Stress Based Mindfulness Reduction

[Aloka]

A talk given by Ajahn Amaro last year at Amaravati Monastery UK.

[Aloka]

Comments welcome .

[philg]

There's a lot to unpick in this talk, mainly because of the 'slippery' nature of what he is trying to put over. The title is a play on words aimed at Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, which he deals with later in the talk. Instead he looks at the causes and consequences of stress in terms of Buddhist meditation practice. Hoe can we reduce stress? Not by attachment to sense pleasures or distractions, of course, or by any strategies to switch off and take a break from stress to become 'Comfortably Numb' (his Pink Floyd reference). Not also by craving to be something, such as to be stress free or even a good meditator.

He concedes that what he is saying could be quite depressing to be told, as a doctor should, the facts of the matter, that we need to understand the 'I' in our practice. Such as, 'I should be good at getting rid of defilements and hindrances' and 'I should be better at concentrating when I meditate'. This 'self view' prevents our development and instead we should be looking at how to reduce the impact of the 'I'. For one thing this brings stress to our meditation, which then becomes a chore. Something to be done to achieve an 'I' end, such as 'this meditation should help me achieve this particular thing'.

His advice is to try to remove the 'I' from our meditation and instead look at what we are doing from another perspective. To try asking, 'is this a good way forwards? If it isn't try something else. Which is kind of the opposite of the advice too often given, that there is only one type of meditation and if it isn't working then you just need to try harder at it, for longer, and in the way you have been told to do it. Other wise you are a 'butterfly' meditator. Instead we should look at meditation as a skill development, not a means to develop ourselves.

We have to be realistic in our desire to be perfect, or at least in how we deal with the stresses arising from our view of our 'non-perfection'. It is perhaps our relationship with our stress we need to work on, not switching off and being numb to it. We need a bring the right kind of mindfulness to stress, which will lead to it eventually not being present rather than got rid of. Not an easy concept to take on board.

[philg]

I'm always fascinated by this area of Buddhist practice. Get rid of the 'I', but we have to use the 'I' to do it. I have to get rid of the 'I'. A bit like the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment where the cat is neither alive nor dead until you look. Or the Zen comment about whether there is a God or not, "There is neither a God nor not a God". Am I currently meditating without an I? No, I just thought of myself meditating, so I'm not. That way lies madness, you may well be thinking. Or we can backpedal a little and look at what else we can bring to the situation.

Instead of thinking that I am doing a meditation I can step aside and look at the meditation practice as something separate to myself. We can do this with our thoughts which arise as we meditate, look at them as something arising rather than as our thoughts. From the outside we look at the thought and it then becomes something else. 'A' thought rather than 'my' thought. Something to be observed and then let go of, some thing to move on from. The whole activity can become something which is happening rather than something I am doing. I've put myself into this situation, but now its merely something which is happening.

These differences are subtle but important as a first step in reducing the 'I'. terms of mindfulness it changes from 'what should I be doing now?' to 'what should be happening now?'. Any decisions and actions can then be put into a 'neither I nor not I' category, from which 'right thought and actions' arise. Slippery indeed.