How to Train a Wild Elephant_ And Other Adventures in Mindfulness - Jan Chozen Bays [4]
The Buddha pointed out that when a wild elephant is first captured and led out of the jungle, it has to be tethered to a stake. In the case of our mind, that stake takes the form of whatever we attend to in our mindfulness practice—for example, the breath, a mouthful of food, or our posture. We anchor the mind by returning it over and over to one thing. This calms the mind and rids it of distractions.
A wild elephant has many wild habits. It runs away when humans approach. It attacks when frightened. Our mind is similar. When it senses danger, it runs away from the present. It might run to pleasant fantasies, to thoughts of future revenge, or just go numb. If it is frightened, it may attack other people in an angry outburst, or it may attack inwardly, in silent but corrosive self-criticism.
In the time of the Buddha, elephants were trained to go into battle, to obey commands without fleeing from the din and chaos of war. Similarly, a mind trained through mindfulness can stand steady under the rapidly changing conditions of modern life. Once our mind is tamed, we can remain calm and stable as we encounter the inevitable difficulties the world brings us. Eventually we don’t run from problems but see them as a way to test and strengthen our physical and mental stability.
Mindfulness helps us become aware of the mind’s habitual and conditioned patterns of escape and allows us to try an alternative way of being in the world. That alternative is resting our awareness in the actual events of the present moment, the sounds heard by the ear, the sensations felt by the skin, the colors and shapes taken in by the eyes. Mindfulness helps stabilize the heart and mind so they are not so badly tossed around by the unexpected things that arrive in our life. If we practice mindfulness patiently and long enough, eventually we become interested in everything that happens, curious about what we can learn even from adversity and, eventually, even from our own death.
3. MINDFULNESS IS GOOD FOR THE ENVIRONMENT
Most of this mental activity, circling around endlessly in the realms of the past, future, and fantasy life, is not only pointless, it is destructive. How? It is fueled by an ecologically harmful fuel. That fuel is anxiety.
You might wonder, how is anxiety related to ecology? When we talk of ecology, we usually think of a world of physical relationships among living beings, such as the relationships among the bacteria, fungi, plants, and animals in a forest. But ecological relationships are based upon energy exchange, and anxiety is an energy.
We might be aware that if a mother is chronically anxious, it could affect her unborn child adversely, through changes in blood flow and in the nutrients and hormones that bathe the baby. In the same way when we are anxious, it affects the multitude of living “beings” inside of us—our heart, our liver, our gut, the billions of bacteria in our gut, our skin. The negative effects of our fear and anxiety are not confined to the container of our body. Our anxiety also affects every being we come in contact with. Fear is a highly contagious state of mind, one that spreads quickly through families, communities, and whole nations.
Mindfulness involves resting our mind in a place where there is no anxiety, no fear. In fact, in that place we find the opposite. We discover resourcefulness, courage, and a quiet happiness.
Where is that “place”? It is not a geographic location. It is not a location in time. It is the flowing time and place of the present moment. Anxiety is fueled by thoughts of past and future. When we drop those thoughts, we drop anxiety and find ourselves at ease. How do we drop thoughts? We drop thoughts by temporarily withdrawing energy from the thinking function of the mind and redirecting it to the awareness function of the mind. This deliberate infusion of awareness is the essence of mindfulness. Relaxed,