Pause and Reflect
Pause and reflect are not two states of mind that come very easily to me. If anyone is familiar with the Enneagram, I am a type eight or what is called “The Challenger”. I have a very hard time sitting still. I am driven and am constantly wanting to do, do, do. I have been known to drive my husband crazy with my inability to just sit down during the day and take a break. My mind is constantly running in overdrive thinking about what is the next thing on my list. While I am working to complete one thing I am already thinking about the next ten things, never taking a moment to pause.
Intensity has only begot the need for more and more intensity in my life. Until now.
For the past year, I have been on an inward looking journey not even realizing at the time that was what I was doing. I turned to Buddhism and mindfulness as a way to get through a very troubling time in my life knowing that the anti-depressant and the high levels of intensity were just not going to cut it for me this time. What started slowly listening to videos and podcasts, reading books and meditating on and off for 5–10 minutes a day expanded into an insatiable hunger to learn more about the Dharma and deepen my mindfulness practice. That did not come about on its own. I had a three day mental breakdown over the Christmas 2020 holiday that literally forced me to stop and really look at myself and my life.
Last weekend I attended my first meditation retreat with the BC Insight Meditation Society. To put what I felt over that weekend into words really does not do it justice but I shall attempt it. The weekend was taught by one of the most compassionate, joyful and aware human beings by the name of Pascal Auclair. Being in his presence, albeit over Zoom, you could feel his love, joy and inner ease radiating through the screen. You just knew by listening to him and watching him that he had really found something special. He did not talk about being enlightened but rather spoke of walking the “middle path” of life like a tightrope walker keeping a precarious balance on the rope. Finding equanimity or the ability to remain balanced in our unstable and unsettling world. He shared with us that just walking on this path brought him so much joy and curiosity he couldn’t help but smile radiantly. Wow, I thought. That is so inspiring!
These two days were not easy as the most sitting meditation I had done at any one time was about 15 minutes max. Over these two days we did about 8 hours of meditation! I found some of the sittings almost painful as my impatience mounted. I felt fidgety, I wanted to listen to him more and I wanted to learn and absorb as much as possible. Sitting still listening to your own mind for hours on end can be really fucking annoying (not very Buddhist of me I know, but honest)!
It really made me realize this intensity that I have, this inability to just be and to feel what I feel. I am so very used to NOT feeling what I feel but rather ignoring it completely and keeping busy so I don’t need to think about it. Well there was no running away for these two days. I had to just sit with it. Be with it. Feel what I feel.
I felt and thought a lot of things over the weekend. You may think, aren’t you not supposed to think while practicing meditation? Well that is impossible and what I have learned meditation is NOT really about. While sitting I recognized my thoughts that I was having, let myself feel and then came back to my breath. It was later while walking that insights came to me and are still coming to me now. This practice is not getting me to a particular destination or solution, it is really a path of experience.
I will share a few of my favourite learnings from the weekend and leave it at that. The entire world suffers from having the wrong view or ignorance. We experience this in our careers, in our relationships, in our culture and with nature. Constantly striving and working toward a wise view or right view is the path to equanimity. Our practice in mindfulness can help us get to right view. There is no point in me trying to control things anymore. We cannot control anything, everything is defective in some way. Coming to rest with the unresolvedness of life can bring real ease. If I can give myself more space or more time, then with this space I can decide what my next action may be. That could be what I say or don’t say, what I do or don’t do and what I feel or don’t feel. A lot of the time I simply speak or act without stopping to pause and reflect before hand. Pascal said, “everything rests on the tip of intention”. How right that is.
Finally the one teaching he shared that resonated with me so deeply was “by releasing fear we create more space for joy”. I have felt this first hand by releasing my fear little by little. Clearing the massive dust balls out from under my proverbial rug. By sharing my deepest darkest secrets in writing I am starting to experience this joy he spoke of. It is not there all of the time, as that is not possible, but joy is certainly more present than it used to be. For that I am truly grateful.
