Every moment there's an opportunity for a delicate awareness.
Coming home from a three-day silent retreat at the Buddhist monastery, I found myself in a kind of chaos when I returned home. My stress tolerance seemed to lower rather than heighten, and I was disappointed that my experience didn't immediately yield an ability to cope with the noise and the stresses of daily living — raising two young children, running a practice, running a household, and all the challenges that each entail.
However, on my third day back, I realized that every moment is an opportunity for practice. The retreat could never be a fix-it-all experience, but only an intensified learning opportunity of what kind of energy and practice I could bring into daily living.
Every moment challenges us to observe, to be aware of our awareness, to be aware of our nature. These are challenging questions: Who am I? What is attention? What is consciousness? Maybe questions like these have no real answers, and the answers are never going to be satisfied in concept or in the writing that I am attempting here. But I feel drawn and energized to capture some of the insight I've gained just in the last few hours.
Yesterday I struggled navigating the daily routine of getting the children up, getting them dressed, getting them to brush, getting them to eat breakfast, playing with them, and transitioning them to leaving the house to say goodbye. This is particularly difficult for my three-and-a-half-year-old who, as she's become more self-aware and aware of relationships, is experiencing some clinginess and some separation anxiety upon arriving at her daycare.
But injecting each moment with intentionality — slowing down, practicing patience and calm, really listening to my children — I felt like my capacity to navigate each situation more skillfully was obvious to me. Providing a structure of listening to some calm classical music as we prepared breakfast, and intentionally practicing meditation, showing them some of the techniques and structure I had learned from the retreat — but most importantly, approaching each moment with as much awareness as possible, attending to and observing my own energy. Can I help them tune into their own awareness of themselves? To take deep breaths in moments of stress or tension. To attempt to breathe through each moment with care.
I am learning that each moment is an eruption of the unknown and of chaos, and that my ability to navigate any challenging situation will be based on my ability to not cling to any particular outcome — or at least to be aware of the cravings I have for things to be a certain way. In relinquishing that underlying tension and disidentifying from it, I find myself having more freedom. And more peace.
I had the experience of grocery shopping this morning, and I had no shopping bags in the car. There was a great sale on pasta sauce, so I decided to get two dozen jars. This little moment put me out of my usual script of automatically putting things into bags — I had to carefully put the jars from the belt back into the cart, and into the car, and then when I got to the house, I was finally able to use a bag, but I had to be careful about putting them in, not wanting to crack any of them.
In this simple moment I could presence myself to the chaos of not having the usual tool, and what I was able to connect to was a sense of gratitude for the invention of bags — I really felt how much more efficient it is to have large grocery bags rather than try to carry things in your hands. In this simple, almost trivial example, I was able to presence myself in observation of a moment rather than getting lost in judgment or thinking about what I should've done, what I could've done. Somehow the task of bringing in the groceries was much more enjoyable when I challenged myself to use this little moment as a practice of presence and awareness. Taking some of the practices I had learned from the weekend, I concentrated on moving the grocery items carefully, noticing my thoughts and judgments that were unhelpful, and quietly letting them go.
The simple moment of mindfulness amidst the simple task of hauling in groceries inspired me to write this essay. The key word from the weekend that came up for me was the word empty. I had never really thought about the significance of this word and what it points to, but it signifies one's ability to let go of the noise, the cravings, and the distractions of mental chatter.
Bruce Lee has a quote from the movie Enter the Dragon: "Empty your mind. Be like water," and he goes on to explain how water is formless and shapeless. But after this weekend, I realized the metaphor isn't about being like water, since water has a form. The actual ideal is being the empty space within the cup, and not any form — because obviously water is a form. If we can completely appreciate the spaciousness within a cup, or appreciate the spaciousness within a room, we are able to connect with this sacred emptiness. The star of the metaphor is the empty space of the cup that gives space to the water to be held. The space is our awareness, our consciousness. What is true for a room or a cup is also true of the nature of our minds.
There's a Zen story that illustrates this well. A student arrives at a Zen monastery, hoping to cultivate his martial arts. The master invites him in to have some tea, but his mind is so full that he continuously rattles on about things he knows, in front of his master, to demonstrate how knowledgeable he is. Finally, the master pours him tea continuously until it spills all over the table, to which the student says, "What are you doing?" And the master says, "If your cup is full, how can you taste my tea?"
We think our richness is in our accumulation, but our wealth is in our spaciousness — in our ability to connect to the quiet distance between each breath, and each person, and each moment. In each of these there is a silence, and at any moment we have the opportunity to move into it. We can empty our minds simply by noticing how much we crave and cling in every moment for things to be a certain way — our unspoken expectations harden in each moment, which brings unnecessary suffering.
The weekend helped me remember the Four Noble Truths, and that essentially suffering is created by attachments and cravings. Our suffering is created experience, and our fear of any outcome is the fear of yet another experience. For myself, I realize I have resistance to growth because I have fear of what might happen. But all I have to fear is experience itself. Having already faced so many experiences, what could I possibly be afraid of?
So what did I take most from the weekend? Empty my mind. Mindfulness is not the best term for the practice we are trying to cultivate — the mind is already "full." We need to reconnect to the spacious, empty, quiet, still mind. There, we can move with vitality, freedom, hope, and joy.