One of my favorite distinctions in doing mindfulness practice envisions the person sitting in mindful meditation as a gardener. Roshi Shunryu Suzuki says that the person who sits in mindfulness pulls the weeds of distraction in order to bury them by the plant of our mind to nourish the growth of single-pointed concentration. We use our attention to return again and again to our object of concentration, usually taught as the inflow and outflow of the breath. Almost any sensory rhythmic sensor experience can serve as an appropriate anchor.
We can practice this as we sit. This is an invitation for us all to try this out if it feels comfortable for us as we read this or at a later time. We might find a relaxed and upright posture as we sit, our sitz bones are grounded on our cushion on the floor, and our knees are folded in half lotus or criss-cross applesauce. Our spinal column is upright, and our body moves very slightly as we breathe in and breathe out. The spine has a slight bend that is the expression of uprightness in our vertebral column. We might experiment by tilting forward and backward. We might then move side to side to find where we are centered. Wherever we feel the most openness and ease is where our natural upright position is. We feel it experientially.
Imagine we are ourselves the flower of our own bodily garden. Our hearts and minds grow in experience as the outgrowth of our bodily processes. Our body is sitting in the upright way that I reference above, and our upright body is like the stalk of the flower growing out of the ground. I invite you to also recognize that the mind’s doings are like the weeds that grow up around the flower. Properly used, the weeds can be like fertilizer for the flower, because we are uprooting the weeds by attending to them as they come up, recognizing them for what they are, and then returning our focus on the object of our attention. We return our attention over and over again to bodily sensations of sitting in an upright way with patience and self-compassion. Each time we recognize that our minds have wandered and return our attention to our bodily experiences as we sit, we are uprooting the weeds.
The weeds uprooted become the organic material that returns nutrients to the soil of our sitting meditation. What we are actively doing is tending to the ground of our experiencing, the soil of our awakening, by using the choice of where we place our attention. Over and over again, we return our mind from its tendency to travel in time to the past and memory and the future and anticipation. We recognize that our mind has drifted, and then we come back to the body in its relaxed posture experiencing. And we can experiment with this method when we are no longer sitting as we go about our day-to-day lives in all their complexity.
Now, the interesting thing about this way of talking about meditation is that it can be hard to discern what is the flower and what is the weed. What is the signal and what is the noise? This is a question that has been arising for me a lot lately with regards to my life in my digital and embodied worlds. Any particular anchor can be the flower or the weeds. We can anchor in our breath, and then attending to the distress of another might be seen as a weed. When we move from sitting meditation to the world, it is easy to get thrown off by our past patterns of relating to other people.
As we all deal with this great challenge, I invite us all to remain the abiding friend of ourselves and others we meet. We might befriend ourselves and others no matter what emotion, thought, or story emerges, and we might have compassion for everyone concerned. We can easily start seeing others as responsible for littering our garden with too many weeds for us to pull up. We can become angry or grow resentful that others are placing too many demands on us. And at the same time, we can ground in the breath at any given moment even when we are with others in the midst of extreme distress and learn how to use our breath and body to remain steadfast and grounded. If the interior of our body is flooding with complex feelings, I invite us all to try this on as we experience the challenges of our lives.
Can we find a posture that helps and way of experiencing our body that helps us find a space for mindful self-compassion? What might you do in the moments of distress to keep your attention focused on your body as an upright, relaxed, and resilient structure for confronting the hard things of life? How might you use these hard things to provide the sustenance for your awakening?
