“Do you have the patience to wait till your mud settles and the water is clear? Can you remain unmoving till the right action arises by itself?” Lao Tzu
It was an ordinary day in the Bali coffee shop.
The hot Indonesian sun poured through the window; traffic roared and screeched in the narrow street outside; patrons called to each other in a dozen languages; John Denver sang of West Virginia heaven on the music loop. I calmly sipped my coffee and worked on an outline for the next meeting of my online meditation group.
I glanced up from my computer as the three men in black entered in a solemn line. Two of them disappeared silently into a back room. One sat down at the table directly across from me. He quietly rested his machine gun on the table and casually pointed it in my direction.
In an instant, eyes saw, ears heard, the mind began assessing: Oh my! What is this? Machine guns! Good or bad? Safe or not? Action needed? Like an efficient bodyguard, my brain spewed all sorts of instant messages about strangers with guns. I’m told that most of those immediate mental flashes were unconscious seeds: residue of a lifetime of conditioning in a brain whose job it is to quickly assess sights and sounds and physical surroundings to try to make me safe.
In so many ways, it was well and good that my body and mind – so very human – had the ability to do this. Ancient animals who were slow with these exquisitely sensitive skills didn’t survive the perils of daily life in the wild to become my ancestors. Nevertheless, this modern brain of mine – determined to avoid the unfamiliar and determined to make me “safe” – can so easily be not fully here in the present. If I forget to remember to pause and investigate, my mind can then proliferate into suffering, supported by ongoing narratives and conclusions that can be quite enthusiastically – wrong.
I see this in all sorts of tragic ways reported in the daily news, with its reports of white neighbors who call police in response to others who are merely different in some way. Minds, conditioned by centuries of trauma, fear and division, see bits of data and then, clinging to these as “true,” react too quickly. If I pay attention, I can so easily bring compassion to what others do “out there” as I watch that process relentlessly unfold in my very own mind.
The challenge for me that day was to allow my own experience and – at the same time – to continue to inquire. I was invited to breathe and to not insist on clinging to those initial assessments. The invitation of my practice was to attend more simply and fully to the direct and embodied experience of what was actually happening in that exact present moment. This is one important way in which my meditation practice is of everyday help. I practice simply knowing experience as it arises in the body/mind. I discover where (and how) to place and discipline my attention. I learn to offer a curious and kind and compassionate knowing of my actual – and, in every moment, quite unique – sensory experience.
Internally, for me that day, a pause into mindfulness very quickly helped; it allowed me to soften and relax. Awareness opened first to the external context. I saw that others’ activities carried on as usual; for them, nothing exceptional seemed to be happening. I became more curious. My new machine-gun toting neighbor soon took out his smart phone and casually began to scroll. I could very soon see that we were all safe.
Then my pause allowed a more full range of knowing as I explored what, if anything, was needed internally. There was the residue of alertness: a quickened heart rate and some muscle tension. I saw that continuing to breathe more deeply might help. My body and mind responded to that kindness; there was even more ease.
Soon the two men emerged from the back room, carrying a bag that I now guessed to be the day’s receipts. They all wandered out, back to the noisy street. Ah, I thought: the Indonesian version of Brinks Armed Security. I laughed; that was fun! All was well.
The experience gave me a wonderful window into how my mind works and how, unattended, it can so quickly engage me in suffering and troublesome speech and action. It was a lesson in slowing down, in noticing, in letting go of clinging to immediate perception and ideas. Freedom.
“So instead of trying over and over again to become calm, we can use whatever arises to learn to pause. To practice bringing awareness close to our own direct experience. Practice releasing our convictions in the truthfulness or helpfulness of our views and opinions. We gain some small bit of insight…(which) brings a little bit of calm, and a little bit of calm brings a little bit of insight…Letting (direct experience) …reveal itself…teach us what is needed.” Ayya Khema