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.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
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.
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.
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.
Friday, February 25, 2011
Habitual Love
Our freedom consists of two things, really. The lesser freedom that we talk about most frequently is what we call freedom of choice. It's a freedom from--from bondage, from compulsion, from enforced conformity. At its most mundane, it's the freedom to choose carrots or peas as you move through the cafeteria line or, if you're my son Andrew, to reject them both and choose a cookie instead. Freedom from is an important freedom. It's freedom from slavery in the many senses of that term, and I don't mean to diminish it by calling it a lesser freedom. It's the freedom that I wrote about in my last post about habits and our freedom from their domination.
But there is a second freedom. It is the freedom for something, or as monastic thinkers would put it, the freedom to love whole-heartedly. Freedom for implies freedom from. I can't be free to love one thing if I'm bound by my love of another. Whole-hearted loving is grounded in the ability to choose what or who we love, but it also goes beyond this choice. A simple example: I love my wife, and I find my love is able to deepen to the degree that the freedom of this love shifts from being the freedom of choice--the freedom to survey an array of women each day and choose which one I should love--to a freedom simply for her, so that my energy is not exhausted by a daily choosing, but can devote itself to knowing her and loving her more fully. I don't choose each day to love Cyndi. I simply love her, and the question for me is how I might move more into that love. (Not that I always give that question the attention that I should, or that my other habits don't crowd it out all too often.)
To say that I simply love Cyndi is to say that I've formed a habit of loving her--and I realize that can sound dangerous. Love that is mere habit sounds dull and repetitive--almost an afterthought. It sounds that way, but if you've moved to such a non-considered relationship, then you really aren't loving at all. Loving,..., true loving implies mindfulness. It implies paying attention. It implies a heart that is engaged. The true habit of love is whole-hearted, and so it can never be an afterthought.
To be mindful, then, is a two-step. It's to attend to our habits so that we might free ourselves from the habits that bind us. But we do this so that we can form new habits--habits of love or, more particularly, habits of loving what is life-giving. Mindfulness both brings to our attention what gives life, and then it allows us to give ourselves (in freedom) to the habit of loving what gives life.
The Gospel passage read in the lectionary this coming Sunday reminds us that we can't love God and mammon. The suggestion is that we free ourselves from the possession of material things---that we loose the bonds of that habit--so that we can give ourselves fully to the habit of loving God. A first step in the deepening of the spiritual life is to move from an obliviousness to God to a place where we ask ourselves if we will love God. A second step is when we stop asking ourselves if we'll love God because we are now asking ourselves how we will love God. That's the habit of love, and it is truly a gift.
But there is a second freedom. It is the freedom for something, or as monastic thinkers would put it, the freedom to love whole-heartedly. Freedom for implies freedom from. I can't be free to love one thing if I'm bound by my love of another. Whole-hearted loving is grounded in the ability to choose what or who we love, but it also goes beyond this choice. A simple example: I love my wife, and I find my love is able to deepen to the degree that the freedom of this love shifts from being the freedom of choice--the freedom to survey an array of women each day and choose which one I should love--to a freedom simply for her, so that my energy is not exhausted by a daily choosing, but can devote itself to knowing her and loving her more fully. I don't choose each day to love Cyndi. I simply love her, and the question for me is how I might move more into that love. (Not that I always give that question the attention that I should, or that my other habits don't crowd it out all too often.)
To say that I simply love Cyndi is to say that I've formed a habit of loving her--and I realize that can sound dangerous. Love that is mere habit sounds dull and repetitive--almost an afterthought. It sounds that way, but if you've moved to such a non-considered relationship, then you really aren't loving at all. Loving,..., true loving implies mindfulness. It implies paying attention. It implies a heart that is engaged. The true habit of love is whole-hearted, and so it can never be an afterthought.
To be mindful, then, is a two-step. It's to attend to our habits so that we might free ourselves from the habits that bind us. But we do this so that we can form new habits--habits of love or, more particularly, habits of loving what is life-giving. Mindfulness both brings to our attention what gives life, and then it allows us to give ourselves (in freedom) to the habit of loving what gives life.
The Gospel passage read in the lectionary this coming Sunday reminds us that we can't love God and mammon. The suggestion is that we free ourselves from the possession of material things---that we loose the bonds of that habit--so that we can give ourselves fully to the habit of loving God. A first step in the deepening of the spiritual life is to move from an obliviousness to God to a place where we ask ourselves if we will love God. A second step is when we stop asking ourselves if we'll love God because we are now asking ourselves how we will love God. That's the habit of love, and it is truly a gift.
Friday, February 18, 2011
Breaking Habits or Loving Them?
Augustine first introduced me to habits. Not those simple things that we call habits--that I bite my nails or drop my dirty clothes on the floor. No, I mean the darker habits that we harbor--habits of envy or anger or lust. The habits of our hearts that lead us, too often, where we've promised not to go. The habits that led Luther to write about the bondage of our wills. Luther's bondage language goes back at least to Augustine. Augustine believed deeply that God had created us with free wills, but as experience lent him its wisdom, he because more aware of our forfeiture of that freedom. We freely choose to chain ourselves, he argues. We make a simple decision--we commit a simple act--and we forge the first link of a chain. Then another decision or act follows the first, and then another, and before we know it, we have willingly forged a chain of habit that makes us into people that we would never choose to be. It's a story that most addicts know well. Augustine's recognition is that we are all addicts in some sense--we all have an addiction to envy or self-pity or lust or pride....
Any addict can also tell you that we forge strong chains---that's a part of the strength of our wills. But we have to know that we nonetheless maintain our God-given freedom. We are bound by our habits, but we are not lost to them. We still have some simple freedoms---the freedom to pay attention, the freedom to love, the freedom to be open to God's grace.
Mindful Prayer--habits cannot take it away from us, though they can impinge on our commitment to it. But we have the simple freedom to notice our breath, to quiet ourselves, to get out of the way to pay attention to the grace that surrounds us. I'll write about the effect of this attention to grace on our habits some other time. Simply put, grace can quietly unwind the chains in which we've bound ourselves, if we just give it the time.
But mindfulness can address our habits more directly, as well. When we learn to quiet ourselves, to be aware of our thoughts and our intentions even as they're giving birth to our actions---as we learn to quiet ourselves, we can notice the energy of habit as it arises within us. I notice the anger that's immediately spurred when someone cuts me off on the freeway, and I can notice as it requests that my foot depress the accelerator just that little bit extra. But what do I do with it then? There are times when I can just reject the habit in the moment, but I know that it doesn't go away. I know that it lurks, waiting until my guard is down. Is there another option?
Thich Nhat Hanh suggests that I can love my habit, instead of rejecting it. Loving it, of course, doesn't mean following it whole-heartedly. No, it means to notice it and let it know that I notice it. I can attend to it. I can invite it out into the open. I can bring it out of the darkness in which it hides and ask it why it is so tormented. He writes that when we notice a habit we can say to it, "Oh my dear habit energy, you are a long-time friend of mine I know you too well. I will take good care of you." (Buddha Mind, Buddha Body, p. 80) The habit does not, then, immediately evaporate. If only it were that easy. But if we live in a begraced world, then I believe that a constant exposure of our habits to the world's grace has to have a softening effect--a transformative effect. I don't know that my habits will ever go away, but if they can just become a bit more pliable, a little less insistent, then by grace I can find freedom amidst the chains.
Any addict can also tell you that we forge strong chains---that's a part of the strength of our wills. But we have to know that we nonetheless maintain our God-given freedom. We are bound by our habits, but we are not lost to them. We still have some simple freedoms---the freedom to pay attention, the freedom to love, the freedom to be open to God's grace.
Mindful Prayer--habits cannot take it away from us, though they can impinge on our commitment to it. But we have the simple freedom to notice our breath, to quiet ourselves, to get out of the way to pay attention to the grace that surrounds us. I'll write about the effect of this attention to grace on our habits some other time. Simply put, grace can quietly unwind the chains in which we've bound ourselves, if we just give it the time.
But mindfulness can address our habits more directly, as well. When we learn to quiet ourselves, to be aware of our thoughts and our intentions even as they're giving birth to our actions---as we learn to quiet ourselves, we can notice the energy of habit as it arises within us. I notice the anger that's immediately spurred when someone cuts me off on the freeway, and I can notice as it requests that my foot depress the accelerator just that little bit extra. But what do I do with it then? There are times when I can just reject the habit in the moment, but I know that it doesn't go away. I know that it lurks, waiting until my guard is down. Is there another option?
Thich Nhat Hanh suggests that I can love my habit, instead of rejecting it. Loving it, of course, doesn't mean following it whole-heartedly. No, it means to notice it and let it know that I notice it. I can attend to it. I can invite it out into the open. I can bring it out of the darkness in which it hides and ask it why it is so tormented. He writes that when we notice a habit we can say to it, "Oh my dear habit energy, you are a long-time friend of mine I know you too well. I will take good care of you." (Buddha Mind, Buddha Body, p. 80) The habit does not, then, immediately evaporate. If only it were that easy. But if we live in a begraced world, then I believe that a constant exposure of our habits to the world's grace has to have a softening effect--a transformative effect. I don't know that my habits will ever go away, but if they can just become a bit more pliable, a little less insistent, then by grace I can find freedom amidst the chains.
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Keeping Time
Every morning, Christopher and I go to his preschool. He runs up the steps and struggles to open the exterior door. (It really is very heavy.) He runs to the first interior door. (You'll note that the verb "run", as well as the verbs "bounce," "jump," "hop," and "bang" will be used quite frequently in juxtaposition with Christopher's name.) He opens that door, and then goes sprinting down the hallway. Every morning. And every morning I smile. It's precious.
This morning I smiled, but it was a little bittersweet. I knew that 15 years from now, as I was sending him off to college (or wherever he goes) I'll have a faint memory of this sweet time, and I'll miss it. I'll wonder where it went. I'll long for it and want it back--even, I'm guessing, while I won't want to give up those future years as well.
This entry isn't another meditation on staying in the moment, since it's the only moment that we have. Yes, one lesson from my recognition of the reality of time and change is that I need to treasure each moment with Christopher, because none of them will last forever.
No, this entry is a reflection on my desire to keep time--to possess it and not let it go. I don't want to just experience that moment with Christopher in the hall. I want to freeze it and lock it away as mine forever. I don't just want to experience the moment in the moment--I want to stay in the moment, even as I want all of the other moments, past and future. I want to keep time--to own time. And I know that it's futile.
How should I respond to the futility? I have a number of thoughts. An obvious one is to acknowledge it and learn to let go as a response. If I know I can't hold on to the moment, then at least I can alleviate the desperation of clutching after it as it escapes. Acknowledging futility gives evidence of a bit of wisdom. It even opens the way to self-knowledge. It opens me to the humility of recognizing that I don't own time. That's what it is to be human. Ultimately, we rent, we don't own.
A second thought is to let go of ownership so that I can just be present to the moment. (Okay, so maybe this is just another entry on staying in the moment, but it's different from the last one.) There was nothing bittersweet in my time with Christopher. The bitter only came with my desire to possess and the frustration of that desire. Let go of the desire and just stay with Christopher!
But there's the third impulse--the mystical/spiritual impulse. It's what I'll call a recognition of the flow---of the divine life that was/is there in that moment. I'll talk about that flow elsewhere--it demands multiple blogs of its own. But the divine--God--is present in all of these moments--and God holds all of these moments within. God does own them, if you will. And God can own me--does own me. If I can be present to God in the midst of my presence to each moment, then I can maintain my presence to them even in the midst of their passing. God is God of the living, Jesus tells us. If God is the God of that moment with Christopher, then that moment lives in God and it is alive to me as I learn to live in God.
I can't keep time, but God can, and God can keep me. Now if I can just learn to be kept.
This morning I smiled, but it was a little bittersweet. I knew that 15 years from now, as I was sending him off to college (or wherever he goes) I'll have a faint memory of this sweet time, and I'll miss it. I'll wonder where it went. I'll long for it and want it back--even, I'm guessing, while I won't want to give up those future years as well.
This entry isn't another meditation on staying in the moment, since it's the only moment that we have. Yes, one lesson from my recognition of the reality of time and change is that I need to treasure each moment with Christopher, because none of them will last forever.
No, this entry is a reflection on my desire to keep time--to possess it and not let it go. I don't want to just experience that moment with Christopher in the hall. I want to freeze it and lock it away as mine forever. I don't just want to experience the moment in the moment--I want to stay in the moment, even as I want all of the other moments, past and future. I want to keep time--to own time. And I know that it's futile.
How should I respond to the futility? I have a number of thoughts. An obvious one is to acknowledge it and learn to let go as a response. If I know I can't hold on to the moment, then at least I can alleviate the desperation of clutching after it as it escapes. Acknowledging futility gives evidence of a bit of wisdom. It even opens the way to self-knowledge. It opens me to the humility of recognizing that I don't own time. That's what it is to be human. Ultimately, we rent, we don't own.
A second thought is to let go of ownership so that I can just be present to the moment. (Okay, so maybe this is just another entry on staying in the moment, but it's different from the last one.) There was nothing bittersweet in my time with Christopher. The bitter only came with my desire to possess and the frustration of that desire. Let go of the desire and just stay with Christopher!
But there's the third impulse--the mystical/spiritual impulse. It's what I'll call a recognition of the flow---of the divine life that was/is there in that moment. I'll talk about that flow elsewhere--it demands multiple blogs of its own. But the divine--God--is present in all of these moments--and God holds all of these moments within. God does own them, if you will. And God can own me--does own me. If I can be present to God in the midst of my presence to each moment, then I can maintain my presence to them even in the midst of their passing. God is God of the living, Jesus tells us. If God is the God of that moment with Christopher, then that moment lives in God and it is alive to me as I learn to live in God.
I can't keep time, but God can, and God can keep me. Now if I can just learn to be kept.
Friday, February 4, 2011
Time
I worry less and less these days if I have the time for this and that, and more about simply having Time. That’s largely because I’ve found that even if I can make time for this and that, I can’t make Time. Time is a gift. I don’t mean tomorrow’s time, or our total allotment of time on earth—though that is a gift as well. I mean this time. This day. The only time that we actually have, unless we ignore it and let it slip away, leaving us with no time at all.
Cyndi and I were talking last night about how cold this winter has been, and I realized that we’ve only just begun February. I longed for March, but then I realized, “Do I really want to just throw February away?” I don’t know how many more Februarys I get. Maybe I should treasure this one. I need to remember how to treasure even the cold, if cold is what fills the time. That’s a part of our problem with having time. We have it only by opening ourselves to what fills it. When we want to avoid the latter, we lose the former. We have no time left. Oddly, though, if we open ourselves to the time—if I remind myself to want February, at least while it’s February—then that transforms what fills February, as well. The cold is the embodiment of the time, and if I value the time, then I’ll learn to value the cold.
So often, when Jesus talks about time, he asks us to remember that time is a treasure. The rich man who fills his barns to secure his future—he loses both barns and future and misses the one the treasure that he couldn’t lose—the opportunity to love today. Likewise, Jesus reminds those who are anxious about their many things—their clothes, their food, their wealth—he reminds them to see the blessings of today, of this time, and to let those other things tend to themselves. To put it another way, if we fill our time with things, the things overwhelm our time. But if we treasure our time for itself, we will find treasures within it--treasures that he hadn't noticed when we were so preoccupied with our things.
Time is a treasure. It’s what God first creates, to hold whatever other treasures that God would give us. Do I tend to the treasure? Do I recognize that I can find God in it, if I’ll just open my eyes—put away distractions. Time—this time—this moment—now—it touches on eternity. Will I find the time for Time?
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