Read Online Finding the Center Within: The Healing Way of Mindfulness Meditation. by Thomas Bien - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Thomas Bien
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believed this so strongly that he actually cultivated his anger. Joe had adopted a life philosophy that seemed optimistic, adaptive, and useful, but he misused it to deny his own experience. That’s getting it backward. He was trying to impose his philosophy on his experience, rather than taking his life as it really is and working with that. And because Joe used his philosophy to deny negative aspects of his experience, he failed to heed the warning that the negative feelings were trying to give him. 02 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 9:46 AM Page 31
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Reclaim Your Authority
One day, sitting in theology class, I realized: Everything I was learning was simply an appeal to authority. How does one decide to believe this or that? You choose an authority, and go with what the authority says about it. The authority might be the Bible, or church tradition, or to some extent even the professor. What this ruled out was one’s own direct experiences. I liked psychology because the scientific method seemed different from such blatant appeals to authority. It took a few years to realize that psychology only substituted one authority for another. The authority was not the Bible, but data, research, and experimental design. It was not church tradition, but Sigmund Freud or Abraham Maslow or Aaron Beck. There is a lot that is good about research, just as there is a lot that is good about scripture and tradition. But the real authority still resides in yourself, since only you can decide what you will accept as authoritative. All external authorities are an attempt to bypass the authority of your own experience. The humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers said it this way: “Neither the Bible nor the prophets—neither Freud nor research—neither the revelations of God nor man—can take precedence over my own direct experience.” This is actually a good description of mindfulness. Rogers was talking about the refusal to allow for any mediator, the insistence on what he himself thought, felt, and experienced. If some external authority told him he should think or feel one way, but his own experience did not fit this, he trusted his own experience. Nor does this mean that you have to then fight the authority or try to convince someone with a different experience that yours is more valid. All that is needed is to abide with good-natured inflexibility by your own experiencing. You do not have to lock horns with anyone.
When you begin to do this simple thing—to just be mindful of your own experience in a gentle, nonjudgmental way—you find a path through the wilderness where you thought none existed. The knots of long-standing, difficult life problems are gradually loosened. And this happens—not by trying to force a solution, not by trying to feel peaceful and calm when you are anxious and afraid, not by trying to feel happy when you feel sad, and not by trying to force anything in particular—but just by being more present to all of it, softening to accept 02 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 9:46 AM Page 32
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what is really happening. If you could force your way through whatever problems you have, if there were some simple solution, you would already have done it and already have found it. Mindfulness is the art of deep presence, without struggle, without trying to fix anything. The best solutions occur when you are not trying to find a solution, but when you are just allowing yourself and everything else to be. This is not pacifism. This is not fatalism or just giving up. In fact, the opposite is the case. When you are deeply mindful and no longer trying to impose anything on your experience or trying to force a solution, you suddenly find yourself acting with surprising clarity and strength, with action that is both efficient and effective, because your action is in touch with what is really going on.
The Trappist monk and noted author Thomas Merton wrote about this quality of
F I N D A PAT H T O T H E C E N T E R
31
Reclaim Your Authority
One day, sitting in theology class, I realized: Everything I was learning was simply an appeal to authority. How does one decide to believe this or that? You choose an authority, and go with what the authority says about it. The authority might be the Bible, or church tradition, or to some extent even the professor. What this ruled out was one’s own direct experiences. I liked psychology because the scientific method seemed different from such blatant appeals to authority. It took a few years to realize that psychology only substituted one authority for another. The authority was not the Bible, but data, research, and experimental design. It was not church tradition, but Sigmund Freud or Abraham Maslow or Aaron Beck. There is a lot that is good about research, just as there is a lot that is good about scripture and tradition. But the real authority still resides in yourself, since only you can decide what you will accept as authoritative. All external authorities are an attempt to bypass the authority of your own experience. The humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers said it this way: “Neither the Bible nor the prophets—neither Freud nor research—neither the revelations of God nor man—can take precedence over my own direct experience.” This is actually a good description of mindfulness. Rogers was talking about the refusal to allow for any mediator, the insistence on what he himself thought, felt, and experienced. If some external authority told him he should think or feel one way, but his own experience did not fit this, he trusted his own experience. Nor does this mean that you have to then fight the authority or try to convince someone with a different experience that yours is more valid. All that is needed is to abide with good-natured inflexibility by your own experiencing. You do not have to lock horns with anyone.
When you begin to do this simple thing—to just be mindful of your own experience in a gentle, nonjudgmental way—you find a path through the wilderness where you thought none existed. The knots of long-standing, difficult life problems are gradually loosened. And this happens—not by trying to force a solution, not by trying to feel peaceful and calm when you are anxious and afraid, not by trying to feel happy when you feel sad, and not by trying to force anything in particular—but just by being more present to all of it, softening to accept 02 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 9:46 AM Page 32
32
F I N D I N G T H E C E N T E R W I T H I N
what is really happening. If you could force your way through whatever problems you have, if there were some simple solution, you would already have done it and already have found it. Mindfulness is the art of deep presence, without struggle, without trying to fix anything. The best solutions occur when you are not trying to find a solution, but when you are just allowing yourself and everything else to be. This is not pacifism. This is not fatalism or just giving up. In fact, the opposite is the case. When you are deeply mindful and no longer trying to impose anything on your experience or trying to force a solution, you suddenly find yourself acting with surprising clarity and strength, with action that is both efficient and effective, because your action is in touch with what is really going on.
The Trappist monk and noted author Thomas Merton wrote about this quality of
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