Barry Garden Path

It is such a burden to worry or even think about the future. It is even a burden to worry about what is happening right now, but I prefer to think about it. I would like to be more receptive of what comes and what might come. I prefer not to plan excessively out of worry about what might happen next.

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.

Sometimes, I think that my heart is my body. My feeling of awareness seems deeply grounded in my body experience. My body is the root of my perceptions, and my heart experience is anchored in that body awareness. Even when I am reflective and am aware that my body is aware, even in those times of focused concentration, my body tugs at that awareness.

As much as I know that my awareness is more than physical, so much of my reflective awareness is still shaped by a penetrating sense of my body. Even when I have those fleeting moments of touching something that seems completely empty, without time or space, my awareness habitually returns to my body and all that it feels.

I may think of myself as essentially a spiritual being. I also seem to be routinely learning what it means to make the most of what it means to be alive with a well-0functioning body, a body that at least still supports my consciousness. I am aware that until I am totally free of what it means to have a self-defined body, I will experience the tension between the physicality of experience and the aspect of experience that is almost totally separate.

The price of being alive is living. Each moment is full of the tension of a wager. Unless I am willing to take the risk of being fully alive in that moment, unless I am willing to embrace the risk of surrender to what is soon to become, I will not experience what it means to be alive with a heart that is my body.

Each moment has the risk of unpredictability and uncertainty. That is what it means for me to have a heart that is my body. My experience is embedded in an uncertain, unpredictable world. That produces a tension.

The fragile experience of an open heart in the body of mine is dependent on my risky leap into each new moment. There is a constant tension between what I think I know in the present moment and what is yet to be.

In order to be alive, I must willingly give myself to it. Not hesitate, not resist. The tension draws me into a different kind of experience that leans beyond my body.

I watched a spider clamor up the top of the shade and then up the wall of my bedroom. There was an instant when I relaxed inside and saw the spider so differently. The whole aspect of my experience shifted. The distance between me and the spider seemed to disappear and we were suddenly next to one another. Someone else might observe that we were actually some twelve feet apart, an observation so different from my experience.

It is such a pleasure to surrender to what presents itself, and I have the joy of experiencing this from time to time. It occurs when I surrender into a place of deep relaxation. One might say it is a deep opening to concentration. It is an effort of no effort. My mind takes a break.

It could perhaps be the touch of the firm mattress where I am sitting. It could be a plant rising from the ground in my garden to be seen and touched. There is a strange emptiness that arises when I experience some thing or some one with surrender. A vastness appears, and there is no attempt by my rational mind to put things into a familiar shape or form. The object of my attention and I seem to step into a field of emptiness.

What had appeared to have shape and form and distance becomes so close the we share the same space. Nothing has apparently changed, the person or the plant or I. But I seem to have shifted in how I am experiencing something. It happens by a simple transforming act of surrender.

Suddenly everything is different. My skin has disappeared and I am moving through space that no longer seems to exist. Simply because I have no longer given it shape or dimension, I have surrendered to whatever or whoever is before me. We have lost distinction and reference.

It is an encounter of deep pleasure, this simple act of surrender.

There is something about expectations that I find unsettling. I am very aware that expectations can often be the occasion of disappointment, especially if the expected doesn’t measure up to what was in my mind.

Not meeting expectations can take the joy out of an otherwise pleasant experience. Relatively neutral experiences can turn sour. Not realizing expectations between individuals can foster irritation and arguments.

I also have this notion that anticipating joyful experience can be a very positive force in my life. I want things to turn out pleasantly. I might even want them to be exciting. Perhaps, for me, the key is how much I am grasping and attached to what I “want”.

The future is constantly full of surprises for me, and things seldom turn out just as I expected. The future often doesn’t measure up to what I expected or perhaps even wanted. The more I am attached to how I want the future to be, the more likely I am going to be disappointed if my experience doesn’t match my expectations.

I don’t want to give up having expectations. At least not yet. I think I do intend to be much more accepting what happens, even if the present doesn’t turn out the way I expected. Resisting how things turn out is a great source of discomfort and is very unsettling. Being attached to my expectations can be a serious distraction and disturbance, a resistance to what I am experiencing.

I still want to keep expectations. I am trying not to be too cozy with them.

The distinction between what I think and what I feel is not what it once seemed to be. What a surprise it has been to discover that to feel is so much more than to know. Perhaps it is a deeper way of knowing, without all the cognitive frills and references that now seem to have cluttered up my life. Things have gotten much simpler. And a lot more clear.

Doing it “right” is, for me, not so much about knowing as it is about feeling. My mind may still clamor to know, inform and instruct. But union, intimacy and absorption is about my ability to feel, not know.

I now think that mindfulness has little to do with mind, except perhaps to set an intention to be aware, to be full of this or that. Perhaps the word should be “feel-fulness” because the experience of union and absorption is not one of the mind but what seems to me to be more of the heart.

My mind must relax, let go of its appointments and duties for me to truly feel. My mind may gather and present data, information and perceptions. But it is the heart that truly knows. There is nothing rational about feeling except for the signposts the might lead to what I feel.

For me to feel is not a reaction, not emotion. To feel is a letting go, a reaching out, an awareness at the deepest level. Emotions may arise, but they are a response to the heart feeling, the awareness. What I feel is not an emotion, but it is an open door to what is present, an opening to an experience of awareness. To feel is not to react but to be intimately aware.

For me, to feel is to enter into presence with a rock, a plant, a person. It is neither good or bad, neither positive or negative. To feel is to be present with a deep sense of awareness.

To feel is to experience overwhelming joy. The mind is finally completely at rest, at ease, without agitation. The mind even seems totally disengaged. To feel is to arise at formless insight, unshaped awareness. It is to know without any reference to past experience. When I feel, my storehouse of experiences is of little use, except perhaps to guide me until that shapeless moment of awareness.

To feel, I must forget. All that has transpired before now has lost its relevance, and I know as for the first time.

Memory, for me, may even cloud or distract my ability to feel. When I reference myself or what has gone before, my clarity of feeling diminishes. The memory of myself or my experience is a great distraction. Self-referencing keeps me from the deep feeling. I am most aware when I ignore that it is “I” who is feeling. The more I am aware it is I who feels, the less likely the feeling will be deep or intimately engaging.

This has been a wonderful shift in awareness. For me, letting go of my rational supports has lifted the fog and revealed a new and exciting landscape. All I have to do is feel, and feel alone.

I do not want my remaining life to be a string of disappointments. It has been easy for me to get disappointed when things do not turn out as I wanted or even expected. I am learning to accept the turn of events as they evolve and not judge them harshly when they fail to measure up to what I wanted.

A cold winter day this past season may have been an occasion for discomfort or even difficulty. But I wanted to recognize it just as it was: an uncomfortable and difficult day. It did me no good to be disappointed that it was not warmer or more sunny when it was in fact cold and dreary. It did me no good to be disappointed that it was not the kind of winter day I might have wanted or liked.

For me, it might have been suitable for me to complain that a day is cold and dreary. But why would I be disappointed just because it is not what it clearly is not? Why be disappointed because it is not sunny and warm?

It might be that I am now sad that a beloved plant is not coming back this spring. But I am not disappointed that it appears to be dead. I am actually a little surprised when my plants return, just as they have in the past, but I am not expecting that things will be a certain way. I am not likely to be disappointed.

For me, it is the difference that comes when I am not so attached to something I want to happen. The more I grasp and cling to a future, expected event, the more likely I am to be disappointed. I try not to live in the future. I try not to focus on how things will be or how I want them to be. Then I am not disappointed when things don’t turn out just as I wanted or anticipated.

There is an unpredictable aspect of all future outcomes, and that especially includes human behavior. For me, humans seem eminently unpredictable. I try not to set too many expectations about how people will act or react. Instead, I try to focus on how they are acting right not, without much interpretation of what the future implications are. The more I try to predict how humans will act, or anticipate how I want them to act, the more likely I am to be disappointed.

I can get caught up in the importance of a plant’s return to my garden, or how I want someone to behave. I may be no less annoyed or saddened when things do not turn out as I would prefer. But I am not necessarily disappointed.

The feeling quality of the experience is remarkably different. The key factor for me has to do with how much I grasp or cling for future events to be a certain way.

I may be sad if it rains on a day I planed work in the garden, but I need not be disappointed unless I am so attached to a bright sunny day. I may not be happy it is raining, but I am not attached to the sunny day that never happened. For me, it is a more flexible way to live, and is an easier way for me to enjoy gardening or being with people.

No one else can manage my disappointment but me. It is mine alone to control. The more I am attached to an unrealized future, the more I am likely to be disappointed. The more I marvel and am even surprised by current happenings, the less likely I am to be disappointed . I may even be able to enjoy a rainy day that interferes with my abandoned plans for gardening.

When I am disappointed, I think that I am resisting what is. I am staying attached to a notion of how I think things should be or how I want them to be. When I am disappointed, I am not angry at how things are as much as I am angry that things are different from what I want.

Disappointment for me is a frustrated realization that this is not the way I want something to be. It is a frustration that things are as they are and they do not measure up to the unreality to which I remain attached.

It is satisfying for me to recognize that, even when I don’t like how things might turn out, I don’t have to be disappointed as well.

There is a small, solitary clump of orange tulips in my side garden. There are now six remaining blooms that remind me of my internal struggle with my churning racism. I don’t think my tulips expected to play such a role.

It began as I sat on my deck, putting on my gardening shoes. A yellow school bus pulled up along my boulevard garden, and three young boys bounced out into the garden, followed by the adult woman bus driver. I was vaguely aware of them, and only mildly irked that they were walking on the plants obviously growing in the garden.

What caught my attention were the words “pick flowers” coming from one of the boys. I jumped to my feet and shouted “Hey” as soon as I reached the edge of the deck and I saw that one of the boys was up in my garden with a strangle hold on a tulip. All the while the woman was standing near the bus, not paying attention to what the boys were doing. She seemed unconcerned about the boys having announced their intention to “pick flowers.” She made no response to their picking flowers.

What followed was an unconnected exchange of her shouting to the boys to get back on the bus, my trying to tell the boys that if they pick the flowers no one else can enjoy them. I pointed out to her that they were walking through my garden as they got back on the bus. She told me what a rough day she had had and that she never has parked in that spot before. I’m not sure there was a single thread of continuity in our change.

I found myself muttering to myself about the great cultural divide between white and black people, and wondering if it will ever be overcome. I was mostly disturbed, not by the behavior of the three boys, but by the woman’s apparent indifference to what they were doing. She could only respond to their getting in trouble, and totally ignored what was a latent teachable moment.

For me, it was an experience that emphasized the cultural difference between some black people and some of us white people. I wondered how many generations it will take to bridge our differences.

I simply cannot imagine a white woman walking down the sidewalk with three young boys and her not intervening if they announced their intent to “pick flowers”. I simply cannot imagine a white woman disinterestedly standing by while they climbed up the hill and began tugging at tulips. I can now easily imagine a black woman being that disinterested and that disengaged.

My imagination has been fed by a concrete experience, and now my racism has another issue to deal with. My remaining tulips seem mute, even unaware of their beheaded companions now lying next to them. They may even be unaware of the danger of passing boys.

However, those same orange tulips now shout out to me a reminder of the danger of young black boys accompanied by a black adult woman. My concern about the cultural divide has taken a hit. My remaining tulips seem OK. I don’t feel so OK.