Recognizing the Unreality of Our Worries
During a meditation recently, I was following my inhale and my exhale. Many upsetting thoughts were swirling in my head, mostly worries and fears about the current political situation and warming temperatures, sadness about my beloved estranged child, fear about potential cancer recurrence, and other random scary thoughts.
The basic practice of samatha (stopping) is learning to come back to the breath and the body, noticing when our minds get spinning and finding our way back over and over again to this moment. Thich Nhat Hanh’s poem Froglessness describes this practice beautifully:
The first fruition of the practice is the attainment of froglessness.
When a frog is put on the center of a plate, she will jump out of the plate after just a few seconds.
If you put the frog back again on the center of the plate, she will again jump out.
You have so many plans. There is something you want to become. Therefore you always want to make a leap, a leap forward.
It is difficult to keep the frog still on the center of the plate. You and I both have Buddha Nature in us. This is encouraging, but you and I both have Frog Nature in us.
That is why the first attainment of the practice-- froglessness is its name.
During my sitting meditation, something inside me said that turning my attention to the breath when my thoughts get hot is just an easy way for me to escape from all the “real” difficulties in life and in the world.
As this belief took root, I could feel the edges of despair moving closer. If only suffering is real, and the present moment is only an escape from that reality, then the world is a very dark and dangerous place from which there is no way out. Luckily, before I was overwhelmed with fear, I was able to remember the question: Are you sure? Are thoughts and worries really more true than the body and the breath?
The answer from within me brought me a deeper breath and more ease: my breathing body in the present moment is as real as anything can be. My thoughts and worries are simply projections of my imagination into the future and ruminations and rehashing of past events. Although these thoughts can be as compelling as a scary or dramatic film, they are not reality. Turning toward my breathing and dwelling in the present moment is coming back into reality, not escaping from it.
Reframing this wrong view shifted something inside of me, and I felt much more free. I confirmed through my attention to each step and each breath, that this is indeed reality.
When I first encountered Thich Nhat Hanh’s book, The Miracle of Mindfulness, I was struck by this teaching:
“If while washing dishes, we think only of the cup of tea that awaits us, thus hurrying to get the dishes out of the way as if they were a nuisance, then we are not "washing the dishes to wash the dishes." What's more, we are not alive during the time we are washing the dishes. In fact we are completely incapable of realizing the miracle of life while standing at the sink. If we can't wash the dishes, the chances are we won't be able to drink our tea either. While drinking the cup of tea, we will only be thinking of other things, barely aware of the cup in our hands. Thus we are sucked away into the future -and we are incapable of actually living one minute of life.”
Our future and past oriented thoughts, as upsetting as they may feel, are not true reality. In fact, they prevent us from experiencing reality with all of its wondrous beauty and difficult challenges – what the Buddha called the 10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows. Reality can only be found right now in your next breath and in the feeling of your body in space as you read these words. Can you feel that?
I hope that reminder gives you a deeper breath and a little more ease during these days when it’s so easy to get carried away by thoughts and worries about the future.
with love,
annie.