In my end is my beginning.
—T. S. ELIOT
Want to know some of what death has to teach? Begin to look at endings. The end of an exhale, the end of a day, the end of a meal, the end of this sentence.
How do you meet endings in life? Do you go unconscious around them? Do you leave, either emotionally or mentally, before an event is over? Or are you the last one in the parking lot, watching as the final participants depart? Do you feel sad and get teary-eyed about endings? Or anxious? Or are you indifferent, isolating yourself and withdrawing into a protective cocoon? Do you stop talking to others before the end arrives? When leaving work for the evening, do you say farewell to colleagues and clients? Do you wait for others to acknowledge the end, or do you jump the gun? Do you visit friends who are dying? Do you think it doesn’t matter if you don’t say good-bye?
During an intensive retreat focused on impermanence, a student noticed the endings of each and every experience. A faded rose along the walking path reminded her of how beautiful the new bloom had been just days before. When she met with me in an interview, she complained, “Everything dies! It is so sad.”
I replied, “It’s true all things change. ‘Sad’ is the story you tell yourself.”
The way we end one experience shapes the way the next one arises. Clinging to the old makes it difficult for something new to emerge.
Breath offers us an opportunity to study our relationship with endings in an intimate way. Breathing is a living process, constantly changing and moving in cycles—inhale, pause, exhale, pause. Every breath has a beginning, middle, and end. Every breath goes through a process of birth, growth, and death. Breathing is a microcosm of life itself.
We sense the journey of the breath from the tip of the nose all the way down the throat and into the pit of the belly. There we observe the subtle moment of transformation when the inhale becomes the exhale. Then we notice the breath beginning its long journey up and out of the body. At the very end of the exhale, there is a gap, a pause. It can be a moment of fear or faith: breath has left the body, and we don’t know for certain if it will return. Do you trust that the next in-breath will emerge on its own? Can you rest your mind in the gap?
After a six-hour triple bypass surgery, nurses wheeled me into the coronary care unit (CCU) of the hospital. This high-tech zone was straight out of a science-fiction movie, replete with multiple electronic monitors and the incessant sound of beeping. My heartbeat was tracked by wires attached to pads on my chest. Clot-busting medications dripped stealthily into the veins in one arm, while morphine flowed into the other arm. A catheter traveled up into my bladder, and another plastic tube drained the fluids from my neck. A long intubation tube connected my lungs to the ventilator that was breathing for me. All the while, the staff quietly bustled in and out.
My mind sluggishly emerged from the thickness of anesthesia. I felt like I was driving down a foggy road. Details of the room and the faces of family and friends would appear in a dusty haze, then fade or mix with dream images. I was in suspended animation, existing in a liminal, in-between state for several hours.
At one point late in the evening, as my son Gabe and my dear friend Eugene sat by my bedside, a respiratory therapist abruptly entered the room. With great enthusiasm, he announced, “Let’s take out that tube and see if you can breathe on your own.” It gave me quite a start. I wasn’t sure if I could breathe. I shuddered and waved him off, sensing that something was wrong with my left lung.
Since the breathing machine left me unable to talk, I scribbled on a notepad, “I’m scared.”
Eugene is a smart, no-nonsense meditation teacher. He intuitively knew what to do. First, he instructed me to sense my body. But I couldn’t do it. I got part of the way down my torso before giving up in frustration. Then he asked me to find my breath, and that was even worse. I had been meditating for years, but suddenly, I couldn’t distinguish between my own breathing and what the machine was doing. I made a panicked motion, like I was drowning.
In that moment, a story I’d heard many times about Suzuki Roshi came to mind. This gentle Japanese man was one of the most revered Zen teachers in America. He was the founder of the San Francisco Zen Center, from which the Zen Hospice Project was born. He has been a central teacher in my life, even though we never met in person. He practiced and taught meditation for decades with wholehearted dedication. Nevertheless, the night before he died, his youngest son, Otohiro, was lowering him into the bathtub when the Zen master became terrified. He thought he might die right there in the bathwater. He started gasping for air and breathing fast.
Otohiro spoke quietly in his ear. “Father, calm down. Breathe slowly, breathe slowly.” Otohiro himself began breathing loudly and deliberately.
Hearing his son’s words and feeling the rhythm of his breath, Suzuki Roshi was able to ground himself and become calm once more.
If Suzuki Roshi can be scared, then I can be, too, I told myself. I let myself feel the fear in my bruised and battered heart. Having spent so much time sitting with my breath, I also trusted that ultimately I would be able to return to it again.
Gabe intuitively put his hand on my heart. It was like a conduit to the very source of love, and it stabilized me immensely.
I pulled Eugene toward me and put my ear next to his face. He understood, somehow, that I wanted to follow his breath.
“Just breathe,” he said calmly. “Let the breath breathe you.”
The sound of his breath and its steady, smooth rhythm became my lifeline. I borrowed Eugene’s breath until I could find my own. Gradually, I grew more peaceful, more relaxed. After some time, I motioned for the respiratory therapist to do his work and detach me from the breathing machine.
With love and breath, I found my way home.
In the Judeo-Christian creation story, as told in the book of Genesis, we learn that on the first day, God said, “Let there be light.” And there was light. The metaphor continues, as on subsequent days, God speaks and he creates the great waters, the earth, abundant plants, and moving creatures. On the sixth day, God forms a human in his own image from clay and dust of the earth. Then God gives this person the breath of life—not through words, but by breathing into the brand-new human’s nostrils.
Once during a teaching at the Metta Institute, my friend the late Rabbi Alan Lew suggested that one way to understand the meaning of this element of the narrative is that breath is the most intimate connection we humans have to the realm of God. He explained that breath is the vehicle for reaching the transcendent. The breath takes us to that experience that is deeper than words, deeper than thought, deeper than form.
Breath animates human life and sustains it. Breath comes before thought and words. It is non-conceptual, wordless. It can’t be described; it can only be experienced. We can breathe without speaking, but we cannot speak without breathing.
In meditation, we use breath to focus our attention on the present. Breathing only happens in real time. It always occurs in the here and now. This is what makes it such a powerful vehicle for direct insight. Often, we think of the present moment only as a stepping-stone on our way to some future goal. But actually, life can only be lived in the present, not in the past or in the future. And this present moment is the only place where we can rest.
Normally, breathing is an involuntary process, proceeding without our conscious awareness, going along at its own pace, minding its own business. When we walk, we breathe. When we sleep, we breathe. The breath is always there, functioning without our interference. This is probably a good thing. Imagine if we were in charge and had to remember to breathe? Most of us wouldn’t last very long.
Curiously, though, when we sit to meditate, we often start by trying to shape the breath. We make it deeper, quieter, as if there were such a thing as a “perfect breath.” In Buddhist practice, a long breath isn’t any better than a short breath. What’s important is noticing that you are breathing.
The breath invites us into the body. John O’Donohue, the wonderful, wild Irish poet, once wrote, “We need to come home to the temple of our senses. Our bodies know that they belong … it is our minds that make us homeless.” We come home as we sense the breath’s texture, rhythm, and pace, the differing length of each inhale and exhale. With time and practice, we learn to align with the breath and move with it, to allow the breath its own natural depth and flow. Every breath takes us to where we belong. As we relinquish command of it, we gradually feel the breath breathing us. This is good training for releasing control of and understanding how to cooperate with life.
While we might believe otherwise, there is nothing boring about being with breath. When we open to the miracle of the breath and sense directly the process of oxygenation, we appreciate how, through a creative collaboration with our blood, air reaches every cell of our bodies. Every moment is totally new. Each breath is unique, purposeful, and essential to life. I liken it to being with a lover. Breathing consciously, we engage in an exploration, a tender discovery of life. Each breath is alive with wonder. Our minds can’t help but become curious as our hearts fill with gratitude.
Our breath also serves as a window to how we operate in the world. With the in-breath, we may take in the world and claim it as “me” or “mine,” constructing an image of a separate sense of self. Or with a simple out-breath, we can recognize our place in a complex web of interconnection with all life. We can appreciate how everything we think, say, or do ripples through that web, affecting everything else—whether it is obvious to us or not.
The breath invites us to rest, restore, and be revitalized. We unhook ourselves from the daily frenzy and bring into balance the instinctive tendency to fight, flight, or freeze. The book of Genesis reminds us that God “blessed and sanctified the seventh day” and rested from all work. When we gather our attention fully and completely into the present moment—whether on a meditation cushion, along a trail in nature, or lying down absorbed in a great novel—we discover the ease that emerges when we are not striving, scattered, or struggling.
Jeffrey, a meditation student of mine, described how his mind was consumed with confusion. He recently had lost his job, and his boyfriend had cheated on him with his best friend. His once familiar world was now in chaos. His mind was trapped in a bedlam of constant strategizing, which failed to deliver any relief.
I suggested he take a breath.
A few days later, he reported that by placing his mind completely on the breath, he could find rest. He said, “I realized that when my total focus was on the breath, my external world could keep spinning. I didn’t need to stop it or resolve anything. The stories repeated over and over, a tape loop in my mind. It reminded me of the cyclone in The Wizard of Oz—houses, wagons, and tumbleweeds circling round and round. But there was nothing I needed to do about any of it. Breathing and sitting in the center of it all gave me a fresh perspective on the chaos. The breath became my resting place, a safe harbor.”
* * *
Awareness of breath is one of the most straightforward and easiest ways to come into the present moment. Placing our warm attention on the breath connects body and mind: the breath calms the body, and the body in turn calms the mind.
With mindfulness, the mind becomes saturated with sensitivity and a balanced acceptance, opening and receiving the present moment just as it is, without clinging to or rejecting anything. We pause, we relax, and we allow. Our thoughts may wander, troubling feelings may unfold, but for once we are not trying to control, change, approve, or reject them.
When we gather our attention onto a particular object or experience and stay with it as it changes, we develop concentration and a certain mental pliancy. The growing stability of mindfulness predisposes us to move beyond superficiality, to penetrate experience and investigate it in order to have a deeper understanding. Gradually, we begin to have insights into why these thoughts, feelings, and emotions arose in the first place. But mindfulness is not just inward looking. It can guide our outward actions.
Clear comprehension illuminates how our relationship to our experience can either cause suffering or cultivate wisdom. This enables us to nurture a different, more helpful response the next time we encounter a challenging situation, person, or thought. It helps us to remain calm and grounded when in the midst of an argument with a child, neighbor, boss, or partner; when we confront illness; when we face loss. We can draw on our cultivated tranquility and access a wiser inner guidance.
One of my students, Liang, was a VP at a huge tech company and a new mother. She had to wake several times in the middle of the night to feed her baby, even though she was back at work in a high-pressure environment. She felt exhausted and stressed out. Every time her baby screamed in the wee hours, she felt instantly irritated. Breast-feeding, she found herself counting down the minutes until she could get back to sleep.
Then Liang started practicing mindful breathing while breast-feeding, and her experience shifted entirely. Instead of wishing the nursing session would just end, she instead began to consciously focus on her breath, noticing the sensations that arose in her body. This enabled her to deepen her connection with her baby. Liang felt happy and at peace, grateful for the opportunity to just be in the moment with her precious daughter. Back at work, she reported, she was still physically tired, but she no longer felt so worn out. She had a renewed enthusiasm for life.
These days, you can find mindfulness being promoted on TV, marketed on podcasts, sold as an app, and featured on the covers of popular magazines. In the cult of productivity, workplace mindfulness has become the latest and hottest hack promising good returns on investment. The current explosion of interest in the application of mindfulness to business, medicine, education, neuroscience, addiction, and social justice issues might have us believe it is a new discovery. But mindfulness is older than religion, older than magic.
Some people seem to think that mindfulness is the “new black”—a suitable solution for all problems on every occasion. There have been thousands of research papers published reporting the positive impact of mindfulness on stress reduction, pain management, heart rate variability, anxiety, gene expression, smoking cessation, disease progression, relapse of depression, personality disorders, grief, and even existential death anxiety. The future of mindfulness seems bright. However, research into mindfulness and neuroscience is still in an adolescent stage. It seems prudent to question popular treatment modalities to assure safety and avoid over-simplification of expectations.
It’s easy to misunderstand the teachings from faith traditions and even such secular mindfulness practices and apply them in a way that skews their original intention. We hear an expert encouraging compassionate action and discouraging negative emotions, and we take that to mean that we should never get angry. That goal is not only unlikely, but also potentially cuts us off from discovering an inner strength we might need to survive difficult events. Pretty soon, we start to reject parts of ourselves in an effort to create a new “spiritual identity.” I’ve done it, and most everyone I know has done it at some point.
The thing is, mindfulness isn’t just about mental fitness, productivity, or achieving a specific outcome. It certainly can lead to healthy and positive changes in our lives. Yet the solitary pursuit of those ends can eclipse our appreciation of the deeper beauty of being fully human.
We are always messing with ourselves. We tell ourselves what we should be experiencing and what we shouldn’t. We work hard to define ourselves, hoping that we are doing it in the right way. This constant activity is totally exhausting. Personal development easily becomes endless and effortful. We try—in fact, we can’t seem to stop trying—to be better, to be someone special. There is a certain aggression in all this so-called self-improvement. Better to return to the true intention of meditation, which is to let go of the striving, to embrace things as they are, and, with equanimity, to discover freedom.
One of my students, a physician named Kandice, wrote to me after participating in our weeklong mindfulness meditation retreat:
I used to view mindfulness as something to achieve. The degree to which I could focus on my breath equaled success. I would often critique the time I spent in meditation, such as, “Well, that session sucked. My mind wandered way too much. I got too fidgety.” I also found myself labeling almost everything that entered my mind during meditation as “good” or “bad.” I believed that keeping a scorecard would motivate me to “be better” at meditation, making my sessions more productive and efficient. I wondered if anyone else felt this way, but when I looked around the room, they all seemed so good at meditating. Sometimes I wondered why I had signed up for the course. I never liked practicing (just ask my mom about piano lessons), but I wanted results, so I kept hanging in there.
Then one day, some of your words got my attention: “Mindfulness results in a non-judgmental way of being.” This sentence was a catalyst for change in my world. The utter relief I felt at not having to spend so much energy judging everything (including myself) was freeing, wide, and expansive. My whole body chilled out. My shoulders dropped, my neck stopped hurting, and I stopped cracking my elbow all the time. I began to develop true mindfulness, understanding that it begins and ends with a simple choice to pay attention to what is so. Period. No scorecard. No grade. No labels. No pressure.
Now when I am being mindful, I feel open to things without assigning them a value: pain, joy, sorrow, anxiety. Past, present, and future all become the same. It can all be there, and that’s okay. There is room for everything to exist. I am here to notice and learn, not to run away from my most challenging emotions or to crave one state over the other. In fact, when I do run away, crave, or attach value, I suffer greatly because I want things to be different than they are. Yuck!
The practice of mindfulness as I now know it continues to be pretty difficult at times. But more and more often, when I am sitting in silence, I know I am there. Literally, I know I am there. I sense my body. This is so important: I really feel my feet on the floor, the air moving in and out of my nostrils, the little goings-on internally, like my pulse, my growling stomach, my aching back.
Slowly over the course of the week, I felt grief surfacing—grief for all the years I had spent living in my head, judging, critiquing, and analyzing. There are still times when I meditate that I cry about this, but I can breathe through it and later, the tightness is gone. Mindfulness is, and always will be, about getting back to my breath. It feels like a very safe place to land, a home, a loving embrace.
I no longer feel as compelled to grade myself on performance. I have learned that mindfulness is not about achieving some perfect state or being the best at something. It is about me being authentic, imperfect, vulnerable, and, well, human.
Meditation is not a cure-all. Even when we practice mindfulness regularly, we can be insightful about certain aspects of our lives and blind to others. I know experienced meditators who are highly attuned to their bodies, but out of touch with their emotional lives. I know others who understand the mind, but completely ignore their bodies. I can think of longtime practitioners who are able to sit in silence for days, but have limited interpersonal skills. Still others have a universal love for all beings, but are unable to love themselves or others in a personal way.
My friend John Welwood, the psychologist who first coined the term spiritual bypassing, once said, “We often use the goal of awakening or liberation to rationalize premature transcendence: trying to rise above the raw and messy side of our humanness before we have fully faced and made peace with it.”
Initially, I’ll admit, I also used meditation to escape the tangle of relational pain in my past. Meditation proved to be as effective a way for me to bypass my difficult history as alcohol was for my parents and drug use was for my brother Alan.
My meditation sessions were full of striving. I developed enormous powers of concentration, which gave rise during intensive retreats to states of incredible rapture and peace. I felt proud of my accomplishments. But when the retreats were over, I’d quickly realize that I wasn’t any happier. I was disappointed to discover that the unhealed wounds, the unexplored traumas, and the conflicts of my life were still there waiting for me when I came home.
Focus, even intense focus, does not produce insight in and of itself. In Buddhist teachings, we use concentration to calm the mind and body so that we can harness them for the development of wisdom. But an attachment to tranquility can cause us to ignore, bury, or deny big swaths of our life experiences.
Idealism is one of the occupational hazards of the spiritual path. It can be the death of any practice. When we create a spiritual ideal, we hold tight to some vision of where we think we should be, but then we use that idea to not be where we are. For instance, we promise ourselves that we will meditate every morning for an hour. But then, after a week, we miss a few days, and we give up meditating altogether.
This is a tricky way for the personality to hijack our spiritual practices for its own ends. If I have a tendency toward narcissism, I may flaunt my meditation habits to feel important and special. If I have a tendency to withdraw from inner difficulties, I may be drawn to teachings on non-attachment and renunciation. If strong feelings scare me, I may subscribe to the belief that a spiritual person isn’t supposed to get visibly upset, and I may talk about “getting beyond our emotions.” By distracting us from our immediate and direct experiences, these defense mechanisms disconnect us from our inner resources.
During retreats, I enjoy the individual meetings with students in which they share their experiences with meditation. It’s a bit like having my own crazy mind walk through the door, only in different costumes. Margie’s personality judges her meditation practice harshly, insisting that she is the worst meditator ever born. Barry has a clear sense of superiority and tries to do everything a bit more mindfully than everyone else on the retreat. Jason fills his journals with brilliant ideas, humorous and onerous anecdotes, and a “golden chain” of insights in place of doing walking meditation. Jeanette gets lost in procrastination, in all-or-nothing thinking. Charlotte admits to slipping out of the retreat to go for ice cream, her personality insisting she deserves a break. Jeremiah complains that meditation is not helping solve his relationship difficulties with his wife.
All of them are me.
Even when you teach this stuff, the mind’s habits continue. I was sitting at a meditation retreat with a good friend who is also a meditation teacher. We can be a bit competitive at times. In an interview with our teacher, my friend reported, “Frank beat me in slow walking meditation, but I was much better at mindful eating.” It’s amazing how the mind reacts to the simple instruction to sit quietly. The personality believes we have to make something happen. There are problems to be solved.
In Buddhist circles, we often say, “Meditation doesn’t solve your problems; it dissolves them.” Our minds are wild. We don’t tame them by trying to stop our thoughts, by repressing our emotions, or even by resolving our problems. We have a lot less control over life than we imagined. To paraphrase Suzuki Roshi’s very kind meditation instruction, which he recited often at the Zen Center, “To give your cow a large, spacious meadow is the best way to control him.”
Your mind didn’t become wild when you started to practice meditation. The mindfulness simply made you aware of what had been happening in the background all along—what your personality is reacting to and trying to manage.
Here is a counter-intuitive suggestion: allow it all. The thoughts, the strong emotions, and the associated energetic patterns—don’t be bothered by them. Let it all stop by itself. Your cow will be much happier.
We’re “still crazy after all these years.” The object of meditation isn’t to change ourselves, to throw out the old and bring in the new. It’s about making friends with ourselves, meeting each and every part of our lives with curiosity and compassion. This doesn’t mean simply that we must tolerate the difficult stuff that comes up in meditation. It means that we have to explore it in order to become deeply familiar with our inner world.
Darlene Cohen, a Zen teacher who lived for many years with rheumatoid arthritis and cancer, said:
People sometimes ask me where my own healing energy comes from. How, in the midst of this pain, this implacable slow crippling, can I encourage myself and other people? My answer is that my healing comes from my bitterness itself, my despair, my terror. It comes from the shadow. I dip down into that muck again and again and then am flooded with its healing energy. Despite the renewal and vitality it gives me to face my deepest fears, I don’t go willingly when they call.
I’ve been around that wheel a million times: first I feel the despair, but I deny it for a few days; then its tugs become more insistent in proportion to my resistance; finally, it overwhelms me and pulls me down, kicking and screaming all the way. It’s clear I am caught, so at last I give up to this reunion with the dark aspect of my adjustment to pain and loss.
Becoming liberated in this human experience means including the personal, psychological, and emotional aspects of life, and also going beyond the personality toward a fuller awakening. We have to be willing to meet our suffering, to uncover the hidden shadows, to acknowledge our neurotic patterns, to heal childhood wounds, and to embrace what we have rejected. I’ve needed to balance spiritual practice with good psychotherapy, somatic work, grief counseling, and other methods of inquiry. Those wise therapeutic relationships have been invaluable in helping me integrate what I first discovered in silence.
* * *
These days, I speak of my mindfulness practice as “a practice of intimacy.” We can’t know ourselves, each other, or death from a distance. This work is up close and personal. Meditation is all about learning to be intimate with ourselves, with others, and with all aspects of this worldly life, bringing the healing power of loving awareness forward so that we can meet what is scary, sad, and raw.
When we see through the mind’s conditioning and our habitual behaviors, we come to understand the ways in which we cause ourselves unnecessary suffering. This is where the real freedom of the practice lies. It doesn’t help us to escape from life or transcend our pain. Instead, we become intimate with everything, and know ourselves as not separate from any of it.
The American Buddhist teacher and bestselling author Jack Kornfield popularized the expression “After the ecstasy, the laundry” in a book by the same name. What this means is that even after a deeply insightful transcendent experience, we still have to deal with the nuts and bolts of life, the everyday activities like cooking and cleaning and caring for our children and elders. I’ve often wondered why we don’t use doing the laundry as a method to discover the ecstasy in the first place. Is this idea too far-fetched?
A meditation student had several small children at home. She found that, as a single mother, she simply could not do her formal practice sitting on a cushion. She would be interrupted too many times. This brought up for her a sense of despair.
When her teacher came to visit, the mother asked, “What shall I do?”
“What do you spend most of your time doing?” he inquired.
“Washing clothes and dishes,” she replied.
So he stood next to her as she washed the clothes and cleaned the dishes, and he coached her in being mindful the whole time. That became her practice, at least until her children grew up and she could return to more formal seated meditation sessions.
Everything we do can be used in the cultivation of mindfulness: driving to work, eating, raising our children, being with our beloveds. We can roll it all into what we call “our spiritual practice” and seamlessly integrate it into every aspect of our everyday lives. Waking to a new day is a holy moment—doorways offer themselves as thresholds to new possibilities, trees are utterly themselves. All things are a potential source of support and awakening. When we attempt to separate the sacred from the ordinary, we create a false dichotomy.
For many years, I have appreciated the teaching of the Indian guru of non-dualism Sri Nisargadatta, who famously said, “The mind creates the abyss, the heart crosses it.” This statement is often understood as highlighting the division between the thinking mind and the emotional heart, and how love is the bridge between the two.
Over the years, I have come to a deeper understanding of what Nisargadatta might have meant. In the Buddhist tradition, mind-heart is one thing. The abyss is formed when we split mind and heart into two. As when we split off the ordinary from the sacred, they appear as two sides separated by a gap. Nisargadatta is reminding us about the vast, limitless space of awareness that is beyond thought and emotion. This space doesn’t separate. When the mind and heart are awake, you see everything in its unique detail, even your problems, and it all comes to rest in love and wisdom.
It’s what Rumi is referring to in his famous lines:
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other” doesn’t make any sense.
Yes, there is space between each breath, each thought, but it actually connects them. It’s a bit like experiments in perception that use the picture of the old woman who, if we look carefully, we can also see as a young woman. Heart and mind, ordinary and sacred—all are in fact a unified whole.
When the mind is attentive, focused, we notice the space. Here is where we discover a place of rest. Claude Debussy is credited with saying, “Music is the space between the notes.” The white space on this page allows your eyes to rest on the words. In art, negative space is just as important as the image itself, helping to bring balance to a composition. No matter how much activity, no matter how many forms exist in our lives, there are pauses and spaces everywhere, inviting us to rest.
These days, I allow myself to slip into the gaps. The gaps are not the enemy. The transitions, the in-between places in life, are where I find peace and tranquility, the refreshment of pure awareness, the still point, the perspective that recognizes the holiness in all things.
Mind the gap. The sacred can be found in the ordinary. Rest can be found in the middle of things.