Not

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Not trying

'When you think critical things about someone, you can stop yourself from doing that. And if you do that enough, in the end it means you get less critical of yourself inside your head.' Eleanor is new in the Mindfulness for Retirement Group and, as some people do, is teaching us the things she believes she is here to learn. 

As the teacher I tend to leave people to do what they have to do, unless it touches on some misunderstanding of the basics. Today I use her statement as a teaching opportunity.

'Thank you Eleanor. Yes of course, you might want to abstain from being critical, ha ha, but this points to a basic difference between mindfulness and other ways of dealing with stress. In mindfulness it's not about trying to be better. It's not about doing anything special to correct something you see in yourself, or in other people. You notice and accept how things are, and that's it. That's all you need. The rest will take care of itself.'

Gabi at the end of the table looks privately intrigued and her gaze turns inwards. Bridget next to me grabs a gusty breath and starts writing a note for herself. 

I'm thinking - hah! she hasn't got it yet! 

Walking home, the cut-through to my road is strewn with white rubbish. Bleached paper, card and polystyrene with smears of ketchup, chewed by the foxes and left across the path. What kind of people would think it was all right to leave it there? 

Aware that I'm the one being critical now, I ask myself how I could welcome the litter, embrace the people. I deliberately open up over my heart. I deliberately watch the critique pass through and I'm rewarded with a wave of sympathy for all the adults in the world striving to do what they think they have to do to get by. To be successful, to be popular, or just to feed their families and keep a roof over their heads. 

All that wrong-headed striving is tragic, I tell myself. Of course I know it, I said, repeating to myself what I believe I need to learn, I've done so much of it myself. 

As I reach the end of the cut-through, I remember an evening after a long meditation session when I was walking through the dusky park and effortlessly I saw how the people there, the mothers and lonely ones and the workers blindly thrusting through it were all trying so very hard and I loved them for it. It was the kind of love you feel for a child learning to walk. Fighting gravity over and over and innocently failing. And innocently, sweetly, pushing themselves up onto their feet and trying again.

Not understanding

Later in the evening I am working on the question What is my true nature? in a Zen dyad session. The idea of the session is to help you be mindful with the question in front of you by having the undivided attention of your partner. On the computer screen in front of me is the woman who is talking about her question, and it's my job for the next five minutes to listen to her with focus, as much as possible without visibly reacting. And then it will be my turn. 

She is talking about how the hospital is still whatsapping her three hours after her working day was supposed to finish. I'm wondering why she doesn't just turn it off. I put the thought behind me. She has an oddly proportioned face that's too smooth, as if she's had a lot of cosmetic work. I try to stop myself wondering if I'm right about that. I start feeling sorry for her that she felt she needed to. I wonder if I'm allowed to smile at her and decide not. The gong goes for my turn to talk. 

I bring myself back from her uncanny face to the question, my mindful focus for the next five minutes. What is my true nature?

I hear myself saying, 'I am not a particle floating on the wave, I am part of the universal wave of change.' I'm pleased with the sound of it, like a wise saying. And the universal wave of change sounds right, but I don't really believe it. I'm just saying it to get it out of my head. To better work out why it's wrong.

'I don't know.' However I approach this question, whatever I do with it, I still don't know the answer. I don't know anything and I never have and that's the gravity I've been fighting. Over and over.

I am uncomfortable however I sit. Shuffling and shifting in the hope of finding a position that will soothe my hunched shoulders and stiff neck, but the painful tension returns in minutes. I feel bad for moving so much and bad for saying something I don't believe and bad for not believing what I'm saying and bad for judging someone by their appearance and bad for not being wise already. She's definitely had a nosejob.

I close my eyes to refocus and drop the question into the middle of my body, down to my gut below the navel and up pops the image of my body as a jug or vase. The image is so clear and precise that I actually believe it. 

'I am a hollow container like a jug. Something without purpose itself other than to contain. This body is a mask...' She nods agreement. Like you're not supposed to.

'No not quite a mask'. A surface irrelevance. 'Is there a word for it?' I see how the person in front of me has an irrelevant surface layer, and see how the image from inside is an unimportant layer of surface. 

Cosmetic! Yes!

'I don't know.' Not knowing can be tactful too. Breathe.

'What's in the jug? A small corner of the space of the universe?' 

I don't know, that's a bit fey? I'm guessing and rehashing things I've read or heard, or extrapolated from something I've read or heard. I wish I wish I wish.

'Oh God! I'm wishing that I could already be living in some future time when I've stopped fighting myself! But I need to be here right now in this chair instead.' The gong sounds. I thank her.

The blond woman opposite flicks a finger at the world with her hair.

'I don't give a fuck about this frigging koan any more, 'scuse my pottymouth.' She looks to her right, away from the screen.

A koan is a question that doesn't make sense to the intellectual brain but does from another perspective. And this question is a koan! 

I find my shoulders softening and the breath sighing out with the relief of not having to keep up trying to understand. Not having to work it out in my churning head. Sighing out gratitude to this person for helping me get here to this freedom from striving. I am back in my chair and out of my head for once.

'I don't know why I plan plan plan all the time', she's complaining, 'It's not like I know what's going to happen. It's not like I can predict which of my cancer patients is going to come back as an emergency tomorrow.' To me it doesn't seem quite genuine. 

I have sympathy for my earlier striving self, for all the time and effort I have put in to trying to understand the rules for a better life; to understand who I am as if that would solve life for me; to work everything out through asking what my true nature might be. As if the not knowing in my head were the ultimate sign of a hopeless case. But what if a baby tried to work out the physics of walking before they could let themselves walk? 

I know now that my labellings and categorisings and rules and prohibitions have twisted me into something that's smaller than my true nature. All the things and feelings and expectations and memories that are mine are only interfering with my true nature. These are what I want to let go of, so that I can be free to live.

'I'm so tired. So so tired. I don't have a life and when I get home all they do is chase me with their whatsapps.'

I see in this moment that being and living is the only way to 'know' my true nature, just as allowing our bodies to work with gravity instead of against it is the only way to 'learn' to walk. My I don't know isn't my intrinsic failure as a person, it's my head tragically believing that it has to understand before I can live.

Without any fanfare, without any drama, I find I hold the committed intention to let those accretions go, like dropping my clothes to the floor so I can be fully myself and nothing more. The bare unadorned me.

I imagine for a moment that will make me courageous. But no, that will make the whole idea of courage unnecessary. A rock doesn't need courage. The wind doesn't need courage. They just are. 

The gong goes. It's my turn to talk.

I find myself to my surprise sitting straight naturally, with ease. 

'I suddenly feel ...dignified!' My body is released from all the calcified screwing up and here it is, a being poised with intrinsic dignity. 

I am a prince. 

Of course I'm not a prince, (I'm not deluded), but that is the feeling. A prince of ancient lineage with a right to be here, just sitting on an ancient rock, with no need or impulse to do or be anything else. 

Dignity that was here all along under the accretions of crap, here before I was born, and here, in some way I don't try to understand, after I die.

I remember the moment in the 80s when Greed was in the cinemas and every success story was about a psychopath and I imagined what it would be like to let go of my strict moral scruples. I would be strong and clear and nothing would shake me. That is what it felt like in my cramped imagination, free and unmoveable. But of course there's a difference now; this time letting go isn't the high road to perdition. This time the letting go has taken me home.

'The rules I make for myself are a distraction from the point. A misunderstanding of what's necessary. Letting go is what's needed. But words aren't really adequate...'

I don't make any obstacle to the world in this place, because I have let go of all the things I thought I had to have about myself, and therefore there is nothing here. It's very simple.

'The world around me is continuous all the way through the place where I thought I was.' I'm trying to explain it to her. Of course my body is here, I can see parts of it, but there's nothing of the old screwed up person I thought I was. It really isn't explainable to someone who isn't there yet.

'I made it all up, and there is nothing else here!' I want this person to know for herself. That striving is the opposite of the way. And I am striving to get her to understand. When understanding is the opposite of the way.

'This is not at all what I thought this was going to be like.' Because it isn't mystical at all, there's nothing ecstatic or visionary here. It just is. 

There's nothing in me that wants to fight against it, demand I prove it, be cynical about it. It's as plain and undramatic as the back of my head. I can't see the back of my head. And I can't see anything that is here in the place that I thought I was, now that I've let go of the complicated things I invented about myself.

Not mysterious

I remember Paul, someone well ahead of me on the letting go road, saying 'Yes, it's bizarre that they made a whole religion out of this.' Yes, it's truly bizarre, because there is in fact no mystery.

From this place, I think, nothing and nobody is able to hurt me. Even if they hurt me I won't be hurt. I can do whatever needs to be done at the moment that needs it. I can say whatever needs to be said at the moment that needs it. And, as seems right just now, I can do and say nothing, and just enjoy this world where I am here, an ancient rock that is no obstacle to the world. 

My dyad partner is looking down now, perhaps reading her whatsapp messages. I remain unchanged.

Now I know what wise men mean about being a mirror - the world is not distorted around me any more. But I also know there never was a mirror. The world is here, in the place where I previously imagined I was walled off from it. I am The Person Formally Known As Separate.

I look at the person I'm not currently talking to. What I see now is that she is also not an obstacle to the world, and that we are in our true nature not separate either. We are not separate from each other. I'm not sure why I would try to tell her this as if we were.

Because there is no each. There is no other. Not because we are somehow part of a magic universe where the impossible is possible, but because we are not what we have believed ourselves to be. We are not separate particles in the waves of the universal ocean, we are not. 

We are, truly and naturally, not.