Not so good at Mindfulness

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
September 22, 2013

The sixth element of the Buddhist eight-fold path is “right mindfulness.” Do you have to give up multitasking? Do you have to do the dishes meditatively?

This is a sermon about knowing what you are doing. It’s a spiritual path I call “Present-Mindedness.” Its rules are simple: Show up. Pay Attention. Breathe. The seventh element in the eight-fold path of Buddhism is “Right Mindfulness”

I have spent a long time fighting mindfulness because I read that we fight mindfulness with eating, drinking, sex, activity and company. You have just named quite a few of the main blessings of life. Reading that, filtering it through my puritan nature or my natural either/or thinking leads me to decide — “yikes, I have to either give those things up or give up on being mindful.” Not true. I also have resisted mindfulness because it sounds too hard, just doing one thing at a time. I fear that I would never get anything written if I didn’t think and write in my head while I did other things.

I read about mindfulness, and some of it sounds like this:

“Usually, the cognitive process begins with an impression induced by perception, or by a thought, but then it does not stay with the mere impression. Instead, we almost always conceptualize sense impressions and thoughts immediately. We interpret them and set them in relation to other thoughts and experiences, which naturally go beyond the facticity of the original impression. The mind then posits concepts, joins concepts into constructs, and weaves those constructs into complex interpretative schemes. All this happens only half consciously, and as a result we often see things obscured. Right mindfulness is anchored in clear perception and it penetrates impressions without getting carried away.”

I have had some time to unpack this, which is one of the things you pay me for, so let me do that. All they are saying is that things happen to us. Then we have thoughts about the things that happen, which mayor may not be accurate. Those thoughts give us feelings. Those feelings can hurt us or others, and they may have very little to do with what happened. Try to just be aware of what happens. Then watch the thoughts you have about what happens.

A simple example might be that, as you are leaving church today, you wave to someone in the parking lot. They turn their back and do not return your wave. That’s the thing that happened. You begin to have thoughts about the thing that happened. “They don’t like me. ” “I offended them somehow.” “I hurt their feelings.” Those thoughts lead to feelings. Shame, anger, hurt. They don’t like me because …. Then you list the things about you people have not liked in the past, or things you don’t like about yourself. You are your own worst critic, if you are like most of us. Then you start having a conversation in your head with them. “1 can’t believe you were offended by that. Grow up! You are just too sensitive for this world. On second thought, you’re probably right, I’m a loser. I open my mouth and who knows what will come out? I should just keep quiet.” You can scald yourself inside with those conversations. When you see that person again, you have feelings about them that they don’t know about. You feel defensive, angry, and distant. You have decided you two have a personality conflict.

Here is what really happened. You waved at them, and they had the thought that you were probably waving at someone behind them, and they didn’t want to look like a fool waving back at you when you were not even waving at them. How stupid would THAT feel? So they just turned and avoided looking like a geek.

One of my teachers, Byron Katie, tells this somewhat earthy story:

“Once, as I walked into the ladies room at a restaurant near my home, a woman came out of the single stall. We smiled at each other, and, as I closed the door, she began to sing and wash her hands. What a lovely voice!” I thought. Then, as I heard her leave, I noticed that the toilet seat was dripping wet. ‘How could anyone be so rude?’ I thought. ‘And how did she manage to pee all over the seat? Was she standing on it?’ Then it came to me that she was a man – a transvestite, singing falsetto in the women’s restroom. It crossed my mind to go after her (him) and let him know what a mess he’d made. As I cleaned the toilet seat, I thought about everything I’d say to him. Then I flushed the toilet. The water shot up out of the bowl and flooded the seat.”

What this spiritual practice of present-mindedness asks us to try is to be aware of when we are having feelings about our thoughts about things– not to stop doing it, not to control our thoughts, but to be aware of what we are doing. Katie’s teaching invites you to ask yourself: “is it true, that that person who didn’t wave to me has been offended? Do I know for sure that it’s true?” The next question is “Can you think of one healthy, sane reason to hang onto that thought?”

Once I was misquoted in the paper. My first thought is “Oh goodness, I sound like an idiot.” It was a story about the billboards about a “ministry” that claimed to be able to take people who are gay and change them into heterosexuals. They said I said the billboards were deceitful and wicked. Which I did. Then they said I said something like “There are some hints that homosexual lifestyle would have been frowned upon by the people 2,000 years ago, but we wink at everything else they thought was wrong.” Which I did not. Only and idiot would say that. So for a while that afternoon, after I read that, I had the thought. “Everyone in town is going to think I’m cavalier about morality. They are going to think Unitarian Universalists have no sense of right and wrong.” Then I got a grip. Only the people who read that article will wonder if I’m an idiot, and the ones who know me will know I’m not.” While I was having the thought that everyone thought I was an amoral nincompoop, I shouted at the dog. Then I thought. “OH, this is my chance to practice. Breathe. I’m having thoughts, then feelings about those thoughts, and they are making me suffer, and I don’t know for sure that my thoughts are true. I will take what action I can, make a plan for the future, and let the rest go.” I wrote a letter to the editor and planned not to talk to that reporter again.

Show up Pay attention. Breathe. Present-mindedness. This simple practice can have big consequences. The University of Massachusetts gives mindfulness training as part of its Stress Reduction Program. The literature for the program says mindfulness practice can help you move toward greater balance, control and participation in your life. They list these benefits:

Lasting decreases in physical and psychological symptoms
An increased ability to relax
Reductions in pain levels and an enhanced ability to cope with pain that may not go away
Greater energy and enthusiasm for life
Improved self-esteem
An ability to cope more effectively with both short and long-term stressful situations.

They describe the opposite of mindfulness: “a loss of awareness resulting in forgetfulness, separation from self, and a sense of living mechanically. “

I like how they say it’s not something you have to learn from scratch. Everyone has had experiences of being 100% there with the experience you are having, without interpreting or layering it with your own accretions. I watched a documentary last week about people who put on flying suits and jump off of mountains. They say they do it because it really puts you in the present moment.

They say: “Fortunately, mindfulness is not something that you have to “get” or acquire. It is already within you – a deep internal resource available and patiently waiting to be released and used in the service of learning, growing, and healing.”

“Already within you” sounds like the way Rabbi Jesus described the Kingdom of God. It’s within you, he said, the size of a mustard seed, the smallest of all seeds, yet it grows into a large bush that can shelter birds in its shade. A tiny practice of showing up, paying attention, and breathing, can have far-reaching effects.

So I sit with the feeling that the whole town thinks I’m an amoral nincompoop. I notice the pain of it. I ask myself if it’s true. I accept this bad feeling. It’s here. I may as well. It will eventually go away.

Mindfulness teacher Jon Kabot Zinn says “Acceptance offers a way to navigate life’s ups and downs – what Zorba the Greek called “the full catastrophe” – with grace, a sense of humor, and perhaps some understanding of the big picture, what I like to think of as wisdom”

Try this for yourself. This is also the great assertion of the Buddha: “don’t put anyone else’s head on top of your own.” Test, test, and know for yourself. Only embrace that which you know, from the depths of blood and marrow, to be true.

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776