by Mark Coleman
In the poem “When Death Comes,” Mary Oliver wrote about confronting our mortality with an open, curious awareness. In it, she describes the potential of living with a full embrace of that innate vulnerability, writing: “When it’s over, I want to say all my life / I was a bride married to amazement.” I think of these inspiring words often. What would it be like, I wonder, to be so struck by the ephemeral beauty of this world that we wished to marry its fleeting magnificence? To be so welcoming that we scooped it up into our arms like a benevolent groom?
In any and every moment, we are given just that invitation. To behold the unrepeatable priceless experiences that present themselves each day. To not take for granted that there will always be tomorrow. The gift of reflecting on death is that it encourages us to live with urgency, rather than regret or postponement, and to be present to the many wonders of this world. Our job is to seize the moment, not knowing how much time we have left. This is clearly illustrated by a story one student, Jennifer, recounted to me:
My mom and I had a troubled relationship. She was powerful. I was powerful. We constantly argued about everything. Even as adults she challenged my decisions. One Mother’s Day weekend I called her and asked if she’d like to spend the day together. I don’t know what brought me to reach out and offer to spend the day with her. I’d typically want to scream after five minutes with her. Something inside just guided me to make the first step to heal our relationship. She was surprised, and there was silence on the line, until she agreed to join me.
The next day was Mother’s Day, and I told her we would pick her up and spend the day with my brother and his kids. When my daughter and I went to pick her up, she asked me, “Why are we hanging with Grandma?” I told her, “We’re moving on. I’m the one with an issue here, and it’s my job to forgive myself for holding anger toward her.” We had a sweet day, and I hugged my mom when I dropped her off at home. Two weeks later I received the news that she had had a brain aneurysm. She died instantly. Without the practice of mindfulness, I wouldn’t have moved through my anger toward her. I wouldn’t have healed my heart.
• PRACTICE •
Death Contemplation
The goal of this practice is to remind ourselves of what is most precious in this life and to love and treasure these things right now, since one day we will have to let them all go, either all at once or one by one.
On small pieces of paper or on note cards, write down one word that represents something you hold very dear or special to you. For example, on one card you might write “health,” on another “nature,” on another the name of a loved one, and so on. Once you have named about ten or fifteen things, people, or experiences, take some time reflecting and meditating on each one and their importance to you.
Once you finish, close your eyes and settle your attention on your breath and body as a way to establish present-moment awareness. Then imagine you are very close to the end of your life. Make it as real as possible; imagine these are your last days and hours and that you will never be coming back. Next, slowly open your eyes, pick one card randomly, and put it behind you. This symbolizes how death will take each thing away from you. Close your eyes each time you have selected a card and consider how it feels to know you will be losing that thing forever.
Continue this process with each card, opening your eyes, selecting one card, putting it behind you, closing your eyes, and imagining that this person or experience has been taken away from you. Once you have selected all the cards, sit quietly in meditation. Feel and reflect on what it is like to have all the things that are most precious taken away in this intimate yet impersonal dying process. What arises? Allow a sense of compassion to emerge, both for yourself and for all those, known and unknown, who are close to death at this time.
After you have finished, take some time to reflect or journal about any inspiration or insight that emerges. Does this motivate you to live your life differently in any way? Does it change the way you hold these things that are so valuable to you? What might you do to make the most of this wondrous gift of life that has been given to you? Reflect on any specific intention or action you might take. Is there some person or experience that you wish to connect with after meditating in this way? Embrace the aspiration to be more fully present in your life, since our time is so fleeting and our departure time unknown.
• • •
Chapter 7
Riding the Waves of Pleasure and Pain
We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world.
— JACK GILBERT
This world provides a never-ending range of experiences. Life moves through a succession of peaks and troughs, highs and lows, miracles and disasters. In one place, babies are born to the delight of gleeful parents, while in others infants are starving. Young fawns prance through bluebell woods, while a cougar kills a sleeping deer. Spring flowers blaze across mountain hillsides, while industrial mining lays waste to tropical rain forests in Brazil. Activists devote their lives to protecting the environment, while smugglers traffic young girls for sex. Humpback whales are saved from extinction, while beluga whales are hunted in the Arctic.
Every day we are bombarded with an endless flurry of beauty and horror, of things that both open and shut tight our hearts. This raises important questions about what to pay attention to and how to respond to this roller coaster of experience. Neuroscience tells us our brains have a hardwired negativity bias, so we tend to look at what is wrong, to focus on the negative. This is clearly reflected in the media, which grabs our attention by highlighting the worst news of the day. Do we let that negativity bias dictate what we see and how we view it? Or do we take a different perspective, as offered by Jack Gilbert in his poem “A Brief for the Defense”: “We must have / the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless / furnace of this world. To make injustice the only / measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.”
Mindfulness is the capacity to see things as they are. That includes opening to the “full catastrophe,” the entire range of beauty and horror that exists. But doing this requires us to stretch to take in such a wide expanse, to appreciate all that is beautiful and wondrous as well as what is tragic.
Every year in the 1990s, I used to travel annually to India to study meditation. As soon as I got off the plane, I questioned why I had come. The polluted air in New Delhi was acrid, and exhaust fumes in Lucknow, the city where I studied, often turned the air into a blue haze. The stench from sewage could be nauseating, and the poverty at times was heart-wrenching. Nothing was hidden away. Funeral processions of families carrying their dead passed openly in the streets. Homeless beggars in Benares sometimes had no arms or legs or displayed crippling leprosy.
Yet on the same street as the lepers, I might see a woman cleaning a public latrine and radiating the most beatific smile, one that melted every brittleness in my heart. Like a momentary scent of heaven, I might catch the fragrance of freshly picked jasmine placed elegantly in a schoolgirl’s hair. Little boys would be laughing and giggling with glee in side streets, playing cricket with little more than a stick of wood and a ball of newspaper. Bells ringing from roadside temples and wafting incense suggested that the gods were not so far away. The intensity of India invited a broad lens of attention, one that encompassed the beauty and tragedy of life.
What goes on “out there” in the world is no different from the ups and downs of our inner landscape. A discerning awareness reveals that when we pay close attention to our mind and body, we see that it, too, is a changing cacophony, oscillating between the poles of pleasure and pain and including everything in between.
For example, take a moment while reading to pay attention to what is happening. Notice the variety of sensations unfolding in your body and mind right now. For myself, as I write this, I notice that my back is unpleasantly tight and achy from sitting too long at my desk, but I can also hear piano music in the background, which is uplifting, soothing, and pleasant. B
ut not everything in my environment elicits a strong reaction, such as the beige color of the walls, which feels very neutral in tone to me. Can you observe a similar variety of experience in this moment?
With awareness, not only do we notice the waves of pleasure and pain, but we can also observe our reactivity to these changing stimuli. Left to our own devices, we tend to react unconsciously, running toward or grasping after what is pleasant and resisting or rejecting what is unpleasant. This creates a constant push/pull, a contentiousness with life that leaves us frequently in a struggle with experience.
To a degree this tug of war with experience is evolutionarily hardwired. All beings and organisms move toward what is safe and pleasurable and away from what is painful and potentially threatening. At times, this is simply self-preservation, like gravitating toward warmth and food and away from pain. Yet we can’t avoid all discomfort; we can’t experience only pleasure. Trying to achieve this all the time only leads to frustration, since so much of life is out of our control. Even if we do attain some peak satisfaction, it never lasts and is soon replaced by yet another experience.
The question we face, then, is the same one I faced in India: How do we ride the waves of pleasure and pain without being tossed around by our preferences and our reactive nature? Over time, through cultivating mindfulness practice, we can learn to access a more steady presence in the midst of such turbulence. When we observe, over and over, how the knee-jerk habit of chasing fleeting pleasures and running from pain doesn’t actually bring peace of mind, that clarity allows us to unhook from that agitation. In this way, we slowly build the muscle of equanimity, the capacity of steadiness and balance no matter what the circumstances.
As an example of this dynamic, I remember teaching a silent meditation retreat in northern India. One day, one of the students, Robert, shared with me the difficulty he was experiencing during the course. He was on a bit of a roller coaster. The first few days were bumpy as he settled into the stillness of the retreat, then one day, as can happen, he became unusually serene. His mind was clear, and his meditations were blissful and spacious. He became so happy that he began to fantasize about how he could maximize this meditation high. Robert mapped out what he would do after the retreat: he would move to Burma, join a monastery, become a monk, and then go meditate in a cave, where he imagined spending the rest of his life meditating in endless rapture.
Of course, all this excited planning destroyed his peaceful meditations. Rather than abiding in meditative stillness, he became restless. His mind became overwhelmed with a torrent of thoughts and plans about his future, and he found it harder to sit and maintain any focus. He lost the desire to meditate and started resisting the tranquility of the retreat. He became uncomfortable, tossed around by the unpleasantness of his busy mind and agitated body. He began to fantasize about getting out of the now-not-so-pleasant retreat and instead chill out some place where he could go surfing. He began judging the other participants and condemning the teachers for misleading him about meditation.
Then one evening during a lecture, one of the teachers described how the mind grasps after pleasure and how this obsession can actually destroy what we find joyful. Robert realized this had been happening to him: he had stopped simply appreciating his serenity and joy. Instead, he’d become consumed with capturing and prolonging the bliss of meditation by fantasizing about becoming a monk. These thoughts — his restless, agitated planning — had eroded the very pleasure he was trying to grasp and caused meditation to feel more and more unpleasant.
This is the hamster wheel of chasing pleasure and fleeing from pain, in which we all get caught at times. Certainly, we can enjoy serenity or bliss when it comes, but we can do so without holding on, since we understand its fleeting nature. Nor do we need to escape or eradicate an unpleasant experience, since we know it too will pass. Yet by simply witnessing the waves of joy and sorrow, the ups and downs, with a clear awareness, we learn to step off the wheel of reactivity. By doing that, we discover freedom and ease right in the midst of wherever we are.
• PRACTICE •
Exploring the Waves of Joy and Pain
Practice this meditation in a public place with a lot of activity, such as a city park. Sit with your eyes open, either with your gaze down or looking directly at everything that’s happening. Open all of your senses and become aware of the various sights, sounds, smells, and sensations in the environment.
Likewise, be aware of the flow of experience within you. Notice the changing physical sensations, the movement of breath, the ebb and flow of emotions, the flicker of thoughts and images. In general, be aware of the totality of your inner and outer experience with a curious attention.
In addition, notice when an experience is felt as pleasurable, as unpleasant, or as somewhat neutral. All phenomena will have one of these three attributes. As you identify the quality of an experience, become aware of your reaction to it. Do you resist or avoid unwanted smells or noises? Do you reject anxious thoughts? Do you demand to hear only melodic birdsong or grasp after what’s beautiful in your surroundings? Do you try to hold on to pleasant feelings? With neutral experiences, does your mind space out or get distracted?
Remember, it is quite natural to react to stimuli. The practice is to simply notice these impulses as fully as possible. If you hear a jarring noise, how do you react? Does your stomach contract or your jaw clench? Do you judge the source of the noise? Does the unpleasant sound overwhelm your enjoyment of other things that are pleasant, or perhaps create so much dissatisfaction that all you experience is negativity?
This meditation trains the mind to recognize reactivity with an open awareness, without becoming consumed by it. With that clearer perspective, we are able to respond more skillfully, whatever the stimulus is. By developing this quality in meditation, we increase our ability to access it when we need it most — in the midst of any strong experience, at work, with others, or elsewhere. To learn to be present with the full range of experience without being tossed about by our impulsive reactions, no matter how pleasurable or painful, is a tremendous support for finding wisdom and well-being in any situation.
• • •
Chapter 8
Understanding the True Nature of the Body
The Church says: the body is a sin.
Science says: the body is a machine.
Advertising says: The body is a business.
The Body says: I am a fiesta.
— EDUARDO GALEANO
Embodied attention is a foundational component of mindfulness practice. It serves as a vehicle for establishing awareness anywhere. Over time we come to live in accord with the maxim: “Wherever you go, there you are.” Wherever we go, there we can be present. But the point of mindfulness is not just to be aware but to look deeply into the true nature of experience, including the body.
“Who am I?” is an elusive query that has plagued philosophers, mystics, and meditation adepts alike, along with neuroscientists, psychologists, and biologists. What is this mysterious thing called me? Who owns this body that “I” inhabit but over which I have little control in terms of getting sick or aging? How is it that I can know myself, can be aware of my mortality, can observe my body, and yet have so little agency over the process? Who exactly is running the show? Why is it that I wish to do one thing, but then watch my body do exactly the opposite, seemingly against my wishes?
These questions rarely yield firm answers, yet this inquisitive attitude keeps us looking. Without inquiring into the mystery of being human, we will never fully know ourselves. Yet the point isn’t necessarily to come up with a simplistic answer to this mystery but to keep plumbing its depths, so we can live our way into our understanding. As Rilke once wrote in Letters to a Young Poet:
Try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms, or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers which could not be given to you now because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to liv
e everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
Inquiry into the nature of the body, into who we really are, invites us to examine our existential nature. In one sense, we are Homo sapiens, having evolved into a particular form with a head, limbs, torso, and five senses. But what animates this body? What dictates how our legs move, and sends electrical impulses so our hands can paint, drive, and put food into our mouth? Are we really the same person despite all the changes to our body, once small enough to emerge from a woman’s body and later as big as our parents; once only able to crawl and now able to run marathons? As we become more aware through sensory contact with our body, these questions can take on a pressing importance.
The body is a wonderland to explore. I am in awe of how the body heals. I recently cut my finger while chopping onions (perhaps not as mindful as I should have been!), and afterward I watched a biological miracle play itself out. First, my finger bled, and then without any conscious direction, the wound formed a scab to protect the damage and stop the blood flow. Over time, the scab slowly reduced in size until, miraculously, the rip in my flesh was again healed skin, as if nothing had ever happened. The body is a mystery that seems to function all by itself.
What is so astounding is how this organic process functions without any seeming intervention from “us.” Our taste buds replace themselves every ten days, so they stay fresh and receptive, which may be why strawberries taste so good. The body grows a new liver in less than twenty weeks (perhaps a good thing given how much junk food we eat!). The largest organ of the body, the skin, is fully replaced once a month. Even our dense skeletal structure, with its more than two hundred bones, is completely overhauled once every seven years. We get a new stomach every three months! Aside from the cornea, the eyes are one of the few body parts that don’t renew themselves. Perhaps this is one reason why our eyes say so much about us, the windows of the soul.
