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

Perfection Within the Imperfect

Asymmetry takes the eye off balance, even creating a sense of anxiety. The natural response is for the eye to resolve the imbalance or to discard it as utterly inconsequential. Yet asymmetry gives space for the unexpected to occur and for perspective to be altered. It allows revelation to transpire.

Asymmetry (Fukinsei) - not adhering to perfection or purposely breaking away from formed perfection

The story of Paul Potts (winner of the 2007 Britain's Got Talent competition) is well known to many Internet surfers by this time. A less-than-handsome, poorly dressed man with a reluctant smile, he was all but dismissed by the judges, especially for wanting to sing opera. No one could have been prepared for the first note he would sing. By his last note, Potts had stunned the judges and audience, disarming whatever expectation they might have had of him.

Had he dashing features, was well dressed and with impeccable manner & breeding, would Potts' talents been recognized in the same way?

Imperfection is what the uninformed eye observes and judges by. For me, “not adhering to perfection” implies giving appropriate time and space for perfection to express itself, as one would give to a butterfly to emerge from the caterpillar. It is to hold to a meditative patience and simply bear witness to what is transpiring.

“Purposely breaking away from formed perfection” allows me to appreciate things just as they are, letting perfection guide itself. Just because I have my own ideas about how things could be better doesn't mean I have to let them out of my mouth or act on them. Only when I can stay out of the way of things will the depths begin to be revealed to me.

Emily Dickinson suggests that ”the soul should always stand ajar” to leave ourselves available to the unexpected possibility. That can happen if I can let myself become comfortable with being off balance as my normal way of being. In interview, Potts would say that from that first audition he would discover that he really was somebody, that he was himself. That is the revealing of perfection.


© Richard Aquino, 2007

The art of Rodney Thompson can be see at his online gallery.

The Muse

Note: The following was extracted from a review written for an art history class years ago.

Reality resides not in the external form of things but in their innermost essence. This face entails the impossibility to express anything real while lingering on the surface of things.

- Constantin Brancusi

I viewed Constantin Brancusi's The Muse After 1918 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's Encounters with Modem Art: Works from the Rothschild Family Collection exhibition. It was the last of three such versions of The Muse created from polished bronze; the first was created in 1917, the second in 1918, with this final sculpture completed shortly after the second. These bronze pieces were preceded by the original work done in marble, finished in 1912.

On first impression, the personality I encountered in The Muse was one of indifference. The faceless being refused to betray an expression, refused to betray what was on her mind. The face stared blindly at (perhaps through) me. Her taunt lips served only to make me even more uncomfortable in her presence. I felt distrust in this cold, calculating, almost unkind being.

But a muse is a guiding spirit and a source of inspiration. Considering this, the persona of sculpture began to shift for me. Instead of indifference, the gaze of The Muse became one of wonder! Her forward lean indicated a keen interest. The tilt of her head spoke of a sense of curiosity (even amusement) in what she was beholding. Taunt lips transformed into a smile of understanding and perhaps compassion. What I mistook as eyeless I now knew to be wide-eyed, all seeing. Unlike her sculpture-ancestors, Brancusi's renditions of The Sleeping Muse, this muse is an alert observer! And I saw her figure as having a more kindly disposition. Is this because I had taken a more kindly interest in her?

Looking into that polished surface, I could see her mirroring the scene of the gallery space all that time, ultimately revealing the source of her inner energy for inspiration and awakening: it is life in all its forms. Her reflection embraced me, the gallery and all that could be captured by her presence. Though immobile, fixed upon her pedestal, the sculpture began to take a dynamic role, reflecting an ever-changing wisdom. Now it was as if The Muse was poised like a sage, reversing roles to challenge my understanding of wisdom and the understanding of others who would stand before her.

It's noted that Brancusi included in his studies not only the art of Southeast Asia and India, but also the teachings of the Tibetan Buddhist monk Jetsun Milarepa. One could guess that he was influenced by polished bronze statues of the Buddha which he had invariably encountered. The wisdom-pose struck by The Muse becomes reminiscent of seated statues of Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion. With these influences, it is likely that Brancusi was familiar with the idea of shunyata, that nothing can be seen as having an independent, long-lasting form.

Brancusi's simplicity no longer seems as a mere artistic technique, but as the only way he could achieve a true expression of nature. Like haiku poetry, his work functions not in relating a thought or story that occupies his mind, but in compelling the viewer to attempt to directly experience the sculptor's own insight.

The Muse has become a meditation that moves me to discover that source of inspiration, that essential Self that lies both within and without, the guiding spirit which is constantly redefining itself. She continually offers an invitation to share that understanding, which is Brancusi's.

© Richard Aquino, 2007