Chapter 7
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, The earth, and every common sight, To me did seem Apparelled in celestial light, The glory and the freshness of a dream.
—William Wordsworth
The joy of becoming real is discovering our liveliness and the freshness and uniqueness of each new moment. We come home to a wholeness and sense of belonging in the world that’s always been with us, even if we weren’t aware of it. In this chapter we’ll explore ways we can help ourselves and one another awaken to the exquisite vividness of each moment.
This type of awakening is fundamental to Buddhism. Indeed, the word “Buddha” means “one who is awake,” particularly in the sense of understanding the causes of suffering and how to end it. The Buddha realized that the fundamental cause of suffering is identifying with a self that feels separate from everyone and everything else. Einstein also acknowledged this fundamental truth in a letter quoted in the New York Post (1972): “We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us.”
The delusion of a separate self is the source of lust, anger, and the many permutations of these forces that create so much anguish in our lives. In his letter to the Post, Einstein went on to say, “Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty” (1972). This too reflects Buddhist psychology, which maintains that as we widen our circle of loving-kindness and mindfulness, we can free ourselves from the delusions of the conditioned mind and realize a wholeness and completeness within ourselves and all things. This is the pathway to awakening to a much larger sense of who you are.
A Sri Lankan meditation master offered a simple explanation of the essence of Buddhism to former Buddhist monk Jack Kornfield: Laughing, the master said, “No self, no problem” (Kornfield 1993, 203). You may ask, “If I have no self, then who am I?” That’s a good question, and one that has been asked for millennia in many religions and spiritual paths. It’s a central question of philosophy and psychology as well, and also a very hard question to answer with concepts. As soon as you attach concepts to the self, you risk setting it apart from everything and everyone else. The self cannot be known in a concept; it’s a here-and-now experience that exists only in the immediacy of each moment. It’s not a thing; it’s an experience. You get a sense of this immediacy when you wonder, “Who is asking these questions about self? Who is speaking words with my mouth, or listening with my ears?” There is someone motivating your actions and experiencing your senses. But consider: These are all immediate experiences that exist only in the experiencing. We all live only in this moment. We don’t live, or see, or take action in any other moment.
In previous chapters, we discussed how all of us become identified with a narrative-based self. You’ve learned mindfulness skills that can help you recognize and disidentify from the self you’ve created. In turn, the meditative awareness of mindfulness grows even as you attend to the conditioned self with curiosity and detachment. As you witness thoughts and emotions coming and going, you become more the witnessing than the stories being witnessed. In this way, mindfulness can become more than what you do; it can become a way of life and a way of being with others in the world. It can become who you are. So it is that Mahatma Gandhi could say, “My life is my message” (Ghose 1991, 386). Gandhi is also reported to have said, “We must be the change we wish to see” (Einhorn 1991, 71). Similarly, we might say that being real is to live the truth, love, wisdom, and compassion we want to see in the world.
Most of us have had moments of awakening in unlikely places and times, such as airports or street corners, as well as in more likely places, like extended meditation retreats or while sitting by a mountain lake. In these moments, we suddenly have access to a natural wisdom that feels like it’s always been within us. Yet we typically also discover how quickly we can be lulled back into operating on autopilot, losing touch with the wisdom and perspective we’d discovered. You may leave a retreat feeling like you’re living within a new clarity and understanding, only to discover that, shortly after returning to daily life and the social world, you’re already lost in some ego trip or another. We all discover soon enough that the conditioned self doesn’t vanish as we awaken. It’s always present to a greater or lesser degree and must simply become a part of our richness as we navigate in the world. The key is to become familiar with the distortions of your conditioned self and learn to recognize when you fall under its spell.
Barry, a longtime student of mindfulness, told a story that illustrates how easily we can fall back into our delusions and ingrained behaviors. He had returned from a weekend meditation retreat just a few days prior. Finding himself in a bad mood, he decided to take a walk. Seeing him leave their yard, his wife called from the kitchen window, “Where are you going, honey?” His response leapt from his mouth like a toad: “I’m going down to the river to club rats!” he shot back. She came running from the front door; “Are you all right?” she asked, knowing full well that there was no river nearby and no rats, and that even if there were, he would never do such a thing. Barry realized what had happened and apologized: “I’m sorry, honey, I’m feeling really frustrated right now and was going for a walk. I’m sorry for saying that. I got you temporarily confused with my mother—again.”
Even as your mindfulness practice grows, you may become identified with a small, contracted self from time to time and speak or act from this unconscious place. Mindfulness (and sometimes your loved ones or friends) can help you notice when you’ve fallen into the delusions of the conditioned self again. Simply acknowledge what has happened with self-compassion and without blame, then return to the here and now and live from your wholeness and clarity. It’s just like in formal mindfulness practice: The moment you notice you’re lost, you’re no longer lost. The moment you recognize that you weren’t here, you’re here again.
Perhaps this is one of the reasons why beginner’s mind is such an important aspect of mindfulness: The path to awakening involves beginning again innumerable times—sometimes hundreds of times in just one meditation practice. Yet repetition is a time-honored spiritual practice, and we wake up a little more each time. This is why becoming real often takes a long time. Beginning again is how we progress and gradually come to live and speak the truth of our lives. Every time we return to mindfulness and compassion, these faculties are strengthened, and eventually they become how we progress and express ourselves. In time, mindfulness and compassion may become a way of life.
Becoming real can free you from habits of personality that you’ve come to identify with. When you speak from a wide-open heart, you aren’t constrained by unconscious ways of expressing yourself. As discussed in chapter 1, unmet needs can drive us to create maladaptive personality patterns when we’re very young. In time, these patterns become automatic and we manifest them without being aware that we’re doing so. What began as an effort to get our needs met can become dysfunctional and color many of our interpersonal relationships with the hues of an injured heart. One interesting way of looking at and understanding these personality patterns is through schemas, discussed in depth in psychotherapist Tara Bennett-Goleman’s book Emotional Alchemy (2001). She identifies ten major schemas, each of which has many variations, and she illuminates the emotional hues of each schema. Most of us have one or two of these as primary schemas in our lives (Bennett-Goleman 2001):
One thing all schemas have in common is that they keep us trapped in conditioned habits of mind that ultimately interfere with deep connectedness with ourselves and others, and this makes loving intimacy impossible. In addition, they’re all built on a faulty assumption: that there’s something wrong with you, and if you can somehow correct it, you’ll get the fulfillment or safety you crave. But this is the trap of self-improvement we discussed in chapter 5, and it will only keep you stuck in a feeling of deficiency. So what’s the answer? It’s helpful to learn to recognize your schemas. By seeing and even befriending them, you can keep yourself from falling under their spell.
Recognizing your schemas can also help you understand why you might tend to repeat certain patterns in relationships. For example, if you tend to choose partners who are abusive, it may be an unconscious effort to reenact early traumatic experiences so you can master them. And though it may seem counterintuitive, meeting people who seem to offer the opportunity to repeat these disastrous relationship patterns is usually exciting. This is why people who long for emotional connectedness so often end up getting married to people who are cold and aloof. But all is not lost. There’s a way to transform these relationship patterns: mindfully witnessing the stories that drive them and compassionately embracing the feelings within them. The next exercise will help you do just that.
Exercise: Recognizing Your Schemas
This exercise will help you identify any schemas that may be involved in limiting self-conceptions and habitual patterns of relating to others.
Over the next week, pay attention to yourself in relationships with those who are important to you, to see if you can identify your habitual schemas, using the list above as a guide. In your journal, make daily notes about the times and places you noticed schema patterns at work. Also note whom you were with and the circumstances you were in. In each instance, see if you can figure out what purpose your schema meant to serve, and record that in your journal as well.
We recommend that you also enlist the assistance of a trusted friend or family member as you investigate your schemas. Others can often see our schemas more clearly than we can. Go over the list of schemas together and see if the other person recognizes the same schema patterns in you that you have. Then take some time to write in your journal about what you discover in these conversations.
After listing and exploring your schemas, spend a little time with each of them, investigating whether you can determine what sort of childhood experiences might have led to their creation. Again, spend some time writing in your journal about what comes up for you.
Finally, investigate how well your schemas are working for you. Are these patterns that you want to maintain in your life and relationships? What sort of emotions come up for you when you fall into the grip of each schema? If you don’t want to maintain these patterns, how can you begin to break free of them? Are there signals that can alert you that you’re beginning to fall into a particular schema? Again, take some time to write in your journal about what you’ve learned about yourself here.
You can return to this exercise anytime to further investigate any schema patterns you notice.
As long as you’re swept up in a narrative-based sense of self and all of the limitations and suffering that entails, you can neither find nor heal your wounded heart, and therefore you remain a prisoner of your childhood. Self-concepts like unworthiness and inadequacy often serve as a distraction from the feelings the story conceals. To live with your heart wide open, you must find, feel, and accept all of your feelings.
Your way of experiencing emotions will change as you learn to be in them and let them come and go without thinking they define you. Rather than thinking, “I’m always so stupid and out of control. Why do I have to be like this?” you might look at it more like “I’m feeling ashamed of what I did, and it hurts.” Instead of wondering, “Why do I have to be such an angry person?” you might think, “Wow, I’m really feeling angry. It hurt my feelings when she said that.” As you increasingly live in the immediacy-based self, you’ll learn to be with your emotions in a more open and accepting way, without criticizing yourself or believing that your emotions represent character flaws that affirm some ingrained self-story.
You don’t have to look far to find the feelings you need to feel. Whether you just started meditating with the practices in this book or have been sitting for many years, you’ve probably noticed that the thoughts and emotions you have the most difficulty with can and often do arise and fill your mind during meditation practice. Generally, this is the opposite of the experience you were looking for! This is why meditation is sometimes called a “shit accelerator.” Whether you want them or not, sooner or later you discover feelings that were squelched for one reason or another. Perhaps you repressed them because you didn’t have a way to cope with them in the situations where they first came up. Maybe you don’t show your anger now because your parents couldn’t tolerate your anger. Or maybe you don’t initiate sex because you don’t feel worthy enough to believe someone would want you.
Emotions come to the surface as you feel deeply into the stories you’ve been hiding in. This means that these stories can become beneficial if you work with them mindfully. This may seem to contradict much of what we’ve been teaching about how stories beguile us into the delusion of a fixed and stable self, but if you look into your stories with the compassionate curiosity of mindfulness, you’ll find that they carry within them repressed feelings that may hold a great deal of value for you. Embracing these feelings will liberate you from the confines of self these stories weave. The key is to feel the feelings and notice their expression in your body without getting caught up in the identity the stories create. Don’t buy into them; listen to them with your heart and turn toward the deeper feelings hidden within them. As you grow in tolerance and acceptance of your emotions, you’ll gradually be able to feel more deeply into the feelings that your stories have concealed. And as you open to accept what you feel, you’ll discover that even a painful story is like a treasure chest, holding within it your heart of hearts.
A huge part of meditation practice is learning to say yes to what is—learning to relax and just let things happen as they will in your mind and body. This is sometimes called radical acceptance (Brach 2004). You might think of it as softening around what comes up for you, rather than contracting. This is particularly important when you discover that many of your harshest judgments are of yourself. This isn’t unusual; when we turn inward, many of us find that we’re harder on ourselves than anyone else is, or than we are with anyone else. See if you can soften around these self-judgments, and notice whether doing so helps you grow in self-acceptance. You can learn to let everything be, both within yourself and in the world around you. You can learn to be just as you are and to stop wanting to be somehow different. In this way, you may also release yourself from the subtle aggression of self-improvement.
In working with aversive emotions, it’s helpful to sometimes shift from the intensity of the emotion and focus on the physical sensations connected to it. You may notice that fear expresses itself differently in your body than shame or anxiety. See if you can work with unpleasant emotions by softening around the sensations connected to them. The immediacy of your sensory experience will help you remain grounded in the moment. Even with very difficult emotions like shame, fear, or grief, you can begin defusing their explosive charge and gradually integrate them into your life by grounding your awareness in the body as these emotions arise.
Know that radical acceptance doesn’t mean you’re okay with terrible things that have happened to you or abusive situations or relationships you may currently be coping with. It simply means you acknowledge that whatever happened has happened. And, as we noted before, if you’re working with trauma, it’s wise and skillful to enlist the aid of a trusted teacher or therapist to help you in this process.
Habits of reactive distancing and clinging are deeply ingrained in the conditioned self and can happen automatically and without thought. When you notice that you’ve suddenly distanced yourself from or are clinging to a thought or feeling, this is a moment to practice radical acceptance.
Mindfulness Practice: Radical Acceptance
The intention of all mindfulness practice is to take everything off of automatic—to learn to respond rather than react to whatever you encounter. But if you’re unable to accept your experience for what it is, you’ll continue to resist it and react to it. Learning to be with and accept things as they are is a key to the mindful path, and a powerful way to live with your heart wide open. Give yourself about thirty minutes for this practice of radical acceptance.
Begin by practicing mindful breathing for at least ten minutes. Let your breath come and go as it will, and use the sensations of breathing as your way to be present.
Next, open your awareness to attend to the thoughts and emotions that come up for you. Particularly attend to thoughts or emotions that you experience as painful or aversive—things you fear, hate, or wish to avoid. For the next ten minutes, notice what you resist and your reactions as these thoughts and feelings come up.
Feel into and acknowledge each of these unpleasant thoughts and emotions as simply as possible; for example, “fear that no one will love me,” “fear of being alone,” or “hatred of my fat body.” Make space for these feelings with an attitude of acceptance and allowing. If it’s helpful, say yes to each of these thoughts and feelings and then let them be. “I was so mean.” “Yes.” “I was so defensive.” “Yes.” “I was so seductive.” “Yes.” Recognize that things are as they are. Something happened or didn’t happen. Simply let everything be and say yes to it. As you attend to these thoughts and feelings, use your breath as a way to anchor yourself in the present moment.
When you’re ready, recenter in the body and turn the whole of your attention to the sensations of the breath coming and going. Acknowledge that the thoughts and emotions you were having are now past and that you can let them be. They were sometimes pleasant and sometimes unpleasant, but they were all impermanent events. Spend another ten minutes just attending to the breath and returning to the felt sense of the breath every time you notice you’ve left it.
Take a little time to write in your journal about your radical acceptance practice. Acknowledge and record any particular patterns that emerged as you investigated unpleasant thoughts and feelings; for example, lots of self blame for unrealistic expectations, judgments that sound a lot like the things your parents said to you when they were drinking, or shame that follows closely on the heels of a craving for reassurance and acceptance from someone you’re attracted to. Take note of those things you had a particularly difficult time saying yes to.
With all of the time and intention we’ve invested in helping you disidentify from the narrative-based self and live in the here and now, you may think we believe ego is a bad thing and you have to get rid of it. We want to clarify that this isn’t our message—and that it isn’t even possible. Actually, the ego is a good servant, but it’s a disastrous master. As you grow in mindful awareness, you’ll come to understand the workings of your ego and the stories that comprise your narrative-based self. The more you grow in this understanding, the easier it will be to take these stories and the ego itself lightly. At a retreat we attended a few years ago, author and meditation teacher Wes Nisker offered a quip from Ram Dass that expresses this perfectly. When asked how his lifetime of meditation had affected idiosyncrasies of his personality, Ram Dass replied, “Oh, I don’t take my personality so seriously anymore. I consider it more as a pet now.”
The fact is, you need to have a healthy ego to get free of the delusions your ego spins. You need the ego strengths of tolerance, acceptance, compassion, forgiveness, and emotional self-regulation to help you recognize and free yourself from the constricted sense of self that has created so much suffering in your life. No one gets rid of the ego—it’s essential to our navigation in this world. But hopefully we will all grow more skillful in using it and not being used by it. Seeing your ego more as a tool and less as your identity will help you free yourself from stories that constrict and limit your life, allowing you to discover more authentic and liberating elements in your life story. And from a more expansive point of view, you may recognize that some of the troublesome parts of your story have been necessary for you to become who you are in your fullness. They may also be instrumental in helping others who struggle with similar life issues. In this way, you can use the stories that once trapped you to serve your awakening and the awakening of others.
Mindfulness enables us to see the qualities of ego and personality that have spurred us to begin this practice in the first place: the cravings and aversions, the attachments and delusions, the things we hate about ourselves or others—all of the things that create so much suffering in our lives. But now you know that seeing these things isn’t the same as identifying with them, and that as disturbing as they might be, witnessing these internal experiences and letting them be is your key to freedom. It’s what enables you to recognize these habits of mind and disidentify from the conditioned self.
In time, the conditioned self no longer rules your life; it becomes just another aspect of who you are. You won’t take it so seriously anymore. In fact, it can even be something to chuckle at from time to time. As this self becomes less prominent, so do the attachments and sufferings associated with it, and this creates more space for your immediacy-based self to flourish. Along the way, you’ll notice that your story is a lot like everyone else’s story and that you aren’t so alone in the world. All human beings have to find a way to cope with suffering in their lives. When you live with your heart wide open to this realization, you discover a greater connectedness with and compassion for everyone and everything—including yourself. In this way, the skills of mindfulness and self-inquiry allow you to investigate and accept all of your authentic feelings and the truth of your unique history. In opening to these feelings, you may find your way home to yourself with truthfulness and love.
Brittany’s Story
As Brittany started watching her mind at work during a meditation retreat, she was horrified to discover how judgmental of others she was. The way a man blew his nose made him an object of her contempt for half an hour. The amount of food a woman took at lunch disgusted her and filled her mind with criticism throughout her meal. In her third day of practice, she herself became the object of her judgments and spent most of the day condemning herself for being such a judgmental person. The more she noticed these things, the more she suffered. She decided to leave the retreat, but then found an opportunity to discuss her self-made hell with a teacher, who helped her see that this misery of mind wasn’t happening because she was meditating—it was happening all the time in her day-to-day life. She had simply begun to notice it because she was meditating. Brittany decided to stay and work with this old habit with more acceptance and compassion.
At the suggestion of the teacher, Brittany invested herself in the AWARE practice for the rest of the retreat. Each day, she found herself acknowledging judgments hundreds of times. Each time, she reoriented to compassionate awareness and letting be. She took this practice home and decided to live within it, as a new way of being in the world. Over the next couple of months, the judgments remained almost as prolific as ever, but at least she wasn’t taking them so seriously.
Paying attention to yourself in interpersonal relationships can be very revealing, often in embarrassing ways. Often, who you are when you’re with others doesn’t match up with who you are when you’re alone. Yet, ultimately, being real means being who you are all the time, including when you’re with others. This is usually much easier said than done. We tend to take our fear of others’ opinions too much to heart. Sometimes it can be helpful to consider the advice of financier and statesman Bernard Baruch: “Those who matter don’t mind, and those who mind don’t matter” (Cerf 1948, 249).
Still, it can be hard to be real in your interpersonal relationships, especially when you’re operating on autopilot. As you travel the path of mindfulness and self-inquiry, it’s helpful to have at least one friend whom you’re willing to speak your truth to, and who can respond to you with truth as well (in a good way, even if you don’t like hearing it at first). Such a friend can inspire you, comfort you, and remind you why you even began to meditate. When you’ve gotten lost in your conditioned self again, such a friend may be able to help you reclaim your mindfulness. And when those near and dear to you have lost their way, you may be able to help them, in turn. At this level of sharing, it’s especially important to bring the skills of mindfulness, loving-kindness, and compassion into speaking truth to one another.
Friendship is of vital importance on this pathway of awakening. We need the friendship of others if we are to grow and fully realize the truth and love we find in our hearts. Each of us discovers different things along the way, and by sharing them, we can all contribute to one anothers’ awakening.
We need one another in many other ways, as well. We discover who we are in how we’re reflected in the eyes of those who understand, accept, and support us. We become real in their love. A passage from the story The Velveteen Rabbit illustrates this in a delightfully whimsical way (Williams 1922, 4-5):
“What is Real?” asked the Rabbit one day… “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”
“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but really loves you, then you become Real.”
“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.
“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”
“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”
“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand… Once you are Real you can’t become unreal again. It lasts for always.”
In childhood, we might find ourselves in how we’re reflected in a loving parent’s eyes. As adults, we might find this sort of clear reflection from a supportive spouse, a trusted friend, or a therapist. In Buddhism we may find truth speaking with a teacher or in the sangha, the spiritual friendship of a community of fellow practitioners. In Christianity this kind of healing community is called fellowship; in Hinduism, it’s satsang, or company of truth; and in Sufism it’s sohbet. Every healing and spiritual path acknowledges the value of interpersonal relationships where we can be authentic, speak our truth, and access our genuine feelings.
A natural vitality emerges when we acknowledge and accept feelings we swallowed up in childhood and have kept hidden ever since. And being in relationships where we can feel and speak these feelings makes us feel even more real and alive. Martin Luther King Jr. put it well: “I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality” (1992, 110).
Throughout this book we’ve discussed how mindfulness can help you move outside your normal processes of self-referencing to discover a larger sense of who you are. When you are no longer identified with limiting self-stories, you’ll discover a new freedom, and you never have to return to who you used to be. This enlargement of self is a kind of transcendence. Literally, the “trance ends,” and you are no longer identified with a story of a separate self that feels disconnected from everyone else. You are no longer contracted within self-centered, judgmental self-definitions and endless concerns about whether you’re somehow deficient. As that old story falls away, your heart can open wide to discover your place in a much larger story—your place in the family of all beings and all of nature. Becoming real means awakening to your innate wholeness and interconnectedness.
Becoming real takes a long time, and sometimes it hurts. By the time you’re real, you can be pretty beat-up, old, and shabby (as the Skin Horse in The Velveteen Rabbit said). Along the way, most of us endure many interpersonal disasters, humiliations, and enormous life problems. That’s why becoming real doesn’t happen to people who are too fragile. Meditation isn’t for the faint of heart. Learning to disidentify from the narrative-based self is often arduous and overwhelming. After a while, though, it becomes less upsetting or disruptive to catch yourself being possessed by those old stories again, and it may even be a little humorous.
Of course, some of the ways in which we can be possessed by our stories aren’t at all humorous. When they are harmful to ourselves or others, as in the case of aggression, sexual misconduct, and other destructive or addictive behaviors, a serious response is called for. Either way, the key is mindful awareness. Notice when you’re slipping into autopilot mode, and when you see this happening, choose to live more deliberately. Be present. Stay in touch with your sense of loving-kindness and compassion and use these strengths to dissolve every destructive habitual pattern of behavior. Anytime you feel compelled to do something impulsively or find yourself reacting in automatic ways, be very suspicious. Habitual behaviors that arise from old stories are often driven by craving or fear. When you pause before responding, you can investigate the source of these automatic reactions with mindful self-inquiry: Where is this coming from? Does it arise out of fear, anger, or desire? Could this action hurt anyone? Do you really have to act on this feeling right now?
Mindfulness Practice: Interpersonal Inquiry
A friend of ours has a very interesting greeting on his answering machine: “Who are you, and what do you want?” Reportedly, there is often a long silence before his callers respond. These are deep questions and worthy of deep personal inquiry. One powerful way of exploring these questions is through the following practice of mindful interpersonal inquiry.
Choose someone to share this practice with whom you feel close to and can trust. This practice includes mindful breathing. If need be, explain mindful breathing to your partner before beginning. You might even practice mindful breathing together a few times before trying the lengthier, more involved practice below. Once you’re ready to begin practicing interpersonal inquiry, plan two sessions, each about an hour and fifteen minutes in duration. You can do the two sessions on the same day or on separate days. It would be useful to have a timer that can sound fifteen-minute intervals so that you can be fully engaged in the practice without having to watch a clock. Before beginning, read through the practice below to get an idea of what’s involved, and decide who will inquire first before you start.
First Practice: Who Are You?
Sit directly across from your partner and practice mindful breathing for fifteen minutes.
When the fifteen minutes is up, make eye contact and then begin the inquiry. The inquirer asks, “Who are you?” After receiving a response, the inquirer pauses for a few moments and then asks the question once again. Continue this practice for fifteen minutes, then sit in silence for a few minutes.
Switch roles and repeat the process.
Reflect on what came up for you in the inquiry for five minutes, and then meditate on the breath in silence for ten minutes. At the end of the silent meditation, give each other five minutes to talk about this experience.
Second Practice: What Do You Want?
Once again, sit directly across from your partner and practice mindful breathing for fifteen minutes.
When the fifteen minutes is up, make eye contact and then begin the inquiry. The inquirer asks, “What do you want?” After receiving a response, the inquirer pauses for a few moments and then asks the question once again. Continue this practice for fifteen minutes, then sit in silence for a few minutes.
Switch roles and repeat the process.
Reflect on what came up for you in the inquiry for five minutes, and then meditate on the breath in silence for ten minutes. At the end of the silent meditation, give each other five minutes to talk about this experience.
These questions and variations on the theme can be very revealing in regard to your conditioned self and the extent to which you’re identified with it. Other questions to consider include “What role do you tend to play in intimate relationships?” “What role do you play in your work or profession?” “What role do you play as a parent?” “What role do you play when you’re with your parents?” “What role do you play as a neighbor?” “What role do you play as a customer?” Get creative; there are many ways to work with a partner to explore who you are and how you are. A continuing dialogue between you and your meditation partner can help you discover many things about yourself that you might not recognize on your own. Return to this practice again and again to see what you discover.
This practice will be much richer when you work with a partner you can share your truth deeply with. However, it may be that you currently don’t have someone with whom you can dive into this kind of exchange. However, you can still explore these questions as a writing practice in your journal. Create the same circumstances for yourself as if you were working with a partner, setting a timer and writing, from the immediacy of your experience, whatever these questions bring up for you. Because writing takes longer than speaking, give yourself more time for each inquiry.
In Islamic tradition, it’s said that the divine motivation for creation sprang from the desire to be known, with God reportedly saying, “I was a hidden treasure. I longed to be known, so I created the world that I might be known” (Frager and Fadiman 1999, 92). Sometimes we sense that there’s much more to being human than we have allowed ourselves to know. We sense that there’s a deep internal wellspring of wisdom, compassion, and love, and that there’s something we are supposed to do with it. We come to know these treasures in the expression of them. A poem by Rumi expresses this beautifully (1997, 31):
Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument. Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
We love Rumi (and gifted translator Coleman Barks) because he speaks from a wide-open heart so eloquently. We can find the treasures of peace, loving-kindness, and gentleness within ourselves when we let the beauty we love be what we do. If you want to learn about love, love this breath—this expression of life as it’s happening in your body. Do it now. Don’t just ponder the concept—really do it. Close your eyes and love this breath as you are feeling it. Love isn’t what you think. It’s what you do; it’s a way of being in the world. Likewise, mindfulness and compassion aren’t just something to read about; these are ways to be. As you find the feelings that have lain buried and hidden within your heart and embrace them, you may come to know and love the heart that has always held them. You discover who you are and always have been as you emerge from who you are not and never were. As the flower falls away, a delicious fruit appears. As you let go of the caterpillar body of your story, you are given wings. You become who you are. You become real. This is why so many prophets and ecstatic poets speak of the need to die before you can be reborn.
Imagine being at sea on a calm night, your ship gliding through the stillness. The stars are shining as bright in the mirror of the water as they are in the sky, and you cannot find a line between what is above and what is below. Suspended here, you become still, floating somewhere between a vastness below and another above. Your heart fills with love. You search for the line that separates you from everything else. It isn’t there, and you too become part of the vastness.
If you want to live with your heart wide open, become like a river that endlessly joins with the sea. This is what it means to become real through love: allowing love to transform you so greatly that you, like the river, become infinite as you give yourself completely and endlessly to love and compassion—an embodied presence that embraces everyone and everything as part of one great whole.
In this chapter we presented two mindfulness practices: radical acceptance and interpersonal inquiry. Radical acceptance is an extension of the work you began with mindful self-inquiry. It brings the focused awareness of mindfulness to those thoughts and feelings that seem most painful and aversive. Yet at this stage in your mindful journey, you’ve honed and developed many aspects of mindfulness, including noting, cultivating spaciousness, self-compassion, and reconciliation. This will help you extend radical acceptance to even these most difficult thoughts and emotions. This is the key to equanimity, and essential to continuing to live with your heart wide open, no matter what circumstances life may bring you. We recommend that you practice radical acceptance frequently in a formal way until it feels natural to you. Then you can more easily bring this perspective to your day-to-day life.
Interpersonal inquiry is a way of broadening your mindfulness practice to include others. If you find others who are interested in practicing together with you in this way, take advantage of this opportunity on a regular basis.