Slogan #16
Whatever you meet unexpectedly, join with meditation.
Meditation practice itself is a practice of pausing, or creating a gap. Every time you realize you are thinking and you let your thoughts go, you are creating a gap. Every time the breath goes out, you are creating a gap. You may not always experience it that way, but the basic meditation instruction is designed to be full of gaps. If you don't fill up your practice time with your discursive minds, with your worrying and obsessing and all that kind of thing, you have time to experience the blessing of your surroundings. You can just sit there quietly. Then maybe silence will dawn on you, and the sacredness of the space will penetrate.
Pema Chodron
Let’s “mind the gap” – we are training our minds to notice the pauses, however infinitesimal, between breaths in order to transfer this skill to different situations or contexts in our everyday lives. Generalization occurs when our minds stop because we are surprised by something unexpected and we’re able to rest in this pause, even for the briefest of moments. If we practice Tonglen in the gap between action and reaction, then compassion training becomes the intervention that will change our habitual Fight/Flight/Freeze patterns. But even if we can’t slow down enough to notice the pause, then our Tonglen practice can create a gap after the reaction has occurred in order to stop the narrative from distracting or overwhelming us. Slogan #16 asks us to resist personalizing, to release self-obsessiveness and egocentricity, and to shine a light on each of our lived experiences as opportunities for change.
The Lojong slogans are training in expanding the boundaries of our meditation to include more and more aspects of our life so that compassion becomes our “go to” in times of challenge. Compassion only works when it’s exercised everyday like a muscle: “when neurons fire together, they wire together” means in practical terms that each time you repeat a particular thought or action, you strengthen the connection between a set of brain cells or neurons. As neuroscientist and psychologist, Dr. Rick Hanson writes, “the mind and the brain are a unified system. As the brain changes, the mind changes. As the mind changes, the brain changes. This means that you can use your conscious mind to make lasting changes to your brain to bring about greater well-being and happiness in your life.” The science of neuroplasticity is both optimistic and hopeful.In her now classic book, Train Your Mind to Change Your Brain, author Sharon Begley states succinctly, “The power of neuroplasticity to transform the emotional brain opens up new worlds of possibility. We are not stuck with the brain we were born with but have the capacity to willfully direct which functions will flower and which will wither, which moral capacities emerge and which do not, which emotions flourish and which are stilled.”
When I pay attention to what happens after I lose composure, it’s a self-compassion practice that helps to process my reaction. As I recall the challenging event, I choose one word or expression that feels true to this situation. By increasing sensations I’m able to decrease the accompanying narrative and locate the felt bodily sense where I feel the challenge most strongly, eg, tightness in chest or heaviness in belly. I acknowledge the reality of suffering: “suffering is a part of life” and the reality of our shared humanity: “I am not alone; everyone feels this way sometimes.” I end this practice by placing my hands over my heart and silently repeat these phrases: “May I learn to accept myself as I am;” “ May I forgive myself;” “May I be kind to myself.”
Imagine the gap as the space between where you’re standing and where you want to be. Here’s a quote from Seng-ts'an (605 AD):
“A tenth of an inch’s difference,
And heaven and earth are set apart.”