A question came up recently in a Drop-In class: what do you do when you’re doing the open awareness mindfulness practice, but the mind is resisting doing the practice and wants to go off onto something else? In this case the ‘something else’ was a broad, spaciousness with a hint of the Buddha Amitabha’s love and a large dollop of pleasure.
We were almost out of time, and so my response was brief. I said, at that point you have a choice. You choose whether you are going to stay with the practice you started with or let the mind go onto some other type of practice. You make a conscious decision.
This is OK as far as it goes, but it’s a bit of a limited answer. So here is a more extended one.
Firstly: what are you choosing?
Secondly: who is choosing?
Both of these are in the realm of Samprajana or ‘clearly knowing’. Let’s look at number one.
When you choose to go towards a different practice mid-practice it’s worth looking at your motivation. This is especially true when – as in this case – there is resistance to being with what’s already happening. What is that resistance about? Usually there is some sort of un-seen view that the experience we’re having is not ‘enough’ – not pleasurable enough, not significant enough. We want ‘more’ and we want something different. Sometimes just recognizing and being with what resistance feels like in the mind is enough to transform the experience.
At times, though, resistance comes when we’re putting in too much effort to be aware and we need to ‘settle back’ and bring a greater quality of relaxation into awareness.
When we ‘clearly know’ what is happening in the body-mind we might decide that the condition of the mind needs something else in the moment. We might realize that the mood is flat or sad, for example, and the awareness is not very strong. We can keep plugging away with bringing mindfulness freshly to each moment, and in fact, that’s what I’d suggest initially. But at a certain point, and especially if the mood is going down, suggesting the awareness is not effective, you might decide to look into your toolbox and see what might help. This action is not coming from resistance to the current experience but ‘samprajana’ raising the question ‘what would be helpful for awareness to grow?’ or ‘what would help the mind quality improve?’
You might then choose to resource the mind through a short metta based practice leading to some uplift of heart-mind. Or to take an anchor to increase steadiness and stability of mind. Or you might open yourself to faith through a Buddha figure you have a connection with. It’s helpful to be clear why you are doing what you’re doing and what your aim is. And once you’ve accomplished some stability or positivity or confidence in yourself, you’re able to return to awareness.
Ideally you make the choice at the beginning of a session of meditation rather than switching part way through, though sometimes that becomes necessary.
So, who is choosing? Who is in the driving seat of the practice? With awareness practice we are training in ‘growing’ the qualities of mindfulness and right view/wisdom. We want them to be strong enough factors in the mind-heart to ‘choose’. They give rise to a more impersonal way of guiding our practice that is not based on personal preferences and conditioned habits of mind. They allow us to access different possibilities and to go where our minds don’t usually go. Understanding and clear seeing is a fruit of this type of mind.
When the desire to switch practice comes, we can ask ourselves is wisdom choosing, or is it craving (with their cousin, aversion)? How much of that ‘wanting’ is the same old conditioned mind going down familiar pathways? And can we strengthen awareness and wisdom further, by recognizing in the moment, what that experience of wanting or not wanting feels like, really know it for what it is?
When awareness becomes stronger, and we develop some momentum in the practice we can more easily identify this benign and impersonal quality directing our practice. With wisdom in the driving seat we can trust where the awareness takes us.
Uncontrived Mindfulness 