The other night at a dinner party, a friend described how she tried to practice mindfulness meditation to keep herself from losing it during an utterly wretched seven-hour layover in an airport while she was exhausted, ill and desperate to get home to her children.Warner goes on to touch on some very important points regarding mindfulness practice. Her experiences also point to some of the perils when certain practices are taken too far out of context. The whole point of mindfulness practice, from the Buddhist perspective, is precisely NOT to boost up the sense of the self.
“I kept trying to be all ‘Be Here Now,’” she said, “but I just wanted to be anywhere but here.”
We all laughed.
Then she described how, on another day, she’d managed not to bite off the head of a woman who’d been gratuitously mean to her 8-year-old daughter, but instead had stayed in the moment and had connected and been able to join with the woman in an experience of their common, sadly limited, humanity.
At which point, full of congratulations (and suppressing my own story of having lost my temper with a woman in an airport bathroom who, I felt, had addressed my daughter Julia with an unforgivable tone of officiousness and disdain), I was beginning to wonder what body snatcher had taken my cranky friend away and left this kindly, calm, pod person in her place.
Where was the woman I always seek out at school events to laugh with? Where was the black humor, the sense of absurdity?
I felt strangely abandoned.
On one hand, it's great when teachers like Pema Chödrön get the 'Oprah seal of approval' but at the same time, what good is any of this if people aren't really practicing properly?
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