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''Mindfulness,'' a quality aspired to by practitioners of what is called insight meditation (known as Vipassana in the Buddhist tradition), isn't that easy to explain.
This much I get: It's not about emptying the mind, which is what I'd always assumed. In a sense, insight meditation is the opposite; it involves noting the ebb and flow of one's feelings and thoughts and allowing oneself to ''sit with,'' or fully experience, whatever comes up -- even discomfort and pain...
Mindfulness means allowing these shifts to occur while remaining present -- that is, without latching on to any one feeling (Oh, no, I'm afraid! Why am I afraid? It's bad, I have to find a way to stop being afraid . . .) or using it as fodder for a familiar narrative about oneself (I'm always afraid, it's a weakness in me; even when I was a kid, I was afraid all the time . . .). Being ''in the story'' is a meditation term for getting caught in a repeating narrative about oneself that feels deeply true but in fact is just habit -- the result of psychological conditioning. Of course, avoiding such thinking can be extremely difficult even while meditating -- we're narrative creatures, and the mind's play often leads quite naturally into
storytelling.
The power of insight meditation, proponents say, lies in its ability to make people aware of, and ultimately free from, the obsessive and restrictive thought patterns that can compromise their relationships and work and lives. Of course, personal transformation, that quieter variant of the American dream, has been the goal of numerous practices and programs -- from Gestalt therapy to Eastern religious practices, from encounter groups to EST -- that have been grouped together by some as the Human Potential movement, an explosion of interest in consciousness and spirituality dating from the early 1960's. Nowadays, the Human Potential movement is wiser and more subdued: there is a general wariness of gurus and abusive teaching practices, a skepticism toward overnight enlightenment and an emphasis on incorporating personal growth and spiritual practice into an integrated life.
Peter Williams spent years in therapy, but found that psychology alone was not transformative enough. ''Therapy helped me,'' he says, ''but it wasn't until I went on a three-month silent retreat that I really got a lot of what my therapist had been telling me for years. I could start to see, My God, I'm just sitting here editing and judging myself day after day after day. You get confronted with it, and it's so painful because there's no escape from it. And the only solution is kindness. Acceptance. Acceptance is not a passive thing. The more you accept, the more you energize your whole being.''
An enormous nexus exists between therapy and insight meditation; all five teachers on the Spirit Rock retreat are therapists, and they have a tendency to discuss meditation using therapeutic language. One teacher, Tara Brach, says: ''More than any other kind of suffering people bring in to me is the suffering of feeling deficient, unworthy in some way. Psychotherapy works on that somewhat -- you're bringing out the nature of the wound and how to address it. But what Buddhism brings to the mix is a way of cultivating compassion for what's going on. You're actually learning to reparent yourself.''
Williams delights in pointing out the little ways in which a silent retreat can teach him about suffering. ''One thing that has been driving me crazy is people coughing,'' he says. ''When you become concentrated, you really polish the sense store, your awareness is really heightened. This person who sits near me coughs really loudly, and I literally feel it in the marrow of my bones. And there's nothing you can do, except just note the pain of the situation.''
Another time, a woman vomited beside him in the meditation hall, then resumed her meditation. ''But life is chaotic, you can't control it,'' he says, laughing. ''May everything in experience lead to awareness. O.K., I have this disgust, and I have this disbelief, and then it's gone. New experience. That's the absolute crux of the practice, learning to be at ease with pleasure and pain. Think about that: if you don't care if the next moment is comfortable or uncomfortable, you're free.''
-- Jennifer Egan, "Waiting for Mindfulness," New
York Times Magazine
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