I was listening to a couple of talks by Gil Fronsdal this week. He’s a teacher and practitioner of insight meditation, also called Vipassana. His talks are extremely insightful and I thought I’d share some of my own thoughts after listening to a few of his talks.

The two talks that I listened to basically amounted to mantras that we can include in our daily life to bring a greater sense of peace and equanimity into our lives.

It’s Ok

After listening to Gil talk about this, I realized what a powerful mantra this is. In his talk he brought up the example of a child scraping his/her knee. A parent doesn’t respond by saying ‘oh my gosh, your knee! You’ll never be able to play soccer again,’ or ‘Oh no, this could get infected and you could get very sick!’ The parent will typically respond with ‘It’s ok,’ which gives the child a sense of peace as well as a sense of connection and loving kindness from their parent. It doesn’t mean that the scrape isn’t painful or that tending to the wound won’t have some pain or unpleasantness, but it does bring a sense of openness where the child can begin to accept and just be with uncomfortable events.

I kind of smiled to myself when Gil used this over exaggeration of how a parent doesn’t respond to situations like the one described above. I think what he was trying to point out is that we need to be more mindful of or own responses to certain uncomfortable events because we typically have the tendency to kind of freak out on ourselves. If we can begin to tell ourselves that ‘it’s ok,’ we might find that it’s easier to accept and look at daily events that we categorize and label as unpleasant in a different light.

Today, I was able to use this mantra at work. I found myself getting overwhelmed and stressed at all the work I had to do and people I had to respond to…which is not an entirely unusual response I have. Immediately, I noticed how my body felt and the stress reaction I was having. I simply said to myself, ‘it’s ok.’ Amazingly, that’s all it took to ground myself. I realized it truly was ok and that I all I had to do was take one step at a time to accomplish the tasks I needed to complete.

Nothing Needs to Happen

This is an excellent mantra that I have begun to practice as well. It covers our constant wanting, doing, desires and expectations.

On its face, it might seem like this could promote some sort of laziness. ‘Oh, I can just sit here on the couch and do nothing…nothing needs to happen.’ That’s certainly an un-mindful approach in my opinion and is more of an avoidance strategy. There’s more to the mantra than that.

Like the mantra discussed above, ‘nothing needs to happen’ helps us to view a situation from a completely different perspective. By stating this phrase, you allow yourself to open up and just be with whatever situation you are in without any wanting or clinging to opinions about how you want something to be.

In doing this, we might find that something actually does happen and it’s far from what we expected. This could be good or bad. As an example, I have found myself caught up in thoughts about my blog and how regularly I should post and if people are reading it and on and on and on. Doing this mantra has helped me to take a different perspective on these thoughts. Why am I so concerned about this? Is there some fear there and if so, what is that fear? I’m examining this further while also trying not to get so caught up in my thoughts about what my progress should look like or how quick or slow it should happen. This letting go has actually brought a greater sense of peace into my life.

Hopefully these two simple, but powerful mantras will help you in your daily life as they’ve helped me.

Photo Credit: circulating

I just started a mindfulness based stress reduction program (MBSR). It’s a big name for what really amounts to being a class/program that teaches mindfulness meditation practices through formal meditation and yoga. Meditation is something that I’ve always been interested in and am just now beginning to practice formally on a daily basis.

I thought I’d share one of my experiences during the first class.

All of us are sitting in a large circle, on chairs, facing each other. We have just gone through formal introductions when our instructor informs us that we will begin our first mediation. We are told that we should remain quiet for the entire process and follow his guidance with an open mind.

He proceeds to walk around the room holding a small wooden bowl. As he walks around the room, he tells us to use our beginner’s mind and look at what is being put in our hand with ‘newness.’ To imagine that this is the first time we are seeing this object. To just look at it without trying to place any labels or thoughts on what it is.

As he approaches me, I open up my hand and with a small spoon he places three small, shriveled objects in my hand. Immediately, ‘raisin’ enters my head. I just observe this thought and let it pass. What is a raisin? Have I actually really looked at one and truly experienced it?

I slowly place the object between my thumb and index finger, picking it up. I look at it closely, noticing the peaks and valleys that make up its outer surface. It’s purple….or is it? I hold the object up to the light and notice that the colors change. I notice that in its thinnest areas, it is translucent. A color can’t really be assigned to it as it’s a multitude of different colors. Inspecting it closer I see the sugar granules on it, sparkling as the light hits them.

Next, we are told to bring the object to our ear. I roll it around between my thumb and index finger. It’s soft and sticky. I can hear a sort of crinkling noise as I roll it around. Bringing the object to my nose, I smell it. The fragrance goes up my nose and down to my throat. I sit with the fragrance without trying to assign a preference to it (e.g. this smells good, or this smells bad). I simply take it in.

The instructor tells us to bring the object to our mouth and place it on our lower lip. I feel the crevasses and stickiness of the object. Next, I place it on my upper lip and notice the slight variations in what it feels like. It’s at this time that I also become aware of more saliva being produced in my mouth.

I finally put the object into my mouth and slowly roll it around, noticing how it feels inside my mouth. I can sense it literally plumping up in my mouth as it mixes with my saliva. I place it between my back molars and slowly bite down, hearing the sound of my teeth going through it. I bite again, simply listening and tasting. Eventually the object starts dissolving and I swallow it, feeling it go down my throat. Being with it.

I look down at my hand. Two more to go! What will these taste like, sound like, feel like? I go through the entire process two more times with beginner’s mind, taking each one in and experiencing it as if it’s my first time experiencing it.

Lessons Learned

First, it’s amazing to discover the kind of satisfaction that one can attain from eating just one raisin.

The more basic lesson learned is one of mindfulness and how I tend to mindlessly eat in my every day life. I think about when I eat at my desk at work while I am still working. I think about eating entire meals and not truly tasting and experiencing them to their fullest extent. Think about how many times you’ve done this or ate a meal in front of the TV. It’s next to impossible to truly experience, taste and smell what we are eating when our mind is somewhere else.

On a deeper level, I felt a certain sense of connectedness, or wholeness from doing this exercise. Looking at the raisin and understanding the collective effort it took to get it in my hand, right here in this moment. The vine the grape grew on. The soil and water that fed it. The person who took care of it and picked it. The workers at the factory who took part in drying the grape to make it a raisin. The truck driver who transported the raisins. The stock person at the grocery store who put the box on the shelf and finally the instructor himself who purchased the raisins and brought them to this class and led us in this meditation.

We love to think of ourselves as completely separate from the whole…a certain duality or individualism. In reality, it is much more complex than that and much more beautiful.

When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world. – John Muir

Photo Credit: beta karel