Your Truest Friend Resides Inside Your Own Heart

As we age it seems that fighting with friends becomes less necessary or even possible. There are fewer matters worth fighting about and even fewer worth risking the friendshipover. That said, I recently had a real fight with a dear friend. The fight arose because my friend had decided that I had done something that in fact I had not done. It was an action that I believe would have been unkind and devoid of integrity. It was not only that I had not committed the act but also, that I could not have done it, as it would have sharply conflicted with my own integrity and internal wellbeing.

Unfortunately for both of us, my friend had taken pieces of reality and, as the human mind is inclined and skilled at doing, woven those independent truths into a larger story, filling in the gaps and constructing a cohesive narrative, which could have made sense but was in fact not true. My friend was suffering intensely with his false beliefs about me, and the proceeding story, namely, what those beliefs meant for our friendship. At the same time, I was suffering at the hands of his mind, being punished for a crime that I had not committed, and a belief about my nature, which was radically out of alignment with my actual behavior. And yet, no matter what I offered, my friend chose to stick to his false assumptions and write the final act of our friendship. I realized, after great strife, that he was more committed to holding onto his pain-inducing and friendship-annihilating story than to opening to the truth, and possibly, the feelings that the actual truth might bring. I came to understand that the truth, what had actually happened, was irrelevant at this moment. His fictional reality was real in his mind and body. Real, but not true.

With so much at stake, fighting naturally erupted. He fought fiercely for me to concede to his mind’s version of reality, and I fought equally fiercely for him to know the actual reality, and with that, to stop punishing me for a fictional crime, and erasing the truth of our deep friendship.

While fighting for the truth did little to shift my relationship with my friend, it was profound in how it transformed my relationship with myself.

When we fight, our tendency is to want to correct the other person’s version of truth, essentially, to get them to agree with our version. We explain our truth over and over again, in newfangled words and styles, desperately trying to create some consistency between what we believe to be truth and what the other believes. The internal dissonance can feel unbearable when our version of truth is in contradiction to another’s with whom we are involved emotionally, particularly when the truth in question implies something about our character or who we think we are.

When all attempts at truth-correction with my friend had failed, I had nowhere to go, no way to be heard or known correctly. The desperate efforts that had been focused outward, on getting him to change his beliefs, to see the truth about me, had not given me what I needed. It was then that I woke up: I remembered to turn my attention inward, and bring myself the loving attention, listening presence and understanding that I had been so desperately trying to get from my friend. I realized that I could not stake my own okayness and wellbeing on his changing his beliefs. Not only was that not going to happen, but it put me in a perilous and helpless position. I needed to be able to get okay with just my own acknowledgment of my truth and goodness. I made the choice to stop chasing what I needed and open to how painful it was to be misunderstood and misperceived, and possibly to also lose the friendship for reasons that were false. I gave myself the right to know what was true, even if it would never be known by another. I honored my integrity and strength in having made the choices I had actually made. I gave myself precisely what I needed to receive from the outside world.

It’s normal to want those we care about to share our version of truth. And yet, our tendency is to need external acknowledgment and validation in order to make true what we already know ourselves. The time comes however, when we need to start taking care of our own knowing, to provide acknowledgment and kindness to our own truth. When I turned inward and honored the sadness and loss in being misperceived, the truth of what I know actually happened, and the integrity of my choices, I felt known, loved and comforted. The attunement that I desperately sought from my friend, I received from my own loving presence. While I will always wish for my friend to know the truth, and me correctly, I am nonetheless able to bring myself the love and understanding, the wellbeing that I thought only he could provide.

In our search for an other who will hear and understand our truth with compassion, we consistently overlook our own company; we forget our own presence as a source of deep comfort and kindness, and blessedly, one that is always available to us. We need only the willingness and wisdom (and sometimes the reminder) to turn our attention inward, listen with kindness, and care about our own suffering. Particularly when we are in pain, searching desperately for comfort and relief from the outside world, we need to remember to flip the process. That is, to turn towards our own heart, listen to what it is carrying, and offer ourselves the compassion and loving presence that we are searching for outside. The experience of being deeply seen and cared about is ours to give—and receive—here now, when we decide to truly be with our own heart.

Mindfulness: How Far Can You Go?

Mindfulness practice is like Russian dolls. Just when you think you have gotten to the biggest doll in the set, you discover that that doll too is inside an even bigger doll. In mindfulness practice, we are continually discovering thoughts behind thoughts behind still more thoughts, seemingly ad infinitum. The more evolved our practice, the further back (behind thought and emotion) we can travel, and the more layers of thought and feeling we can see before becoming identified with what’s arising. Ultimately, mindfulness practice increases our capacity to witness what is happening inside and outside of us, until there is no more self to do the witnessing.

The difficulty or limitation we often run into in mindfulness practice is that we put the brakes on too soon, close our eyes and dive into or become aligned with the material that our mind is presenting. Specifically, we witness an aspect of our mind but then we get caught in the next layer of thoughts, the ones that say something about what we just witnessed. What’s different about this second layer of thoughts is that we believe them, and thus are not able to see them as something separate from us. There is no longer an I to witness them.

Two cases in point:

A woman practicing mindfulness notices that as she walks on the street her mind never stops announcing its preferences and judgments about what she is seeing. Her mind shouts out “Wow, I hate that haircut, darn that’s a big behind, I wish I had that handbag, and on it goes.” She is not particularly interested in the judgments that come, but that fact doesn’t keep them from coming. Through her mindfulness practice, she becomes aware that her mind ceaselessly judges everything it sees. (In other words, she has a regular human mind.) Step one of her mindfulness practice is successful in that sense. But then, as a result of this newfound awareness about her mind, she hears new thoughts. The mind generates new material. The new thoughts tell her that she will never be a spiritualperson, that she is judgmental by nature and in fact hopeless and awful. At this stage in the process, she and her thoughts become united. She believes them. They are one thing. What she doesn’t do is move to the next Russian doll and see that these judgments of herself are just another set of thoughts that the mind is presenting. At this stage, when her thoughts become self-critical, she believes them, merges with them, and thus loses her perspective on them.

This woman is a classic example of what many people do with their mindfulness practice, namely, use it against themselves. This woman learns something about her mind’s nature and then silently, cleverly, the mind slips back into the driver’s seat and generates new thoughts about the person who would have such a mind, blaming the person for being the wishful thinker of such unacceptable thoughts. The witness however believes these new thoughts and doesn’t see them as the most recent incarnation of mind that they are. At this point, the mindful witness joins forces with the mind and the practice of mindfulness is suspended until further notice.

In a second example, a man who is attending a business meeting notices that his mind becomes very agitated and busy when a female colleague starts telling a personal story to the group. The thoughts he hears are angry and blaming of his colleague, for taking up everyone’s time with her nonsense. Using mindfulness practice, he sees these thoughts and is able to refrain from trying to change them or get involved. He is aware of having the thoughts without the accompanying anxiety and inner turbulence that has accompanied such thoughts in the past. But then his mind gets sneaky, telling him that he is an angry person, just like his father before him, and that he will never have a partner if he feels this way when women tell their stories. He believes these new thoughts and does not see them as just the next layer of thought that the mind is generating. Because he cannot see them as yet another (stepped up) version of his mind, he becomes afraid of them—afraid of his own mind. At this point, he is back to being a hostage of the mind and his mindfulness practice is derailed.

Behind every thought is another thought. As we go further in our mindfulness practice, we get better at seeing the thought behind the thought, without combining ourself with it. We have to keep our witness goggles firmly in place as the mind morphs into subtler manifestations of itself, and gets more and more difficult to keep track of and visible, out in front of us. The mind is a master chameleon and an expert at becoming whatever it needs to become in order for us to stop seeing it as separate from who we are. Mindfulness practice is an effort to see even that chameleon-like quality.

Furthermore, mindfulness practice is often practiced without one of its most important elements, namely, curiosity. The attitude that accompanies mindfulness is one of kindness and interest. When we learn something new about the nature of our mind, whether we want that to be its nature or not, we take the attitude of “Huh, wow, look at that, that’s what my mind does. Curious!”

Mindfulness practice is not conditional; we are not observing our mind in order to make a case against it or ourself. The eyes that are looking at the mind in mindfulness must be compassionate eyes, or at least neutral, understanding that this wild animal called human mind is after one thing, survival, which is synonymous with being in charge. Mindfulness practice helps us realize that we don’t choose the thoughts our mind spits up but we do choose whether or not to listen to or believe them. In truth we are the one the mind is talking to, the one whose attention the mind is trying to keep, but the mind doesn’t want us to know that.

When you reach the thought or feeling that you believe is the last one, the witness itself, the ultimate observer of mind, don’t stop there. Notice that you have stopped looking and pull the lens back yet again. Ask yourself, who (or what) perceives even that last thought, the one that feels like truth, who you are, or just what is? Get behind even that “last” thought or feeling, and then see where you are. There’s always further to go… until there isn’t, and you aren’t.

Mindfulness For the Uncooperative Mind

Mindfulness is hot, and like all hot topics, it comes with a lot of truths and a lot of falsehoods. Teaching mindfulness, I hear the same questions arising time and again, misunderstandings really about what mindfulness is and what it means as a practice or way of life. Indeed, most of the obstacles that we believe stand in the way of living mindfully are, in fact, not obstacles at all.

The Big Three: Misconceptions about Mindfulness

#1  Mindfulness is not for the everyday Joe—not applicable to a regular life.

As one client expressed, I have kids, which means that I am constantly planning for then… camps, holidays, dinner recipes, weekend babysitting, etc. etc. I can’t just be here in the now, it’s not practical for real life. Mindfulness doesn’t apply to my always-planning mom existence!

Many of my clients arrive with the belief that having to do anything that involves or is about the future disqualifies them from being mindful. In truth, mindfulness simply means being conscious or aware of what is happening inside and outside of you right now. Being awake to life as it is unfolding. Planning for the future and attending to the past are necessities in modern life, and neither has anything to do with being mindful. While the contents of what we are planning may be related to the future, the planning itself is something that is happening right now. Perhaps we are making an airplane reservation—the airplane will take off in the future but conversing with the agent, experiencing sensations in the hand holding the phone, receiving thoughts about what you are hearing, taking in sounds from the room, feeling emotions about the upcoming travel, all of it and a thousand other events are all occurring right now. Making plans, with mindfulness, simply means paying attention to the experience of making plans, being awake to what it is like for you to live this moment of planning. The subject of the moment is irrelevant; the moment itself is always happening right here and right now. Nothing can ever be happening in any time but now. If at this moment your body is breathing, then there is a present experience available to you, and thus mindfulness is possible.

#2  Mindfulness means focusing on my breath or meditating, which isn’t always possible in everyday life. Hence, mindfulness is a step away from or out of life. A client put it this way, when a strong emotion comes up, like when I get really angry at my boss at work, I can’t always just check out of the conversation and start listening to my breath or chanting om. Mindfulness, for this reason, is not really viable in real life tough situations.

The truth is, practicing mindfulness does not require checking out of life, but just the opposite, checking into life. When a strong feeling such as anger arises, mindfulness simply means paying attention to what that anger feels like in the body, how it manifests, what thoughts and stories accompany it, everything that is happening inside and outside you as you experience the anger right now. Mindfulness means witnessing that strong emotion with full presence, watching the weather of anger erupt in the sky of awareness. Sometimes it does help to come back to the breath, just for a moment, to get grounded in your body and not spin off in the storm of mind, but this is not necessary for practicing mindfulness. Mindfulness means staying here where you are—with whatever is here in the present moment, and meeting your direct experience, your life, as it actually is.

#3  I can’t be mindful with this mind, my mind as it is; if and when my mind is different, calmer perhaps, then possibly, mindfulness can happen. Many people believe that mindfulness requires a certain kind of mind, a baseline of peacefulness or tranquility, and that their mind as it is is far too wild to practice such a skill.

In fact, mindfulness does not depend on any particular kind of mind and certainly not a calm one. If mindfulness required a calm mind, it would have died out as a practice a long time ago. In the same way that meditation is an investigation of your inner world as it is, right now, without preference or judgment, similarly, mindfulness is just an honest look at the way your mind, your direct experience, and your life is at any given moment. You are not more mindful if what you discover is that you like the moment you are living and no less mindful if what you become aware of is not pleasing. Mindfulness only means that you are noticing, becoming conscious of and dwelling in your direct experience, not pushing it away, or if you are trying to push it away, noticing that too. Mindfulness is not about what you find when you drop down into yourself, but that you do drop down into yourself, and that you do so with an attitude of compassionate curiosity. If, in turning the lens on yourself, what you notice is that your mind is judging your experience unkindly, then mindfulness would entail bringing an open and kind curiosity to that unkind and judging mind. And so it goes. There are no right answers in mindfulness, no better things to discover under the lens of your own attention, and no better kind of mind to practice with. The only things needed for mindfulness are a mind to practice with, a willingness to try and stay present, and an interest to meet yourself and your actual experience.

The next time you hear the thought that mindfulness doesn’t apply to you, with the way your life is, your mind is, your circumstances are, notice that thought, and maybe the feeling or sensation that comes along with it. Pay attention to what it feels like in your body to be listening to that thought. Before you know it, the you who can’t practice mindfulness will be practicing mindfulness in its most authentic and powerful form! 

Because You Feel It Doesn't Mean You Have to Be It

Mindfulness, halleluja!  What liberation, to become aware of our own mind. With all the recent attention on mindfulness, we are getting better at being able to watch our minds in action, notice the thoughts it generates, the stories it tells us. We are starting to understand that it is simply the nature of the mind to fire thoughts, randomly and ceaselessly, whether we want to hear them or not. The fact that this happens is not our failing, just the nature of the beast called mind. So too, we are starting to realize that thoughts don’t necessarily contain the truth… or even anything particularly interesting.

Thoughts may not always be true, but emotion… now that’s an entirely different thing… or so we think! Emotions must be taken very seriously. Emotions arise out of our lived experience, and thus must contain some fundamental element of truth. When we start observing our emotions however, we realize that emotions fire almost as randomly as the chatter we call thoughts. One moment we are flooded with icky feelings, suddenly back in a story from middle school. The next moment the channel changes and a new movie plays. For no reason, we find ourselves in a tsunami of bliss as the image of summer camp wafts into consciousness. 

Emotions follow thoughts and are made of thought stories (that we believe) about whatever experience we are re-living or imagining. Our emotions are made of bundles of thoughts, and contain the truth that our thoughts have written. We relate to our feelings as fixed and entirely trustworthy entities, and yet, like weather moving through the sky, our feelings are often as unreliable and changeable as everything else our mind puts out. When we stop romanticizing our emotions, as fundamental truths that arise out of the all-knowing heart, we can notice them as another byproduct of our wild and temperamental minds.

Further complicating our ability to put our feelings in front of the witness, we believe that our emotions are fundamental to who we are. We think that if we feel sad, we are sad, if we feel unworthy, we are unworthy, and so on. The combination of our belief in the truth of our feelings along with our propensity to identify with them, makes emotion the hardest aspect of the mind to become mindful of, the trickiest play of the mind to get behind and see clearly.

In order to be mindful of our emotions, some part of us must have the ability to watch our feelings, be with our feelings, and feel for them… all without actually becoming them. Can we relate with our sadness without feeling entirely sad, be with our sense of unworthiness from a place that doesn’t share the unworthiness? This would imply that some part of us could remain separate from and larger than even our strongest emotions. You might ask, If I am not made of my emotions, then what am I made of? Yes, maybe I am not made of my thoughts, but how could I possibly not be what I feel? What else if more fundamental to me?

The process of gaining perspective on or un-sticking from our emotions is further complicated by the fact that we are emotionally attached to our emotions. As a friend described, My feelings contain a piece of my heart. I feel like my feelings are my children, I guess I love them in some way. Noticing our emotions would mean that we would have to let go of them just a little bit, at least enough to be able to be with them. Being with our feelings can feel like we are abandoning our children, severing the merger between us and them. Indeed, this sense of loss can present a real challenge.

In truth however, we can best serve our strongest emotions by offering them our own kindness and compassion, and loosening our stranglehold on them (and thus theirs on us). In order to bring true comfort to painful feelings we have to be the larger parent to the wounded-ness in us, to be with our feelings, but not of them. We experience a deep sense of relief as we create a little bit of space between us and our feelings, allowing our feelings to absorb our company rather than our identity.

We want and need a separate grown up, a compassionate presence that can protect and lead us out of our suffering, even as our suffering is screaming for us to stay in it and as it. Sometimes, we need something or someone to represent a different possibility, to sit beside us and not be where we are. We can be that something or someone for ourselves. Our emotional pain, young as it often is, lacks the wisdom to know that we do indeed need to unstick from it a little bit, to be just to the side of it, in order to actually make it feel better. First, we must be mindful that such emotions are happening within our awareness, and second, we must bring our empathic company to that which we witness. Such company is a gift of kindness to ourselves, and not the abandonment that we mistakenly believe. This awareness is the more evolved wisdom that both blooms from and gives life to genuine wellbeing.

Mindfulness includes not just awareness of thought, but also awareness of our deepest emotions. At the farthest end, awareness can include even the very sense of the “I” who witnesses such phenomenon, but more on that later… Practice mindfulness not only with your What’s for dinner? thoughts, but with the emotions that you feel most attached to and identified with. Ultimately, having some space between yourself and your feelings liberates you from the deepest bondage of the mind. The good news is that you can in fact feel your feelings, the energy that they contain, without actually having to be them or be swallowed by them.

!0 Best Practices For Being Present

By now, most of us know that now—here—is where we’re supposed to be. We get it that we are not living our life fully if we are always lost in thought, tumbling through a story about the past or future. But how do we do this thing called being present? How do we actually bring ourselves into a state of here-ness, deposit ourselves into this moment, so that we can truly be in our own life?

What follows is a list of practices, tools, for being here. The fact is, we can’t really ever be anywhere but where we are, but our attention, our mind, can indeed travel elsewhere. The tools that follow are designed to sync up your attention with your body, so that the two are in the same place, like a floating photograph that moves into its frame. The practices I offer can be used for as little or as long as you like at a stretch, and are meant to be practiced several or more times throughout the day. The practices are like gravity boots that pull you into now, and plant you in the place where you actually are.

When it comes to techniques, we are all made differently and what lights one person’s world on fire might not even heat the embers under another’s feet. Some of us respond to visualizations, some sounds, some felt senses, some ideas, and the list goes on. The important thing is to try out different practices, and notice what they do for and with your own presence. Notice which techniques hold the drop you out of your mind and into your body, ricochet you out of whatever story you are lost in. Once you know what works, you can create a now toolbox from which to draw. It is important to make such practices a habit, to schedule these techniques like you would important appointments, and initiate them before you have missed out on a whole day of now-s, a whole day of your actual life. The real key is practice, for that there is no substitute, and no moment better than now--to meet the now.

The Now Toolbox

1) “Am I here?”

At its core, to be here requires to NOT be somewhere else. The first tool therefore is to pay attention to where your attention actually is. Ask yourself, “Where am I right now?” or simply, “Am I here?” Make this simple but profound question a habit. Notice too where you go to check for the answer. The place that you consult is also the destination, presence itself!

The Body: The physical body is always in the present moment. The body cannot and does not seek to be anywhere but here, unlike the mind, which wants to be anywhere else. We can make use of the body’s always-present nature, and use it as a vehicle to come back here. By dropping into the body, and experiencing it directly, we hitch a ride straight into now.

2) Sound

Tune into just the sounds that are happening around you right now. Don’t go to the mind to name them or explain how you feel about them or why they’re happening. No effort is needed. Just listen, allow your ears to receive, and pay attention to this.

3) Body Sensation

Feel the sensations that are happening inside your body right now. Again, don’t name the sensations (twinges, anxiety, exhaustion, pain etc.) and don’t explain why they are happening. Just feel them directly as sensations. Notice too that they just happen, without effort.

4) Breath

There is an expression, “God is as close as the next breath.” Similarly, we are always just a breath away from presence, and we can always catch a ride to here on our next breath, simply by paying attention to it. The tool then is to feel your breath, pay attention to the sensation of the breath moving through you. Notice that without doing anything, your body is breathing itself, breathing you. Pay attention to the gaps between breaths, and the space of waiting for the next breath to happen. Get intimate with the entire breathing miracle occurring within you.

5) Inside and Outside

Bring your attention to what you are seeing right now. Notice what is here in front of you. Next, add to your awareness what you are hearing, the sounds that are being received by your ears. Hold both at once. And, then, still maintaining awareness of your seeing and hearing, add in the sensations that are happening inside your body. Hold the awareness of all three simultaneously. Ask yourself, “Who is it that is aware of both the inside and outside?”

6) Paying Attention to Mind

Turn your lens back on itself. Pay attention to what your mind is doing right now, listen to the thoughts that it is generating, the chatter it is chattering. Do not get involved in or respond to the contents, just observe your own mind in action, without doing anything about it. Put yourself in the audience to your own show. Ask yourself, “To whom are these thoughts appearing?” 

7) Widening Your View

Silence — listen for the silence that sits under the noise of mind. Find the sound of universal silence out of which the noise arises.

Stillness — feel for the stillness that exists behind the endless movements of mind — thoughts, feelings and sensations. Experience this deep stillness, undisturbed by that which moves through it.

Spaciousness — imagine that your thoughts and feelings are like weather appearing in a big sky of consciousness. Open your view wide, and wider still. Sense the infinite space in, around and behind the thoughts and feelings, the open sky through which the weather is passing. Shift your attention from the objects moving through your consciousness, to the vastness that contains them.

8) Feeling Presence

Close your eyes and feel the sensation of your own physical presence, your body’s weight, and existence. Bring your attention to the feeling of your body being here, just being. Drop into the particular sensation that is “I am,” “I exist.”

9) No Next

Remove next—imagine that there is no next event, next task, next person or next anything to get to. Invite yourself to stop preparing or getting ready for something else to come. Deliberately remove all elses. Meet now with nowhere and nothing else still to get to.

10) The End and the Beginning

Imagine that these are the last few moments of your life in this body, as you. Drop into that fundamental sense of you-ness. Feel the you that has always been here — from a little child until now, still here. Dip into this unchanging feeling of being you, which has remained while all else —thoughts, feelings, situations, body, beliefs, etc. have passed. Feel the you that is immune to time and the very ground of your being.

Each of these practices holds the power to boomerang us back into this present moment. Discover what works for you and then make these practices a part of your daily life!  They are called practices because they are to be practiced! Even a few moments, consistently, can change your life. If we are not here, quite literally we are not here — not in our life. We are missing in action, lost in a story that exists only in our own mind. The life we are living is already dead, a memory of something that already happened, or a fantasy of a hypothetical future. Without presence, we are in a life that doesn’t actually exist.

Ironically, ours is a society obsessed with FOMO. And yet, many of us miss out on the most important thing of all, our own life. Seems we ought to be worrying less about missing the next party and more about missing existence. Every moment from which we are absent is a profound loss, particularly when you consider the brevity of our stay here. Build your now toolbox and practice, practice and then practice some more. The benefits of such a practice are nothing short of life itself.