"Notes on the Mirror"

Sometimes on Tuesday nights I attend a meditation group. At some point in the evening, we are assigned a mindfulness task for the next week from the book How To Train a Wild Elephant by Jan Chozen Bays. Some of the mindfulness tasks have been... for the next week leave every space you enter better than you found it. Or...for the next week occasionally use the left hand if we are right handed. Or...for the next week end your day by noting five things for which you are grateful. Or...for the next week when you see someone consider “This person will die tonight” When I first heard this task, I thought, “Well, this sure is going to lay a nice foundation of morbidity for my week!”

But it turned out to be quite a poignant week. I remembered how quickly death can come, how sometimes someone really does die suddenly. You really can see someone one day and then the next day find out that you’ll never see them again.

I’m thinking of my grandmother who died of a heart attack at 86. We were shocked by her death. In retrospect, I’m not sure why. She was 86, after all. As her doctor sweetly said her grieving family, “Now, if you could bargain a year to die, 86 wouldn’t be a bad age to go, would it? And he was right. To die at 86, as my children would say, is to die ‘a ripe old age’. But still we were shocked. Just months earlier, I had moved back to my home town and envisioned a life of my baby daughter growing up around her great grandmother. And then, a heart attack in the middle of the night. No chance to help her die. No chance to say good-bye.

“This person could die tonight.” The human body is fragile and our life can change in a moment. Wake up, as the ancient teachings say, wake up and see this life as it is.  Here is an evening chant used at Great Vow Zen Monastery.

May I respectfully remind you,
Life and death are of supreme importance.
Time swiftly passes by and opportunity is lost.
When this day has passed, our days of life will be decreased by one.
Each of us should strive to awaken.
Awaken!
Take heed!
Do not squander your life!

An important detail of this particular weekly task that the phrase “this person could die tonight” is not just a phrase to think about when seeing others, but it is to be a note on your mirror.

All of the weekly tasks from this meditation group are designed to bring us into mindfulness. This is a word that can be found in so many fields right now. Everything from brain research to parenting advice, from religious practice to house cleaning tips. Mindfulness is used to treat chronic pain in hospitals and it is used to treat addiction in rehabilitation centers. I know someone who is a therapist at a place called Portland Mindfulness. This is a whole therapeutic practice using mindfulness as a way to help people who live with depression and anxiety and the destructive patterns that can so easily emerge in our daily life and relationships.

If you follow this word around you’ll see people using it in different ways and it probably won’t take you long before you discover that people will even argue about the correct definition of mindfulness.

It seems there are three ways that the word mindfulness is used. The first is that mindfulness is used as paying attention to the present. The second is that mindfulness is asking how does this action reflect the principles of a compassionate and skillful life. The third is that mindfulness is how there is nothing but mind - inside us, outside us, in silence, and in sound. It is all mind. Mind-full-ness.
​I was recently at the post office and there was a very long line for no good reason. It wasn’t just before the holidays. It wasn’t right after the end of the work day and it wasn’t even lunch hour. It was just plain old 10:30 in the morning. I was toward the front of the line and as I looked back I noticed a pattern. Multiple people walked through the door, looked at the line, sighed as they resigned themselves to donating more time than they budgeted to their little post office errand. And then...out comes the cell phone.
Before I go on with my rant on cell phones (and I promise I’ll keep it brief), I will disclose that I do not carry a cell phone and I probably have too much fun demonizing them. Same with facebook. There’s just a lot about the spiritual side effects of technology that does not impress me.

So this first definition of mindfulness is about paying attention to doing one thing at a time. If you are washing dishes, mindfulness would mean just wash the dishes - not thinking about what is next, not thinking about beauty or God or sentimentality, just this dish with your whole heart and then this dish with your whole heart.

Cell phones support us in our mind’s slippery nature to be elsewhere. The human mind is always looking for what is next. That is just the nature of the human mind. Just as my dog’s nature is to eat trash. I don’t get angry at my dog for being a dog.  I just put the trash can under the sink where she can’t dig into it.

The mind’s version of eating trash is that the mind assumes that there is something better to think about. There is a place that is more perfect to live than this home. There is a person who is more worthy of our time than this one. Anything would be better than giving my precious whole hearted attention to this sticky dish again. This the nature of the mind. We can follow the mind’s lead and run after the busy mind’s every impulse and tantrum. Or we can remember that we have a choice.

When I saw a line of people looking at their cell phones I remembered that there are three formal postures for meditation -  sitting meditation, lying meditation, and standing meditation. So I lowered my gaze, brought my silly judgemental mind away from the other people in line and their silly cell phones, brought my attention into my body, into my breath - one at a time.

Let’s go ahead and do this so you can have this choice next time you are in line.

Inhale - suspend
Exhale - rooted down
space

Mindfulness is about giving your attention, but there are many ways to give attention. Unless we practice giving our whole hearted attention, chances are that we will default to half hearted attention. This looks like doing one thing while thinking about another, or doing two things while thinking about a third. These divisions can sometimes feel good. Even like a little high, as if we have some super power in our human consciousness that allows us to divide and divide and divide our attention and conquer multiple things simultaneously! This can feel like we are winning, like we are multi-tasking and checking things off our list and planning for one thing while doing another, like we will get to the final level of our day with the most points!

But all this winning comes at a cost.  

When I am giving my half-hearted attention to a task, eventually I am tired, irritable and impatient.  I agree to play with my son and his Legos but I really don’t like Legos all that much, and I am thinking about this sermon that I want to write. I’m not honoring my love for my son and I’m also not honoring my love for leading worship, and chances are good that in the heat of the Lego building I will lose my patience with my son because he will innocently be interrupting my thoughts about this sermon.

When I am giving my whole hearted attention to one thing, there is surrender. Even in Legos, and yes, occasionally even in sticky dishes. No matter what it is - if I am being mindful with this one thing, there can be wholeness.

For me, mindfulness in the present is the gateway to God. When I am surrendering my attention to one thing, there is an experience of unity, as if all space rushes into one, all time drops into this.

three-pointed breath - top of inhale, top of exhale, space

The second definition of mindfulness is how we mindfully live the principles of a skillful or compassionate life.

This is when we align with something larger than ourselves, could be a religious tradition that calls us to our great vows. Our seven Unitarian Universalist principles are such a starting place. We could take these seven principles and consider how does this action right now relate to living out these truths? So we are mindful of the larger tradition and teachings as we make choices about our lives, allowing these principles to help us develop in spiritual maturity.

We could ask ourselves: how does this action reflect...

the worth of each person
compassionate relationship
spiritual growth
search for truth and meaning
democratic process
world peace
interdependent web of existence

One question we could ask ourselves is: how am I living a generous life? How is my life contributing to the well being of others? Because the vast majority of our waking life is about maintaining our personal well being and the well being of our little circle of those closest to us. But living a life that it is of benefit to others can be a stretch. And so mindfully living in relation to our seven principles can be a way to light our way toward living a generous life.

What is it that stops us from living the generous lives we intend? What stops us from giving our whole hearted attention? What stops us from a mindful life?

It seems like my opinion is often my biggest obstacle. Like when it comes time to roll out my yoga mat, my opinion almost always says, “It is too cold.” “I’m tired and deserve a nap.” “Checking my email is more important.” “Running that errand, cleaning this room will be more productive.”    So I have come to see that my opinion about spiritual practice is rarely helpful.

Just as my opinion about whether I feel like cooking dinner is rarely helpful. Because, truth be told, I rarely ever have a lofty opinion about cooking dinner, but I do it, and once I am there, cutting and preparing and sauteeing, I’m often surprised by how joyful it can be. Sometimes there is an insight about how grateful I am to have this food. Sometimes I am overcome with love for my children and husband as I am preparing our meal. And sometimes I just whole-heartedly cook the meal, no big insight necessary, thank you very much. There is broccoli. There is chicken. Dinner is made and served. We sit. We pray. We eat.

In Buddhism there is a teaching called the eight worldly winds. These winds are beyond our control and they have the power to knock us off course easily. We want to be popular perhaps even famous. We want to feel good and comfortable. We don’t want to be in pain or grief. We aren’t in control of whether these realities blow into our life but our life sure can become unstable when we are under the influence of one of these winds. The best we can do is to steer a middle course, not blowing completely with the wind or against it, a course that is informed by the winds and uses a rudder so we can find momentum in the wind and keep moving forward, knowing all the while, this wind will pass.

‘There was a well-known scholar who practiced Buddhism and befriended a Chan Master. Thinking that he had made great stride in his cultivation, he wrote a poem and asked his attendant to deliver it to the Master who lived across the river. The Master opened the letter and read the short poem aloud:
“Unmoved by the eight worldly winds, *
Serenely I sit on the purplish gold terrace.”
A smile broke up on the lips of the Master. Picking up an ink brush, he scribbled the word “fart” across the letter and asked that it be delivered back to the scholar.
The scholar was upset and went across the river right away to reprimand the Master for being rude. The Master laughed as he said, “You said you are no longer moved by the eight worldly winds and yet with just one ‘fart‘, you ran across the river like a rat!” ‘

And then the third definition of mindfulness is the Mind-full-ness, that there is no separation, inside and out, there is nothing but Mind.  We touch this reality when we are in deep states of meditation or prayer. We express this reality by offering our whole hearted attention and also by living out our principles to create a skillful and compassionate life.  

We could look at all three of these definitions of mindfulness as being the nature of God. Perhaps this is how God lives - through our whole hearted attention, through our commitment to principles larger than ourselves, through the unity of all things there is God, in all this capital M Mind glory, through the cosmic power of eternal cycles of destruction and creation as well as the most intimate of stirrings of our most vulnerable and tender heart.

So what will call you toward mindfulness, toward whole hearted attention? What note on your mirror will call you toward awakening, toward the principles that best describe who you want to be when you grow up, toward the precious glimpses of unity with all of life. What note will you post on your note on the mirror to remind you?  Will it be ‘leave every room better than you found it’? Will it be “brush your teeth with your left hand”? Or will it be ‘this person will die tonight’?

In one respect, it doesn’t matter what you choose for your mirror, or even if you choose anything.  Life will go on. You’ll be happy. You’ll be sad. And yet, of course, it matters. How you will return to mindfulness matters. How you will move forward into your life, into coffee hour, into your church, into your family, into your breath - it all matters.

Each of us should strive to awaken. So, take heed. Do not squander your life.

May patience and wisdom be with you always. May you be well.