How to Train a Wild Elephant AND OTHER ADVENTURES IN MINDFULNESS Jan Chozen Bays, MD SHAMBHALA Boston & London || 2011 SHAMBHALA PUBLICATIONS, INC. Horticultural Hall 300 Massachusetts Avenue Boston, Massachusetts 02115 www.shambhala.com © 2011 by Jan Chozen Bays Cover photograph © Masterfile Royalty Free Cover design by Daniel Urban- Brown All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bays, Jan Chozen. How to train a wild elephant: and other adventures in mindfulness/Jan Chozen Bays.—1st ed. p. cm. eISBN 978-0-83482746-2 ISBN 978-1-59030-817-2 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Spiritual life—Buddhism. 2. Consciousness—Religious aspects—Buddhism. 3. Attention—Religious aspects—Buddhism. 4. Awareness—Religious aspects— Buddhism. I. Title. II. Title: And other adventures in mindfulness. BQ5670.B39 2011 294.3′4435—dc22 2011006476 Contents Introduction 1. Use Your Nondominant Hand 2. Leave No Trace 3. Filler Words 4. Appreciate Your Hands 5. When Eating Just Eat 6. True Compliments 7. Mindfulness of Posture 8. Gratitude at the End of the Day 9. Listen to Sounds 10. Every Time the Phone Rings 11. Loving Touch 12. Waiting 13. A Media Fast 14. Loving Eyes 15. Secret Acts of Virtue 16. Just Three Breaths 17. Entering New Spaces 18. Notice Trees 19. Rest Your Hands 20. Say Yes 21. See the Color Blue 22. Bottoms of the Feet 23. Empty Space 24. One Bite at a Time 25. Endless Desires 26. Study Suffering 27. Silly Walking 28. Water 29. Look Up! 30. Defining and Defending 31. Notice Smells 32. This Person Could Die Tonight 33. Hot and Cold 34. The Great Earth beneath You 35. Notice Dislike 36. Are You Overlooking Something? 37. The Wind 38. Listen Like a Sponge 39. Appreciation 40. Signs of Aging 41. Be on Time 42. Procrastination 43. Your Tongue 44. Impatience 45. Anxiety 46. Mindful Driving 47. Look Deeply into Food 48. Light 49. Your Stomach 50. Become Aware of Your Center 51. Loving-Kindness for the Body 52. Smile 53. Leave Things Better Than You Found Them Beginning a Sitting Meditation Practice Suggested Reading Acknowledgments About the Author Introduction People often say to me, “I’d love to practice mindfulness, but I’m so busy I can’t seem to find the time.” Most people think of mindfulness as something they must squeeze into an already full schedule of working, raising children, caring for a home. In truth, making mindfulness part of your life is more like a game of connect the dots, or like a paint-by-numbers kit. Do you remember those pictures where each small area is labeled with a number that tells you which color to use? As you filled in all the brown areas, then the greens and the blues, a pleasing picture begins to emerge. Mindfulness practice is like that. You begin with one small area of your life, let’s say how you answer the phone. Each time the phone rings, you pause to take three long, slow breaths before you pick it up. You do this for a week or so, until it becomes a habit. Then you add another mindfulness practice, such as mindful eating. Once this way of being present is integrated into your life, you add another. Gradually you are present and aware for more and more moments of the day. The pleasing experience of an awakened life begins to emerge. The exercises in this book point to many different spaces in your life that you can begin to fill in with the warm colors of open-hearted mindfulness. I am a meditation teacher, and I live at a Zen monastery in Oregon. I’m also a pediatrician, a wife, a mother, and a grandmother, so I understand well how stressful and challenging daily life can become. I developed many of these exercises to help me be more aware, happy, and at ease within the flow of a busy life. I offer this collection to anyone who would like to become more fully present and enjoy the small moments of their life. You don’t have to go to a monthlong meditation retreat or move to a monastery to restore peace and balance to your life. They are already available to you. Bit by bit, daily mindfulness practice will help you uncover satisfaction and fulfillment in the very life you are living now. WHAT IS MINDFULNESS AND WHY IS IT IMPORTANT? In recent years, interest in mindfulness has grown enormously among researchers, psychologists, physicians, educators, and among the general public. There’s now a significant body of scientific research indicating the benefits of mindfulness for mental and physical health. But what exactly do we mean by “mindfulness”? Here’s the definition I like to use: Mindfulness is deliberately paying full attention to what is happening around you and within you—in your body, heart, and mind. Mindfulness is awareness without criticism or judgment. Sometimes we are mindful, and sometimes we are not. A good example is paying attention to your hands on the steering wheel of a car. Remember when you were first learning to drive, and how the car wobbled and wove its way along the road as your hands clumsily jerked the wheel back and forth, correcting and overcorrecting? You were wide awake, completely focused on the mechanics of driving. After a while your hands learned to steer well, making subtle and automatic adjustments. You could keep the car moving smoothly ahead without paying any conscious attention to your hands. You could drive, talk, eat, and listen to the radio, all at the same time. Thus arises the experience we have all had, of driving on automatic pilot. You open the car door, search for your keys, back carefully out of the driveway, and . . . you pull into the parking garage at work. Wait a minute! What happened to twenty miles and forty minutes between house and job? Were the lights red or green? Your mind took a vacation, in some pleasant or distressing realm, as your body deftly maneuvered your car through flowing traffic and stoplights, suddenly awakening as you arrived at your destination. Is that bad? It’s not bad in the sense of something you should feel ashamed or guilty about. If you are able to drive to work on autopilot for years without having an accident, that’s pretty skillful! We could say that it’s sad, though, because when we spend a lot of time with our body doing one thing while our mind is on vacation somewhere else, it means that we aren’t really present for much of our life. When we aren’t present, it makes us feel vaguely but persistently dissatisfied. This sense of dissatisfaction, of a gap between us and everything and everyone else, is the essential problem of human life. It leads to those moments when we are pierced with a feeling of deep doubt and loneliness. The Buddha called it the First Truth: the fact that every person will at some time experience this kind of distress. There are many happy moments in our lives, of course, but when our friends go home, when we are lonely or tired, when we feel disappointed or sad or betrayed, then dissatisfaction and unhappiness emerge once again. We all try over-the-counter remedies—food, drugs, sex, overwork, alcohol, movies, shopping, gambling—to relieve the pain of ordinary life as a human being. All of these remedies work for a little while, but most of them have side effects—such as being in debt, blacking out, getting arrested, or losing someone we love—so they only increase our distress in the long run. The labels on over-the-counter remedies say, “For temporary relief of symptoms only. If symptoms persist, see your doctor.” Over the course of many years I have found one reliable remedy for the relief of recurrent discomfort and unhappiness. I have prescribed it for myself and for many other people, with excellent results. It is regular mindfulness practice. Much of our dissatisfaction with life will disappear, and many simple joys will emerge, if we can learn to be present with things just as they are. You’ve already experienced moments of mindful awareness. Everyone can recall at least one time when they were completely awake, when everything became clear and vivid. We call these peak moments. They can happen when we experience something unusually beautiful or poignant, such as the birth of a child or the passing of a loved one. It can also happen when our car goes into a skid. Time slows down as we watch the accident unfold or not. But it doesn’t have to be dramatic. It can happen on an ordinary walk, as we turn a corner and everything is, for a moment, luminous. What we call peak moments are times when we are completely aware. Our life and our awareness are undivided, at one. At these times the gap between us and everything else closes and suffering disappears. We feel satisfied. Actually we are beyond satisfaction and dissatisfaction. We are present. We are Presence. We get a tantalizing taste of what Buddhists call the enlightened life. These moments inevitably fade, and there we are again, separate and grumpy about it. We can’t force peak moments or enlightenment to happen. The tools of mindfulness, however, can help us close the gaps that cause our unhappiness. Mindfulness unifies our body, heart, and mind, bringing them together in focused attention. When we are thus unified, the barrier between “me” and “everything else” becomes thinner and thinner until, in a moment, it vanishes! For a while, often a brief moment or occasionally a lifetime, all is whole, all is holy, and at peace. THE BENEFITS OF MINDFULNESS There are many benefits of mindfulness practice. Research on happiness conducted by Brown and Ryan at the University of Rochester shows “people high in mindfulness are models of flourishing and positive mental health.” It is good for all ailments your heart and mind, and even of your body. But don’t believe me just because I said so. Try the exercises in this book for a year and discover how they change your own life. Here are a few of the benefits of mindfulness that I have found. 1. MINDFULNESS CONSERVES ENERGY It is fortunate that we can learn to do tasks skillfully. It is unfortunate that this skill enables us to go unconscious as we do them. It is unfortunate because when we go unconscious, we are missing out on large parts of our life. When we “check out,” our mind tends to go to one of three places: the past, the future, or the fantasy realm. These three places have no reality outside our imagination. Right here where we are is the only place, and right now is the only time where we are actually alive. The capacity of the human mind to recall the past is a unique gift. It helps us learn from our errors and change an unhealthy life direction. However, when the mind doubles back to the past, it often begins to ruminate endlessly on our past mistakes. “If only I’d said this . . . , then she would have said that. . . .” Unfortunately the mind seems to think we are very stupid. It calls up the errors of our past over and over, blaming and criticizing us repeatedly. We wouldn’t pay to rent and watch the same painful movie two hundred fifty times, but somehow we let our mind replay a bad memory over and over, each time experiencing the same distress and shame. We wouldn’t remind a child two hundred fifty times of a small mistake he or she made, but somehow we allow our mind to continue to call up the past and to inflict anger and shame upon our own inner small being. It seems that our mind is afraid that we will fall prey to bad judgment, ignorance, or inattention yet again. It doesn’t believe that actually we are smart—smart enough to learn from one mistake, and not to repeat it. Ironically, a mind filled with anxiety is likely to create what it most fears. The anxious mind doesn’t realize that when it pulls us into daydreams of regret about the past, we are not attending to the present. When we are unable to be present, we tend not to act wisely or skillfully. We are more likely to do the very thing the mind worries we will do. The capacity of the human mind to plan for the future is another of our unique gifts. It gives us a road map and compass to steer by. It decreases the chances that we will make a wrong turn and end up caught in a long detour. It increases the chances that we will arrive at the end of life satisfied with our life path and what we have accomplished. Unfortunately the mind, in its anxiety for us, tries to make plans for a huge number of possible futures, most of which will never arrive. This constant leapfrogging into the future is a waste of our mental and emotional energy. The most important way we can prepare for the unknown-to-come is to make a reasonable plan and then to pay attention to what is happening right now. Then we can greet what flows toward us with a clear, flexible mind and an open heart, ready and able to modify our plan according to the reality of the moment. The mind also enjoys excursions into realms of fantasy, where it creates an internal video of a new and different me, famous, handsome, powerful, talented, successful, wealthy, and loved. The capacity of the human mind to fantasize is wonderful, the basis of all our creativity. It allows us to imagine new inventions, create new art and music, arrive at new scientific hypotheses, and to make plans for everything from new buildings to new chapters of our lives. Unfortunately, it can become an escape, an escape from whatever is uncomfortable about the present moment, an escape from the anxiety of not knowing what is actually moving toward us, an escape from the fear that the next moment (or hour or day or year) could bring us difficulties or even death. Incessant fantasizing and daydreaming are different from directed creativity. Creativity comes from resting the mind in neutral, allowing it to clear itself and provide a fresh canvas on which new ideas, equations, poems, melodies, or colorful strokes can appear. When we allow the mind to rest in the present, full of what is actually happening right now, redirecting it away from repeated fruitless, energy-sapping excursions into the past, future, or fantasy realms, we are doing something very important. We are conserving the energy of the mind. It remains fresh and open, ready to respond to whatever appears before it. This may sound trivial, but it is not. Ordinarily our mind does not rest. Even at night it is active, generating dreams from a mix of anxieties and the events of our life. We know that our body cannot function well without rest, so we give it at least a few hours to lie down and relax each night. We forget, though, that our mind needs rest, too. Where it finds rest is in the present moment, where it can lie down and relax into the flow of events. Mindfulness practice reminds us not to fritter our mental energy away in trips to past and future, but to keep returning to this very place, to rest in what is happening in this very time. 2. MINDFULNESS TRAINS AND STRENGTHENS THE MIND