©Caitlin Rose Kenney ~ please do not distribute without consent and credit to the author
The invisible realms of the human heart, mind and soul are rich and complex. The intangible parts of a human's inner world are what the philosopher John O’Donohue called “interiority”. The human interiority has shades of longing, disappointment, grief, anger, shame, jealousy, inadequacy, doubt, insecurity and fear as well as shades of content, hope, joy, relief, insight, wonder, peace and more. Becoming aware of, or an expert in, the inner landscape is cultivated through mindfulness.
Mindfulness is the ability to perceive what is arising in the present moment with empathy and acuity.
A mindful awareness can be pointed towards something external, such as a conversation you are having with a friend or centering clay on a potter’s wheel. It can also be pointed towards your own interiority, like mindfulness of the mind or tracking your sensations. Yin practices are especially helpful containers for developing mindfulness of your interior landscape.
A prerequisite to many mindfulness practices is stillness or slowness. This is especially true for developing an understanding of your interiority.
It is all too common to suppress, distract, and numb away difficult experiences. When you find stillness you create the opportunity to become more self-observant and recognize what is really going on in your interior landscape. You can notice both the protective measures your ego takes to hide from pain and the underlying raw emotional charge. Your mind is an outstanding story-teller and mindfulness helps you become aware of your stories, defenses and preferred distractions. But the real reward is finding your way to the heart of things. As one teacher put it, “The closer we look, the more reason we have to love.”
Regularly entering stillness takes courage. If you explore a stillness practice, you will confront unresolved issues in your psyche and may be tempted to “fix” things. Rather than the “fix it” mentality, give yourself acceptance and open to the possibility that you are perfectly imperfect.
When we become still and practice our aim, as Ani Pema Chodron explains, is
... to train ourselves simply to feel what we feel. I like to call this “holding the rawness of vulnerability in our heart.” When we’re resisting or trying to escape from “what is,” there is usually some kind of physical sign — tightening or contraction somewhere in the body. When you notice this sign of resistance, see if you can stick with the raw feeling of discomfort just for a moment, just long enough for your nervous system to start getting used to it.
Seated meditation is often prescribed to cultivate a mindfulness practice but it can also be developed during everyday activities. Yin Yoga is a fantastic container for a mindfulness practice because it evokes a wide range of sensations and the stillness of the body allows you to more easily recognize turbulence in your mind and heart.
One of the most valuable qualities you can bring to mindfulness practice is curiosity.
What would happen if you stayed still for one more breath?
What would it be like to sit with boredom?
What would it be like to invite your difficult emotions to stay awhile and get bigger? What would it be like to make friends with your flaws?
This is the process of waking-up and becoming conscious. Rather than turning away from yourself, or indulging in story-lines, you stay right in the middle of whatever is present. Ani Pema talks about this as the capacity to be with yourself just as you are and with your circumstances just as they are.
Waking-up can, in part, be painful. Why would we want to do this? In answer to this, Pema Chodron shares a lesson from her teacher Anam Thubten.
“All flaws that exist are part of us. They begin to heal on their own when we accept them as they are. They can be fertilizer for our inner growth. Recognizing them without denying or maneuvering around them is the key point.”
Developing a mindfulness practice is not just uncomfortable it is also the pathway to the big open blue sky. It takes dedication to sit, regardless of the weather, and be with yourself. The fruit of all of this practice is not that you don’t experience storms, but that you have the capacity to weather and honor life just as it is.
The wonderful irony about the spiritual journey is that we find it only leads us to become just as we are. The exalted state of enlightenment is nothing more than fully knowing ourselves and our world, just as we are. In other words, the ultimate fruition of this path is simply to be fully human. And the ultimate benefit we can bring to others is to help them also realize their full humanity, just as they are.