I recently enjoyed an article in Psyche Magazine: Equanimity is not stillness – it is a mobility of the mind.
In my early experience of meditation I was looking for some special state of mind, and from time to time I had really nourishing experiences. Different meditation traditions have concepts such as enlightenment, nirvana, transcendence or salvation, which can easily be interpreted as special states of mind. However, whenever I have had some form of “special state” it was fleeting and difficult to recreate. I remember coming back from my first silent meditation retreat incredibly relaxed, only to find that the feeling wore off as i got back into daily life. What are sometimes called “peak experiences” are useful and helpful, but they are only part of the story – we have troughs or valleys in among the peaks, and they are part of the landscape too. .
I now teach meditation as a process, and find it valuable to think in terms of process when we consider some of the concepts in meditation practice. So in the article above, equanimity is described as an active expansion of awareness and a process of exploration and evaluation. If we look at some of the challenging world affairs such as climate change and war, then equanimity is not detached and indifferent; rather equanimity explores all immediately relevant aspects, balancing them, taking into account what can be done from an individual perspective, including the potential to take meaningful and effective action or to accept our inability to act.
After reading the article, I wondered about applying the process perspective to other aspects of mindfulness. Rumination or worrying, for example, are natural processes, where the mind automatically applies its defence mechanisms to protect us. We often talk about mindfulness attitudes such as patience; patience viewed as a process is quite different from a stoical putting up with a situation, rather it is an active attempt to understand the situation and not act in haste. Beginner’s mind, another mindfulness attitude, is something we can cultivate; we can approach familiar situations as if they are new to us, exploring them more widely than we usually do, often noticing things we routinely miss.
Considering our moods as processes, and beginning to realise that we can modify those processes is a key motivation for mindfulness practice. Which is why in a typical mindfulness meditation, we anchor our attention on something such as the breath, then when we notice that our attention has drifted we bring it back in a gentle and kindly way to the anchor. In this way, our habitual thinking comes to the surface, and we interrupt it, and our awareness of the process of thinking is changed a little.
So, when you feel stuck, maybe reflecting on that stuckness as part of a process may be helpful.
