O'Grady Psychology Associates

Psychotherapy, Marriage Counseling, Neuropsychological Assessment

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Meditations on Humpback Whales: Mindfulness of Sights and Sounds

Tofo Beach, Mozambique
Tofo Beach, Mozambique

On a recent trip to Africa, I climb the bluff from which, I’d been told, I could see whales breaching. I have the strand to myself; September in Tofo, Mozambique, is not the season for beach-goers. I stand like a sentry as I gaze out at the Indian Ocean. I’m familiar with the Pacific, but this is new and thrilling, standing at the edge of the great continent of Africa where several oceans meet.

I scan the white caps for whales, not sure what to look for, not expecting to see them, but feeling excited and hopeful. White, foamy waves turn and tumble in a violent sea…but no whales—and I begin to feel like I have missed out on something important. Perhaps something that will give this long journey a special meaning, beyond appreciating seeing my family.

And then I settle into just gazing and waiting with no expectations. Letting the waves curl and furl as they will, but still letting myself settle into a comfortable place, a standing meditation on the waves. I notice in that stillness of mind the breeze has calmed. My mind has calmed and settled…and there, I spot what’s clearly whale blow, distinct from the wave spray. The sea water gusts up and disappears, and then I see the first of the whales breaching. An enormous black body thrusts up and crashes down in a huge swell of white that I’d have mistaken for another wave if I hadn’t seen the whole sequence. When I calm and settle, letting go of expectations and anticipated disappointment, whales breaching are there to be seen.

In fact, I see so many whales I lose count. I am alone on this bluff, feeling contentment I had not experienced on this trip until now, through patience and letting things happen without trying to make them happen: Allowing the experience to be just that, being with the waves, the sound of the surf, and the breeze. Feeling the sand under foot, and settling into myself.

Insight in meditation happens in much the same way. It is not the goal. Insight can be an outcome, but can’t be forced. Thoughts and feelings that come up during meditation should neither be pushed away nor clung to. Letting go of striving for any particular experience to happen allows for effortless inner quiet.

When I first looked at the ocean, searching for whales, I was craving to see them—and so couldn’t settle into the experience of just being there. But when I let go of needing the experience, my vision shifted and I saw clearly. The whales continued to slap the ocean’s surface, I continued to watch, but without getting caught up in excitement—which can be a seductive detour away from insight.

Splash
Splash

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The Present Moment and Transformation

Mindfulness and transformation.Research reported in the respected journal Science, in an article titled “Just think: The challenges of the disengaged mind” by Timothy D. Wilson et al. (345, 75 [2014]), presented results summarizing 11 studies where participants were first given an electric shock; all participants admitted that the shock was unpleasant, and said they would pay to avoid it. Researchers then asked the subjects to sit in the empty room and entertain themselves with their thoughts without cellphones, iPads, or other distractions. There were only two rules: you can’t get out of your chair, and you can’t fall asleep. Participants did have the option to press a button and receive a shock again.

The mind is its own place, and in it self

Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.

 John Milton, Paradise Lost

 Very much to the researchers’ surprise, the study found that 70% of the men and 25% of the women chose to shock themselves instead of just sitting there with their thoughts—remember, for no more than 15 minutes.

Researchers ran the test in a lab with college students, but also with older subjects (recruited from churches, farmer’s markets, etc.) in their homes, and they tried to replicate the study with a wider sample of people minus the electric shock. They found that these folks also had difficulty sitting still for 15 minutes alone to entertain themselves with their thoughts. Over half the people admitted to cheating by using their phones. The majority said that hated the experience—it was boring.

What is going on here? Why is it so hard to entertain ourselves with our thoughts that people will actually resort to painfully shocking themselves just for something to do? Why not just stay in the moment and wait it out? Partly, reflecting back and looking ahead are just human nature, something our big brains allow us to do and a big reason for our evolutionary success. Because we can think ahead and formulate goals, or review the past and learn from it, we can accomplish stunning achievements like writing novels, building bridges, and curing diseases (not to mention more ordinary but still essential accomplishments like saving for retirement). But that’s not the whole story.

While being past- or future-minded can have benefits, it’s clear that mindfulness—staying in the present moment—offers essential benefits as well. The present moment is the only one that truly exists. It’s only in the present moment that we can feel peace, fulfillment, and harmony. And it’s only in the present that we’re free to choose. That’s why people meditate and why so many religious traditions include some kind of mindfulness exercise.

But researchers in the study found that even subjects who had experience with meditation and mindfulness found it only slightly easier to sit still without distraction. I’ve found this in my own practice. When I explain mindfulness to my psychotherapy clients, they understand the concept and its value on an intellectual level, and may even experience a sense of pleasurable release during some meditations. Even though my clients have come to me for help in dealing with life’s burdens, and even though they get good results from meditating, it’s still not easy for them to practice mindfulness regularly.

So, what comes up for people when they sit alone with their thoughts? We experience restlessness, discomfort, boredom, and irritation. Sitting in stillness, letting moments come and go and staying with the quiet space, gives room to encounter the self. We come face to face with our anger, our envy, our jealousy and our pride. Those feelings are unpleasant and it is easy to want to be quickly rid of them. Switching the channel in our mind to a diversion such as a show, a game, or a piece of chocolate cake takes us temporarily away from the difficult emotion. We don’t want to feel like a jealous person, for example, because that gives way to other feelings such as guilt—which makes us feel worse. Our self-concept takes a beating when we give it time in the quiet moments.

But if we are to enlarge our Self and be fully alive, we have to face the darker sides. As Goethe writes in “The Holy Longing”:

 And so long as you haven’t experienced this: to die and so to grow,

you are only a troubled guest on the dark earth.

To be at home on earth, learn to sit with yourself in the present moment.

 

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Happiness and Pleasure Born of Reverie and Reflection

Photo credit: Vicki DeLoach

When I was little and living in lush, sweaty Georgia, my mother would take me and my brother out to the lawn and we’d pick delicate white daisies, carefully connecting stems end to end to make a halo or a crown. Secluded from other cares, for me those afternoons before being called to dinner felt eternal, endless. We didn’t ask to watch TV, the only screen available back then. And if we were lucky, the day would turn dusky and bands of lightning bugs would appear, making their mystical dance around our heads, flying just low enough so we could catch a few in our glass jars. I always released mine after a few seconds, hoping they would remember me as kind and come back again the next evening.

Daisies don’t grow in the grass in California where I live now. Bugs do. They crawl up and down gigantic blades in a determined march to get to the other side of the lawn. When my twins were little, we’d get down on our forearms and elbows and watch their surprisingly fast journey. Then we’d roll onto our backs and look at the clouds, finding comical animals, monsters, and castles. Absorbed in our thoughts, time moved much slower than the clouds and bugs. When my husband called us to dinner, we strolled to the house, calm and happy.

Several years ago, we tore up the grass to save water. I don’t see the bugs up close now, but I see the honeybees and hear their sweet music, along with the birdsong.

Long before Gautama became enlightened while sitting under the Bodhi tree, he experienced a calm, peaceful reverie as a boy while sitting under a rose-apple tree in his father’s field. This Buddha-to-be watched the grass being churned in the fields and noticed the bugs being displaced by the plow, some dying and some surviving. Contemplating the transitoriness of life with calm awareness, he experienced the state Buddhists refer to as jhana—a rapture and pleasure born of seclusion from the usual demands of life. This glimpse was lost in memory for many years, until that day under the Bodhi tree when Gautama realized that life brings suffering, yet it also brings a way out.

Meditation is one of the paths that bring awareness, insight, and calm. These states of meditation where the mind is free from craving, aversion, sloth, agitation, and doubt, are experienced when we can be alone without demands of daily life pressing us toward the ever-present distractions that impinge daily. Watching clouds or bugs with nothing on your mind may bring about that first state of meditation, just as it did for Buddha. Taking time with no purpose, but to sit still, listening and observing, may bring surprise and joy.

 

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How Wisdom Emerges from Body-Scan Meditation

 

 In mindfulness practice we use the Body Scan as a way to develop attention and focus on the body without judgment.Mindfulness Meditation: Using the Body Scan as a Focus

Body-scan meditation focuses deliberate attention on the body without judgment or wanting anything to come from it. This isn’t a traditional relaxation method; people may feel peaceful, but they can also feel antsy, impatient, irritated, and hungry. That’s the point: You can experience these feelings, thoughts, and sensations without needing to take them further. Just notice, and then move on to the next part of the body.

With physical pain, for example, our thoughts might go something like this: “My back hurts, that muscle ache could be a spasm or what if it is bone cancer, maybe I should have an MRI, or maybe I need to go to a chiropractor, but that could mean I have to go three times a week, how will I get off work? My wife is going to be mad at me for spending the money, but then, damn that! If I’m hurting, then I need to get out of pain. She has no business keeping me out of the doctor’s office. I deserve to spend money on me sometimes. Just like when I was a kid, and my mother didn’t take seriously the pain in my arm, and it was broken! I went for weeks before she took me to the doctor… ”

The thoughts go on like that. Before you know it, you’re fuming; your body is more tense than when you began. You feel irritation not only at your wife, but your mother, the medical system, the ACA, and your insurance company. You probably feel sorry for yourself. All that strong emotion gets internalized into your pores, your muscles and sinews, and your heart. Your focus on your body ended ten minutes into the 45-minute practice: all you can think about is getting up and googling “back pain.”

A mindful alternative might go like this: “My back aches, oh, okay. It hurts now, that is how it is right now.” And then you rejoin your yourself, and think, “Noticing my right shoulder…noticing the feelings present there…I bring my attention to my right arm, noticing what is there to be felt…” At the end of the body scan, you open your eyes and realize that you have stayed with the practice for most of the 45 minutes. Your mind wandered, but you didn’t end up becoming angry with your partner, your mother, the medical system, and your poor luck.

Living with all our emotions can be difficult. It’s not uncommon for feelings to be transformed into physical sensations that can very possibly develop into an illness. You didn’t cause the illness, but being in prolonged or frequent physical and emotional turmoil puts the autonomic nervous system (ANS) into a constant state of over-arousal, a kind of hyper-drive that leads to difficulty sleeping, tense muscles, fretting, and worry.

In his poem fragment “Eternity,” William Blake wrote about the elusiveness of joy:

He who binds to himself a joy

Does the winged life destroy

He who kisses the joy as it flies

Lives in eternity’s sunrise.

Happiness studies show that no one is happy all the time. In the same way, wisdom is not always with us. We have moments where it all comes together, and then it disperses again. Focusing on the body with awareness is a way to allow wisdom to emerge without trying.

How does wisdom enter in? In the second, alternative, body scan you notice the pain in your back, move on, and finish the practice. You’re more rested because you didn’t get attached to any one thought. Then sometime later in the day, you do a kindness to yourself. You think, “I’m feeling some ache in my back; I’ll listen to my body over the next day and see if I should pursue it further. But for now, I’ll take care to not overdo the wedding, and to come inside and rest.”

That is wisdom. It’s not Socrates, or Jesus, or Buddha; it’s your own wisdom that emerges because of your kindness to yourself, and because you didn’t let yourself go down the rabbit hole of your thoughts.

Below is a thirty-minute Body Scan Mindfulness Meditation. It is one of the first meditations used in Dr. Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction class (MBSR) and is also a core meditation used in Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT). It is best done laying down, with your eyes closed.

Body Scan Mindfulness Meditation

 

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How to Survive a Rip Current of the Mind When Practicing Mindfulness Meditation

Mindfulness Meditation

Ruminations and Worry Make Meditation and CBT Difficult

Recently during a visit to Hawaii, I read a pamphlet on ocean safety that described how to survive a rip current. They can travel 1-8 feet per second, meaning that in an astonishing 8 seconds, you could be carried sixty-four feet out to sea!  The instinct is to fight the rip, which only makes it worse because fighting something that powerful is exhausting.  After exhaustion comes panic, and in gulping for air, swimmers choke on seawater.

In mindfulness training, we talk about letting thoughts pass away like waves in the ocean. But what if your mind gets caught in a rip current? When the waves are so turbulent that they produce the conditions ripe for a rip?

Surviving a rip current depends on doing something that is contrary to instinct. The key is not to fight the current but to understand it and go with the flow—while at the same time, swimming across the strong current, parallel to the shore. Find a spot where waves are breaking on the shore, and let yourself be carried back to the beach by the same ocean that took you away. If you are unable to swim diagonally to the shore until the waves carry you back, then relax and let the current carry you out: it will eventually lose strength and, if you have conserved your energy, you can swim back.

The same instructions can be applied to mindfulness-based cognitive therapy. Many people come to mindfulness meditation, or Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) or stress reduction (MBST) depressed, anxious, or dealing with panic disorders. Asking them to sit still and silently focus on their breathing is an enormous task.  We talk about letting thoughts pass away like waves in the ocean, but what if your mind gets caught in a rip current? Often, the thought stream is too strong for the breath to anchor them, and MBCT clients get carried out to sea by their ruminations and worries.

When the mind gets carried away in a panicky current, it feels as if there is no escape. At those moments, the urge is to give up, even to quit the practice. So, when feelings threaten to overwhelm you during meditation, turn to wisdom learned from the sea.

Remember that a rip current doesn’t pull swimmers underwater; it carries them away from shore in a narrow channel of water. When your mind begins to ruminate, think of the thoughts as a channel, not the whole ocean. That channel can be overcome by allowing yourself to relax and accept the strong pull. Fighting it will wear you out. Notice where the shore is, pay attention to the flow of the water as it moves to the shoreline, and think of your body as the shore, grounding you. You are solid and firm. Ruminative thinking, like the rip current, will lose its strength eventually, and you can return your focus to your breathing. Each time you resist your instinct to fight the overwhelming thoughts and just accept them, you will be training yourself to be a stronger and smarter swimmer.

How to Survive a Rip Current

Remain calm, do not panic. Should you find yourself caught in a current that’s taking you away from where you entered the water, remember that panicking will only tire you.

  1. Go with the flow. Do not attempt to fight the current. You will almost always lose the battle. Swim across or perpendicular to the current’s direction.
  2. Wait until the current releases you. It will.
  3. Swim parallel to shore and then make your way in.

From KORC (Kauai Ocean Rescue Council)