Tag: Pema Chodron

A Question About Meditation

meditationI like to read about meditation – the shelf on my night-table is filled with books by Pema Chodron, Mark Epstein, and various other Buddhist-inspired meditation teachers, whose words and ideas I find soothing, especially before bed. But actually sitting on a cushion and meditating every day? Not so much.

I like meditating in groups, and I’ve enjoyed going to various meditation centers in New York City, which has plenty of them. But I can’t always get myself to a group sitting, and I’ve been especially reluctant this winter.

Meanwhile, I keep seeing new studies studies touting the benefits of meditation – to treat insomnia, reduce stress, improve creativity, even prevent brain shrinkage as we age. So lately I’ve been thinking I really ought to be more serious about doing it.

What I love about the books is learning about Buddhist philosophy and psychology, and its application to daily life. I’ve found the practice of mindfulness incredibly helpful, for example, in getting me to really pay attention to, and appreciate, what I’m doing at any time. I also think it’s invaluable for coaching – encouraging clients to slow down and experience the moment they’re in, or an event or emotion they’re struggling with, has immense benefits and can be really important to the ability to make lasting change.

But I’ve still found it hard to just sit for 20 or 30 or 40 minutes a day with my eyes closed, or staring at the floor, depending on the particular style of meditation involved. I sometimes meditate on the subway, which is always calming, and I’ll practice that kind of one-pointed concentration on the breath or on my movement when I’m running or at the gym or doing yoga, at least for short periods. I even use it to take a nap in the afternoon or fall asleep at night. It’s the sitting still part – and staying awake – that I have trouble with.

I imagine it’s because all my life, I’ve had the feeling that I’m supposed to be doing something – often, something other than what I’m doing. I remember in college, if it was a beautiful day outside and I was in the library studying, I’d feel like I should be doing something outdoors. If I was outside, say, hanging out with friends or going for a run, I would feel like I should be in the library studying.

Now, when I sit down to meditate, that struggle comes up constantly. I immediately think of all the other things I have to do. Within minutes I’ll find myself jumping up and making a to-do list.

I remember being on a weekend meditation retreat once at a retreat center in the picturesque Hudson Valley, and telling the meditation teacher in my interview that I was wondering the whole time why I was sitting on the floor inside all weekend, when I could be outside doing something. He just smiled his wise smile, and told me that was okay, I can just let myself feel that. That sort of helped.

I know it’s in part the way I was raised – in a very traditional, achievement-oriented Jewish immigrant family, where we were always expected to be doing something aimed at achieving some concrete, demonstrable result – studying or practicing the piano, for example. That attitude helped us get into good colleges and graduate schools and landed us professional degrees and accolades, but I think both my brother and I still have a hard time settling down – accepting and appreciating things as they are — just being, as the Buddhists would say. Which is a problem. Because we can’t, and we won’t, always be achieving something. And even if we are, we likely won’t be achieving it as much or as well as we want to, or we’ll be thinking we really ought to be achieving something else.

One of the cornerstones of Buddhism is that life is filled with a “pervasive feeling of unsatisfactoriness,” as the Buddhist psychoanalyst Mark Epstein describes it in his book, Going on Being: Buddhism and the Way of Change, about his own exploration of Buddhism and psychology. “We want what we can’t have and we don’t want what we do have; we want more of what we like and less of what we don’t like.” Seeing this clearly is part of the point of meditation – to illuminate how our minds work and cause us suffering. The idea is that if you see your mind doing this – and as in my retreat, it will start doing this pretty quickly when you sit to meditate – we’re able to recognize those as just thoughts, not necessarily “truths” – and create some space around them, lessening their grip. I understand and appreciate the theory, and it’s helped me become more aware of my thoughts (including the absurd and dysfunctional ones), which has been really helpful. But I still can’t get myself to sit down and meditate every day.

What are other people’s experiences with this? Do you need to have a formal practice of daily sitting meditation to truly incorporate mindfulness and its insights into your life? I’d really like to know.

by Daphne Eviatar, coaching & consulting

Start Where You Are

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The view from my roof at sunset.

I’ve been trying to get outside more.  I love the outdoors, but the noise and congestion of New York City can make being out on the street pretty unpleasant, so lately I’ve been escaping to the roof.  I’m lucky to have access to a rooftop, and I’ve discovered that sunset yoga up there can be pretty amazing — and free.

The problem is that getting to the roof requires climbing up a ladder that’s in a really disgusting old utility closet.  The closet was disgusting when I moved into this place 17 years ago, filled with corroding old paint and stain cans, various kinds of cements and glues and solvents and other toxic substances that inevitably leak and spill and are really hard to safely (and legally) dispose of.  So somehow, I’ve never cleaned it out.  But now that I’m climbing that ladder to get to the roof more often, the nastiness of the space has really struck me.

I’ve also been reading Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze’s book, Walk Out, Walk On, which I’ve written about here.  One of the most striking stories in the book is of a group of people in Brazil who took an abandoned apple warehouse filled with sludge — “layers of dirt, asbestos, syringes and excrement” — and turned it into a thriving community center. Organized by a group of Brazilians who started the “School of Warriors without Weapons,” the community of Paqueta, realizing that no one else was going to come clean up that old warehouse for them, decided to take on the task themselves.  Working just 15 minutes a day each, volunteers who’d created a vision for what they wanted the place to be cleaned out the 11,195-square-foot warehouse and transformed it into something their community really needed:  a healthy public space.

It’s an amazing story that inspires me in all sorts of ways, especially as I think about how coaching skills could help advocacy and community organizations. But what it inspired me to do the other morning was to clean out my closet.

After descending the ladder, I was about to just close the door once again on the dirt and muck and leave that project for another day. Maybe I was influenced by that post-yoga feeling of well-being, but it suddenly struck me that no one else was going to come and clean that closet up for me.  And that actually, doing just a little at a time wouldn’t be all that difficult.  Sure it’s kind of gross, but I can wear rubber gloves.  It’s really not that big a deal.

So I pulled out the gloves and some sponges and paint scrapers and I cleaned the damn thing up.  And you know what?  It wasn’t that hard.  I haven’t gotten rid of all the old containers in there yet, but it only took me about an hour to clean up the layers of grime that had built up on the shelves and the molding, and the chunks of debris scattered on the closet floor.  And man, did I feel better afterwards.

We’ve all had that experience:  some task looms before you that you don’t want to tackle because it seems really impossible and unpleasant and like it will take forever.  But imagine how nice it will be when it’s done;  then just start where you are.  Eventually, you’ll get there.

“Start Where You Are” is also the name of a Pema Chodron book I like that makes a really helpful point.  You can’t get to the good stuff without going through some bad stuff too.  Pema puts it more eloquently:

Life is glorious, but life is also wretched. It is both. Appreciating the gloriousness inspires us, encourages us, cheers us up, gives us a bigger perspective, energizes us. We feel connected. But if that’s all that’s happening, we get arrogant and start to look down on others, and there is a sense of making ourselves a big deal and being really serious about it, wanting it to be like that forever. The gloriousness becomes tinged by craving and addiction. On the other hand, wretchedness–life’s painful aspect–softens us up considerably. Knowing pain is a very important ingredient of being there for another person. When you are feeling a lot of grief, you can look right into somebody’s eyes because you feel you haven’t got anything to lose–you’re just there. The wretchedness humbles us and softens us, but if we were only wretched, we would all just go down the tubes. We’d be so depressed, discouraged, and hopeless that we wouldn’t have enough energy to eat an apple. Gloriousness and wretchedness need each other. One inspires us, the other softens us. They go together.

I’m not equating cleaning out my closet with life’s most painful moments.  But the point applies even to the simply unpleasant and annoying tasks we try to avoid:  if everything were easy and good and clean and beautiful all the time, we wouldn’t really see and appreciate it. Nor would we appreciate how difficult life can be for others, whose lives may be dominated by many more annoying, difficult or even truly wretched circumstances. Even in taking on grubby little chores, we can find compassion for others, and greater possibilities for ourselves.

by Daphne Eviatar, coaching & consulting

It’s Okay To Be Blue

screamblueNow that we’ve passed Labor Day, there’s all sorts of advice out there about how to beat the post-vacation blues. Tips range from immediately unpacking your suitcases to going for a run to taking stock of your life and your work.  All good ideas.

But in a culture obsessed with the quick fix — things you can do, buy, eat or drink to make you happy — there’s one bit of advice you rarely hear:  let yourself feel lousy.

You’ve left your idyllic vacation spot, returned to a noisy city, a boring or stressful job, and re-immersed yourself in all the day’s bad news. It’s not surprising you don’t feel great.

After a recent week of traveling and being completely checked out, I made a huge effort to appreciate my return to home and work, ease back into my life, etc..  And I still felt crappy for a while. That’s okay. In fact, it can be a good thing to let yourself actually experience your emotions rather than pushing them away.  One surprising thing I’ve learned through coaching is that really sitting with my emotions for a while allows them to slowly transform — and can lead to some pretty amazing insights.

Left alone, emotions themselves last only about 90 seconds to 2 minutes.   It’s the story we tell ourselves about them – that my life sucks, my job sucks, I’m stuck in this place I hate, etc. – that tends to drag out that emotion, and cause us to have it over and over again and feel stuck.  Pema Chodron talks about this beautifully in her books, and suggests people “lean in” to the emotion rather than run from it. (This is a very different concept of leaning in from Sheryl Sandberg‘s.)

When I was feeling particularly lousy one evening, I called up my copy of Jon Kabat Zinn’s book, Coming to Our Senses. A professor of Medicine at University of Massachuseetts medical school and creator of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, Zinn talks about the healing power of just focusing on the present and experiencing your emotions, without the overlay of thoughts.

As Zinn explains:

Enthralled once again, even when in great pain, with the story of me that I am busy creating, unwittingly, merely out of habit, I have an opportunity, countless opportunities, to see its unfolding and to cease and desist from feeding it, to issue a restraining order if necessary, to turn the key which has been sitting in the lock all along, to step out of jail, and therefore meet the world in new and more expansive and appropriate ways by embracing it fully rather than contracting, recoiling, or turning away.

So when you’re hit with that defeated or sad feeling, try just letting it be. Notice it, check in with yourself, with your body, and really feel it. Where do you feel it? What does it feel like? Drop the story line that’s feeding it, and see what else comes up. Does it begin to shift? What I’ve found particularly amazing about doing this is that by sitting with it, the pain not only goes away, but turns into something else — something new — that moves me forward.

by Daphne Eviatar, coaching & consulting