The Trauma of Everyday Life

opening of the internal landscape. They stop being obstacles when we learn to “hold” them in meditative awareness.
    The most esoteric aspect of the Four Foundations of Mindfulness has to do with what is called mindfulness of mind. It does not really mean observation of individual thoughts or emotions—this is covered in the fourth foundation under the rubric of mindfulness of mental objects. It has more to do with the ability of the mind to know itself knowing, if that makes any sense. In the beginning steps of this foundation, one learns simply to know, for example, what a mind filled with fear or a mind immersed in joy feels like. One is directed not so much toward the pleasantness or unpleasantness of the feeling, or even toward the texture of the emotion, as toward the shape or sensation or experience of the mind colored by a particular feeling. When the emotions are strong, it is not hard to shift perspective and feel how intensely they color the mind, especially if one is sitting in meditation all day deliberately doing nothing. But as the emotions calm down, it is still possible to observe the mind with the mind. The mind that knows knows itself knowing. It is quite strange, but at the same time it feels entirely natural. In some Tibetan Buddhist traditions, to make it more accessible, this is called mindfulness of space instead of mindfulness of mind. It is compared to the blue sky that appears when the clouds of grief and fear and vanity are burned off by the sun of mindful awareness. Empty, luminous, and knowing, it is said, the mind knows itself as it really is.
    I can give a personal example of how this works. When I went to take my walk after my breakfast of the missing toast, I was still aware of a lurking dissatisfaction. I was ashamed, I realized, of my failure to be mindful in the morning. My feeling reminded me of how a visiting gallery dealer must have felt when he backed up and squatted down to take a photo of one of my wife’s sculptures and sat on a fragile piece of porcelain he had not noticed and shattered it. The sound of the broken porcelain resounded through the gallery and he looked as if he might faint. I saw him berate himself and I could immediately relate to how he was feeling. “I can’t believe I did that!” he must have scolded himself.
    On my walk after breakfast I had the definite sensation of the trauma of the morning having not completely disappeared. My meditation did not seem to be releasing me the way I thought it should. My mind was more concentrated, as the Buddha wished it to be, but my thoughts were still there, as I did not. I often think that I shouldn’t be thinking when on retreat but thinking is what my mind does, so I have to find a way to not turn it into a problem. As a result, I find myself watching my mind thinking about thinking, or thinking about not thinking, and I try not to think I am just wasting my time. The teachings on the Four Foundations of Mindfulness have helped me make room for this in my meditation.
    That morning, my thoughts were particularly pronounced. I was walking. Not the ultra-slow, lifting/moving/placing, mindful walking I had been taught to do between sitting meditation periods, but a more normal stroll. I was taking a walk after breakfast on an old country road that looped around the outskirts of the retreat center. It was a ramshackle road but not without charm; full of trees, and woodland birds that skittered alongside as I walked, making me feel like Snow White or one of her seven dwarfs.
    A couple of things were in my mind as I walked. The morning’s lapse of mindfulness. My feelings of shame. The sense of my life disappearing out from under me. And the Buddha’s teachings of no-self. It’s hard to be on a Buddhist retreat without thinking about no-self. Every lecture insists on it. What is the self, we are constantly asked to consider. And Buddhist sutras, like the famous Diamond Sutra, are always ready with a metaphor or two. The self is but “a star at dawn, a bubble in a stream, a flash of lightning in a summer cloud, a flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream,” they suggest.
    “Those are a lot of things for a no-self to be,” I thought to myself as I strode along, eyeing the breaking of the late-autumn day, my self-preoccupation tugging at my mind. Did I understand it? I wasn’t so sure. No-self must mean inner peace, the place beyond thought, the reservoir of contentment I sometimes found when I successfully