ìYou see a pile of stones and fail to see the mountains. The marvelous thing about miniature landscape gardens is that they are imitations of mountains and streams. The base is made to look flowing waves and the cliffs are made to seem covered with vegetation. Sometimes you can see miniature gnarled pine or knobby plum. You might see unusual blossoms or strange new shoots from their trimmed branches.îÖ ìThese stones then, just a number of inches tall, and this tray roughly a foot across, they are nothing short of a mountainous island rising from the sea! Jade-green peaks penetrate the clouds and are encircled by them. A blue-green barrier, immersed in water, is standing straight up. There are caves as if carved in the cliff sides to hide saints and immortals. Jetties and spits flat enough and long enough for fishermen. The paths and roads are narrow and confined, yet woodcutters can pass along them. There are lagoons deep and dark enough to hide dragons.î
An excerpt from the rhyme prose that sums up the philosophy of Bonsai as well as a mindful perspective one can take when dealing with daily life. Today I was thinking of the garden weíre building in our front yard, Iím really looking forward to the chance to get my hands into the dirt, and take the time to converse with plants, bring vegetables out of the soil, and contemplate our exchange. In the past Iíve only been able to grow cacti, their perseverance constantly amazes me, their ability to adapt to my temperate backyard, often rainy or frosty, springing back to life for our parched summers. As far as vegetables, or temperamental flowers Iím at a loss. I canít wait to learn.
I remember as a kid walking with my mom, littler brother and dog, down to the victory garden near our house, people tending their small, twine parceled plots, the garden itself was built by the city during World War 2 to improve morale and conserve veggies for the troops. I remember the care and precision people would put into a four by four square of dirt, little rows, tiny trellises, the slow progression from vine to bean.
Now bonsai gardening is a far cry from vegetable in your front yard, but in reality it’s only as different as you want it to be. The same physical needs of the plant apply. In fact gardening is not so different from mindfulness practice in general. Growing as a human being, growing in emotional and physical awareness is similar to the fruition of fruit. Neither will be attained without patient intent. A flower will wither and never bloom without water and sun, the blossom is not inherent in the stem. The same is true for people, although the potential for mindful awareness exist it doesnít come to the surface without patient intent.
There are some easy to incorporate ways to use a garden to cultivate mindfulness, even a potted cactus.
When you look at your plants, take notice of whether they are simply surviving, or if they thrive under your diligent care. We can ask ourselves this same question at this time.
We can see an all together too hot day or frosty morning and learn to accept things that we canít control, like the weather, but appreciate how it is those same random variables that make our lives and the live of our plants possible.
When you are elbow deep in the soil, pulling weeds or harvesting, and your face in buried in some aromatic leaves purely by proximity, think on your breathing, remember that you and the plant are engaged in an exchange. You breath out, your green buddy breaths in.
We water and till and weed for the sight and smell of their flowers, and the nourishment and taste of their fruit. take the time to think about this exchange, and the lives lead by our plants and ourselves.
Dealing with physical pain is a normal occurance in the life of any human. We all occasionally get a headache, migraine, achy joints etc. The usual remedy is to pop a couple tylenol or aspirins. Some people have a few beers after work… but what about those of us who find ourselves in much more than that. What about the millions of people around the world every day dealing with various types of chronic and constant pain , for whom taking a few pills isn’t enough? Or what about the people who find pain killers TOO effective, turning grandma into a puddle of giggling mush.
“Whatever it takes to take the mind off the pain”
But what if pain wasn’t really that bad. What if the actual sensory experience of the pain your feeling didn’t really ‘hurt’?
When dealing with pain of the physical body in mindfulness practice the important thing to remember is that you want to go into the pain rather than try to avoid it.
You can do this by allowing your awareness to become totally focused on the actual sensation of the pain away from comparison to ‘not pain’ and away thoughts floating around in the mind about how horrible the pain is. Resting as the witness of the pain and taking notice of its individual charateristics and features will allow you to adopt a different relationship to your pain.
When you can recognize yourself as the awareness separate from the content of what is occuring within awareness, you are doing what ken wilber calls
‘resting as witnessing consciousness’.
In some of the medical research being performed on mindfulness for specific pain reduction applications, the researchers have found that the physical sensation of pain in some subjects suffering from arthritis remained the same while the psychological discomfort they had been experiencing dropped significantly…
These kinds of findings only further illuminate the distinction between what we feel, and how we feel about what we feel.
When we’re practicing mind training or mindfulness we are always trying to first relate to the freedom of being awareness no longer identifying with its own content.
This idea of learning to use the awareness like a muscle is the foundation of mind training techniques found in nearly all spiritual traditions.
So next time your dealing with a bout of pain in the body follow a few simple steps that will help you alleviate the suffering.
1. Take a few deep breathes and find somewhere quiet where you won’t be disturbed. Unplug the phone, turn off the t.v., put the kids to bed, whatever you need to do to build a sanctuary for yourself. After all, on its deepest level, this is about getting back to yourself and in a profound way learning to honor your own feelings and experiences with an open mind and heart.
2. Perform a scan of the body allowing your awareness to travel up from the feet to the top of the head. If you find your attention being pulled elsewhere by the physical pain present at the moment, simply acknowledge the pain is there and move your focus back to the part of the body you were scanning.
3. Once you have relaxed your breathing and you’ve become aware of the activity going on in all parts of your body outside of the pain, allow your awareness to focus on the physical pain itself. Take note of the particular qualities the pain has… is it sharp or dull? wide or narrow? rough or smooth? you get the idea. This type of passive non-judgemental relationship toward the pain is key. Just allow the pain to be, study it like a scientist who has never experienced pain before.
4. After five to ten minutes take a break by becoming aware of the room around you, colors, sounds, etc. and repeat this exercise as many times as you feel is effective.
I hope this and some of the other techniques we’ve been putting up on the blog are helpful. If you have any questions or comments, or you’ve been dealing with chronic pain yourself by using mindfulness, please feel free to leave us some feedback. We’d love to hear from some readers.
“Every day in every way, I am getting better and better”
This is the mantra of late nineteenth century doctor and creator of his own brand of autosuggestion Emile Coue.
Every night before he went to bed and every morning when he just woke up he would repeat this to himself, gradually instilling new optimism in his unconcious mind.
The way we talk to ourselves internally is often treated as second importance to building will power and doing what we ought to be doing anyway. Its not uncommon to hear someone say something to the effect of:
‘Just put one foot in front of the other and learn to do it even when you don’t want to.’
While this is good advice in some sense, it doesn’t take into account the fact that most people aren’t ever going to do it. They simply won’t. When you have a meeting to go to and your fellow co-workers are all there waiting, you have a certain negative social leverage to motivate you to get dressed and show up. I.E. if you don’t they will all be very very upset with you tomorrow.
However, if your goal is to do something for yourself, such as hitting the gym more regularly or starting to write that novel you’ve been thinking about in your spare time… then the outside motivation of other people holding you accountable isn’t there. You’re going to need something more than just pure willpower.
In this instance having the right self talk is critical.
Heres a few easy ways to get started with Auto-Suggestion:
-Set a timer on your watch to go off at various intervals during the day. Take this moment to become aware of your thoughts and internal voice taking careful note of the tone, volume, and attitude you normally speak to yourself with.
-Repeat the same ritual that Coue performed every morning and every night. Laying in bed repeat to yourself ‘I am getting better and better every day’ or a mantra specific to your goals. The key here is to say it like you really believe it. Smile to yourself and don’t be cynical, let the idea creep in little by little that you really are getting better.
-Place written positive affirmations/mantras all over your house or apartment and repeat the statement three times every time you see it. This is a very effective method I highly recommend to everyone who struggles with self-motivation.
-Check out the theory of Autogenic Training, a type of auto-suggestion created by a German psychiatrist named Johannes Schultz.
Hopefully with these starting points you’ll be able to get a feel for the power of autosuggestion and the difference it can make when it comes to self mastery. Start to talk to yourself like you would a friend, like someone you care about. Who knows… before you know it… you may start believing the things you tell yourself.
To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance.-Oscar Wilde
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