Tag: buddhism

The Mindful Pause

On March 31, 2021

Reading Time: 5 minutes

While mindfulness and meditation can sound great in theory, it often feels impossible to implement them into real-world situations. So in this article, I want to put forth a simple framework that will help with this: mindfulness is pausing. Known as the mindful pause or the sacred pause, this concept will give you a practical way to bring mindfulness into your everyday life.

In an earlier article—What is Meditation—I tried to clear up some misconceptions about meditation, such as why it’s different from mindfulness. You can read that for the full details, but in short, meditation is a method or process while mindfulness is a state of being—a quality of mind.

And how you achieve that quality of mind depends on your specific meditation practice. I personally do a practice known as vipassana, but whatever you do, the point is to achieve non-judgemental awareness of your mind. Known scientifically as meta-awareness, this state of mind removes our identification with thoughts and allows us to have a detached bird’s eye view of the mind.

It sounds simple, but don’t let that fool you into thinking it’s easy. It takes a lot of practice (aka failure) to build up the stability and concentration needed to sustain mindfulness. And while this is already challenging on the meditation cushion, it’s even harder in the fast-paced hustle of life. This is because much of our life is spent in a zombie-like state—our minds acting on auto-pilot.

But this framework—thinking of mindfulness as pausing —allows us to stop the auto-pilot and create some space. And in that space, we have a much better chance of connecting with our best intentions.

Mindfulness Is Pausing

“In a moment of stopping, we break the spell between past result and automatic reaction. When we pause, we can notice the actual experience, the pain or pleasure, fear or excitement. In the stillness before our habits arise, we become free to act wisely.”
jack kornfıeld, The Sacred Pause

One of the difficulties of starting a mindfulness practice is that we don’t magically get really good at it. At best, we can only notice just how mindless most of our behavior is. And not only do we do and say things out of habit, we then dig ourselves into deeper and deeper holes by defending whatever we did.

I guess we prefer the post hoc rationalization route over admitting that we didn’t really mean something. Even worse, our brains evolved to be so good at lying that we often believe our own lies/rationalizations.

So yes, our minds are a mess. And mindfulness isn’t some simple cure—you have to accept that you will still behave in regretful ways. But building the habit of mindful pausing should slowly increase your success rate.

Respond, Not React

Unless I happen to crack a funny joke with just the right timing, it’s rare that my immediate reaction to something is the ideal one. Such reactions seem to come from a small and ego-centered sense of self—they are often triggered by anger or fear, and they almost always lack the bigger picture.

But there’s a popular concept in meditation to counter this: respond, don’t react.

A reaction is automatic and fast—a stimuli input leads quickly to an output. These can be useful in certain situations, but they also get us into so much trouble. A response, however, implies that we run the input-output calculation many times in the privacy of our own minds before deciding what to do.

And when you’re in a stressful situation, avoiding immediate reactions like this can feel like a superpower. Almost always it is the wiser path. But it only works when you first pause long enough to recognize what is happening. In pausing, you step back and just allow the reaction (like a difficult emotion) to make itself known. You might not fully understand it, but with mindfulness, you won’t be lost in it, allowing you to more wisely contemplate a response.

Our Best Intentions

“In this pause, we can examine our intention. If we have set a long-term intention or dedication for our life, we can remember our vows. Or we can simply check our motivation. Are we caught up, upset, angry, trying to get even, win at any cost?”
jack kornfıeld

Think about how many times you check your smartphone every day. Some of those checks are legitimate, but how many are just a distraction from boredom? (I literally just checked my phone for no reason while writing this paragraph.)

What if every time we felt the urge to check our phones, we paused and had a check-in with our hearts instead?

By this I mean you take a moment—30 seconds to 1 minute—to close your eyes and go home to your body. For one mindful minute, you pause the automatic thinking and instead have a conversation with your deepest intentions. What is my goal for the day? What impression do I most want to leave with people?

This is not so much a conversation in language—it’s not the logical part of our brains or the voice in our heads that loves to blabber on. It’s a felt sense of intention that’s deeper than language. It’s about pausing and listening more than it is about thinking. The phrase “listen to your heart” really just means listen to a deeper and wiser part of yourself.

What are the deepest/best intentions that we have? Ultimately—deep down and underneath our short-term or selfish goals—I think we just want to connect with people. We want to contribute positive energy to the world and help others. We want to love and be loved. Pausing to regularly connect with your heart and remember this is one of the best ways to bring mindful wisdom into your life.

After connecting like this, we can integrate those more noble intentions into our behavior. Even if we still go forward with a confrontation of some kind, it will be a much wiser (and ultimately more effective) response.

Tara Brach’s RAIN

Tara Brach is an amazing meditation teacher, and she has an acronym for bringing mindfulness into difficult situations. It’s known as RAIN, and according to her website, the letters stand for the following:

R: Recognize What’s Going On
A: Allow the Experience to be There, Just as It Is
I: Investigate with Interest and Care
N: Nurture with Self-Compassion

It’s a great way to systematically work through a difficult emotion like anger, but it’s worth noting that before you can even start the process you must pause. By definition, you cannot recognize a difficult emotion when you are lost in it. So while adding a P to this acronym would ruin its catchy name, I think all of those letters are ultimately downstream of the mindful pause.

Yes, pausing is often the hardest part. But it’s the only way to even remember that you have an acronym like that in your toolbox.

One can define mindfulness in many ways, but this is why I prefer to remember that mindfulness is pausing. If we are to implement the wisdom of mindfulness into our life, we will always have to pause first.

And you don’t have to wait for a difficult situation—you can create mindful pauses regularly throughout the day. Just a few times, instead of checking your phone, have a mindful minute to pause and check-in with yourself.

On days when I forget to do this—even if I don’t have a conflict—I usually feel scattered and distant from my body. But when I remember to pause, I almost always have a more pleasant, present, and connected experience of the day.

Mindfulness Resources

Simply Begin Again, a guided meditation by Joseph Goldstein
Duncan Trussell Family Hour with Jack Kornfield
The Sacred Pause by Jack Kornfield (aka why mindfulness is pausing)
The Happiness Lab: Reconnect With The Moment
RAIN: A Practice of Radical Compassion by Tara Brach

The Power of Begin Again

By Luke

On January 31, 2021

In Meditation, Self-Improvement

Reading Time: 7 minutes

It’s far too easy to get stuck in life. We can get stuck in mental stories of the past or in old patterns of behavior. We can also get stuck in anger and resentment at ourselves, others, and reality itself. And this attachment to the past makes self-improvement in the future way more difficult. But there is a practice in meditation that will help you to let go and begin again anytime you want. As meditation teacher Jack Kornfield says: “No matter how hard the past is, you can always begin again.”

January 2021 is almost over, and statistically speaking that means many of you have already bailed on your New Year’s Resolutions—in fact, January 17th is known as “National Quitter’s Day”. It seems as if the new year gives people far more faith in their discipline than is deserved.

So what is it about the new year that motivates people like this?

I think the obvious answer is that the new year is like a reset, a way to begin again with a clean slate. But this reasoning risks being shallow—just because an important element of the calendar has changed doesn’t mean that your slate is actually clean.

Deciding that January 1st will be the start of the “new you” is fine, but it requires that you first put in the work towards forgiving the “old you”—this is what cleaning one’s slate really means. To ignore or suppress the past is a recipe for failure.

But this isn’t to say that forgiving your past has to be some complicated feat. Meditation has taught me that there is a way—often a really simple way—to let go of the past without suppressing it. Through a combination of attention, compassion, and forgiveness, one can learn how to leave the “old you” in the past in order to truly begin again.

And it’s the key to changing yourself, your habits, and your relationships in a way that will last.

**Note: You can listen to our corresponding podcast episode on the psychology of new year’s resolutions here.**

How To Begin Again

In theory, the concept of beginning again is actually quite simple. The directions could be something like this:

Take a few deep breaths so that you can clear the mind a bit and bring your attention into the present. Breathe long enough to feel some stability.
Allow whatever thoughts to arise, especially negative ones, and just notice them.
Take note of the thoughts that make you mad or resentful towards yourself and others, and take special note of shameful emotions related to your past behavior.
Understand that they’re all in the past, a place you can’t change. Let them all go and begin again.

You could even simplify it into one sentence: forgive yourself and others, let go of the past, and start your life over today. When you connect to the concept in the right way, it feels this simple. But like many aspects of life, just because it’s simple does not mean it’s easy.

And it’s not a one time move. You will mess up, and so it’s not about purity. Beginning again—as one does countless times during a single session of mindfulness meditation—is beautiful precisely because you can do it over and over.

Yes, like anything, it risks being abused. This is not forgetting the past as in pretending it never happened or suppressing it. Instead, it’s realizing that reality is what it is and you can’t change the past. Plus holding onto the past in an unhealthy way will only mess up the thing you can change, the future.

Personally, I think learning some basic mindfulness meditation—sitting down to familiarize yourself with the mind—is one of the best ways to help simplify your ability to begin again.

Mindfulness Meditation: Simply Begin Again

“The three most important words in mindfulness meditation are simply begin again”
Joseph Goldstein

Many people start meditating with some kind of basic mindfulness practice, like this guided one by Joseph Goldstein. The goal is to settle one’s attention on an object like the breath in order to avoid being lost in thought. They assume it will be a peaceful time and their mind will eventually become cleared of thoughts.

But when they sit down and close their eyes, they collide with the chaos of the mind—the constant waterfall of thoughts on various trains of association. In one moment the mind brings up trauma from your past and in the next, it’s imagining the pizza it wants for dinner. A beginning meditator probably won’t stay with the breath for more than a few seconds at a time—they have to regularly “wake up” to discover that they’ve been lost in thought.

This is how my first attempts at meditation went, and it almost made me give up. I assumed that my mind must be too busy—or at least my focus too dull and scattered—and that I was doomed to be a failed meditator. But early on, I thankfully heard this amazing advice from meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg:

“The healing is in the return, not in never having wandered to begin with.”

After hearing her lecture on this, I realized that I had misunderstood the whole point of the practice. It wasn’t about tightly gripping one’s attention onto the breath and rarely getting lost in thought. It was actually about getting lost, after which you notice it, come back to the breath, and start over. In the framing of Joseph Goldstein, you could summarize the practice in two steps:

Sit comfortably and gently rest your attention on the breath, wherever you feel it most clearly.
When you notice that you’ve been lost in thought, take note of the thought and then simply begin again.

So without realizing it, I was already on the right path. In fact, the most important moment in meditation is not when you’re succeeding—when you’re up on the waterskis of mindfulness. More important is the moment when you notice that you’ve fallen. Such a moment brings a beautiful clarity and a genuine opportunity for change.

Nonjudgmentally Letting Go

So on a micro-scale, meditation is all about messing up, nonjudgmentally realizing you messed up, and finding the compassion and will to begin again. In a ten minute meditation, you might do this over a hundred times. But you don’t judge that as failing—you realize that you’ve had over a hundred times to practice the skill of letting go and starting over. And it gets easier each time.

Why shouldn’t we judge ourselves? I can think of three answers to this. First is that even highly skilled meditators regularly get lost in thought—it’s just how the mind works. The second is that the temptation to judge yourself means you aren’t lost in that moment—you’re in the clarity phase of the practice. And lastly, judgment is a form of gripping onto the past and it will block your ability to let go. You cannot begin again if the mind is filled with resentment towards the past.

After letting go, it takes just a few logical steps to realize that you can scale this practice up into a philosophy of life. Again, even though the idea might be simple, implementing it might not be easy. Depending on your mind, it might take a lot of work to view the past with enough compassion to just let go of it. But it’s the only way to achieve real forgiveness towards yourself and others.

Forgiveness

“This ability to begin again has ethical force as well—it’s actually the foundation of forgiveness. The only way to truly forgive another person, or oneself, is to restart the clock in the present.”
Sam Harris

There are countless ways to define forgiveness, and ultimately it’s an individual process. But I want to give one framing of forgiveness that I picked up from spiritual teachers Byron Katie and Stephen Mitchell. The basic idea is to reframe your view of the world: things don’t happen to you but rather for you.

Stephen Mitchell, with paradoxical language typical of spirituality, says “forgiveness is realizing that there isn’t anything to forgive”. His wife Katie defines it in a slightly different way: “forgiveness is realizing that what you thought happened didn’t.”

This echoes the teachings of Franciscan friar Richard Roar who defines love as “accepting what is”. When he talks about forgiveness, he says that the first step is to forgive reality itself. Our egos can get so wrapped up in the specifics of our lives, but when we zoom out in a spiritual way we remember that we are just one note in the symphony of reality.

So we first forgive reality—we let go of our grip on how reality could’ve been. Or as the popular quote says, “Forgiveness means giving up all hope for a better past.” This does not mean that we just “forgive and forget” in a shallow sense. We seek to understand unjust actions of the past and we don’t take our wrongdoings lightly. As Jack Kornfield says:

“We may resolve to never again permit such harm to come to ourselves or another. And at the same time we can also resolve to release the past and not carry bitterness and hate in our heart.”
jack kornfield, The Practıce of forgıveness

Forgiveness is a release from the past. It takes compassion towards yourself and others. It also takes courage: even though we all have our inner demons, we find the strength and faith for redemption and a fresh start.

So this ability to let go of the past and begin again, no matter how difficult, is the foundation for real forgiveness. And you will strengthen this “letting go muscle” every time you sit to meditate. Even if anger and resentment towards the past still arise, mindfulness will help you to no longer identify yourself with these emotions. You can let go of them quickly and when they’re gone, they’re really gone.

The Purity Trap of Resolutions

“Always remember: If you’re alone in the kitchen and you drop the lamb, you can always just pick it up. Who’s going to know?”
Julia child

So how does this ability to begin again work for resolutions? Basically, it fixes the delusion of purity that enticed us into a new year’s resolution in the first place.

We love purity for its simplicity. There are no messy exceptions—things are neat, categorized, and easy. The new year can feel like a chance to reset, to live life the way that you know you should. A new year’s resolution is like finishing the mountain of dishes that have been piled for a week—the kitchen is now sparkling clean— and vowing to never fall into that trap again.

But let’s be honest, you’re likely to let the dishes pile up again. Reality is messy, it’s not the orderly neatness that our minds crave. Sure, it’d be nice if you stick to your new diet every single day, but we must realize that purity is not the point. The point of setting a new year’s resolution is not to be a pure person but to be a better person. And if the purity of a clean slate is what motivates you, then what will be your motivation once you mess up?

Keep in mind that we’re talking about the ability to begin again, not just the action. Sometimes you should hold onto the past in order to learn some lessons. Begin again doesn’t say that we should let everything go, but that we should be able to let anything go.

So consider practicing this. Sometimes it will be simple and sometimes it will take time and work. But it is a practice, and the more you do it the easier it will get.

The Value of Beginner’s Mind

By Luke

On August 26, 2020

In Meditation, Mental Frameworks, Self-Improvement

Reading Time: 6 minutes

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few”
Shunryu Suzuki

Aging, like many things in life, is a double-edged sword. No, I do not mean the physical aspects of aging, as frustrating as that can be. Instead, I mean that the psychology of aging—how the brain’s pattern recognition systems evolve—comes with pros and cons.

These are the categories and heuristics that we form and continually update in order to understand reality. We need these, and the positive thing is that we can sharpen them up as we age—we can make them more encompassing, consistent, and reliable.

It is as if we create a conceptual map of reality—a map of categories, personality types, expectations, intuitions about danger, etc.—which we use to offload our thinking and quickly analyze the world.

But there is a downside to this process. As we gain life experience and wisdom, we also lose something else: novelty.

In the presence of novelty, we are open to many possibilities. We have humility and awe at the uniqueness of what’s in front of us, and we don’t assume that it will fit into an already formed category. Novelty captures our attention to be fully in the present moment.

It gives us what the Zen master Shunryu Suzuki calls beginner’s mind.

Beginner’s Mind

Finding freedom is a recurring theme in meditation. This freedom can be expressed in many ways, but I think the most encompassing framing is a freedom from attachment.

It is our clinging to things—to views, desires, states of emotion, etc.—that begins the feedback loops of suffering. We wish for the external world to be a certain way, and we suffer when it is not. Or when we actually get what we want, we quickly realize that we are still clinging to yet more desire.

But as we let go of attachments, we find more freedom and less suffering. We see and accept reality as it is.

And beginner’s mind is such freedom—freedom from the past. It is the quality of seeing something as if for the first time. It means we no longer cling to our knowledge, experiences, opinions, or expectations. We have fresh awe and appreciation at the miracle of what’s in front of us.

“A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life.”
Rachel Carson

As we age we learn and adapt. We form heuristics—rules of thumb—in order to more quickly analyze reality. We notice various causes and effects, and we expect the same patterns to continue. We also learn about different personality types and what to expect from them. And perhaps most important to our evolutionary past, we learn what assumptions will keep us out of danger.

This knowledge is not necessarily wrong, but it is also not free. In our clinging to mental models and assumptions, we often overlook the genuine uniqueness of the present moment. The mind wanders because it assumes that the present is probably more of the same old stuff.

But by definition, the present moment is always novel. It of course resembles patterns from the past, but every moment is still a brand new coming together of matter, energy, and consciousness. Beginner’s mind—and the meditation practices that cultivate it—help us to truly connect to this fact. We don’t allow the past to cloud the present. All of our past knowledge could be wrong, so we choose to see things as they are in the present with fresh eyes.

And when we see the present moment as a novelty, we give it our full attention. We cultivate a state of open-mindedness and appreciation toward reality.

Solving Problems

There is also a practical aspect to beginner’s mind. This is to say that even if the meditation/spiritual approach isn’t for you, beginner’s mind is a fantastic tool for solving problems.

We’ve all experienced the feeling of being stuck on a problem. This could be a life decision—do I take that new job or not—or it could be something creative like writing an article. Either way, a difficult problem will often leave us stuck in the weeds. The harder we push on it the less it budges.

So we might just give up for the night and get some rest. When we do this, something mysterious can happen the next day—as we dive back in, the solution often jumps out at us right away. How does this work?

“It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.”
John Steinbeck

The neuroscience of spindle events, bursts of fast brain activity during non-REM sleep, is one explanation for how this works. It also explains why Einstein is said to have taken many short naps throughout the day. Supposedly, he would fall asleep with a spoon in his hand and a metal plate underneath him to avoid deep sleep—as soon as his hand relaxed too much, the spoon hitting the plate would wake him up, hopefully to fresh ideas.

But subjectively speaking, the solution still arrives mysteriously. And often it’s a very simple solution that we just didn’t see before, something that was being blocked by our previous assumptions. While sleeping works for many people, for me ideas come most often while I’m walking outside.

In the spaciousness of walking and loosening my grip on the problem, a novel solution often comes to me. The wandering of the mind brought about a beginner’s mind that didn’t get stuck in the same ways. A lot of our past rules and knowledge are probably useful, but just one wrong assumption could be what keeps you stuck.

“When we are free from views, we are willing to learn. What we know for sure in this great turning universe is actually very limited.”
Jack Kornfield

This type of beginner’s mind is very similar to first-principles thinking, and it’s also why it can be so useful to ask someone else for help. They aren’t clouded and biased from spending hours on the problem, and as such solutions often come very quickly. Our previously published mental framework, The Null Hypothesis, is a similar tool for getting rid of these biases in order to properly solve a problem.

To practice beginner’s mind is to practice seeing a problem like your friend would. View the problem as if for the first time, because maybe you missed something the first time. When you aren’t boxed in, there will be many more possible solutions, and one of them might just be the right one.

Gratitude

Gratitude is another recurring theme in meditation, and it also intersects perfectly with beginner’s mind. This is because beginner’s mind cultivates a fresh and unique outlook on things, instead of taking them for granted.

Whether we are looking at our significant other or out in nature looking at a tree, beginner’s mind reminds us to slow down and see the details. We bring freshness to how we see, and that freshness invokes gratitude for the delicate intricacies of all things.

But this is not the default mode for our brains. The default mode is what is known in psychology as hedonic adaptation. Also known as the hedonic treadmill, it means that our bodies and minds always return to base levels of excitement and happiness. The first encounter with something pleasurable excites us the most, but in each subsequent encounter, the emotional impact on our nervous system is reduced.1

Hedonic adaptation is an especially easy trap to fall into in long-term relationships. In the beginning, you look deeply into a person’s eyes and can’t believe how special the moment is. It’s like time has stopped and you see the entire universe in their eyes. But then life happens—the body adapts, the mind adapts—and you stop seeing those moments with beginner’s mind. You tend to forget how precious it is.

So hedonic adaptation is a kind of glitch in our mind that robs us of our happiness and gratitude. But with a mindfulness practice, by specifically trying to cultivate beginner’s mind, we can get ahead of this glitch.

This is because gratitude is less about external reality and more about our internal framing. And with mindfulness, we can actually have some control over that internal framing. It’s a practice that we can get better at—breathing in the present moment and cultivating gratitude for where we are.

In a sense, beginner’s mind is learning to forget so that you can appreciate. Even if something is around you all of the time, you can always slow down and appreciate how special and temporary it is.

None of this is to say we should have beginner’s mind all of the time. We couldn’t survive if we always saw the world with such childlike innocence—often we should trust our knowledge and instincts.

Beginner’s mind is just a mental framework, a reminder, that encourages us to see the world with fresh eyes—to be present and allow time to slow down. Because sometimes you should be—and deserve to be—in awe and appreciation at the novelty of the present moment, whatever it is.