Finding the Center Within: The Healing Way of Mindfulness Meditation. Read Online Free Page B
Author: Thomas Bien
the next one planned. Her friend Mark said it was the workshop, and though she did not recognize the name of the famous leader, she nodded knowingly when he mentioned it. Yes, of course she’d heard of her from the Oprah show.
Seekers like Judy deserve credit. They have taken a crucial step. They have paid attention to their sense that something is missing and are trying to do something about it. At least they are looking in places that actually contain help, instead of the more indulgent, destructive paths some follow. The difficulty is in connecting these insights to their lives.
Judy tried to bridge the gap between the mountaintop experience of her retreats and workshops with the valley experience of everyday life by staying one step ahead of herself—always having the next retreat or workshop planned before returning from the present one. Her real life was overwhelmingly complicated. It was easier to live with vague fantasies of self-improvement than to face the complexities. Someday she would get it all together. Someday she would have the right job, the right relationship, enough money, live in the right place, and have all the right thoughts and feelings. Someday she would know peace and wholeness. It all seemed to depend on finding the right workshop, getting the right prepackaged answers. Judy had been a retreat and workshop junkie for years. Her strategy of always having the next workshop planned succeeded just enough at staving off anxiety that she never saw its futility. She kept pushing that stone up the hill and ignoring that it always rolled back down. The retreats and the workshops that she attended were wonderful, and she found wisdom and supportive people at them. The problem was not with the retreats. The problem lay with something deeper, with the way Judy kept the focus off of herself and her own life, the way she kept looking outside herself for the answers. Judy could not resist the urge 01 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 9:44 AM Page 5
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to tinker with herself. The more she did this, the more the peace she sought eluded her grasp.
Connect Where You Are
The essential thing people want to know from teachers and therapists comes down to this: How can I be happy? How can I find peace?
The essential answer is always the same: Begin where you are. If the 1970s were the “Me Decade,” and the 1980s were the decade of greed, today we look back on a century of growing self-preoccupation. Freud published his first major work, The Interpretation of Dreams, right at the birth of the twentieth century. And from that point on, we have been increasingly fascinated with ourselves. Yet at the same time, our anxiety and uncertainty have only increased. For all this fascination and preoccupation, we are more estranged than ever from ourselves and our world.
The reasons we have failed to find peace through all this astonishing effort are doubtless complex. But part of the answer is that we are looking in the wrong place. Part of the answer is that all of our searching leads nowhere if it is rooted in a fundamental distrust of ourselves and our nature. Psychology can help and spirituality can help. But as long as our searching is rooted in self-distrust, we will always be trying on someone else’s answer. Workshops and retreats and other tools can only be helpful if you use them to help you connect with where you are . There are many different complications, roles, and roadblocks in our lives that contribute to pushing the stone uphill. There are also many attitudes and beliefs that contribute to our incessant motion that leads us nowhere and in fact keeps us stuck in the same place. But before trying to understand the way out, we need to take a look at how we got into this mess in the first place.
Look at Life’s Curveballs
Sometimes life throws a major curveball at us. Times of major change, for good or ill, are obvious challenges to our capacity to remain centered. At such times, even the
Seekers like Judy deserve credit. They have taken a crucial step. They have paid attention to their sense that something is missing and are trying to do something about it. At least they are looking in places that actually contain help, instead of the more indulgent, destructive paths some follow. The difficulty is in connecting these insights to their lives.
Judy tried to bridge the gap between the mountaintop experience of her retreats and workshops with the valley experience of everyday life by staying one step ahead of herself—always having the next retreat or workshop planned before returning from the present one. Her real life was overwhelmingly complicated. It was easier to live with vague fantasies of self-improvement than to face the complexities. Someday she would get it all together. Someday she would have the right job, the right relationship, enough money, live in the right place, and have all the right thoughts and feelings. Someday she would know peace and wholeness. It all seemed to depend on finding the right workshop, getting the right prepackaged answers. Judy had been a retreat and workshop junkie for years. Her strategy of always having the next workshop planned succeeded just enough at staving off anxiety that she never saw its futility. She kept pushing that stone up the hill and ignoring that it always rolled back down. The retreats and the workshops that she attended were wonderful, and she found wisdom and supportive people at them. The problem was not with the retreats. The problem lay with something deeper, with the way Judy kept the focus off of herself and her own life, the way she kept looking outside herself for the answers. Judy could not resist the urge 01 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 9:44 AM Page 5
K N O W W H E R E Y O U A R E
5
to tinker with herself. The more she did this, the more the peace she sought eluded her grasp.
Connect Where You Are
The essential thing people want to know from teachers and therapists comes down to this: How can I be happy? How can I find peace?
The essential answer is always the same: Begin where you are. If the 1970s were the “Me Decade,” and the 1980s were the decade of greed, today we look back on a century of growing self-preoccupation. Freud published his first major work, The Interpretation of Dreams, right at the birth of the twentieth century. And from that point on, we have been increasingly fascinated with ourselves. Yet at the same time, our anxiety and uncertainty have only increased. For all this fascination and preoccupation, we are more estranged than ever from ourselves and our world.
The reasons we have failed to find peace through all this astonishing effort are doubtless complex. But part of the answer is that we are looking in the wrong place. Part of the answer is that all of our searching leads nowhere if it is rooted in a fundamental distrust of ourselves and our nature. Psychology can help and spirituality can help. But as long as our searching is rooted in self-distrust, we will always be trying on someone else’s answer. Workshops and retreats and other tools can only be helpful if you use them to help you connect with where you are . There are many different complications, roles, and roadblocks in our lives that contribute to pushing the stone uphill. There are also many attitudes and beliefs that contribute to our incessant motion that leads us nowhere and in fact keeps us stuck in the same place. But before trying to understand the way out, we need to take a look at how we got into this mess in the first place.
Look at Life’s Curveballs
Sometimes life throws a major curveball at us. Times of major change, for good or ill, are obvious challenges to our capacity to remain centered. At such times, even the
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