How to Train a Wild Elephant_ And Other Adventures in Mindfulness - Jan Chozen Bays [75]
Is that bad? It’s not bad in the sense of sin or guilt. If we are able to drive to work on autopilot for years without having an accident, that’s pretty skillful! We could say that it’s sad, though, because when we spend a lot of time with our body doing one thing while our mind is on vacation somewhere else, it means that we aren’t present for much of our life. When we aren’t present, it makes us feel vaguely but persistently dissatisfied. This sense of dissatisfaction, of a gap between us and everything and everyone else, leads to unhappiness.
Let’s look at it from the other side. When have we really been present? Everyone can recall at least one time when they were completely present, when everything became clear and vivid. We call these peak moments. It can happen when our car skids. Time slows as we watch the accident unfold or not. It often happens at a birth or as someone dies. It doesn’t have to be dramatic. It can happen on an ordinary walk as we turn a corner and everything is, for a moment, luminous.
Peak moments are times when we are completely aware. Our life and our awareness are undivided, at one. At these times, the gap between us and everything else closes. We feel satisfied—actually, we are beyond satisfaction and dissatisfaction. We are present.
These moments inevitably fade, and there we are again, divided and grumpy about it. We can’t force peak moments or enlightenment to happen. Mindfulness, however, helps close the gap that causes our unhappiness.
Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh has called mindfulness a miracle. It seems like it. When we learn how to use this simple tool and find for ourselves what it can do, it seems miraculous. It can transform boredom into curiosity, distressed restlessness into ease, and negativity into gratitude. Using mindfulness, we will find that anything—anything—we bring our full attention to will begin to open up and reveal worlds we never suspected existed. In all my experience as a physician and a Zen teacher, I have never found anything to equal it.
A large and growing body of scientific studies supports the claims about the surprisingly reliable healing abilities of mindfulness. Jon Kabat-Zinn at the University of Massachusetts Medical School has developed a training called Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). He first taught MBSR techniques to people suffering from chronic pain and disease, people whose doctors had referred them as a last resort after other medical therapies had failed. The results were so good that he began helping people to apply these techniques to other illnesses. Other doctors and therapists learned MBSR techniques and tried them out successfully with a variety of disorders. There are now many articles in medical and psychology journals documenting the benefits of MBSR for illnesses ranging from asthma to psoriasis, heart disease to depression.
Why is mindfulness helpful to us? Left to our own devices, we easily become lost in thoughts about the past and the future. The capacity of the human mind to plan for the future is a unique gift. Unfortunately the mind, in its anxiety for us, tries to make plans for a huge number of possible futures, most of which will never arrive. This constant leapfrogging into the future is a waste of our mental and emotional energy.
The mind also enjoys excursions into realms of fantasy, where it creates an internal video of a “new me,” famous, handsome, powerful, talented, successful, wealthy, and loved. The capacity of the human mind to fantasize is wonderful, the basis of all our creativity. It allows us to imagine new inventions, create new art and music, arrive at new scientific hypotheses, and make plans for everything from new buildings to new chapters in our lives. Unfortunately, it can become an escape, an escape from the anxiety of not knowing what is actually moving toward us, the fear that the next moment (or hour or day or year) could bring us difficulties or even death.
When we allow the mind to rest in the present, full of what is actually happening right now,