For Its Own Sake

[T]here was from the very beginning of MBSR an emphasis on non-duality and the non-instrumental dimension of practice, and thus, on non-doing, non-striving, not-knowing, non-attachment to outcomes, even to positive health outcomes, and on investigating beneath name and form and the world of appearances, as per the teachings of the Heart Sutra.   – Jon Kabat-Zinn

I love this brief description of the foundational intentions of Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR)—especially the phrase: the non-instrumental dimension of practice.

Most of what we do is instrumental. We do or say something in order to make something else happen. I say ‘Please pass the salt.’ in order to get you to give me the salt shaker. I exercise every day in order to feel better and to stay healthy. I might go to work in order to earn money to support myself and my family. Or I might wear a mask in order to help prevent the spread of COVID-19 and to keep myself safe. Everything is done for some purpose outside itself.

Being instrumental in our actions is called being mature. It means we have learned that some consequences to our actions are often knowable and useful. If I’m hungry, I open the refrigerator door to see what we might have available to eat. Knowing our way around this everyday world of cause and effect is an important part of mental health and our capacity to live in harmony with our surroundings and with each other.

Instrumental action is, however, only one dimension of life.

Non-instrumental action points to another way of being in the world. This is sometimes called expressive action—when we do something for its own sake. MBSR and Zen invite us to explore this world that the ancient Taoist described as doing-not-doing or wei-wu-wei. In this world we are not setting our sights on something beyond the present moment. We intentionally give up our attachment to the outcome of our actions and give ourselves fully to the moment.

Of course, whatever we do or do not do has some consequences. Everything is both caused by innumerable other factors and leads to unimaginable outcomes, most of which we will never know. But the possibility of being so fully engaged in the activity of the moment that we no longer hold onto imagined, desired or feared outcomes is a kind of liberation.

As long as we are doing things in order to make something else happen, we are dependent on the results of our actions for satisfaction. When our actions are without expectation, we are free to appreciate what is already here and to find fulfillment in the activity of life itself. It’s not that we become blind to outcomes and consequences, but rather we focus on what is in our control right in this moment and let the future take care of itself for a few moments.

The non-instrumental dimension of practice refers to a both-and stance. It’s like practicing scales on the piano not as a way to become a concert pianist, but as an expression of your love for music. Or like weeding in the garden without focusing on how many weeds are there, but weeding as expression of your love for being outside and playing in the dirt.

So we meditate, not in order to become calmer or more balanced (though this may happen), we meditate as an expression of our human capacity to be present and as a way of exploring what it really is to be a human being.

Personal Practice – Take some time today to be non-instrumental—to do something for no reason at all. Do something that has no purpose. Maybe sit in a chair and stare off into space. Rearrange the objects on top of your dresser. Find a place outside to sit and make a small sculpture out of the sticks and stones and grass you find right where you are. Daydream or make up a song that doesn’t make sense. See what happens.

For extra credit —  do something with a purpose (e.g. washing the dishes or mowing the lawn) and forget the purpose while you are doing it.

Traveling Nowhere

The ‘transformation of view’, which represents a long-term goal of MBSR training, is a process of replacing various unexamined preconceptions and misperceptions with more accurate or functional understandings of reality and oneself. As Kabat-Zinn describes it: ‘We can say the goal would be to see things as they actually are, not how we would like them to be or fear them to be, or only what we are socially conditioned to see or feel’   Ville Husgafvel  

Melissa and I will be leading a retreat in Belgium beginning this afternoon. Over the past ten years, we have often been invited to lead many retreats in Europe – from Italy to Denmark and Finland and from Wales and Ireland to Austria. We have loved the opportunity to see beautiful places and to meet people who want to learn and practice the Dharma.

All of these retreats have been organized by Universities and organizations that are training people to become Mindfulness teachers. We have led retreats and workshops for the faculty and students of these centers as well as for people who have taken mindfulness classes and are interested in more. Almost all the organizers themselves are former students of Melissa’s when she was one of the lead trainers for Jon Kabat-Zinn and the UMass Center for Mindfulness for twenty years. When she retired from those positions ten years ago to teach Zen full-time, the individual invitations to teach began coming in.

The relationship between Buddhism and Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) is often debated. One of the brilliant things Jon Kabat-Zinn did when he created MBSR in the late 80’s was to make the insights of Buddhist teaching available to people with no interest or openness to Buddhism or religion. Jon himself trained for a short period of time with the Korean Zen Master Seungsahn (who was also my teacher’s teacher) but centered his MBSR classes at UMass Medical Center where he was on the faculty.

Jon began in the basement of the building, working with a few patients dealing with chronic pain, the ones that the doctors had no more solutions for. After being featured on Bill Moyer’s special on the mind and the body, and the success of his book Full Catastrophe Living in the early nineties, his idea gained popularity and has now spread around the world. This is a wonderful thing that has changed the lives of many individuals who never would have stepped foot in a Zen Temple or even tried Buddhist meditation.

But anything that becomes successful is in danger of failing itself. The original mission gets watered down and people forget the deepest teachings in favor surface outcomes. In MBSR, the struggle has been to affirm that people’s physical health does often improve with these practices, but that this change is a byproduct of the transformation of view mentioned above by Villa Husgafvel, an MBSR teacher and researcher.

Zen Buddhism is not nearly as popular as mindfulness, though the roots, and I would even say the essence of mindfulness and MBSR are grounded in the insights and practices of Zen. Transformation of view is another way of talking about what we call in Zen awakening—seeing through our human delusions (various unexamined preconceptions and misperceptions) to the ground of reality (a more accurate or functional understandings of reality and oneself).

This waking up is the freedom and liberation we all seek. Free to be who we already are. Free to appreciate our lives in all their dimensions without being stuck by the incessant demands of our social conditioning and our small sense of self. It does lead to increased well-being on many dimensions, but ultimately it is freedom from being trapped in our parochial notions of how things should be so that we can fully participate in how things actually are.

This year, thanks to the world pandemic, we won’t be traveling anywhere. But we begin teaching a retreat in Belgium via Zoom this afternoon. Some students will be there in person and some will be joining from other points of the world via Zoom like us. It won’t be the same as being nestled in a small village outside of Brussells amidst the fertile rolling hills of Belgium. And I don’t suppose there will be wild poppies lining the narrow road, nor will I be exchanging lilting ‘Bonjour’ with anyone on my bike ride this afternoon either.

But we are happy to be leading and teaching and learning as best we are able—practicing what we preach by appreciating whatever conditions we encounter as the fullness of life itself.

About Time

The first day in August has caught me by surprise. Didn’t July just begin the other day? Wasn’t it June just the other day?

The speeding up of time is a well-documented phenomena among us older folks. One theory is that, with each decade the government increasingly (and secretly) taxes our time, so there’s just not as much of it to experience. But I mostly subscribe to theory of the diminishing proportion. Each day or month or year of my life is an increasingly small proportion of the whole of my life to date, therefore it goes by quicker.

For example, one month 5.5% of my grandson’s life. For me, 5.5% of my life is 42 months or nearly 4 years! But looking at facts on the ground, it seems pretty clear that even this does not capture the radical difference of time in our lives. Young toddlers change much more in one month than I do in four years. So maybe it’s not just a percentage thing.

As I approach my sixty-eighty birthday in November, I am aware of moving from young-old toward middle-old. (Right now I’m saving old-old for somewhere around 80 so I have something to look forward to.) I’m trying to notice the changes, both the losses and the gains, as I move through this period of my life.

Old age is often disparaged in our culture, but so far I’m quite enjoying it—at least this first part. I certainly can’t do what I used to be able to do, but the urgency of making something of myself and to accomplishing great things is slowly releasing me from its fierce and anxious grip.

These days, each day seems less and less a discrete unit of time—less and less measurable. A ‘day’ is more like a convenient label for something that turns out to be quite elastic. Or maybe ‘days’ don’t really exist. ‘Day’ is perhaps an unsubstantiated label we’ve created for convenience, then taken for real.

For me, the days and weeks and months of my life feel less firmly attached to linear time. I have less of a sense of moving through time and more appreciation for some continual unfolding that can’t really be measured. While this is not a boon to those who email me and want a timely response, it is a distinct improvement in my quality of life. I am, on my good days, released from the tyranny of time and the scourge of busyness. Though I am often engaged in doing this or that, teaching or talking on the phone or working in the garden, when I am fully present, I am less bothered by controlling some imagined future outcome and more able to enjoy what is already here.

So, welcome to August, whatever that might mean. And if you’re waiting for an email from me, I promise to respond….some day.

Personal Practice – Can you find your way into the timeless quality of the moment you are in? Stop several times today and see if you can locate anything in your experience that resembles a ‘day’ or ‘time.’ If you feel busy, take a moment to investigate what busyness really is. Are you busy when you are walking fast or working hard? Can you do exactly what you are doing and not be busy?

Problems in Paradise

The waterfall sounded wrong when I got to the porch this morning. I couldn’t see, but it didn’t sound like the usual amount of splashing. I set my laptop down and traipsed down to the koi pond to see what the problem was. Immediately I could see that the water flow over the rocks was much lower than usual.

Now our waterfall here at the Temple is actually a trick. The water appears to be moving only one way—down. But it is actually moving in a circle. The part where the water moves back up to the top of the waterfall is, however, hidden. Off to one side of the pond, hidden under a plastic ‘rock’, is a submerged pump that pushes the water up through a buried plastic pipe. It unnaturally flows uphill until it reaches the top and then naturally tumbles down over the rocks.

Sometimes I feel like the water is a caged animal that we are making perform tricks endlessly for the amusement of the zoo-going audience. Forced upward again and again, to do its lovely watery thing of following gravity and falling down.

But other times I suspect the water particles vie for the chance to take the ride. Like humans in an amusement park jostling each other eagerly as they wait their chance for another ride on the roller coaster. Into the dark mysterious pipe. The thrill of flowing upwards (not a usual occurrence for water). Then out into the light and the exhilarating and effortless falling down. Finally exiting the ride, back in the pond to tell stories of adventure and bravery to their waiting friends who weren’t chosen for the trip.

Of course I know the water doesn’t choose, it merely responds to the forces around it. It always says yes. When the wind blows across the top of the pond, little waves appear as the water. Without thinking, water allows itself to be touched by the wind and the energy of the wind expresses itself as ripples. And when the water in the pipe is pressed by the pump, it moves in the direction of least resistance, which, in this case (when the pump is working properly) is upward. Naturally rising.

What are the winds and pumps of my life? Is nighttime the same for me as water in the pipe? Are there invisible forces that restore my potential energy – that raise me up during the night so that I can again tumble down through my next day? So much happens in darkness. Maybe it’s the dark and invisible work of my gut that invisibly digests my food and sends the potential energy to each one of my cells to burn in whatever way they desire. Maybe metabolizing is like water falling down a waterfall.

But really, the pump submerged in the pond is like the heart that is carefully hidden away in my darkness of my chest. Like the water in the pond, my blood is a closed system. The heart beat and impels the blood through the vast web of watery roads in my body. The miles of piping that wander everywhere and bring the energy of oxygen—giving each cell the potential energy to follow the gravity of its natural function.

I once had a procedure done where they smeared my chest with goop then pressed hard with a cold metal sensor around to ‘see’ the blood flow in my heart. Aside from being messy and slightly uncomfortable, it was amazing. Amazing to see the wild pumping of this vital hidden engine. My heart itself was nothing like a hallmark card.   It was more like a small anxious animal of amorphous form. In constant motion. Every beat a matter of life and death. The blood constantly passing through. Generating enough pressure, but not too much. No waterfalls here, just a closed system of water and tissue and bone pumping the urgency of life day and night.

The waterfall in the pond is small potatoes compared to the cascade of blood through our bodies. The pump submerged in the water is of simpler stuff than the beating heart of each one of us.

Seeing the low water flow, I thought of calling Oldin, our sangha member who is an EMT, thinking that he knows a thing or two about pumping things. But decided rather to call Corwin, our pond master and figurer out of mechanical things. Hopefully, he’ll be able to come over this morning and correct our watery problem. In the meantime, I’ve pulled the plug to save the pump from its straining.

All is quiet now.

You Belong Here

The other day I was looking out the window with my grandson and I pointed out the man across the street wearing a mask. ‘You know people didn’t always wear masks,’ I said to him. He didn’t respond because he doesn’t know how to talk yet, but I think he got my point. Especially as I went on to explain about the pandemic that began one month after his first birthday. Before that, I told him, you only had to wear a mask if you were getting a stem cell transplant or robbing a bank. (He smiled faintly.)

It was a shock for me to realize again that the particular circumstances of the world at our birth are what we call ‘normal.’ I remembering studying World War II in fifth grade – writing my report the night before with my mother taking dictation on the typewriter and me almost in tears with anxiety as I tried to find my own words for what I was cribbing from the encyclopedia. (It wasn’t plagiarism as long as you said it in your own words.)

For me, World War II had ended at some point in the distant past. Little did I know that it was just fifteen years before that men and women around the world had been killing each other in extraordinary numbers—that a mere twenty years before, our country was fully engaged in a convulsive effort to fight militaristic expansive actions of Germany and Japan—and that the outcome was far from certain.

The fear and confusion around the bombing of the World Trade Center towers on 9/11 is now nearly twenty years past. My grandson will study it in school as something inevitable and unimaginable. And his first experience of pre-school this fall will be in small pods with teachers wearing masks and with all kinds of other regulations about how much contact he can have and with whom. I am incredibly saddened by this. But he is not.

I feel the weight of all the things he will not be able to do, but he, like all of us, only knows what he knows. ‘People wear masks and I can’t play with the kids who live next door.’ He will meet the circumstances of his life fully, and like every human being before him born on this planet, he will try to make the best of what he encounters. I don’t complain (often) about having to wear shirts and pants, and I suspect masks will just be part what a decent and caring person in his world wears.

The other day, a friend pointed me to a wonderful essay on Camus’s The Plague, by Robert Zaretsky. In the essay Zaretsky writes about the character Rambert who is a journalist who had come down from Paris to Algeria to write an article. While writing this article the city was locked down because of an outbreak of the plague. Rambert tries all kinds of ways to get out of the quarantined city so he can return home. At one point, he goes to the local doctor, Rieux, and asks for a medical pass verifying his good health so that he can travel back to Paris. The doctor replies, ‘”Well you know I can’t give that to you.’ And Rambert, frustrated, says, “But I don’t belong here.” And Rieux’s reply is quite simple and utterly true. “From now on, you do belong here.”’

From now on, you do belong here. Or as another friend says, ‘This is the new abnormal.’ Our world will never be the same and we are all trying to figure out how to live in this new world. For most of us, it is still a strange and disquieting world. Are we still in the first wave or is this the beginning of the second? Will I ever want to go out to a restaurant again? Will the Patriots play any football games this fall and if they do, will the decision of three of their key defensive players to ‘sit this season out’ diminish their chances? We all live with these weighty questions.

Meanwhile, life goes on. Mothers and fathers love their children and want to keep them safe. We grandparents are happy to help out as we can – in person or on Zoom or through the occasional phone call.