We appreciate all of you for sharing your reflections during our exercise this month of “bringing a BMCM retreat home”. This week, we will explore how slowing down the mind can increase concentration on the passage, thus deepening meditation. Slowing down can be challenging, but we have many opportunities throughout the day to keep trying. Remember that slowing down isn’t only about pacing, but also about setting priorities.
During retreats we often work together in small groups to reflect on an Easwaran reading or video talk and to brainstorm practical suggestions to try. Regarding the current topic of Slowing Down, what are some successes you have had?
Do you have a specific challenge that you’d like tips for? Review the reading below for ideas, or ask your eSatsang friends!
The following excerpt is from Seeing With the Eyes of Love by Easwaran, pages 41–45.
Of course, slowing down the day is only the first step. The hurried pace that keeps us “weak in love” originates in the mind. You might stop at someone’s desk to be sociable, but that doesn’t mean your thoughts have stopped. They are immaterial, after all! Most people are perceptive enough to know when this is taking place. If you’re pretending to chat with them while your mind has sprinted ahead toward the conference room, you might as well take the rest of you there too.
No one can love with a mind that is going fast – or one that is divided. No one can love with a mind that is apt to swerve wildly, whether to avoid the small exigencies of daily life or to pursue something bright across the room that attracts you.
Let me suggest a small experiment. For a day or so, think of yourself as James Joyce, or any other writer who specializes in stream of consciousness writing. With the uncritical eye of the motion picture camera, observe your thought processes when you are in different states of mind. When you are feeling irritable, take a peek. If you have occasion to be afraid or anxious, check again. If a strong desire overtakes you and you can manage to see what’s going on in the mind, take note. Check your vital signs at the same time: see how rapid your pulse is, and whether your breathing is shallow and quick, or deep and slow.
If you can do this accurately – which is harder than it sounds – you will make a very interesting discovery. Fear, anger, selfish desire, envy: all these are associated with a speeded-up mind, and when the mind speeds up, it takes basic physiological processes with it. The thinking process hurtles along, thoughts stumble over one another in an incoherent rush – and, on cue, the heart begins to race and breathing becomes quicker, shallow, and ragged.
Interestingly enough, the reverse is also true. Once the mind gets conditioned to speed, not only do speeding thoughts make the body go faster, speeded-up behavior can induce negative emotions as well.
Suppose you’ve slept through the alarm and are in a rush to get off to work. You rip through the kitchen like a whirlwind, grabbing whatever you need as you go, trying to button your shirt while you eat your toast on your way out the door. The next time you catch yourself like this, watch and see how prone your mind is to negative responses. Everything seems an obstruction or a threat. Your children look hostile – if you see them at all – and even the dog seems out to ruin your day, draping herself right across the threshold in the hope of tripping you up. “Watch out!” the kids say once you’re gone. “It’s going to be another of those mean-mood days.”
In a way, getting through the day is much like driving a car. When you’re driving over sixty-five miles per hour, you need a lot of space just to turn or stop. At high speeds you can’t see the scenery along the way; if you try, you may get yourself killed. You might even miss the road signs, and if a possum or squirrel is trying to cross the road, you may not be able to avoid it. In the same way, those who have been conditioned to race and hurry through life often don’t see people, just blurs. When they hurt others, they are often not even aware of it. They can injure relationships without even knowing that damage has been done.
A speeding mind is a dangerous thing. When thoughts are going terribly fast, they are out of control, and there is no space between them. To press the analogy further, it’s like those dangerous moments on the freeway when cars are not only speeding but following bumper to bumper. Everyone is in danger.
A thrilling realization comes when you begin to understand this two-way relationship between speeded-up thinking and negative emotions. If you are chronically angry, fearful, or greedy, you know well how much damage these tendencies have done to your relationships, making you “weak in love and imperfect in virtue.” And you know, too, how dauntingly hard they are to change when you approach them head-on. Their roots go deep in your past conditioning. You can talk them out, analyze them in your dreams, reason with yourself, go to anger workshops and fear seminars; still they wreak havoc, out of control.
But suppose that instead of going after chronic anger or fear directly you were to tackle the thought process itself – the mind in its Indianapolis speedway mode. When a car is going a hundred miles per hour, you can’t safely slam on the brakes. But you can lift your foot off the accelerator. From one hundred miles per hour the speed drops to ninety-eight, then to ninety-five, then ninety, until finally you’re cruising along at a safe and sane fifty-five. You’ve decelerated gradually and safely.
This is exactly what happens to the mind in meditation. You put your car into the slow lane – the inspirational passage – and you stay there, going through the words of the passage as slowly as you can. Distractions will try to crowd in, and you don’t want to leave big gaps for them to rush into. For the most part, though, you just increase your concentration. In this way, little by little, you can gain complete mastery over the thinking process.
Saint Francis of Sales describes the process in more traditional language:
If the heart wanders or is distracted, bring it back to the point quite gently and replace it tenderly in its Master’s presence. And even if you did nothing during the whole of your hour but bring your heart back and place it again in Our Lord’s presence, though it went away every time you brought it back, your hour would be very well employed.
As you do this, your health cannot help improving, because the poor, innocent body is typically the victim of ungoverned mental activity. When I see somebody in a burst of fury, to my eyes it almost looks like a thousandth of a heart attack. When it’s repeated over and over, when you get angry more and more easily, the time may come when the heart will say, “I can’t take it any longer!” Of course, it might not be the heart; it might be the lungs or the digestive organs or some other physiological system or process. Whatever the result, I believe the same contributing cause is often involved: a chronically agitated mind weakening the health of the body.
People who don’t easily get provoked, on the other hand, have what one researcher, Suzanne Kubasa, calls a “hardy personality.” It is difficult to upset them, difficult to make their mind race out of control. As the mind slows down, I would say, you get more hardy – more patient, more secure, more healthy, more resilient under stress. Meditation is the key to achieving this end.