Gladdening the Mind
Why True Ease Isn't Something We Build, But What Remains When We Uncloak
A Zen parable from Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, goes like this: A man walking across a field encountered a tiger. He fled. The tiger chased him to a precipice, where he caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself down over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. A second tiger hungrily waited below. Trembling while he clung only to the vine, the man looked down—he saw two mice, one white and one black, gnawing little by little at the vine. The man saw a luscious strawberry near him. Holding onto the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other.
How sweet it tasted!
The effortlessness depicted in this classic, yet timely, tale still eludes most of us. Some days, meditating can feel like gritting teeth through a tough exercise program with a trainer who turns to you midway and says, “Smile. Isn‘t this fun?” Cultivating the inner smile—gladdening the mind—occurs easily in meditation. Yet under pressure it becomes major exertion. Why is it that “allow happy” becomes the mental equivalent of hoisting a kettlebell and not the effortless pluck of a juicy strawberry?
The answer could lie in how modern society defines the mind. Because neuroscientists know a lot about the brain and can find answers to how the brain works with fMRI, it’s no wonder that the mind has come to be seen as its byproduct. But what was translated from ancient times as “mind” was originally known as citta, or “heart-mind.” Citta is holistic. It encompasses emotion, mood, disposition, and felt presence—it’s like an entire hand compared to a single pinky lifting a five-pound weight.
The holistic approach of ancient meditators makes a lot of sense in light of recent findings. Meditation researchers—the HeartMath institute, for one—whose studies focus on the heart as well as the mind (the modern definition), reveal that the heart acts independently as a sensory organ with its own intrinsic nervous system. But more than that, the heart sends more signals to the brain than it receives from it. So rather than the brain directing the heart, the heart more heavily influences the brain.
When we engage in heart-focused breathing and layer our memory of a positive experience or loved one over that activity, the process gladdens the mind naturally. Happiness is supported from a more informative, powerful source. But in our desire to prance easily over the quicksand of a pressured day, we must not assume that technology will give us the three-step fix to combat stress.
Skilled meditators would argue that technology alone cannot deliver genuine ease or happiness. They would likely recommend samatha—concentration that focuses on sustaining gentle attention to the breath or physical sensations. Rather than striving or analyzing, samatha calms the nervous system, guiding the mind toward lightness and an inner smile. But it requires patience and practice. And it may require we simplify our lives, which many of us lack the means to do.
The inability to relieve ourselves of pressure is when the absurdity of our lives can push us to extremes. Take, for example, Well-Dying. Begun in Korea (the country with the highest suicide rate), the practice includes spending time lying in a closed coffin, intended to shock participants back to appreciating their lives and families. It reportedly works. But with the cultural proclivity towards harmony and desire to please others, is the experience merely another way to meet societal and work expectations?
The job of gaining approval, measuring up, and maintaining the self-image, belongs to the ego. Even if we can’t sit on meditation retreats for months at a time to release the ego’s excessive hold over us, we can start by seeing how it creates and enjoys extremes.
Our personal identity is filled with adaptations to a lifelong list of experiences from our earliest day forward. Neuroscientist Dan Siegel explains it this way: at the most basic level, a flow of energy and information creates memory and makes us who we are.
As we live life, layers of memory embed our encounters and ways of coping with them—this forms a self-enforcing scaffold of neural connectivity in the brain, which cobbles together our identity. Ultimately, these neural connections organize our lives. By acting as a loop through which we interact with the world, they take the term “tightly wound” to a whole new level of meaning.
We wear our identity, our ego, like an invisible cloak. And although the cloak is real, it’s not the whole of who we are. Lack of spaciousness, a curated mind created by the vampiric ego, crowds out our core being and stops us from seeing this cloak for what it may be—a straitjacket.
While we tend to see through the cloak of identity with rest and time off, Well-Dying appears to take the opposite approach. It leans into the bustle of daily life, making prominent the memory of how much the participants love their family and life. They are literally boxed in, their coffins not unlike heavily starched garments.
A glimpse below everyday identity to see who and what we are at our core—a parting of the cloak—does not happen. Without that insight, we cannot work with and strengthen what lies beneath. In a Well-Dying ceremony, we would embrace the cloak that we wear and, especially, create and appreciate its new threads—the threads now woven into it that prove how much we love our families and lives, just as they are.
Well-Dying provides little more than brief disengagement from the ego’s spin of narrative, memory, reactivity and habit. Therefore, its participants miss out on a sense of awe and possibility that arise from a full range of awareness. They miss opportunities to let their minds re-center, which helps them reach new levels of wellbeing. And they lose the ability to cultivate a more sensitive, flexible mind that leads to the positive states associated with the core being.
The core self is a remaining quality, existing under thought, reaction, identity, and adaptation. It is not, according to Siegel, a function of the transient contexts that come and go in our lives. Although few meditators live from it constantly, most will at least glimpse it. But those moments matter. Through them, we are able to appreciate and pluck the strawberry.
