Tag: the full catastrophe

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The best way out is always through

Resilient tree growing through a fence
A resilient tree shows us the way through

Resilience. That’s what comes to mind each day as I pass this tree on my walks around the neighbourhood. Resilience in the face of suffering. Perseverance in the midst of pain. 

You might have seen this unusual tree in the photos I shared on Instagram last week as we saw yet another stay-at-home order announced. I offered it as a reminder that we have within us the strength to overcome whatever challenges stand in our way, to make it through to the other side – we need only find a way to connect to it.

Sometimes the challenges we encounter are of our own making, and sometimes they’re beyond our control, arriving seemingly out of nowhere – like this fence. We could be going about our business, this tree was simply growing in the forest, and suddenly something stops us in our tracks. To be honest, I’ve found myself in that very situation in recent months: stopped in my tracks by unexpected health problems. In the face of challenge, in the face of pain and suffering, how do we connect with our inner strength and resilience and harness its power to guide us safely through?

For me, this connection comes through mindfulness, which of course, can take many shapes and forms. Asana and pranayama, the postures and breathwork of yoga, help me release tension and create space in body and mind so that I can open my awareness to signals arising within. Meditation deepens my practice of svadhyaya (self-study) and santosha (contentment) as I observe, notice, embrace my experience without judgment or attachment, with lovingkindness and compassion. I invite mindfulness into my favourite everyday activities – gardening, baking, walking in nature. I give thanks for the many blessings in my life, without glossing over the fact that I’ve lost my job, that I’m struggling with health issues, that I’m tired of being stuck at home in lockdown. I remind myself of the vital importance of self-love, self-care, self-compassion, and self-acceptance. Connecting to the present moment through these practices fosters in me a deeper connection to myself, a greater awareness of who I am beneath all the mental busyness, beneath the self-doubt, the pain, the expectations and uncertainties.

In his poem A Servant to Servants, Robert Frost wrote that “the best way out is always through” and I believe that’s just what mindfulness teaches us. We learn to welcome the present moment exactly as it is – its joy and its pain, its triumph and its sorrow. We learn to practice acceptance of what is rather than fear of what might be or regret for what was. We take it day by day, moment by moment, breath by breath. We make our way through the challenges, fueled by strength and resilience we’ve cultivated within, and like this extraordinary tree, we keep reaching our branches to the sky.

Tree branches reaching to the sky
Branches reaching to the sky
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Why are we thankful?

I recently read about something that resonated with me: the idea of conscious gratitude (thank you author Danielle LaPorte).  I often speak of the benefit and power of practicing gratitude, especially in times of challenge and duress.  However, simply giving thanks for everything in a general sense runs the risk of glossing over why (and whether) we are thankful, as well as what lessons we learned and/or benefits we reaped from it.

The term ‘spiritual bypass’ was coined in the 1980s by Buddhist teacher and psychotherapist John Welwood.  Spiritual bypassing occurs when we use spiritual practices to avoid facing unresolved issues, emotions, or situations.  An example of this would be to say that because you like who you are today and where you are on your path, you must be thankful for all that has come before.  At first glance this sounds perfectly okay, and it is in line with what any number of self-help books and articles might recommend, but what happens when we dig below the surface?  What happens when we sit with our experience in mindful meditation and physical or emotional pain from a past event returns?

In our mindfulness practice we seek to rest our awareness in the present moment and experience all that arises with a sense of equanimity.  We cultivate the ability to become comfortable with the uncomfortable; we build our inner strength and resilience to weather storms that arise within, be they physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual.  However, is weathering a storm the same as being grateful for it?  Do we really need to give thanks for the lightning strike that cripples us, or do we instead use the tools of our practice to simply accept the strike and its effects? We learn many lessons from the challenges in our life, and we can certainly be grateful for those lessons, but we must also acknowledge and accept where they came from – glossing over a painful experience with a blanket ‘thank-you’ does not necessarily address the havoc it may have wrought upon us physically or emotionally, and that havoc might resurface again and again in different ways if we do not acknowledge the root cause.

The example of spiritual bypass I offered above – if I am content with where my path has taken me thus far, I must give thanks for all that brought me here – is one I have used myself, and it may be a familiar refrain for you as well.  However, my practice has taught me that I do not need to be grateful for something to accept it as part of my experience.  I do not believe that a loyal employee must give thanks to the employer who lays them off, just as I would never suggest that a shooting victim must give thanks for being shot.  To me, this kind of giving thanks indiscriminately is practicing gratitude on auto-pilot, without any mindful awareness, disconnected from our intuition.  That being said, even in the midst of challenge and suffering, there will always remain things in our life for which we can give thanks, including the teachings we uncovered through our suffering.  This is conscious gratitude.  We pay attention to our experience and use the tools of our practice to discern what we have lost, what we have gained, what we have learned; we acknowledge and accept all of it, the full catastrophe, as part of our experience, and then we decide what we are truly grateful for and we give thanks.

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The unsung hero

“I survived because the fire inside me burned brighter than the fire around me.” ~Joshua Graham

When we hear about mindfulness, its many virtues are extolled.  We are told that practicing mindfulness will make us more productive at work, improve our memory, help us sleep better, reduce our levels of stress and anxiety.  All of these things are true, and there are so many more benefits to bringing mindfulness into our daily life.  However, at the root of it all is one important benefit that I do not think gets enough mention: resilience.

When we come to our meditation practice, we sit with our present moment experience exactly as it unfolds.  That experience might include pain, anguish, sorrow, frustration, or anger.  Our mind might throw up defenses against these feelings, try to divert our attention, carry us away into dreams of the past or future, but despite its best efforts, we must eventually return to the present and whatever that moment holds for us.  The more time we spend sitting with experiences we label as unpleasant, the more familiar they become.  Rather than seeing them as something to fear and avoid, we recognise that they are part of us, part of our journey, part of the natural ebb and flow of our daily life and experience.

In the yogic tradition, resilience is embodied in the practice of Santosha, contentment.  Through Santosha we learn to accept whatever comes and whatever goes; we cultivate a sense of equanimity and seek to respond to challenges from that balanced place within us.  We grow stronger, building up our resources so that when storms lash at us from all sides, when the waves are so high we cannot see the shore, there is a well of strength deep within that keeps us buoyed until the weather clears.

Looking back at our life, we see grief and loss, joy and triumph, we climbed tall mountains and traversed dark valleys, and we survived through it all by drawing on the strength within us.  On the days when you feel the weather turning, when the skies are dark and the seas are churning, dive deep inside and ignite the fire within, let it burn brightly and guide your way through the storm.

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The two arrows

When we welcome mindful practices like yoga and meditation into our lives, we learn about the myriad benefits they can bring.  We might feel them physically: less pain, more energy, softness, strength.  We might feel them on a mental or emotional level: less stress and anxiety, greater ease and calm.  Pay attention to the present moment, and all of these benefits can unfold for us.  It sounds so simple, and yet I am often reminded that ‘simple’ does not make it ‘easy’.

When we practice mindfulness, we seek to pay attention to the present moment in an open and receptive way, without judgment or attachment.  However, as human beings we unconsciously form judgments about all that we experience – good, bad, pleasant, unpleasant, happy, sad, the list goes on.  Mindfulness does not stop the judgments altogether, but it makes us aware of them when they arise, and more importantly, it teaches us to release our attachment to those judgments; we learn to accept what arises just as it is without attaching a story to it, without getting carried away from the present moment in that story.  Again, this sounds simple enough on the surface, but learning to release our attachment to the narratives we create can be very challenging, especially when those narratives come from deep-seated places and experiences within us.

When our attention rests fully in the present, we are witness to all that arises in that moment. For example, when we attend to sensation in the body, we begin to notice that sensations ebb and flow moment by moment – an itchiness here, a tingling there, warmth on my back, coldness in my feet.  When we attend to the breath we might notice that inhales and exhales differ in length and breadth and depth, and the breath moves differently in different areas of the body.  When we attend to our thoughts we might notice more busyness some days than others, or that certain thoughts come back again and again, and others seem to appear out of nowhere.  As we deepen our practice of mindfulness, we notice more and more about each moment’s experience, and we cultivate the ability to do so with less and less attachment.

In the Buddhist tradition, it is said that the root of all suffering is attachment.  We are attached to the desire to have (craving what is good, pleasant, happy) and the desire to not have (aversion to what is bad, unpleasant, sad).  We get attached to our judgments and perceptions of people and places and things.  When something arises in our experience, two things can happen: we can react automatically based on these preconceived notions that we have developed over our lifetime, or we can respond from a different place, a place that is open and receptive, a place of compassion and equanimity.  If we respond from this place, we can view the experience through a different lens and observe its nuances without those old judgments colouring our perception and causing us suffering.

When we sit down to meditate and we open our awareness to the changing experience of each moment, at some point we will inevitably be confronted by the suffering of our judgments and attachments.  We attend to the sensations in our body and a sharp pain arises.  Most of us would naturally feel an aversion to the pain; we might also attach a unique story to this particular pain – a story about an injury or illness, a story about something stressful, a story that makes us feel fearful of this pain.  There is a Buddhist parable about two arrows, and the first arrow is this initial sharp pain.  After we have been struck by this first arrow, would we intentionally shoot ourselves with a second arrow?  Of course not – and yet we do this through our unconscious reaction to the pain and our attachment to the story we create around it.  It is this reaction that is the second arrow of suffering, and while we cannot always control the first arrow, we can definitely work on stopping the second one – or at least reduce its impact.

The first arrow could appear in our practice as a physical sensation, as a mental or emotional sensation, or perhaps as something we perceive as energetic or spiritual.  We practice mindfulness so that we can cultivate resources like compassion, lovingkindness, acceptance, and equanimity.  We often think of directing these resources to our loved ones and those in the world around us, but it is vitally important that we also direct them towards ourselves.  When the first arrow strikes, we call upon these resources to help us respond consciously in a balanced way.  We feel that sharp pain – or deep loss, betrayal, anxiety, humiliation – and we reach into our heart and tap into our compassion and lovingkindness.  We sit with the pain and we accept it as part of this moment’s experience.  We resist the stories that want to attach themselves to the pain and carry us away from the experience of it.

Mindfulness is not an easy practice when we start to peel back the layers of our experience, but it is one that is full of rewards and enduring benefits.  Mindfulness helps us come home to ourselves, to create a place within us that is warm and welcoming and compassionate and accepting of all the many facets of who we are.  Indian spiritual leader Osho reminded us: “Drop the idea of becoming someone because you are already a masterpiece. You cannot be improved. You have only to come to it, to know it, to realise it.” Mindfulness helps us find our way to this realisation, recognising our innate wisdom and beauty and letting it guide us in the way we treat ourselves, others, and the world around us.

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Through the looking glass

Sitting on the streetcar recently I felt a tightening in my stomach. I breathed into the sensation and recognised it immediately – anxiety. I sat with the sensation, stayed connected to my breath, allowed myself to simply be with the anxiety without attachment or mental drama carrying me away. I attuned to the sensation with openness and curiosity and my attention revealed its source: an Alice in Wonderland feeling I have experienced several times before.

My life for more than a decade has been somewhat nomadic. We move every couple of years to a new city/country/continent and each time I start over again from scratch – I build a new community, make new friends, find new jobs, explore my new surroundings. Like Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole, the view before me is sometimes dark, hazy and unclear. I am moving forward but I do not know where I’m going, where or when I’ll land, will there be solid ground when I get to the other side? Sometimes uncertainty can be exciting, exhilarating, filling us with anticipation; other times it can be deeply stressful, even frightening. For me, the trick to managing things like uncertainty is remembering to ground myself in the present moment.  I find stillness, I connect to my breath, I listen to my body and the rise and fall of sensation with compassion, with kindness, with a willingness to open myself up to whatever lies ahead.

Fear, anger, anxiety, sorrow – they are as much a part of our experience as joy, love, happiness and peace. Mindfulness pioneer Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn calls it ‘the full catastrophe’, the richness of life and the inevitability of all the challenges and triumphs, joys and sorrows that entails.  Mindfulness will not make our challenges magically disappear. What it will do is allow us to look at them head on.  When we acknowledge our fear, our anxiety, our uncertainty, we give that experience a name and shine a light on it.  In the light of day it begins to lose its power over us.  We can observe it from a place of calm curiosity without attaching any particular story, meaning or drama to it.  When we attend to ourselves without judgment, in an open and compassionate way, we can learn to accept the full catastrophe, we can even welcome and embrace its highs and lows as an integral part of our extraordinary human experience.