Month: June 2019

I find my breath is very helpful. Besides keeping me alive, breath is a central tool in my experience of mindfulness. Actually, it is not so much the physicality of my breath that is helpful, but it is the awareness of my breath that is central to my ushering in concentration. The awareness of my breath focuses my attention, and after that I relax in an interior atmosphere of ease.

Breathing is such a natural and regular event that I normally don’t notice it. Still it occurs about 11 times a minute, day and night. My breath constantly nourishes me with oxygen. In addition, my breath helps me focus my mind, bringing it to a state of sustained concentration, allowing me to experience the bliss of a relaxed and focused mind. But of the time, I am unaware that I am breathing.

I am also typically unaware that all around me, the same breathing is constantly occurring. Wherever there is life, some kind of breathing occurs. And I am totally surrounded by living organisms.

Some breath brings oxygen to living cells, as in animals and insects. Sometimes oxygen is given up in a reverse kind of breathing, as it is with plants. Where there is life, there is breath in some form. It is not always a complicated and sophisticated process as it is in large animals. But the breath occurs throughout the living world that surrounds me. The grass, the dirt, the birds, people. All are routinely breathing as we continue to live.

Today I am aware not only of my own breath, but also the breath that occurs all around me. The world surrounding me is breathing constantly, and for once I am aware of that breath as well as my own. The invitation to awareness presented by these living beings is huge, so huge I can scarcely grasp it. To be aware of breath is so much more than being aware of the breath that happens in my body. It is happening all around me, constantly.

It is perhaps only humans for whom breathing is an aid for mental focus and can stir the bliss of a focused mind. For all living organisms, however, breath is an exchange with the environment that constantly sustains our life. For humans like me, it is also breath that sustains concentration and bliss as well.

My life is littered with fables. There are so many made-up notions of reality my culture has taught me that it has been hard for me to be open to the unknown. There has been an answer for nearly everything.

Wanting to be certain, it has been hard for me to embrace the unknown, uncertain and undefined. My fellow humans have obliged by filling in most of the blank spaces. My culture has taught me how to relate to the world in ways that have little to do with experience or reality. I have been taught to believe, when to know was momentarily out of reach. Even science has been quick to offer tentative certitude.

My mind and heart are filled with a vast library of cultural fiction, put there to placate a deep desire to know and understand. Rather than face and absorb the unknown, I have learned to live in a made-up reality. For instance, my world has been enveloped in a fog of religious beliefs that people have fashioned to explain what they were unable or not ready to understand.

Experience raised questions of unseen reality and creative imaginations filled in the voids with religious notions. In time, many of these notions have been recognized as blatantly fictional or false. But many others remain in the daily conversation of my culture.

I also breathed the atmosphere of racial bias that supports most cultures, including my own. When there was a lack of genuine experience and understanding about the “others”, the gap has been filled with made-up notions of what those “others” were like and what I could expect. Fictional veneers have been placed to reface differences that I experience, fictional veneers that serve to further keep us separate.

People create fictions of extra-terrestrials because of the unknowns surrounding phenomena they occasionally experience. In another age, there might have been fictional angels or demons luring behind the unknowns. Today, creatures from another planed are conjured up to explain what people have yet to fully understand. Something is experienced, and imagination rushes in to explain, or at least suggest, the unknown.

I notice an aspect of emptiness to most of my experiences. There is an unknown quality or feature to much of what I experience. Rather than be quick to explain away the unknown, I prefer to encourage my mind and heart to be at ease with things I do not yet know or understand.

Perhaps, in time I will have the insight to reach behind the obvious phenomena and touch a reality I had previously missed or mis-understood. Rather than live in a world of make-believe, I choose to embrace the unknown as readily as I embrace the known. My mind is more at rest, and I am more likely to be comfortable boldly walking in an atmosphere of ephemeral fog.

I want to live in a realm of infinite possibilities, as yet unknown.

Much of my life, perhaps most of it, I been suspicious of pleasure. Pleasure clearly has been something that I am constantly taught to be suspicious and cautions about. I am turning that caution around and welcoming pleasure into my every daily encounters. I am learning how to allow the joy of deeply felt pleasure become part of my delight in being human.

The pleasure of deep concentration is gradually changing me and my attitude about pleasure. It is transforming my experience of pleasure and my intention about pleasure. The experience of surrendering to the joy of a focused and relaxed mind has taught me how to embrace pleasure, and I am gradually allowing it to fill my whole presence. It is becoming a feature of my walking day.

Open surrender to and absorption of what presents itself can be an intense source of pleasure. It is the experience of no resistance and no grasping. There is scant barrier to experience and no attempt to “keep it this way” when something is pleasurable.

Perhaps I I have been taught to be suspicious of pleasure for good reason. It is easy for me to start grasping, to want to keep experiencing pleasurable things. It is easy to want to make the experience of pleasure go on and on. To make it happen again and again. It seems so easy to imagine pleasure that does not end and try to make that happen. This, I think, is a danger of intense pleasure.

It doesn’t have to happen that way.

The experience of deep concentration had taught me both to enjoy the pleasure of a relaxed, focused mind and to be satisfied with what is an ephemeral encounter. A focused mind can both be immersed in pleasure and emptiness at the same time. A focused mind is in a state of surrender, of letting go. Becoming absorbed in awareness does not have the aspect of grasping, but is a surrender to what is.

It is a learning that I apply to walking through my garden, to drinking tea, or to being with a friend. Becoming immersed in the pleasure of the moment is close to being immersed in the timeless. There is no need to attempt to hold onto the moment.

For me, deep pleasure is a state of the mind. It may arise from a tactile or other sensory experience. But the immersion in joy rests in the awareness of the occurrence of the sensory event.

A traditional expression of this is the use of the breath as a foundation and gateway to deep concentration, and to deep pleasure. I also think any sensory experience can be the foundation and gateway to the deep experience of pleasure, which is actually a state of a concentrated mind.

I train my mind to concentrate and to immerse in pleasure when I sit on my pillow. My breath is the primary point of contact with the physicality of my environment. From there, I move into a state of relaxed, pleasureful mind. Sometimes, I have the same wonderful experience when I hold my tea cup, when I walk among the plants of my garden, when I touch the hand of someone during a concert.

The pleasure of a contented, focused mind is slowly expanding and growing through my days.