Thursday, March 31, 2011

Showing Up

Evidently Woody Allen is the one who said that "90% of success is just showing up." I was looking for the author of the quote on-line, and I found it on a blog that was highly critical of the idea in its turn. "That's not what we need to teach our children." was the response. "We need to expect far more of them than just showing up." I understand the respondent's frustration, but I don't know that he understands how hard it is to "just show up." If any of us could show up--and I mean really show up--on a consistent basis, our lives would be so much richer. What we'd have to offer the world would be so much deeper.

In many ways, that's what the spirituality of mindfulness is about. It's about showing up. Thu Nguyen, a mindfulness teacher here in Fairfax County, once taught a small group of us at my church how to hug one another mindfully. (It's a practice he learned from Thich Nhat Hahn.) His point was that so often when we hug, we don't actually manage to show up for our hugs. It's a motion that we go through, but we aren't really there for the other in the hug. We aren't there ourselves, so we certainly can't be attentive to them whatever they are bringing to the hug. A mindful hug is  hug where you actually pause in the midst of your life to show up for the hug. You see the other person and ask them to see you. You take them thoughtfully, so that you can hold them for as long as they would like to hold you. Again, you're present to them. Present to the hug. That's the point of the hug anyway, isn't it? Really, with the hug, 100% of success is showing up.

I come back again to the question of spirituality and mindfulness, and the spirituality of teaching mindfulness in a secular setting. I realize that this idea of "just showing up" is essential both to the practice and the spirituality intrinsic within it. We want to teach our children how to be mindful so that they can be present--so that they can show up for their lives and for the world. Mindfulness is the practice of being there, and not somewhere else in your head distant from the moment before you. Too often we think that we need to do more than show up, and so we're off looking for that more, absenting ourselves from the present. We communicate that to our children, and they too struggle for the more, forgetting to just show up for life there and then.

I don't know how to put a percentage on the importance of showing up, but I know there's nothing more that I want from myself, from my children, and from anyone with whom I'm in relationship. Just show up. If only it were that easy.

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Spirituality and Mindfulness II

I had a lovely weekend thinking together with folks  about how we can enrich the lives of our children and youth by opening them to mindful living. Nothing radical, but perhaps revolutionary. The goal is to make space for intentional quiet and self-awareness in the classroom---the kind of quiet and self-awareness that forms our brain in healthy ways and open our hearts to the world.

I came to the conference with the questions of my last post in mind. The issue of spirituality is acute when thinking about mindfulness in education. It's imperative if you want to bring the basic healthy practice of mindfulness into a classroom that be a secular practice--that it be about stress reduction, about creating mental space for clear decision-making and richer awareness of self and other. The fundamentals of mindfulness practice are so rich, and they can be appropriated in any context.

At the same time, not only was it clear implicitly that a deep spirituality was at work in almost everyone speaking at the conference, but when I explicitly asked about it in one small group, the response was quite warm. Everyone present acknowledged the need for a "secular" approach to mindfulness in a school setting---but everyone also avowed that the practice of mindfulness for them was deeply spiritual. The basics of this spirituality are humility, compassion, and an awareness of the deep connectedness of life.

Susan Kaiser Greenland got at one of the most essential truths of this when she reminded folks of the need to be mindfully rooted oneself if you're going to offer the practice of mindfulness to others. It's not simply a collection of techniques--like typing--that you can teach simply by running through the mechanics. Mindfulness is a way of being--of being peace, being open, being connected, being compassionate--and it's a way of being that's infectious. You can offer others mindful practices, but these will best lead them into mindful being if you, the teacher, embody the reality into which you are inviting them.

I was grateful for the weekend, and for Richard Brady, who organized it.

Thursday, March 17, 2011

Spirituality and Mindfulness

I'm going to a two day conference on Mindfulness in Education over the weekend. Susan Kaiser Greenland is the keynote speaker, and I'm looking forward to hearing her. Much of my work with children I've learned from her wonderful book, The Mindful Child.

The conference, though, has me thinking about the connection between mindfulness and spirituality. SKG works out of the tradition of Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction that was born out of the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn, among others. This tradition defines itself explicitly as a secular science so that it might find a home in medical science and in public schools. It attends to the very real physical, measurable effects of mindfulness training, especially the capacity of mindfulness training to reduce stress in our lives. Mindfulness training is directed in almost all traditions first to taming the "monkey mind" that will literally wear us out if we let it.

My practice of mindfulness began, in some sense, with this secular approach. I was simply trying to keep my mind from spinning in a dark time. (See my first post, Getting Started) But I quickly discovered the links between mindfulness training and my own practice of prayer, and as my practice of prayer deepened into contemplative prayer, so did my mindfulness practice deepen. Only when I discovered the practice of mindfulness in the Buddhist spiritual tradition through the work of Thich Nhat Hanh, however, was I able to put a name on the practice of mindfulness and bring it into more explicit connection with my understanding of the spiritual life.

There is a difference between secular practices of mindfulness and those that overtly acknowledge the spiritual reality to which this practice opens us. I don't know how to name this difference, except to say that the spiritual traditions around the practice of mindfulness are always pushing us to open ourselves to something more through the practice. The model from Kabat-Zinn emphasizes stress reduction in the title, and that certainly is a product of mindfulness training, but its only a preliminary stage for spiritual traditions of mindfulness. In the spiritual practice of mindfulness, we try to free ourselves from the stress of life not as an end in itself, but as a means to opening ourselves to something more--to our relationship with creation and, more significantly, to our relationship with the Life in which creation "lives and moves and has its being."

A last thought. However much there is a difference between the spiritual and secular practices of mindfulness, I would also want to emphasize their continuity. Reading through the work of anyone writing about MBSR, you find constant reference to the something more. That's the power of opening yourself to life--you can't help but to be touched by the something more that fills it. For me, this continuity is important for understanding my spirituality. It helps me grasp that the life of the spirit isn't something separate from my embodied life. I'm not delving into the magical or supernatural when I immerse myself in the spiritual. Rather, I'm simply engaging life in its depth dimension. God's creation is one, and the spiritual life exists in a unity with the physical and psychological life. That's so much of the beauty and the mystery of creation.

Thursday, March 10, 2011

Naming

Many cultures have a tradition that suggests that naming someone or something gives you power over them. It's an idea embodied in the Rumplestiltskin story. Having named my five-year old, let me just say, "Hah!" I have no power over him, and he would mock me if I suggested that I did. Knowing his name--that doesn't even give me any definitive knowledge of him. He is a mystery to me in so many ways, and I know that this mystery will only deepen as he ages. But knowing his name, what I do have is a relationship with him. He, likewise, relates to me in so many ways through my name--Daddy--though he was also excited to discover that I was named "Stephen" as well.

The second chapter of Genesis offers the story of God's creation of the Adam and all living things, and in the story the many creatures pass before Adam and Adam names them. Too often we've thought this story permits our domination of creation--a "name = power" kind of thing. But even if we don't make that mistake, we are wont to think that knowing a name, we are able to define something. We can put it in a box. This is a cat, and so it's not a dog, and this is what it means to be a cat.... I love all that we've learned through scientific inquiry, but too often it's only encouraged this trust in our ability to define. Now I can know my cat or my son at a genetic level. But does that really allow me to know them?

There's a deep belief in the mystery of all creation embedded in almost all spiritual traditions. Nothing is an island to itself---we and the world around us have no clean definition. Our life is bound up with our fellow creatures, and it is more profoundly bound up with our creator. So to know the name of anyone or anything--it can't offer us a definition since no definition exists. Instead, it offers a relationship. That's what Adam gained in Genesis. A relationship with all of creation. That relationship allows us to explore the mystery of another, to explore the life that we share.

There is a deep power to names, but it takes wisdom to understand that power and then to live into it.