Mindfulness, Equanimity & Spaciousness

This month I attended a funeral for a family friend.  She was only 30 years-old, and it appears she may have died from a drug overdose.

Watching her mother sob heavily while kneeling in front of the urn that carried her daughter's ashes, I silently wondered, "how will this mother possibly be able to make space for this?"

Then, a moment later, I began to think about mindfulness.

In his book, Heal Thy Self, the Director of The UMASS Center for Mindfulness, Saki Santorelli reminds his reader in his chapter Quiet Mind, Open Heart that in many Asian languages that use characters for words, the word for "mindfulness" may be more accurately translated as: bringing the heart-mind to this moment.

He writes:

Sometimes people confuse mind in the word mindfulness as having to do with thinking about or confining attention to cognition, imagining that we are being asked to engage in some form of introspection, discursive self-analysis, or mental gymnastics. Simply put, mindfulness is bringing a fullness of attention to whatever is occurring, and attention is not the same as thinking...

The artist and calligrapher Kazuaki Tanahashi describes the Japaenese character for mindfulness as composed of two interactive figures. One represents mind, the other, heart. Heart and mind are not imagined as separate.

When I first began formal mindfulness practice--whether it be yoga (asana), sitting meditation or the body scan--I do not think my narrow view of mindfulness would have allowed me to have had a deeper understanding of what Mr. Santorelli was actually saying here. 

But now, many years later, watching a bereaved mother grieve at the funeral of her eldest daughter, my conceptualization of mindfulness has grown far more expansive. Now, I can appreciate the aspiration of the Buddha when he said:

Develop a mind so filled with love that it resembles space, which cannot be pointed, cannot be marred, cannot be ruined.

A mind (and heart) as vast as space...Could that be possible?

Because, sometimes, when I am flowing through a yoga sequence, or I open my eyes at then end of a 20 minute sitting meditation, I actually do feel more expansive- like my insides have somehow stretched wider during the practice so that I can, nearly literally, hold more.

Western Buddhist teacher and author Sharon Salzberg might say this is a gift of equanimity.

In a dharma talk called Equanimity and Faith given on January 13, 2010 at the Insight Meditation Society that is available on a Dharma Seed podcast, Ms. Salzberg talks at length about the relationship between mindfulness and equanimity, and equanimity and spaciousness.

She describes it this way:

Equanimity is known as the balance of mind...Equanimity is the voice of wisdom, it is the articulation of wisdom...I think of it as a kind of spaciousness. It is opening to something bigger than what we might find right in front of us...One of the ways of deepening equanimity is through mindfulness.

After listening to this talk (several times), I began to imagine a sort of algorithm:

mindfulness increases equanimity -----------equanimity increases spaciousness,

in the mind and the heart.

So when a big event occurs that may feel tragic or unpredictable, the mind and heart say to you, "I don't like  this. This is terrible!  And, I can still make room for it." 

It would seem, this organic process of making space for the undesirable is what allows us to adapt, shift and ultimately integrate during times of distress rather than fragment and decompensate.

I say organic, because I've been wondering lately about the relationship between the biological term called "allostasis," which is often described as maintaining stability through change (Bruce S. McEwen, Neurobiology of Aging, 2002), and the possible over-lap with mindfulness, equanimity and spaciousness.

The Merriam Webster dictionary defines allostasis as:

the process by which a state of internal, physiological equilibrium is maintained by an organism in response to actual or perceived environmental and psychological stressors.

So does that mean allostasis is to the body as equanimity is to the mind-heart?

Unitarian Universalist preacher and Maine Game Warden Chaplain Kate Braestrap suggests in her book Here if You Need Me, which is based on years of being the actual person who tells the family member that their daughter, spouse, parent has died in some god-awful tragedy, that we (human beings) already have the wisdom of how to do this; how to make space for the impossible.

She writes:

It doesn't matter how educated, moneyed, or smart you are: when your child's footprints end at the river's edge, when the one you love has gone into the woods with a bleak outlook and a loaded gun, when the chaplain is walking toward you with the bad news in her mouth, then only the cliches are true, and you will repeat them, unashamed. Your life, too, will swing suddenly and cruelly in a new direction with breathtaking speed, and if you are really wise - and it's surprising and wondrous, Brother, how many people have this wisdom in them - you will know enough to look around for love. It will be there, standing right on the hinge, holding out its arms to you, If you are wise, whoever you are, you will let go, fall against the love, and be held.

Is that the mind-heart so filled with love it resembles space? Is that mindfulness?

Later in the same Dharma Seed talk described above, Sharon Salzberg tells a really cute story about some advice she gave her then 8 year-old goddaughter about how to practice mindfulness, equanimity and spaciousness.

She says that one way to relate to a hurtful experience is to allow your mind-heart to be

really, really big like the sky...your heart is so open, and maybe that is different than maybe when you feel like a sponge...when every mean thing someone says to you comes into you and fills you, and you get all soggy and yucky.

I like this very relatable version of dharma that even I can understand.

But more importantly, with continued formal mindfulness practice, I feel like I could actually apply it to my life.

It also makes me wonder about all of the exciting scientific research currently being done on resiliency and post-traumatic growth, and their possible relationship with mindfulness.

Sitting back at the funeral, I longed for her mother to have some sort of method or practice to allow her access to the wisdom within that would help her hold the enormity of her suffering in balance.

May it be so.