Freeing the Heart-Mind
My latest lesson is coming from hormone therapy — the estrogen blocker I’m on because the cancer cells found in my right breast had estrogen receptors. As I understand it, estrogen was (and potentially continues to be) fuel for cancer growth in my system. It seems to me now that estrogen is like an engine, a driving force. With levels depleted (the desired effect of the therapy), I’m tired, have trouble focusing, feel weak, and rapidly gain weight. Fine, but more challenging than these is inexplicable sadness, drama, and irritability.
Is the first thing you do in the morning to start listening to the mind’s endless commentary? That’s been my experience and now more than ever. It continues all day unless I shift gears in a way and practise listening to Life instead. Here’s what that looks like.
Freeing the mind: you are not your thoughts; you’re not even thinking them.
After 13 years of meditation and mindful living, I’m pretty familiar with my mind and its tricks to get me stressed out, irritated, or sad. So, for the most part, life unfolds for me on an even keel. Even extreme challenges can be met with calm and kindness, with equanimity. I’ve found mental hardship like these mood swings much harder to cope with than bodily ones, but thankfully I have the training to practise, instead of suffer, with them. To watch what the mind is doing rather than to be caught up in it. When a story has me swirling in a vortex of thoughts, I can let go of that eddy, relax into the river, and float freely. But gosh, the mind is sneaky and sticky, it’s very compelling.
Do you remember the scene in the movie, Contact, when Jodie Foster's character is in the alien machine and her seat is shaking crazily because it's not part of the original design? When the chair finally breaks apart, she is left to peacefully float for the rest of her journey. The agitated thinking mind is like being in that chair. Having the skill to bust up or step out of a vortex of thought uncovers what Tara Brach calls “great and natural peace.”
To varying degrees we live in those eddies of thought. We make a home there called “I, me, and mine.” The Buddha referred to this activity as house-building. The mind is constantly building, maintaining, and renovating this house. (Incidentally, according to dream interpretation, when we dream about houses, those dreams are about ourselves.) This house is a convincing sense of reified self that has endless stories about what has happened, is happening, or might happen and projects those stories onto here and now. It is extremely helpful to know that you are not thinking these thoughts. They are an automatic function of the brain not so different from the beats of the heart or pumping of the lungs. Thoughts happen on an impersonal stage and only proliferate when they have an audience, as in you or me. Nearly everyone’s mind is a non-stop chatterbox. Like maybe not the case for modern day sages like Pema Chödrön, Sadguru, or Eckhart Tolle, but we usually listen blindly to this chatter, believe it, and speak and act based on it. I even catch my mind having ridiculous debates with itself. Here’s a radical suggestion: while the mind can be applied effectively in learning, parenting, creating, and so much more, most of its restless, aimless, non-stop activity is unnecessary. It’s a huge relief to let go of that chatter — like unclenching a fist that has been trying to grasp the river. Whereas rumination and worry, commentary and judgement, create tension in the mind and body and shut down the compassionate heart.
Freeing the heart: “remain focused internally, or externally, or both internally and externally.”
Upon his final awakening, the Buddha declared the ridgepole broken; the house would be built no more. There was no longer a distinction between internal and external, self and other. He realized the actuality and benevolence of a free mind that was vast and boundlessness. In this beingness there is nowhere for the arrows of pain and suffering to land. Some arrows are shot at us and some we shoot at ourselves. In the legend, when these arrows were shot at the Buddha, they became flowers. They landed in a heart-mind space where, not only was there was nothing to strike, there was the power to transform pain and suffering.
To explore what is internal and external and what, if anything, divides them is a foundational Buddhist practice of mindfulness. It is an exercise in dismantling the house. Mindful observation can show us that, on several levels, what is happening in one’s body, heart, and mind is not different from what is happening in the surrounding environment and in others. An analogy in nature is the relationship between the monarch butterfly and milkweed. The monarch caterpillar’s purpose is to eat the leaves of the milkweed plant until it is ready to make a cocoon somewhere. That cocoon shimmers for a time like an emerald further bejewelled with gold. The monarch butterfly emerges from the cocoon in the north to then fly far south — to Mexico! Laying eggs there, it will set off a series of generations of monarchs that return north, in relay fashion, to where the final butterfly lays eggs again among the milkweed plants for the cycles to repeat. But where does this fantastic journey begin and where does it end? Where does the milkweed end and the butterfly begin?
You know the way physicists zoom in on atoms or zoom out to to the stars so that our human level of experience becomes immaterial? If we look closely at the butterfly or caterpillar or milkweed (or zoom out to view the whole journey), the cycles lose their distinction as discreet beings or events. Those become concepts we use to describe the illusory flow of coterminous happenings. Where, for example, we find that the butterfly wing is actually a collection of tiny scales in the way a bird’s wing is made up of feathers. Or that in the cocoon the caterpillar becomes genetic soup that is also the butterfly. If we could zoom in on the cells and atoms that make up our bodies and their environments or zoom out to the genetic history of all humanity (or all of life), then internal or external — self or other, us and them — lose their distinctions. Sagan’s novel explores this, too. In it, all of humanity is delivered an extraterrestrial message and nationality and personal interest become impediments to receiving the message and fulfilling the directions. Ultimately, the story unfolds questions of the heart. What is God? What is love? The oft-quoted last line of the book reads, “For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.”
When my mood swings are at their strongest, I’m in that eddy or dark house. It’s confusing, self-referencing, and agitated. Every spiritual tradition has descriptions of suffering in this way — the dark night of the soul — and offers practices to let go into experience that is lighter and brighter, more vivid and clear. This week, I’ve been using the phrase, “what is the state of my mind right now?” from a koan meditation by John Tarrant. For me, just asking that question breaks up the swirling waters so they become still. I can laugh that I was caught up in that unnecessary stuff again. I’m in a heart space where there is nowhere for the arrows to land.
The work of getting free: stop chasing rainbows.
Another helpful analogy is a rainbow. We all know it appears as something real in the sky and that it constantly moves away from you as you chase it. The rainbow is another series of coterminous events we make into a concept. That colourful arc in the sky doesn’t actually exist. It is merely light traveling on a trajectory, through a rain drop, to bounce off the retina in your eyes. By this magic show, each of us sees a different rainbow, our own projection of light’s spectrum. That’s why we never catch it.
In a way, how each of us sees the world is a magic show projected by our own minds. Right now, the mind is creating an inward and outward experience from what you see, hear, taste, smell, touch, and think. Not to say that the people around us are holograms, no. But our experience of them is limited by the mind’s perceptions, stories, prejudices, biases, and commentary. Leave the mind activity aside to see people and the moment unfold their own truth. Remember, from the Tao, that the softest thing can overcome the hardest thing? Life has a deeper wisdom that will guide one who has an open heart whereas the mind is likely to set up limits and boundaries. It will interfere — with its projections and with a myriad of voices accumulated in a lifetime of conditioning. My mood swings are made up of these projections, voices, and conditioning and my mind will get busy being hurt by and in turn flinging arrows. It is so helpful to see that the sadness, drama, and irritability are constructions and not reality. I don’t have to believe them. Or even listen to them. In Sagan’s novel, Ellie, the main character, has built a large part of her life around hating her stepfather for replacing her father and resenting her mother for marrying him. In the end, she learns she had it backwards. It is a fantastic twist and also a great example of how we never know the whole story despite our minds’ convincing pictures.
So far, for me, I’m grateful to have these mood swings to practice opening the heart-mind where arrows can become flowers. This is a brief dance of light, after all. Don’t take up residence in those eddies. Don’t try to hold the river. Just stop, let go, and float free.
These things show up in my art, too! Spiritual Warrior, 2015, collage, 36x24”
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A recent docuseries, Our Universe, explores the commonality of life and the first episode actually zooms in/out on the smallest and the most immense aspects of life. Interestingly — small or big, near or far, now or then — these concepts also lose their distinctions in talking about photons of light and the story of the universe. We lose the distinction between, not just internal and external, but also personal and universal. The movie and novel, Contact, explore these shifts in perspective as well.
