Semi-detached

They are popping up everywhere, as a panacea to the ills of our high-speed lifestyles; as a secular means to reducing anxiety and reducing stress… Too busy for a class? Download an app! 

I’m talking about meditation and mindfulness.

They have enabled me to experience welcome relief from a prolonged period of depression. My practice helps me to believe that through nurturing my family and friendship bonds with loving kindness I can appreciate the value and pleasure of life, learn to be present, and experience happiness in this chaotic and brutal world. 

But the more meetings I attend and the more practitioners I listen to, the more questions I have. 

While the intention may be to take the ‘middle way’ through regular meditation and mindfulness,  one also has to ask if such a potent tool for tinkering with our minds holds any dangers. 

Finding the most suitable meditation practice is crucial, but so is a skilful teacher. The meta bhavana meditation which focuses on cultivating loving kindness towards all beings has the potential to promote a compassionate attitude to the people that we encounter on a daily basis and appears to be the antithesis of Zen detachment. But even this technique can take for granted a level of self regulation when it comes to choosing suitable subjects to meditate upon (e.g. deciding to send positive wishes to your grumpy postman rather than your childhood abuser).

The apparent paradox of being ‘present’ through mindfulness, yet being detached from the forces that bend and bow our emotions, is not easy to navigate. Just where does one end and the other begin? Good teachers don’t pretend to know all the answers, but they should be able to support and guide you. Above all they should listen and honour your individual experience.

However, while spiritual teachers can be wise, insightful, inspiring and compassionate, they are not professionals. They aren’t necessarily counsellors or psychologists, yet they have the power to impart disturbing ideas about the nature of our existence, or insist that in order to dispel unhappiness you should learn to accept things as they are. 

It deeply concerns me that people turn up to such meetings to sort out their shit, yet without a skilled teacher alert to the nuances of the teachings being espoused, or in tune to the kind of vulnerabilities people carry around, some serious damage could be sustained. 

Through the millennia, it has never been everybody’s calling to detach themselves from life and meditate, to be a ‘renunciate’. Lorin Roche, a scholar of meditation and its social and psychological implications, argues that most people are ‘householders’, i.e. the majority of people who “live in the world and evolve through working and playing with it.” 

The renunciate detaches from the world, the householder engages. But what if a householder is encouraged to detach themselves? To weaken their desires, instincts and emotional intelligence? According to Roche, this can have serious implications.

I perceive a dangerously blurred line between accepting what is - in order to dissipate unnecessary drama and discontent -  and accepting what is morally and ethically … unacceptable. And how are people struggling with past trauma, or living with abuse, given their vulnerable, warped realities, supposed to perceive the difference?

It’s the concept of detachment that both intrigues and disturbs me too. Ultimate detachment from the material world might bring enlightenment, but Buddha was only able to do this after a prolonged and profound journey through his own and others’ experiences. 

Meditation is a powerful tool that can enable us to glimpse our deeper, higher self and sense our human potential. But we need to find the right approach and a skilful teacher to show us how to use it - for ourselves, not against ourselves. As Roche says, “it’s easier to destroy than to create.”

I find an unlikely parallel in Jonathan Glazer’s film Under The Skin where an alien life force, in the process of navigating human existence, finds itself moving from the dispassionate observation of human suffering and emotions to being overwhelmed by wonder, love, mercy and fear through its experience of wearing a human body. 

Detachment is what makes it alien. And, though the human condition encompasses joy and tenderness as much as savagery and pain, we can’t escape this. But like Glazer’s alien, it’s possible to make our own tentative steps towards cultivating compassion - for our own wondrous bodies and the embattled spirits they contain -  as well as for other people we encounter. 

We are householders of our own bodies, our own relationships, our own lives, and I agree with Roche: to detach from these aspects risks destroying our own humanity. What are we then? Perhaps a distant, detached alienated force of existence that simply observes life instead of living it. 

N.B. I'd like to credit Heidi Hanson's superb blog on trauma and healing for inspiring this post.  

Seasonal, Defective and Disordered

As the days draw in and the sky seems to hang perpetually dull and opaque, the glowering shadow of SAD (seasonal affective disorder) begins to flicker in my peripheral vision.

The falling leaves, the failing light, all signs that the death throes of another year are upon us, needling an incipient anxiety that life is slipping past too quickly. But this year, at least, I have discovered a means of lifting (if only momentarily) the veil of this the gloom-laden smog. I turn to meditation.

Its aim is not an empty mind or a state of utter detachment (or at least, not for rookies like me) and, only occasionally, I am fortunate to conjure bliss from this practice. It’s not a quick fix, or a distraction. It is rather more the means to allow my mind to fix my mind.

I only know one person who claims to find it easy. For most, there are always barriers, either to doing it at all, or to doing it satisfactorily. These obstacles can be external – the pleasant distractions of losing yourself to an evening of TV, or reading a story, doing a puzzle or playing a game; or internal – the ever-churning thoughts, plans and worries that plow through our minds like hurricanes.

In Triratna Buddhism, the two primary meditation practises are mindfulness of breathing and metta bhavana (cultivation of loving kindness).  The first, simply by the nature of our biological need to breathe, is readily accessible and can be key to learning how to pay attention to the state we are in.  Yet, the onslaught of life can be so immense, our detachment from our essential self so great, that the simple question, “How are you?” seems almost impossible to interpret, let alone answer.

But, once you are able to begin resisting the force of your storming brain, or the drip-drip of anxiety, to recognise just when and how far you are being pushed from the pathway of contemplating the in-and-out of your breath, then you can begin to regard a thought as just that – a thought- and not any more real or compelling than the process of gas exchange within your body. Let the thought go on its way, and bring yourself back to the breath.

But how does someone, surrounded by demanding humans, dazzled by dozens of competing obligations, find the opportunity to meditate?

Sara Burns, in her wonderfully down-to-earth and honest book, A Path for Parents (What Buddhism Can Offer), describes how she became mindful of the briefest moments when she could centre herself with a mini-meditation. She writes: “ …try it while watching your children play, or anywhere you have a few spare minutes not talking to someone else…” Easier said than done, you might argue, but it’s a far more realistic goal than meditating for hours on end in an incense scented prayer room, as nice as that would be!

An elderly lady, who attends the same meditation meetings as I do, claims she could never manage meditation when she was around her children. Eventually she decided that she would schedule particular times in her week to ensure she kept it up. Like playing an instrument, the longer you leave it, the more difficult it is to re-engage with the practice.  

Of course, when you begin to still your mind, things begin to float to the surface. They are not always pleasant. Sadly, some people who have suffered loss or tragedy and would benefit most from the chance to heal themselves, find the clarity it brings hard to bear. It’s easier to leave those unwelcome emotions to sink back into the mud, particularly in a world where we are expected to ‘get on with it’. Others can lose patience with our need to deal with our pain – they are probably afraid of facing their own long buried suffering – but we can be hurried through bereavement or topped up with drugs for depression, neglecting the long healing journey we really need to take. But the need to be productive rather than contemplative is the ethos which keeps the behemoth of our global economy lumbering along like a Frankenstein’s monster. 

Halloween is barely over, but snow-flake festooned seasonal food is on the shelves, the TV spews out advertisements of all the things we should buy to attain a perfect Christmas, and city streets begin to heave with stressed-out shoppers with too much to do. I can feel my chest tighten at the thought of what’s to come, the heightened expectations, the diminishing bank balance, the seductive shiny things, the compelling myths of Happy Christmas that blind me to the grasping, hungry beast that I continue to sustain at my own cost.

And … breathe …