Begin Anew

At the dawn of this fresh and shiny new year, it's a great time to reflect on the Buddhist perspective about starting fresh. Over the next several weeks, we will be bombarded by advertising and media telling us that this can be our best year ever, that we can transform our life in some spectacular way, usually by buying some product or service to support us in this challenging effort. But imagine, that there was absolutely nothing you needed in your life to live the best life possible. You don’t need some new thing or new person or new experience. There are not gadgets to purchase or experiences to chase after. To live your life spectacularly, all you have to do is practice being present. Practice being compassionately aware of what’s going on inside and outside of you moment by moment. In practicing being present, the full world of possibilities opens up to us in a way not possible when we are sleepwalking through life. It seems so simple that many might think that can’t possibly be true. Or some consider it so hard that we might as well not try. Or, we try for a little bit but get discouraged at the first sign of resistance.

Granted, practicing being present is a lifelong process. But it’s a tried and true method for completely transforming lives. Practicing presence continuously reminds us that Life is a verb not a noun. If we think of life as a noun, we concretize ourselves and everything before and after and during. We think of ourselves as a certain way, a certain kind of person, a certain type of life. We think of the past and the future, as some kind of immutable thing. But in Buddhism, nothing is seen as immutable, everything is seen as always-changing. In order words, life is a verb. We are in the process of living it, in each and every moment; we are riding a wave of births and deaths, of being and not being, in each moment. As you sit here this morning, allow your attention to rest on the sensation of being present in this moment. Visualize your body, your mind, and everything around you as ever-changing, impermanent. If we could see ourselves and things at the atomic level, we would see that this is so very true, just energy swirling around in a certain form.

So, instead of having this thing called our life and these experiences called our past, instead we have this process of living, riding the wave of being. It might feel a little shaky at first, what do we hold onto if nothing is permanent? The only thing we can really hold on to is our compassionate awareness of the present moment. Imagine that your old beliefs about the way life is, imagine those beliefs are just electrical stimuli in your brain, knowing that stimuli is changeable. Imagine that any concerns you have for the future are just electrical stimuli which might include emotional responses that once again are always changeable.

When the Buddhist teachings talk about impermanence it can at first seem very depressing. If I can’t hold on to anything then why do anything? It might feel scary or worthless. But, if we can experience this tried and true method of mindfulness, we can learn to ride the wave of life, not just sit on the shore in fear. Riding the wave of life includes clear seeing of what’s happening, and…knowing with full presence, we can appropriately deal with whatever comes our way, trusting the moment to deliver the information needed and the internal knowing to live this life as best we can. Think of yourself as someone riding the waves of the ocean on a surfboard rather than sitting in a beach chair waiting for the ocean to come to you.

Now imagine that you don’t need the New Year to change your perspective, to give yourself a fresh start because you get a fresh start in every moment. And imagine that you don’t have to deny or let go of those parts of you or parts of your past that you might feel are unlovable or bad in some way. Buddhism is about compassion and compassion is about letting experience in, not shutting it out.

The practice of mindfulness means letting experience in. A Japanese poet, a woman named Izumi who lived in the tenth century, wrote: “Watching the moon at dawn, solitary, mid-sky, I knew myself completely. No part left out.” When we can open to all parts of ourselves and to others in the world, something quite extraordinary happens. That’s the point at which we begin to connect to ourselves and with one another.

–Joseph Goldstein, from “Heart Touching Heart,” Tricycle, Winter 2007

Sharon Salzberg says in “The Force of Kindness “

We need to be able to forgive ourselves when we stumble or forget, and based on that forgiveness, be able to reconnect to our basic intention. Our intention of being mindful. One of the primary tools we have in spiritual life is the understanding that everything is changing all of the time, that nothing is fixed, and nothing is permanent. Because of that truth, when we make a mistake we realize that we can always begin anew.”

So, we can use this time of renewal to reinforce our intention to practice mindfulness. We can find moments in each day when we mentally take time to find out where our awareness is, where are our thoughts? Are we dwelling on the past in some way, reliving it over and over? Or perhaps we’re dwelling in the future on some possible event or situation. What happens when you pull yourself back and take a few moments to be fully present? To bring awareness to that specific moment. This process of waking up within our life is the process of learning to ride the wave. Not fixing something then being done.

You can learn many different techniques and traditions. You can get a special mat and special bell. Those are all good things, but they aren’t the thing. The Process. So, perhaps we can let this new year be simply about practicing compassionate awareness, of accepting all of ourselves, and all of others, of staying present to find out about what is really happening in our life, of learning new ways to deal with old problems and new opportunities. If we could bottle mindfulness and sell it on an infomercial, we’d get phenomenal sales. So, alas, we just have to take this free gift, open it up, explore it, use it, and see what happens. All for free.

So, to end with some additional motivation to practice, I’ll quote BHG from an article he wrote on the practice of mindfulness. In it, he says,

Ancient Pali texts liken meditation to the process of taming a wild elephant. The procedure in those days was to tie a newly captured animal to a post with a good strong rope. When you do this, the elephant is not happy. He screams and tramples, and pulls against the rope for days. Finally it sinks through his skull that he can’t get away, and he settles down. At this point you can begin to feed him and to handle him with some measure of safety. Eventually you can dispense with the rope and post altogether, and train your elephant for various tasks. Now you’ve got a tamed elephant that can be put to useful work. In this analogy the wild elephant is your wildly active mind, the rope is mindfulness, and the post is our object of meditation, our breathing. The tamed elephant who emerges from this process is a well-trained, concentrated mind that can then be used for the exceedingly tough job of piercing the layers of illusion that obscure reality. Meditation tames the mind.

- Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, from “On Practice: Breathing,” Tricycle, Spring 1995

So, for this new year, let’s take advantage of all this advertising and media onslaught. Each time you see an ad for weight loss product or something about New Year’s resolutions, use those moments to practice mindfulness. It costs a lot less and delivers a lot more good in the long run.