We spent an hour just breathing in and out, and you know, it turned out to be pretty interesting. When thoughts came up, we were supposed to just nod to them, then let them go and return to our breathing. Thoughts and breathing, thoughts and breathing, and then as I kept doing this, I noticed something more, some part of me that I hadn't known before, that was watching all this going on, a quiet, wise old part who was just looking at it all and nodding OK. He'd been doing that all along without my knowing it. I thought of him as an old guy with a white beard. But he was me, that was my Buddha mind.
The next hour we were supposed to keep breathing and watching our thoughts, but at the same time notice everything happening around us right here and now. That turned out to be quite a lot. It's amazing what all is going on that we don't pay attention to because we're shut off in our thoughts -- worrying about what happened in the past and what might happen in the future. Esther, the group leader, called this our monkey mind because it's always jumping from one thing to another. It gets lost in each thing and doesn't have any perspective on itself. But the Buddha mind, that silent witness, can give us a peaceful perspective on ourselves and the world.
From that deeper level I noticed how much beauty shone in simple things: a beaded curtain of eucalyptus buds swaying in the breeze, dust drifting through sunlight, a fly walking on the wall. Watching these while quietly breathing in and out, I could tell the buds, the dust, the fly, and I were all part of the Buddha mind. It wasn't just my mind but something we shared. This was a bit spooky because it meant there was more to me than me, or there was less of me than me, depending on how I looked at it.
Esther said each of us isn't an autonomous monad but an aspect of a larger wholeness. She compared the Buddha mind to the entire light spectrum, which is mostly invisible to us, and individuals to the colors we see. Colors and individuals appear to be different, but they're just sections of the overall spectrum. Continuity is more basic than differences, but we don't see it that way. The same analogy works with the ocean. We are waves that think of ourselves as self-contained units, but we're really just water that has temporarily taken on this form. Our true identity, the water, isn't born and doesn't die. It just is. The wave suffers because of its delusion of individuality, the water doesn't. This principle simultaneously destroys our concept of ourselves and gives us a greater one.
What she was saying was heavy-duty stuff, but it clicked in me because it described how I was feeling just sitting there breathing and paying attention. I signed up for the next weekend.
During the week I practiced mindful breathing and awareness as much as I could, which wasn't very much. It was almost impossible while I was listening to Pashto in the language lab. I could sort of do it during the regular classes between having to give answers. I could do it best when I was alone, but I was hardly ever alone. We did everything as a group. At meals people wanted to talk, and if I would've told them I just wanted to pay attention to my breathing, they would've thought I was crazy. Finally I came up with the trick of putting my MP3 in my ears but with no music. During meals I could eat in silence, and no one bothered me because they thought I was listening to rock songs and that they could understand. Some of the people I usually ate with did think I was being unfriendly, but I didn't know how to explain it.
One night as I was doing mindful breathing trying to go to sleep, all these scenes of war came rushing out at me -- people getting blown up, crippled orphans, survivors filled with a grief that turns into hatred. They took me over like an invading army. My throat tightened, and I started to hyperventilate -- gasping for air, feeling like I was suffocating. Not exactly the desired effect! I kept with the mindful breathing, though, and rode the turbulence through into calmness again. Gradually I stopped trembling, and the thoughts backed off, but I knew the war was still out there waiting for me.
The second weekend was called Buddha Heart, Buddha Hands. We did walking meditations where we integrated our breath with our steps, walking slowly and noticing everything happening in and around us from the deep inner peace of mindfulness. Now we did more than observe it. We tuned in to the feeling level of what was going on. Esther told us first to feel our own emotions as we were walking, to open up to them, accept them, and embrace them with compassion. When we can accept our pain without resentment, we're ready to love our whole self, warts and all.
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