Have you ever noticed that you can’t shut the awareness off? As long as we are alive and awake, awareness is present. Sit with your eyes closed for 30 seconds and try not being aware. You can’t do it. As we develop our ability to focus and still our minds, our awareness can turn around and observe itself. That is amazing. As we learn to relax the habits of the egoic personality, the non-judgmental clarity of awareness starts informing our lives more and more. Instead of getting completely identified with the pleasant and unpleasant experiences which occupy our days, we are more likely able to step back and see them as passing events which we can relate to with more ease and wisdom. The more we align ourselves with the point of view of awareness, the more we can hold the joys and sorrows of our lives without getting swept away in knee jerk reactivity to them. This holding of our experience means that we are relating to our lives with more mental clarity and freedom and are less likely to experience suffering from the changeable, unsatisfactory, and selfless nature of events.

From a work life perspective, aligning ourselves with awareness makes us better colleagues – we’re more present during conversations, and more likely to see our colleagues with fresh eyes. Awareness tells us when we’re in need of a break, when we’re losing our focus, or when we need to reset our work priorities. Awareness keeps us on track so that we can manage our time better, and it helps us stay present during meetings. Awareness puts us in touch with our emotions so that, when responding to an upsetting email, we give ourselves a pause to acknowledge how we’re feeling, defusing the raw emotions so that we can craft an appropriate response that isn’t coming from a place of anger. Awareness helps us see the unskillful habit patterns of our minds, dis-identifying from negative narratives that hold us back at work and in our daily lives.

One of the most amazing things about awareness is that it is not static. It is a living experience, something that we can keep opening to and deepening into the more we practice.

There is so much vulnerability in our world. Wars, famines, oppression, political instability, economic insecurity, climate change, and other types of suffering caused by greed, hatred and ignorance. But even when our life circumstances seem ideal, things are unreliable. Everything is changing, after all, we are buffeted by stress and uncertainty, and the impersonal nature of events beyond our control keeps us forever seeking safety. Wanting security, we take refuge in things we think will lead to security but are inherently untrustworthy, impermanent, unstable. Perhaps we take refuge in our national identity, or our relationships, or our health, or our thoughts, or our retirement account. But any of those things can and do change or end at any time.

In Buddhism, there is a traditional way of talking about refuge, and that’s known as the three refuges, or the three jewels. Buddhists the world over chant the phrases, “I go to the Buddha for refuge. I go to the Dharma for refuge. I go to the Sangha for refuge.” I myself have chanted these phrases tens of thousands of times in the last three plus decades of practice.

Refuge in the Buddha means taking refuge in the principle of awakening itself. It’s important to remind ourselves that the Buddha is not a god. Not a supernatural entity. He was a human being. And that a human being named Siddhartha Gotama achieved enlightenment under the Bodhi tree is a foundational event in human history. It points to the fact that other human beings can awaken as well. The Buddha is a model and inspiration for everyone, pointing to our capacity as human beings to awaken and free ourselves of the mental patterns that cause anguish and distress. When we bow to the Buddha and take refuge in him, we are bowing to the Buddha within us, to our own capacity for awakening.

The first time I bowed to a Buddha statue, I knew something important had happened. I had always associated bowing and ritual as being hallmarks of cultish thinking. But when I bowed to the Buddha I understood that I was bowing to my own potential for transforming my mind. By bowing to the Buddha I was saying to myself, “Yes, awakening is possible. And it is possible for me.” It was a stunning possibility for me. And it still is.

When we take refuge in the Dharma we are aligning ourselves with the Buddha’s teachings. The word dharma is often translated as Truth. On the deepest level it means taking refuge in the truth of the way things are: the truth that there is suffering, that there is a cause of suffering, that we have the potential to free ourselves from suffering, and that there is a path that leads to suffering’s end.

My first experience of refuge was art. I believed that by practicing art I would get to know myself deeply, evolve and anneal myself through the furnaces of inner and outer experience and become a wise man as a result. Although I practiced art for many years, it didn’t quite work out the way I envisioned, and there came a day when I knew that I needed something else. That something else was therapy. I knew I had to understand myself better. To gain knowledge of the forces that had shaped me, and the therapeutic process was a tremendous benefit to me, providing me with much insight into my psychological conditioning. It was only after many years of therapy, though, that I understood that something else was needed. And that’s when I found meditation and Buddhism.

Looking back on art, therapy, and dharma, I realize that all three of those endeavors, for me at least, were about finding the truth. In what did the Buddha himself take refuge? The Buddha took refuge in the Dharma. The truth of the way things are. Truth is a very important value in Buddhism, and to tell a lie is considered a serious act of unskillfulness.

But the world we live in presents a big challenge for those who take refuge in the truth. Because we live in a post-truth world. A world in which public figures offer falsehoods about things both small and profound and seemingly never face the consequences of their lies. In fact, millions of people may believe those lies. But just because we live in a post-truth world doesn’t mean we abandon the truth. If anything, we value it even more. We keep reminding ourselves that if we take refuge in the truth, the truth leads to waking up. This becomes our north star.

We take refuge in the sangha or community of like-minded seekers of awakening. This for many people is the most challenging of the three refuges. All of us on the path are unfinished works in progress, imperfect beings. As part of a sangha, you will offer people love and offer fellowship in the dharma. You will also betray, abandon, and insult people and cause them harm. Sartre said it well in No Exit: “Hell is other people.” It’s tricky to take refuge in individual people who are as flawed as you are. We are all afflicted with various forms of stress, we all have blind spots, and we are all haunted by the stories we have inherited or created that limit our joy.

Taking refuge in the sangha jewel is about purifying our hearts in relationship. This means that we take refuge not in the flawed personalities of our dharma friends, but in the principle of awakening that each of us tries living in community. In practice this means that we awkwardly collide with each other while doing our best to stay awake and not cause harm. At the same time we persistently cultivate the skill of seeing the best in ourselves and others. Those collisions, like sharp stones in a riverbed rubbing against each other over many years, eventually grind us down so that our coarseness and sharp edges get smoothed over and we can be at peace with others.

Very closely aligned with the dharma is when one takes refuge in the natural world. If you’ve spent time in the woods, or in some other part of the natural world, there’s a healing that can happen. Because the natural world reflects your own vastness but not your limited egoic self.

When I was younger I used to go on backpacking trips in the California wilderness. As I hiked up and down switchbacks, across broad meadows, past cool mountain lakes, carrying everything I needed on my back, my thinking mind would simply stop and I experienced a sense of pure being filled only with dappled light and birdsong. The trees surrounding me did not reflect any of my worries or plans, they were just themselves, silent and towering, inviting me to be just myself. Time and again when I returned from a backpacking trip to civilization, I understood that my mind had been in a different state of consciousness, where my connection to the elemental nature of reality was far stronger.

There is a great story about the night of the Buddha’s awakening. As the enlightenment experience began to happen for him, Mara, the demonic personification of delusion, attempted to undermine the Buddha’s confidence in what he was doing. At one point Mara sneered at the Buddha and asked, “Who would even witness your awakening?” In response the Buddha simply touched the earth with his right hand, as if to say, “The earth is my witness.”

Right now our planet could certainly use more people taking refuge in the awakened presence of nature. It is not separate from our own awakened presence.

Perhaps the simplest form of refuge is the refuge in awareness itself: the knowing of experience which is not caught in experience. This is the refuge that is available to us every moment that we are alive. No matter what you are experiencing, no matter the awkwardness or complexity of the situation you find yourself in, coming back to awareness in this moment is a sure way of snapping out of the trance of your stress-inducing fantasies and projections.

As long as we are aware, we are home.

This idea of non-attachment works its way into our lives. When facing a difficulty, a frustration, a heartbreak, a little voice in our head may say, “I know I’m not supposed to be attached. So I’m trying to take the high road here and not let the situation get to me.” Some people end up getting attached to being non-attached!

Often called spiritual bypassing, this attempt to “not get attached” tends to force us to avoid the difficult experience in the first place, so that we never end up metabolizing it, working through it, and learning from it. The truth is that human beings always get attached. It’s what we do. We get attached to whatever gives us pleasure, we get attached to our friends and loved ones, we get attached to our opinions, our sports teams, our comforts, our routines.

A better way of thinking about attachment is to notice what happens when you do get attached. Usually when something we love leaves or threatens to leave there’s some sort of suffering or stress that arises. And we can be mindful of this. We can learn a lot about our suffering, and about ourselves, when we pay close attention to where we cling and what happens when we experience the loss of the object of clinging.

Take sadness for instance. When something beautiful in our life comes to an end, it isn’t spiritually fruitful to say, “I am going to practice non-attachment and not let myself get sad.” It is very spiritually fruitful, however, to meet your sadness with clarity and kindness as you start to process the experience of loss. One of the great benefits of practicing mindfulness is that when we suffer a loss and feel sad, our meditation practice allows us to gently hold that sadness in the space of awareness and let it unfold in its own way and within its own timeline, so that we can digest the experience of loss and investigate it rather than avoid it. We also get to see that the sadness is not the totality of who we are, that while we are sad there are also layers of us that are not sad, which provides perspective in our time of hurt.

Sadness and grief are universal experiences, and when the sadness in our lives is known and seen without our stories getting in the way, our hearts become connected to all others who experience sadness in the world. That connection provides insight into the nature of being alive.

Connecting to sadness as an inevitable thing that comes with being human can help us process sadness as a sacred, even a healing thing, as we integrate the experience of loss into our lives and develop insight into the impermanence of phenomena. If we avoid the impact of our loss so that we don’t feel the sadness, if we spiritually bypass it, then we are breaking off and discarding a precious piece of ourselves. This is actually a form of self-harm. Because owned sadness connects us to all beings who feel sad, bypassing that sadness traps us in the isolation of our own stories. And then our sadness becomes hopeless.

A number of years ago my father died suddenly in the night. I remember falling to my knee and gasping at one in the morning as I held a phone to my ear as someone called to tell me the news. But instead of grieving and feeling my loss, I was forced to get busy. The two days after that phone call were a whirlwind of activity for me. My dad had been a man of some prominence, and as his next of kin, I had to take on everything involving his burial and the settlement of his estate. I called all the relatives to tell them the news, drove to Reno where dad had lived to meet with his accountants and attorneys, and began the legal process whereby I would be named executor of his estate. I also invited dozens of people to a memorial service, found a chapel in Reno to hold it in, hired a mortuary and picked out an urn in which to store his ashes, wrote an obituary for the local paper, coordinated arrival dates and details of friends and relatives, and arranged for a post-service reception with food and drink. It was non-stop activity all the time, and my grief was on pause while I immersed myself in the to-do list of the moment. I felt isolated and alone within the administrative obligation of “making arrangements.” It was something happening only to me, and I just needed to take care of it.

One of the things I needed to do was pick up death certificates from the county medical examiner so that I could have my father’s various accounts transferred to my control in order to properly settle his affairs.

My parents had divorced when I was a little boy, but my mom had come out to Reno to support me. The day of the memorial service mom accompanied me to the medical examiner’s as I paid for 10 death certificates. I gathered the certificates and slid them into a folder and then mom and I got into my car and I began driving us to one of the casinos in town where we were to have lunch. Halfway to lunch, it suddenly dawned on me that I had not seen my father’s body, and that I had just missed the last opportunity to do so. I was to leave Reno the next day, and dad’s body was to be cremated shortly after. In fact, no family or friends at all had seen my father’s body: it had just been paramedics and the medical examiner. I was stunned; I had been so busy making arrangements that I had completely forgotten about this very basic filial experience of bearing witness to a parent’s corpse.

“Mom, we have to go back to the medical examiner’s,” I said, my voice filled with urgency. “I never saw dad’s body. I’ve got to see him.”

So we drove back to the medical examiner’s. Mom sat in the waiting room while I went to the front desk and made my request. After a short wait the medical examiner himself showed up and we shook hands. He then escorted me into a gleaming silver elevator and we went down one floor. When the door opened we stepped out into a hall and there was my dad’s body on a table, his trunk and legs covered in a cloth, his head visible.

“Dad,” I said, my voice trembling and my knees a bit weak as I stepped closer to him. The grief was now alive in me, and I felt it in my bones. I noticed that dad’s face was set in an expression that I often saw him wear – his lips pursed in a way that indicated he was concentrating on something important. But whatever that important task was, it was not for the living to know. As I left a few minutes later, the coroner said to me, “Thank you for coming in today Mr. Scheinman and making an identification. We always appreciate it when a family member does that.”

When I rejoined my mother upstairs, I felt a powerful sense of something important having been completed. By being close to dad’s body I had also come close to what I had lost and the sadness triggered by it. When I left the medical examiner’s office I felt a greater sense of wholeness and connection to the truth, a greater connection to what this precious life is all about and to all the beings who suffer because they cling. Something deep had shifted in me, and I no longer felt isolated and alone.

When we bypass our sadness, we cut off a vital piece of the heart – the part that understands that suffering because of loss is the most human of experiences. By opening to sadness with conscious intention we can reclaim that part of the heart, let go of our isolation by seeing our connection to others who know loss, and become more whole as a result. In that wholeness, we no longer feel a hopeless sadness, but one that brings healing.

Then of course we hear about the latest findings from science. The studies that show how mindfulness can decrease stress, delay aging in the brain, increase the immune response or strengthen the ability to focus and be productive at work. In an age of collapsing spiritual traditions, science is often viewed as a secular religion, and when secularists hear about the positive science surrounding mindfulness they get downright giddy. And interested.

With so many blissed out people on glossy magazine covers and so much edifying hard data about benefits, it seems like you’d be crazy not to practice mindfulness!

The truth, though, is more complex. The goal of mindfulness, when properly understood, practiced and taught, is not, ultimately, about achieving some alpha state of mental performance, or about feeling blissed out or radiantly calm (although these states can and do result from regular intensive practice). Another way of saying this is that mindfulness is not supposed to be fun, easy, or calming. It is not about having no pain. In fact, mindfulness – when it is practiced with some integrity and depth – has much to do with meeting pain – raw, human, everyday pain – with honesty, openheartedness, and clarity. I’ll illustrate this with a story from my own practice.

I got up early one morning and began my routine of sitting in meditation. All things seemed normal as I settled onto my bench. But within a minute I noticed that my stomach was feeling unsettled. Soon the feeling intensified and became queasiness moving in the direction of nausea. After a few more minutes I noticed that my shoulders were hot and my face felt flushed. I had become overheated all at once, which then intensified my stomach distress. I took off my sweatshirt in response and soon felt the morning air from the open window start to cool me down and provide some relief.

After about 10 minutes, I began to yawn frequently. I had not gotten a great sleep the night before, but the yawning – deep, loud, incessant yawning – seemed not connected to being tired. I remembered that frequent yawning is often a sign of anxiety. This was an odd realization for me, because I didn’t feel particularly anxious when I woke up. Am I anxious? I asked myself. As I sat there over the next few minutes I found an answer to that question by sensing into my chest, slowing down my thought processes, and noticing what I noticed. I soon realized that I was, in fact, feeling quite anxious. About 20 minutes into my sit and after repeatedly yawning, I began moving my hands along my thighs in a sign of extreme restlessness. At 25 minutes I started to fidget constantly, scratching itchy patches on my head or face and continuing to yawn every few seconds, as I realized the extent of my anxiety. My distress had been hidden, embedded in my body, and was now unfolding itself in my consciousness as a result of practicing being aware. My whole body felt uncomfortable now, my focus was totally shot, but I continued to sit on my bench, simply being with my discomfort, acknowledging it without judging myself for it. By the 45 minute mark I said to myself, “This really sucks. I don’t like it. Ugh!” I sat with my dislike of the discomfort and continued noticing my reactions. I spent an hour feeling like crap, but I didn’t resist it.

When I stood up from my bench after an hour of very un-calm, un-blissful practice, I was feeling far more alive, far more connected to myself, and far more in touch with my own doubt and pain. I was also far more in touch with my own resilience and strength for being with it all. My Yawning Meditation had not been fun at all, nor did I ever feel a sense of pleasure or wisdom the entire time I was doing it. Yet wisdom was manifesting itself simply by my being willing to experience things exactly as they were without feeling like I should have been having more fun or being more “productive.”

Mindfulness, above all, is about being with the truth and seeing it clearly. Not the cliched, superficial, magazine cover truth – but the very messy truth of our lives.

Given the suffering and anxiety caused by wars physical, relational, and mental, I thought it might be fruitful to share some thoughts on peacemaking in practice.

One of the greatest qualities of mindfulness as a skill we can develop is the ability to give space to how we are without judging ourselves for how we are. And without needing to fix how we are either. When we can do this, our default reactivity begins to soften, and this leads to a sense of greater calm. That’s because the habit of giving space to ourselves is an act of compassion and healing. When we give space to experience without judging it, we let go of blaming ourselves for our difficulties, and as a result we are kinder to ourselves. When we are kinder to ourselves, we are more peaceful. From this inner peace, we relate to others more peacefully as well. In a sense, by cultivating this non-judging space within us during meditation, we are starting to make peace with ourselves and the world.

Our lives are so often busy, our to-do lists so endless, that our attention is commonly preoccupied with an incessant array of thoughts, plans, and duties. We are seemingly trapped in the doing mode of life, the gritty hustle-bustle of things. Now just to be clear, there’s nothing wrong with the doing mode. We all have things we need to get done. The problem is when the doing mode becomes the main or even only focus of our lives. When this is the case, we lose our connection to the being mode. The fact that you are alive, that you have being, has its own integrity and value without reference at all to your job title or what you produce. The being mode is how we heal, recharge, process inner and outer experiences, how we become whole. When we lose connection to the being mode, we are essentially cutting ourselves off from the source of all our power and wisdom. Ignoring the being mode of life is committing a kind of violence against personhood. This is another way that we wage war with ourselves. Meditation is powerful because it reconnects us to the being mode. When we meditate every day, we are reconnecting every day. Every day we reconnect to being is another day of making peace with ourselves and others.

Another way mindfulness helps us move towards peace is by helping us get over the story of ME. We spend a lot of time creating our world in our own image. It’s been said that we think of our life like a movie that we’re the star of, following a script written specifically for us. When we’re the star of our own movie, though, it makes us a bit self-centered, doesn’t it? It all becomes the big drama of our lives, with all the supporting actors, story arcs and subplots, heroes and villains. It becomes ME against a hostile world, from which we have to defend ourselves. And we believe this movie of our life because it’s so compelling. But another great skill we learn by practicing mindful awareness is to recognize that this movie plot which we take to be true is just a collection of stories that are fundamentally evanescent and insubstantial.

That’s because meditation practice helps us see the shifting nature of our thoughts, the soap bubble quality of them. Our thoughts are events in consciousness rather than hard facts. With awareness we can choose which thoughts are worth following and which aren’t. When we see that our narratives are really just a collection of transient thoughts, the idea that there is a being in the control tower called ME isn’t so insistent, and it begins to lose its predominance in our lives. When that sense of ME starts to relax it leads to a great sense of relief. And peace. That’s because we no longer need to defend it.

Of course in our time of ubiquitous social media and curated information bubbles, it can be easy to get overwhelmed with input. This is especially true when current events seem like a five alarm fire all the time, and our doomscrolling tendencies makes it even worse. So titrating your exposure to media may be a wise and important strategy in cultivating a peaceful mind and heart.

One of the most beautiful recent examples of activist peacemaking is the story of the Buddhist monks who walked for peace last year. Starting in October 2025 from Fort Worth Texas, a group of monks from the Vietnamese Theravadan tradition began a 15-week walk of 2,300 miles (or about 20 miles per day). The monks walked through the deep South, through Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, into the Carolinas, then north to conclude at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC. The monks often endured harsh weather, and two of them were injured in a road accident, with one having to get his leg amputated and then continuing the march in a wheelchair.

What was the goal of the monks walk? To “bring a message of unity, compassion and healing.”

Crowds of thousands of people from all walks of life and political persuasions came to see the monks as they passed through their communities. Every day the monks walked they proved that it doesn’t matter who you are, people are hungry for peace. The lead monk, Venerable Bhikkhu Pannakara, when asked how it made him feel when he would see thousands of people showing up to see them, said that he cried. Because he realized that thousands of people were showing up because they were suffering and that they really want peace in their lives. The last time I checked the Monks’ Facebook page had 2.9 million followers.

These monks are a great example of peacemaking. And also a great example of engaging in peaceful resistance to the status quo – which, unfortunately, appears to be war in one form or another. The monks are also a reminder that peace doesn’t just happen because it’s a good and needed thing – it happens when people practice it. In fact, it’s absolutely essential that people practice it.

We think of patience as a virtue, but patience also has many benefits to those who practice it. Those benefits include better mental health, better friendships and neighborliness, less depression and frustration, greater satisfaction in life goals, and enhanced physical well-being, according to just one study cited by Greater Good Magazine.*

I’ll get back to patience in a moment, so bear with me. First I’d like to state the obvious. We are busy people. Our lives are filled with lots of doing. We spend our days departing, arriving, making, planning, scheduling, thinking, judging, deciding, etc. We get lots of things done in our modern, complex world. But from a meditation perspective, we may not be getting as much done as we think.

There is a well-known teaching story of a Buddhist monk from Asia who was visiting the United States and at the airport in the US he was asked what he thought of America so far. The monk looked around at all the people rushing about the airport, and he replied archly, “It seems like Americans are quite lazy.”

What the monk in this story is saying is that, from a spiritual perspective, if you really want to get something done, you need to stop being so busy doing things and start paying attention to your mind. But it is also true that for the non-monastic householder, to sit down and deliberately do nothing for a half hour of meditation is to go against all the pressures and conditioning on us about being busy and “productive.”

Let me add one more thread. And that is a famous quote from Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor. “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

Our lives are filled with our reactions to things that happen to us. Those reactions are sometimes quite necessary as we need to meet what life gives us. But often and to our detriment, many of our reactions are a reflection of our fundamental impatience with difficulty. For example, an unpleasant event happens (stimulus), and we react negatively (response). Someone says something unkind or unfair to me, and I get into an argument with them. That’s a very typical scenario (and it is one that I personally have experienced more than I’d like to admit.).

But when you meditate, if the unpleasant experience comes to mind, you may feel the urge to get into an argument and fight back, but you can’t act on the urge. You can only observe it. And that’s the space that Viktor Frankl talked about. And this is one of the ways that we can develop patience from practice. By meditating every day and watching your urges come and go in the space of awareness, you are widening that gap between stimulus and response. And that changes your brain, your life and how you relate to your challenges.

In Buddhism patience finds its way onto one of the famous Buddhist lists. It is considered to be one of the six Pāramīs, or Perfections, that are critical qualities for spiritual development. They are given in this order: Generosity, Virtue, Patience, Energy, Concentration, Wisdom.

The word for patience in Pali is Khanti. It is often translated as patience, but it also conveys other qualities, like forbearance, endurance, steadfastness, and tolerance. So Khanti isn’t just about turning the other cheek; there’s a toughness to it as well. An ability to endure. Patience can be thought of not only as an excellent personal quality, but also as something you can practice. If you are a meditator you already hang out in that gap between stimulus and response on a regular basis and so your patience muscle is stronger than for many people. So when you’re in a difficult situation, reminding yourself of your capacity to dwell in the space of choice rather than reactivity is a way of gently encouraging patience. Bringing to mind your gratitude for what you already have is another fine way to cultivate patience.

Patience helps us out in many difficult situations. When dealing with someone who annoys you, practicing a little patience can save you from your worst impulses of disdain or insult. Waiting on a seemingly interminable line at the grocery store or in the middle of a traffic jam, practicing patience can keep you from blowing your top in frustration. And patience goes a long way in a romantic relationship and can be the thing that keeps it intact and moving towards greater intimacy and connection.

One of the most challenging and also transformative ways we can practice khanti is when people are hurting us in some way. The best example of this we’ve seen recently is the way the people of Minneapolis responded to the fascistic ICE invasion and Federal Government-sanctioned brutality in their community. Folks from all walks of life teamed up and kept their neighbors safe in a process that became known as “neighboring.” People drove children to school so that their parents wouldn’t get hauled away by ICE. Women gave their breast milk to strangers’ children for the same reason. Rapid response ICE watch networks tracked ICE agents in real time and warned immigrants of their presence. Food deliveries kept neighbors fed. And this community intervention against ICE was done non-violently. That’s the patience, the endurance, the steadfastness, showing up.

Patience doesn’t mean sticking your head under a rock. It means not allowing your response to be weakened by rage and fear.

Just as practice deepens our ability to be patient because it widens the gap between stimulus and response, so it also takes patience to practice in the first place. As soon as we assume our meditation posture, all the things we need to get done or are preoccupied with start crowding into our minds. This is one reason why meditators choose not to meditate. They don’t want to face that restlessness. But if you can be patient toward the restlessness and let it be, you will eventually settle down.

It certainly takes patience to be on a spiritual path. Spiritual work is a little bit like peeling an onion. Just when you think you’ve figured things out, that you’ve left your old destructive patterns behind you, the next thing you know they come roaring back, destabilizing you anew.

So on the path of inner development one vital thing we have to learn is to be patient with ourselves. Having your dysfunctions repeat is not a sign you’re doing the practice wrong, it’s a sign of how deep your conditioning is. As it is for all of us.

Above all, it takes time to heal and to evolve. And patience is a key skill on that path.

*(https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/four_reasons_to_cultivate_patience).

Hi Everyone - While I move and settle in to a new location I’ll be pausing the Monday night class at Yoga Kula which has hosted the class since 2024. Thank you Yoga Kula for hosting me! And thanks to everyone who showed up and practiced with sincerity and heart over the last two years. I am deeply honored that you joined me. I will keep you updated on details of a new class location and time when we can practice together again. Hopefully soon.

In the meantime, here’s a recent meditation on patience. The talk on patience is here, and soon there will be blogposts on patience, facing difficulties in practice, and peacemaking in warlike times.

I am looking forward to reconnecting with you soon in person or online. Kind regards and blessings to you.

Bill

About the Class: The focus of this drop-in class is cultivating presence, awareness and awakening in daily life through practical and relatable teachings. Through the gentle persistence of regular meditation practice, guided inquiry, and open-heartedness, wisdom can arise in even the most ordinary of moments. By deepening our connection to ourselves through meditation and mindful awareness, we cultivate mental and physical wellness in our lives. The session consists of a 30-minute teacher-led meditation, followed by a short talk on a relevant topic, and then a group discussion. People of all races and ethnicities, sexual orientations and gender identities are welcome.

About The Teacher: Bill Scheinman has been a meditator for over 30 years and practices in the Insight Meditation tradition of Theravadan Buddhism. He has taught meditation for more than 20 years in a variety of community, healthcare, and corporate settings. He has facilitated 8-week courses in mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), worked with individuals as a mindfulness coach, and has taught mindfulness for numerous corporate clients. In 2017 Bill became a Community Dharma Leader through Spirit Rock Meditation Center and is a graduate of Spirit Rock’s Dedicated Practitioner Program. As a volunteer Bill taught meditation at San Francisco’s County jail for nine years and served on the Board of the San Francisco Insight Meditation Community.

This is why it takes courage to be mindful – because we have to confront the shadows within us over and over again, ad nauseum, excavating the inner terrain of our sadness, rage and fear, our desires, shames and fixations. The practice of mindfulness is a hero’s journey inside, where our demons are waiting not to be slain, but to be known.

For many years I harbored the thought that I had failed to succeed in certain aspects of my life and that this failure was why the circumstances of my life were the way they were. This particular thought pattern was a very slippery thing because it appeared to be fact-based and beyond dispute. So much so that I barely took note of the thought whenever it arose in my consciousness. It was simply, Oh yeah, this happened at such and such time and I failed and it changed the course of my whole life.

What I didn’t understand for a long time is that this thought pattern which held that “I had failed” was usually not even conscious. It was mostly submerged just beneath the level of my conscious scrutiny. Because of this I tended not to investigate it. But it worked overtime causing me harm. The “I failed” narrative caused great tension and pressure inside me, because the sense of having failed was measured against an ideal I’d been unconsciously holding about what it meant to be “successful.”

This all came to a head a while back during a meditation session when I was cultivating self-compassion. The old story of having failed rose into my awareness. With a tenderness of heart cultivated through the self-compassion practice, I suddenly had a revelation. With astonishment I realized that instead of thinking that I had failed at a certain life goal all these years, what I had really been thinking was that it was me, my life and existence, that was the failure.

This was a mental pattern I was suddenly able to see clearly after years of believing it to be true and not being mindful of it. I realized that this pattern had caused me untold moments of suffering, that it had affected my sense of who I was or what was possible in my life, that it wore on me mentally and physically and I hadn’t even questioned it. It was such an enormous relief when I understood this.

It is totally okay to make an assessment about how your plans turned out. It’s okay to acknowledge that you failed at doing something. Hell, the wisdom gained from failing is what matures us so we can take on new challenges. But it is an entirely different thing to personalize a failure and apply it to your existence as a whole. Seeing with clarity what I had been doing to myself was a crucial turning point for me and ever since then I have been much kinder to myself.

We all have habitual negative mind states. Patterns that hold us back. Some of these patterns emerge quite often and easily during meditation and we can recognize them, name them, and get to know them so well that they often lose their negative charge. Some other patterns take longer to be recognized. Many of these mind states cause us harm without us knowing it. These negative patterns are essentially mental prisons in which we are doing time. We are limited by them without even realizing it. When we can see the harm they cause us with clarity, we have been set free of that prison and those limitations.

Recognizing the hurt a mind state has caused you is a wonderful invitation to treat yourself in a loving way. And surely this is one of the best reasons to meditate. When we see with clarity the construction of our negative patterns, we have the choice to release them. With self-compassion and with insight, it is easier to let the pattern go.

What we’re letting go of is really a habit. And a habit is all about clinging. What are we clinging to? We are clinging to what we know, what feels safe and comfortable.

Buddhism talks a lot about clinging and not clinging. That’s because to cling is also to suffer. As spoken of the ardent practitioner of mindfulness, it is said, in the refrain to the Satipatthana Sutta, “And he abides independent, not clinging to anything in the world.” That phrase is said over and over again in that teaching. And the value of not clinging, of letting go, is mentioned countless times in Buddhist teachings.

Even the word nibbana, which we usually translate as enlightenment, implies non-clinging. The word literally means extinguishing the flame. What does the flame cling to? It clings to its fuel.

So, there’s a big emphasis on clinging as a cause of suffering, and not clinging, or letting go, as the gateway to freedom.

Why do we suffer when we cling?

Because everything is impermanent. If you cling to what can’t actually be clung to, you’re setting yourself up for stress and suffering. For loss and heartbreak. And for cycles of reactivity that only lead to more suffering. Buddhism is really oriented towards realizing that impermanence is a fundamental aspect of reality. And letting go of the idea of permanence, or said another way, embracing change, is what allows the new and unknown to emerge. It’s also what allows us to transform ourselves, to learn, to love, to deepen our experience of life.

In meditation, just to assume a meditation posture for a given amount of time each day represents a significant act of letting go. I mean, what’s a typical weekday morning routine for many people? You wake up, your mind starts thinking about things, the wheels begin to spin. Maybe it’s about a meeting where you have to present. How’s it going to go? you wonder. Or maybe it’s about the political leadership of your country and the terrible things that are happening. The cortisol starts entering the bloodstream. By habit we want to get up, check our phones while we have breakfast, take in the news, and step onto the treadmill of the day. But if instead of doing that you sit down for 30 minutes and just try being with your breathing, that is an act of letting go of the habit of busyness. Letting go of the habit of the mind that likes to be busy is a simple act that leads to healing. Or maybe you like to practice at night. And maybe you would ordinarily have a glass of wine after work. But instead of doing that you’re sitting and being with yourself. That’s a letting go too. Instead of dulling yourself with alcohol, you are recharging yourself with being.

In the act of meditation itself we’re essentially practicing letting go all the time. You try focusing on the breath in your practice. You sit and you feel your breath coming in, and you feel it going out. And you take another breath. And another. But before you know it, you’ve lost the breath and begun thinking about getting plane tickets for a trip you need to take next month. Or your son’s soccer game. Or your portfolio or bank account balance. Or some other worry. And then you recognize that you’ve lost the breath. So, what do you do? You redirect your attention to the breath. You come back. In the moment that you came back to the breath you practiced letting go of worry. And then you’re with the breath again. A few moments later, you realize you’ve been fantasizing. Maybe having a fantasy of delicious food, or sex, or visiting an exotic city. You’ve lost the breath again. So you come back to the breath again. And in that moment, you’ve practiced letting go of desire. In your meditation you are constantly practicing letting go of these mental states of desire, aversion, and delusion, just through the simple fact of being in the here and now with your breath. In the process you are transforming how you relate to yourself and the world. You are letting go of your unconscious habits and making the conscious choice of being here.

When you’re on a meditation retreat and you’re practicing intensively, you might begin to discover that your body’s in a lot of pain. Maybe you discover parts of the body that are wounded that you didn’t realize were wounded. And eventually you learn to meditate with the pain. You figure out how to do it. In so doing you’ve let go of the idea that your meditation practice has to be pain free. And to learn how to be with discomfort and pain in the body, also conditions us to be with discomfort with other things, with difficult people, relationships, emotions, situations in our lives. So we learn about discomfort. And we learn about how to respond to discomfort rather than react to it. We cultivate wisdom just by making the conscious choice to return to the breath and be with things as they are.

In our meditation practice we also learn to let go of the stories we tell ourselves about self/others: Our heads are full of such stories, and we see this when we practice. We see our stories return again and again, and we let go of them again and again. And eventually something becomes free in us. Because we get used to seeing our stories and letting them go, we don’t believe them as much. And we realize that our thoughts are just events in consciousness, not facts. Like passing clouds. We don’t have to take them - or the idea of “me”- so literally.

Our practice helps us let go of emotions. It doesn’t help us get rid of our emotions. Rather the act of mindful awareness helps us metabolize our emotions so that we are able to let them pass through us and learn what we need to learn from them.

Our practice also helps us let go of the need to be in control. One of the most common delusions in life is the idea that we can control external events. It’s true that we can control some events, but most events big or small are beyond our control. And letting go of the need for that control is a great relief.

Part of what we want to control is the idea of perfection – that we can somehow become perfect. Which means that we are always seeing ourselves as a project – as somehow tweakable enough to attain an immaculate state of excellence. Again there’s a tremendous relief when we can let go of this illusion.

And letting go of being perfect has a lot to do with the idea that we are a fixed and separate self in the first place. Mindfulness practice, especially when it gets deep, shows us clearly that human experience is in a constant state of impermanence and flow, and that if we can let go of the idea of being a solid “thing” and align ourselves with that flow, what we can become and be is boundless.

To let go is to admit that what we’re letting go of is not the source of a permanent happiness. It should be said that letting go is not about getting rid of something. Pushing something away aversively is just another form of clinging. Letting go is simply the habit of clinging starting to relax and fall away.

Is letting go an act of will? More often than not, letting go is not willed. You don’t do it, it does you. It arises naturally in the course of daily practice. In fact, if we try forcing ourselves to let go it won’t work. We need to live through the experience, not avoid it, and letting go happens naturally as a result of being awake with that experience. We find the grace to let go because we’ve been willing to open our hearts to holding on and seeing the stress in that.

How is it that letting go happens naturally? It’s because there’s something in each of us which wants freedom and recognizes it.

I recently found myself unexpectedly in the company of someone that I don’t particularly like or trust. A difficult person you could say. We were in close quarters, in an elevator, and we stood in that awkward period of silence waiting for the inscrutable machinery to click into place and send us upward. In the few moments that we were together, though, I was surprised when we both exchanged greetings and indulged in some pleasant small talk.

Later I thought about this interaction. Here was someone I didn’t like. Yet if that was so, how come we had had a positive interaction? After reflecting for a moment I recognized that I was feeling more relaxed and undefended that day. Why? Because for the first time in a couple of weeks I had had a longer, deeper meditation. My recent sits had been of shorter duration due to the disruption of the holidays and my practice lately had been a bit dull. Because I had sat for a longer period of time on this particular day my nervous system reset itself and I became unplugged from the rush and reactivity common to the season. As a result, I was simply less prone to embody my bad tendencies and was able to experience this person’s presence on its own terms – as another human being in the world who was in need of kindness, respect, and meaning.

It was really quite striking to me how the simple fact of meditating for a longer period that day had deactivated the power of my habitual negativity. I am also reminded that there can be a fine line between the kind, caring and resilient version of myself that I like to think I am and the schmuck I can be when my meditation practice hasn’t been strong.

But I’d actually like to dig a bit deeper into what it was about my meditation that day that allowed my heart to remain open during a potentially difficult social encounter in an elevator.

I am a non-monastic meditator who sits once per day. Like other “householders” I find that it can be a complicated matter to set aside 15, 30 or 45 minutes in a 16-hour day and devote it to cultivating mindful presence. There are many things competing for our time, after all, and many of them are things we need to do, like making breakfast, commuting, working, driving the kids to school, cooking, cleaning, socializing, etc. Which means that when we sit down for our daily session of meditation, all of these needs are impacting our minds and bodies, roiling our nervous systems with the energy of schedules, plans, and obligations. (This is why it can be so helpful and important to go on a residential meditation retreat for a number of days or weeks – you get to leave your daily routine behind and devote every moment of every day to practice. I highly recommend it).

So when we householders first sit down to practice there’s often a lot of mental and physical noise going on. As a result, restlessness and anxiety is a very common experience. Sometimes or even often a session of practice can consist almost entirely of fidgeting in one’s chosen posture, constantly getting distracted by runaway thoughts, and finding large gaps in one’s attention.

Take the simple and universal experience of having an itch. Will you scratch that itch or not?

I have pretty bad allergies. They seem to be especially active as I am waking up and starting my day – in other words, right about the time I want to meditate. Sometimes it can take almost the entire session just to stabilize my runny nose and start feeling settled. People often think that meditation is supposed to be fun and enjoyable. What they don’t understand is that meditation is merely a reflection of the current conditions of your life – there are pleasant moments and unpleasant moments and neutral moments. Being present for all those moments is enormously beneficial, even if it doesn’t happen to feel especially good while you are doing it.

So, getting back to that itch….

On this particular morning, as I sat down to practice and closed my eyes, I noticed right away that my allergies were a problem. My nose was running, I sneezed a few times, and the sneezing triggered itching all over my face. I had to come back to my breath over and over again. Fifteen minutes went by and I still wasn’t getting any traction. My attention remained scattered, I was itching everywhere and I had to keep tending to my runny nose. If I had to analyze my meditation at that moment, I’d surely conclude that it sucked.

About 30 minutes in I noticed that the runny nose had finally stopped. It was just the itching I had to deal with now. Within a few minutes I found that I was able to pay more attention to my breath than to my itching. This was a positive development and it had taken me 30 minutes to get there. When an itch was especially acute, I would scratch it. As the minutes passed, though, my attention began to steady more on the breath. The steadiness of attention opened up for me the innate stillness inside the mind. That stillness was a pleasure and I followed it as my mind was naturally drawn to it.

A moment later a shift occurred when a bad itch came and my hand started to rise to scratch it, but rather than interrupt the pleasure of my building concentration, my hand stopped in mid air and gently descended back to my lap. This happened over and over. I would get an itch, my impulse would be to get rid of it by scratching, but because my awareness now included the breath, and the pleasure I felt because of the concentration and steadiness of mind, I found the mental space to resist. Calm and focus gathered steadily and the pressures of life and the world began to fall away from me. Itches came and went but I just let them do their thing. The stillness deepened, and I was completely immobile for a few minutes, until, finally, my meditation timer went off.

It was the first time in weeks that I had gotten to that still place inside my mind and body. And I felt the difference right away. I was more grounded than I had been in awhile, my chest was open and relaxed, and during the day I felt a greater patience with myself and others. While interacting with people is always a two-way street, I have no doubt that those few minutes of concentrated attention that morning conditioned my positive elevator interaction later that day. Which is why it is also so important to understand that even a few minutes of stillness and focus can change the trajectory of your day. By not scratching that itch for just a few minutes, I was training my mind and heart to be patient and less judgmental.

I sat for 45 minutes that day and most of it was miserable, but those 7 or 8 minutes of stillness were pure gold and a great reminder to me of why we practice.

We can also think of mindfulness practice as a form of nervous system regulation as we heal ourselves by reducing stress and our identification with mental chatter. We can see mindfulness as a way of integrating the different parts of ourselves, metabolizing the disparate forces within us so that we become whole.

And a lot of people practice mindfulness because it helps them become more focused and more effective in their lives. This might be the emphasis of many corporate training programs that offer mindfulness training to their employees.

All of those are valid ways of thinking about the value of practicing mindfulness.

On this Valentine’s week I’d like to highlight an aspect that is often overlooked. And that is the notion that mindfulness is really an expression of love.

When we love, we are not forcing anything, we are not imposing our will on the beloved. The heart is open and receptive. Carl Jung wrote, “Where love rules, there is no will to power, and where power predominates, love is lacking.” Love is not about domination – it is about openness, it’s about welcoming what’s here.

Similarly in mindfulness, we are not attempting to interfere with what is arising in consciousness. We give space to experience exactly as it is. We respect what’s already here, without trying to make it be something else. These are qualities of love that we embody when we practice.

Simply put: without love, there can be no mindfulness. Mindfulness is an expression of love.

The very fact that we give ourselves space to practice and do nothing but be aware, that is an act of love. It is certainly an act of self-love. Because by welcoming what’s here, we are basically saying YES to whatever is arising – and that includes all the angry knots in the mind, the places where we are wounded and ashamed, the panic, anxiety, and phobias that we have…we’re allowing and respecting all of this in our experience. This is what love does, it opens us to what’s true. Truth is an essential ingredient of love. One thing about love: it can hang out with the truth, no matter how painful that truth might be. If you think about all the conspiracy theories and all the misinformation that pollutes our current political climate – there’s no love in it. It’s all hatred and ill will. But love is about allowing the truth to be known. And that’s what we do when we meditate. We allow the truth to be known, and in doing so, we come into alignment with reality.

Bob Sharples wrote: “Don’t meditate to fix yourself, to improve yourself, to redeem yourself; rather, do it as an act of love, of deep warm friendship to yourself.”

So, that’s what meditation is. It is an act of love, a befriending of ourselves. Every time you practice, you are actively loving yourself.

But it’s not just about yourself. We interact with the world every day and our actions make an impact on the people we meet and on our communities. So when we love ourselves by taking the time to sit quietly and non judgmentally with our experience, we also create the conditions by which we express love for others. We give our openheartedness to them, not trying to dominate them but trying to understand what is true for them, giving respect and knowing that they too need meaning, love, kindness, compassion, just as we do.

By opening to our own depths non-judgmentally, we can also recognize and open to the depths of other people….which is the basis for true intimacy.

In terms of our meditation practice, there is also an arc, and sometimes it too can be hard to see. We go through phases when our practice doesn’t feel strong. When we feel like we are just going through the motions. We come across the same distractions, the same habitual mental states, the same confusions and wrinkles in the mind, the same limiting narratives. Sometimes it feels like we are not changing at all. That the practice is not serving us. But do be encouraged - it takes time to season and mature a human heart, and even though the layer of the onion you just peeled away looks exactly like the one before it, you are closer to the center than you realize. Practice works its mysterious magic even when you don’t know it. Every epiphany, every insight, every moment of waking up, is a direct result of countless hours of seemingly tedious and inconsequential meditation sessions in which all that seemed to happen was the reappearance of your familiar demons.

All of which is to say that the key to practice is to keep showing up. Whether you know it or not, the arc of practice bends toward freedom. And in that spirit, I wanted to let students know that live classes resume on January 26 at Yoga Kula in Berkeley. Hope to see you there.

Best to all in the new year.

One of the most simple yet profound frames of reference for mindfulness practice is the frame of awareness of feelings, often called “feeling tone.” The basic idea is that every event, or even every moment, has a basic tone which we experience as either pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. Mindfulness practice helps us pay attention to our experience of feeling tone. When we experience something unpleasant, if we notice and acknowledge it, we are more likely to respond to it rather than react to it. As an example, if someone says something unkind to you, by noticing the unpleasant emotions that are likely to arise, and where you feel them in the body, you are taking a pause and letting yourself digest the pain, thus interrupting the fight or flight reactivity that might have lead to a bitter argument. Once the man I was working for screamed at me – not a fun experience. But instead of reacting from the pain of his words, I let myself experience the pain just as it was. That allowed me to steady myself and respond in a way that transformed the interaction in the moment and led to a better relationship between us.

One way of practicing mindfulness of feeling tone is during our mindfulness practice sessions. We can play with letting ourselves be with unpleasant sensations instead of getting rid of them. For example, if you have an itch, notice what it’s like not to scratch it. If you practice not scratching the itch you are developing patience and self-control, which conditions your mind to be patient and tolerant with “itchy” people or situations. When things feel neutral during practice – neither pleasant nor unpleasant – focus on the neutrality. Get interested in it. This conditions your mind to notice being alive in those moments of down time when we might normally space out and lose interest. Noticing the tendency of the mind to grasp when things feel pleasurable is a way of training ourselves to live life with more balance and contentment. By noticing the grasping in the mind and then bringing your attention back to your object of focus (the breath, for example) you are training yourself to notice the pleasure without getting attached to it. Through the high definition lens of mindfulness practice, we see that pleasant, unpleasant and neutral experiences aren’t fixed but come and go, are always changing, and are not the source of permanent happiness, unhappiness, or identity.

Being aware of our feeling tone helps us become aware of our reactive tendencies and begins to unravel them as we experience more clarity and balance in life, and more freedom in how to respond in everyday situations.

When you’re working really hard and it’s time to take a break, what do you do? What does it mean to take a break? Is a break walking away from your desk while checking out your phone for messages, visiting social media for updates from friends, or browsing your favorite news blog? Is taking a break eating at your desk while shopping online? Or is it visiting a colleague to have a business conversation? Many people believe they have to be productive all the time, so even when they take a “break” they have to do something potentially useful. (A student of mine once confessed that when she brushed her teeth at night, she was texting friends with her free hand. She explained that brushing her teeth wasn’t accomplishing enough!) The problem with these kinds of breaks is that they keep the mind focused on conceptual experiences. But a true break means we are giving the brain a break from concepts. Brain scans have shown that when people are focused on concepts – doing work, for example – conceptual thinking regions of the bran light up. The brain is expending a lot of energy when we are doing things that take conceptual focus. When we expend this kind of energy without pause, hour after hour, it can be quite exhausting. When we are exhausted, our performance suffers, our inner sense of well-being declines, and our health can suffer as well. Burnout and lack of engagement often follow.

A true break, on the other hand, is all about letting go of concepts and allowing the brain to rest in a being state. The idea is that when you take a break, really take a break from the doing mode – the mode that uses concepts – and rest in the being mode. An example might be sitting on a park bench, without reading or thinking, but just enjoying the park. Or doing something with your hands like washing the dishes or gardening. Going for a stroll is another being-mode activity (so is walking the dog). Doing 10 minutes of mindfulness practice is another example of resting in the being mode. As is eating a meal mindfully.

When people take a break from concepts and rest in the being mode, scans of their brains show more activity in the Default Mode Network, a region of the brain activated when the brain is at rest, and less activity going on in regions associated with concepts and doing. This gives their brains a rest, which means they are getting the refreshment that is needed to bring about sustainable focus and performance.

Jon Kabat-Zinn once quipped that we humans are so busy all the time that you could almost call us “human doings” rather than human beings. Being is a fundamental aspect of who we are. Being does not require us to get things done and perform. It has its own power and dignity. And as long as we connect with our being on a regular basis throughout the day, it will not only help sustain our effectiveness, but it will keep our perspective on life open and responsive.

An inveterate news junkie all my life, I suddenly shunned all outside input, dreading the next shocking headline from CNN about pandemic curve charts. I obsessively washed my hands, sprayed bleach solution on doorknobs and handles, got into arguments with my partner about the right kind of mask to wear, insisted on cooking all our meals, and with relentless focus shopped online for toilet paper, rubbing alcohol, and dish soap. I meditated every day, as usual, but my practice didn’t seem to help at all. A week went by. Two weeks. I was still a mess. My partner and I worked from home and frequently got in each other’s way, and my emotional brittleness made things more tense. When she came home from a walk and began to share the latest unsettling news from the CDC, I put my hand up and told her that I didn’t want to hear about it. That in itself was a huge role reversal for me; I had never in my life avoided the news. I was always the giver of news. In those first weeks, as a way to combat my anxiety, I began reading potboiler detective novels so that my mind could find a place to escape. I literally read nothing else for months.

Weeks went by of more fear, horror, home cooking, remote work, seemingly ineffective meditation sessions, online shopping, and detective novels. I was still a mess. It seemed as though my meditation practice had completely let me down, that I was incapable of cultivating any redeeming awareness at all. Instead, I sought refuge in distraction, avoidance, fantasy, things we mindfulness practitioners are encouraged not to do. Move toward the difficult, we are told. But I was having none of that. I relished my comfort food, my cheap page turners, my avoidance.

Some time around month two, I noticed that I appeared to be a little less of a mess. Don’t get me wrong. I was still a mess. But what I noticed is that the part of my mind that was aware I was a mess had somehow resurfaced after having been away for weeks. All of a sudden, my window of tolerance was more open, and I experienced more space – more awareness – for being with things the way they were, and for seeing the fact that “I was a mess” and that it was okay to be a mess. Somehow, without my noticing, the freaked out committee members in my mind had slowly, gingerly, crawled up from under that rock and had begun to look around to see if it was safe. More days passed, and while I still washed my hands frantically, I was generally able to relax more as well. Little by little, I began taking in some news, and I was able to talk to people about what we were all experiencing. Yes, I was still a mess, but I was also aware that being a mess was just part of what I was experiencing.

After three months or so, the idea that “I am a mess” seemed to have retreated. During this time I had assumed that my meditation practice – of being with things the way they are with mindful awareness – had abandoned me. In actuality, I realized now that my practice had been working all that time, but I was too stressed out to see it. When we sit down to meditate we often discover that the first 15 minutes or so our minds can be very scattered, lost in fantasy, and that in the last few minutes of the practice the mind can suddenly gather and become collected. This is a very common experience in meditation. And I realized that this exact process played itself out over weeks instead of minutes during the early days of Covid.

My practice, in other words, had been serving me, even though it didn’t look pretty. I realized that just because things are really hard and we’re responding in a less than perfect way, it doesn’t mean that we’re not practicing with it. It just means that things are really hard and we are doing the best we can. With this perspective, I understood that my practice had held me in this challenging time, even if I didn’t know it. Like everyone else, I am a work in progress. I navigate the mundane roiling of life and its crises as well with the tools and the conditioning I have. In retrospect, avoiding the news and reading potboilers was a skillful means to calming my nervous system. Meditating every day, which had seemed so ineffective for weeks, had kept me at least partially connected to the realm of awareness, so that when my nervous system did begin to calm down, I was able to notice the thought “I am a mess” not with judgment but with self-compassion and interest.

More than ever I realized that our practice doesn’t need to look “good” in order for it to be working. We don’t need to have radiant smiles like blissed-out people on magazine covers. Our practice doesn’t need to be perfect, and above all, we don’t need to be perfect. We just need to commit ourselves to practice itself, whether good, bad, or ugly, and do the best we can. With that commitment, the fruits of practice reveal themselves in their own way for each of us.

Then, all at once, I realize what I’ve been doing. I’ve simply been indulging my rage. In that instant I’ve remembered to be mindful.

Taking a mindful stance, I become instantly attuned to my physical and mental state. I notice how my body feels in this state of anger. I notice the tight sensation of heat in my chest, the burning in my throat, the quickening of my pulse. I see that the anger I’m feeling is made up of these unpleasant physical sensations. I recall the thought, This person will not be able to push me around anymore! I realize that this is just a thought that feeds the anger, and that the thought arose because of these sensations of hurt in my body. I also realize that those sensations arose just now because I remembered the words that he spoke to me. I realize that part of me actually believes his words. Otherwise they would have no affect on me.

Okay, I reflect, he may or may not respect me. But I can’t control that. I can only control how I react to what he says. So, if I can’t control him, what am I left with? The answer: my feelings of hurt. So I breathe with them, feeling the heat in my chest, the constriction in my throat, the coiled-spring urge in my arms to strike out. As I do this I allow the thought This person will not be able to push me around anymore! to reprise now and then. As I keep breathing and letting myself be with the sensations without trying to change them, I notice that the heat in my chest and throat has started to cool. And now the thought This person will not be able to push me around anymore! seems pretty silly. I begin feeling more relaxed. I still don’t feel comfortable with this person, and think he probably disrespects me, but the anger just isn’t there anymore.

As I keep breathing I reflect, Wow, that anger seemed so real, so solid! Where did it go? Where is it now? Now I think back on the words the person used that hurt me so — ooh, yes, I feel a slight twinge in my chest just recalling them. A little more hurt arises. But that’s okay. The hurt doesn’t define me now. I’ll keep breathing with it whenever it surfaces, recognizing that the part of me that knows the hurt isn’t feeling hurt at all. I’ll forget this, of course. But the thing is, the knowing is always there. It’s up to me to remember it.

Instead of thinking of work life balance as an external state to achieve, it may be more useful to think of it as an inner equilibrium that we can cultivate every moment we are alive. Like a tightrope walker who is constantly making micro-adjustments to keep from falling, work life balance becomes an ordinary activity that we can do all the time to make sure that we are living our lives sustainably.

An example of work life balance may be something as simple as remembering to notice your breath during a meeting, or turning off notifications on your smartphone when you get home from work, or driving to work without the radio on to build greater focus while you commute, or consciously choosing to say no to that event invite that is just one too many, or remembering to call old friends you’ve been wanting to catch up with, or deciding to put your work down and go for a walk. Above all, work life balance is about being sensitive enough in each moment to understand what is truly needed.

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