7

Developing Confidence

Retreat

One of the most powerful aspects of going on pilgrimage is retreating from busyness—the daily responsibilities and schedule that normally make up your life. These regular features not only define the quality of your life, but also outline your identity.

When you extract yourself from your habitual environment, you invite the possibility of a new identity to emerge. This can mean going into long retreat in an isolated cabin, or a cave. Maybe it means a motorcycle journey over the Tibetan plateau, or a walk through the Spanish countryside. I once rented a bungalow near the beach on a remote Vietnamese island, for seven months. It was a fantastic retreat—no one to talk to (language barriers and no Internet), plenty of fresh fruit, and a big isolated room to practice all day. Lizard entertainment. Late-afternoon swimming meditation on the deserted beach. Once you have the internal structure in place—your practice instructions and some discipline—you can go anywhere.

You might protest: what if I can’t take time out for a retreat? Perhaps you must go to work every day or take care of your family—you can still establish a retreat-like environment by setting boundaries. I know people who have created a semblance of retreat even in the midst of their daily lives. You can include your “worldly” activities as part of your retreat practice—this has the added benefit of helping you bring the fruits of your meditation into your daily life. You could eliminate social events and extraneous conversations for a period of time and spend that time on your meditation cushion. Maybe you don’t have the luxury of taking two weeks off, but could you sit when your children leave for school? Could you come straight home from work and head right into your meditation room?

What’s important is to disconnect from the daily distractions and let your mind settle. It’s hard to get into deeper states of meditation when you are constantly poised to respond to external prompts: the phone, e-mail, newspapers, neighbors, text messages. It may be hard at first, but you can train people not to expect you to reply immediately. It really comes down to your own self-discipline and willingness to let go.

Unplugging

Twenty years ago when I opened a Hotmail account, I wrote my first e-mail from Mysore. Before that, there was a mail bin in the foyer of the shala, and we would wait two or three weeks for letters from home.

Back then it felt like magic to communicate in real time. Fast forward to today and we discover that too much connectivity has unfortunate side effects. This magical machinery that transformed our lives by creating constant connectivity has disconnected us from deeper parts of ourselves.

Many of us no longer sit quietly to watch a sunset, or sit in a sidewalk café simply to observe the flow of life, or open a hardback book to read—much less compose a handwritten letter. These are precious gifts, and habits I developed early in my life, my precursors to contemplative practice. I would hate to imagine life without them.

The Internet has robbed us of some of the serendipity that occurs with travel, and this is a key part of any pilgrimage. You don’t know who you are going to meet along the way. You open yourself to whatever arises. These days, you wouldn’t dream of getting on an airplane to India without having a hotel reservation, or without even knowing if the teacher you are going to study with is in town. (K. Pattabhi Jois wasn’t, when I first arrived in 1997!) But in this case you close off many opportunities for chance encounters. When I called (on a landline) from Varanasi and learned K. Pattabhi Jois was not teaching at the moment, I decided to travel to Mysore and wait for him. He showed up a few days after I arrived, and as a result I was able to study with him in a very intimate setting—there were twelve of us practicing with him. Sometimes when you trust your instincts—rather than information—you get extraordinary gifts.

Setting boundaries allows the space necessary for transformation to occur. You wouldn’t expect a new relationship to thrive without setting aside some private time. Relationships need nourishment and privacy to delve deep into things. This is also true for your practice—you are developing a relationship with your inner wisdom.

You might need to give yourself permission to step outside your daily life to seek deeper truths. Of course you need to take care of your responsibilities. But isn’t it your duty to live out your full potential? Isn’t it your responsibility to be happy? Try disconnecting from the daily distractions on a regular basis, even if it’s for a set amount of time each day. This one simple habit will have profound effects.

Fair warning: you will most likely not get this permission from people in your current circles. People get nervous when someone steps outside of the box—there is a strong tendency to try to pull her back in, like a potful of crabs about to boil. “If we are going to boil alive, then so are you, my friend.”

So permission will have to come from you.

When you change your daily habits without awareness—you start eating more cake, having that extra glass of wine in the evening, or start the morning with e-mail instead of a walk or a yoga practice or picking up your pen or paintbrush—then the tone of your day is set. Combine a string of days, and the tone of your life is set.

And the opposite is true: small conscious changes over time can have profound effects on your state of mind.

Yoga and Meditation Practice

You are extremely fortunate to live in a time when esoteric spiritual practices are readily available. But you need to be a bit savvy if you want to really benefit from the practices.

Yoga prepares the system for meditation. Ashtanga yoga, in particular, is a systematized path to meditation. Traditionally, sitting meditation is not taught in the Ashtanga system. The logic goes like this: once the body is prepared and purified, meditation will happen on its own. I like to believe this. I also think it helps to encourage it; to develop it through formal practice. I see it as a way of expanding the dimensions of the yoga practice.

The eight limbs of yoga—Yama, Niyama, Asana, Pranayama, Pratyahara, Dharana, Dhyana, and Samadhi—are your map.

Essentially, the entire path of yoga is a meditation practice. But if you look at all the yoga classes happening in studios around the world these days, you might not immediately see this connection. You might have to find a separate teacher or center to get proper instruction on meditation practice. The two approaches to practice—yoga asana and meditation—are definitely compatible, and if you undertake both, you’ll have rocket fuel under your asana.

Simplicity

You know that sense of ease when you watch a professional athlete doing their thing? They make it look so easy. Simplicity is the hallmark of a pro.

Keep it simple. Come back to the practice you are doing. When you notice yourself making stories, thinking thoughts about things, acknowledge that, and come back. Back to awareness of breath, body, movement, stillness, mind. Find the stillness within movement.

When you are learning a new practice or posture, it is important to stick to the traditional instructions. Later, when you have some experience, you can improvise a bit. But like a good musician, technique is required before you have the skill to play your heart out.

Thinking is ego’s domain; thoughts to reinforce your version of yourself and the world. So the point of practice is NOT about thinking, but coming back to experience: of breath, of movement or stillness and awareness. Breath provides a focus; movement and stillness provide a context. Coming back to the breath again and again interrupts the mental stream—it cuts the never-ending chatter that occupies our mind in the usual daily context. You override that by coming back to the awareness of breath. This is an important point, because it is possible to go through years of breathing practice thinking that you are practicing awareness of breath, without actually practicing awareness of breath. There is a big difference!

Be aware of your breath. Try it now. As you breathe in, notice that you are breathing in. As you breathe out, notice that you are breathing out.

I love this simple practice from the great Vietnamese Buddhist Master Thich Nhat Hanh:

Breathing in, I know I am breathing in.

Breathing out, I know I am breathing out.

Breathing in, I notice my in-breath has become deeper.

Breathing out, I notice that my out-breath has become slower . . .

Breathing in, I calm myself.

Breathing out, I feel at ease.

Breathing in, I smile.

Breathing out, I release.

Breathing in, I dwell in the present moment.

Breathing out, I feel it is a wonderful moment.

Applied Mindfulness

If you have ever tried to follow the breath in meditation, you know that the mind wanders easily away from the present moment—it has a tendency to get distracted. When your distracted mind is left unchecked for prolonged periods, you may end up ignoring entire aspects of your life.

When you are able to focus the mind for a while, you start to recognize your habitual patterns. Not all habitual patterns are bad—washing your hands after changing the kitty litter is probably a good one to keep. Maxing out your credit card on a retail therapy binge whenever you have a bad day at work might become problematic. Once you are able to see the patterns, then you can start to ask yourself: Do I really want to keep doing this?

Luckily, you have a choice. You recognize this choice by practicing mindfulness. Start simply by sitting down to watch your mind in meditation. If you do this on a regular basis, and maintain a certain degree of focus and discipline, you will—sooner or later—start to experience moments of clarity and presence.

How do you do this?

Make a habit of checking in with your breath. Notice your breath when you are on the computer, or talking to a friend, or driving to an appointment. Get to know how the breath changes with your state of mind. From a yogic perspective, when the “winds”⁹ are disturbed, the mind will be agitated. When you settle the breath into a rhythmic flow, the mind also settles. Whenever you notice you are distracted, return again to the experience of breath entering and leaving the body. This is a first step toward settling the mind.

Confidence comes from developing this experience. When you can rely on yourself to stay present through thick and thin, you can handle just about anything.

Settling the Mind

Think of a jar filled with water and sand. When it is shaken, the sand swirls around, clouding the water. This is what a distracted mind is like—no clarity. A settled state of mind is characterized by clarity.

The most direct way to achieve this settled state of mind is through the practice of sitting meditation. When you have practiced this for a while you develop the capacity to bring this calm clarity to your daily life.

Recognize thoughts as impermanent and insubstantial. After all, where are they? Can you grab one?

When you ally with the spaciousness of the mind instead of the contents of the mind (thoughts and emotions) you automatically shift your perspective. This allows you to more fully focus on whatever you choose.

But, while mindfulness may provide temporary relief of ignorance—the tendency to avoid the truth of what is right in front of us—it won’t alleviate emotional suffering over the long term.

In order to witness your destructive patterns—the habits of body, speech, and mind that cause you to suffer—you need to take a step back and develop a wider perspective. For that you need awareness, which arises through expanding your view. So the key to making mindfulness applicable to daily life is to develop awareness.

Awareness

Mindfulness is bringing your focus back to the task at hand, whether you are observing the breath in meditation or chopping carrots. Awareness is remembering to be mindful of what you are doing. So when you get distracted during meditation, or suddenly the soup boils over on the stove, you come back and remember your focus. You attend to the distraction, return to the breath, or to the carrots, and resume your mindfulness—tending to whatever you have chosen as your object of attention.

The only way to interrupt bad habits that cause suffering is to first become aware of them. In practicing mindfulness and awareness, you learn about your own tendencies and idiosyncrasies. Once you are able to see your patterns, you can apply antidotes necessary to bring yourself back into balance.

If I have a tendency to get defensive when provoked, I can learn to stay physically present and engaged. If I easily fly into a rage, I can learn to slow down my reactivity by remembering a mindfulness technique. If I have a tendency to be lazy, I can learn to create structures that motivate me.

Awareness is the great medicine that allows you to heal your emotional wounds. Without your imbalances—your heartbreaks, struggles, disappointments and obstacles—there would be no journey to take—no need to seek medicine. So you should also bow to your weaknesses, in gratitude. They are the gatekeepers.

Your greatest obstacle is your greatest strength.

Awareness leads to recognition of the interconnected nature of every aspect of our experience. You start to see how relaxing the body and deepening the breath affects your state of mind. Eventually you start to see how every thought, word, and action sends out waves that affect the subtle details of your environment and relationships.

The dawning of awareness arises when you are able to sustain relaxed mindfulness of the present moment. It happens naturally when you are fully present, engaged, and relaxed. Say you are in conversation over dinner with your beloved, and he or she is telling you all the reasons you are so wonderful. You would probably be so riveted by these words that you would not be at all distracted by the child screaming in the restaurant, or the clatter of plates as the waiters rush about, or by the little spinach leaf on his tooth. Mindfulness is what keeps your ears tuned in to the words; awareness is recognizing what is happening in the present situation—the context. Essentially, there is no effort involved in awareness. The practice is to stay focused and relaxed in equal measures.

Awareness is observing the process of being mindful; it is conscious involvement in whatever we are doing. If mindfulness is continuously coming back to the present moment, awareness is recognizing the context in which mindfulness takes place. Mindfulness + awareness = presence.

How do you bring mindfulness and awareness to your pilgrimage?

Presence

Being fully present is surprisingly challenging. It’s so easy to opt out of the present in favor of a juicy fantasy. If you are waiting for a certain outcome, you may miss signs that don’t align with your expectations. Presence is essentially being fully embodied, here, now, without imposing our expectations.

This is a great practice to do while on a journey. One of my favorite practices while traveling in a foreign country—or to a new part of my country—is to simply observe without trying to decipher anything. Allow the sights, sounds, smells—the feel of the heat, the taste of new food—to simply wash over you without having to identify or categorize it. Try to suspend judgment long enough to have a direct experience. Sometimes I take myself out on “artist dates” (if you don’t know about these see Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way) and just watch the world as if viewing a great art exhibit.

A traditional analogy is of a child in a Tibetan temple—experiencing the dazzling sights, sounds, smells—the whole atmosphere will leave an impression. But the child has no idea what any of it means. The significance of the images, the words being spoken, the rituals—everything will be meaningless. But the experience will leave an imprint, a mood.

While you are observing your surroundings, imagine you are like a child who is seeing things for the first time. Don’t assume you know what’s going on. Make note of the details of your environment. Tune in to your body to see what messages it is picking up. Notice the body language and facial expressions of others. Listen with your inner ear, or your sixth sense. Open your mind to possibilities you have not yet imagined. Just as there is a difference between hearing and listening with the ears, let the mind “listen.”

Presence Enables You to Weather Storms with Greater Ease

It’s easy to engage in destructive patterns when you’re not aware of them. You get overwhelmed and go into “reaction mode.” There is a stimulus—like someone saying something hurtful—that sparks a feeling. You don’t like it, you don’t want to feel it, and so you hurry to find an escape from that feeling. You lash out, run away, pick up a cigarette, quit the job, ditch the partner—anything to distract you from the physical sensations of a disturbing emotion. When you slow the whole process down by using the practice of presence, you give yourself a pause to check in and choose an alternative response.

What does all of this have to do with your pilgrimage? Becoming aware of your own habits through mindfulness practice allows you the freedom to choose consciously to engage in behaviors and patterns, rather than being dragged along by a lifetime’s worth of struggle. You can learn to ally with the spaciousness of the present moment instead of reacting to the content of the storyline. So this process of applying mindful awareness to your daily life offers the possibility of resting in a balanced state of mind no matter what the moment brings, so you remain open to whatever arises.

That’s powerful medicine.

Guided Mindfulness Meditation

Look for the “Introduction to Sitting Meditation” in the Resources section on page 220.

Take the posture simply, with dignity and grace, but without hope or pride. We are not doing anything spectacular or particularly noteworthy. We are just sitting down, and for a period of time allowing ourselves to become aware of our experience of the present. It can be quite boring. If it is, then just notice that. If you have an ecstatic experience of bliss and suddenly see the light, then just notice that, and come back to the present in all its mundane detail. The idea is that, in the absolute sense, one state of mind is not preferable to another. Whether we have thoughts of divine inspiration or of what we will eat for breakfast, the response is the same: notice what happened, and then come back to earth, the breath, the body.

Writing Practice: Developing Confidence

Sit for ten minutes. Then use the following prompts and write for ten to twenty minutes on each one:

What am I aware of right now?

Where do I show up with full 100 percent presence?

What are the signs that I am present?

What gives me confidence?

What disturbs my confidence?

What is happening right now?

There is no right or wrong way to do this and it may feel simplistic. The point of this exercise is to help you tune in to a more refined awareness of your experience in the moment. Think of it as writing meditation practice.