Over the past few weeks, I’ve been training Beefy to ‘heel’. (Beefy is my 5-year-old Australian Cattle Dog). He was a massive leash-tugger when I first adopted him, but he’s been eager to learn so he’s fallen into step rather quickly. Still though, he can periodically get on what I call a ‘Sniff Crusade’ where his nose seems to lead him endlessly down an aromatic roller coaster, increasing in speed and want-intensity as he goes, until he’s finally fiending for scents in such a way that it seems he might combust (I’m exaggerating, but hopefully you get the picture). A scent binge. Almost by definition. While this is no doubt par for the course with many dogs, what interests me about it is how similar this relationship feels to my experience of my own mind.
Distilled, the practice of Mindfulness Meditation is the cultivation of a relationship between two fundamental parts of ourselves — Awareness and Attention. As we sit still, we train our Attention on an object (object being something like the breath or mantra or sound, anything we place our Attention on and continually bring it back to). When our Attention wanders, we gently bring it back to that object. The instruction is simple and the task of shifting our Attention is something we all do often throughout the day. So why does the practice feel so impossible? Well, I’d argue it’s because of our relationship to it.
Like a dog, our mind has its own nature. It does what it was created to do — think. It discerns, remembers, interprets, imagines… — and like a dog, it can ultimately only be what it is. So when most people start practicing, they want their mind to be ‘calm’. And if it isn’t that, they think they either can’t meditate or are doing it wrong. Not the case. Your mind is active naturally, and that’s a good thing. And likely for your own good. But, like a dog, it needs consistent reinforcement of its relationship to you, or at least the relationship you want to have with it. Again, this relationship I’m speaking of is between your Awareness (the part of you that knows you are reading this right now) and your Attention (the part of your mind that you keep guiding back to reading this blog post after you get distracted). Believe it or not, this relationship is responsible for creating much of your sense of well-being and your sense of feeling like a terrible meditator.
We wouldn’t expect a dog to stop sniffing around for potential food or animal litterings when we’re out on a walk. Why do we expect our mind to stop thinking, perceiving, feeling, conceptualizing when that is exactly what it was meant to do (and what got you to this moment, here, able to read these randomly arranged letters and words I’ve worked so hard to write)? So just like when you come home from work and your dog jumps all over you in an abundance of joy, you might sit down to meditate or relax on your couch and find your mind activated in an abundance of thoughts. Do you get mad at your dog for greeting you in that way? Sometimes, yes. Is it your dog’s fault? No. Can you train him to behave differently? Yes. Somewhat the same with your mind. You can’t blame your mind for racing when it does. (Well, actually you can and most likely do, which is why I’m writing this post). In this example, your mind is just doing what it should. If it is indeed racing, then it’s most likely dealing with something of which you may be unaware, signaling to you some deeper emotional unrest. But your mind is not doing something wrong by being overactive. It isn’t flawed. And neither are you. Also, I’m not saying you have to resign yourself to having an overactive mind, either. ‘So what do I do?’ you may be asking. Well, I say grab the leash of meditation and take it for a stroll.While training a dog can certainly be different than training the mind, we are going to look at ways in which it is similar. With Beefy, I allow his odoriferous tirade at the beginning of walks until he’s gotten most of his bathroom breaks out of his system. After that, I patiently reign him in creating a framework for him to focus. I give him a job, so to speak, of ‘heeling’. Otherwise, he’ll binge again and again on the canine perfume wafting from every bush, lawn, or hydrant. When I give him his job, we end up walking side by side, his paws tat-tat-tatting to the slow, bass-beat rhythm of my footsteps until we eventually settle into a calm harmonious stride together. Once that occurs, he’s more even-minded overall; he’s less reactive to oncoming dogs and various stimuli, noticing distractions but taking most things in stride.
After a few weeks of having done this, he habitually begins to prefer the calmer more synchronous walk and my maintenance of him becomes less work. Personally, I think it’s a bodily reaction. His nervous system seeks habit, calm, and predictability and he’s found it in this positional relationship with me. This is not much different than what happens to your mind during your sitting practice — your mind begins to prefer the calmer state, the engagement of your parasympathetic nervous system, and it begins to form a habit of trying to find its way there. That sounds medical and scientific. You don’t care why or what happens, you just want to know how to do it. (Which I’m glad about because we only know so much about the how and what).
As we sit, as beginners or advanced practitioners, we quickly begin to differentiate our Awareness from our Attention. We become Aware when our Attention is focused on something (the object — breath, mantra, etc…) and when it’s not (distracted). When we find it distracted, we bring it back to that object. Over and over again. That’s it. You observe your Attention as it hunts for new stimuli — thoughts, sounds, sensations, emotions… When asked, we all usually describe the experience of our minds as scattered, busy, restless, crazy or however you perceive the goings on in there. And, often we frame that distracted experience as what is keeping us from being ‘able’ to meditate. Rest assured, this is not what’s keeping you from being ‘able’ to meditate. That is the meditation. It’s the point.
It can feel disconcerting at first like, something like a new dog owner might feel when he’s overwhelmed by the exorbitant energy of his new pup. ‘How do I calm it down?’ he might think. This is the question everyone wants to know. Well, here’s the good news and the bad news all at once. By observing your mind, you just did what you can do. That’s it.
The calming of the mind is what happens as a result of focusing. Beefy and I, you, or any meditator are alike in this way — we need to give it a job to do. That’s why reading or coloring tend to calm us down. It’s in the doing, the focusing, that our mind settles. We don’t go into meditation trying to calm ourselves. That can’t be the ‘doing’. We go into meditation with the intention of focusing our minds. Calm arises as a result of that.
Here’s another misconception about meditation practice. Whether or not you can keep your Attention on the object (breath, mantra, etc… ) for a long period of time does not dictate the likeliness of you calming your mind. Whether you have your Attention on your breath 20 times in ten minutes or 0 times in twenty minutes, you are still practicing and benefitting. Here’s the kicker… both of the aforementioned practice stats (20 or 0) can be described as equivalent to one another.You may even feel like you were distracted the entire time you sat in meditation, that it felt like absolute insanity in there. But when you stop, open your eyes, and re-orient yourself to the outside world, that is when you will notice the effects of what you just did while meditating. That is when you might feel some calm. Like Mr. Miyagi intimated in Karate Kid… polish over hear, shine over there. Meditate now, feel calm after.
Besides learning to participate in the emotional regulation of Beefy or my mind, there’s another important piece to this puzzle. Having Beefy as a pet exemplifies a type of relationship we need to have with our own minds.
When I walk Beefy, I tune into him and I’m Aware of where his Attention is leading him. This is part and parcel of having a dog (in my mind). He’s smells something, he spots an animal, he seems like he’s going to go to the bathroom. I keep an eye on him or sense him through the tension in the leash, almost at all times. In part, I do this to protect him from eating a rock or running into the street or an oncoming unknown dog, but I also do it more selfishly. I simply like staying connected to him. It’s part of the pleasure of having a dog. I get to sense what he senses, experience his change in focus from moment to moment and feel a small portion of what it’s like to be him. Empathy, I suppose you could call it. I start to feel — yes, that squirrel is exciting and inviting, yes, that noise is odd and loud, and yes, there are so many other smells and sights that it’s overwhelming! (I’m hoping dog owners know what I’m talking about. Maybe some of you non-dog owners get the picture too.) The value of this is that it changes the tone of my corrections of his unwanted behavior. Beefy is rarely doing anything to subvert my power over him or get under my skin, he’s usually just being himself, following urges and instincts. Sometimes, now that we’re bonded, he even looks to me for help in regulating himself. He doesn’t know when to stop eating or chasing or barking sometimes. He doesn’t know whether to pick up that strange object on the ground or if that stranger is a friend or foe.
One night Beefy drank too much water after our final walk at around 9pm. In the middle of the night he came over to the side of my bed (he doesn’t sleep in my bed with me) and he sat there staring at me, his tail wagging nervously. When I opened my eyes and realized, I followed him to his bed and realized what he was trying to tell me. He’d wet it. The reason why he’d come to the side of my bed was to ask me what to do and how he should feel about it.
So how should I have react to that? That wholly depends on my relationship to him and his mishap. Obviously, you might be saying to yourself. But what I’m suggesting is that you might want to ask yourself the same question when your mind wakes you in the middle of the night with something unexpected and potentially unwanted or frustrating. Your relationship to your mind’s ‘doings’ is important. Not because you’re trying to get it to behave, like Beefy, in some subserviant way, but because it is another factor in your sense of well-being we’re all trying to get out of meditation.
You might find after you sit for a while you have a keener sense of what your mind is doing. Instead of thinking, ‘Oh, I was distracted,’ you may start to notice it more subtlety — ‘I was obsessing, ruminating, worrying, fantasizing…’. Sitting and trying to meditate with these feelings can at the least be frustrating. But sometimes those feelings come up when we’re not meditating and we don’t want them to — we’re afraid them, it’s not good timing, it’s embarrassing… By practicing your relationship to these unwanted thoughts, feelings and states when you’re meditating, you can begin to feel less threatened by (and less a victim of) your own mind. You can learn to accept what is happening and maybe find ease with it.
Perhaps we’ve gone too far for this blog post. Let’s get back to the dog, you may be thinking.
These days I can get Beefy to heel pretty easily. Together, we make him the sweet, loving, well-adjusted dog that he is. In time, this easy state of being will become such a habit for him, he may not need me in the same way. The same thing will happen with if you practice Meditation. Your Awareness and your Attention will exist side by side with ease and synchronicity and that will give you a sense of well-being.
What I’m talking about here takes time. It’s something that you work for years to habituate. And as you get better it also gets harder. It takes regular practice and patience. And the gauge of whether or not it’s benefitting you are found in the relationships and experiences in your life off the meditation cushion, not in the achieving or not achieving on the cushion.
So the next time you come home from a long day and you feel your mind activated, bouncing all over the place, grab the the leash of meditation and take the dog of your mind for a walk. Do it on the regular. Otherwise, you can’t complain when you come home after not having done it for days to find it’s grown restless and chewed all of your inner furniture.
