When I was in college I went to the Zen center at Green Gulch north of San Francisco to meditate for a week. I knew how rigorous it was going to be so I diligently practiced zazen until I could sit for almost an hour in perfect stillness. I was quite proud of my ability. At the zen center we sat so quietly that even if someone swallowed you could hear it so I tried to not even do that. Then one morning a woman came in who wasn’t as skilled and she shifted and moved around trying to get comfortable quite a bit. What a racket! But after a few days she settled in and got quieter and quieter until one morning at breakfast she remarked, “I heard the ocean this morning!”. A fellow student replied, “It was always there you just needed to get quiet enough to hear it”. And it was true the sound of ocean waves crashing into the beach was always there in the distance but you did have to be very, very still to hear it. In the very same way we need to get still enough to hear what is really going on for us. Usually we are too busy shifting around to get comfortable for us to pay attention.
That woman later asked for chocolate chip cookies for dessert. Scandalous! What an interesting story I was telling myself. That simple pleasure was not allowed. Fortunately the cooks were wiser than me and obliged. But here is the interesting thing. Have you ever eaten something, super slowly and with exquisite focus? If you try that with a normal chocolate chip cookie your head will explode. They are way, way too sweet and intense for that. They are designed to blast past our normal inattentiveness and grab us by the throat so we can’t help but notice them. What the Zen cooks baked, however, was a cookie that invited you to really deeply pay attention to it. You had to get quiet enough to appreciate it.
We find our Truth moment to moment within. Meditation teaches us how to get quiet and still enough to actually hear it, but it is only one of the ways to get there. It is just a tool. The goal is to keep on exploring within. Taking a moment to check in with ourselves and getting quiet enough to really hear those distant ocean waves. Asking ourself, what is going on with me right now? And then how about now? A compassionate observer always watching and noticing. This is something that should be taught in school but isn’t. This is practice that we need to cultivate.
Hakomi therapists teach mindfulness by example. The therapist looks for the right moment to pause us in our story and have us notice what is going on in our body right now. Have us notice what stories are running through our head. And then encourages us to keep on tracking. Notice those quick little deadly thoughts that slip in and out and then noticing how our body reacts to those thoughts as well. How we get tense or fearful or angry. We start to realize our body and mind are not really separate things. Let’s talk about that next.