How to Train a Wild Elephant_ And Other Adventures in Mindfulness - Jan Chozen Bays [46]
Final Words: One of the Buddha’s famous sayings is, “Anger does not cease through anger, but through love alone.” Become aware of aversion within and use the antidote—practice loving-kindness.
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Are You Overlooking Something?
The Exercise: Several times a day, pause to notice what you’re paying attention to at that moment and then open your senses to see if you can discover what you’ve been failing to notice. Our attention is usually selective. What are you ignoring?
REMINDING YOURSELF
Post notes around your environment that ask, “Ignoring?” (Don’t ignore the notes!) You might also set an alarm to help you stop several times a day to do this practice.
DISCOVERIES
We go about our days with a narrow focus. We attend to the sound of the alarm clock, what our mind says is on our to do list for the day, what’s on the TV or computer screen, the voice on our cell phone. Our attention widens only when something unusual occurs. A loud bang! The ears are alert. Is that a car backfiring or was it a gunshot? Or the weather suddenly changes and we look up at the sky for the first time in weeks, or maybe months.
When we stop and purposely enlarge our sphere of listening and seeing, we realize that there is so much happening that we are missing. We’ve been blocking out the sounds of the refrigerator humming, the sounds of traffic, the feel of the ground under our feet, the position of the sun in the sky, the many colors in the linoleum on the floor. We may notice that when we enlarge the realm of our attention, there is a sense of relief and relaxation, as if it took a great deal of energy to hold a narrow focus.
It’s impossible for us to pay full attention to two things at once (unless our mind is exceptionally well trained). Try it. Pay full attention to the bottoms of your feet, feeling every sensation of warmth, tingling, pressure. Notice where the sensations are the strongest and where they might be absent. Now try to hold that awareness while quietly counting backward by sevens from one hundred. You can feel the mind trying to hold two things at once, flickering back and forth between the feet and the mental math.
If our mind isn’t made to be fully attentive to two things at once, then we are always ignoring a lot of things. For example, most of the time we ignore our breathing, letting our body breathe by itself. When people first begin practicing mindfulness of the breath, bringing the mind’s attention to the simple act of breathing, they can tie themselves in knots trying to figure out what a “normal” breath is. How long or deep should it be? Should they move only their chest or also their belly? They have to learn not to interfere with the breath or force it, to let their mind witness the breath as if they are watching themselves breathe at night when they are deeply asleep.
When we focus our attention on the breath, we cannot attend to our list of things to worry about. That is how breath meditation can lower blood pressure and reduce stress.
DEEPER LESSONS
Ignoring the countless sights, sensations, and sounds that impinge on our eyes, skin, and ears may be essential when we need to focus on getting tasks done, such as reading a book before an exam, writing a sensitive e-mail, or getting a high score on a video game, but all that sensory blocking takes energy. When we are able to let go of those invisible shields and open our awareness to all that surrounds us, it is like stepping out of a cramped, musty room and finding ourselves in a large alpine meadow. Eye doctors tell us that if we are focused on a nearby object such as a book or video screen for a long period of time, we need to refresh our eyes (and protect our eyesight) by looking at something in the distance at regular intervals. The same advice applies to our mind. We need to let it out of its tiny box regularly, letting it expand as far and wide as it is able.
When