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The “Turning Towards” Pathway.

The famous boxer, Joe Lewis, reportedly said everyone gets knocked down sometimes but while you’re down there you might as well pick something up. The stuff I teach and try to help others discover is what I’ve picked up from many such falls. One of the most valuable benefits of mindfulness is the ability to turn towards life’s falls and failures and personally “feel into” whatever fear, or shame or pain these events call forth. Mindfulness provides an internal place to face whatever has come into this moment with wide open awareness, without resistance. As I’ve turned towards the pain of my losses and failures I’ve discovered some things I think you will too – it has been my own fear and desire that has caused most of my life’s greatest troubles. It’s only because I’ve been knocked down or fallen down so many times that I’ve learned something about these big mischief makers that I might pass on to you.

As a teacher and therapist I’m only teaching the stuff I’ve learned from the “school of hard knocks”, like for example, desire is an endless wanting that is never satisfied by anything you might feed it. No matter how much you keep shoveling in, it always wants more. Surely, you’ve figured this out too - everyone has done too much or eaten too much of a good thing - again and again. The problem is, figuring it out doesn’t stop the gnawing sense of wanting that keeps us going back to the trough for more and more of what’s never enough. Understanding isn’t the solution any more then feeding the craving is a solution. It’s the craving itself that’s the problem and no amount of feeding it or denying it or understanding it will eliminate it. Craving is just one of those things that came with every human package at birth. Like belly buttons or the brains we came with, we are all get stuck with this one. With mindfulness we can turn towards and feel into and learn to manage the craving itself. Of course, fear works pretty much the same way. Fear also has an endless source and no one ever dispels it by becoming more and more protected or powerful or trying to run away and hide from the things that scare us.

Mindfulness helps me notice when I am falling under the spell of fear or desire and helps me awaken from the pathogenic (suffering-causing) trances these mischief makers create. Mindfulness dis-spells trances. It can also help dispel all the other sufferings our minds cook up for us because it enables us to see these things as they really are – just thoughts. I’ve spent a great deal of time trying to run away from fear and fulfill all my desires but I’ve always ended up back where I started. . . . fearful and filled with more desire. Meditation is another word for “nowhere left to run”, or maybe, “nothing more to gain”. It is only after many years that I’ve come home to the one work that has made a real difference in reducing my own suffering, the inner work of finding peace, contentment and happiness right where I am, just how I am, right in the midst of my own “Full Catastrophe”. I’ve ended up coming back to what has been the real work all along - coming to terms with who I am, as I am, where I am right now. In every right now.

This “turning towards” pathway is the same one I invite you to follow. It’s a sacred path that consists of one humiliation after the other. Perhaps all spiritual pathways are. I have found forgiveness and “don’t know mind” to be a useful attitude to navigate with. I use it to follow my calling, and it’s how I investigate “what’s healing” for each human being who comes to me looking for direction. I have been deeply invested in meditation and other awareness practices for nearly 30 years and I still take each step as a beginner. I hold everyone I would teach or help in the same spirit – with beginners mind. Each human being travels a unique path of awakening and no one of us can really know what is healing for another. That knowledge and wisdom is deep within each of us. Mindfulness is the key that sets this wisdom free. My work is to help people “grow” their own mindfulness and learn to navigate their lives with it.

There is a wondrous power at work in the universe that we can see in all things: in nature, in life itself, in knowledge and wisdom and compassion and the human mind-body in its intrinsic wisdom to heal itself, and in how human beings can still love and hope and endure through the most difficult of life’s challenges. May you come to know this power at work in your life and find “turning towards” every bit as fruitful as I have.