Keeping the Best for First

I just keep realising how important the very first things we learn about mindfulness are and how over and over again these lessons are reaffirmed in different ways. So what do I mean?

Well, our very first instruction is place our attention on our breath and when the mind wanders (eight seconds later) recognise this has happened and return it to the breath. There are lots of small variations on this but this is basically it. Doing this we are beginning to train ourselves to catch ourselves thinking and step back from our identification with our thoughts. It’s an invaluable and basic skill. Most of us unconsciously assume we are what we think and feel and then suddenly comes the realisation that these are just things that happen within my awareness. My thoughts and emotions - however useful they are - are not me.

Of course this is not easy to do. This is why the very first teaching on an eight week mindfulness course is “Automatic Pilot”. The recognition that we have a lot of unconscious habits that are running us and that many of these cause a great deal of unhappiness. I actually think this is the most profound teaching that the course offers. As we drill down into what it really means it slowly becomes apparent that what we think of as ‘ourselves’ is in fact one great mass of reactions that are almost entirely conditioned by our previous experiences. We are engaging with the world and ourselves through - to use an image from the last blog - our own special pair of greasy glasses.

And then comes the key word that runs through everything like a place name in a stick of rock. Acceptance, acceptance, acceptance. All of us approach meditation, and Buddhism more broadly, simply wanting to feel better and when meditation makes us feel better we are happy and encouraged to do it more. However, while this is a perfectly good motivation (at least to start with) it paradoxically is profoundly unhelpful when actually practicing meditation and indeed in just about every other aspect of our lives. Picking and choosing which meditation experiences we like and want and those we don’t like and don’t want is simply to be caught up in our automatic pilot. Spotting we are doing this and stepping back, letting it go is the skill we have been cultivating from the very first time we sat on our meditation cushion or chair. Yes, meditation experiences are always present - calming, boring, relaxing, frustrating, insightful, confusing, pleasant, unpleasant - but the important thing is not what they are but our ability to rest in awareness and let them all come and go. We accept them, neither grasping at them nor pushing them away, and out of this comes an emerging freedom from the tyranny of a reactive mind.

A further layer of this is how we work with our emotions. Here the themes of not getting caught up and acceptance are repeated. Recognising we have been triggered - a particularly greasy spot on our specs - we step back and ask ourselves, “Where am I feeling this in my body”, and then we rest mindfully in the felt sense, being careful not to get dragged back into thinking and not trying to use the method as an antidote against whatever we are feeling. Whatever the emotion, we train in just allowing ourselves to feel it and nothing more. But easier said then done! The temptation - the undertow of emotions, driven by automatic pilots, deep seated reactive habits, core wounds created in childhood, semi-independent aspects or parts of our personality - is to immediately get caught up in the narrative, the story of what happened or will happen, and be totally consumed by it. In other words, the exact situation that our practice of simple mindfulness is designed for: caught up in thoughts around my felt sense - notice this and name it thinking.

What else? Ah, yes, the first and second arrow. The first arrow is the stuff we can do nothing about and the second is the pain we cause ourselves when we react rather than respond. So really we are again talking about emotions that happen when we experience events that we have not control over. Think our family, neighbours, world events, our own thoughts and feelings. Being able to use this extremely useful insight is entirely dependent upon being mindful. If we can’t catch ourselves firing the second arrow, the only arrow we have any control over, then we will wound ourselves over and over again. What is the wounding? Adding additional self-criticisms, feelings of shame, winding ourselves up with imagined fears, cogitating obsessionally about dysfunctional relationships. All contracted and dark states of mind.

And then we come to the deeper layers of our practice. Layers that we may as yet have absolutely no experience of. Deepening states of profoundly untroubled calm and insight into the nature of how things really are - which at its deepest is “awakening”. The thing with these is that they sound so far off we can sort of dismiss them. Something like, “I’m so far away from this there is no point in even considering them”. However, the truth is that the skills necessary to make these real we have been training in from the very beginning. Profoundly untroubled calm - samadhi - grows out of the muscle of mindfulness. Being able to come back from emersion within distraction. The equanimity that is the signature of a calm mind grows out of acceptance, the dropping away of reactive picking and choosing. And seeing things as they truly are, the view of awakening, grows out of spotting we are looking through the distortion of our finger impregnated greasy specks and gradually taking them off.

The very things we thought were just the beginning of our journey turn out to be all the things necessary for bringing it to an end.

PS. When I read stuff like this there is sometimes a voice in me which says things like: What’s the point of all this as the world around erupts in horror. Or: I’m a really bad meditator, I can’t even be mindful let alone the other stuff. Or: What does he mean there is a difference between reactions and responses? Or: My thoughts and emotions are me and they are precious. Or: … well you get the idea. Ideas that pop into our heads that we instantly identify with. It’s not that many of these thoughts are without value. They all are in the appropriate context, but when they come up about or around our meditation practice in all likelihood they inner protectors fearful of change masquerading as something that demands attention. Or by another name … just thinking.

NW. 3 April 2025