Being Present

My experience and that of my students is that when we miss practice we are avoiding something in our life as well. Whether it be strong emotions, troubling relationships, or events that leave us feeling powerless, we tend to avoid them, hoping these issues will simply disappear if we do not look at them.

Christine Feldman, author of Boundless Heart, says, “It is not possible to separate the quality of our meditation from the quality of our lives.”

Whatever is showing up in our practice is showing up in our lives. What is showing up in our life will visit us in our practice.

One example of this practice and life interaction is when we miss formal practice. We set an intention. Commit, have it as one of our goals. Then we don’t carry through – at all, for brief spurts, or longer absences.

We have learned or have been told that mindfulness meditation opens so many doors for us. It takes us into quiet, stillness, and calmness. It can result in relaxation both during practice and as we go through our days. It brings us to awareness and choice in the moment. It teaches us to let go and accept our experience.

It opens another door as well.

The door to our inner being. To our self. To our big self, when we are open, expansive, accepting, aware, kind and compassionate. And to our little self when we are closed, constricted, tight, hurting, defensive and reacting rather than responding. It brings us directly into present-moment experience. And it brings us directly into contact with discomfort.

To have a mindful life – to live in the moment, to be present, to drop the ruminating of rehashing and rehearsing, to immerse in the sensory experience . . . we must turn toward ourselves. To become aware of what is happening right now. To see clearly what our inner experience is. What that inner experience is responding to in the outer world. To become aware of how we are relating to that experience – with balance and equanimity, aversion, or clinging.

At the core of mindfulness meditation training, we are our object of meditation. Our being. Our experience. Our relationship with that experience.

Engaging ourselves as the object of our meditation practice is the antithesis of the way we have been conditioned. First, we are conditioned to not put ourselves up front and center. We feel selfish or are seen as selfish. We use words like narcissistic or egocentric when we take time for these practices. We fear we will be labeled as self-centered, greedy, or needy. We are conditioned to have negative value judgments about putting ourselves in the center of awareness.

Choosing to start a meditation practice takes an act of courage. We have to overcome this conditioning of not attending to ourselves and taking time for ourselves. We need to embrace doing something for ourselves that is nourishing and nurturing – not something we have been conditioned to do. We have to challenge the belief structure we are conditioned into – one must be productive and busy, one must tend to others first, to be idle is to invite trouble, and to be still is to be useless and worthless.

Often this is enough to keep us from meditation, we simply can’t get by those conditioned beliefs. Those who do start, are often in so much discomfort and pain that they try to overcome these belief structures. Then we run into a second set of cultural conditions that discourage practice.

Avoiding discomfort. We have been trained to ignore what we feel, ignore what we need, turn away from our inner experience, bury our fears and helplessness, numb our pain, silence the voice that asks, “Is this all there is?” , turn away from our deep dissatisfaction.

Even evolutionary development seems against us in cultivating a mindfulness meditation practice.

Strong emotions dysregulate our system. When we experience feelings like fear, pain, helplessness, sadness, or anger it triggers our vulnerability and turns on our fight/flight/freeze autonomic nervous system. The resulting behavior is to flee what causes us emotional pain, to fight against it, or freeze into inactivity. This process takes us directly into the center of the paradox.

Engaging the practice of mindfulness meditation soothes our nervous systems. To gain the benefits of soothing our system, we must first face our discomfort and the complexities of our emotional life.

My experience and suspicion is that when we miss practice we are avoiding something in our life as well. Whether it be strong emotions, troubling relationships, or events that leave us feeling powerless, we tend to avoid them, hoping these issues will simply disappear if we do not look at them.

In our daily life journey, how often do we not address a problem because it seems insurmountable? It seems unsolvable. It feels larger than life and too big to handle. It seems like there are too many risks involved in dealing directly with the problem, whatever it is?

Is this happening in our meditation practice? As we meditate formally, we come face to face with ourselves, with the sensations and emotions that arise in the body, with the memories or fears that cause us distress. We come face to face with the aspects of our lives we aren’t ready to admit are causing us grief. We are too afraid to touch them with awareness and attention as this view requires a need for uncomfortable action. So much easier to simply avoid. To simply miss practice, also missing our life.

There are options other than staying away from our practices and our life’s problems. Talk to someone about the difficulty with practice or the problem in your life. Learn how to manage the discomfort in our sitting practice, and the challenges arising in life. Share our struggles with a group, like a meditation group or self-help group. Read about ways other people have approached meditation when they know there is distress and discomfort involved. We can go ahead and practice anyway and in the process learn how to become a witness to our experience and not get caught in it.

Finally, we can bring awareness, kindness, and compassion to all of our experiences, during meditation and as we move through our days.

Jack Kornfield says, “Spiritual dedication gives us no immunity from the joys and sorrows of life’s body. Every spiritual master faces the difficulties of fatigue, sickness, and death, just as we all do. What dedicated practice gives us are the tools to awaken compassion and awareness in this human realm, ways for the heart to hold it all.”