Dazu Huike suffered from anxiety. When Bodhidharma refused to teach Dazu Huike mindfulness, Dazu Huike cut off his arm, gave it to Bodhidharma, and asked again. Bodhidharma received the arm and accepted Huike as a pupil. Few of us, I suspect, feel that the happy, enlightened, one-armed Dazu Huike got a good deal. But those of us that have suffered recurrent anxiety or depression know just how valuable a tamed mind would be. So this past Thursday, The School of Life invited us to keep our arms firmly attached and encounter mindfulness with cognitive therapist Mark Williams, author of The Mindful Way Through Depression.
We usually view our emotions as reactions to the outside world, overlooking the fact that our internal dialogue shapes and mis-shapes the world according to how we feel about ourselves. Williams believes that when our situation provokes our mind into negative self-commentary, the emotions we experience are reactions to our internal commentary and story-weaving, not to our actual situation. Our efforts to avoid the thoughts only makes them stronger. Thus, we need to cultivate methods that separate the unwanted interpretations from the normal experience of emotions.
Yet could anything be more hopeless? Each of our minds is a veritable Walt Whitman, reciting to itself at all hours: “I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume”. And just like Walt Whitman's poems, our mind has a lot of things to say, and we must listen and agree to all of it until it is done.
Like all interminable poetry readings, the mind is interruptable. Buried underneath the interpretation and commentary is what Williams likens to a silent movie; our own immediate experience of the world. Learning to absorb ourselves in this immediate experience through meditation, however, is only half our work; we must also learn to treat our thoughts as mere mental weather, not as originating from our soul or speaking for us. We are not thinking things; we are listening things, and the thoughts we must be subject to belong to no one.
Involving ourselves in the immediate experience of unwanted emotions can also yield surprises. The philosopher Gilbert Ryle observed that the physical experience of weeping can be deeply pleasurable, though our body is wracked with unhappiness. Once we begin to be mindful of our actual, immediate present, we may become surprised at how livable-in the full breadth of our lives really are.
John Lidwell-Durnin is a freelance journalist. He is currently co-authoring a book on education and the will to know. Visit his blog at: http://considerthegourd.wordpress.com/
The School of Life are running an 8-week course on Mindfulness, and Professor Mark Williams will give a Sunday Sermon on Mindfulness in June.
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