If a tree falls

I often tell meditation students that there is no perfect place to meditate. We meet in a beautiful, serene room -- where we hear yoga students "ommming" in the studio next door, the beeping of the crosswalk sinal, and the skateboarders in the parking lot.

But last weekend I was in a place that was as good as it gets: A former Shaker mill in upstate New York. The room where we practiced had wide, worn wooden floors and large windows that opened onto a view of trees whose leaves were kissed with yellow. A brook flowed down the hill, providing the constant -- yet constantly changing -- sound of water flowing over rocks that spas and therapists try to simulate with fountains to borrow its calming effect.

We were doing body-centered practices, relaxing into the earth, listening to the voices of nature, feeling our toes, one by one, and it was as smooth as the floors that had seen a hundred years of wear. We went outside for walking meditation, filing silently to a relatively level place beside the brook. And we were met by the buzz of chainsaws.

People on the neighboring property were cutting down trees, massive trees that had stood for years and years. As I reached one end of the path, getting ready to turn back, there was a mighty crash as a tree hit the earth. Before we went back inside, another tree was down, thudding its weight into the ground.

Back on our cushions, the leader dinged a bell. "Chainsaw meditation," he said.

People obviously had strong feelings about what happened. Some simply stopped and stared at people with the chainsaws, angry expressions on their faces. My feelings were mixed. We'd just taken down a tree at our house that was dying (and planted a new one), and I'd gotten in the habit of noting dead branches on trees as I moved through the world. There was a tree along the stream that was dead and dry and undoubtedly will fall into the water this winter when the weight of the snow settles on it. That, in turn, will change the stream in some way.

I'd been to this same center in the spring -- the teachers and other students were all different, the water in the brook was higher, the leaves were new, not getting ready to die.

Everything changes -- the yoga class moves on to stretching silently, the crosswalk stops beeping and traffic moves, the chainsaws finish their work for the day. Meditation is about becoming aware of what's there in the moment -- the external phenomena, the internal thoughts, and the interplay between the two -- and resting in the awareness that says, "right  now, it's like this." That's where calm and wisdom abide.

When we speak of "calm abiding," we are not referring to a calm situation, such as meditating in a quiet, beautiful place. We are speaking of a mind that stays steady in the midst of fluctuating circumstances. -- Yonge Mingyur Rinpoche

Love it? Hate it? Meh. Why that matters

Most people take their thoughts for granted. I think, therefore I am, and I don’t think about where the thoughts come from, whether they are accurate, what biases they contain. We believe our thoughts tell us what is happening, and we follow them. We’re addicted to thoughts. If we aren’t having thoughts, if we’re bored, we panic.

To break that addiction, the Buddha prescribed the Foundations of Mindfulness. The first is Mindfulness of Body. We become aware of our bodies and rest our attention there. Typically we use the breath to practice. We pay attention to the breath, and when we notice that we’re lost in thought, we find our way back. Over and over.

By staying with the breath – or coming back to it – we cultivate an ability to pay attention to one thing, to stay in the present moment. The breath tethers us to now.

The Pali word for the second Foundation is “vedana.” It’s sometimes translated as Mindfulness of Emotions, but it’s more basic, more foundational than that. It’s about the feeling tone that comes before full-blown emotions. It’s an unconscious assessment we make thousands of times a day about every sensation or phenomena we experience.

We hear a noise, we respond – we like it, we dislike it – even before we give it a name: “motorcycle.” Lawnmower. Ice cream truck.

The Buddha identifies those feeling tones as pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral.

The automatic responses are the building blocks of judgment. They’re also described as the seeds of what the Buddha called the three poisons – passion/aggression/ignorance, or greed/hatred/delusion. That feeling tone – pleasant/unpleasant/neutral – determines whether we take a protective or open attitude toward the situation.

You can practice Mindfulness of Feeling Tones with each of the senses: what do I smell? Taste? See? Hear? Is it pleasant – do I want more? Unpleasant – take it away? Huh?

The idea here is just to feel in a direct way, without any commentary, and to see the reactions of immediately judging any experience as agreeable or disagreeable, to become aware of these judgments, which are constantly happening. To become aware of them gives us the opportunity to stop the chain, says Lama Lhundrop, a Kagyu teacher (Kagyu is the lineage of HHDL).

Sharon Salzberg relates the second foundation to the classic teaching of the hindrances that prevent us from moving forward in meditation: desire for sense pleasures, anger, laziness or boredom, restlessness, and doubt. These states are said to weaken wisdom.

By becoming aware of the feeling tones that precede these states, we can progress toward achieving equanimity, the ability to be with whatever happens without being pulled into it.

Lama Lhundrop: “Our feelings will be accompanied by awareness, and as we are aware of them and the connected judging process, we can find ways to let go of them, one after the other. Due to mindfulness we can avoid further chain reactions with all the connected emotional trouble.

“Mindfulness of feelings also has the effect that we get to know ourselves better and do not run away from our feelings anymore. They become familiar experiences of great variety but without any special importance. In spite of their great variety they are all the same in one respect: they come and go without leaving traces.
“This meditation gradually leads to non-identification with feelings or sensations. Feelings will then arise without secondary thoughts that create a connection to an imaginary I or self. They are simply what they are: feelings, a flow of experiences, ever-changing.”

In the beginning, Mindfulness of Feelings is an awareness of how every feeling triggers a chain of chain of reactions. As you become more adept, you can simply feel feelings, without reactions or judgments.

The Buddha said: “His mindfulness is established with the thought, ‘Feeling exists’ to the extent necessary just for knowledge and mindfulness, and he lives detached and clings to nothing.”

This is a dramatic departure from the way we normally operate. When something is pleasant, we want to hang on to it, to have more. That clinging causes suffering. Everything is impermanent and fluid – trying to hold onto it is futile. Similarly, trying to escape from painful or unpleasant feelings leads to suffering and addiction to our means of escape. And detachment or delusion or ignorance keeps us from fully experiencing what’s there in the present moment.

Because Buddhists aren’t zombies. The idea is not to stop feeling but to feel what is here in the present moment without piling on reactive thoughts or history or projections. By clearing those away, getting to the foundational feeling tones, we can relate to emotions rather than be controlled by them.

Pema Chodron writes:

Emotional reactivity starts as a tightening. There’s the familiar tug and before we know it, we’re pulled along. In just a few seconds, we go from being slightly miffed to completely out of control.

Nevertheless, we have the inherent wisdom and ability to halt this chain reaction early on. To the degree that we’re attentive, we can nip the addictive urge while it’s still manageable. Just as we’re about to step into the trap, we can at least pause and take some deep breaths before proceeding.