On mindfulness and Tonglen

“Undisciplined squads of emotion.”–TS Eliot

He could have been talking about me. Yup … all of you here understand this at least about me! I live primarily where my emotions take me.

I have been thinking quite a lot about mindfulness lately. It’s as if Teh Universe keeps prodding me with a stick, saying “learn this”. Discussions I’ve had with unconnected people (that is, to each other). Things I’ve read. Such ongoing synchronicity. And each thing after the other settling that little bit deeper in me.

I’m very well aware of how deeply I live in my emotions. How I feel every moment and feel everyone else’s moments as well 🙂 How I’d bend to the will of my moods. How undisciplined it is, as TS Eliot said.

“I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger than reason.”–Anais Nin.

My friend Rena said of herself “But it also delivers me into the arms of intense beauty, sensitivity, and a lot of other wonderful things.” and so it applies to me too. The enjoyment and the soul in music, poetry, literature and art for one thing. It can be a beautiful thing, this living in extremes of emotion, but it can also something entirely too solipsistic and anxiety-making by the act of wallowing, the giving the emotion full reign over me.

And so I’ve been thinking of mindfulness in relation to emotion. Mindfulness, properly speaking, is about being mindful of your thoughts. Of having the ability to watch your thoughts as if from outside, without judgement of the thoughts or yourself. About realising you the person, and your thoughts, are two different things, as in “I am not my thoughts”. The separation of thoughts from the I.

Mindfulness is something that is cultivated on many esoteric and hermetic paths of wisdom. The two I’m most in tune with being Buddhism and Anthroposophy. It is the aim of both to develop equanimity. It’s often used in tandem with Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, a method of counselling or therapy very widely used by psychologists, particularly in relation to depression where it has had wonderful results, which challenges the thought processes.

You can choose your thoughts. So too, supposedly (so I’ve heard haha!), you can choose your emotions. Or at the very least, I’m thinking, you can be aware of them and where they are leading you. Thereby allowing you to divert their path, if you want. That is not to say by being mindful of your emotions you need deny them … disconnect yourself from feeling. No not at all. More allow you to keep a lid on them, keep them contained. This weekend, unintentionally, I’ve found myself doing this … being aware of what I’m starting to feel (not that I’m ever unaware, but as if looking from outside), and thinking about the actual feeling and asking myself am I being sensible or allowing it to take me somewhere that has no validity right now. Yes, I still feel uncomfortable about what is going on and the emotions it is bring up, but I’m not wallowing in angsty depths of despair. My intuition is working overtime about something and I know that things are not perhaps as the seem, but I’m not giving into it wholeheartedly as I normally would.

Unintentionally it has happened, this sitting back from myself and observing. Perhaps by osmosis from this constant synchronicity taking place. Who knows … but I do know I need to work on this, to keep practicing and developing some balance in my emotional life.

Almost side by side with this constant ‘prodding’ about mindfulness has been the thinking about the Buddhist practice of Tonglen … a meditation designed to develop compassion. Very basically it is about taking in (and on) the suffering of another (or yourself), taking that pain and letting yourself feel it. Breathing it in and feeling it. Then breathing out and sending peace, joy, happiness… whatever you can that might ease their pain. And then realising that you are connected with all sentient beings … that millions of others are suffering and perhaps feeling the same exact thing you are at that moment and letting yourself feel that, then sending out relief. The idea is to develop compassion.

When I first read about Tonglen it worried me. For myself that is. I already feel the pain … I don’t shy away from it in fear or disgust. And I already feel the pain of others … too much a lot of the time. A lot of the time I’m aware of it, when it is overwhelming, other times I’m not aware of it and I absorb and reflect back other’s moods. I already allow myself to feel every bit of the pain. I can’t help but feel every bit of the pain. It was this that bothered me. Should I sit and absorb and feel the pain where I should be trying to get a handle of my “undisciplined squads of emotion”? Would it make things TOO painful? More painful than they already are?

This evening I realised, with more reading of the subject, that yes, this would be a good thing. To do Tonglen would not be to wallow in the pain, because you breathe it out again and work on relieving it, for yourself, for the person you are concentrating on in your meditation, for all sentient beings. All good karma. All good personal therapy if you get right down to it. And again, it is a form of mindfulness.

WAGE PEACE

by Judyth Hill.

Wage peace with your breath.
Breathe in firemen and rubble, breathe out whole buildings and flocks of redwing blackbirds.
Breathe in terrorists and breathe out sleeping children and freshly mown fields.
Breathe in confusion and breathe out maple trees.
Breathe in the fallen and breathe out lifelong friendships intact.
Wage peace with your listening: hearing sirens, pray loud.
Remember your tools: flower seeds, clothes pins, clean rivers.
Make soup.
Play music, learn the word for thank you in three languages.
Learn to knit, and make a hat.
Think of chaos as dancing raspberries, imagine grief as the outbreath of beauty or the gesture of fish.
Swim for the other side.
Wage peace.
Never has the world seemed so fresh and precious.
Have a cup of tea and rejoice.
Act as if armistice has already arrived.
Don’t wait another minute.

~ written Sept. 2001, New Mexico for Poets Against War web site.