Coming Home to Loving Awareness - Part 2
Mindfulness is a training in seeing clearly. It’s a training in cultivating the genuine causes for happiness, inner peace, and freedom from suffering. When we notice particular memories or thought patterns showing up, again and again, that’s usually a sign that this is something we need to work on in therapy. This is just one way in which mindfulness meditation and psychotherapy support one another.
From a space of mental balance, inner peace, and self-worth we can then enter into healthy relationships with other people, rather than fall into codependency or trauma coupling. True intimacy is built upon a foundation of two individuals coming together from a place of authentic autonomy and healthy self-worth.
In my own experience, therapy has been immensely helpful and continues to play an important role in my own evolution. I also cannot imagine traversing a path towards wholeness without the practices of mindfulness meditation. In order to discover that which we are seeking, we must first become clear about the causes for genuine happiness.
We need to train our minds to see clearly and to cultivate the essential qualities of the heart-mind: loving-kindness, compassion, appreciative joy, and equanimity. Ultimately, heartfulness is not separate from mindfulness.
Most people find it difficult to confess their insecurities in large part because the mind mistakenly identifies with these thoughts, feelings, and actions to be permanent, fixed, and a structural part of the ego itself. While we absolutely all have patterns, we’re all born with a certain temperament and specific genes to a particular set of parents in a given environment, all of the things that make up the entity called a self are far more fluid than we imagine.
We are not our insecurities. We are not our beliefs. We are not what happened to us in the past.
Clinging to these attachments is part of the illusion of the self. This is where it’s important to draw a distinction between the vocabulary of psychotherapy and of Buddhism.
From a psychotherapeutic perspective, the ego is wounded and needs to heal. Childhood issues, past traumas: our conditioning continues to have a profound impact on the way that we relate to other people, on the ways that we do, or do not know how to receive and offer love.
As Carl Jung said: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
On a relative level, our sense of self needs to heal. This is absolutely true. This is why psychotherapy is so important. I’ve come to appreciate this point very much through my own work with my therapist.
We don’t need a path; we need paths that complement one another and that we’re able to integrate.
To the extent that we can not integrate them, the mind can notice this tension and learn to become more comfortable with paradox.
The teachings of Buddhism and mindfulness meditation allow us to see through the illusions of the self and to cultivate the capacity for genuine happiness from within. We see that the self is a necessary illusion to live in the world, but it is an illusion nonetheless. We also see how the movements of the ego--this self--is constantly creating our suffering and we learn how to transform that suffering into genuine well being for ourselves and others.
Thus, from a Buddhist perspective, there is a deeper part of our Being that was never broken, doesn’t have to be fixed, and is perfect just as it is.
This is the paradox: we are always being and always becoming. As Zen master Suzuki Roshi said: “You’re perfect as you already are, and...there’s always room for improvement.”
On a deeper level of consciousness, when we allow the movements of the mind to become still, the thoughts, feelings, and images circulating around this construction of a self, these concepts of “I,” “me,” “mine,” we can touch a profound place of stillness: we can abide in awareness as awareness.
Contemplatives from various traditions have understood this. In one of my favorite Upanishads it says:
“There is something beyond the mind
That abides in silence within the mind
It is the Supreme Mystery beyond Thought
Rest your Mind and Spirit upon That
And nothing else.”
Awareness is the Supreme Mystery that lies beyond the mind--the ego. One flavor of this Awareness is Loving Awareness.
Loving awareness is our true nature, our greatest refuge. It’s one face of this indescribable mystery of Being. Meditation is a training in returning to this Source, again and again. As we return to rest in awareness, again and again, with more consistency and clarity, layers of baggage we drop away. We see that we don’t need to cling to our suffering any longer; it’s not really who we are anyway.
Just as there’s a dropping down into this mystery there’s a simultaneous movement as well: the opening of the heart.
Love is the felt experience of opening one’s heart not only to others but to ourselves, to the universe, to The Great Light of Consciousness that shines through each and every one of us. We become conscious of the choices that we face anew in each moment: do I want to continue living my life from a place of fear, with my heart closed, shrouded in shame, clinging to a past that no longer serves me?Or today will I make a different choice: to listen to my heart, to heal, to trust that the universe has given me all of the lessons I have had to awaken for the benefit of myself and for all beings everywhere, without exception?
A more fulfilling spiritual journey is not about climbing a mountain to escape or seeking refuge in a concept like heaven, where things aren’t messy and you’ll never experience pain. As Rumi said: “the cure is in the pain.” Suffering so often comes through our relationships with others. We are wounded by the very people we love the most, and who love us; out of our own ignorance, pain, and confusion, we hurt others.
To see this clearly is to forgive oneself and all beings. To forgive oneself and all beings is to love oneself and all beings. The messy world of relationships is how we awaken.