Aware Presence Meditation (Script)

Follow along on Mindfulness+, season 4, episode 9: Schroedinger’s Glacier.

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Irwin Schroedinger, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist of quantum mechanics, writes: 

“The conditions for your existence are almost as old as the rocks. For thousands of years men have striven and suffered and begotten and women have brought forth in pain. A hundred years ago, perhaps, another man sat on this spot. Like you, he gazed with awe and yearning in his heart at the dying light of the glaciers. Like you, he was begotten of man and born of woman. He felt pain and brief joy as you do. Was he someone else? Was it not you yourself?”

What is this mystery that we hear from the mystics, sages, enlightened masters across the ages? This mystery that somehow all of it — all of manifestation, all of fullness, all of creation — is ourself. Of course, I’m not asking you to go looking in the mind for some new insight into this mystery, but rather we take the timeless path of the mystics through the ages and just bring our highest awareness to this moment, exactly this experience.

Notice in this spot where you find yourself in the world right now, everything you are seeing, everything you’re hearing, everything you’re feeling, the fullness of your experience in this moment. But rather than becoming fixated on what you’re seeing, what you’re hearing, what you’re feeling, you are invited to fall back. Get curious in this moment about what is seeing, what is hearing, what is feeling? What is it that sees through these eyes, hears through these ears, feels and senses through this body?

This is a question that can’t be answered with the mind; any constructs the mind conjures will just be more images to see and sounds to hear and feelings to feel. No words can describe this territory adequately, but it doesn’t mean we can’t point to it. What is it in this very moment that is seeing, that is hearing, that is feeling? Whatever it is, whatever we call it, we know that one of its properties is awareness. We know that it — which is to say we — are aware. If we weren’t aware, there’d be no seeing, no hearing, no feeling. There’d be no experience, no knowledge of any existence whatsoever.

And so we come to rest in this simple awareness, this openness, this luminosity. Whatever this awareness is, this aware presence, this consciousness, this intelligence, in this very moment we are aware of seeing and hearing and feeling.

Now this same awareness — this awareness that we are — the same awareness that is aware in this very moment of all arising must have been the same awareness that was aware the moment we were born, the moment we came into this world. The moment we entered this world in human form there was seeing, there was hearing, there was feeling and an awareness knowing this seeing, hearing and feeling. 

A  hundred years ago perhaps another human being sat in this very spot, stood in this very place that we are in this very moment. In that particular moment, that particular human being was aware of seeing and hearing and feeling, perhaps feeling things not so different from what we feel now. And a hundred years ago in the experience of this so-called other being, what was it that was aware of that feeling, of that hearing, of that seeing? In Schroedinger’s words, “Like you, he gazed with awe and yearning in his heart, the dying light of the glaciers, begotten of man, born of woman, he”/she/they all “felt pain and brief joy” as you do. What is it, what is this mystery that is aware of pain and brief joy?

Can you find a beginning to this awareness, this conscious spirit? Can you find a time where you, aware presence, didn’t exist? In order to find this time, this space where you didn’t exist, you, aware presence, would actually have to be present to be aware of that time and space. 

Or what if you gaze into the eternal future, is there a time or place where you will cease to exist as aware presence? Where you awareness, intelligence and spirit will no longer be sensitive, no longer be sentient and aware? To find such a moment in time and space, you, aware presence, would have to be present and aware of this moment where you supposedly cease to exist. In this very moment, are you able in your direct experience as awareness to find any boundary, any border beyond which you simply stop? Are there any boundaries at all in your direct experience? 

As we move deeper into this mystery, we start to intuit, we start to sense directly the same light, the same awareness that knows our own soul. It’s the same awareness that knows the world’s soul, that knows the soul of all worlds, all universes, all manifestation:  all known through awareness, by awareness, as awareness. 

Your closest friend and confidant who sees you personally, knows you,  what is the mystery that knows through their heart and sees you and feels you and attunes to you, the same awareness through which you are aware of this dear friend, it’s the same awareness that knows and loves you back.

What about your enemy? The person you just can’t find a way to reconcile with, can’t find understanding in your heart of how they could be this way, what is it that is aware of the experience of not understanding our enemy? And is it not the same awareness that sees through their eyes, hears through their ears and feels through their heart? Is it not a seamless principle that enlivens us both, animates us both, the same awareness that knows pain and brief joy through both of us?

Right here, right now in this newly arising moment, this new spot in time where you stand, where you sit, where you lie, where you move, a tumbling kaleidoscope of sensory experience, seeing, hearing, feeling, touching, tasting, smelling. And what is it that knows this experience? What is it that’s aware? Whatever we call it, its boundaries are unfindable. 

Feel this unity, this union in your heart and by heart I mean your very core, your very center. Rest in yourself, aware presence, neither coming nor going — the very light that lights up all worlds, all possible worlds. 

What Pain Makes Possible: A Meditation

By Thomas McConkie, adapted from an episode of Mindfulness+

A few years ago I was at a tough retreat where I was in a lot of physical pain. I mentioned my pain to my teacher, Shinzen Young, and he said something in his characteristically strange way. (By the way, when a teacher says something in a funny way, pay really close attention to it because they are probably saying it in that way for a very specific reason.) Shinzen said, “Have gratitude for what this pain is making possible.” 

Have gratitude for what this pain is making possible.

I want to unpack this a little bit. You might already have an immediate sense of the power of that teaching in your body right now, but let’s get to the basics of Buddhist practice. Essentially pain and discomfort, when we’re willing to really investigate it deeply, when we’re willing to just like hold a microscope over our discomfort, we start to have an insight into how we process pain, how we relate to pain. We realize that we would prefer not to be in pain. It doesn’t take a deep, adept meditator to figure that one out.  

But as we look closer and closer, we realize something subtle happening, that it’s our reactivity to pain, it’s our rejection of pain, our unwillingness to actually feel what we’re actually feeling that creates suffering in our experience. And when we pay attention to pain, we realize, “Ah, I would rather not feel this way.” And then we feel reactivity in our system, we feel resistance in our system, and it’s that resistance to the full of our experience that generates suffering. 

If we’re lucky and if we have a little guidance or if we just have an inclination to stick with it, get curious and stay open, we stay open, we relax, we let that reactivity kind of unwind, we soften even though what we want to do is run screaming from the pain, what we actually do is relax, soften, escape into the pain.

This, for most of us, doesn’t happen all at once, it happens over the course of many encounters with pain. We re-train ourselves at the deepest level of the body-mind. Rather than tense up and react to pain, we actually soften and escape into pain. And the more we do that, the more closely we observe in the moment, our suffering diminishes. We realize that our pain can be increasing exponentially even as our suffering is decreasing to nil. Not just practically nothing, but we start to have the experience of what life is like as a human being with absolutely no suffering whatsoever. It’s remarkable, it’s absolutely remarkable. 

So pain actually, as inconvenient as it can feel to us, is a grace because it reliably illuminates our very personal patterns of resistance and reactivity to all experiences in life. And if we’re willing to go through that door, over time it leads us down a path of letting go of reactivity and resistance. Very powerful.

So that teaching, just that single instruction turned that whole retreat around and I found myself in a state of gratitude for what the pain was making possible. And the good news is, well maybe it’s good news, you don’t have to do a solitary retreat, although I highly recommend it. This is not about doing a solitary retreat or any retreat, it’s about right now, that right now in this moment there is some degree of discomfort in your experience, probably. There is almost certainly some degree of reactivity, resistance in your system. You might say, “No, I’m feeling amazing, I’ve got my bubble tea here, the temperature’s perfect and I’m chilling with my podcast, I couldn’t be better.”  

You think you’re comfortable, but really the more closely you investigate, the more you realize that at more and more levels of your beings, there is resistance and it is generating significant suffering. Really, in these COVID times, how far do we have to look for suffering, right?  We all have preferences in life and many of those preferences have been frustrated. So reflect on this a moment, how would you  prefer things to be today? Like imagine: “Well, I’d prefer that a virus weren’t ravaging the world right now, and that I didn’t have to quarantine.” I would prefer that. That would be wonderful if people weren’t dying, and if it just felt safe to go out my front door and say hello to my neighbor up close where I can feel his or her heart next to my heart, I would prefer that strongly. I would strongly prefer that I could spend more time with my brother who’s been hit really hard by this pandemic, who lost both of his jobs and doesn’t have his own transportation, so he’s kind of been crawling up the walls with figuring out how to manage all this time in the world? And we used to spend a lot of time together before COVID, but we haven’t been able to do that because it’s not safe in our quarantine situation with our baby.

Well, let me just throw in another preference here that my newborn son’s grandparents can’t come into our house and hold him because they both have their own risk factors in exposures to COVID, and I am watching like every moment of every day and this being is changing and he’s becoming a new person and his grandparents are missing out on that and that’s painful to me. So hopefully, I’ve primed the pump there with some of my preferences. Notice what you prefer right now, notice how your preferences aren’t being met perfectly, which is just the condition of human life. And then notice the reactivity you have to that. Notice how you’d like things to be different and the very distinct feeling of being a human being having an experience that you would like to be different. Let that sink in a little bit, and then have gratitude for what this pain is making possible.

I’m going to transition us into some practice here.

Meditation

Take a moment to settle in. Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing. Let your body support the practice. Let your posture support clarity of awareness, focused awareness.

And pay special attention to any discomfort. Of course there will be a lot of comfort and pleasure in the body for most of us. I want you to really pay attention to discomfort, even pain. The pain could be physical, it could be emotional, mental, psychological, even a very rarefied kind of pain, kind of spiritual angst. There are different densities of pain, you could say. Just notice any discomfort whatsoever in your being and as you do this, have gratitude for what this pain is making possible.

What does that mean?  Gratitude for what this pain makes possible. Pain and discomfort illuminate where we stick, where we hold fast to our preferences. And if we’re present enough, if we’re sensitive enough, we start to realize that relaxing with the pain diminishes our suffering exponentially. Our habit is to brace against pain, to want to escape it. The body wants to be comfortable, the mind wants to have certainty and answers, and sometimes physical comfort is just not available. Oftentimes, certainty, answers in the mind aren’t available. What can we do but escape into this pain?  

And as we do this, the pain becomes sweet. Pain shows us exactly where we are generating suffering. If we loosen our grip, if we let go, let flow with our experience, we can remain completely open and present to amounts of intensity. We don’t need the objective situation, the world, to be any different than it is. We don’t need to get rid of our preferences, we all have preferences as human beings. But we learn to let go of our need to make the world conform to our preferences. And doing this, practicing in this way, our access to freedom and love deepens exponentially.

Beyond any conditions, this freedom, this love that you access, that you become, this freedom and love that you ultimately are has nothing to do with conditions inside or out. You can cultivate an attitude of willingness to be fully informed by this moment, the experience of this moment — all that’s arising in the body, mind, all that’s arising in the entire world. Of course this doesn’t mean you don’t respond. You’ll always respond to your own feelings, your own conscience, what the world calls you to do. But it’s in open and full awareness that we become fully responsive to life. In collapsed and compromised awareness, we can only be reactive, thrashing around, trying to change circumstances desperately, just to get back to some fragile sense of comfort. What happens when pain takes you beyond any need to cling to comfort?  What happens when your practice, when your life no longer requires that you constantly seek comfort?

Rather, more and more you learn to open up fully to what is, the truth of what is, just this. Opening up fully to what is, you respond to life as a full human being. Have gratitude for what this pain makes possible.

For more, check out the Mindfulness Essentials course.

The Rare Chance: Meeting a Buddha Face to Face

It’s amazing to me to read about the ancient Chan masters of China. This is a country I’ve lived in and a tradition I’ve studied. People who yearned to receive teachings would wander in the wilderness. They would trek across the entire country on foot, and they would take up into a monastery during the rainy season because it was too perilous to travel because of weather conditions. People really endured crazy hardships to just go and find a good, high quality teaching. And here we are now: you can order a boxed set of CDs on SoundsTrue, click a button, they deliver it to your door and you can listen to world-class Dharma talks. You can get on tricycle.org and hear a series of Dharma talks and teachings and pointing-out instructions. 

All of that is remarkable, but It’s especially beautiful and potent to run into a living, breathing manifestation of the practice, a person who really embodies the fruits and the maturity of the practice. And there is a term that I really like in the Tibetan tradition which can translate in English as “the rare chance.” The Rare Chance is the chance we have to actually encounter a living, breathing Buddha, we could say, or more neutrally, a Holy Being. And just being around them, we sense what is possible in this practice, not just what is possible in the practice but we sense at a deeper level who we actually are.

I have a story about this. I remember my first conscious encounter with one such being. This being is David, and I met him when I was 19 years old. I was invited to his house, and he was just hanging out casual like and I was struck immediately by his presence. 

There was an air of just ridiculous happiness about him. There was a sense of freedom, profound presence. And his attentiveness to me — our conversation, our interaction — it really disarmed me. 

And all these years later, I remember one of the mind-boggling things he said. I was at the time a troubled teenager who was trying to work out my fraught kharma with Christianity, and of course we were talking about God, and I said, “David, who is God?” And he paused and kind of took a breath and he said something like, “I know enough to know that any thought I have about God is fundamentally inaccurate.” And it wasn’t his words in that moment, although his words were cool and his words have stood the test of time by Dharmic standards, but it was the feeling in the air after he said it. It was this sense of openness, of mystery, of total unknowing that just I’ve never tasted anything like it. 

Up until that moment I had a notion that if we didn’t know such an important thing like who God was, I’d just be riddled with anxiety until I figured it out. I’d be a dysfunctional human being. And here I was, meeting my Rare Chance, seeing a living, breathing being manifesting the exact opposite of what I believed to be true. He was showing me how wrong-headed my idea was.

I thought not-knowing would make me dysfunctional and reduce me to just total paralysis in life, and here I was in the presence of a being who was Unknowing. In Zen terms, he was the manifestation of “don’t-know” mind: I don’t know the answer to life’s mysteries, but I am accustomed to the free-fallingness of my life. I’m accustomed to the sense of free-fall. And in Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s words, “The good news about the free fall is that there is no bottom.” We just keep falling and we can learn to appreciate the deliciousness of the free fall.

I’m using words to describe this moment years later, but in the moment it just got into my body, it got into my bloodstream, and it’s as if the potency of this being’s mindstream cleared me out. It just totally opened me up and gave me an insight into a possibility that was not possible prior to that moment. That is a little sketch of my first Rare Chance in life that was consciously met.

It’s so sweet to me, just remembering it now. I’ve been on the path for over 20 years and I’m one of those people who kind of after that seed was planted, I was just voraciously devouring books, traveling the world looking for teachers, giving my whole heart to my daily practice and every moment in between hopefully, and without that meeting, without that encounter with a living being I’m quite sure my fate would have been different.

It’s as if all of the books in the world, all of the teachings via the internet, via books, could not equal that single encounter which totally broke my heart open. 

And this is the Rare Chance spoken of in the Tibetan tradition. So here’s what I want to say to you, here is why we are talking about it and we’re going to do some practice with it momentarily as we do on the show. If you have had such a choice encounter already, if you are one of these fortunate beings who’s had an encounter with a living being who manifests the choicest fruits of this practice, then I want to take a little time really watering that seed, deeply appreciating that encounter. Because really that encounter is the foundation of everything that unfolds after it.

If you don’t feel like you’ve had that real life encounter with this type of being just yet, you can simply ask for it. There was never a more opportune moment on the planet than this moment right now to open up your heart and really ask for this, for a being to come into your life and really change you at the deepest level. 

And I might add that it’s not the person who changes you. It’s something much deeper, much more profound, much more nameless than any human form. It’s what’s behind these holy beings that makes them holy. In Christian terms, it is the light of Christ that pervades all of manifestation. In Buddhist terms, it is the Mother of the buddhas. It is the perfection of wisdom that enlightens and quickens these beings that makes them holy. So I’m not here to create a culture of teacher worship but rather to really acknowledge these beings as vessels of the timeless, formless wisdom and compassionate action that is the Dharma.

I’ll give Dan Brown the final words here. He speaks of the Rare Chance in his beautiful book Pointing Out the Great Way, and he writes, “The entire path towards enlightenment begins to ripen from this moment of interest generated during the Auspicious Meeting.”

The auspicious meeting is none other than the Rare Chance, and when we are gifted with this auspicious meeting, an interest in the Dharma is born, a seed is planted and from that seed begins to ripen the entire path of enlightenment. It’s my experience that wherever we are on the path, some seem to be far ahead, some seem to come long afterward, but we are all very much walking the path of enlightenment, and there is an unspeakable grace drawing us towards it. 

No Body, No Mind: Meditating on Our Baby Nature

By Thomas McConkie, adapted from an episode of Mindfulness+

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My first son is now 12 days old. I am profoundly sleep deprived and drawing on all of my meditation training to somehow function without sleep day to day. I’m feeling pretty good, and I’m happy to share an application of mindfulness practice that involves our own baby nature. 

What do I mean by that?

Not everybody realizes that in a sense babies aren’t born the day they’re born. Babies leave the womb on the day we say they’re born conventionally. But psychologically, a baby doesn’t “hatch” into an identity separate from the environment until, some research has it, between four and nine months. So this technical term “hatching,” we could say the real birth of the human child, like when the baby, not differentiates from the mother physically coming out of the womb but when the baby differentiates from the cosmic flow of all of creation and realizes that he/she/they actually are somehow separate and unique from the environment.

This is really a profound moment. We could say it’s the beginning of the formation of an ego, ego in the healthy sense of just an “I,” a self with integrity and uniqueness. What’s interesting about this is that every one of us has logged thousands of hours on our first days and weeks and months of life. We logged thousands of hours just floating in an undifferentiated phenomenological continuum. No sense of having a mind, no sense of having a body. After we were born we were still waiting to be born. And in that in-between place, between worlds, there is a kind of timelessness where we’re completely one with and in participation with the flow of nature, of all things.

And what’s too bad is that four to nine months or so after we hatch, we tend to not recover this utterly valuable skill that we’re born with, namely the skill of flowing as a force of nature, with no sense of separation from anything. And yet we know developmentally that this is at the heart of who we all are. 

So this meditation is a little bit longer than we usually do to let you drop in a little bit deeper. It’s in the spirit of recovering your baby consciousness, your infant’s nature or to put it a bit more poetically: it’s a return to innocence, the place where you spent the first season of your life, completely in the bosom of creation, no sense of separation. Let’s see how this feels, see what it does for our practice to exercise these different layers of our consciousness today.

I recommend you do this meditation with eyes closed, just to take your focus, your attention away from the appearance of a world outside yourself. Just find a place where you can relax, let go.

Meditation

As a little bit of a warm-up as we drop into this together, I want to exercise the opposite capacity that we’re working with. I want you to imagine the body, see the body in your mind’s eye. After all, as adults we’ve all spent many years forming and adding layers on top of a mental image of the body. And this mental image becomes so dominant that over time we lose more and more of our capacity to just be in the flow of physical sensation. When we ask somebody, when we ask an adult to feel sensation in the body, unconsciously they will picture different parts of their body in their mind, not realizing that that is a distinct act from being in sensation. So just notice that you’re able to call up an image of the body. Notice what the body looks like in your mind’s eye:  its boundaries, its shape, its proportions. Every aspect of what the body looks like, you can feel, you can see and just let it go, let it be in the background of awareness. 

And to open the meditation up a little bit more, I want you to use your imagination just a touch and imagine that you are just born, just emerging from the mother’s womb. You’re one second old, and you know absolutely nothing of a body. The word body, the image of a body, just meaningless abstractions. What you are in this moment when you’re just a nanosecond old is a formless field of awareness.

Sensations arise from nowhere and go back to nowhere. What you are aware of, just one second old, totally immersed in the flow of awesome nature, is intensity. You are aware of the magnitude of sensation. Just notice in this moment in the formless field of awareness cascading with sensation that some sensation is intense. And in this moment other aspects of sensation may be more subtle, quiet.

Notice where sensation is salient, where it naturally sticks out in awareness. And of course to call it sensation is just a convenience of using language as a newborn babe, one second old. You know nothing of sensation. There is only a kind of free-floating amorphous tingling vibration. It hangs about for a moment, makes its appearance, exhausts itself and disappears from whence it came. Just allow yourself to rest deeply in this formless field, full of tingling vibration rising and falling.

And sometimes tingling vibration arises and even at one second old, you have a basic sense of pleasant or unpleasant, pain and pleasure. Just notice moment to moment as the activity of sensation rising and passing; it brings with it a sense of pleasantness, unpleasantness. But take care to let go of any mental labels whatsoever. As adults we have so many layers of judgments, habituated responses to different experiences. But at one second old, it’s all learning, it’s all alive, intelligence, streaming through your still wet physicality, just born into the world, all vibratory activity is learning, is information, is intelligence:  the sting of hunger in your belly, the comfort of being held, totally relaxing. Just notice what sensations rise and feel the part of you, namely this formless field of awareness that can just allow them to rise and pass.

And notice when you attach no meaning, no story to this tingling vibration, rising and passing. You naturally fall into a place of timelessness, in between sensations there is no time, nothing happens.

And now this moment, brand new, you know nothing of the thinking mind. You know nothing of the concept of a body, where you start, where you stop. There’s only the effortless coming and going, a tingling, vibratory flux through the field of awareness. It leaves no trace when it vanishes. There’s no grab or stick when it arises, no trace or residue when it passes. Sensory experience emerging from timelessness, falling back into timelessness, like waves falling back under the surface of the ocean.

With these last few moments, you can take a moment now to bring your adult mind online to integrate it into this practice by way of just feeling gratitude, gratitude for having a human birth, a human body so utterly sensitive, so intelligent. Feel the gift of every moment of sensation, the feel of temperature on your skin, the touch of your clothes, the pressure over your seat where you sit or lie down. Feel the warmth in your heart, in your body renewed with life with every breath. Every single one of us came into our personhood, our unique self in this very way, completely immersed in the flow of nature, sensation, enchanted by the blooming, buzzing arising of infinite worlds.

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For more guidance, check out our Mindfulness Essentials course.

The Mindful Review: Meditation, With Script

By Thomas McConkie, adapted from an episode of Mindfulness+

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John Yates (Dharma name Culadasa) created a practice called the Mindful Review that has been really helpful for me. Think of it as you take some time each day to look at the film of your life so to speak and especially pay attention to the things that didn’t go well. 

That’s what we’re doing here. It’s a little bit different in tone from other practices we’ve done, but I promise you it’s a really valuable one that you’ll want to keep in your repertoire.

So just get comfy, wherever you are. You don’t have to be in a formal meditation posture at all to do this practice, but you certainly can be. Formal meditation posture is powerful and will bring support and depth to anything you do. 

We’re just going to do a little review, calling up a moment in the last 24 hours. And if you can’t think of anything in the last 24 hours, think of something in the last week. It doesn’t have to be a cataclysm. It can just be a suboptimal moment, which our lives tend to be full of.  Any moment that brought suffering unnecessarily, avoidable suffering, namely you reacted to an objective event in a way that was less than optimal. And by objective event, it could be an event in the world, but it could also be an emotion. After all, we objectify our emotions and respond to them in an objective way, so basically how you related to anything that caused any undue suffering. Just call it up.

Meditation

Call the event up vividly: See it, hear it, feel it, taste it, smell it. Where were you?  What were you doing?  Who were you with if anybody?  Really reconstruct the moment. This creates a kind of virtual reality for the body. When we imagine it, it brings the experience back up in the body, it gives us some juice to work with.

Notice how good your mindfulness was as you call this experience up. How mindful were you being in the moment? Where was your attention, what were you paying attention to? Maybe you needed to be broadly aware of the environment that you were overly focused on something. Or maybe the opposite, maybe you were broadly aware of the environment, but you needed to be more focused. You needed to be more focused but you were just scattered and not totally tight on the matter at hand, so just notice how your attention was.

Notice what information is coming in through your senses, thoughts, feelings, sights, sounds, all of it. How clear were you in the moment, how alert?  

Notice any feeling emotion present if it was positive, negative, neutral. 

Take a moment here to really acknowledge how you responded to the situation in a way that was less than desirable. Just acknowledge it to yourself. Resolve to respond differently in the future. So this is where you get to reimagine the memory. Imagine that you responded with much better mindfulness, even perfect mindfulness. How does the scene play out now?  Just let it play out, feel it in your body, your heart, your mind. You’re now in this same situation but you get a second chance to live it again, only this time with perfect mindfulness. What do you do differently?

Good. Finally, if you reacted to a situation objectively in a way that hurt yourself or hurt others in any kind of way, make sure you take the time to make recompense. You might owe someone an apology, you might owe yourself an apology. Hopefully you didn’t do any property damage during the suboptimal response, but if you did, make sure to make things right. Just think about what you could do to make things right. Oftentimes it’s really just acknowledging to ourselves or another like, “Hey, this is how I acted in this moment and I did it in a place that was not particularly mindful or helpful.” No need to haul yourself over the coals for this. You note the response and commit to responding with more mindfulness the next time.

In a sense, it’s that simple. Just call up the situation vividly, notice what was going on in the moment, and ask why we acted the way we did.  And then imagine ourselves acting from a place of more mindfulness. That does a lot to rewrite our scripts and our programs. 

Part two is really important. I want you to stay in this same moment, the moment that you reacted to in a way that caused suffering for yourself, for others. I want you to examine your intention in the moment, deep down beneath your response and of everything you did in the moment, what was the underlying intention?  Just notice it, detect it. Feel it, and even put some simple language to it. 

When I do this practice and find my intention, in that moment when I acted less than desirably, I was trying to get something out of my way that I perceived to be in my way. Something’s in my way, I get it out of my way, that was the intention, a kind of angry response to it. What’s yours?

And now as we did in part one, I want you to replace the intention with a more wholesome intention, a more mindful intention. Imagine yourself in the same situation, the same objective challenge, everything’s the same except now, your intention is different, you’re replacing the previous intention with a new, more adaptive intention, a more mindful intention.

When I do this in my own practice, I imagine a new intention of just staying open and soft, not bracing, staying open and soft. 

And finally, imagine next time something like this, similar in any way might happen, this is making a prospective memory, a memory of the future. Imagine this same thing or something similar happening in the near future, and you have this new intention. “Next time this happens to me, I’m just going to stay open. I’m going to listen to the other person more. I’m going to be kind, patient.”  Just see what’s true for you, feel it playing out in the future.

And there it is:  there’s your second chance.

Well done. 

An Example

So I’ll tell you, it was Sunday, it was a really stormy Sunday in Salt Lake City and I got out my iPad and just wanted to read the Sunday paper, and I wanted to listen to my music on Spotify while I read the paper.  You’re going to get a glimpse into my first-world problems real quickly here. I got the paper up on my tablet, I put on some nice soothing Sunday music and the moment I flipped back from my Spotify app to the newspaper, that music stopped playing, and I did it a few times and it kept doing it. And I went to Settings and I erased the app on my tablet then downloaded it again. Then I turned off my app and my tablet and turned it back on, I did all the stuff you do when you problem shoot. Which is good for me; a few years ago before I started this Mindful Review practice, I probably would have been screaming at my tablet long before I did five things to intervene.

And then moving along, after I had failed to relaxingly read the paper with my music, I remembered an audio course that I wanted to listen to, and I needed to get it from my laptop to my new tablet. You’re starting to see the pattern here. But the AirDrop didn’t work, Apple! And I did several different things to try to get those tracks over to my tablet, and at this point I’m feeling a real clenching in my chest, like like I’ve gone from “Ah, it’s so cozy inside, the rain’s falling, I’m warm inside, got my music going, got my paper,” to within 30 minutes I was in a hell realm. My solar plexus was clenching and I was irritated, I was angry, I was growing impatient and to top it all off, I got some strange bill from the electric company that was literally 10 times more expensive than it usually is. 

And gracefully at that point when I got the bill, I said, “Self, this is not the kind of Sunday I set out to have.” And this is what kicked in the Mindful Review, and I thought of all of you and I thought, this is a really good practice that I want to share with my friends. 

So what happens is just now when I was doing this practice with you, I was calling up that moment right when I started to feel that clench in my solar plexus, right when I started to get irritated, and at the bottom of that experience was this intention, like kind of cave man problem in my way, destroy problem. I gave that a good 30 minute push of doing as many tech workarounds as I could, which is not many in my case. 

And when I dropped into the Mindful Review, I quickly realized, “Oh I have this intention, like I just have to explode the problem or crush it with my rock,” to extend the caveman metaphor. And it became clear to me that, you know what, I don’t have to solve all the world’s tech problems right now, it’s okay. My priority right now is to relax. Another time I can pick it back up when my priority is to figure out my new tablet. And that would have saved me a good 20 minutes of clenching and getting frustrated.

So I replaced the intention of bracing and wanting to smash the problem with a rock to just staying open, staying relaxed. And when I replaced my old intention with a new intention in this situation, the intention to just be soft and stay open, the whole scene changed. Like instead of obsessing about how to come up with a workaround on how these apps communicate with each other, I just relax and I say, “You know, I care about being relaxed more than I care about listening to music and reading the paper simultaneously, or you know what? I have a speaker I can put on instead of having to listen to music and read a paper through the same device.” I get creative, I start to flow when I’m soft; I’m no longer running into a problem. That is, that’s it. It’s simple but it’s profound.

Our mindfulness practices will be defeated many dozens if not hundreds of times a day. We’ll experience more and more freedom, more  and more creativity and dynamic quality in the way we show up in life as our practice deepens, and still there will be these valuable moments of failure. And when we bring the Mindful Review to these moments where our practice was collapsed, we shine a light on what was going on in the mind, what was going on with my intention, what was going on with my attention in that moment where I collapsed?  

We imagine the scene unfolding where we’re more mindful, where we have a new intention and over time we train ourselves to optimally respond to the problem areas in our lives, to the holdouts. That’s the principle, that’s the practice. You can go back to this meditation, review it, it just takes a few minutes to step through each particular challenge moment in your practice, and over time you’ll find that you’re making huge progress in the most difficult areas of your life. You’re more and more mindful, you’re more and more intentional about how you’re showing up.

If you’re interested in getting back to the original source, Culadasa, John Yates, writes a powerful book, The Mind Illuminated. You can check that out as well. I hope you’ll work this Mindful Review into your daily practice and really start to draw the benefits from it.