In Pursuit of Happiness

Note: This was written a year ago for a spa industry magazine. I don't think it ever got published.

Life can be experienced as a meditation. Put another way, life can be experienced completely free of stress. These sound like bold and unreasonable statements, yet they represent the most fundamental and truest state of being human. It’s what we know as the experience of being happy. We don’t have to become “enlightened” to understand this, but it does mean that we have to give it some attention, should this way of experiencing life interests us.

Our everyday existence is fraught with things that help us create stress, and therein lies the key: we alone create stress. We can casually watch a situation unfold before us, while the person next to us becomes completely panicked over it. For the same event, one person creates stress where the other does not. The experience of stress is completely optional. Yet it’s not always clear that this is so, that other choices can be made. It’s here that the practice of meditation is useful.

Meditation is simple. When distilled from its many definitions, meditation is nothing more than paying exquisite attention to simple things. We can give that kind of attention to something familiar to us, like our breath. By doing that, we create a way of watching how our mind operates, watching how it creates a myriad of things, including stress. As long as we are alive, we have our breathing. If we can find even a single breath to give our attention to, we have a meditation.

But as a start, it’s useful to consider at least a couple breaths at one sitting. That gives us the time to notice things. In trying to give our attention to the breath, we’re going to become aware of…our thinking! Thinking seems to insert itself despite our intention to just pay attention to the breath. The power of meditation is that it provides us with a contrast: we begin to see not only how pervasive our “day-to-day mind” is, but how that compares to the experience of “silence” as we singularly hold our breath to be the most important thing on our mind. Our mind becomes still, but our thinking doesn’t go away; we’re simply not distracted by that thinking.

The stillness allows us to see how our distracting thoughts lead to feelings and emotions, how they in turn connect to memories, how the ingredients mix together to form a story, how the story starts to drive our reactions. Observing ourselves in the act of becoming distracted, we can see exactly how and what we create through our own story-making. Then we notice: we can actually choose to be distracted by our thinking or not.

We become increasingly familiar with the story/stress creation to where we can interrupt the process at any point simply by finding our attention with the breath. We notice that the process can be interrupted sooner, that takes less and less effort to do so. There comes a recognition that we can return to that state of calm and being at peace that is meditation in a breath-moment. The life experience is being transformed.

Meditation practice is much like fitness training: just as no single trip to the gym makes us stronger and aerobically fit, no single meditation will make our lives stress free. Any form of training takes time. More importantly, our new fitness follows us out into life; it doesn’t remain in the weight room or on the treadmill. Our meditation training allows us to know immediately when we’re being distracted; it also allows us to know that sense of calm for longer periods of time. As this “meditation fitness” follows us out into our lives it begins to influence not just ourselves, but others as well.

Those who would annoy and irritate us cannot do so because that story is no longer valid. Confrontations defuse themselves when we decide not to participate on those terms. People notice our calm and are in turn calmed by it. Facing challenges in an authentically stress-free way, we become a model of behavior that others would wish for themselves. Our words carry farther and deeper because people listen to a voice that comes from a truthful center. By crafting a life experienced as a meditation, we craft a different and hopefully better world to live in.

Mythologist Joseph Campbell wrote: "Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy." That is the experience of happiness: to see life as it is and be genuinely happy, no matter what life presents to us. Stress dissolves away, since it is an uninteresting story to start with. Through meditation, this spiritual happiness is ours to know, ours to enjoy, ours to share, and is only a breath away.


© Richard Aquino, 2008

Just a Breath Away

Note: Originally written as a sidebar for an upcoming magazine article on meditation.

One way to bring mindfulness into our living is to bring attention to very simple things. Breathing is something we do all the time and because of that, something we tend to take for granted.

Try this: imagine taking in your next breath as if you were taking a sip of cool water. That's something that you have done hundreds of times! As you take that sip, you can feel that coolness enter into your mouth. You can follow that coolness down your throat and all the way into your belly.

Now “drink in your breath” in the very same way. Follow the breath's coolness as it enters the body through the nostrils, down your throat and past your lungs. Instead of catching the breath in your chest (as we are apt to do), follow that coolness all the way down, as you experience that drink into your belly. We create a sense of mindfulness as we experience very ordinary things in unique and different ways. As we take the time to perform this very simple act, our ability to be mindful lingers more and more.

The beauty is that we are never without a breath: mindfulness is always just a breath away.

© 2007 Richard Aquino