“You cannot wait for an untroubled world to have an untroubled moment”.
– Lemony Snicket
I’ve long wanted a regular meditation practice but like millions of others, had a tough, discouraging time turning it from a curiosity into a routine. Fighting against the fundamental principles for a successful meditation practice was a well-grounded, highly cultivated gift of distractibility. My entire life has been one continuous bid for attention between an unending series of competing shiny objects. I was making my daily attempt at a 12 minute sitting practice one morning and as usual, I was battling my ceaselessly energized monkey mind. Monkey mind means exactly what it implies. It’s a Zen metaphor for a state of mind that’s easily distracted and perpetually restless. Basically it’s a mind wandering lose through its hard drives, looking for something fascinating or labeled “important”. The monkey mind then drags the content into your conscious REM space for some really intense focus – focus you didn’t order up, didn’t want and would rather be rid of. So you try to expel it from your field of consciousness, and it only gathers strength. It generally comes out most powerfully when someone is attempting to achieve a state of stillness, suited for meditation. It operates on the same principle involved in trying to form new, healthier eating habits – you’ll never crave your favorite foods so strongly as those moments when first trying to change.
I’ve found that embracing the attitude sitting is just sitting is emblematic of all activities, and is the great benefit and gift of the practice itself, not reaching for a desired state of mental tranquility in order to achieve it so I may apply it elsewhere.
Who knows where your mind might stray. Monkey mind just wants to play and steal moments of peace from you. Of course as you’ve probably already realized the more you battle your monkey mind directly, the more capable and empowered it becomes of holding your attention. My monkey mind is world class. I’m convinced that if Monkey-mindedness were an Olympic sport, I’d be its Michael Phelps. I’ve been so perplexed that I’ve wistfully speculated that perhaps my monkey mind has its own monkey mind. Although it appears to be completely untrainable, the first step on a long road toward some mental peace and a little discipline has been the recognition that my distractibility and restlessness are features of my inner life whether I like it or not, and adopting a deep level of acceptance of it. This is just the way I’m built. All the guilt in the world for being distractible only strengthens it as a trait. I used to be shamed as a kid by my teachers over my distractibility. Occasionally ringing in my ears, is the phrase I heard all the time during my public school career: He has so much potential, but we just can’t get him to sit still and pay attention to anything. I have a few more victories now, but I still sense the little boy in me who endured that scolding and felt powerless to change it.
On some such occasions of high distractibility I think of the story of Bodhidharma the first Chinese Zen patriarch who after being denied entrance into a Shaolin school, according to legend, meditated in a cave while facing a wall for 9 years. When one of his disciples went to incredible lengths, for years, to interrupt his meditations in order to ask him a question, the disciple finally cut his own arm off as an offering of his sincerity and presented it to Bodhidharma. Finally stunned into giving his attention, he asked his student what was his question. The student replied “I need you to pacify my mind. I cannot find one moment of peace”. Bodhidharma said “Bring your mind out here and I’ll pacify it” and his disciple answered that he has searched and searched, but could not seem to find it anywhere. “There” said Bodhidharma, “It’s pacified once and for all”, and his disciple immediately achieved perfect peace from that day forward. While as much as I’d like to be a little less distracted in life, I won’t be cutting off my arm. I’m working on other means.
When people think of meditation, or as it’s referred to in the most simple and direct terms, sitting, it’s been popular to assume that sitting is designed to produce some sense of serenity in those who sit by way of frequent seasons of mindfulness. The idea being that these calm-producing mindfulness techniques, learned through sitting, can then be brought forward into other areas of life. It can become a state of mind which can be practiced and returned to when reacting to daily routines. This notion is very common right now and certainly has some merit. But sitting in the true Zen sense is not for anything else. It’s not any kind of means to an end, it’s just sitting for its own sake. Zen practioneers don’t believe in sitting to get something out of sitting. “We just sit” they will say, and pay attention to their posture and their breathing only, and not with the notion that it will help with something later. This is a very subtle distinction between Zen mind and everything else. Especially in the West, we cannot help but think of doing something as a means to getting something else. We are fully programed to act only in order to achieve. We don’t really like to do anything unless we can draw a straight line from it to how it adds something to us, something we want or believe we need. For instance lots of people don’t really like to work out, but they will for health benefits, to be trimmer and get into in better physical shape. Again, there’s nothing wrong with this approach, in fact it’s admirable. But it is not the same as doing something to just be doing it and there is a subtle impact on the capacity for inward stillness when it’s being sought in sitting meditation. I began to think that although sitting is a good practice for me to stay involved in, my approach would have to change. I was attaching my desire for a still mind to the wrong activity. As somebody might put in a country song, I was looking for mindfulness in all the wrong places.
I’ve found that embracing the attitude sitting is just sitting is emblematic of all activities, and is the great benefit and gift of the practice itself, not reaching for a desired state of mental tranquility in order to achieve it so I may apply it elsewhere. Shunryu Suzuki in his simple but elegant book “Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind” says this, “You become discouraged with your practice when your practice has been idealistic. You have some gaining idea in your practice, and it is not pure enough”. Wanting to have mental serenity to take back into your daily life is called a “gaining idea”, and while it is certainly a worthwhile ideal, your practice will be overthrown by this secondary goal. This is the idealization he’s describing. You’re sitting to get something else, someplace else. It’s so rare in my life, and I’m certain in the lives of many people I know, to do something just to be doing it. To experience what artists, writers, athletes and others call the zone or some refer to as flow. Sometimes you only know you’ve been in the zone with hindsight. People will have this rather sudden experience of “coming to” as if they had fainted. But they didn’t lose consciousness, in a way they found consciousness. It appeared as an extended period of perfected focus on the one thing they were doing. But they did so without trying to do it. Their mind was tranquil, but not inactive, or we might say it was resting in action. It was moving along on task, undistracted by preoccupations with the future, or past, or the passage of time. What the Taoists call Wu Wei – effortless action. My bass guitar teacher told me that his mother would wake him up for school, and he’d be slouched in a chair asleep with his bass on his lap in the morning, and he would have no consciousness at all of when he fell asleep, or how long he practiced – his instrument and emerging giftedness took him into the zone without a plan for exiting. Not a bad spot to be in if you want to be a virtuoso. The mindfulness and liberation from distractions and restlessness that I seek can be found hidden in the everyday activities of life; from writing a book to mopping a floor, or my therapy practice – learning to allow myself, as much as is possible, to be totally in the room and engaged with my clients, or with my writing, or with my mop.
Thomas Merton the Trappist monk and author wrote about this concept often, not in terms of sitting but in terms of allowing the quality of the experiences one is having be much more significant and sought after than the quantity. He would have abhorred the concept of multi-tasking and probably thought of it as the road to the hell of a distracted mind. He once wrote about the experience of divided focus by comparing it to the experience of a tourist who goes through a museum with a guide, and looks conscientiously, without much pausing, at the items deemed most important in the guidebook. He emerges from the experience less alive than when he went in. “He has looked at everything and seen nothing” Merton wrote “He has done a great deal and it only made him tired. If he had stopped to look at one picture he really liked and forgotten about all the others…he would have discovered something not only outside himself but in himself. He would have become aware of a new level of being in himself and his life would have been increased by a new capacity for being and not doing”. There is no better condemnation of multi-tasking than this. Its makes us much poorer as human beings and reduces us to human doings. We only multi-task because we want to get done in order to something else more quickly. But when we get to that thing, we’re in danger of experiencing it as being stripped of any quality as well. Everything we do falls under the same risk of living a life cut up into segments of shallow attempts at living. Merton also said that “by doing things badly, we make ourselves less real”. That’s because we settle for actions that don’t pull us into any depth. How will we know what’s real in us if we’d rather be passive spectators to somebody else’s creativity rather that create something of depth out of ourselves?
If we learned to do one thing at a time, and do it with the level of focus it deserves, we might learn to enjoy, or at least be as wholeheartedly engaged with, the tasks we normally want to rush through, as much as the tasks we’re trying to rush to. And of course, when trying to tame my monkey mind in sitting, people with good intentions would offer advice for me, and after a while, that would in advertently add to the sense of failure. “Have you tried counting breaths”? people would query. “You should imagine those thoughts to be like clouds passing slowly by your frame of consciousness”. I’ve not only tried all of that, but I’ve advised others to try these techniques. They’re helpful, but only if you’re called to this specific kind of practice as opposed to another kind, like walking meditation, or guided meditation, or using visualizations. For me, this was not about “succeeding” at sitting necessarily, but about finding the thing I could invest myself in from my heart and with my best sense of mindfulness and presence. As you walk through the museum, you must select the piece that speaks to you, that moves you in order to capture a spirit of contemplation. The principle I seek is not to drag the peace I fight for in meditation into the other acts of my life, but to enter fully into all of the acts of my life equally and for their own merit. It is in this act of full engagement, to be present in what I’m doing, without trying to just finish it to get on to something else, that produces the tranquility I had been seeking. Trying to find tranquility in non-activity to practice in action is backward. Each act can exist in relationship to itself, not only in relationship to something else. This is the wonderful spiritual equilibrium that Merton talked about: “The more you’re involved in the spiritual life, the more ordinary it becomes until there is a complete poverty of the special”. What do we do before enlightenment? asks the Zen student, “Chop wood and carry water”. And what do we do after enlightenment? “Chop wood and carry water”.
Another thing you may hear from Zen teachers is “I can’t give you serenity, you already have it”. When people hear this they think it’s either some kind of Zen trick, or simply not true. But how would you ever give another person a state of mind? And following on the same principle, how could you give it to yourself? Where would you find such a thing? There is no dispensing it. You can only find it within you. And you can’t find it within you if you don’t already possess it. The teacher is not lying, they are hoping to break our fixation with conceptualizing the issue in the wrong terms. If you seek something you already have you’ll be perpetually frustrated because you don’t believe that it’s already in your possession and everywhere you look it’s not there. Like Bodhidharma’s persistent student we don’t stop looking for our glasses until we’re told that “They’re right there on your head”.
In therapy I have clients who are stuck in their turbulence because in some ways they wish to be stuck. They cling to their condition and the goal for therapy is not teaching techniques that lead to more peace, in a cognitive, didactic fashion, but gently discovering the deeper reasons for wanting to remain stuck. What are the benefits they are getting by not moving on? Those reasons are important for the moment and not to be minimized or judged. But they are not important for all time. There is a reward system of some kind that’s just not been allowed consciously to surface. The therapist gives nothing that is not already present. The purpose of the symptom, as we say, is hidden and the goal of therapy must consciously shift away from trying to obtain to one of discovery. Bringing the hidden things to light. By this same notion, it’s helpful to shift the focus of finding peace in practice only to one of practicing the things that lead to the discovery peace everywhere. If you’re not able to perform any actions without distractions and monkey mind, you may have an attachment to distractedness itself. Our culture certainly encourages filling every spare second of one’s time with something meant to have no lasting effect, no nurture, no sense of meaning. A certain amount of mindless gaming or power watching a Netflix series, or card games are necessary and probably healthy. But do you ever do anything that requires full attention, focus, and demands your depth? If you don’t, then you’re feeding your monkey mind at the expense of your larger self. I fear our culture has us make this trade off frequently, and that some people may feel near the end of their life that they never discovered anything that was worth entering into with a whole heart. They may sense that life has been like reading People magazines, in a waiting room for your appointment with the funeral director. The only way to avoid this startling sensation is to learn to fully embrace the things that shone for you like jewels in the light of your best attention – the things worth your life’s precious but limited quantity of energy.
Monkey-mindedness draws its strength from an emotional seed bed sustained by boredom revealing a restless mind needing to find something to do. When you do what you love, with a commitment to giving full attention to it, you tend to stay focused and it’s this outwardly facing focus that calms the wandering mind. By not looking we behold. By not engaging we find a sustaining harmony between our parts. By ceasing to seek, we find. By doing, we rest.
Wind and Current 
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