We live our lives in moments. Moments are the currency of human experience. A few days ago, my wife and I were out walking our puppy. We ran into a woman we often enjoyed seeing with her husband when we were on walks. We knew they had sold their home and assumed they had moved out of the neighborhood. Instead, we were delighted to learn they had moved into a smaller home a street over from us. As we talked and caught up, she mentioned another couple we routinely encountered walking their dog. We learned that the husband had died just a couple of weeks ago at the age of 54. Here in the span of maybe 10 minutes of conversation, we experienced a delightful moment of reunion that we could not have anticipated, and a moment of sorrow that was clearly unexpected. I remember having the thought “this life is a wild ride.”
These days, we wake up to an unfolding of moments that pulls us into the wild adventure happening on the world stage. The news comes at us like a firehose and it feels as though there are many more moments that are disturbing than delightful. There is so much going on and we really don’t know how things are going to turn out. It is impossible to predict the latest political maneuverings at any level of local, national, or global government. Economic uncertainties abound. People who want life to be more affordable are told that things really are affordable or that affordable “isn’t a thing.” On top of any challenges that may be going on in the smaller circle of our personal lives (which you may have noticed don’t just stop because there is so much going on in the world), things seem uniquely unstable and uncertain. However, from an evolutionary perspective, we can be reminded that every era has had to deal with significant challenges in politics, economics, health, and weather on a global level. I hear so often people say or write “no, this is different” or “this is the worst it has ever been.” I think things feel this way because this is our time to navigate these kinds of challenges. We did not experience the Black Death plague in Europe, Asia, and North Africa that killed between 75 and 200 million people between 1346 and 1353. None of us were alive during the Taiping Rebellion in the mid-1800s when there were 20-70 million deaths in China. We didn’t live through 70-85 million people dying – about 3% of the world’s population – during WWII. I suspect those people experienced those times as “uniquely different,” or “the worst that’s ever happened.” We can only read about those times. Jon Kabat-Zinn referred to the fullness of the human experience as the “full catastrophe” and we are now actually living through the “full catastrophe” of the times we inhabit. The convergence of “poly threats” (in the language of the United Nations) posed by climate change, the rapid technological advances leading to AI, the shifting of wealth to the very few – all of these have created complex geo-political tensions. And while there are aspects of uniqueness, it is important to our well-being to remember that the world has always been uncertain, Uncertainty is a basic dimension of human experience at the personal and collective level. World events don’t create uncertainty – they reveal and remind us of it. The uncertain and uncontrollable has always been here.
Our evolutionary “wiring,” designed to keep us safe and alive, has always been challenged by uncertainty. The unfolding of our history as a species has been a succession of “projects” to develop and reduce that uncertainty. The focus of the projects has changed over the ages. The availability of food given the uncertainty of the weather occupied the human race for quite some time. Now, with one or more grocery stores at every major intersection, most of us don’t give a thought about whether food and other essentials will be available. With the development of vaccines, most of us do not have to concern ourselves with diseases that have taken countless lives in the past. Systems of education have been developed and refined such that opportunities to become educated are taken for granted when it was once available only for a privileged few. We have insurance to protect us against catastrophic events such as car wrecks or major medical incidents. These successes have provided remarkable levels of stability. We count on these things every day.
However, there has been an unintended side effect of these extraordinary developments to reduce uncertainty. We are accustomed to so much order that when we encounter the unexpected, it can feel so unsettling. How could this happen? Why me? A new diagnosis, the unanticipated loss of a job, the breakup of a relationship – all can remind us that certainty is truly an illusion. How the 10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows of life will unfold will always be a mystery.
When the ground of routine and expectation shifts, the usual reaction is fear and anxiety. Again, we are wired for this. The uncertain is experienced as a threat even if we are not physically in danger. Our fight-flee-freeze system kicks in automatically and we can live in a constant state of hyperarousal. Ideally, we become a little more alert, a bit more cautious about how to proceed in and through the unexpected. However, our fear and anxiety can easily become a constant rumination about potential negative outcomes that can move us to hasty and unskillful actions or to a paralysis of hopelessness. Hyperarousal can also keep us from noticing the good that can continue to manifest in ourselves, and others, and in the miracle of life on earth. Uncertainty brings a lot of stress.
One of the great insights that emerged from the mindfulness-based stress- reduction (MBSR) curriculum that Jon Kabat-Zinn developed in the late 1970s is that the stress we feel is not from the unknown itself but from our reaction to it. The initial participants in MBSR were people facing very challenging medical diagnoses; they were dealing with the stress of encountering their mortality. And what was discovered in the course of developing mindfulness skills is that a quality-of-life marked by peace and a sense of fulfillment could still be cultivated in the midst of those kinds of challenges. Reliably. And it is no less true today. We can find a sense of stability and groundedness within ourselves in the midst of a great deal of uncertainty.
The fear and anxiety that often mark our initial reactions to uncertainty often leads to the question “what am I/what are we to do?” We want to take action so that this uncertainty goes away and we can return to a less worrisome, more predictable day-to-day existence. Mindfulness practices prioritize a different question. Rather than “what am I to do?”, the question becomes “how am I to be?” in the midst of these conditions. How can I relate to the barrage of reminders about uncertainty everyday so I do not cause unnecessary suffering to myself or others?
There are a number of ways that mindfulness practices can anchor us in these turbulent times.
Come Home To Your Body
Mindfulness practices invite us to come home to the ground of our bodies. As long as we are breathing, our bodies are here. The body is not in the past or the future. Practices like the body scan and focusing on the felt sense of the breath are not a means to avoid or escape the chaos. They provide the means for us to be more attuned to how we are being impacted by what is going on around us. We become more sensitized to when, how, and how much stress we are navigating. This attunement is particularly important in monitoring our exposure to the various forms of news media clamoring for our attention. Many news media outlets are less oriented to providing information and are designed more to activate our emotions. When we refine our awareness to how the body is holding stress, we can appropriately measure how much or little news to expose ourselves to throughout the day. It is like the difference between mindlessly stuffing ourselves with food and eating out of a true need for nourishment. We can discover that we can stay informed by dipping into the news rather than wallowing in it. We can also intentionally look for those sources of news that focus as much on what’s going well as on what’s going to hell.
Meditation is Practicing Working with Uncertainty
Every formal meditation practice is a working with uncertainty, with not knowing. Think about it. When we take our seats, we may have some intentional plan. We might want to do a breath meditation or a lovingkindness meditation. However, whatever structure or style we might choose, we literally do not know what is going to happen in those 15 or 20 or 30 minutes. We don’t know what thoughts will enter our mind, how quiet or restless the mind will be, what sounds may appear in the soundscape, what sensations will be experienced in the body. The only thing we can have any control over is the quality of attention we give in receiving the unfolding of our experience moment by moment by moment. The invitation is to allow everything to be just as it is. We have no chance to be certain what we will encounter. Meditation practice is the laboratory par excellence for working with the “noise” associated with not-knowing.
Inevitably, in our meditation practice and in our daily lives off the cushion we encounter the three primal causes of suffering as identified by the first truly wise psychologist. The Buddha spoke of learning to be aware of and work with the energies of greed, aversion, and ignorance. Greed is wanting things we like or that are pleasurable to persist. Aversion is the “hatred” – the pushing away of things that we don’t like, and ignorance is simply checking out and being in a daydream. In a certain sense, each of these energies lead to projects for attaining certainty and they are all doomed to fail. They are the winds driving all the commotion in our world today.
Mindfulness is Heartfulness
The Buddha also taught that it is essential to cultivate the good – to allow our heart/mind to express the wish for ourselves and others to be happy and to be free from suffering. He developed practices that offer lovingkindness to those relationships we find anywhere along the spectrum of easy and enjoyable to the challenging. He taught practices to help us “get out of ourselves” and acknowledge the suffering of those we know and of those who are suffering in faraway places.
Cultivating the good offers a counterpoint to the mind’s tendency toward judgment. We live so much of our lives in a dual consciousness where we pit what we like against what we don’t like, us against them. This is another “certainty project” that causes tremendous suffering. Richard Rohr talks about the seven Cs of the dualistic mind: “it compares, it competes, it conflicts, it conspires, it condemns, it cancels out any contrary evidence, and then it crucifies with impunity.” These 7 Cs are on display in the acrimony we witness every day. However, it is simply impossible to engage in an of those 7 Cs while earnestly wishing someone that you hold in your heart and mind that they be happy or that they be free from suffering. Practices that cultivate the good are a royal road to move from dualistic thinking to a unitive consciousness that understands we are all interconnected. Mother Teresa said “if we have no peace, is because we have forgotten that we belong to one another.” Cultivating the good reminds us that we are all members of the one and only true community – the community of planet Earth – in the midst of all its diversity.
Resting in Awareness
Meditation practices such as the body scan or following the breath are intended ultimately to strengthen our capacity to be aware. But they are not the endpoint. The real peace meditation has to offer is to rest in awareness rather than directing it at something. This is often referred to as “choiceless awareness.” Here we discover our true nature. We have been graced with this boundless awareness that actually is the ground of our being when we learn to rest in it. We see everything that arises in formal practice – sounds, sensations, smells, thoughts, feelings – as simply appearances arising in the vast space of awareness, like clouds moving through the sky. We don’t reject any of them and we don’t identify with any of them. Resting in awareness offers the amazing experience of realizing that while we might feel afraid or anxious, awareness itself is not afraid or anxious. Awareness is the space in which anxious thoughts or feelings to arise.
Formal Practice is Essential
Meditation is a humbling enterprise if we approach it from the perspective of trying to reach some meditative state – where we pursue some outcome. Meditation is the great teacher to let us know that we really cannot control what happens but the quality of our lives depends mightily on how we meet what happens. And we require constant reminding of this. The root word for mindfulness in Pali means “remember to remember,” which means we need re-minding to be here, to take up residency in the only true ground – the present moment. Formal practice is an extended pause from the necessary and not-necessarily-urgent doing of our lives that provides that re-minding. We are instruments needing to be tuned and re-tuned again and again each time before we go out on the stage of our lives – which is the real curriculum of practice. This is why formal practice is so important. We need to take time out to practice dealing with the winds of our minds in order to deal with the winds of the world’s dramas. Without formal practice, we tend to live in what Joseph Goldstein calls a state of “more or less mindful.” We don’t touch the profound peace that comes with being fully mindful by taking refuge in the present moment.
Make Your Life an Offering
From the humility that emerges from earnest practice, we can cultivate and embody a sense of our own loving connected presence and understand that this is the superpower that we all possess. We can be ambassadors of connectedness and be a ground for one another.
Many people feel helpless in this time. It can feel like there is not much we have to do offer that can make a difference, that maybe we have to just wait until we can vote again. But this is a time where we need “all hands on deck.” Not all of us can respond, for example, to what has been taking place in Minneapolis by writing a protest song the way that Bruce Springsteen did. But it is critical to understand that the offerings of our loving connected presence don’t have to be “big” in the way we typically think of. A smile, a genuine “hello,” a small kindness, allowing to pass the impulse to say something judgmental or unskillful, all of these things may appear small to us but the impact they might have is also uncertain. That we don’t know what that impact will be says nothing about its potential.
What we do have control over is to embrace a meditation practice to work with our minds and hearts. This allows us to embody a loving connected presence and offer that in response to the “daily bread” that we are given each day. Tuning the instrument of our being each day allows us to offer the song that is uniquely ours to whoever and whatever we might meet day by day. And we can remind ourselves that we a part of a community of many many people who practice all over the world – day by day. We can trust that the shared intention of such a vast community will ultimately carry us through and even allow us to flourish in these difficult times.