One of our colleagues, Chris Germer, co-creator of the Mindful Self-Compassion class, said, “An unstable mind is like an unstable camera: we get a fuzzy picture.”
I’ve been feeling lately that my picture has been pretty fuzzy. There has been a lot of change in my life and in the lives of many I care about. And I am feeling, more and more, my concern about the state of our national conversation.
The thing is, I don’t always notice that my mind’s shaky and unstable. I tend to blame myself or blame others instead. To wish something hadn’t happened, or that something else had happened. As I’ve seen this pattern more clearly, I’ve resolved to emphasize mindfulness practices which support stabilizing the mind. I think it’s helping. I’ve been feeling a bit more steady and more trusting. Even as I do feel caution around not minimizing or losing track of difficult feelings – another tendency of mine that can lead to a fuzzy picture of how I am and what’s going on.
Anchoring Meditation – also called Attentional Focus Training – emphasizes a narrowly focused attention that helps to settle the mind. As you can experience by trying the anchoring practices on our website, the object of attention can be any present moment experience. Often sensations in the body are used. What you’re feeling in the physical body can only be happening now. Tuning into present moment experience pulls us out of past and future thinking which is often quite destabilizing to the mind.
When we gently hold focus on something like the feelings in our feet, or our hands, or the sensations of contact between the body and the earth, we’re supporting stability in attention which supports the mind in settling down. Tuning into the other senses, like hearing the sounds around us, or gazing softly at a scene in nature, can have much the same effect.
Or, my personal favorite, we can befriend our breathing. It’s right here in our bodies all the time ready for us to tune in. When I feel into the breathing I notice it tends to smooth out and deepen. I enjoy the feeling of rising and falling in the belly, and that usually invites a softening in the belly that helps.
But here’s a common problem: when we need help stabilizing the breath the most, it’s the hardest for us to do! The mind keeps being drawn back to worries, memories, troubling predictions, irritations, and…. you name it!
And so I’ve been returning to an old friend and it’s really helping. I’ve been practicing Breath Counting. The process of following the familiar directions to find my breath again in my belly; to feel the inhale and exhale; and to allow the breath to fall into a natural rhythm really helps. As I feel a little more settled I start quietly and softly counting each exhale: 1, 2, 3, …. Sometimes I get to 10 and then I return to 1. More often I get distracted somewhere along the line and I chuckle to myself that this practice really should be called “Returning to One” more than Breath Counting!
A neat thing I learned is that counting the breath as a meditation has a very long history. I’ve been studying a book from the 6th century by an early Chinese meditation master named Zhiyi (pronounced something like zhuh-r-yee) in which he details this practice and gives helpful tips around also paying attention to the quality of the breathing: letting it be smooth and natural. Deeply relaxed.
It strengthens my confidence knowing I’m practicing in a long, long line of meditation ancestors who, just like me, must’ve had pretty unstable minds sometimes!
Engaging with this practice again (and seeing a bit more clearly that while there are real problems out there, much of what’s bugging me stems more from the state of my own mind) has me deeply appreciating this poem by Lynn Ungar.
The Way It Is
by Lynn Ungar
One morning you might wake up
to realize that the knot in your stomach
had loosened itself and slipped away,
and that the pit of unfilled longing in your heart
had gradually, and without your really noticing,
been filled in – patched like a pothole, not quite
the same as it was, but good enough.
And in that moment it might occur to you
that your life, though not the way
you planned it, and maybe not even entirely
the way you wanted it, is nonetheless –
persistently, abundantly, miraculously –
exactly what it is.
Breath Counting has been helping me to stabilize my mind a bit lately. If the anchoring practices intrigue you, I hope you’ll give them a try. These days I feel like we need all the help we can get!
