anyway?

Hoo, hoo, hoo?

The Zen Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh writes and teaches about the importance of mindful breathing. In his work he often focuses on the deceptively simple act of breathing in and breathing out, and turning that natural function into a focal point of meaningful transformation. Lying in my bed in the dark, I began to practice a version of his mindful breathing technique – three deep, intentional breaths, each with its own affirmation: letting go, being here, and opening up.

            With the first breath, inhale, paying attention to the way your body instinctively draws in air. As you exhale, silently say the words “letting go,” allowing your exhalation to empty you out. Inhale again, noticing that this inhalation is a little longer, a little deeper than the first. As you exhale, silently say the words “being here,” coming out of your mind and into this present moment. Inhale a third time, feeling the way your body is enlivened by the vital breath the cosmos so willingly provides. Exhale in the consciousness of gratitude, silently saying the words “opening up,” allowing the doors and windows of your small sense of self to swing wide. Feel yourself becoming diaphanous, borderless, unified.

            Letting go. Being here. Opening up. Feel the stillness spread throughout your mind-body system the way ink spreads in water. Witness yourself growing calm as the thoughts that plagued you dissipate like clouds in a clear desert sky. Emptiness. Spaciousness. Boundless awareness.

           

Letting Go

            When you practice letting go, you are relinquishing the illusion of control. You simply drop the pretense that you’re in charge. You affirm the fact that everything is transitory, and that we don’t really own anything – it’s all borrowed, and we have to give it all back, sometimes suddenly and without warning. As we let go we shift from fear and covetousness to love and gratitude – gratitude that we even got to touch, enjoy, or experience any of it. As we let go, we feel a deep sense of freedom and joy welling up from within. We know that our being, our essence, is not defined or supported by outer forms – the things we own, our houses, our cars, or our job titles and reputations. Even the dear loved ones who fill our days and nights with love, laughter, creativity, and surprise don’t belong to us. We walk alongside each other for a while, then we part ways, one by one, until we stand alone again at the precipice. We’re born alone, and we die alone. These sweet lives we’ve been given are a fleeting gift of infinite value, but they are not our private possession. The great paradox: only when we let go do we truly receive. Grasping, clinging, craving, and attachment produce only suffering.

Being Here

            When we mindfully decide to be here now, a great transformation begins. Moving into present moment awareness is a simple shift, but it requires on-going recommitment and affirmation, so tenacious is the old habit of living in the past or living in the future. One of the things we let go with the first breath was our story, that long and laborious narrative we drag around with us where all of our so-called disadvantages and all of the wounds inflicted on us are replayed ad nauseam. We think we need our story, because it is an archive where we store the evidence used to prove our unworthiness. All of the messages we ever received from harried, distracted teachers who didn’t notice us, emotionally distant parents whose self-absorption kept us at arm’s length, or the lovers who retaliated against us, not realizing that the pain they felt was self-inflicted – when we come into this now moment those old messages lose their meaning and power. We are free. And when we let go of fantasies of the future, whether worried anxiousness or utopian escapism, we put both feet in the here and now, the only place there really is.

The past doesn’t exist. What we call the past is a thought that occurs only in the present moment. The future is even less real than the past. There are no memories in the future to cling to, only imaginary projections. Like the past, all future-thoughts occur only in this present moment. Returning to the now moment of pure awareness, we feel a certain groundedness and immediacy, something you just can’t get in the thought-realm. The present moment isn’t a thought, it’s a vibrant, lived experience prior to thought. The present moment is the only place where you stand a chance of coming out of the ethereal world of the thought-stream and into the real world of experiential awareness. Only here can you experience real freedom, real love, and on your best days, glimpses of bliss.

Opening Up

            When we let go and enter fully into the present moment we feel a great unfolding, an opening up. No longer girded like a warrior in battle, we show up vulnerable, full in our faith that the universe is a nurturing, supportive, abundant, and generative place. We are not strangers here – that was part of the illusion we released – we are part and parcel of the totality that arises from its own infinite intelligence. When we open up we commit the final act of absolution. We know that there is nothing left to seek, nothing left to defend, nothing apart from anything else. We are home right where we are, in this skin, in this house, in this town, in this beautiful, miraculous world. We are divested of all notions of hierarchy. We are humbled and proud all at the same time – paradox like that no longer has any hold on us. We see past duality and conflict to a spacious peacefulness and loving-kindness. We know that all work is service, and we show up earnest and cheerful and do the work that is ours to do.

            Three breaths. Letting go. Being here. Opening up. It’s a practice you can carry with you anywhere you go. It works at the office, in traffic, on the tarmac, at the awkward family gathering, or in the middle of the night when you can’t sleep. Wherever you are, take the opportunity to move into the freedom of your own essential nature. You don’t have to seek it, create it, or understand it; you have only to allow it. And breathe.

Transience

“You can’t step in the same river twice.” ~ Heraclitus

         This just in from the Department of the Painfully Obvious: everything changes.

         The transient nature of life puts us in a precarious position.  Lulled into complacency by the apparent solidity of the world, again and again we are shocked, shocked I say, by life’s sudden transitions – the terrible phone call, the cancer diagnosis, the death of a friend.  Like Charlie Brown we fervently believe that this time Lucy will hold the football in place.  But every time we go to kick it, it isn’t there.

         Intellectually we know that everything born dies, every day turns to night and every song fades into silence.  But like a sharp pain this awareness is dulled by the narcosis of forgetfulness.  Like nodding drunkards we fall over and over into the unconscious illusion that all of this will last, that we have more time, that there is always tomorrow.  Actually, there isn’t.

         There is only now.

         And when you reach out to grab it, even it is gone, replaced by another now moment.  That’s why grasping is so futile.  There is nothing to grasp.

         In Buddhism this fundamental fact is known as anitya or impermanence.  But don’t take Buddha’s word for it.  Life itself provides us with an ever-growing mound of incontrovertible evidence.

         If one follows this reasonable premise to its logical conclusion, we arrive at another core Buddhist teaching, shunyata.  Shunyata is usually translated as “emptiness” or “the void,” but those approximations distort as much as they reveal.

         What shunyata actually conveys is the fundamentally indefinable nature of reality.  Whatever all of this is, it is beyond all concepts and cannot be turned into a thought, let alone a word.  Shunyata is the field of pure potentiality out of which all forms arise and to which all forms return.  Yet shunyata itself remains ever formless.  So in that sense it is empty of fixed forms.  But it is most definitely not nothing.

         Shunyata is like a clear sky and things are like clouds.  Clouds arise and take form, last a while, then disperse, sometimes slowly, sometimes suddenly.  This is the nature of all things.  As he lay down to die, the Buddha left his students with one last thought.  It was something he had said many times before, but given the situation, he thought they ought to hear it one last time.  “Remember this,” he said, “all forms arise and all forms fade.” 

         Knowing this enables us to navigate the strange and beautiful arcs of our lives with a modicum of dignity and joy, knowing that we don’t own any of it, it is all borrowed, and we must give it all back, sometimes suddenly and without warning.  Even in the face of the transience of all things it would be wrong to conclude that nothing matters – quite the contrary.  Everything matters, and more than you ever thought possible.

         Every fleeting moment has a magical quality, a sacred ordinariness that we mostly miss, caught as we often are in dreams of yesterday and tomorrow.  Only when we come back to this now moment do we tap into the real. 

         There is no such thing as the past.  What we call the past is just a thought, a memory of a previous event, captured and pinned like a dead butterfly on a cork board.  Time spent wallowing in the past is time stolen from the now. 

         The future is even less real than the past because it hasn’t even happened yet.  It’s just speculation and fantasy.  Dwelling in the future, whether in pleasant fantasy or torturous worry, is also time stolen from the now.

         We cannot change the past.  It is forever out of reach.  The future is equally elusive and beyond our grasp.  What we call the past or the future is only a thought and thoughts by their very nature exist only in the now.  We are only and forever rooted in the now.  Now is the only place we will ever be.  This is where we think, act, feel, love, share, and have our being.  And yet most of us spend very little time here, caught forever in thoughts of the past or the future.

         Buddhist practice seeks to draw us out of our thought-world and back into an immediate awareness of our authentic nature.  But what is it going to take to get us out of our head and back into our heart?

         Meditation, devotion, prayer, service, loving-kindness, empathy, compassion – these are the core practices of all spiritual traditions.  As the Tibetan saying goes, “Want to go to hell?  Think of yourself.  Want to go to heaven?  Think of others.” 

         Before this kind of advanced practice can really take root – it takes great courage, stamina and habituation to truly be compassionate – a good way to jump-start your road to spiritual recovery is to get out in nature.  It’s difficult to stay stuck in your head when you’re walking across fallow grassland in a cold winter wind under a deep blue sky with a murder of crows swirling around you in Van Gogh spirals, the smell of rain on distant mountains awakening ancient bonds nearly forgotten in the discordant isolation of city life.  For one blessed moment you are pulled out of your precious thought-stream and suddenly find yourself standing still with both feet on the ground at the center of the universe and everything is turning in one endless web of interconnected being.  There is no path, there are no crows, there is no you – there is only the achingly beautiful totality, all of it shimmering with infinite significance, all of it radiant with loving-kindness.

         Another good way to begin awakening is through music.  Of all the art forms music most plainly reminds us of the fundamental emptiness of reality.  It’s invisible and ungraspable.  It exists only in this now moment.  We do not control it.  We experience it fully only to the extent that we are able to come out of our thoughts and enter the present, allowing its myriad waves to wash over us and rock us gently into sweet surrender.  Music, all music, is about seduction.  It pursues us until we relent.  And when we do, we are rewarded with reverence and communion – reverence for the sacred nature of all that is and communion with our own unity with the sacred.  In the depths of music the secret of our infinite value is revealed, not as a thought, but as a direct, immediate experience that transcends thought.  This is why we listen to our favorite music over and over again.  We long for that union, that affirmation of our deep and abiding significance, our ultimate oneness with the source.  The harmonies and rhythms of music wordlessly replicate the intricacies and nuances of reality itself, and in this reproduction we behold a mirror in which we can better see ourselves.

             When things change, and they will – when those we love are taken from us, sometimes slowly, sometimes suddenly and without warning, when we find ourselves all alone in a field with nothing but the wind to hold onto, we are drawn into a powerful and liberating awareness.  We see through our tears that no matter what there is an unbroken light, an unchanging love that binds it all together, despite the apparent transience.

Runaway Train

How do you stop a runaway train? How do you break that racing chain of thoughts and worries and plans and schemes? How do you stop the spinning kaleidoscope of all-possible-scenarios that flood the mind’s eye with a dizzying array of fragmented colors and lines that lead nowhere? If the mind is such a powerful part of life, why do we over-think everything to death?

From the perspective of evolutionary biology, it makes sense that the early human beings who worried a lot and excelled at imagining elaborate worst-case-scenarios would have a better chance of survival. The hyper-vigilant hominid perpetually anxious about whether or not there was a saber-toothed tiger in the bushes was far more likely to survive and pass on his genes than his more lackadaisical brother, you know, the one they call “Tiger Food”. Traits like the capacity to worry were naturally selected by the process of evolution. The result? Modern humans have an inordinate capacity to vividly imagine every conceivable negative outcome and spend a lot of time worrying about the worst possible future, a place where everything goes wrong, everything is lost and everyone hates you. Early humans who worried about scarcity of resources would work harder to store up food. They would envision future problems and work hard to prevent them by creating elaborate plans. As a result, they would be far more likely to survive than their live-for-today neighbors who never worried about a thing and died from easily preventable missteps. We are the children of worriers.

So here’s the problem. We modern humans have plenty of food and adequate shelter and extremely long odds on the possibility of saber-toothed tiger attack, yet we still carry around with us this vestigial and irrelevant conditioning. Our capacity for worry and fear far outstrips our actual risk factors. The mind, once our greatest asset, is now our greatest liability.

Have you ever woken up at three in the morning, mind racing, thoughts crowding, worries bearing down on you like angry bees? It’s dark. Everyone’s asleep. You’re lying there perfectly safe in your bed. You’re not thirsty and you don’t have to pee. There’s nowhere to go and nothing to do. And yet there you are, adrenalin-sopped, heart racing, blood pounding, desperately envisioning endless possible negative outcomes, inventing problems and emotionally inhabiting them for absolutely no reason whatsoever. It’s all just conditioning playing itself out, echoes of once-useful impulses. There are no saber-toothed tigers.

Maybe it’s time to turn these giant brains of ours back on themselves. Maybe we should do a little thinking about thinking.

The first thing you have to do is laugh. It’s all sort of silly how the thought-stream sucks us into a vortex of anxiety despite the absence of any legitimate cause. And when you laugh, the death-grip of the mind is loosened. I always worry a little when I visit churches or synagogues or mosques or classrooms or satsangs where no one’s laughing, where a desperately serious and self-important air hangs over the entire room and every soul in it. Without laughter, people too easily fall prey to the ever-pervasive thought-stream. When we laugh, the whole charade is exposed and we, for a moment anyway, return to our original selves, free and easy, as we were before these giant brains took over. That’s why laughing feels so good. It is a glimpse of freedom.

The second thing to do is decide to set into motion some different patterns. Now that the shackles of the busy mind are no longer hidden, it’s time to search for the right key to unlock them for good. Techniques like meditation, centering prayer, physical exercise, music, dance, immersion in the beauty of nature, practicing loving kindness toward others – these are all proven and effective methods for breaking the tyranny of the thought-stream. There are also a whole host of other remedies that are far less effective: television, shopping, drugs, alcohol or any other form of sensual escapism. The problem with these “solutions” is that they tend to create as many or more problems than they solve. Some people realize this after the first bong hit. For others, it takes thirty years of addiction for the bloom to fade from the rose.

My friend the spiritual teacher Will Newsom uses the analogy of a compass. When we are trapped in the thought-stream, drowning in currents of worry and fear, it’s as if our compass needle is jitterbugging all over the place. How do we get the needle to settle back to truth north? How do we restore our original inner-peace, our naturally joyful equilibrium? We cannot force the needle to go where we want it. In other words, you can’t solve the problem of over-thinking with more thinking. “A problem cannot be solved,” said Einstein, “with the same consciousness that created it.” Like trying to see your own eyes or bite your own teeth, we cannot cure the mind with the mind.

Wayne Dyer writes that a sign he saw on the wall of a church basement where he attended his first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting burned into his psyche like a brand: “Our best thinking got us here.” Relying on the mind to cure the problems of the mind is a fool’s errand.

Does it help to replace bad thinking with good thinking? Certainly. Does it help to set positive intentions and craft a plan of action? Naturally. Right thinking is a necessary preliminary step in the process of restoring sanity. But it is only a preliminary step. Right thinking alone is insufficient.

Instead, Newsom and many others suggest a far simpler approach.

Quiet down, rest in the silence and wait.

You don’t have to fix anything or solve any problems. That’s just more mental manipulation. Instead, sink beneath the mind. For most people, meditation and centering prayer are the best paths to this goal and are profoundly effective if given a chance. When we meditate or practice centering prayer, we practice presence in this now moment and drop down beneath the level of thought. Deepak Chopra calls it entering the gaps between thoughts. Don’t try to stop your thoughts. Resisting them only makes them stronger. Instead, simply notice them, laugh, and settle down like a rock sinking to the bottom of a pool and watch your thoughts slide by above you on the surface as if you were watching clouds drift by in the sky. You are not the clouds; you are not your thoughts. In the content-free, thoughtless silence your compass needle will naturally return to true north all by itself, through no effort of your own. In the same way that we do not consciously digest our own food, grow our own hair or heal our own cuts, inner peace is not an achievement of the mind. It happens only when you break free from the tyranny of the mind.

Great spiritual teachers from Jesus to Yoda all make the same promise: peace is possible – as individuals, as families, as communities and as a planet – if we somehow learn to get off of this crazy, runaway train.

One Twenty Ten

Just as every drop of the ocean carries the taste of the ocean, so does every moment carry the taste of eternity. -- Nisargadatta Maharaj

It’s often said that every ending is a beginning. So it must also be true that every beginning is an ending.

As we celebrate the beginning of the second decade of the 2000s we feel more keenly than ever the loss of what can never be retrieved or relived. The past has a way of doing that, of slipping away without even leaving a note.

Despite our increasingly effective (and intrusive) ways of capturing the sights and sounds that masquerade as our “experience”, there is still one unavoidable fact: no matter how many megabytes of audio and visual data we collect, there is no way to make any of it truly last. Our technology makes us clever archivists, but when it comes to stopping time we’re still knuckle-dragging primitives.

I sometimes wonder what it must have been like to live in a world before photography, film, video and sound recording. How has this relatively recent technology altered the way in which we experience the world?

Back when I used to shoot film, actual film, on my 35 mm cameras, I would carefully choose each shot. Film and prints weren’t cheap, and you only had 24 or 36 on a roll. You had to make each shot count. So you thought a lot about composition, lighting and most importantly, value – was this scene or image worth keeping?

Now that we’re all shooting digital we are no longer bound by these frugal restrictions. We shoot indiscriminately. Later, we’ll see if we got anything good.

But what does all this continual image-gathering actually get us besides the need for bigger and bigger hard drives? As we gain endless files of archived images, what do we lose?

Quantum physics affirms the vexing nature of image-capturing. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, also known as “the observer effect”, shows that the act of observing alters the observed. There is no way to look at something without changing the thing you’re looking at. Early in her career as a young anthropologist on the island of Samoa, Margaret Mead dutifully recorded the self-reported rampant promiscuity of her adolescent female subjects. Many years later the same girls, now old women, told another anthropologist, “we made it all up.” They said it was fun making up stories for the American scientist lady. And, they said, she seemed to eat it up. Mead’s influential work, based on her research in Samoa, touting the alleged harmlessness of casual sex had a profound effect on the twentieth century. The innocent lies of a handful of Samoan girls arguably contributed greatly to a sea change in the sexual mores of the modern world. Mead thought she was recording objective reality. It turns out there’s no such thing.

The act of observing alters the observed. But even more importantly, it alters the observer.

As a boy I used to shoot a lot of super-8 movies. It became an obsession. Everywhere I went, whether I was shooting or not, I noticed great compositions, I framed shots, kept a watchful eye on lighting conditions and logged locations into memory for future projects. My eyes had become mere accessories to my camera. The process took me over. I stopped shooting super-8 film many years ago, and to this day, I still have not purchased a video camera. I’m afraid of what might happen.

I am also in the habit of journaling when I travel. Whenever Lori and I go somewhere, I bring a blank composition book and couple of pens. As I drink my morning coffee I write for an hour or so about the previous day’s events. I love to write, and I love coming home with a detailed account of our time in Manhattan or on Kauai or on the windy moors of Cornwall. There’s just one problem. As we’re walking through Stone Age ruins or standing in front of Van Gogh’s Starry Night at MOMA in New York I’m thinking, hmm, what should I write about this tomorrow morning? Even without a camera around my neck I’m still strangled by the process of encapsulation.

No matter the technology, the fact remains that our attempts to capture reality have captured us.

Recently, I’ve initiated an experiment. What if I just stood in the middle of my life and stopped trying to record the “important” moments? What if I just reveled in the experience of the now? Rather than compose shots, design pan-zoom combinations or draft paragraphs, what if I just stood there and breathed the Navajo prayer, “beauty to the right of me, beauty to the left of me, beauty below me, beauty above me, beauty behind me, beauty before me; I walk the pollen path.”

Wherever we are, we are forever at the center of an ever-changing vortex of sacred transformation. None of it can be captured; none of it can be frozen and put on a shelf for later experience. This is it. Here and now. We are either present to it or not. You can’t have it both ways.

In our obsessive craving to possess everything we overlook the simple truth; we already are everything. This holy moment contains all the grandeur and majesty of the ages. We look incessantly outward, just beyond the grasp of our outstretched hands, blind and numb to the treasure within. “Without going outside, you may know the whole world,” Laozi writes in the Dao De Jing. Every drop of water contains the whole of the ocean and every moment holds the fullness of eternity. We don’t need to capture and cage the heartbreaking poignance of the fleeting moments of our lives. There is nothing to grasp or possess. Time, Plato says, is just the moving image of eternity. The eternal Presence is forever, unavoidably within us.

2009 was a blur. What if we brought a different, more awakened consciousness into the new year? If it’s anything like 2009, 2010 will be over before you know it. It’s already slipping away. Put down your camera and open your eyes. There is only going to be one 2010.