Category Archives: Resources

Mindfulness Resources for Working with Pain

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The “Felt Sense” Prayer, as shared by Tara Brach

Intro to Bringing Mindfulness to Pain 15:06

Guided Meditation: Bringing Mindfulness to Pain 17:40

Jon Kabat-Zinn has been a pioneer in bringing mindfulness techniques into the mainstream of medical practice to work with stress, pain and illness. You can read an overview of this work here. He is the author or editor of dozens of books; a good place to start is Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of the Body and the Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness.
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Resources to support peacefulness in the moment

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Guided meditation: Happiness and Loving This Life, led by Tara Brach

Today we drew on the work of beloved mindfulness teacher Tara Brach to explore how to find peace, even happiness, in the face of frustration or difficulty. In the prologue to her book True Refuge: Finding Peace and Freedom in Your Own Awakened Heart, Tara wrote about the adversity in her life that drove her own spiritual journey:

My earliest memories of being happy are of playing in the ocean. When our family began going to Cape Cod in the summer, the low piney woods, high dunes, and wide sweep of white sand felt like a true home. We spent hours at the beach, diving into the waves, bodysurfing, practicing somersaults underwater. Summer after summer, our house filled with friends and family—and later, with spouses and new children. It was a shared heaven. The smell of the air, the open sky, the ever-inviting sea made room for everything in my life—including whatever difficulties I was carrying in my heart.

Then came the morning not so long ago when two carloads of friends and family members took off for the beach without me. From the girl who had to be pulled from the water at suppertime, I’d become a woman who was no longer able to walk on sand or swim in the ocean. After two decades of mysteriously declining health, I’d finally gotten a diagnosis: I had a genetic disease with no cure, and the primary treatment was painkillers. As I sat on the deck of our summer house and watched the cars pull out of the driveway, I felt ripped apart by grief and loneliness. In the midst of my tears, I was aware of a single longing. “Please, please, may I find a way to peace, may I love life no matter what.”

True Refuge is a profound and life-changing book Another that you might consider in the same light is Full Catastrophe Living, by Jon Kabat-Zinn, a pioneer in integrating mindfulness practices in medicine, trauma, and pain control.

Awareness of Thoughts: Some Resources

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It was lovely to be with you today to explore awareness of thoughts. Here are some related  resources:

Audio recording, Introduction to Awareness of Thoughts, 13:45

Audio recording, Guided Meditation: Awareness of Thoughts, 16:18

You can learn about the research at Queens University in Canada that indicates that we have about 6000 thoughts a day here.

For a fun but also moving example of how taking a moment to ground in presence can illuminate what follows, enjoy this video of Yogetsu Akasaka, a Japanese Zen Buddhist monk who has respectfully brought beatboxing to traditional sacred chants. You can view it on YouTube.

 

 

Still Do I Keep My Look

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A poem for the body

Still Do I Keep My Look, My Identity
BY GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Each body has its art, its precious prescribed
Pose, that even in passion’s droll contortions, waltzes,
Or push of pain – or when a grief has stabbed
Or hatred hacked – is its and nothing else’s.
Each body has its pose. No other stock
That is irrevocable, perpetual,
And its to keep. In castle or in
With rags or robes. Through good, nothing, or ill.
And even in death a body, like no other
On any hill or plain or crawling cot
Or gentle for the lily-less hasty pall
(Having twisted, gagged, and then sweet-ceased to bother),
Shows the old personal art, the look. Shows what
It showed at baseball. What it showed in school.

Published in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, November 1944, pp 76-77

Finding Refuge in the Body: Some Resources

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Dissatisfaction with the body causes endless suffering and fuels the multibillion-dollar diet, cosmetic and plastic surgery industries — which of course are fueling dissatisfaction with the body. As the Irish Poet John Donahue has written, “We need to come home to the temple of our senses. Our bodies know that they belong… it is our minds that make us homeless.”

A few years ago, a pharmacy in the UK designed a project called “Perceptions of Perfection” that gave a photograph of the same woman to designers in eighteen countries around the world and asked them to photoshop her to look like the ideal woman in their particular cultures. The project has glaring limitations as it focuses primarily on the Americas and Europe with only one Asian country, China, represented and almost nothing from Africa. That said, it shows that beauty really is in the mind of the beholder. You can see the results here.

When we dissociate from our bodies, we dissociate from life itself. As beloved mindfulness teacher Tara Brach has noted, “The most profound and full presence can only be experienced if we’re awake right here in this body – with a quality of sacred presence that comes when, without any resistance or grasping, we really plant ourselves in the universe, in this body, in this being right here.”

Listen to Tara Brach speak on Mindfulness of the Body and Embodied Spirit here.

 

Mindfulness and Vitality: some resources

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Listen to Teresa’s guided meditation on vitality (16 min.)

Dr. Ellen Langer, a renowned mindfulness researcher and experimental social psychologist at Harvard University and the author of the groundbreaking book Mindfulness, defines mindfulness as the simple process of actively noticing new things. The beauty of mindfulness is that every moment we spend being truly present is new: this moment, this very moment, has never happened before and will never happen again. We’re not lost in the past; we’re not projecting into the future. And this sense of newness brings renewal, even doing tasks we previously considered mundane.

You can read more about Dr. Langer and her innovative research here.

The Irish poet David Whyte has brought poetry and insight to the role of work in our lives in ways that have revitalized work culture around the world. His books include Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity and The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America. 

Here, he writes about a wise friend who brought him insight into the cure for exhaustion:

I felt as if I didn’t have an ounce of energy left to do the work I had been doing…. I could feel how utterly exhausted I was in body and spirit, and how much I needed to talk with someone, anyone, but also how marvelous is was [that I was about to be visited by the person who ] … had exactly the kind of perspectives I needed at that moment.

I could see Brother David already in my mind’s eye….[He] was my kind of monk; no stranger to silence but equally at home in the robust world of work, it’s words, and its meaning… You might be impressed by his extraordinary capacity for compassion, but it did not mean he would let any unthinking assertion  pass him by without a challenge or clarification…

[After he arrived and we sat across the table from each other with glasses of wine,] I looked up at Brother David, the nearest thing I had to a truly wise person in my life, and found myself blurting,

“Brother David?”

I uttered it in such an old, petitionary, Catholic way that I almost thought he was going to say, “yes, my son? But he did not; he turned his face toward me, following the spontaneous note of desperate sincerity, and simply waited.

“Tell me about exhaustion,” I said

He looked at me with an acute, searching, compassionate ferocity for the briefest of moments, as if trying to sum up the entirety of the situation and without missing a beat, as if he had been waiting all along to say a life-changing thing to me. He said, in the form both of a question and an assertion:

“You know that the antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest?”

“The antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest,” I repeated woodenly, as if I might exhaust myself completely before I reached the end of the sentence, “what is it, then?”

The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness.”

From Crossing the Unknown Sea by David Whyte, Riverhead Books, 2001,  pp. 129-132.

Artwork,  “Dalmatian Pelican” ©2021 Teresa Jordan

The importance of delight…

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Listen to Teresa’s guided meditation on delight.

In January, the podcast The American Life rebroadcast an episode titled A Show of Delights. When they first broadcast the episode a year earlier, during a time of wildfires, racial injustice, the beginning of the pandemic, and ever-increasing division, they called it revolutionary programming. To claim delight in a time of such disturbance, they admitted, can feel frivolous, even disloyal. But the ability to find joy and delight in the midst of darkness is what can give us the balance and strength to go on.

The first segment of the show interviewed bestselling poet Ross Gay, author of The Book of Delights. Every day for a year, he wrote an “essayette” on delight, cataloguing everything that had pleased him on that particular day.

He undertook, if you will, a practice of delight.  And he found that he had to train himself to notice delight, to strengthen his muscle of delight. Delight doesn’t just arrive, he realized. You have to go looking for. The more he practiced, the more delight he found.

And Gay wasn’t just singing kumbaya. It’s striking how many losses are in the book: sickness, injury, the death of good friends. As Gay told the host of This American Life: “When I think of joy, grown up joy is made up of our sorrow, just like it’s made up of what is pleasing to us. Often, it felt like I wasn’t going to be able to talk about delight without talking about these other things. Delight often implies its absence.”

Artists know this is true. You need the darkness to see the light, the light to understand the darkness. And scientists recognize it, too: If you gaze at the sun, you will go blind. And if you never look away from the darkness? You will go blind.

Delight is a counter balance to difficulty: yin and yang, darkness and light. The Aztecs believed that the god Quetzalcoatl gave chocolate to humankind to make up for the pain of having to live on earth. The Buddha talked about the 10,000 joys and the 10,000 sorrows.

During the Vietnam War, Thich Nhat Hahn and other young monastics worked tirelessly to relieve suffering in the countryside, and to broker an end to the war. Anyone they found, they would try to help: soldier or civilian, South Vietnamese, North Vietnamese, or American. Because they wouldn’t take sides, they were shot at from all directions. Their work was tireless and often gruesome. But they went back, day after day after day. Thich Nhat Hahn spoke of what gave them the strength to continue in the introduction to Learning True Love: Practicing Buddhism in a Time of War, by Sister Chân Không:

“One day, Chân Không was preparing a basket of fresh, fragrant herbs to serve with rice noodles, and she asked me, ‘Thay, can you identify these herbs?’ Looking at her displaying the herbs with care and beauty on a large place, I became enlightened. She had the ability to keep her attention on the herbs, and I realized I had to stop dwelling on the war and learn to concentrate on the herbs also. We spent ten minutes discussing the herbs that could be found in the south of Vietnam and the ones in the central regions, and that encounter took my mind off the war, allowing me to recover the balance I needed so badly.”

Read “A Brief for the Defense,” a poem by Jack Gilbert

Listen to “The Show of Delights” on This American Life.

Listen to Teresa’s guided meditation on delight.

 

Some additional resources for mindfulness of emotions

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The extreme disturbances of the past few months have challenged us all in unprecedented ways. Sometimes those challenges are opportunities for growth. New York Times journalist Emily Esfahani Smith has spent much of her career studing how people respond to adversity. In an article titled “On Corona Virus Lockdown? Look for Meaning, not Happiness,” she looks at why some people experience post-traumatic stress while others – equally disturbed by the events – experience post-traumatic growth.

And poetry always helps:

Stone
by Charles Simic

Go inside a stone.
That would be my way.
Let somebody else become a dove
Or gnash with a tiger’s tooth.
I am happy to be a stone.

From the outside the stone is a riddle;
No one knows how to answer it.
Yet within, it must be cool and quiet
Even though a cow steps on it full weight,
Even though a child throws it in a river;
The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed
To the river bottom
Where the fishes come to knock on it
And listen.

I have seen sparks fly
When two stones are rubbed,
So perhaps it is not dark inside after all;
Perhaps there is a moon shining
From somewhere, as though behind a hill—
Just enough light to make out
The strange writings, the star-charts
On the inner walls.

You can find more readings from poet Naomi Shihab Nye and Margery Williams’s The Velveteen Rabbit here.

 

Some Guidance for working with LovingKindness

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Rachel Naomi Remen, writer and professor of integrative medicine, tells of the blessing her grandfather, a rabbi, had for her. He always called her Neshume-le, which means “little beloved soul.” When her mother was very old, Rachel told her mother about her grandfather’s blessings. And her mother looked at her with great sadness and said, “You know Rachel, I’ve prayed for you every day of my life, but I never had the wisdom to do it out loud.”

The practice of lovingkindness is a way to live these blessings out loud, even if out loud is only a whisper to one’s self, to one’s soul. It is a way to live our love for our family and friends, for our benefactors, for people we know and don’t know, even people we dislike, for every person and every being with whom we share this earth. And it is a way to bestow that blessing on ourselves, to recognize the deep worth of our own wondrous souls. No one has ever laid on their death bed and thought: I wish I had beat myself up more often.

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Invitations: Mindfulness of Emotions

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Class 4 Invitations: Awareness of Emotions and working with RAIN

  1. Continue to practice mindful stillness at least a few minutes each day such as mindful breathing, 10-breaths practice, or work with Mindfulness Daily.
  2. Read Chapter 1 of Tara Brach’s book Radical Compassion, “Learning to Love Yourself and Your World with the Practice of RAIN,” available to read for free online here.

Radical Compassion: Learning to Love Yourself and Your World with the Practice of R.A.I.N. – Chapter One

3. Practice RAIN at least once during the week. Guidance with the process is helpful, and Tara Brach offers a number of guided meditations and other resources on her website:

RAIN can be particularly powerful when practiced with a partner. Tara explains the process, and offers a guided practice, here.