by Chris Grosso
It makes sense to meet people where they are, and even though I don’t work in the corporate world, his use of terminology didn’t throw me at all. Maybe it’s generational? Everyone on the planet can benefit from this stuff.
Michael kept me from getting too carried away. “I would qualify that and say there are certainly people who might need a specialized form of practice. If someone is undergoing a psychotic experience or has a serious mental illness, it might take a while to have the effect that we’re looking for, but yes, most people could use a nice dose of mindfulness.”
To take that thought further, I asked about another passage from The Mindful Geek, in which he presented the three elements, a meditation theory called CCA: concentration, clarity, and acceptance. Could he tell me more about it?
It turns out that it’s an adaptation of a theory from Michael’s teacher, Shinzen Young, who refers to the third element as equanimity instead of acceptance. Michael opted for acceptance over equanimity—which may be perceived by some as a “weird” Buddhist word—making the thought more accessible. “The two qualities—concentration and acceptance—are interesting. They go together in almost every form of meditation, whether it’s Buddhist or Hindu, whether it’s a concentration practice or Vipassana practice. You want to have a modicum of concentration, of being able to bring your attention to what you want to bring it to, when you want to bring it, for as much time as you want to bring it. In other words, concentration is paying attention to what you want to pay attention to.
“Then there’s acceptance, or equanimity, and that is the nonjudgmental part. You are accepting whatever is happening in a very matter-of-fact way. If your foot hurts, your foot hurts right now; it doesn’t have to be a big deal. If a weird, fucked-up, difficult, unpleasant thought is arising—well, that thought is arising, and you say okay. That’s the acceptance. When you put concentration and acceptance together, you can get some very powerful meditation going.
“However, the combination of concentration and acceptance is still a little broad. There are many different forms of meditation that fall under or employ these two features. What makes mindfulness special is the aspect of sensory clarity, wherein we try to deconstruct the sensory elements of experience in a very fine-grained way. Let’s go back to the foot. When people meditate on their foot, it’s not ‘Hey, there’s my foot, check, done’; it’s a matter of getting into the details of the feelings, and then the details of the details of the feeling, to the nth degree. That’s sensory clarity. If you have concentration and acceptance going, that’s good, but when you get into that sensory clarity element, that is when the meditation starts to go deep, deep, deep, deep.
“It’s simply taking the thread of sensory experience and following it. It’s like unraveling a sweater—you keep following that strand of wool all the way to the end, and at the end, the sweater isn’t there anymore and you have a skein of yarn. In the same way, if you take the thread of sensory experience of the feeling of your foot all the way to the end, it will unravel into emptiness.”
Michael had succeeded in expanding my understanding of mindfulness, so now I wanted to apply it to recovery. We’re all recovering from something, so how can mindfulness help us to truly heal? How can it lead to recovery from whatever dis-ease we’re suffering in our lives?
“This is a question I could go on about for a long time. The fundamental point is that mindfulness asks us to confront reality. This is the beginning and the end of how it helps us recover—from drugs or alcohol, emotional abuse, physical trauma or disease, or even the suffering of the everyday vagaries of existence. I’ve worked with mindfulness in this capacity with thousands of people and seen truly beautiful and inspiring results. We tend to want to think about anything but the main issue, because we know it hurts and has caused us a lot of pain. At the core of all of this is whatever behavior or whatever difficulty was there in the first place.”
To counteract this, we use drugs or Netflix or sex to numb ourselves. “These short-term coping mechanisms are things we absorbed by osmosis along the way. We absorbed them because they work a little bit, but the problem is that they all have downsides, and some downsides are bigger than others. An example of a large downside with almost no upside would be sniffing glue. It doesn’t do that much and it doesn’t do it for very long, but it will destroy your brain—yet there are people who use this as a coping mechanism.” But it’s not just drugs. “People can live their whole lives narcissistically self-absorbed in their own wonderfulness while ignoring their own pain and shortcomings and the real needs of others. A lot of people get a long way on that coping strategy, and yet it also has major downsides. The beautiful thing about mindfulness is that it says we’re not going to pretend that it didn’t happen, we’re not going to ignore the pain you’re in. We’re going to look at that clearly, and at the same time, we’re going to look at your strategy and how it does and doesn’t work, and think about other ways that might work better.”
Let’s say we’re doing what Michael suggested: We’re addressing the core of the problem—the pain and whatever else is coming up for us. What then? How do we engage and work with that?
“The first thing I want to come back to is that mindfulness allows you to see the core issue clearly. It’s not enough to say ‘Yes, that exists.’ You’ve got to get in there and notice the details. Once you do that, it gives you the means to move forward, because you’re no longer resisting it. A big part of people’s coping mechanisms is the desire not to engage pain—we want to move away from it—but mindfulness, from the beginning, is giving us the skill to engage it with at least a little bit of acceptance, and later with a lot of acceptance. If you’re already touching your pain and not resisting it and in fact meeting it with acceptance, you might already be past your addiction or bad behavior. It’s that move of first acknowledging pain and then accepting it—deeply and in detail—that is the essence of the practice.
“The short version is that you should approach the pain one tiny baby step at a time, taking on as much as you can handle, but not too much. That’s where kindness and compassion for yourself come in. Often people call this loving-kindness, but I don’t like that term. To me, that’s not the right translation or even the right mood for what works. What works is kindness. What happens is people, particularly people who have a long history of trauma and perhaps addiction, have a lot of material to beat themselves up about. If you’re going to add ‘I can’t accept my pain’ to the list, it’s not going to help.
“We must be extremely gentle with ourselves in this process and make sure that we’re not overwhelmed. Make sure that we’re not re-traumatizing ourselves or beating ourselves up. All it takes is sitting with kindness—that’s the whole thing. Sitting with it with kindness and caring, and the minute it’s too much, the minute it feels like it’s doing damage, then you back off. The thing is, it’s going to hurt. I don’t mean that you should back off the minute it hurts. You’ve got to be willing to sit with some pain, but it’s when the pain is being mean to yourself or overwhelming, or somehow too much.”
In other words, directly acknowledge the pain or suffering in an experiential way. “It’s not enough to say ‘Yes, I’m in pain.’ You must acknowledge and experience it. Then, little by little, accept it. To me, that’s the entirety of the path. Simple, but not necessarily easy at all.”
I couldn’t get enough of The Mindful Geek. I had one more excerpt I loved and had to share:
When I first began teaching meditation, I thought that nothing could be easier than asking students to relax. Who wouldn’t like that? Boy, did my students teach me differently. Asking them to relax elicited a variety of negative responses. Some people got upset, anxious, or angry in feeling that they were doing it wrong. Others noticed that they were not relaxed, and got freaked out by how stressed they felt. Still others felt that they couldn’t relax, no matter how hard they tried. Sometimes the response I got was basically, “You want me to relax?! Fuck You!” 2
Why do so many people have this reaction when they first come to meditation?
Michael said, “It’s that we live in a stressed-out society, and the triggers—fear, oversaturation, overwhelm, and things like that—are driving the stress. If people are working through a lot of issues with something like substance addiction or some psychological material, there’s a strong need to not go there and be distracted from it. Simply being asked to relax is like saying, ‘Um, hey, get well.’ On top of it, we don’t live in a very relaxing society, and it’s hard for people. You’d think it would be easy, but this is the same reason many people have difficulty falling asleep at night—all the bed wants from you is for you to relax.”
This brought up something that I still deal with quite often—coping with too much feeling, that experience of being emotionally overwhelmed that can occur while meditating (or, honestly, at any given moment of the day). Could Michael talk about that and what meditators can do when it happens?
The initial prognosis wasn’t great: “It will continue to happen. I don’t believe there’s a healthy state of a human being where you don’t have emotions, including negative emotions, and there will always be the possibility of overwhelm that’s called life.” Fortunately, it gets better: “There’s nothing wrong with that. If overwhelm happens, whether it’s on the cushion or walking around, we need to be able to work with that. The number-one thing is acceptance. ‘Okay, I’m having an overwhelming emotional experience right now. I’m freaking out.’ That’s not bad, and that doesn’t make me a shitty meditator—that makes me a person. That’s fine.
“Beyond that, you should realize that we spend our days trying to suppress emotions, especially negative emotions. We’re trying to hold them in. You can feel it because emotions are bodily sensations. We try to contain them, squeeze them down, and then distract, distract, distract. That’s the social method. ‘Let’s watch a movie instead of feeling those feelings.’ When you’re meditating and you’re more open, you start to feel it more, or sometimes stuff gets to be too big to ignore. You may start to freak out, but the main thing to understand is the difference between the physical part of the emotion and the ideas about it. Most of the overwhelm and freak-out part is from the ideas about the emotions, because the actual body sensations, no matter how uncomfortable they get, aren’t that bad. They’re not as bad as hitting your thumb with a hammer.
“It’s the reaction to the emotion and the ideas about the emotion that start to turn it into something that’s difficult. Number one is noticing the difference between the body sensation of the emotion and the thoughts about it. Once you start tracking those separately, it cuts the feedback loop between ‘I’m having a feeling in my body’ and ‘Oh my God! I’m having a feeling; I’m thinking about it and freaking out,’ which causes more feeling to happen, which causes more freaking out to happen. They’re tied together, so when you start tracking body sensations, emotion, and thoughts separately—detangling those, to use Shinzen’s term—you stop the feedback and they’re easier to handle.”
This talk of detangling brought me to thoughts of nondual awareness versus nondualism, something else I wanted to discuss. In his book Nondualism, Michael wrote:
Nondual awareness is an experience.
Nondualism is a philosophy that talks about that experience and its meaning.
These two things are very different, and confusing them can lead to all sorts of problems.3
How would he elaborate on that point so we could avoid confusion and subsequent problems?
“Twenty years ago, I noticed a giant resurgence of interest in nondualism in America, particularly with Neo-Advaita derived from the teachings of Ramana Maharshi, but also in the Buddhist world. What was interesting, especially in the Neo-Advaita community but also in general, was that people were giving instructions and talking about their nondual experience, which was cool and a powerful teaching, but I noticed that there seemed to be a fundamental lack of any understanding about the history of people doing this and the philosophy behind it. There was also an active aggression toward talking about the history or the philosophy. I understand that we want to get people out of their conceptual bubbles and heads and into their nondual experience, but I felt that was happening at the expense of thousands of years of experience and knowledge. It doesn’t somehow ding my nondual experience to talk about nondual philosophy. I got fed up with this anti-intellectual strain of nondual teaching in America.”
I always found this fascinating. Could he talk about the ways in which these seemingly contradictory statements were pointing to the same thing?
Michael explained that the teachings of nondualism come from various Upanishads, the sacred Indian texts that emerged before Buddhism and modern Hinduism, around 800 BCE to 500 BCE. One of the best-known mantras from the Upanishads is Tat Tvam Asi, which means “thou art that” or “you are it.” Michael told me, “What that basically means—and this is a fundamental statement of nondualism—is, if you’re looking at a chair, you’re a chair. If you’re feeling a breeze, you’re the breeze. If you see the sun, you’re the sun. Thou art that. You are it. There’s no difference between you and that thing.
“We could contrast this with neti neti, which means ‘not it’ or ‘not this, not that,’ and is another way of teaching nondualism. It says no matter what you see, hear, feel, you are not that—you are not the chair, you are not the breeze or the sun or whatever. Tat Tvam Asi and neti neti sound like diametric opposites. Which is it? This is where the teachings point to the essence of the matter:
“It’s simple, honestly. Your brain is a bunch of meat inside a bone cage. It’s sealed in a box, and it’s got peripheral devices telling it about the outside world—our eyes and ears, etc. The brain is receiving those signals from the peripheral devices and decoding them and assembling them into a picture of a self and a world. If you understand that, you’ll get everything you need to know about nondualism.
“Because if that’s the case, then the brain’s experience of the outside world, its sights and sounds, and the inside worlds, the feelings of your body and thoughts, all arise in the same generated model of the exterior and interior world all at once. I’ll put it another way: It’s a virtual world you build in your head. It’s like being in a first-person shooter game—the avatar, the weapon, the battlefield, and the guy’s head that you’re blowing off are all on a screen, it’s all the same thing. What these two sayings from the Upanishads are trying to tell us is, you can think of yourself as being everything on that screen equally, or nothing on the screen completely. It means the same thing, because everything that’s arising in sensory experience is activity or signals in sensory experience. Every thought or feeling of being you is equivalent to every external experience of the sun rising or a tree in the wind, because it’s all sensory signals. From a nondual perspective, you’re either identified with all the sensory signals equally or noticing that you are simply the awareness of those sensory signals and are none of the content—not your thoughts, not your feelings, not any of it.”
That was pretty much the best description of Vedic nondualism I’d ever heard. How would that look in the Western traditions?
Michael helped me see how it’s the same thing. “Nobody owns human experience.” I’m just going to repeat that because it’s so fucking great: Nobody owns human experience. Okay, back to Michael, who said, “People everywhere at all times have the capacity to notice nondual experience. In Western tradition, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, there are certainly plenty of people having nondual experience and talking about nondual experience, particularly like some of the well-known Christian saints, the Hasidic or cabalistic masters in Judaism, and the Sufis in Islam. They describe this experience, and one of the interesting things about nondual experience is that it doesn’t have any problem talking about God. You can have a theistic nondualism as easily as you can have a nontheistic dualism, but in certain ways Western religion is friendly toward nondualism.”
Okay, then—so what can nondualism teach us about healing and potentially avoiding relapse altogether or returning to self-destructive behaviors? Is it even possible?
Before he could give me a full answer, Michael wanted to define relapse. “My view on any bad behavior or addiction is simple. It’s not a problem unless it’s a problem. Everything we do in life is in one way or another a habit, and habits themselves are not the problem. It’s not bad to have the habit of brushing your teeth. It’s not bad to have the habit of checking the rearview mirror while you’re driving on the highway. Why don’t people call those addictions? Because they’re not a problem, they’re a benefit. To me, relapse indicates returning to a behavior that is destructive, that is causing issues in your life. You know it, you know it’s bad, you know that it’s going to cause trouble, and yet, for whatever reason, you decide to go back in and engage that behavior again. It’s that simple.”
I needed to unpack that! I’ve experienced several relapses, the last one almost killing me. I know many other people who’ve struggled with relapse for years—not just with drugs and alcohol, but with food, shopping, and relationships as well. From Michael’s point of view, what’s happening when we decide to go back to those behaviors? To stay in the bad habits?
