From Suffering to Peace

by Mark Coleman

  All of this begs the question, who are we? If the body continually replaces itself, part by part, am I really the same person as I was last Christmas, or ten years ago, or when I was a teenager or a baby? And if this process is happening by itself, then who is this “I” who thinks it is in control? We like to think that the self, our thinking mind and personality, is running the show, but if our bodies function on their own — healing and aging regardless of what we think, do, or say — then perhaps we have less ownership than we like to think.

  There is an old Sufi story about a crazy wise guru named Mullah Nasruddin. One day he goes into a bank to cash a check. The teller asks him for some identification. After searching frantically through many pockets in his coat and trousers, he is unable to find his wallet. Finally, he smiles, pulls a mirror from his bag, looks at himself, and says wryly to the teller: “Yep. That’s me.” How often do we do the same thing, looking in the mirror at our face as if to confirm, yep, that’s me. But is the body we see really who we are?

  Mindfulness practice brings an intimate introspection to these questions and reveals that things are not always quite what they appear. This inquiry can overturn our preconceived notions of who we take ourselves to be, inviting us to hold things from a different and sometimes radical perspective.

  At times, in deep meditation, the sense of one’s body can appear to dissolve and challenge our conventional notion of what a body is. The usual perception of having physical boundaries can fall away, and we can experience ourselves as vast as space with no obstruction. At other times, we may feel the body to be so empty it is like air — transparent, light, and ephemeral. We can also sense the body as mere vibration, pulsing electricity, like waves of photons colliding. Every day, the body completely disappears from consciousness as we enter deep sleep. In fact, for a third of our lives, we live on this earth without any awareness of our body in this state. If all these empirical experiences are real, then what is the true nature of the body? Might it include all of these shape-shifting realities?

  The investigation reveals our physical form is not as fixed as we like to think; it is an ever-fluid process. Insightful awareness clarifies that the body is not actually “our” body! We don’t own or even control much of our body. What becomes clear is that the body is not ultimately who we are. Yes, we have physical form, a shape, a body that ages. Yet who we are is beyond this physical form, beyond definition, category, or any other limited concept. When we misattribute the sense of self to our body, it is clearly a case of mistaken identity. (Later chapters will explore the issue of identity further.)

  What we call the body is a construct made up of a matrix of physical processes that have no beginning or end, in the same way that the elements that comprise us do not disappear when we die but simply merge into new forms. It is analogous to a bunch of water molecules bound together as an ice cube. We know the water is just in a temporary, conditioned frozen form. So, too, are the elements that comprise our body.

  Our final invitation to explore the nature of the body is at the time of death. From the perspective of awareness, we can see how the body deteriorates, but the clarity of presence can pervade and endure even in death. My first Insight Meditation teacher, Christopher Titmuss, recounted a story from his time as a Buddhist monk studying in southern Thailand. He had developed a friendship with a monk named Por Long Bhut who had developed liver cancer but refused all medicine and painkillers. In his final hours of life, the monk invited Christopher to lay down beside him on his bamboo mat in his hut. “Time has come,” he said. Death was close at hand.

  Christopher recalled the elder in the final hours whispering faintly about how each sense was fading away one by one. Christopher recounts: “After an hour or so, Por Long Bhut whispered to me in Thai — ‘No seeing.’ Then he said a few minutes later, ‘No hearing.’ Por Long Bhut never reacted. He knew deep inner peace before, during, and after the diagnosis of cancer. Por Long Bhut’s depth of mindfulness and meditation along with the clarity that he was not the body helped make his transition smooth from life to death. He was a liberated and untroubled human being.”

  Clearly, the Thai monk felt no agitation about dying, for it was clear to him that he was not the body. This is the liberating power of mindfulness, which frees us from the constraints of the physical body and of our misidentification with it, even at death.

  • PRACTICE •

  Exploring the Selfless Nature of the Body

  Assume a comfortable meditation posture and close your eyes, turning the gaze of attention inward. Open your awareness to hearing and become present to the ebb and flow of sounds. Notice how sounds are known quite effortlessly with mindfulness. Rest in that spacious awareness for a few minutes, noticing how it happens all by itself — a sound arises and there is a simple knowing each time.

  Now turn your attention to include awareness of the landscape of the body. Notice as physical sensations appear and disappear; these are also known quite naturally without any need to make an effort. Perhaps you feel the contact of your legs or buttocks with the chair or cushion you are sitting on. Or you may notice the temperature of the air on your skin or the touch of clothing. Attend to the variety of physical experiences for a few minutes, and notice how these sensations come and go by themselves and how easily they are sensed in awareness.

  In the same way, sense the breath, moving like a perennial inner tide of inhalations and exhalations. You don’t make the breath happen; it moves by itself, ceaselessly flowing, keeping the body alive. Notice any feelings or thoughts about this understanding, how bodily life simply maintains itself organically through all kinds of biological processes. Be aware of the breath for a few minutes in this way.

  Then shift the attention to the heart as it beats, the pulse in your veins. Reflect on how the heart, like every other organ, operates according to its own nature, without any prompting from you. In this way, sense directly how each organ of the body operates on its own, and how you are simply a witness to the process. Notice how that observation touches you and affects your relationship to your physical experience. Continue this observation through the day, noticing how the body miraculously functions by itself, selflessly.

  • • •

  • SECTION 2 •

  FINDING PEACE IN THE MIND

  Chapter 9

  Working with the Thinking Mind

  A man is but the product of his thoughts. What he thinks, he becomes.

  — MAHATMA GANDHI

  When I first started meditating, I was amazed by the experience of getting to know my own mind. Introspective meditation felt like a revelation. No one had ever talked to me about paying attention to my mental habits, patterns, and thoughts, nor suggested that these might be the primary source of our well-being or stress. Like most people, I was conditioned to think that happiness arose from external sources: that it lay in success, wealth, relationships, and so on. It struck me as confounding that, for all the fifteen years I was getting an education, not one minute had been devoted to paying attention to one’s own mind. By the time I came across a quote that said, “Nothing can help you more than your own mind trained,” that rang very true.

  The mind is an amazing phenomenon. In recent years, neuroscience has barely begun to scratch the surface of what the mind is, let alone develop sophisticated-enough tools with which to study it. Our minds can create beautiful works of art, design cities in the desert, and build satellites that photograph deep space. Great minds can strategize to resolve problems as vast as climate change and develop mathematical formulas to calculate the size of black holes.

  As creative as the mind can be, it can also be a dangerous force. Human minds have designed weapons so powerful we could destroy ourselves if they were ever employed. Equally, the mind can turn on itself and create the grounds for self-destruction. We can become tormented by anxious views about the future or riddled with self-doubt and negative self-judgments. The mind can be perceptually brilliant yet also delusional in i
ts observations.

  In effect the mind is neutral, yet it is a tremendously powerful tool. What arises within it and how we work with it can make the difference between suffering and peace. With mindfulness practice, we study the mind to uncover dysfunctional thinking and release unhelpful mental patterns. Through observation, we can explore the potential of the mind to create, to envision, and to love. We can also inquire into the nature of reality itself.

  One way to help cultivate inner freedom is to turn awareness toward our mental habits and tendencies. Everyone has a mind, yet no one receives an instruction manual! It is like putting a dog into the front seat of a car and expecting it to know how to drive. We are born with a brain whose sophisticated neural circuitry has developed over millions of years. We are prone to innumerable impulses, reactions, and mental biases that have accrued, not just in our lifetime, but over thousands of generations. So much of what we do is just inner programming playing itself out.

  Yet surprisingly, we think we are masters of our own destiny. We like to believe we are in control. However, on closer inspection, we see that most mental activity happens by itself. We are subject to constant pushes and pulls; we react instinctively or habitually, but rarely with any sense of agency. Our mind lives in a Pavlovian world, responding to thoughts, impulses, and impressions as if salivating upon hearing a bell signaling time to eat.

  Consider the plethora of thoughts that run through your mind every day. The National Science Foundation posited that we can think upwards of fifty thousand thoughts a day. That is a lot of thoughts — almost one per second! No wonder we feel our mind is cluttered! Not surprisingly, the most common hindrance in meditation is to become lost in those thoughts. And how many of those same thoughts did we think yesterday? Our thoughts are not as interesting or original as we like to believe. They are more like repeats of old TV dramas.

  Mindfulness practice brings insight as well as some space from the turmoil of our minds. The first insight people often have is just how many thoughts we think. That is sobering in and of itself. Another insight is that thoughts are just thoughts; they are not as real as we believe them to be. A famous Chinese story describes a Taoist monk who painted a tiger on the wall of his cave. After putting on the finishing touches and painting the eyes, he suddenly became scared, thinking it was a real tiger!

  We do the same every day with the creations of our mind. We conjure the memory of a delicious pizza we ate yesterday and suddenly get hungry. We recall a person we are attracted to and suddenly feel aroused. Or we imagine our boss becoming frustrated with us, and our breath shortens and our heart pumps with fear. Our thoughts appear to be real, which plays havoc with our mind, body, and well-being. A phrase attributed to Mark Twain sums this up well: “I have known a great many troubles in my life, most of which never happened.” Believing all these mental flickers drags us into a lot of angst.

  One key mental habit we uncover with mindfulness is the process of proliferation. This is the way the mind free-associates in a tumbleweed of thoughts. For example, say we notice the smell of fried garlic coming from a nearby kitchen. No sooner does the mind recognize the smells than we find ourselves lost in a flurry of thoughts about lunch. However, it doesn’t stop there. The garlic triggers a cascade of memories, perhaps of a delicious pesto pasta dish we recently had, which reminds us of a long-ago visit to Florence, which leads to reminiscing about walking the city streets and exploring its medieval churches and eating in its heavenly trattorias.

  Next thing we know, we are planning our next European vacation, perhaps to Venice, and wondering why it has been so many years since we took a real vacation. We start analyzing our work life and our finances and all the recent stress we’ve been dealing with, and we are reminded of our pledge to take better care of ourselves. Amusingly, that line of thinking leads us to why we took up meditation — in order to let go of the stressful, endless stream of thoughts in our head! This is the folly of proliferation.

  The clear lens of mindfulness allows us to see thoughts for what they are: mental images and ideas that flutter briefly across the screen of awareness. A helpful metaphor is to imagine awareness as a vast blue sky and thoughts as clouds that continually float across that expanse of the mind. The clouds, however strong and thick, can never obscure the vastness of the sky. We can learn to abide in this sky-like awareness and not get lost focusing on each individual cloud. Even when large storms come, and we are filled with maddening or even terror-inducing thoughts, they remain only storms that leave the sky unaltered. The grounding quality of awareness has the capacity to hold all experience, no matter how intense or bleak.

  By seeing thoughts in this way, we are less likely to be at their mercy. The goal isn’t to stop thinking or to achieve a thought-free life. Not only is that impossible, but we obviously need thoughts in order to live in engaged, creative, and effective ways. What is essential is developing a wise relationship with the thinking process. Meditation training teaches us that our thoughts come and go, just as clouds in the sky come and go. In this way, we recognize thoughts without getting lost in endless rumination, nor whip ourselves into a painful frenzy about something that isn’t actually happening. This helps us abide much more fully in the present moment, where life actually happens.

  A meditation student, Joann, once compared working with thoughts to driving a car with a manual transmission. She wrote to me:

  My body is the automobile, my thoughts are the gears, my mindfulness practice is the clutch, and my deeper wisdom is the steering. When the clutch is out, the wheels are engaged and the automobile moves in whatever gear it’s in. When the clutch is pushed in, the gears just spin, and the vehicle coasts or stands still. For me, mindfulness is “pushing in the clutch” and allowing the thoughts to just go round and round, giving my deeper wisdom time and space to decide which thought I want to embrace and act upon — which direction I want to go. When it becomes clear the steering wheel is pointed in the best direction, I let the clutch out — slowly, of course.

  From the perspective of mindfulness, we learn to discern when thinking brings wisdom, clarity, and understanding versus when thought leads to more painful states of mind and heart. In section 2, we will uncover some of the more subtle, pernicious, and challenging areas of our thinking that undermine our well-being and freedom.

  • PRACTICE •

  Mindfulness of Thoughts

  Find a sitting posture you can maintain with ease for fifteen to twenty minutes. Close your eyes and focus your attention on your breath. The awareness of this practice is twofold: to be mindful of breathing and to be aware of the various thoughts, images, views, ideas, and stories that float through the sky of your mind and ceaselessly pull your attention.

  There are many ways to engage with our thoughts. The first is simply to be aware as thoughts arise and to practice what I call the three Rs: recognize, release, and return. We recognize the thought, release our fascination with it, and return awareness to the breath or to the particular object we have selected for our practice. Meditation often focuses on doing this over and over and over, which builds concentration. In this meditation, the goal is to stay focused on the thoughts themselves.

  As thoughts appear, label each one to identify what kind of thought it is. First, you can categorize thoughts in relation to past, present, or future. Is the thought a memory or reflection on a past event? Is it a plan for the future or speculation on what might happen? Is it awareness of something occurring right now, perhaps commentary or analysis? Notice if thoughts are more inclined toward the future, the past, or the present.

  Then become more specific about exactly what kinds of thoughts arise. This requires a shift from being lost in the content and detail of the thought to recognizing the process or type of thought that is present. For example, if you start planning what kind of breakfast you will make after the meditation, simply become aware that planning or fantasy is happening. In the same way, you can become aware of many types of thinking, like w
orry, fear, fantasy, speculation, regret, doubt, or desire. Without becoming lost in the specific content, label these types of thoughts, such as “planning” or “remembering,” which strengthens awareness of them. The more quickly we recognize types of thoughts, the less likely we are to be pulled into their web. This helps us release them and stay focused in the present or on the task at hand.

  A key facet of mindfulness is awareness of both experience and your relationship to experience. In this meditation, as you notice what types of thoughts arise, also notice how you react to them. Labeling thoughts with a negative emotional quality or tone helps indicate this reactivity. Does judgment arise, so that you snap your attention back harshly after being consumed in thoughts? The more you recognize how natural and human it is to be lost in thought, the more easily you will be able to find a sense of ease and humor with this process.

  Lastly, observe how much you take your thoughts to be reality. The thought of a ghost is not a ghost. It is simply an image in the mind. The more we believe our thoughts to be real, the more we will be sucked into them. The more you recognize the ephemeral, transient, and insubstantial nature of thoughts, the less hold they will have over you.

  Finally, bring awareness to the way you identify thoughts as yours, as if you are initiating them. Most of the time thoughts happen randomly or out of a complex web of causes and conditions. The more you can see thoughts as impersonally as clouds in a sky, the more you can create a more spacious relationship with them.