Concentration, Clarity, and Equanimity: Three Mindful Skills

By Thomas McConkie, adapted from an episode of the Mindfulness+ podcast

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Why do we hear so much about the breath when we talk about mindfulness?

There's a good reason for it. The breath is with us all the time. In this moment wherever you are and whatever you're doing, you're doing it in a body, and that body is breathing. Because of this, virtually all meditative traditions make use of the breath. It's a ready-made object of meditation.

Focusing on the breath is also an intuitive way for us to contact our awareness. The breath moves slowly enough that most people are able to track it immediately, without years of practice. When we pay attention to the breath, we open up different opportunities in awareness. It can be a really powerful tool in developing mindfulness.

In addition, breathing makes it easier for us to develop basic meditative skills.

My experience is that virtually every teacher talks about these skills in one way or another, and you see them in the ancient texts as well. But I've never come across a clearer framing of it than a framing from Shinzen Young — an American born teacher who has really influenced my practice. I feel a lot of gratitude for him.

Young talks about mindfulness as a skill set. He says any time we practice mindfulness we're practicing concentration, clarity, and equanimity.

Concentration is just what it sounds like. Most people intuitively understand that concentration means focusing on one thing while letting other things be in the background, out of focus. There are more details to cover, but for the time being we can leave it at that.

Clarity helps us notice what’s happening moment to moment. This is really important because when we're able to get clear on what's happening moment to moment, we become free from it. Rather than being totally buried and lost in an experience, we take a step back and witness it. We're able to see it clearly from a slight distance, and this allows us to come back in to experience with a certain level of spaciousness and freedom. Clarity improves our objective behavior in life.

Equanimity is about acceptance. It’s our ability to just accept what's happening moment to moment — to not interfere with the flow of experience. Often, the moment I introduce this concept, hands shoot up in the room and people say: "Woah, what if it's appropriate to interfere? What if something's going on that I don't want to see happen? What if there's injustice, violence, and my job is to act?" Those are great questions. The point here is that when we're deeply accepting, when we cultivate this quality of equanimity and awareness, it doesn't mean we're not still passionately engaged in the world. What it means is that we're not in denial of what's happening. We're open, present, and receptive. We allowing the fullness of experience moment to moment to inform us. Fully informed, we're able to act more appropriately and skillfully in life.

Now, let’s take a moment to practice these skills, using the breath as the foundation of our practice.

Wherever you are, I encourage you to find a little perch or somewhere where you can settle in. Allow yourself to come in to a posture where you can relax and also be alert.

For a moment you can just allow your awareness to fill the entire physical body. Like water soaking into a sponge, you can allow your awareness to totally soak through the physical body.

You can bring awareness to the torso: notice the expansion and contraction of the torso as you breath in and breathe out.

I'd invite you at this point to breathe in a little more fully than you usually do on the in-breath, filling your lungs with oxygen and feeling the stretch through the torso as you breathe in more fully. And likewise on the out-breath you can breathe out a little more fully than you normally would. Pushing the air out and feeling the collapse. The emptying of the lungs and torso. Feeling this contraction. Letting that go, you can come back to normal breathing.

Just letting the breath move through you naturally, not trying to control it in any way. Notice at this point the top of the in-breath. Breathing in as if you were a photographer on an expedition trying to take a photograph of a rare species. I want you to pay special attention to the top of the in-breath. See if you can notice the point at which the in-breath becomes the out-breath. The exotic creature rears its head, the out-breath.

You can do the same at the bottom of the out-breath: see if you can notice the very moment at which the in-breath appears. As if you were trying to capture a photograph of that very moment that the in-breath appears.

Notice that however closely you look, you'll never find an actual line or moment when the in-breath becomes the out-breath. In-breath and out-breath are just words and ideas. When we plunge into the actual territory, we experience that the in-breath and the out-breath are seamlessly intertwined.

So you can let go of in-breath and out-breath and let go in to simply breathing. Neither in-breath or out-breath; just the organic whole. The unbroken flow of breathing.

As you stay with breathing, you can allow the out-breath particularly to soften you even more. With each out-breath you feel the body let go even more, riding the breath like a wave into deeper and deeper relaxation.

As you soften in the body you'll notice a natural quality of acceptance arise, an ability to just allow the body to be as it is. Allow this entire moment to be as it is. The body might not be perfectly comfortable, and that's perfectly okay. There's a part of you that can just allow it to be exactly as it is.

Thoughts continue to flow through the mind, and there's no need to do anything about them. You can allow thought to flow through the mind as naturally as blood flows through the veins. Whatever's happening in the body and mind and the world around you, you can allow it. You can hold it with this quality of acceptance, with equanimity.

You can stay in contact with these flavors of awareness, having a natural settledness of focus and concentration in life. You can allow things to be as they are and deeply enjoy the flow of life that we're always immersed in as long as we're breathing.

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Transcribed by Seth McConkie, edited by Jon Ogden

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Tricycle Feature: Latter-day Zen

Enjoy the most recent feature of Lower Lights in Tricycle, a publication focusing on the independent voice of Buddhism in the West.  Read here

Webinar - Parenting: Mastering the Art of Ongoing Growth

In this call, Thomas speaks with master teachers Dr. Terri O'Fallon and Kim Barta about how a developmental perspective can help Parents and children in their journey of growth and flourishing.

•Explore what is meant by both child development and adult development
•Consider fascinating examples of how child and adult development interact
•Offer simple practices for cultivating greater compassion and understanding toward both parent and child
 

Love From Beyond: A Eulogy

My friend, Mary Elizabeth Pitt Hess (July 17th, 1980 - November 26th), changed me as much as any friend I’ve ever had. She asked me to offer the eulogy at her funeral before she died, but due to circumstances beyond my control, I wasn’t able to. 

When I told my friend Eric Overton–a gifted artist–how sick I felt that I wasn’t able to honor Mary’s request, he lit up with a vision of making the eulogy into a short film. 

This is for Mary, in honor of her wisdom and power in Life, ever-present in her Death.

Souls of Sangha: Igor & Madison Limansky

Q: Igor, how was it for you to have Lower Light’s beginning be in your living room? 

Igor: Tom (McConkie) and I have always shared meditation and talking about practice together. When we ended up moving in together in 2011 into this apartment, he started getting a lot of people talking to him about meditation and so they just started meeting right here. For me it was interesting because I was working on the Obama campaign as the Utah State Director and so my whole world was consumed by that. Every little bit of time was spent working. To be able to come here on Wednesday nights and not think about work and to actually have a moment with friends and community, I started understanding community organizing and what was happening around me with a greater sense of purpose. It was really a sustaining force in my life from the very beginning. 

Q: How has your practice help shape your relationship? 

Madi: I feel like we have similar tools that we are using to communicate or to handle something challenging, even if we aren’t great at it, we are able to come back to the same framework of presence. Even last time when you guys were going to come over for this interview and we were feeling overwhelmed with a conflict and had to cancel. It was really nice to recognize that we needed that time to dive into it and it was comforting to know that we could be honest with you guys and you would understand. I don’t know if we would have handled that situation the same way if it wasn’t for our practice.

Q: What does living in community mean to you right now? 

Madi: I guess for me as I am getting older, I’ve noticed that a lot of my relationships are one dimensional, like the people I work with or family members or people who I go out with or girl friends who i’ll have occasional lunches with. I feel like living in ourcommunity, there are so many dimensions to our relationships. We can witness one another in so many different moments in our lives, not just fun friend time, but also really challenging things that are coming up. I appreciate a community that I feel so supported by and also that I feel I can support in those same ways.

Igor: I grew up moving around a lot. I went to 4 different high schools, 3 different junior highs and 4 different elementary schools. Even though we didn’t stay in one place, we ended up coming back to the Salt Lake/Holladay area. I guess I felt like this was my home. I started working in politics and noticed that most people take the itinerate political route, so they get a job on a campaign in Nebraska, get a job on a campaign in Ohio, and then they go to D.C.. It was really early on that I knew that that wasn’t at all interesting to me. I wanted to be here, in a place where I felt I had roots, in a place that I felt had a sense of what community was. That’s kind of been my focus for a while and Lower Lights has really put a fine point on what it means to support one another and to create community. It reminds me how important it is to bring my whole self to everything I do and that I need to listen to others to help encourage someone to be their whole self. I really can’t imagine living my life without that.

Q: What is a gift you have received through practice? 

Igor: Something that sticks out to me is the concept of equanimity. Just giving myself radical permission to feel what is going on and acknowledge the truth of what is happening. I’ve had a lot of conflict with my family and with my mom. I remember being with her when she was in a paranoid state and feeling the kid in me getting angry and wanting things to be different than they were. I have a clear memory of repeating to myself, “equanimity” and allowing that word to be a guide to ask, “what am I feeling now?” I remember that as soon as I had done that, everything changed and I could feel myself relaxing into more space to feel. The ability to put that word into action and feel it change the situation through acceptance, lightened the intensity. That is a specific situation, but it happens much more regularly as I spend more time in community and spend more time in practice.

Madi: I can think of a lot of examples, the one I’ll talk about, which I can’t talk about without crying, is when a dear friend of mine died… I was confused and I carried a lot of guilt. We weren’t in a good place in our friendship when he died. Feeling like I’d never had the chance to reconnect with him before his passing was really hard for me. Growing up in Utah at every funeral, they are like “be happy, they are in heaven, everything is fine.” I just always have had a hard time with death because everyone around me has a certainty with death and I have felt alone in my confusion. Being in a community that could hold me in all of that and not give me any answers and encourage me to keep asking questions really changed the way I processed and am still processing his death. 

Q: Is there anything left unsaid that you’d like to share? 

Madi: I am feeling just so sensitive right now. I am just really aware that this is the room where we grew our sangha. I’ve done a lot of healing in this room.