Hello Everyone,
Last week, I introduced the practice of mindfulness meditation. This week we’ll be developing our view by getting curious about ‘Gentleness’.
I don’t know about you, but I can be quite hard on myself. This kind of self-aggression can start as early as when I’m still in bed in the morning. Before my feet have even hit the ground I can be calling myself lazy. I can compare myself to others, I can indulge disempowering self-narration, and I can even find myself in overtly violent self-talk.
For periods of my life this kind of harshness has been debilitating. Whether it’s things that had been said to me, things that I read in the news, or absorbed inadequacy from endless scrolling on social media, the impact has often left me disempowered, victimised, and frozen as a result of a self-attitude that when I am seeing clearly, is just a collection of stories I am telling to myself.
All-in-all, there’s some way in which I have, at times, failed to be a friend to myself.
When the Dalai Lama first came to the West, he was surprised to discover that Westerners had a lack of self-esteem. People who were around at that time tell stories of the Dalai Lama asking the westerners that he would meet, ‘And do you feel that? Do you have a lack of self-esteem?’ Despite the technological progress of the western side of the world, people seemed to be without a genuine sense of their innate value. He was astounded.
When we are harsh towards ourselves, inevitably that finds it way into how we relate to others also. We not only put limits on ourselves but limit the extent to which we can connect with and uplift others. Underneath all of our self-criticism and denigration, beneath our lack of self-belief and jealousy, we might find that there is pain. The pain of not feeling good enough - just as we are.
Ironically, instead of helping us to get better, this can really be a hindrance to our own development.
In mindfulness meditation practice, we are getting familiar with our own experience so we can be present without turning away and into habitual pattern. As part of that process, we need to meet ourselves exactly where we are. We can’t force ourselves into any kind of new pattern for very long by suppressing what we don’t like. Instead, this tradition suggests that we become a friend to all of our experience. As you may know, a good friend can transform the way we experience a situation. We all benefit from being received with care, humour, and forgiveness.
So, what I want to ask of you this week is that you be gentler with yourself. You already know how to do this. Thinking back to the way you might hold a lover, a new-born baby, or a small animal, you know what it is to be tender and gentle with what is present.
In this way, when we take our seat in meditation, we can also tend to the needs of our own body. Taking your time to settle in, finding a comfortable posture, and relaxing into where you are can have a tremendous impact on how practice unfolds.
In a similar way, when we place our attention on the breath we might imagine covering the breath like a light silk blanket might rest upon the flat of a table. Intense focus is not the aim of the game here.
And finally, when we label our thoughts as thinking, we can do so with gentleness, lightly noting the thoughts without judging ourselves for wandering. If we notice our labelling as harsh, we can label a second time, with gentleness.
As we practice becoming gentler with our experience, we may begin to notice an additional kind of patience and spaciousness arises around what would have previously been solid and heavy self-talk. In that additional space we can discover the rest and peace of knowing that we are just who we are, where we are, right now. From that place, we have the fertile opportunity to uplift ourselves and recognise the goodness of our life without aggression, but from heart.
There is enough struggle and war in the world without our own adding to it in our own experience. With the cultivation of gentleness, we might find a more easeful way to take the steps necessary to uplift our world.
