Stopping and Resting
Just as gardens need time to renew during the winter, and plots of farmland need to rest for a year or more to yield better crops in the future, we need to take time to stop and rest. Inherent in all religious traditions is a time for rest and renewal. Whether it be Shabbat or Sabbath, or just “lazy day,” the results of self-renewal are the same.
Growing up, Sunday was a day of rest for my family, one that began with church, followed by a special breakfast and relaxation time. Later in the afternoon we would enjoy the best meal of the week. Other nearby family members often joined us for these meals, which were typically enjoyed in a local park or by a lake in the summertime. After eating together, my cousins and I would either swim or play in the park. We celebrated the Sabbath without any major effort, and we always felt renewed. The day became more challenging as it wore on, since Monday meant back to school. Yet I always felt better knowing that at least for one day, we felt rested and renewed.
“In our consciousness there are wounds also, lots of pains. Our consciousness also needs to rest in order to restore itself. Our consciousness is just like our body. Our body knows how to heal itself if we allow it the chance to do so. The same thing is true with our consciousness; our consciousness knows how to heal itself if we know how to allow it to do so. But we don’t allow it. We always try to do something. We worry so much about healing, which is why we do not get the healing we need. Only if we know how to allow them to rest can our body and our soul heal themselves.”
—Thich Nhat Hanh
Wanting bountiful growth each spring, we let our garden beds go barren during the winter months. So too we need to prune our lives of too much doing, and lie fallow at times so that we can listen to our bodies, thoughts and feelings. Through silence we listen to what is needed, through space we see the beauty that is in and around us, and by stopping we are truly able to enjoy life and those we love.
Practice:
• In what ways do you find time to stop in your daily and weekly routines?
• Reflect on someone or something that represents beauty in your life. How does the condition of space play a role in enhancing this beauty?
• During the silent moments of your life, what is it that emerges—moments of delight or moments of fear?
Regardless of your schedule, find times to be silent, create space and stop along the way.
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” —Viktor E. Frankl
Chapter 3
Being: Watering the Seed of Mindfulness
“Of all the meditative wisdom practices that have developed in traditional cultures throughout the world and throughout history, mindfulness is perhaps the most basic, the most powerful, the most universal, among the easiest to grasp and engage in, and arguably, the most sorely needed now. For mindfulness is none other than the capacity we all already have to know what is actually happening as it is happening.” —Jon Kabat Zinn
At a recent meditation retreat, I spoke with a woman who had been a doctor before joining the monastic community as a teacher. I asked her, “Do you still practice medicine?” After a long pause, she looked directly into my eyes and said, “Brother, mindfulness is the best medicine.” I have shared this story with others, including a friend who has experienced stage-four cancer, who said, “Mindfulness practice has saved my life.” Whether we are ill or healthy, we should always focus on improving the quality of our lives.
In learning to care for ourselves as gardeners, we sought to have a beginner’s mind, including openness, faith, patience and acceptance so as to see in new ways. We also learned that we require silence, space and stopping to rest so we can renew ourselves. Mindfulness is a practice that supports everything else we have learned thus far. It means learning to be present in an openhearted way to what is occurring in us and around us. Mindfulness is the practice of bringing our whole being to everything we do. It is a way of seeing—a lens—that will help us cultivate the seeds of love in others and ourselves. Mindfulness itself is a seed that, when watered, strengthens and grows, making us more alive and vibrant in the process, like a rose bush receiving the right nutrients, sunlight and water.
How wonderful it is to walk out into a beautiful garden, which offers a vision of what might be cultivated in the gardens of our homes and our consciousness through mindfulness. The practice of mindfulness is the ability to be truly aware and see what is happening within outer gardens and the gardens of our consciousness. The key practice and the essence of becoming a “master gardener” of our consciousness is to know how to nourish the seed of mindfulness.
“The practice is to nourish the seed of mindfulness so that it becomes a positive ‘habit energy’ and a means of transforming suffering in the form of negative seeds.” — Thich Nhat Hanh
Mindful or Mindless?
Scattered weeds in the garden are no different than the stress we experience in our lives. Spiritual teacher and author of The Power of Now, Eckart Tolle says, “Stress is caused by being ‘here’ but wanting to be ‘there,’ or being in the present but wanting to be in the future. It’s a split that tears you apart inside.” If we learned to focus on each moment and live fully in the present, we wouldn’t be swayed by the angst of the past or the worries or dreams of the future. As Matthew 6:34 reminds us, “Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.”
Just as we have formed the habit energies of being in the past or the future, we have also unconsciously trained ourselves not to be in the here and now. In the same way we have learned to be “mindless,” we can consciously cultivate the positive habit energy of being mindful through an ongoing awareness of where our attention is at any given moment. We could be in Monet’s garden in Giverny but miss its beauty if we’re preoccupied by some concern. We could be sitting with our beloved, but if our mind is elsewhere, we are missing out on giving and receiving love, and on life itself, which is ultimately found only in the present moment.
“Nothing ever happened in the past that can prevent you from being present now; and if the past cannot prevent you from being present now, what power does it have?” —Eckhart Tolle
When we are mindful, there is an awareness of what is happening in the present moment. We are fully experiencing our thoughts, feelings and what is happening within our bodies. We are conscious of our actions, whether it be walking to our car, eating a meal, or taking a drive in the country. We are more likely to move slowly through the day, attentive to what is happening and enjoying every moment, even daily rituals, as if they were happening for the first time.
When we are mindless, there is the tendency to operate on automatic pilot. We struggle to stay on task, and we frequently multi-task without realizing what we are doing. We find ourselves hurrying to reach our goal, only to find it difficult to slow down enough to enjoy reaching it.
Of course these are extremes, and most of the time operate with qualities of both mindfulness and mindlessness. In our aspiration to be more mindful, remember it is best to keep a “beginner’s mind” and an acceptance of what is happening in the present moment.
Mindfulness Is Being Aware and Remembering
When a famous teacher was asked what practice is most important, he always responded with one word—“Awareness!” Thinking he would expound on such a brief answer, students would often ask again, and again his response was “Awareness!” Our first step in cultivating the seed of mindfulness is to become aware of what we are experiencing within our body, mind and feelings at any given moment. This practice seems obvious, but think about the last time you talked with a friend. Were you truly with them, or was your mind focused on what your next response might be, or on other thoughts and feelings?
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