Autobiography In Five Short Chapters
Chapter I
I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I fall in.
I am lost… I am hopeless.
It isn’t my fault.
It takes forever to find a way out.
Chapter II
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I pretend I don’t see it.
I fall in again.
I can’t believe I am in this same place.
But it isn’t my fault.
It still takes a long time to get out.
Chapter III
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I see it there.
I still fall in… it’s a habit… but,
my eyes are open.
I know where I am.
It is my fault.
I get out immediately.
Chapter IV
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I walk around it.
Chapter V
I walk down another street.
– Portia Nelson
As we’ve explored stress and anxiety this week, we’ve started to identify the “deep holes” that we often fall into. We’ve explored ways for walking around those holes, and, possibly, finding new paths to travel.
Today, I’m going to introduce you to another mindfulness practice that is particularly helpful for dealing with strong emotions, anxiety, and stress.
Back in week 2, we talked about how we could break down pretty much any emotion into the following components:
Mindfulness teacher Shinzen Young says that without mindful awareness of what’s happening, each one of those factors (valence, thoughts, bodily sensations) are multiplied — so if (for simplicity’s sake) each of those elements had a value of “10” in terms of intensity and suffering, you end up with a suffering level of 1000! (I love how Shinzen reduces mindfulness to equations ?).
Without mindfulness, multiply each factor:
Suffering = 1000
Once we bring our mindful awareness to what is happening, the thoughts and sensations and valence are all still there, but now they are simply additive — our suffering level is 30, instead of 1000.
Suffering = 30
As I’ve said all week, the emotion and stress are already there — by bringing awareness to them, we reduce our suffering.
So how do we do this?
There are two basic forms of mindfulness meditation. We have been primarily practicing what is called focused attention — during our practice, we select an object (anchor) to be the focus of our attention (breath, body, sound). Each time the mind wanders, we gently bring our attention back to our anchor.
Another type of mindfulness meditation is open awareness. With open awareness, there is no set anchor or focal point for your attention. Instead, your attention/focus is on whatever happens to be in your conscious awareness at the time. (To an extent, we did a little bit of this when we investigated our emotions back in week 2).
The diagram below shows what open awareness meditation might look like:
So, as you sit in meditation, a stimulus (thought, sounds, memories, etc.) occurs, and instead of thinking, “Oh, it’s just a passing cloud,” and watching it drift by, you spend some time investigating it. Eventually, a new stimulus enters your awareness, and you investigate that as well.
With open awareness meditation, the feeling itself becomes the object of meditation (instead of the breath or body). We recognize our awareness of anxiety is not anxious. Jon Kabat-Zinn describes it like this: “Your awareness of the anger is not angry. Nor is your awareness fearful. Nor is it sad.”
In truth, you’re probably doing a bit of both types of meditation in your practice. This open awareness is especially helpful for dealing with stress because it allows us to break down a powerful emotion into manageable parts, instead of being overwhelmed by the intensity of our feelings.
Ultimately, you are coming to recognize that you can make awareness your default mode of being in the world. You are coming to realize that you are not anxious, or sad, or overwhelmed, or [insert one of a bajillion other emotions here]…. YOU ARE AWARENESS ITSELF.
Wowzers. This is powerful stuff.
Click here to listen to a guided open awareness meditation.
As a bonus for this week, you can download the following image to print and post anywhere you need it — a list of the best, research-supported practices for managing stress and anxiety!
