Resiliency of Awareness
This is an edited version of the Zoom talk I gave for the Wednesday Night Sitting Group on January 19, 2022 in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada
At the beginning of a new year, many of us feel as though we are getting a fresh start. And yet, we are always in transition. We are always changing, shifting and experiencing ourselves in new ways and hopefully, we are being conscious of that, as well. It would be like pressing a refresh button all the time.
Recently, I designed a new website. Once it was ready to be launched, I needed to transition the domain holder to my new host. As I sense into my own changing identity, it felt symbolic for me to bring forth a fresh look and a new feel to my website. To transition the connection from the domain holder to the new host takes about three days and in order to find out if it was working correctly, I needed to go to the data page and keep refreshing the window. I would open the page and press Refresh and then a bit later, Refresh. For about three days, it was like a mantra for me — Refresh, Refresh. It felt like a wonderful meditation and reminder for my mind and heart.
The world has changed so drastically in the past two years. We are entering our third year in this pandemic. A buzz word that has come along with it is “resiliency”, which is really referring to a capacity for emotional resiliency. Without resiliency, we can easily be taken over by the emotional intensity of the situation, or by our reactions to the way things are. And in these challenging times, we can sometimes feel like there is no ground beneath our feet — no safe place to stand. We can feel a deep sense of insecurity.
But what is true safety in an unsafe world? This is an important question for us to ask at this time. Because what needs to be understood is that the safety we are looking for cannot be found in this world. In this world, nothing stays the same. There is no stable ground. Nothing is truly fixed or solid,. Everything is out of our control. Without access to an inner refuge, or sense of inner safety, this feels scary and can be destabilizing.
For me, what the practice has been about since I first stepped on the path is to find true refuge. As human beings, we need to feel safe to move forward, to transform, to change. Feeling safe is what allows us to let go of what doesn’t serve us anymore because we have a ground under our feet as the world spins.
Neuroscientists say that our fear reactions come from the reptilian brain (or the lizard brain) which essentially controls our survival instinct. It is also referred to as the animal soul. It’s what activates the fight, flight or freeze responses. When we are resilient, we are operating from a different location altogether. We can call this our higher mind, or wisdom-awareness and this is what we strengthen in our meditation practices.
This gives us a clue to finding our true refuge, our true safety. We need to know where to look. One of my favorite Mullah Nasruddin stories (Nasruddin was a Sufi mystic and wise man in 13th C Turkey). Someone comes across him at night, standing under a lamp post and asked, “Nasruddin, what are you doing out here at night?” And he says, “I’ve lost my keys.” And the friends says, “Well, where did you lose them?” And Nasruddin says, “In the house, but I’m looking out here because there is more light.” In the same way, we look in the wrong place to find our true refuge. It is not in the worldly conditions, but within our own mind and heart.
Tonight, I’d like to explore the awareness that we develop in our meditation as a way to access this sense of safety, resiliency, ground of support — our true refuge. To help frame this discussion, I’d like to draw on one of Mingyur Rinpoche’s teachings in his book called, Joyful Wisdom: Embracing Change and Finding Freedom (copyright 2009, Harmony Books). I appreciated the way he writes about awareness. He is essentially writing about resiliency and the way to find the ground of support that brings us balance in the face of uncertainty. (I’ll include his words in italics).
He begins, “Ordinarily, our minds are like flags in the wind, fluttering this way and that, depending on which way the wind blows. Even if we don’t want to feel angry, jealous, lonely or depressed, we are carried away by such feelings…We are not free; We can’t see other options, other possibilities.” What is necessary is awareness — the basis, or support of the mind. This is the foundation, or ground of our being.
Why is this? Because, “It is steady, unchanging, like the pole to which the flag of ordinary consciousness is attached.” Awareness in itself is equanimous because of its steadiness. It is not reactive. We can say that it is even non-preferential.
Our goal is to become grounded in this awareness. Mingyur Rinpoche says, “The wind of emotions may still blow. But instead of being carried away by the wind, we turn our attention inward…and become the witness or the watcher.” I would call this an embodied awareness. Drawing on the body as a support for awareness brings us in contact with the totality of our experience. We can witness the contents of both body and mind.
Mingyur Rinpoche says, turn your attention inward and become the witness. And this is the first step in our awareness practice. As soon as we do this, there is space. There is some detachment. We are not completely identified with what’s happening in the mind, in the body or with emotions. There is some separation. There is the instant recognition that we are more than just our minds and bodies.
And here is the key. Our intention shifts to knowing the ground of awareness rather than identifying with the emotions, with our thoughts and feelings. And this is why we call it practice. We are not disconnecting from our experience. We are still curious about what’s happening. There is the recognition, “I’m thinking this, I’m feeling this”. But now there is more space to recognize this. We aren’t as swallowed up in the intensity of what’s happening.
Mingyur Rinpoche calls this space “the mind’s natural clarity”. And as we sense this space, we can begin to settle and expand. He says, “We can still feel our feelings, think our thoughts, but slowly our identity shifts from a person who defines him or herself as lonely, ashamed, frightened, [unworthy] to a person who can look at [all that occurs] as movements of the mind.” I call this shifting our location, finding another perch from which to see things, to know things, where our wisdom and compassion can flow. One teacher calls this, the “eagle’s perch.”
Now we are getting a sense of what brings about resiliency. We begin to develop and establish stability in awareness so we can be with our experience without wavering.
Let’s go a little bit further into the subtly. Usually this teaching is given on intensive retreats where the conditions support a sustained awareness of our experience. But under the present circumstances, we need it for our daily practice now.
In his book, Mingyur Rinpoche breaks down the practice into many different stages but I’m condensing the teaching into two parts for brevity and simplicity. He starts with pointing out two types of awareness that he calls ordinary awareness and meditative awareness. Ordinary awareness is when we simply know what’s happening. This is basic Vipassana practice, or the practice of bare attention, or mindfulness. “I know what I’m thinking, seeing, feeling, hearing, tasting. I know what’s happening in my mind and body, the five senses.
It’s called ordinary because it’s happening all the time when awareness is present. And that’s the caveat because most of us are not aware all the time. We are often identified with and lost in our thoughts and emotions. This ordinary awareness could also be called, being and knowing. For example, we see a bird. We don’t think about whether it’s a good bird or bad bird, whether it’s beautiful or not beautiful. It’s just what it is before any commentary. There is a simple acknowledgement of what is there with very little judgment. Even if our experience is not clear, we notice that. This is the first step.
The second kind of awareness is meditative awareness. This is a more subtle lens that Mingyur Rinpoche calls “developing attentional muscles,” where we can observe more complex patterns without getting lost. Take any predominant pattern that’s arising — anger, irritation, self-righteousness, impatience, self-pity, unworthiness, hopelessness, fear, shame, we can apply meditative awareness.
The difference between ordinary and meditative awareness is that the later is a way of paying attention where we take our experience as an opportunity to stabilize our awareness. We take it on as a practice to find our ground, our resiliency, our equanimity, right in the middle of our experience. Our intention is clear. We are not trying to problem solve, or analyze, or feed the story which only feeds the emotional intensity.
This is what Mingyur Rinpoche recommends as a practice which I’ll paraphrase. First, as we sense into our body, emotions and thoughts, we begin breaking down what seems complex and overwhelming to just one mind moment at a time. Just one moment — in order to see that there are many parts to the experience. There is the mind — our thoughts which make up the story line or content of our experience. There is the emotional impact which can be felt in the mind and body — our fear, resentment, jealousy, envy, anger, for example. There are also physical sensations in the body, like tightening in the stomach, heat, shortness of breath, rapid heart beat. There may be images in the mind, almost like a movie playing out. We might see someone mad at us or giving someone else the attention we crave. We are visited by memories. All of this has an emotional impact.
Mingyur Rinpoche points out that as you look with meditative awareness, the complex becomes like a bubble in which there are many smaller bubbles. Applying your attention to the smaller bubbles develops your capacity to look at these more overwhelming patterns or triggers. Doing it this way breaks down the bigness, or sense of solidity into manageable bits. As you watch these smaller bubbles, your thoughts, and sensations shift and change. When a bubble within the bubble pulls your attention, then you can focus on that smaller bubble with meditative awareness. You see how experience can become more and more subtle.
For those of you who have sat in intensive retreat, this is the same method we practice then. Since our awareness becomes more stable over the days of retreat, it can be easier to sustain our attention in this way. But the intention here is to bring this way of practicing into our daily lives — to approach our experience with meditative awareness so that it becomes our home base. As Mingyur Rinpoche says, “…gradually your attention will shift from identifying as swallowed up in an emotional bubble to the one watching the bubble.” This is the game changer — to live in the world as we are, not as we think we are.
In the last part of this chapter, he says there is one thing isn’t emphasized enough, and that is sometimes we need to just stop our practice. We need to take a break. When do we stop our practice? He says, when you lose your focus or feel disgusted to go forward. When the mind is dull or confused. When the method seems unclear. Whatever you try, practice doesn’t work. You feel doubtful anything will work. Your reservoir is empty. At these times we don’t want to push through because there is an empty reservoir.
Mingyur Rinpoche draws on this analogy: The concepts of, ’dry channel’ or ‘empty reservoir’ comes from, “… irrigation practices implemented by Tibetan farmers who would plant their fields around a natural reservoir, such as a small pond or lake, around which they’d dig channels that would run through crops. Sometimes, even if the channels were well dug, there wasn’t much water flowing through them, because the reservoir itself was empty. Similarly, even when you practice, even though you have clear instructions and you understand the importance of effort and intention, you can experience fatigue, irritation, dullness or hopelessness because your mental, emotional and physical “reservoir” is empty.” Then, he says, short practice periods are important to refill our reservoirs. We don’t throw the practice away. Just take short practice periods throughout the day.