How to Train a Wild Elephant_ And Other Adventures in Mindfulness - Jan Chozen Bays [36]
In the same way that being sick helps us appreciate good health, as we become aware of many kinds of suffering, we also become more aware of its opposite, the many simple sources of happiness—the perfect eyelashes of a baby, the smell of the first drops of rain on a dusty road, the slanting shafts of sunlight in a quiet room.
Final Words: Suffering gives us the motivation to change. Whether that change is positive or negative is up to us. Suffering also gives us the gift of empathy for all who suffer as we do.
27
Silly Walking
The Exercise: Several times a day, especially when your state of mind is not optimal, do a silly walk of some kind. The easiest kinds of silly walking are these: walking backward, skipping, or hopping on one foot.
Watch what happens to your state of mind or mood as you walk in a silly way.
REMINDING YOURSELF
Put a small piece of tape on the tip of your shoe.
When you notice it, assess your mood, giving it a rating of 1 to 10 (with 1 being “miserable” and 10 being “very happy”). Then do a brief silly walk and assess your mood again. Any changes?
If you need inspiration, search on YouTube or other Internet video sites for the Monty Python sketch called “The Ministry of Silly Walks.”
DISCOVERIES
This task was inspired by Monty Python’s “Ministry of Silly Walks.” After watching this episode we were fooling around, inventing new ways to silly-walk. We discovered that silly walking is one of the fastest ways to change your mood, and the mood of those who are watching you. See if your kids will try it when they’re being cranky!
The ability to change mind-states that are diving toward negative or depressed is a vital skill. Until we are adept at changing mind-states using the mind, we often have to recruit help from the body. Silly walking works because, as we say in Zen, the body and mind are not two. They are not separate or independent of each other.
DEEPER LESSONS
We cannot depend upon people or things outside us to change our difficult emotions. Why not? First, because another person can never truly experience or know the state of our heart. In addition, people are what the Buddha called “conditioned things.” This means that they are temporary, they will change, disappear, or die. At the very least they can’t be available all the time, such as when we panic during a test or are distressed after a difficult job interview.
The Buddha advised his followers, “Be a lamp unto yourselves.” This means that we can learn to turn on the bright light of our awakened mind and use it to look objectively at what is happening in the machinery of self. By means of this clear light we can observe when and how the small self is not functioning optimally, and we can learn how to fix it.
When we learn to change an unwholesome mood by ourselves, rather than being the victim of our changing emotions and thoughts, we are becoming what is called in Zen the “Master or Mistress of the House.” Through diligent practice we can become confident about our ability to change our thoughts and moods as required by each situation. Then our fear of being a human being living in the midst of constant and unpredictable change begins to dissipate. We can experience a taste of true liberation—liberation from the tyranny of our mind and its fluctuating emotions.
Doing this task we are reminded to take ourselves lightly. Silly walking moves our mind from its preoccupation with ourselves and our predicaments and changes our perspective. The Japanese Buddhist master Shonin said that we humans are “foolish and ignorant beings.” When