Toronto Method Mindfulness Handbook: Six Lessons in Embodied and Compassionate Meditation 9781039165977, 9781039165960, 9781039165984

Table of contents :
Cover
Introduction
QR Codes and audio
Class #1: Seeds of Mindfulness
Practice: Breathing as an anchor for concentration
What is mindfulness meditation
Practice: Six-Sense Noting
Class #2: Celebrating your Festival of Emotion
Practice: Affectionate Breathing
Celebrating your Festival of Emotion
Mindful Self-Compassion
RAIN (Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture)
Practice: A Guided RAIN Meditation
Class #3: The Valence Paradox
Practice: RAIN
The Valence Paradox
Class #4: Damaged!
Practice: Body Scan
Damaged!
Philosophy of the Implicit
Practice: Resourcing, Titrating, and Pendulating
Class #5: Nonduality and Other Holies
Practice: Four Elements (Earth, Water, Fire, Air)
Nonduality and Other Holies
Nondual Practices
Spirits in the Material World
Class #6: Suddenly Pure
Practice: Trizone Awareness (Mind, Heart, Body)
Maps and Schemas as Practice Tools
Suddenly Pure—Natural Awareness
Glimpse Practices
Practice: Natural Awareness
References
Acknowledgements

Citation preview

TORONTO METHOD

Mindfulness HANDBOOK Six Lessons in Embodied and Compassionate Meditation

ARI KAPLAN

One Printers Way Altona, MB R0G 0B0 Canada www.friesenpress.com Copyright © 2023 by Ari Kaplan First Edition — 2023 Advance Reader Copy For review purposes only, not for distribution or re-sale All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information browsing, storage, or retrieval system, without permission in writing from FriesenPress. ISBN 978-1-03-916597-7 (Hardcover) 978-1-03-916596-0 (Paperback) 978-1-03-916598-4 (eBook) 1. Body, Mind & Spirit, Mindfulness & Meditation Distributed to the trade by The Ingram Book Company

For generation z, who teach me something daily

TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 QR CODES AND AUDIO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 CLASS #1: SEEDS OF MINDFULNESS . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Practice: Breathing as an anchor for concentration . . . . 15 What is mindfulness meditation . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Practice: Six-Sense Noting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 CLASS #2: CELEBRATING YOUR FESTIVAL OF EMOTION . . 27 Practice: Affectionate Breathing . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 Celebrating your Festival of Emotion . . . . . . . . . . 33 Mindful Self-Compassion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 RAIN (Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture) . . . . . 43 Practice: A Guided RAIN Meditation . . . . . . . . . . 45 CLASS #3: THE VALENCE PARADOX . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 Practice: RAIN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 The Valence Paradox . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 CLASS #4: DAMAGED! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 Practice: Body Scan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 Damaged! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83

Philosophy of the Implicit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 Practice: Resourcing, Titrating, and Pendulating . . . . . 93 CLASS #5: NONDUALITY AND OTHER HOLIES . . . . . . . 97 Practice: Four Elements (Earth, Water, Fire, Air) . . . . Nonduality and Other Holies . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nondual Practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Spirits in the Material World . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

101 107 113 117

CLASS #6: SUDDENLY PURE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129 Practice: Trizone Awareness (Mind, Heart, Body) . . . Maps and Schemas as Practice Tools . . . . . . . . . . Suddenly Pure—Natural Awareness . . . . . . . . . . Glimpse Practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Practice: Natural Awareness . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

131 137 141 145 147

REFERENCES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159

INTRODUCTION

I

n 2022 I developed a mindfulness meditation curriculum and delivered it for my practicum-in-training as a certified professional mindfulness meditation facilitator.1 This handbook is the culmination of that project and contains summaries of six one-hour live online classes. I first learned about mindfulness meditation about a dozen years ago when I was 40 years old. It was a chaotic time in my life. I was divorcing and stressed at work and home. Someone close to me had started taking a meditation course after they had a mental health episode, and I took it with them. I gradually became interested in mindfulness and wellbeing and mental health balance. I went to my first meditation retreat at the Kripalu Centre in western Massachusetts led by Tara Brach, who is now my teacher. In 2016, when I was 45, my dad died, which was a hard year. While that hung over me, I came back to a more regular meditation

1.

The Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program with Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach is a two-year training program for teaching awareness and compassion-based practices, offered by Sounds True, the Awareness Training Institute, and the University of California at Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center. In my cohort, Class of 2023, there were over 2,000 people enrolled from over 70 countries. 1

Introduction

practice. In reflection, that year was transformative because I decided to leave the law firm where I had worked for 18 years and became a partner to start my dispute resolution practice and my own firm as a sole practitioner. That change was hugely vulnerable and exciting. I credit mindfulness and meditation for helping me with insight during that transition, which has proven to be a huge success for me professionally and personally. Mindfulness has made me a better lawyer and dispute mediator and better human being around my family. It has helped me to reduce stress and reactivity, maintain clarity and calm, drink less, and has been an antidote of sorts to avoidance and attachment. It is probably the most important skill I have learned. Even though I made progress with mindfulness practice, and arguably because of it, in 2018 I started having anxiety episodes. This was the first time in my life I was aware I was experiencing anxiety, and it started after the shooting of parishioners at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. The shooting affected me. I am third generation of Holocaust survivors. I believe that trauma experienced by my grandparents in 1940s Europe affected me epigenetically and in a fundamental way. As poet Kendrick Lamar says, “it’s in my DNA.” I read Sam Harris’ book Waking Up and started using his app, and also therapeutically explored my generational and family trauma. Mindfulness meditation taught me how to step back and feel a fearsome energy moving through me and allow it in kindly, see it closely, integrate their meaning, and discharge it. That works, for which I am grateful. I also discovered in mindfulness a draw to soak into mysteries and paradoxes of the mind accorded with meditation. In 2020, before COVID-19 arrived, a teacher training course came to my attention. I felt drawn to the opportunity to go deeper and better understand myself. I believe that if you want to master a subject, learn to teach it. I learned a lot in that two-year program, as you will read in the coming pages. 2

TORONTO METHOD MINDFULNESS HANDBOOK

I was persuaded by the importance of practicing and celebrating my emerging relationship with emotion, so I applied for and am now pursuing a PhD in law and emotion at Western University. I am curious about the role of emotion in our legal and justice system. As I continue to practice, the most important piece I have learned in my personal growth is that the path involves baby steps. This is an approach I learned from my wife and partner Dr. Melissa Melnitzer. One of her teaching modules that I use for myself is called 15-minute beginnings—honouring each person’s uniqueness and taking permission to help yourself in small steps of self-reflection and self-care, each of which can incrementally heal and transform.

A word about the title of this handbook, “Toronto method” mindfulness. Mindfulness meditation is an ancient practice with Asian and Buddhist roots, and it exists in numerous cultures, including my own Jewish faith. Meditation has been part of Western health and wellness for a half century, beginning with Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) clinical programming. Toronto method is what I say to myself when I learn something from a local approach that resonates with me and influences my outlook when practicing mindfulness. Over the course of my training, it became increasingly obvious—unsurprisingly so—how much we naturally condition within our localized environments. To name a few influences on my orientation as a meditation practitioner and teacher: first, I adopt in this handbook the two “subscales” of mindfulness being curiosity and decentring. That was developed in the “Toronto Mindfulness Scale” (Lau et al., 2006), a widely used empirical instrument in psychology research papers. Second, I summarize two mindfulness-based approaches, one of which was 3

Introduction

developed locally, Emotion-Focused Mindfulness (EFM). Also, I am inspired by the experiences of my local practitioners like Asha Frost, Tamara Levitt, Jeff Warren, Humble the Poet, and others—especially their stories and openness in sharing their knowledge. This handbook is organized around six lessons,2 the first four of which are designed to be progressive and gradual in difficulty level. In Class 1, Seeds of Mindfulness, we practice learning how to concentrate on the breath (an anchor), plus noting sensory experience. My definition of mindfulness meditation, curated from sources, is that it involves cultivating embodied awareness experience in the moment with curiosity and acceptance. Each word is explained in that chapter. Class 2 is called Celebrating Your Festival of Emotion. We practice receiving experiences in a spacious container of loving awareness and self-compassion. This is also called heart practice. My teachers emphasize a combined approach to mind and heart practice. Tara Brach refers to the two wings of mindfulness and compassion. Jack Kornfield invites us to “rest in spacious awareness and feel the presence of love.” We are introduced to the RAIN practice (recognize, allow, investigate, nurture), which encapsulates this integrated heart-mind approach to meditation and mindful experiencing. We also learn how mindfulness

2. When I worked on my practicum, it was suggested we design six classes to deliver to a group. My initial thought was: how am I going to start this homework? Then I realized it was Passover time and what entered my head was the song Shisha mi yodeah, Shisha ani yodeah, Shisha sidrei Mishna. Who knows six? I know six! Six are the orders of the Mishna. That got me started on the assignment. I followed the titles of the orders of the Mishna to organize the mindfulness meditation learning materials. Class 1 is titled “seeds of mindfulness” because the first order of the Mishna is zeraim (seeds). The last class is called “suddenly pure” because the sixth order of the Mishna is tehoros (purities). This handbook is not on Jewish meditation. The class titles, for me, are a mnemonic for remembering the method and steps involved. 4

TORONTO METHOD MINDFULNESS HANDBOOK

meditation activates neural pathways, and are introduced to a therapeutic intervention, mindful self-compassion. Class 3, The Valence Paradox, teaches an important intermediatelevel skill and is a second foundation of mindfulness. Here we learn how to identify positive, negative, and neutral tones in the body, recognize them as pleasant and unpleasant sensations, and hold them equanimously and with kindness. We also learn how to notice and dissolve our inclination to bond with “ABCs” (attachment, bias, and craving). These things reside in the body as uncomfortable paradoxes. We also learn about ghosts and spells. The theory and practices in Classes 1 to 3 are the building blocks of what you can learn in an introductory course in contemporary mindfulness meditation. We follow and honour the approach of Insight meditation, Vipassana, and the Buddhist Theravada tradition.3 Class 2 integrates Metta, Pali for kindness and heartfulness. Class 3 teaches Vedanā, meaning feeling tone. By adopting these practices, you have a proven path-oriented method to psychological wellness. Class 4, Damaged! is an advanced class concerned with traumaaware practice and offers mindfulness tools for working with intense pain and fear. We practice a 20-minute body scan meditation and go down a rabbit hole of self-therapy known as Focusing. Here you look for a “felt sense” in your body—can be non-verbal—that correlates to suffering and may be indicative of unrecognized emotion. Focusing can help access unfinished business from adverse childhood experience, which you may otherwise bypass in ordinary meditation. With some techniques, you can supplement mindfulness with

3

Theravada is Buddhism’s oldest school, said to originate in the 3rd century, BCE. At the conclusion of my teacher training, we were invited to teach meditation as a bodhisattva. This is a person witnessed to be on the awakening path and who commits to practicing and helping others cultivate vipassana, clear insight into the nature of reality. 5

Introduction

words, gestures, and visual images that symbolize an expression. You can find coherence in an embodied experience and mindfully integrate it, transforming a painful memory and carrying it forward with new meaning. Focusing is the second mindfulness-based intervention introduced in this course, and it can be interfaced onto the schema of the RAIN practice, which you can practice yourself or with partners. In Class 5, Nonduality and Other Holies, we explain non-self, which is an ancient and universal mind state for disidentifying from thought and decentring from emotion. Using mindfulness meditation, the feeling that there is a boundary between yourself, as a separate individual, and the outside world metabolizes into a flow of experience. Sam Harris says, “there’s no one standing on the riverbank watching the contents of consciousness flow by. There’s only the river.” Finally, Class 6, Suddenly Pure, teaches natural awareness. This meditation technique is also called the “direct” approach, or “effortless” mindfulness. The premise is that your awareness, your consciousness, is always present and waiting to be recognized. Natural awareness is sometimes seen in contrast to classical meditation by saying that you need not necessarily have to labour through a gradual mindfulness methodology to reach your goal or destination to end suffering. With natural awareness, you can reorder neural pathways by “just being” or “doing nothing” without striving—and that is all perfectly fine. There is obviously no one method of meditating that works for everyone. There are lots of good apps and teachers from diverse traditions including yours. Good advice on this topic is from Moby, who is also a practitioner. He says that meditation is not a cure-all, it won’t fix all your problems, and it shouldn’t be dogmatic. It should serve you, not the other way around. I hear him offering that advice and conclude by singing, there’s always room in life for this.

6

TORONTO METHOD MINDFULNESS HANDBOOK

I hope you find this handbook helpful where you are and wish you well on your path and personal growth.

Ari Kaplan

Toronto Ontario Canada January 2023

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TO RO N TO METHOD MINDFULNESS HANDBOOK

QR CODES AND AUDIO

T

hroughout this book you will see QR codes where a guided meditation begins. To wirelessly access and listen to the audio of the meditation, open the camera app on your phone or tablet, point the camera at the QR code, and follow the instructions on screen (e.g., tapping on what appears). In addition, the QR code here takes you to torontomethodmindfulness.com which is the general homepage where you can find all the audio for the meditations in the handbook.

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C lass #1:

SEEDS OF MINDFULNESS

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indfulness meditation involves cultivating embodied awareness experience in a moment with curiosity and acceptance.

13

PRACTICE: BREATHING AS AN ANCHOR FOR CONCENTRATION Breathing is life-giving. In every breath, we take oxygen into our bodies to nourish and sustain us. We inhale the molecules we need; we exhale what we do not need. Breath is constant: its rhythm moves within us, creating space and time to be present. Present to sensation. Present to emotion. Present to one another. And present to ourselves. —Valarie Kaur,

See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love

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any wisdom traditions have practices that connect breath and consciousness. Coherence breathing steadies the mind, activates the parasympathetic neural system, and calms the body and heart. This is an on-ramp for mindful experience. Practice 1: In the handbook Jewish Meditation: A Practical https://www. torontomethGuide, Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan writes, “Breathing odmindfulness. com/practice1 forms a link between the conscious mind and the unconscious. By learning how to concentrate on your breath you can go on to learn the unconscious mind” (Kaplan, 1985, p. 5). Any sensory focal point of concentration can be used as an anchor for meditation.

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WHAT IS MINDFULNESS MEDITATION

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indfulness meditation involves cultivating embodied awareness experience in the moment with curiosity and acceptance. We can probe each word for meaning. Involves. Involvement implies an unfolding process. You and your mind are an operational process unfolding in the brain. Your “neurons that fire together wire together. And what happens in your brain, changes your mind, since they are a single, integrated system” (Hanson, 2009, p. 28). Cultivating. This is meditation. Meditation is a skill you cultivate, like learning to swim or fish or play piano. Meditation is a way to cultivate mindfulness. Let mindfulness be an informal habit you practice throughout the day in any moment. Practicing mindfulness is beneficial to your body, neurophysiology, and wellbeing. It helps create new and healthier neural tissues and pathways that positively affect the mind and body. Embodied. Embodiment is the First Foundation of Mindfulness in Buddhism. Tara Brach teaches that awareness of your body is right at the centre of every experience of waking up. One direct path to presence is to remember you are here and living in this body. In the 1970s Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn developed mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), an approach that drew attention to recognizing that embodiment is relational and foundational for human health and wellbeing, because people are interdependent and an interconnected system of mind and body. A common denominator of psychological 17

Class #1: Seeds of Mindfulness

suffering is disembodiment, a sense of separation or disconnection from your body. In philosophy, disembodiment is a mind-body paradox. This suffering of disconnection is reflected in literary works and the arts. Mindfulness teachers refer to this example from James Joyce’s Dubliners: “Mr. Duffy lived a little distance from his body” (Joyce, 1914). Awareness. This is your consciousness, your whole singular sphere of awareness containing all your experiences. Everything you experience happens in consciousness: sensations, seeing, hearing, emotions, memories, thoughts; everything you are aware of is the contents of consciousness. Everything you experience can be an object of awareness. When you mindfully intend to have awareness, you can learn to rest in experience without trying to change or manipulate them, even unpleasant and uncomfortable experiences. Experience. This is your immediate subjective experience. Only you have your consciousness, and it contains only your objects of awareness. When you recognize that you are having an experience, you can notice it pass because all experience is temporary and impermanent. Visualise space: open sky, moving clouds, waves on a shore, river of consciousness, “eddies in the stream.”4 Moment. This is the present moment. Only in real time can you be meaningfully aware of your experience. When you are aware of feeling anxious, that happens in the present. When you are not aware in the present, you may believe that something is wrong with you. That is an identification of thought as reality, which it most certainly is not. All past and future experience are memories or anticipations. Those are thoughts which always pass in a moment. Every recognized moment has unconditioned possibility on an edge of unfolding the

4.

18

Neurodharma: “Broadly defined, an eddy is a patterning of something that is stable for a time and then disburses. A cloud is an eddy of the atmosphere, an argument is an eddy in a relationship, and a thought is an eddy in the stream of consciousness” (Hanson, 2020).

TORONTO METHOD MINDFULNESS HANDBOOK

big bang. Feel wonder knowing that an unconditioned moment of awareness is aligned with quantum physics. Curiosity. This means taking “care” from the Latin cura, being interested in having knowledge of a thing. You care about your wellbeing and may be curious of this course. Curiosity is a wellspring for wonder, a “mercurial sibling” who points you to insight. Insight is something that can come to you in a moment. Acceptance. This is a radical idea. Tara Brach’s first book is called Radical Acceptance. This is your intention, your willingness to hold everything true in your experience in a container of kindness and care for yourself, non-critically, non-judgementally. Remember, Brach’s “two wings” of mindfulness and compassion. Acceptance is to continuously nurture yourself, rinse and repeat. For more on acceptance and self-compassion, see Class 2. Mindfulness

is

CURIOSITY + DECENTRING

Source: Toronto Mindfulness Scale*

Another explanation: there are two “subscales” of mindfulness: curiosity and decentring, according to the Toronto Mindfulness Scale. (Lau et al, 2006) Decentring is the process of having an embodied awareness experience in a moment. It is an intentional process of observing your thoughts and feelings as temporary events that pass away separate from yourself. The task of decentring is done through the “three Ds:” distancing, disidentification, and d’meta-awareness. For more on cultivating spaciousness, see Class 2, then Class 3, and then #4… 19

Class #1: Seeds of Mindfulness

1. Meta-Awareness

= DECENTRING

2. Disidentification

Observing one’s thoughts and feelings as temporary events that pass away, and separate from oneself

3. Distancing

In summary, mindfulness meditation is the science, art, and practice of spacious loving awareness. These are concepts and practices; no amount of explaining mindfulness can replicate a subjective experience with meaning. All experience is embodied waiting to be noticed; only through the body can you coherently integrate thoughts and emotion, which is a process of healing; this is always available by being curious and gifting yourself permission to be conscious in a spacious and friendly container holding all your experience.

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PRACTICE: SIX-SENSE NOTING

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bserve every time you notice an awareness of a sensory experience by saying to yourself (as the case may be): Seeing…hearing…feeling/touching…tasting… smelling…thinking…

Practice 2: https://www. torontomethodmindfulness. com/practice2

I learned the benefits of noting practices, such as Six-Sense Noting, from Vince Horn of the Buddhist Geek Network community. Vince attributes his learning of social noting practices from the Burmese and Malaysian Buddhist traditions and from Kenneth Folk, who coined the term “contemplative fitness.” They describe mindfulness meditation practices as performing neurosurgery on ourselves and encourage people to “shamelessly cultivate positive mind states” during meditation sits. INSTRUCTION #1: Find a posture that’s comfortable and alert. Rest your hands and your eyes as you will. Check in with some breaths or other grounding— feel your breath from the moment it arises until it evaporates. Feel the sensation of sitting or standing. Notice the ground and weight of your body. Bring your attention into your body. Be relaxed, easyminded, and steady. Be present with the fullness of your sensory experience. Have your breath guide through your senses. 21

Class #1: Seeds of Mindfulness

INSTRUCTION #2: Notice the data points of sensation as punctuations in your awareness. Notice each tone in its constituent raw parts, as it is arising, any pre-conceptual quality. Avoid labeling a conditioned object. For example, when sensing sounds, note “rattle,” “hum,” “grind,” instead of “furnace” or “truck.” When you attach a mental note to verbalize what is happening in the moment, it accomplishes two things: 1. by calling it out, we neutralize an inclination to identify with it. A familiar mantra: “name it to frame it” (to myself, I say “name it to tame it”). This is a process of decentring, and it works with emotions too. Brené Brown writes in Atlas of the Heart, “naming an experience doesn’t give the experience more power, it gives us the power of understanding and meaning” (Brown, 2021, p. 23); and 2. it also gives your working mind something useful to do, a helpful activity like how a rudder steers a boat. When you wander in thought or daydream, that is your brain’s default mode network working productively and sometimes creatively. The default mode network is an important and useful function and was necessary for evolutionary survival. Six-Sense Noting helps to pause this default mode and cultivate mindful experiences. This is important because when you pause, you can notice and investigate, inform with meaning, and integrate healthier optimal neural networks. Another practice note when meditating: if you recognize that you have been caught up in thought, it is normal. Come back to a focus on your breathing and start again. Drifting off is a correct way to practice—by starting again, you are flexing and building your neural muscles, like doing reps with hand weights. You build strength and 22

TORONTO METHOD MINDFULNESS HANDBOOK

tissue in steps, including each time you return from distraction to awareness and note a sensory experience. Here are some additional notes on Six-Sense Noting: • Thinking is a sensory experience, no different than any physical sensation. When you understand this, mindfulness meditation makes so much sense. Thoughts are contents of consciousness that are shifting and moving and passing through us on their own. Realizing this is a key to liberation from being identified with your thoughts. When you become aware you are having a thought, imagine you are witnessing yourself in that thought— you are sitting in a movie theatre and seeing a scene of yourself on a large screen, doing whatever you are doing. You are aware that you are thinking of that memory or story, and instead of being embedded in it, you have some distance—this is your meta-awareness. This technique is sometimes also called thirdperson visualization. When feeling anxious, recall it like you were watching a movie of that peaceful time you were outside, by a lake or amongst trees or a forest, maybe walking with a dog or your partner or friend.5 • Feeling and touch are the same sense. Feel the touch of your seat or your legs, whatever is touching the ground. Simultaneously feel the weight of gravity’s pull and recognize that it keeps you steady. Feel your arms or hands against a surface and the touch 5.

Visualizing your memories from a third-person perspective, “as if you’re watching a character in a movie,” is a common mindfulness meditation technique. See Jacob Stern, “You’ve Probably Seen Yourself in Your Memories,” The Atlantic, August 29, 2022. Stern observes that the phenomenon of third-person memory was once pathologized, however, a scholar at the University of Alberta reports that roughly 90 percent of people report having at least one third-person memory and their research indicates that about a quarter of people’s memories from the past five years are third person. One caution, however: third-person memory experience can lead to a trauma-induced dissociation, for which you may need support. For more on trauma-informed mindfulness, see Class 4. 23

Class #1: Seeds of Mindfulness

of tapping your fingers lightly. Dissolve the image you have of the shape of your hand—can you feel each tap as a basic tonal punctuation on a field of awareness—noting each passing sensation as a data point on an infinitely large plane or sphere. • Hearing. Notice how every sound arrives on its own, without you doing anything, and sustains and decays for not a moment longer than it naturally persists. You are not hearing a bell, but rather tintinnabulations such as chime, ring, tinkle, ding, bong, ping. Recognizing that sound just arises is mindfulness of hearing. • Seeing happens with your eyes open or closed. Seeing is the sense most identified with your ego. When seeing a speeding car as you cross the road, note “shiny, moving, red,” not “I wish that were mine.” Notice if feelings arise as you cross the road, such as “be careful.” Now pause and close your eyes (not while crossing the road), and look into the cloudy field of vision. You may see shadow, light, swirl, sparkle, constellation, imagery, visuals, or symbols. Be curious when extending what you experience in sight. • Taste and Smell. Notice how your body reacts when your tongue tastes residue from a meal or snack. When you remember the scent of a cookie and the taste of chocolate, that is mindfulness of thought, and that is always okay to be mindful of to cultivate a positive mind state. The sense of distaste is a feeling of disgust and dis-smell a feeling of contempt. Those two sensations are known as siblings, and both involve aversion to something offensive. They evolved for survival to protect organisms from ingesting or touching noxious objects that could threaten health or life. • Breathing can correlate with multiple senses in a moment. You may note “feeling” when the air expands your belly and touches your internal organs. You may note “hearing” from the hiss of an exhale. You may smell food cooking on the stove and note 24

TORONTO METHOD MINDFULNESS HANDBOOK

“there is a delicious scent.” In winter, you may note “seeing” as you observe a frosty cloud exiting the mouth and may say “there is touch” when you feel cool air against your nose or lips. Noting your breath is a mindfulness double whammy—it sustains concentration with an anchor (in this case, breathing) and allows you to engage directly with a sensory experience. Contemplative fitness and neurosurgery, indeed! This concludes our introduction to mindfulness meditation. The primary task is building concentration, to notice and name your bodily sensory experiences and allow them to be as they arise and pass in each moment. Just like your breath. In the next chapter, we will learn to bring some intentional loving kindness into your experiences.

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C lass #2:

CELEBRATING YOUR FESTIVAL OF EMOTION

I

n this class, we learn about mindful self-compassion, emotion theory, and neurophysiology. We learn two core practice skills: affectionate breathing and the “RAIN” practice (recognize, allow, investigate, and nurture). I also tell a personal learning reflection, recounting how my discovery of mindful self-compassion was an “aha” moment that pointed me toward healing.

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PRACTICE: AFFECTIONATE BREATHING

A

ffectionate breathing is a mindful selfcompassion practice, centred on kindness to yourself. You visualize breath as a friend or companion in relationship with you. It is like practicing breathing as an anchor, with intentional kindness Practice 3: https://www. and friendly imagery. torontomethodmindfulness. I learned affectionate breathing from Dr. Heidi com/practice3 Walk in Toronto, with whom I took the Mindful Self-Compassion course. See also The Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook: A Proven Way to Accept Yourself, Build Inner Strength, and Thrive (Neff and Germer, 2018). INSTRUCTION #1: Find a posture that is comfortable and alert. Rest your hands and your eyes as you will. Feel the sensation of sitting or standing. Notice the weight of your body. Check in with some breaths—feel your breath at the moment it arises and at the top of the inhale. And bring your attention into your body. And be relaxed, easy, and steady. Be present with the fullness of your sensory experience. Have your breath guide your senses. If breathing is difficult, shift your focus to your hearing or hands, or feet on the ground. INSTRUCTION #2:

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Class #2: Celebrating your Festival of Emotion

Take a moment and invite your body to breathe you—there is no effort needed here, your body knows what do to. Become aware of this natural, automatic process, take a moment to be thankful for this element, this clean air finding its way into your body by itself. Feel this breath as nourishment, sustaining. Taking enough of what you need and not more. INSTRUCTION #3: Feel wonder at the biochemical processes happening in your body, breathing enriching oxygen molecules in your lungs, converting it in your bloodstream to carry and replenish your systems. Allow yourself an interest in how your body collects and aggregates oxygen and carbon and you exhale carbon dioxide into the environment. Know that atoms you ingest have been present for billions of years. They are from distant stars originating with the big bang. You are breathing the same air as your ancestors. INSTRUCTION #4: Feel the natural rhythm of your breathing and body, flowing like a gentle rocking of the sea meeting on a shore—feel the air splashing through your body from the inside out. INSTRUCTION #5: Imagine air entering from the top of your head, washing your brain, massaging your neck. Bring your breath down into your abdomen. Notice your systems gently shifting and swaying with every displacement of air, touching and moving and warming your insides. And on your exhale, imagine the breath flowing down through your legs and exiting from the soles of your feet. And again, entering from the crown of your head, through your full body and down out your feet. Now reverse the flow. 30

TORONTO METHOD MINDFULNESS HANDBOOK

INSTRUCTION #6: Visualize this breath as your friend who can be summoned at a moment’s notice—always there, whenever you remember. You can inhale kindness, friendliness, pure and unfiltered energy that is identical to yourself.

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CELEBRATING YOUR FESTIVAL OF EMOTION

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o you question the idea of celebrating difficult emotions? We have been socially conditioned to believe that emotion is something to be avoided, afraid of, or to contain or feel ashamed of. The adjective emotional is often sexist to imply a feminine weakness. As I come to learn more about affect and emotion, and accept myself as I am, I think about how emotion is like a fingerprint of one’s aliveness, proof that you exist in this world, in this body. And that is something to celebrate, with yourself and others, because it is common to every human…actually…it is common to most mammals.

NEUROLOGY, EMOTION, AND MINDFULNESS “We ain’t nothing but mammals, well, some of us, cannibals.” — Eminem, “The Real Slim Shady” This is a lesson on mammalian neurophysiology and emotions. To begin with, all mammals experience emotion. The word emotion comes from the Latin emovere meaning “to move out.” The essence of emotion is motion. Philosopher Susanne Langer writes, “To feel is to do something” (Langer, 1967). “All mammals are sentient beings meaning that it feels like something to be alive and dealing with challenge.” Emotions “move animals to action in ways that promote their survival” (Davis and Montag, 2019). 33

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Emotions and their impulses are constructed in the brain. BRAIN PART

EVOLUTION

NEEDS MET

Neocortex

Primate

Connection

Subcortex

Mammalian

Satisfaction

Brain Stem

Reptilian

Safety

HOW IT WORKS

Attaches to others Approaches reward Avoids harm

Current neuroscience research challenges the so-called “triune brain” (Feldman Barrett 2017). However, I am using this classic model here because it is easy to understand both metaphorically and biologically. Think of your hand as an easy model for your brain. This is where your 85 billion neurons reside. Create a fist. See this image adapted from Mindsight by Dan Siegel (2010).

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Wrist—this is your brain stem and spinal cord, the reptilian brain where your automatic neural processes operate, which ensure you stay safe and alive. Here the vein of your vagus nerve complex originates. It extends down to regulate your heart and lungs and is involved with the parasympathetic system; as you extend your exhalation, the heart rate slows, and it feels relaxing and restorative. Vagus has a newer branch that reaches into your eyes, ears, and face as part your social engagement system, which is why your heart rate increases when you are chatting with someone you really like to engage with. Fingers—with your hand in the shape of a fist and covering your thumb, look at the fingers extending to the back of your hand. This is the outer layer of your brain—your cerebral cortex—most evolved in humans, and the newest part is your neocortex. This is where higher cognition, executive functioning, problem solving, and your advanced and wise intelligence reside. Your fingertips represent the pre-frontal cortex (the most forward frontal part of your cortex). This is where you set goals, make and monitor plans, direct action, and steady attention. Mindfulness meditation builds tissue in the prefrontal cortex, and practitioners report an increased sense of self-control. Thumb—inside your fist, buried subcortically under the cortex is the limbic region, your limbic system. The limbic system developed in mammals around 200 million years ago. This is sometimes referred as the mammalian brain. This is where emotions are born, and they correlate with a desire to approach something rewarding or avoid something unpleasant. The limbic system includes the amygdala, represented by your thumbnail; it is an almond-shaped gland. The hippocampus is illustrated by the rest of your thumb digit. Shaped like a seahorse, this is central to our evolution and survival as a species.

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The amygdala is your emotional processing structure. It is constantly scanning your environment for threat signals (verbal/nonverbal, facial expressions, words, posture) and activates your impulse to fight, flight, or freeze plus related stress chemicals, cortisol and adrenalin. The hippocampus is where memory is created, specific recollections of personal experiences. It helps us feel grounded and learn from experience. The amygdala and hippocampus work together. The former is stimulated by rich experiences with meaning to a person, which signals to the hippocampus and elsewhere that you’re having an important experience needing to be remembered and put into longer term storage. This limbic system is not fully developed in humans until around age three. That is why toddlers have trouble self-soothing. Children need external soothing, but since parents get stressed, this is not always reliable. So, every human has negative experiences during childhood. There is a term for this: adverse childhood experience. Certain avoidant behaviours develop during childhood when they were properly needed for survival. Those are internalized as implicit memory and built into patterns in our psyche as adults, which develop into core negative beliefs about ourselves expressed as the voice of our inner critic. This natural negativity bias can get reactivated whenever we sense a familiar cue, a situation that was present early on when we felt uncared for, unseen. Remember, “the brain is like Velcro for painful experiences and Teflon for enjoyable and useful ones” (Hanson, 2020). Ordinarily, the hippocampus calms the amygdala when you feel threatened by helping you remember where you are now and that you’re probably not in danger. However, when negative experiences are traumatic events, what happens in the brain is a feedback loop— the memory storage in the hippocampus fails, unable to soothe the amygdala with the information that the cue you think is a threat is not the same as the historical one. You experience an “amygdala 36

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hijack” (Goleman 1996). Your brain can’t remember the context of the emotional memory, so you unconsciously end up believing that the present situation is as harming to you and dangerous as the person who traumatized you. Sometimes this may manifest as overwhelm, or dissociation, which is a normal mammalian freeze reaction. Because neurons that fire together wire together, when we overfocus on bad news, the amygdala’s alarm bell continues to ring resulting in a reactivity cycle of negative experiences. Rumination is a classic example of this. Negativity creates an unpleasant identification with sensations, which leads to a separation and disembodiment from yourself. The effect feels like living a short distance from your body, like Mr. Duffy in the Dubliners. If we do not tend to this conditioning by noticing and soothing sensations in the body, it intensifies and reinforces negative inter-actioning as adults. There are mindfulness practices which aid during experiences of separation, disembodiment, anxiety, and intense emotion. Over time, mindfulness practices help build neural tissue in the hippocampus and the pre-frontal cortex. This improves processing and regulation of emotional signals and can help stop a cycle of painful memories stored in the body from being repeatedly cued up and rewounding. These practices are a proven road map to healing, in baby steps, when done mindfully and with self-compassion.

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MINDFUL SELF-COMPASSION

M

indful self-compassion is when you can mindfully and intentionally apply heartful presence to your conscious space. Here you mindfully create a container filled with loving awareness, performing acts of kindness to yourself and others, and then stay with what arises—even unpleasant experiences—and ultimately learn to love all parts of you including those aspects you may have loathed or avoided. In Buddhism, heart practice is called Metta—lovingkindness. In Hebrew, this is called Chesed—lovingkindness. Compassion is manifest in all wisdom literatures. The following instruction sums up the essence of an integrated dual practice of mindfulness and heartfulness: Rest in spacious awareness and feel the presence of love. Become the loving witness of all things. You become loving awareness itself. The freedom of loving awareness is available; it just takes practice for you to remember it and to trust that it is always here. When you feel lost, stuck in a tiny part of the big picture, contracted, or caught up, take a breath and visualize yourself stepping back. With a spacious mind, you can witness even these contracted states and hold them in loving awareness (Kornfield, 2017, p. 16).

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THE “THREE PILLARS” OF MINDFUL SELF-COMPASSION 1. MINDFULNESS Emotions are packets of energy that pass through our bodies as feelings and can be noticed with curiosity and observed at a distance, just like sights, sounds, thoughts, and any other sensation. 2. COMMON HUMANITY Emotions are deserving of compassion, because everyone has these same automated processes, because we’re human. Everyone is a work in progress. Feeling that as an interpersonal experience is common humanity. 3. KINDNESS The essence of radical acceptance is that emotions pass through more easily when we establish a loving and accepting relationship to them. Here you may invite yourself to be curious and approach hard spots with a higher wisdom, friendliness, and attending-ness. Mindful Self-Compassion practices have been researched and applied successfully and you may use these in any moment. AFFECTIONATE BREATHING Try the affectionate breathing practice we did at the top of this class. This is visualizing your breath as a friend or companion.

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SELF-APPRECIATION Acknowledging all the things you do well is a form of selfappreciation, which is self-compassion. Take a pause to appreciate something about yourself that you know others would validate. Recall something in your job that you did well. Enjoy the satisfaction of holding your tongue before saying something you could later regret. It is nice to feel grateful for the things you can appreciate and savour those experiences and allow them to linger. Right now, in this moment, you can give yourself self-appreciation because you have allowed yourself to engage in self-care by learning selfcompassion and mindfulness meditation. Take a moment every day to appreciate something good about yourself and your day. SOFTEN, SOOTHE, ALLOW This is a method of giving yourself a friendly spaciousness in which to hold all your sensations and live with the fullness of everything you experience, including difficult and unpleasant sensations. You can be curious without judgement about any cravings or aversions that may arise, all while feeling safe and cared for. Try this practice anytime you recognize that you have a moment to connect with yourself. Softening is giving yourself physical compassion. You can soften your body with your hand pressing gently or stroking your heart area, or on your solar plexus. Allow your muscles to relax as if in warm water. That’s softening. Soothing means giving yourself emotional compassion. Try talking out loud to yourself in a private place. Say things you would share with a friend who was feeling bad, such as “that was really hard,” “that did not go my way,” or “that news was 41

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lousy.” Using words and touch that activate your care system releases oxytocin and endorphins, which feel good. Place a hand on your cheek, jaw, or belly. Sounds of a kitten purring are soothing, as is petting your dog, cat, or a soft object. I find the fireplace channels on Netflix and YouTube soothing. Allowing means giving yourself mental compassion. Imagine allowing yourself the space and courage to face the messiness and truth of even unpleasant experiences. Can you allow kindness and curiosity without judgement? Give yourself permission to be yourself just as you are. Lean into loving all parts of you, which helped you survive and become the beautiful person you are now.

A FINAL WORD ON YOUR FESTIVAL OF SELF-COMPASSION Mindful self-compassion is not easy work, and it takes a lifetime. For me, that is something to always look forward to. There is something profoundly celebratory in realizing that your awareness is your birthright and dignity that cannot be given away or taken from you. It is always available in the moment. Be kind to yourself, even when you feel like taking a pass. And if you do take a pass, that’s fine too. Song lyrics sometimes remind me that there’s nothing I need to do in this moment but be grateful and savour both the weight and spaciousness in all of Life’s Rich Pageant, reminding me of that R.E.M. album and their song “Fall on Me”, where feathers hit the ground before the weight can leave the air.

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RAIN (RECOGNIZE, ALLOW, INVESTIGATE, NURTURE)

T

he RAIN practice was conceived in the 1980s by Michele McDonald. In the 21st century Tara Brach innovated the practice by modifying the “N” of RAIN from what was originally “nonidentification” to explicitly insert self-compassion. Some people feel that non-identifying does not need to be a task in a step, rather that the decentring process can happen naturally after practicing mindful 43

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self-compassion. Brach changed the “N” to “Nurture” and moves non-identification to “after the rain,” which can include an additional practice step of naming any felt sense arising and having some distance from it (Brach, 2019, p. xix-xx, 245-248).

THE STEPS OF RAIN Recognize when there is energy in your body calling out to be seen and observed. Ask, “what is happening inside me right now?” Remember that you may always recreate your home refuge of awareness. This is your real homespace. Allow yourself to step back and rest in the fullness of spacious awareness, as you are, vast and open, without judgement. Practice soften, soothe, allow. Bring your heart into your mind, body, and breath. Investigate where you feel in your body various tones, patterns, cravings, and aversions. Asking yourself, “what wants my attention right now?” Are there any primary or secondary emotions you can uncover? Are you feeling angry about something unjust or unfair? Are you protecting yourself from a feeling underneath of hurt, loss, or grief? What are you believing in this moment about belonging, choice, relationship, power? Do you see an opponent in front of you? And if so, be curious about that and where you feel it in your body. Investigating is one of the most vulnerable steps of RAIN and is the topic of all of Class 3 and Class 4. Nurture yourself with mindful self-compassion practices, over again, as you cycle and repeat the RAIN steps during the course of a 20-minute sit. “After the After RAIN”: Journal for 10 minutes regarding your experience of decentring.

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PRACTICE: A GUIDED RAIN MEDITATION INSTRUCTION #1: Find a posture that is comfortable and alert. Rest your hands and your eyes as you will. Check in with some breaths—feel your breath from the moment it arises, including its temperature and flow. Feel the sensation of sitting or standing. Notice the weight of gravity in your body. Bring your attention into your body and just be relaxed, easy-minded, and steady. Be present with the fullness of your sensory experiences. If breathing is difficult, shift your focus to your hearing, hands, or feet on the ground.

Practice 4: https://www. torontomethodmindfulness. com/practice4

INSTRUCTION #2: Bring to mind something that is causing you grief—something irritating maybe. Make it mild to moderate, definitely do not bring to mind something traumatic, maybe a 2, 3, or 4 on a 1–10 scale of bad experiences you’ve had and which occupy you or you feel stuck in. This can be something at work or at home, a conversation you had, or something you did or said widely, or pain you feel. Take a moment to visualize the scene or situation. It may feel unpleasant or charged but know this is the starting place for exploring and finding healing.

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INSTRUCTION #3: Ask yourself, “what is happening inside me right now?” Sensations, emotions, thoughts. Just be aware of these. Note the senses… hearing…thinking. Allow yourself to be you in the moment and feel the flow of your sensations, even if they are uncomfortable or unpleasant. INSTRUCTION #4: Ask what wants your attention, what are you believing right now? Tell yourself that you care about yourself in this situation—“that is hard.” Listen to what your body is telling you. Ask yourself what is underneath the immediate emotion…is there hurt beneath your anger, fear beneath your grief, shame beneath your righteousness? What is present sub rosa—beneath the rose? INSTRUCTION #5: Invite yourself to sit quietly for a few minutes. Remember that when your attention wanders—and it always does—just start again. Gently come back to your anchor and then continue the RAIN cycle. And when you are ready, conclude this meditation and come back online. In summary, RAIN is an easy to remember mnemonic to recall steps for bringing heartful mindfulness into a difficult moment. Applying these tasks when you recognize an unpleasant experience may allow it in without judgement, and invites investigating what is present with a nurturing kindness.

PERSONAL REFLECTION In the introduction to this handbook, I wrote about how I first learned mindfulness when I was 40 years old. Someone close to me 46

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had started meditating after a bipolar episode. Learning to meditate together was a bonding experience and was also curiously helpful to me. I practiced periodically and went to a few weekend retreats. When I was 45, I regularized a mindfulness meditation practice. That year, my dad died, and I also started my own law firm. Meditation demonstrably helped me to reduce stress and reactivity at that time and focus better at work and at home. As I said, mindfulness meditation is probably the most important skill I have learned. Still, there was something inside me that I was not accessing. I had bad moods that sometimes seemed to cover me, and I would microaggress toward people who I love. I did not understand it then, I was denying. It was when I discovered mindful self-compassion that I truly understood that mindfulness needs heartfulness. Recognizing that was an “aha” moment for me and allowed me more insight. I discovered why I felt that I was not making progress. I suffered through something called meditation bypass. This is where we use mindfulness to bypass unfinished business buried in our bodies. As I learned in the RAIN practice, mindful investigation constantly requires heartful nurturing. That was a breakthrough insight for me, and it is still hard work to practice. Second, I was experiencing a common phenomenon called backdraft, when a very old pain arises right after you give yourself kindness and compassion. It’s like when fire rushes into a new room after it’s consumed the oxygen in the previous place. I remember one Sunday after we finished a half-day online group retreat. About 30 minutes after it ended, I began feeling like a miserable human being for the rest of the afternoon. I said something stupid to someone and went out for a mindful walk. It was then, during that grounding on land, that I recognized I was having a backdraft moment after a beautiful morning of mindful self-care, appreciation, and group connection. Noting this out loud to myself helped me disidentify from the loathing and it began to warm me with the knowledge that 47

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I was experiencing a common human phenomenon worthy of deep compassion. It also made me very aware that I was in my neighbourhood and walking on land that has been lived on for thousands of years by people still inhabiting here, and I could appreciate all of that as well as interconnect with their pain. Backdraft is a normal experience that feels terrible, like your progress is hopeless. The good news, I learned, is that recognizing a backdraft experience is a sign that the healing process is happening. That can be truly liberating, even as it paradoxically feels worse. And this leads to our next chapter.

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C lass #3:

THE VALENCE PARADOX

I

n this class, we continue practicing the RAIN meditation with an emphasis on the Investigate stage (the “I” of RAIN). We will learn the theory of “valence” and the skills used to recognize pleasant and unpleasant “feeling tones” in your body that incline toward positive, negative, and neutral. When we lack awareness of embodied feeling tone, it can present in the form of craving, attachment, and resentment, and over time they reinforce beliefs on topics such as privilege and entitlement. Mindfulness and self-compassion can help you to notice these various categories of feelings and mental states and how those patterns of energy generate dynamics in your mind around beliefs, and relationship with others. We will also learn how to come back from the mental spiral that is the double paradox of belonging: the more we believe we are separate from another, the greater our 49

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need for connection as well as tendency to separate from ourselves and others.

WHERE WE ARE IN THE COURSE To summarize where we are in the course to this point: in Class 1 (Seeds), we learned how to do basic noting of sensory experience and that’s mindfulness. In Class 2 (Emotion), we learned how to practice receiving and holding experiences in a spacious container of loving kindness and self-compassion. Classes 1 and 2, when practiced together, are the ground floor for noticing and allowing experiences with kindness. This is Class 3, on valence, also known as the Second Foundation of Mindfulness in Buddhism. Here we learn how to identify and hold pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral tones in the body. This is an essential intermediate skill to help you decentre from thoughts and emotion and be aware how you exist in the world. You can cultivate the skill of investigating valence using the RAIN practice (recognize, allow, investigate, nurture), in particular by dropping into the “I” of RAIN (Investigate).

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PRACTICE: RAIN INSTRUCTION #1: GROUNDING. Find a posture that is comfortable and alert. Rest your hands and your eyes as you will. Check in with some breaths—feel your breath from the moment it arises until it evaporates. Feel the sensation of sitting, standing, or lying down. Notice the weight Practice 5: of your body and feel gravity’s pull. Bring your https://www. torontomethattention into your body. Be relaxed, easy-minded, odmindfulness. com/practice5 and steady in this grounding. Visualize yourself touching the Earth. Be present with the fullness of experience. Have your breath interact with your sensations. If breathing is difficult, shift your focus to your hearing or hands, or feet on the ground. Notice any shift in temperature, rhythm, and flow. INSTRUCTION #2: CLEARING. You are invited to notice your full field of consciousness. Imagine you are clearing a space in the garden of your mind, in the sky. This is your space of awareness—a refuge in the moment. You can always remember to come home to your clear, open and benevolent home space. INSTRUCTION #3: RECOGNIZE AND ALLOW. 51

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What is happening right now, in your body? What invites your attention in this moment? Sounds, sights, scents—try to note the raw data points of these sensations; that’s not a truck outside, it’s a rattle, a hum, a grind. Temperature on your skin or against your nose. Pressure on your seat or in your jaw. Tightness. A nagging thought or interaction. Sense these as punctuations in your wide and friendly field of awareness. And just allow them to be. INSTRUCTION #4: INVESTIGATE. You may ask yourself: is there a particular tone associated with a feeling in your body? Is there a tightness somewhere? In your gut, jaw, chest area? Is it uncomfortable? Or maybe there is a pleasant tone, a comfortable soothing sense of presence? You are invited to sense if there is a colour or tone. Can you characterize the feeling as pleasant or unpleasant? Don’t worry about the magnitude, just the direction of it. Is it neutral, or ambivalent, or positive, or negative? Can you be with these sensations in this moment? And can you ask yourself, what is it that truly is here for me, right now? INSTRUCTION #5: NURTURE. Maybe you want to put a hand on your heart area, or your jaw or cheeks, and gently press, feeling the comfort of your touch. And pay careful attention to each impression, punctuation of sensation. Can you be okay with the experience? Can you feel like this is what it is? INSTRUCTION #6: START AGAIN. You are invited again to clear the space around your multitude of sensations and hold them gently within, with interest. Breathe. You are practicing RAIN. Recognize what is happening right now. Take a step back and allow yourself permission to rest in spaciousness, as you are, without judgement, vast and open. Just do nothing, and 52

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breathe. Can you notice each impression moving on almost as you notice it. Sit quietly for a few minutes. When you wish to do, Investigate the story you tell yourself about what has happened today. Nurture yourself with kindness and appreciation. Remember that when your attention wanders—and it always does—just start again, gently come back to your anchor. And when you’re ready, you may conclude this meditation, and come back.

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THE VALENCE PARADOX

V

alence is a mindfulness and Buddhist term denoting positive or negative affect. It is the next skillset we are going to learn. How is valence a paradox? Read on…

NEUROPHYSIOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY OF FEELING TONES Buddhists use the term Vedanā—in the Pali language, it means “feeling tone.” The tones of pleasant and unpleasant experiences are felt somatically, in the body as packets of energy. These tones touch you from the inside and can be recognized. Your affective tones, pleasant and unpleasant, are feelings of “good” or “bad” on a basic neurophysiological and psychological level, and each one has a particular quality. If tones go unnoticed or unchecked, it will naturally lead to internal tension and suffering in the form of craving, attachment, or ignorance. These three conditions are known as the three poisons in Buddhist teachings. The psychological term for affective qualities is hedonic tone, or valence. The philosophy term from the field of phenomenology is qualia, from the Latin “quale” meaning a “raw feel,” something you can describe as a “subjective or qualitative property of experience… that can be revealed or identified through introspection.” Recent 55

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research in cognitive neuroscience at the University of Ottawa points to common methodologies for investigating qualia and their valences and integrating those as scientifically-accepted information (Gouveia, 2022). The neurological process of valence happens as follows: during the first few tenths of a second of an experience, the amygdala in your brain’s limbic system determines whether a stimulus is positive, negative, or neutral. There is an initial assessment, or appraisal. One theory of affective neuroscience states that our brains gauge experience, roughly speaking, on a “Love-Hate” scale, and: Each of the primal emotional affects is evaluative—that is, has a valence that is either pleasant or aversive and signals objects or situations to approach in the case of the pleasant ones (seeking, lust, care, and play) or to avoid in the case of the aversive ones (rage, fear, and panic). Yet, experiencing a primary affect does not necessarily mean all mammals can self-reflect on their emotional experiences. However, “raw” primary affects are experienced as pleasant or aversive qualia, which alter behaviour and provide for secondary-level learning, or conditioning principles (Davis and Montag, 2019). Another way to illustrate valence: recall from chemistry class the valence of an atom is how many bonds it can make with another atom. The electroconnectivity (+/-) is part of the outermost layer of the atom’s electrons. Valence electrons need the least amount of force to be freed from the atom. This is a literal metaphor for valence in mindfulness and how, by noticing your own internal electric patterns—your e-motions—you can learn to decondition from them and let go of unhelpful things in your life.

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BEWARE THE “NEUTRAL TONE” —IT IS NOT IMPARTIAL…[WHATEVER] There is a third feeling tone—Neutral. This tone is also a form of arousal where we feel like we want to move on (recall from Class 2, emotion is from the Latin emovere). Neutral is not like an aversion, rather it feels like boredom or ambivalence, indifference or restlessness. You may notice an inclination to want to ignore something. For me, neutral tone is the drone I feel when I imagine someone putting their foot on the gas pedal when the car is in neutral. I also hear the neutral tone when Kurt Cobain sings “oh well, whatever, never mind” on Smells Like Teen Spirit. Like pleasant and unpleasant tones, the neutral tone can condition into attachment, craving, and ignorance. Anne Applebaum writes in Twilight of Democracy: the Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism that unchecked boredom is one factor leading people to experience “cultural despair” which presents as chasing a simplicity in an imagined nostalgic past (Applebaum 2020, pp. 30, 45, 75-78, 106, 117-123).

MINDFULNESS OF FEELING TONES Ordinarily, cravings are neural patterns conditioned as habits with which we become identified. Everyone goes through this. When we are caught in a craving or aversion, it becomes difficult to see reality clearly with the higher wisdom that we know and trust we’re capable of. However, taken to an extreme, cravings and attachment present as addiction and violence. Mindfulness meditation provides an opportunity to break these unwelcome habits at the ground floor of experience. The first step is to note your sensory raw experiences in the body. Step two is to note your feeling tones—pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. This is an important levelling up skill. It allows you to see and dissolve the 57

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direction of your affective inclination before it unfolds as a conditioned reaction. When you are not decentred, these tones are invisible and you may repeatedly react by manufacturing a satisfaction and wanting to control, ignore, resist, judge, or do things other than what may be right in front of you wanting attention. A mindful moment can restore in yourself a place of acceptance and loving awareness, and can show what is directly in front of you. Here are some examples of how you can try to mindfully notice some valenced affect in your body. Craving presents as a signal to desire or chase after something you feel may be rewarding, like sugar. Positive/ pleasant example: When you see your friend approaching you with a smile, your brain reacts positively and you release oxytocin and endorphins, which are pleasure chemicals that make you want to approach an object because you expect to feel that it will be rewarding. A negative craving is an aversion where we incline to avoidance or aggression. Negative experiences correspond with a signal to lower your dopamine level. When this happens, it produces feelings in the body of dissatisfaction or discontent. Negative/unpleasant example: If your friend looks sad or mad or you sense a mood coming, you may want to rectify that unpleasant feeling by eating a cookie, which will restore your dopamine levels. By recognizing these affects, you empower yourself with a wisdom to investigate deeper, plus the freedom to choose how to respond. Tones and Compassion. You may approach sensations (Class 1) and now tones (Class 3) with a gentle, friendly attending, loving intention (Class 2). When you notice a craving, tell yourself that you know you are having a conditioned habit. This does not make you a bad person—these dynamics exist in every human, “across cultures”6 —and acknowledging that is the common 6. Davis and Montag, 2019 at p.7. See also, Feldman Barret (2017) that while certain emotional patterns exist in all humans and across societies, they can greatly vary from culture to culture. 58

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humanity pillar of mindful self-compassion. After having a pause and reflecting, decide if you want to act on your craving. If you do, don’t be hard on yourself. If you are having ice cream, savour it and let it linger.

BINARIES, BIAS, AND POLARITIES, OH MY! “Belonging flourishes within this paradox: everything is connected, yet everything is experienced as separate. Although we are not one, we are not separate. And although we are not separate, we are not the same. Denying either side of this paradox leads to not belonging. The delusion of separation begats a dynamic of domination. There’s only one side—belonging.” — Sebene Selassie,

You Belong: A Call for Connection

The paradox of separation begins with our fight, flight, or freeze reaction assessing a perceived threat by way of a negative or neutral feeling tone. Recall that every human has a neurological negativity bias conditioned into our systems and DNA (Velcro for bad experiences) because of the human need to survive, plus early child experiences and later conditioning. We adapt by cleaving our psyche into a simple way to understand experiences where we see a binary and polarity, one of two directions where, after an experience, we feel an urgent need to believe that we have to choose between two seemingly contradictory things. Our tendency toward polarities and contradiction does not come out of nowhere, rather it is the result of conditioned biases that develop as neural patterns, which present as blind spots or feel like an endless spiral. Some people have testified that the patterns of

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spiral suffering look like fractals, or self-referential in design, “nonlinear chains of interdependency”.7 An illustration of people having separation paradox, in the legal system: when lawyers present options to clients to reasonably resolve a dispute, the client may correctly ask, “why should I compromise on a matter of principle?” or, “how can I cooperate with someone who is my opponent?” These are natural questions. As a dispute mediator, I know you cannot compromise without principle, and we cooperate best when there is an opposing or divergent viewpoint in the room. Lawyers know that when people dig into positions, there is an emotional component, obviously. This flows from identifying with some contradiction, producing a paradox-like belief or perspective on the matter. The more intense a stressor is that rubs up against a person’s sense of identity and belonging, the greater the stakes are perceived to be. And underneath all that is a reality and wisdom in a truth that interconnects both poles of the perceived binary.8 And if you are unable to do that, you may present with bias, namely an inclination to favour or oppose something or someone. Bias inhibits a person’s ability to impartially or clearly analyse or reflect on something. Bias happens because “people seek information that confirms beliefs, and they ignore or discount information that contradicts it,” writes labour arbitrator William Kaplan in his important work, Why Dissent Matters: (Because Some People See Things the Rest of Us Miss) (Kaplan, 2017, p. 49).9 7.

In some Indigenous traditions of knowledge, “fractal patterns operate at multiple scales across the natural and social worlds and call for a less cognitive and anthropogenic mode of responsive agency.” (Darnell, 2019, p. 233).

8. For more on paradoxes in dispute mediation, see Bernard Mayer’s book The Conflict Paradox: Seven Dilemmas at the Core of Disputes. 9. Kaplan observes that the U.S. Army’s Applied Critical Thinking Handbook alerts military personnel to be “honest in facing personal biases … The ideal critical thinker is habitually inquisitive, well-informed, trustful of reason, open-minded, flexible, fair-minded in evaluation, honest in facing personal biases, prudent in 60

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In law and the justice system, biases are bad. Biases are unacceptable expressions of pre-judgement. This is where the words prejudice and prejudicial come from. Everyone has biases, even if you value equality and fairness. This is because they exist independent of intention or awareness. Rhonda V. Magee writes and speaks extensively on how mindfulness can be used as a tool to help legal and justice professionals notice their own biases around race and identity. In The Inner Work of Racial Justice: Healing Ourselves and Transforming our Communities Through Mindfulness, Magee invites lawyers and judges to use mindfulness meditation to examine their relationship with bias and develop a “more nuanced capacity to perceive and to understand how race and racism operate in our own lives and in those of others.” Then, by reflecting on and sharing those experiences with colleagues, they can become active participants working toward “mutually healing personal and interpersonal transformation … that touches on the collective and the systemic” (Magee, 2019, p. 24). The good news—in fact, awesome news—is that anyone can subjectively explore their biases as objects of awareness by using mindfulness meditation to note their bodily sensations while asking themselves: • When do I tend to remember information that confirms my preconceptions? (confirmation bias) • How do I tend to resist information that makes me uncomfortable…do I bring up counterexamples which are less representative than are being suggested? (availability heuristic)

making judgments, willing to reconsider, clear about issues, orderly in complex matters, diligent in seeking relevant information, reasonable in the selection of criteria, focused in inquiry, and persistent in seeking results which are as precise as the subject and circumstances of inquiry permit.” (Kaplan, 2017, pp. 52-3). 61

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• Why do I tend to reject a change or an innovation that contradicts some established paradigm, prevailing attitude, or received wisdom? (Semmelweis reflex) • What makes me tend to orient to “whataboutism” or feeling like I need to call out another person as being biased? This can present as deflection, avoidance, or denial. (partisan bias) Where do you feel those in the body?10 Biases come from a disembodied sense of separation, disconnection, which is a feeling of non-belonging. Separation can lead to a non-caring toward others. You know this when you see someone not able to give another person the benefit of the doubt. That disconnection is how the othering of people happens. An illustration of separation as indicated from an unchecked neutral feeling tone is when someone finds themselves comfortable with a status quo and justifying it without awareness of their social location and privilege in that moment. By mindfully decentring from the experience, you may be able to witness the truth of a potentially harmful impact toward others that may be present in something that you support or tolerate. There are practices to notice separation in an embodied experience. It presents in your body as a sense of discomfort or dissonance when someone or something does not fit into a construct—it feels confusing, contracted, rigid. You may become frustrated by someone’s perceived inability to change or adapt to the system or feel like you are being mistreated or affronted. And with that frustration, you stay separated by thinking narratives about the other person. Your assumption is that you would somehow be different or better if you were them. This is a crutch—your behaviour or attitude toward another person is premised on your being better than them or their being inferior. A person suffering through this kind of separation

10. See also, ad hominem and tu quoque fallacies. 62

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can sometimes belittle others with derogatory or even dehumanizing language. Buddhists warn about tones that may resemble being kind or understanding toward someone, but in reality are feeling pity or sentimentality. Those are “near-enemies” of belonging. “Near enemies are states that appear similar to the desired quality but actually undermine it. Far enemies are the opposite of what we are trying to achieve. For example, a near enemy of loving-kindness is sentimentality. A far enemy of loving-kindness is ill will, the opposite of loving-kindness. Similarly, a near enemy of compassion is pity and a far enemy is cruelty” (Brown, 2021, p. 235). With respect to feelings of pity, it necessarily involves othering another person making them separate from yourself, unlike compassion, which is “shared suffering … a mutual connection with the pain and sorrow of life.” While there are similarities, pity undermines compassion and is therefore a near enemy of it (Brown, 2021, p. 124). Conditioned attitudes of othering come from a lack of self-awareness of embodied shame, and this can lead to real harm. Philosopher and legal theorist Marsha Nussbaum calls this “projective disgust.”11 An attitude of domination can arise when you feel that you need to act to protect yourself from people who frustrate you. Be aware if you feel a response in your body after you hear a justification 11. She writes: “The roots of anger, hatred, and disgust lie very deep in the structure of human life, in our ambivalent relation to our lack of control over objects and the helplessness of our own bodies. It would be naive to expect that projections of these negative emotions onto other people will not take place - although we may certainly hope to moderate their number and intensity. Throughout history, … sliminess, bad smell, stickiness, decay, foulness - have been associated with, indeed projected onto, groups by reference to whom privileged groups seek to define their superior human status.” (Nussbaum 2008, at p. 234, 347). 63

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from someone that lacks acknowledgement of an action’s oppressive impact or intent or smacks of entitlement, passiveness or indifference. You may be vulnerable to these qualities if you suspect you may suffer from cynicism or burnout. Being aware of oppression is a matter of justice and professional responsibility. One example of this in our legal system is that family mediators are required to be trained in screening for domestic violence and power imbalances. The law does not allow people to settle a legal dispute involving family rights if there is reason to believe there is coercion or the threat of harm. Intimate partner violence is very real and mostly involves male perpetrators victimizing women and transgender people, especially BIPOC women, and therefore its prevention is public policy.12

THE BRAIN IS AN “ENCHANTED LOOM” The brain is an “enchanted loom” of neural connections and our cravings are like “spells that make us think that things will be more painful or pleasurable than they will actually be” (Hanson 2020, p. 183-4). Spells are pre-scientific modes of thought arising from evolutionary survival which make the mind prone to enchantment by promises of lasting satisfaction. “With the right nudge people can be convinced to see something that isn’t there” (Kaplan, 2017, p. 50). When people “wake up” from a delusion of separation and non-belonging, they report it is like being disenchanted from a spell. When I realize I have been caught in a spell, I hear John Fogerty

12. Policy on Intimate Partner Violence and Power Imbalances, Ontario Association for Family Mediation (Feb 2022): “police statistics show that more than 95% of complaints to police about abuse are made by women against male perpetrators.” See also Violence Against Women: Myths, Facts, Controversies, University of Toronto Press, 2011. 64

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singing “I ain’t gonna take none of your puttin’ me down … I put a spell on you because you’re mine.” When you fail to disenchant, it can feel like living in an unending maze.

KAFKA’S MIRROR Have you ever been in a situation that was Kafkaesque, like there is no way out of an absurdity? I had a cat for 18 years I named Kafka, simultaneously loving him and unaware I was enthusiastically projecting my contradictions into the cat when I spoke with him. Sam Harris speaks about the real Kafka and mindfulness, in a classic moment on his Waking Up app: In his novel The Trial, Franz Kafka includes a parable titled “Before the Law” about a man who goes seeking the law and is confronted by a guard who stands before an open door. The guard assures him that the Law he seeks lies within but won't let him pass. So, the man spends the rest of his life there trying to convince the guard to let him enter. He begs him, he confronts him, he engages in small talk, he attempts to bribe him, and the guard accepts these bribes so that the man won't feel that he has left anything un-tempted. And finally, when the man is about to die, he asked the guard, “I've been here all this time, why has no one else come this way seeking the Law?” And the guard says, “no one else could have come this way since this gate was made only for you and now, I'm going to shut it.” There are many interpretations of this parable. I'm not sure what Kafka meant by it, but it has a structure that captures the nature of our predicament: there is a gatekeeper to the present moment and it's our own minds. It's our identification with each passing thought. This next thought is the gatekeeper and, yet, right 65

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now, connecting with life in the present moment stands wide open. This next thought, unrecognized, is the gatekeeper and, yet, seen for what it is you will find that you're already past him, already free of the problem, already identical to the bright and unimpeded space of consciousness.

EQUANIMITY: THE “SPACIOUS IMPARTIALITY” OF YOUR MIND The way out of the valence paradox is through conscious spaciousness. Viktor Frankel, the psychologist and Jewish Holocaust survivor who wrote Man’s Search for Meaning, has a quote widely attributed to him that is oft quoted by mindfulness practitioners: Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.13 This mind-state being described by Frankel is equanimity. This can feel like a kind of spacious impartiality where things may just be okay and going to be okay, and you can simultaneously hold and allow the full panoply of experience, including pleasant and unpleasant things. Equanimity is neither apathy nor indifference: you are warmly engaged with the world but not troubled by it. Through its

13. While this famous quote is attributed to Frankel, it does not appear in his writings and its first appearance seems to be by Stephen Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, in his foreword to the book, Prisoners of Our Thoughts: Viktor Frankl’s Principles for Discovering Meaning in Life and Work (Second Edition) by Alex Pattakos. Covey states in the foreword that he believes he read that quote in a random book in Hawaii and, “I did not note the name of the author, so I’ve never been able to give proper attribution” (Pattakos, 2010, p. vi). 66

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nonreactivity, it creates a great space for compassion, loving-kindness, and joy at the good fortune of others (Hanson, 2009, p. 86). In conversation with Sam Harris, meditation teacher and AI scientist, Nikki Mirghafori succinctly encapsulates the freedom available in equanimity. The shortcut to freedom is in this one teaching: you can have equanimity in the midst of the pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. Try a short practice. Consciously, take a step back and clear a space in your mind that holds all your contradictions and paradoxes. Note the flowing energies and colours and qualia of your tones as pleasant, unpleasant, grasping, aversion, restlessness, ill-will, boredom, envy, whatever. Now release all need to be right. Do so tenderly as you observe all experience passing through your system. Pretend you have placed these tones in a balloon, and they float above you, away. How do you feel now about letting them go, and what do you notice? Can you integrate the experience in a friendly, accepting manner? Can you sense any coherence in that?

INTENTION AND WONDER There are two useful ways to train to be equanimous: have intention and feel wonder. Valarie Kaur is a lawyer, filmmaker, activist, and mindfulness practitioner. In her book See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love (2020), she describes her Sikh faith and one of its principal tenets: “you are a part of me that I do not yet know.” She invokes that phrase as her source for wonder and reckoning with generational trauma of violence against Sikhs in the United States after 9/11. In her opening paragraph, she recalls being a child in rural California: In the beginning, there was wonder. Once, while playing in a stream, I saw a butterfly dancing over the water and put 67

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out my finger and asked it to come to me—and the butterfly perched on my finger. Back then, there was no question: the earth under me, the stars above me, the animals around me, were all part of me. And wonder was my first orientation to them all, the thing that connected me to them: You are a part of me I do not yet know (Kaur, 2020, p. 7).

PERSONAL REFLECTION When I was eight years old, in 1979 my family was on a sabbatical year in Israel. We lived on a kibbutz, a collective farm. It was founded in 1950 by communist Hungarian Holocaust survivors. One sabbath, my family went for a walk in the neighbouring Arab village of Tul Karem. There were three or four boys playing soccer, and when they saw us, one or two of them started throwing rocks and laughing. One of the rocks hit my ankle, and I started crying. My mom shouted at them in broken Hebrew, which somehow morphed into Yiddish. One of their parents came out and saw us, and she invited us to their shop. The dad, who ran the shop, gave me an ice pack for my foot. I looked up and they smiled, and I saw their kindness. He went to the back of the store and got a bottle of cola, came out, opened it, and handed it to me, again smiling. It was sweet and warm, and I relished it knowing I was not allowed to have soda pop in the morning. While drinking, I wondered: does that man get the soda for free because he owns the shop? I had no words to articulate the feeling that I knew this family was a part of me that I did not yet know. I no longer noticed the pain in my ankle, and at some point I had conciliatory eye contact with the other boy. We walked back to the kibbutz and later ate our light supper in the communal mess hall with the other families. And because it was the holiday of Hanukah that night, there was a banner at the entrance that read, “A great revolt happened here.” I learned a 68

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communist blessing over the candles, and then the older kids acted out scenes from a revolutionary polemic.14 At bedtime, my mom took me to the kinder house designated for children aged six to nine and read me some Harriet the Spy, and then left to go to her and my dad’s home one hundred meters away. I slept in my co-ed room and got to be taken care of by the surrogate mother, my metapelet Iris, who grew up on the kibbutz. Once, I used a very bad word around her and she ignored it. After we returned to Canada, I learned that Iris unfortunately lost an eye in a terrorist incident. Years later, I learned that our kibbutz, Yad Hana (“Hannah’s hand”, named after WWII Hungarian paratrooper and poet Hannah Szenes), was a refuge for Palestinian labourers during the intifada of 1986, and later a home for Jewish settlers who evacuated their homes during the disengagement of 2005. I’ve been thinking of my metapelet Iris and the Palestinian family from Tul Karem who I briefly met over 40 years ago. I have them in 14. Amir Locker-Biletzki researched their PhD dissertation in history at the University of Guelph. He interviewed people from my kibbutz back then, and reported: “Though there was no uniform protocol for the Communist ritual of Hanukkah, the blessings accompanying the lighting of the candles featured a common content and orientation. In Yad Hana the ceremony was performed in front of the congregated kibbutz members; the blessings over the candles included "a candle for freedom, which the heroic Maccabees enjoined us to fight for no matter what the cost, a candle for peace between nations, a candle for toil, a candle for fraternity between humans and between nations, a candle for the love of the homeland, a candle for the Party that lights our way, a candle for all children and a candle for our Yad Hana." According to the testimony of a former Yad Hana member, the ceremony also included the acting out of parts of Howard Fast's My Glorious Brothers by the kibbutz children. The ceremony was conducted under a banner that read "A great revolt happened here," no doubt a repudiation of the traditional slogan "A great miracle happened here." Candles were lit for the true independence of Israel, for Jewish-Arab fraternity, and in condemnation of the military government. (Locker-Biletzki, 2015, p. 149). See also: Carmit Gai, Masa Leyad-Hana (Back to Yad-Hannah). Tel Aviv: Am Oved Publishers, 1992. 69

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my thoughts from time to time, and I silently wish them kindness and to be filled with wonder. And in that, I have no contradictions. JOURNAL PRACTICE: Ask yourself what comes to mind with the word “nostalgia.” Do you feel reflective? Once upon a time, did things feel wasted, unjust, or boring, maybe dangerous, but also, were aspects of it sweeter or simpler? Still, you would not really want the past back. Whether or not that resonates, journal for 10 minutes on what comes to you when you say, “I feel nostalgic for…”15 As you meditate on your journaling, catch your feeling tones. Gift yourself an intention to a paradox—can you wonder if it is possible that nothing is impossible and all things and beliefs can be

15. A meditative footnote on nostalgia. Brené Brown (2021, p.91), describes nostalgia as a “primarily positive, context-specific bittersweet emotion that combines elements of happiness and sadness with a sense of yearning and loss.” It is “likely to be triggered by negative moods, like loneliness, and by our struggles to find meaning in our current lives.” In this way, nostalgia is a “double-edged sword, a tool for both connection and disconnection. It can be an imaginary refuge from a world we don’t understand and a dog whistle used to resist important growth in families, organizations, and the broader culture and to protect power, including white supremacy.” Anne Applebaum (2020, pp. 73-5) distinguishes between “reflective nostalgia”, i.e., remembering a time that maybe felt unjust, wasted, or boring, maybe dangerous, but also, had aspects of being a sweeter or simpler time (Ari: this is what I feel when I listen to The Suburbs, by Arcade Fire); and “restorative nostalgia,” where people dangerously slip into enchantment by “mythmakers and architects, builders of monuments and founders of nationalist political projects,” who incuriously believe in a truth without nuance, a “cartoon version of history,” which unfortunately leads to conspiracy theories, scapegoating, and sometimes genocide. See also, the role of boredom and loneliness in Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). Finally, Adrienne Matei (2017) recounts how the word nostalgia was created as a medical term in the late 1600s, “by combining the Greek words nostos (homecoming) and alga (pain). The disease’s reported symptoms included loss of appetite [and] hallucinations of the people and places you miss.” 70

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true, somehow? Can you see your dilemma not as between mutually exclusive alternatives, but rather as elements in a codependent system of reality? From these insights, notice whether you are able to be with your competing demands, respect alternative perspectives, transform tensions into ideas, and manifest a healthy emergence of confidence, generosity, graciousness, modesty, joy, insight, and equanimity.

CONCLUDING WORD This lesson ends with another quote from Viktor Frankel’s Man’s Search for Meaning. It reveals that the search ends when you recognize that every single moment has unconditioned potential to receive meaning from a vantage of spacious awareness. Frankel’s point is also a strange loop of a paradox: the meaning of life is that life has meaning? Below, Frankel describes his first days after being freed from a Nazi concentration camp, which he survived miraculously, notwithstanding his government having passed legislation declaring him retroactively subhuman and regulations ordering his and other families exterminated: One day, a few days after the liberation, I walked through the country toward the market town near the camp. There was no one to be seen for miles around; there was nothing but the wide earth and sky and the freedom of space. I stopped, looked around, and up to the sky—At that moment I had but one sentence in mind—always the same: ‘I called to God from my narrow prison and He answered me in the freedom of space’ [Psalm 118:5]. How long I sat there and repeated this sentence. And I knew that on that day, in that hour, my new life started. Step for step I progressed, until I again became a human being (Frankel, 1992, p. 96-7). 71

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his class is titled Damaged! It is sort of a Part Two to the Valence Paradox, in the sense that we learn to further sharpen the skill of investigating experiences with mindful self-awareness. Here we are trying an advanced level self-therapy technique called Focusing, designed to access and heal pain and unfinished business residing in the body. This is the second technique showcased in this course that is a mindfulness-based intervention (the first being Mindful Self-Compassion in Class 2), and this approach is similarly adapted for self-care. First, a summary of the course thus far, and then a 22-minute body scan meditation.

WHERE WE ARE IN THE COURSE We have now completed half the course, which are building blocks for an introduction to mindfulness meditation practice. We learned 73

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in Class 1 how to do basic noting of sensory experience. That’s mindfulness. In Class 2, we learned how to practice receiving experiences in a spacious container of loving awareness and self-compassion. That’s heartfulness. Class 3 was on valence and feeling tone to identify pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral tones in the body and how to hold them equanimously. We also learned about how to notice and dissolve the inclination toward attachment, bias, and craving— ABCs—residing in the body, and how those can be projected onto others. In Class 4, we learn the theory and practice of Focusing, which can be tried during the RAIN practice (recognize, allow, investigate, nurture). We are now moving into an advanced set of modules. There are mindfulness tools here for working with intense pain and fear. Please be prepared to possibly trigger post-traumatic experiences for which you may need external support, as we learn some important skills intended to help you courageously reckon with adversity, and which can lead to healing.

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his meditation practice is called Body Scan 2022, because there are 20 instructions over a period of 22 minutes. Through a body scan, we quite literally become aware of the embodiment of all our domains of experience: sensations, thoughts, Practice 6: and emotions; they all reside in your body and https://www. torontomethcan be felt as packets of passing energy. There is a odmindfulness. com/practice6 paradox implicit in the body scan: by visualizing awareness of your body parts, their shapes tend to dissolve into a cloud of sensation as soon as they are noticed. The point of this exercise is to help you decentre, or as Sam Harris says, to realize that “as a matter of direct experience, you are simply the space in which sensations, or thoughts, and anything else you can perceive, is appearing and changing in each moment.” There really is only a choice between noticing what is arising in your mind and body in each moment and not noticing, and to not notice is to live in a trance of thought-spell, which is as unreal as anything. INSTRUCTION #1: Find a comfortable posture. Check in with some breaths. Feel the sensation of being grounded, sitting, standing, or lying down. Notice the weight of your body and feeling gravity’s pull.

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INSTRUCTION #2: Taking a moment to acknowledge your place and the immediate space around you—whether it’s quiet or not. If you are inside, are you in a room or close to a wall or window? Are you near the ground, the earth, or high above in a tower, or somewhere in between? Just notice your immediate environment. Take a moment to acknowledge the land you are on, and your gratitude for how you benefit from it. Pause to acknowledge any Indigenous Peoples who lived here and inhabited this land before you, whether their descendants are still here or not, whether they migrated, or assimilated, or were displaced. Asha Frost writes, “As you acknowledge the Earth beneath your feet, feel the Spirit of the Land and all it carries, for it has witnessed lifetimes of both beauty and pain” (Frost, 2022, p. xiv). Feel whether you can notice a sense of wonder in that, and if you personally can relate or connect to complicated experiences of the land and what has transpired below your feet. INSTRUCTION #3: Bring your attention into your body. Allow yourself to surrender to the subjectiveness of embodied experience. This is felt in the body. Breath and body are the “first foundation” of mindfulness. Your body is “right at the centre of every experience of waking up.” The most immediate and direct path to presence is to remember: I am here and alive in this body, right now. INSTRUCTION #4: You are invited to bring your focus of attention to your left hand. Wherever your left hand is resting, tap your fingers; on the table, your knee, against your thumb, or just turn your palms upward and tap into the air. Feel the digits bend, the click of your knuckles, the space between your fingers. And do the same now with your right 76

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hand. Squeeze both hands into a fist, and now relax them—feel the tingle arising, or change in temperature from that, and allow your hands to soften. INSTRUCTION #5: Notice your shoulders starting on your left side. Briefly bring your left shoulder up—allow it to touch your ear—and relax. Now do the same with your right shoulder. First, bring attention to it; you have a right shoulder. Then slowly bring it up to touch you ear. And down. With your next breath, imagine you are breathing into your shoulders—maybe rotate them both forward on the inhale, and then rotate them backward on the exhale, as if your breath kinetically propels into motion the machinery in your shoulder blades and joints. INSTRUCTION #6: Allow your awareness to follow upward to your neck—imagine your breath gently massaging the back of your neck and then making a swirl as it tickles your throat region as your awareness ascends toward your face. Feel the patterns of energy and micro sensations that define your face in this moment—warmth or tingling or tension. Squint your eyes and feel those muscles activate. Notice how that makes you smile, then imagine it being received by another person who smiles back. INSTRUCTION #7: Bring your awareness around to the back of your head. Picture the back of your head as though you are standing behind yourself looking at the back of your head. See your hair or scalp from the back. It can feel odd to sense observing yourself from the back, and you may feel self-conscious. If this is uncomfortable, try to allow that with kindness. And while your awareness is behind your head, ask: 77

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where are you in all this; are you in front of the back of your head, are you behind your eyes? Look for your self, glancing on the surface. Do you have a centre of consciousness, or is that also a feeling? Is the sense of being the watcher, a witness, a sensation that can be noticed in consciousness? INSTRUCTION #8: Noticing your jaw, loosening it up. Perhaps slightly open and close your mouth, stretching your jaw muscles. Do you sometimes feel tension and stress in your jaw? With your mouth open wide, breathe into your jaw. INSTRUCTION #9: Resting your attention on the tip of your nose, breathe through your nose. Feel the cool air entering your nose, and warm air exhaling through. With your next breath, direct the air upward into your head. Imagine the next inhale as a kind of brain wash as you exhale, expunging all stress or worry. INSTRUCTION #10: Bring your attention to your ears. Become aware of the sensation of hearing. Imagine you can sense the waves of vibration carrying sound into the passageway of your ear canal, converting at the membrane of your ear drum, vibrating against the three little bones of your middle ear (the smallest bones in your body), like a tiny hammer and anvil, amplifying into the inner ear and transforming into energy by hair cells. These signals then travel along neural pathways to the auditory cortex which process and regulate the sensations. Sounds are a useful anchor or tool for mindful experiences. Spend a moment listening to the sounds in the room, the hum of machinery, a rattle outside, or people’s voices. Notice how sounds arise all on their own, and do not linger even for a moment longer 78

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than they persist. Notice the raw data points of sound, the initial approach, how it decays, sustains, and finally releases. Ask yourself if this sound is associated with your ears, as a matter of direct experience, or rather, isn’t sound merely another sensation arising in your singular unified field of consciousness. INSTRUCTION #11: Now allow your breath to fill your chest. Let your chest be open. Notice your chest from the inside-out, through your lungs. Our lungs diffuse the oxygen molecules from the air and convert them into our blood stream. Can you imagine and feel the molecular process happening through your lungs? How wonderful and awesome this is as you follow the points of oxygen through your circulatory system, until it aggregates and ejects as carbon dioxide, created by your body, all by itself, without you having to do anything. INSTRUCTION #12: Feel your heart—notice the beat, maybe you can hear it. Place a hand over your heart and press gently, kindly—give yourself some love. As mammals, we respond to calming, loving effect of touch like no other animals do. INSTRUCTION #13: Bringing your attention to your belly. Notice what you feel in your stomach; is it tight, or tense? Sit with that discomfort for a moment. We often hold deep, old pain in our gut. With your next breath, fill your upper abdomen with loving air. On the exhale, release all your stressors, allowing each molecule to be a bubble of stress that dissolves as your midsection softens with tenderness and kindness. Feel the area firm and soften with each rise and fall of your breath. Imagine that you can see out of your belly button, looking up at your head and closed eyes. Imagine watching yourself meditate from 79

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your mid-region and what that perspective looks like. Do you see how your face looks at peace and beautiful? INSTRUCTION #14: Now notice the way your internal organs move and shift, adjust into place, with each breath—your kidney, liver, pancreas, intestines— swaying like waves on a shore. Feel the rhythm that both moves within you and creates space and time to be present. You are creating this time and place, in this moment. You are this next moment. INSTRUCTION #15: Bringing your awareness down through your hips, connect to your torso—pause and breathe into your hips. This region cradles the body’s centre of gravity. INSTRUCTION #16: Feel your legs against the chair or surface, notice the weight holding you. Be grateful for the strength in your legs that has carried you. Noticing your feet, maybe they are against the floor. Every step you take is like kissing the Earth. Wiggle your toes. Feel the space between each toe. Feel the electricity in your toes from the insideout. Those currents originate in the brain. INSTRUCTION #17: Take a moment for a full body breath. With each inhale, visualize the breath entering from the top of your head, and with each exhale, imagine your breath flowing out through your feet. Try that a few times, and if you like, reverse the flow so the air enters through the soles of your feet and rises up through your entire body and then out the top of your head.

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INSTRUCTION #18: Now visualize your whole body dissolved into a cloud of energy. Feel each sensation as punctuations in your wide-open field of awareness. Each tingle, pressure, temperature change, or thought is like an impression on an infinitely large bingo card. And as you note the data points of sensation, see if you can pay attention as the shape of your body begins to fade. INSTRUCTION #19: Sit in silence, for a couple of minutes. Feel a deep knowing present in the quiet. Allow a soft curtain to shroud your body with wisdom. Rest as you are, relaxed, easy-minded, and steady. INSTRUCTION #20: When you’re ready, take a minute to conclude the meditation; stretch, yawn, open your eyes, and come back to your day, which is waiting for you with open arms.

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his lesson, Class 4, is called Damaged! The inspiration is from the title of a book by Toronto physicians Robert Maunder and Jonathan Hunter (2021) called Damaged: Childhood Trauma, Adult Illness, and the Need for a Health Care Revolution. They write about “ACE scores;” ACE stands for adverse childhood experience. Their research observed that, “disease and suffering caused by early adversity affects over sixty million American adults and about nine million Canadian adults. Childhood adversity is likely to cause adult health problems in one in three kids” (p. ix-x, 193). This fact helped me feel less alone as I reckoned with my intergenerational trauma and neuroatypical experience of being in the world.

FOCUSING ON EMOTION WITH FELT SENSE Using mindfulness meditation, you can learn to carefully dive deeply into your psyche when you feel ready to face obstacles to addressing past adversity. Mindfulness can help you stir up, observe kindly, investigate, and heal aspects of your Self that may have been buried for many years due to trauma or avoidance. One such self-care method is called Emotion Focused Mindfulness (EFM). As a therapy, EFM is called Emotion Focused Mindfulness Therapy, or EFMT. It was developed in Toronto by Bill Gayner. Emotion-focused therapies (EFTs) carry forward the work

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of the philosopher and psychologist Eugene Gendlin,16 integrating it with contemporary emotion theory and the work of Toronto psychologist Les Greenberg.17 Warning: EFMT is a mindfulness-based intervention—a clinical modality used by trained therapists. You may benefit from professional support in helping you access and manage feelings that can arise from traumatic experiences. Back to Gendlin, he discovered that some people can move beyond a verbal or conceptual understanding of their suffering while connecting with a bodily experience and, in so doing, effect a durable change in themselves. Gendlin called this approach Focusing. The essence of Focusing is to invite you to find a way to refer to a nonverbal sense of your experience with curiosity and acceptance. This is called the Felt Sense. Focusing is grounded in the knowledge that your body can generate meaning, and it parallels much of the mindfulness training already presented in this course, including the RAIN practice (recognize, allow, investigate, nurture). Focusing has a structure and process designed to probe deeper into experience, using mindfulness plus the aid of a “metaphorical symbol” that denotes an expression (Langer, 1967, p. x). Focusing can be adapted into your meditation sit using the RAIN practice, particularly as you “Investigate” your experiences (the “I” of RAIN).

16. In the 1950s and 60s, Gendlin worked with psychologist Carl Rogers. 17. Greenberg's mentor was Laura North Rice, who was also a colleague of Carl Rogers. Greenberg developed EFTs with psychologist Sue Johnson in the 1980s, and those two wrote a manual on emotion-focusing for couples. 84

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STEP #1: GROUNDING The first step of Focusing is to ground yourself in awareness in the moment. Some people call this step “GAP” (ground, aware, present). This is similar to practicing the “R” of RAIN (recognize): I am here in this moment; what is happening right now in my body. This task is also called “Touching the Earth,” described as, … shifting into mindful experiencing, coming alive to [the] body’s empowering resonance with the situation, how experiencing is a fluid synthesis co-constructed by multiple processes within us and around us in the world … characterized by an earthy, grounded, spacious, nonjudgmental friendliness that enables us to decentre from difficult thoughts and feelings, recognizing they are not direct truths about self, others and the world. This enables us to make deeper sense of emotions, to recognize and carry forward helpful emotions and to let go of unhelpful ones. (Gayner, 2019b). Practice: Pause. Feel that you are alive in your body. Breathe. Drop back and clear a space in the garden of your mind. Centre your attention and decentre your Self. Be an embodied experience in the moment.

STEP #2: FINDING This step involves searching for a vague, Felt Sense of a matter. Here, you try to drop a familiar storyline that may be associated with an experience and sense what remains. Can you simultaneously let go of a narrative and hold on to the feeling? Can you feel the feeling beneath the feeling? Finding can be tried during the RAIN practice; this is one way to mindfully practice the “A,” “I,” and “N” of RAIN (Allow → Investigate 85

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→ Nurture). Finding a vague, Felt Sense is done with friendly attending—approaching your Self with kindness, allowing and nurturing, softening and soothing. Asking yourself: What is my body holding onto? What am I believing now? What is in the way of feeling good? You may ask yourself a paradox question, such as: Can I be [X] while I sense [Y]? While doing this step, finding, it is also helpful to know that the Felt Sense is not already there, not some thing to find. Rather, we are allowing it to arise and form itself from the bits and elements of experience. A vague Felt Sense can begin to emerge when you allow yourself to experience there is “something unspoken inside me,” an aliveness. NOTE:

If at any point you are feeling overwhelmed, you can practice resourcing, titrating, and pendulating (see below).

STEP #3: FOCUSING The heart of the Focusing practice is bringing the Felt Sense into focus. One metaphor illustrating this is a telescope or camera lens bringing a thing into focus. As you allow the vague aliveness found inside of you to continue to emerge, can you begin to describe it using a word, phrase, or other vocalization that resonates in the moment? This step can also be non-verbal—a sound, colour, image, artwork, movement, dance step, gesture, or other symbol that resonates with a past experience you had and are also feeling now in the present. One pastor who tried Focusing compares it to the monastic practice of lectio divina (divine reading), where “a line or phrase or even single word in a passage of scripture reaches out to the embodied imagination of the meditator and insists look at me . . . closely.” 86

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He describes his own experience with David Whyte’s poem “Sweet Darkness,” stating that the “felt sense listening to this poem was a relieved and bracing sense of the possibility of living differently.” (McDargh, 2011, pp. 455, 462-3). In the 1983 film Flashdance, Jennifer Beals plays a welder by day and dancer at night. There is a scene where she is dancing in her warehouse apartment to the song “Maniac” by Michael Sembello. As she bounces off the floor and walls, you can sense her seeming to focus on a deep past pain, and by expressing it in dance, she liberates herself from it. Also, from that film: When you hear the music, close your eyes, feel the rhythm wrap around, take a hold of your heart: what a feeling.

STEP #4: RECEIVING FORWARD In the concluding stage, you may receive a Felt Shift. This is a process of integrating the experience with a renewed sense of understanding. You participate in the aliveness, from which emerges a new, coherent meaning. Here you may have an incremental transformation—one baby step of healing—as you acknowledge what you have been through, with gratitude and self-appreciation, and what has come of it. You may feel that this sense of received meaning inspires you to carry it forward and outward as you co-exist and co-participate in the world. You are not alone, and moreover, in carrying forward, you belong. Take this opportunity to allow yourself to feel that a sense of magic has occurred. Give yourself permission to journal for 15 minutes about the experience.

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sychologist Carl Rogers wrote: The curious paradox is that when I accept myself as I am, then I can change.

This quote describes a universal paradox of life: all living organisms must change in order to stay the same. A biophysiological expression of this paradox is that none of the cells in your body existed a decade ago; they regenerate every seven to ten years. Almost every atom in your body and brain is replaced, annually. Gendlin articulated this paradox as “letting go and holding on at the same time.” In the practice of Focusing, this is dropping the storyline, letting go of a past narrative, and simultaneously holding onto the essence of the Felt Sense. The final step in Focusing, receiving and carrying it forward in the world, is evolved from Rogers’ concept of person-centred growth through shared experience. One illustration of letting go and holding on as a shared, interpersonal experience is when two people having a meaningful conversation stop talking and, in that gap, you can feel the essence of the conversation through each other’s silent presence. Life hack: try doing this with your inner critic/protector who you know as your shadow self. Gendlin developed a philosophy based on this experience, called Philosophy of the Implicit, which is that life is a single integrated process that generates both the living thing and its environment, and 89

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that environment is reciprocally identical to our own bodies. As you live through any situation, the situation itself becomes part of the body’s own process, implicitly. Self-reference becomes self-making. Practicing the Implicit: take a moment to breathe into your chest. Be aware of how your chest expands as the air goes in, and contracts as the air goes out. And be aware too that it is not as if your chest expands first, and then the air goes in. Chest expanding and air going in are the same event. They are the same, simultaneously occurring. This theme, we exist as interactive processes with ourselves and environment, is represented in human expression, famously in Douglas Hofstadder’s Gödel Escher Bach, winner of the 1980 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction. In this book, Hofstadder was trying to illustrate the paradox of a thing creating itself through self-reference and infinite recursion, as depicted in Bach’s fugues, the artwork of M.C. Escher, and Gödel’s mathematical theory of incompleteness. How does this recursive rabbit hole relate to mindfulness and Focusing? Recall that your nonverbal symbol for bringing a felt sense into focus can manifest from visual art or music. This connection flows from the shared experience of creativity born from trauma. And because your separations and contradictions can be felt as embodied experiences, sometimes just meditating on fractals can offer insight.

NO, SHE’S NOT HARDLY ALICE Bringing Felt Sense into Focus: Metaphor of a telescope bringing something fuzzy into focus: “What a curious feeling!” said Alice. “I must be shutting up like a telescope!” And so it was indeed: she was now only ten inches high. 90

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“Curiouser and curiouser!” cried Alice. “Now I’m opening out like the largest telescope that ever was! Good-bye, feet!” (for when she looked down at her feet, they seemed to be almost out of sight, they were getting so far off). “I hardly know, sir, just at present – at least I know who I WAS when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then… being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing… I almost wish I hadn’t gone down that rabbit-hole–and yet–and yet–it’s rather curious, you know, this sort of life! I do wonder what can have happened to me!” (Carroll, 1865) See also, Sarah Polley (2022), “Alice, Collapsing” in Run Toward the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory, in which the author recalls her experience as a 15-year-old actor playing the role of Alice on the stage in Stratford, Ontario. Polley speaks in kafkaeque terms. In reading this, I felt the resilience in her quest to find meaning from the ordeal, even as the confusion was palpable: Every one of Alice's attempts to make sense of her new, irrational world, to find anything approximating normalcy, or to simply get home is thwarted by mean-spirited creatures with their own irrational systems of logic. In any given hour I [too] was growing and shrinking, growing and shrinking, like Alice drinking the various potions in Wonderland. Something clanged in me, dissonant, an echoing gong of an inner knowing; something felt off, something felt strange. I pushed it away. I had gone through the looking glass of my own life. (Polley, 2022, p. 8, 23-7)

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ometimes anxiety, panic, or emotional pain will arise when meditating, or at seemingly random times in the day. This is natural and probably inevitable. Often, it is possible to feel equanimous and just be with the unpleasantness within your window of tolerance. Other times, many times, it is not. When difficult and traumatic experiences arise, there are mindfulness tools available designed to help you move through the fear.

Practice 7: https://www. torontomethodmindfulness. com/practice7

Resourcing: Try to move your attention away from the strong sensation to a pleasant or neutral area in the body or externally. Feeling your feet on the ground or arms on the table or soothing your body with touch. Recalling an image, person, message, or memory that offers a sense of ease and safety. In Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankel describes how he kept his sense of hope alive during his darkest moments in the concentration camp: My mind clung to my wife's image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to 93

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rise. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of humankind is through love and in love. (Frankel, 1992, p. 48-9) Titrating and Pendulating: These are steps designed to shift your attention back and forth between different “domains” of stimuli to support a sense of stability. Doing so allows you to be in contact with a little bit of the felt intensity at a time, and integrate the experience in a stable, mindful way. To titrate, set up a neutral or pleasant resource anchor, breathe, or open your eyes or pay attention to an object like a tree or desk. To pendulate, take your attention back and forth between the painful sensation and your chosen resource anchor. Gradually explore, using mindfulness, the unpleasant sensations in the painful domain. By pendulating between them, you may notice it creates more space and ease. One method that I use with a painful memory is to toggle between the first-person perspective (my direct, painful experience) and the third-person view (like watching the scene in a movie). If done mindfully and stably, these “narrative impulses” can be shaped and reshaped such that the experience is rendered from “chaos into coherence.”18

18. “First-person memories tend to elicit stronger emotional reactions at the time of recall, and by taking a third-person perspective, we can distance ourselves from the painful experience.” This is because: Remembering an event from a first-person perspective puts you in an experiential frame of mind. It helps you recall how you felt in the moment. Remembering an event from a third-person perspective puts you in a more narrative frame of mind. It helps you contextualize your experience by bringing it in line with your prior beliefs and fitting it into a coherent story. 94

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Other tools for decentring during fear and pain include manifesting spaciousness. When you feel contracted, like a small glass of water with a large tablespoon of salt—a very salty experience — imagine instead that your body is the size of all of the Great Lakes, the largest freshwater reserve in the world, in which even hundreds of kilos of salt are indetectable. Also, try disidentifying from pain using language and noting. Instead of thinking, “I am anxious,” or “my back hurts,” try noting out loud, “anxiousness arising,” or “there is aching.” Remember this equation: suffering = pain x resistance, or as Baruch Spinoza said, “when you understand the causes of pain, it ceases to be suffering, that is, it ceases to be pain.”19

PERSONAL REFLECTION I have tried Focusing and have an experience I can share of what integration and coherence feels like. When I was maybe five years old, my dad kept me at the dinner table because I wouldn’t eat the fish that was our dinner that night. So I sat there for what had to be over an hour after everyone left. I had to stay there and didn’t eat the fish, until my mom came in and took what felt like pity on me, and she fed it to the dog while my dad wasn’t paying attention. Years Some people have cautioned against undertaking a so-called “mental time travel” experience that I describe here, as a third-person memory, unless you are able to have the meta-awareness that it is an exercise and “you know the memory is distorted, because you could not possibly have been looking at yourself at the time.” This can sometimes be difficult during a dissociation and, “In this way, third-person memories are sort of terrifying.” (Stern, 2022) 19. For more resources on trauma and mindfulness, see David Treleaven (2018), Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness: Practices for Safe Healing. Also, as mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, mindfulness meditation can sometimes trigger reliving past experiences. In these circumstances, professional support may be recommended (Goldberg et al, 2022). 95

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later, when I asked my mom about what became known in Kaplan family lore as the Incident of the Fish at the Dinner Table (and the Dog Who Ate It), she felt bad and told me that was how they understood parenting techniques recommended in the 1970s, “according to Dr. Spock.” Not a huge incident, overall, but I must have held inside some adverse experience of shame that I was a bad person for not eating the fish. Using Focusing, I visualized going back to that episode and had a brief compassionate conversation with my younger self. I honestly felt a subtle experience shift in my body that can’t be put into words. It felt like soft blips cascading through me, like I was momentarily back in time and repaired something; a butterfly effect carried forward to the present like I changed the past and my present self was reconstituted as if that one small incident never happened. There was no epiphany, just a subtle sense of the essence of the sadness of what was together with, yeah okay, I get it, it’s fine.

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he lesson builds upon the prior classes with some additional skillsets that you may not learn in an introductory course on mindfulness meditation practice. Here we look at what Buddhists call non-self or emptiness. This state is a form of decentring that involves having curiosity and being open-minded. Sometimes described as spiritual or mystical, nondual experiences can evoke feelings of universal interdependence, interconnectedness, impermanence, and unity. And that’s mostly a good thing.

WHERE WE ARE IN THE COURSE We have now completed two thirds of the course.

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We learned in Class 1 how to concentrate on the breath plus do basic noting of sensory experience. That’s mindfulness. In Class 2, we practiced receiving experiences in a spacious container of loving awareness and self-compassion. That’s heartfulness. My teachers repeatedly emphasize the combined approach to these practices, the two wings of mindfulness and compassion where you can both rest in spacious awareness and feel the presence of love. The RAIN practice (recognize, allow, investigate, nurture) encapsulates this integrated heart-mind approach to meditation. Class 3 teaches an important intermediate-level skill. We learned how to identify positive, negative, and neutral tones in the body, recognize them as pleasant and unpleasant sensations, and hold them equanimously with kindness. We also learned how to notice and dissolve our various inclinations that link us into ABCs (attachments, bias, and cravings). These reside in the body as uncomfortable paradoxes. The theory and practices in Classes 1 to 3 are the building blocks of what you would learn in an introductory course in classical mindfulness meditation. We follow, generally, the approach of Insight meditation, or Vipassana, according to the Buddhist Theravada tradition. Class 2 integrates Metta, the Pali term for kindness or loving awareness. Class 3 teaches Vedanā, meaning feeling tone. By adopting these practices, you can begin to develop a pathoriented, gradual mindful method to psychological wellness. Class 4 is an advanced class concerned with trauma-aware practice that offers mindfulness tools for working with intense pain and fear. We do a deeper dive down a rabbit hole of self-therapy known as Focusing. Here we look for a felt sense in your body—particularly non-verbal—that correlates to suffering indicative of unacknowledged emotion. Focusing can help you access unfinished business from adverse childhood experience in a way you may otherwise bypass in ordinary meditation. You may supplement your mindfulness work with words, gestures, or visual images to symbolize your 98

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expression. You can find coherence in the embodied experience and then mindfully integrate it into your psyche, transforming a painful memory and carrying it forward with new meaning. Focusing can be interfaced onto the schema of the RAIN practice, which you can practice yourself.

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his meditation is called Four Elements (Earth, Water, Fire, Air). It is adapted from a classic Buddhist meditation found in the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, a discourse on the foundations of mindfulness. Here you are invited to Practice 8: visualize your body’s constituent elements and https://www. torontomethlayers of reality as the same compositional process odmindfulness. com/practice8 as the rest of the universe. These practices aid in decentring and non-identification. By observing the immediate presence of elements in our bodies and sensing each one viscerally, we can evoke an implicit sense of interconnectedness and impermanence. By deconstructing our bodies and selves into elemental parts, we can recognize that all things are temporarily constructed, including moments, and at the same time feel manifest with our environment. Earth: This represents your body; bones, limbs, flesh, and muscle, no different than the ground on the earth, sand, trees, rocks, and mountains. Water: This is all the fluids produced in your body. Around 65% of our body is water, the same percentage that covers the earth’s surface, more or less. 101

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Fire: This is your metabolism and digestive system, like how the sun allows for photosynthesis. Heat becomes life. Air: Breath is air, filling your lungs and cavities, exiting the body and returning to nature. INSTRUCTION #1: Find a comfortable posture on your chair or cushion. Find a place for your hands on your lap, or sides, or on a surface. Have your eyes closed, or open, eyelids resting easy. Feel the sensation of being grounded in your place. Notice the weight of your body. Feel gravity’s pull into your seat. Feel your breath moving in and out of your body, all by itself. Be relaxed and easy-minded. INSTRUCTION #2: Take a moment to acknowledge your place and immediate space around you, whether it’s quiet or not. Notice your immediate environment, the land you are inhabiting in this moment, how you benefit from it, acknowledging those who lived here before you. INSTRUCTION #3: Bring your attention back into your body. Feel your sensations from the inside-out. Focus awareness to where you experience contact, such as your feet on the floor, clothes on your skin, or body in the chair. INSTRUCTION #4: Allow yourself to feel the element of solid form inside yourself. Without thinking too hard about what this means, try to examine where and how you feel solidity. This might be the structure of your skeleton, the chair you’re sitting on, any places of tension in your muscles or the weight being lifted as they relax. With these physical

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sensations, you know that you’re here in this moment and connected to this solid earth. INSTRUCTION #5: We can experience our body as not separate from the earth we live on. Feel yourself as the earth; not on the earth, rather an expression of the earth: hard, heavy, soft, rough, smooth, light. Your flesh and bones are proof that we eat and digest from the earth and all of our body is from the earth. Try biting your teeth, tapping them together and feeling their hardness, feeling that sensation resonate throughout your bones. Molecules, compounds, and every physical structure has density and mass. The Earth is simultaneously inside of you and outside your physical body, and reciprocally identical. All the same. INSTRUCTION #6: Turn now to the Water element—Moisture. Some people associate the moisture of fluids in the body as a feminine experience, like being in and part of a womb. Also bring to mind clouds, creeks, rain drops, and steam. When you drink water, it becomes you. And you also become part of the hydrological cycle, through sweat, tears, saliva, blood, fluids, lakes, and rivers. Think of yourself as part of the bio-geo-chemical cycle involving the continuous movement of water with the Earth. Always present, flowing, and changing form with the seasons. The exact same water element is part of you and not separate from outside of you. Flowing, cohesion like the bonding of hydrogen and oxygen to produce water molecules. INSTRUCTION #7: Sense the water element: In your body, you may feel pulsing. That is water pulsing through vast systems in the body. Feel it pulsing in your fingers, your feet, the heart, and in every cell of your living body. Feeling water in the eyes as they move in the sockets, feeling liquid 103

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in the mouth. Water inside of us, the same water that is outside of us. All the same. Like the earth, your body without moisture is like the dryness of your bones—the earth with no water is merely dust, which we also are, and solid earth as water is ice. INSTRUCTION #8: Transitioning to the element of Fire, or heat. Sensing the fire element, you may feel heat and coolness. Feeling warmth in your torso or chest, and coolness in your hands or feet or nose. This temperature is the fire element in your body. Its energy comes from the Sun, from the big bang, heat, light, warming our bodies. The Sun allows for photosynthesis, energy converted into food for leaves and plants; directly warming and feeding the earth, giving us nourishment from the food we eat. We eat food and the grass eats the sun. Your body is fire and energy, metabolism and digestion. Visualize your digestion as a metaphor for a campfire. If you add newspaper, a large roar of flame and heat arises, and quickly dissipates. This is like having sugar rush your body. Carbohydrates burn quickly, causing blood sugar level changes and associated mood, fatigue. For an even campfire, use a slow burning log, a balanced fuel source. This is like how our bodies digest proteins and healthy fats, whole grains and vegetables. INSTRUCTION #9: Heat is a source for life, and it can also represent danger and destruction. Like a moth enchanted by a flame, or Icarus flying too close to the sun. Notice if you have a craving or attachment when consuming more than you need. Have you ever noticed that by watching a flame, gazing into the fire, as a matter of direct experience, you become almost identical to the flame itself, changing, dancing, flickering? 104

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Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame. Blessed is the flame that burns in the secret fastness of the heart. —Hannah Szenes, c. 1942 Be kind to yourself as you recognize the compounding of what may be unhealthily consumed by your body for the planet. Be grateful for that which sustains you and those you love. INSTRUCTION #10: Being aware of the Air or Wind element. Being mindful of the air, space is filled with air. Your body cavities are filled with air. We sometimes take for granted the beautiful air that breathes our bodies, it’s rhythm alive inside us. Sensing the air, feel the sensation of the breath. Air coming in through the nostrils, filling the lungs and lifting the chest. Where can you feel the air in your breath? Supporting, pushing. We breathe it in, the same oxygen exhaled from trees passes through our veins. Become the air, breathe with the forest. You may look for places in the body where you can feel space empty but for air— your nostrils, mouth, and ears can offer insight into the air element. INSTRUCTION #11: Feel the interacting of air with the earth, the ebb and flow of air and body, expanding the body, moving the joints, connecting your bones, shifting your internal organs, and then the air leaving and relaxing the body. Rest back and ride the air wave; be carried like a particle on an infinite wave, realizing there’s nothing at all that you need to do.

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INSTRUCTION #12: In this last minute of the meditation, see if you can sense the interaction of all four elements inside and outside your body. The body needs the Earth for food and shelter, we need Water for hydration, bathing; we use Fire to keep warm, cook our food, and power our devices, and of course the Wind delivers us oxygen and energy gifted by a tree’s exhale. And whenever you are ready, we can end the meditation, and if your eyes are closed, you may open them.

FURTHER WORD ON THE FOUR ELEMENTS The Four Elements meditation is one of my favourite meditations to be guided through as a participant. I learned this practice on a six-day silent retreat that I took for my teacher training program. The meditation invites you to take a step back from the trance of thought, feel less attached to emotion, challenges and possessions, and shamelessly facilitate positive mind states for connection and ease. When I practice Four Elements, I imagine the peeling away of layers of substance that comprise mind and body. I ask myself, “which element do I most feel right now? Am I solid, liquid, flame, essence? All or none of the above?”

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his lesson, Class 5, is called Nonduality and Other Holies. Nonduality posits that every person’s sense of identity and self-identity is unreal and conditioned, and this can be empirically tested and experienced. Using mindfulness meditation, the feeling that there is a boundary between yourself, as a separate autonomous individual, and the outside world metabolizes into a flow of experience. As Sam Harris says, “there’s no one standing on the riverbank watching the contents of consciousness flow by. There’s only the river.” That is a holy cow, maybe. Nonduality is at the centre of Sam Harris’ book and app, Waking Up. It is the orientation and philosophy of his meditation ecosystem. Sam argues, pretty convincingly: The feeling that we call ‘I’ is an illusion. There is no discrete self or ego living like a Minotaur in the labyrinth of the brain … Subjectively speaking, the only thing that actually exists is consciousness and its contents. The word nondual is a literal translation of the Sanskrit term advaita, meaning “not two.” It implies that there is no duality of subjects and objects, namely no separate you and everything else that is not you. Nondualism is found in numerous world religions: Buddhism, particularly the Tibetan Dzogchen tradition (to which Sam Harris credits his own waking up), North American Indigenous traditions, 107

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Hinduism, Zen, my own Jewish tradition,20 and many more, plus in numerous philosophies and systems of ethical living. Sam Harris makes an empirical claim: if you “look closely enough at your own mind in the present moment, you will discover that the self is an illusion. However one looks for it, this self is nowhere to be found.” Sam invites you to test this theory directly, and yet, you can’t spend too much time on it because your non-self exists purely at the surface of experience. When you try to find a “there, there,” you can have a brief glimpse that there is no homunculus inside your head “driving the bus.”

HOW DOES NONDUALITY HELP ALLEVIATE SUFFERING? Before describing some nondual practices, a word on nonduality and psychological suffering. Recall that a goal of mindfulness meditation (if you are goal-intended) is to learn to decondition from your identification with thoughts and emotions, recognizing that they, as sensations, are impermanent and pass away. In psychology terms, a nondual experience is simply extreme decentring for a brief moment. Presented here are meditation tasks that build mindfulness skills in curiosity and decentring (literally, the two subscales of the Toronto Mindfulness Scale). That is part of a recipe for mental wellbeing. These are clinically proven building blocks for disidentifying from experience, to dispel ourselves from believing negative thoughts and emotions and acting on ABCs (attachments, biases, and cravings). 20. Kabbalah is the centuries-old system of Jewish nonduality, practiced today by Hasidim and others: see also, Jay Michaelson (2009), Everything Is God: The Radical Path of Nondual Judaism. 108

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You may believe that non-self is nonsense, which is perfectly fine. Most people probably will agree that both you and they exist as separate people. However, practicing non-self and nonduality is not intended to make you believe that you are not an independent real person in the physical world. Obviously, psychological well-being requires a healthy sense of self. And if you have any doubt regarding your identity, look at your tax bill. We know that neurologically, the sense of self is conditioned as a pattern in the brain, because your mind and brain are integrated processes. The default mode network in the brain produces a large part of your sense of self. You can brush your teeth while planning out your day, like an automaton, because that’s a familiar conditioned process in your brain. Mirror neurons, the sense you have of another person—what allows you to empathize—also emerges from the same circuitry in the brain that supports your sense of an independent self. And this mirroring effect works both ways, between yourself and people around you: This co-regulation has measurable effects. Changes in one person’s body often prompt changes in another person’s body, whether the two are romantically involved, just friends, or strangers meeting for the first time. When you’re with someone you care about, your breathing can synchronize, as can the beating of your hearts, whether you’re in casual conversation or a heated argument. (Feldman Barrett 2020) I am reminded of an African saying, “I am because you are and because you are, I am.” This is known as “Ubuntu” and it is literally true because of mirror neurons. I learned Ubuntu from some wise practitioners and teachers, like Sebene Selassie, Rhonda Magee, and Ruth King. I also recall the Sikh expression, “you are a part of me I 109

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do not yet know,” which I learned from Valarie Kaur’s book, See No Stranger. I commit to heart the Hebrew imperative to love my neighbour and welcome the stranger because we too were once strangers in a strange land. I recite Maya Angelou’s Human Family, “We are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike.” The expressions I have just recited sometimes move in me a feeling of dissolving my sense of an independent self and replacing that with an interconnection with others and a propulsion to do something. When I walk on the land near my home, I acknowledge with humility the Indigenous peoples who also live here and their history and trauma, and in that shared Oneness, I am moved to action to reckon with my own role causing harm and benefitting from harm caused to others. Philosopher Jay Garfield says that the illusion of an independent self functions as a kind of foundation for “moral egoism,” which is corrosive because it perpetuates reactive attitudes like blame and anger and inhibits meaningful relationships. He explains: When we understand our interdependence with those around us rather than the idea that we are independent entities that just happened to encounter one another, then we understand the role that others have in constituting and making possible who we are and that can allow an attitude of competition to be replaced by an attitude of gratitude, which itself can be extraordinarily liberating (Waking Up App). Nonduality presents as paradox because it means that things are both inseparable and not the same. This is the same thing as the insufferable valence paradox. And like every paradox, when you try to look closely at it, it disappears. Similarly, this is how the “I” (investigate) step in the RAIN practice operates and how we let go of difficult attachments.

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So it is possible to lean into the mysteries of nondual practices: visualize what it could possibly look like as if you don’t really exist as you may perceive. It can feel liberating.

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here are various meditation techniques to help you glimpse the illusion of self and meaningfully integrate the experience into your life. Sam Harris teaches that as a matter of training, you can directly recognize first-hand that “the feeling that we call ‘I’ is itself the product of thought. … Having an ego is what it feels like to be thinking without knowing that you are thinking.” Recognizing that is healthy and can lead to insight, in any moment. One way that I practice distancing from unpleasant thoughts is to presume (to pretend that there is evidence of something, in a strict sense) that I am not causing my thoughts, however strange that may seem. You, too, can test this, conceptually and as a matter of direct experience. Say, “I am not causing my thoughts.” Tell yourself, “What I call me is merely the sum compounding of my experiences.” There is something logical in being open to this idea even as what seems impossible is possible. Try saying, “I am as I am.” Nondual practices and the experiences they evoke are truly and entirely subjective. You are not required to prove anything. All you need is to allow yourself to be curious and open-minded with the intent of self-care and wellbeing.

STOP THINKING! Try this: For the next 10 seconds, stop thinking. Just pause, clear your head, and give yourself permission to entirely cease thought. 113

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One…two…eight…nine…ten. That was obviously impossible, right? A person cannot truthfully say they stopped thinking. Thinking is automatic for people. It is an involuntary process continuously unfolding in the brain. Try another experiment: what is the first TV show or movie that comes to mind? Once you’ve found it, ask yourself: did you prethink, “okay, which one do I choose now,” or did something spontaneously pop into your head? If you didn’t pre-think those thoughts, who did? Who are you? What are you?

OFF WITH THEIR HEADS! Sam Harris promotes the practice of “having no head”, which he learned from Douglas Harding’s work and his booklet, “On Having No Head.” One series in his app is called Headless Way, produced by meditation teacher Richard Lang. We tried a headless practice during Body Scan 2022, when you were invited to bring your locus of awareness to behind your head. You were guided to imagine looking at the back of your head and asked whether you could find “yourself ” in front of the back of your head, behind your eyes. One Headless practice involves looking through your field of vision as if it is just an occurrence of seeing is happening and being recognized for all that simply is. Because I wear glasses, I can adjust my gaze in my field of vision using the blurred outline of the lens frame as a tool for headless awareness. Make your gaze very wide to capture your entire field of vision. Imagine your peripheral view as if you were in a camera’s “pano mode.”

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Headless practices are ways to experience first-hand the feeling that there is no subject “I” aiming a beam of attention at a so-called object of awareness. There is only one state of being. As linguistic metaphor, this would be like saying there is no subject-verb-object, only verb, specifically, being. To remember this, I recall the title of a book I enjoyed in my 20s, God Is a Verb by David A. Cooper. I can also quickly recall headless awareness by visualizing Helena Bonham Carter ordering, “Off with their heads!” in her role as the Red Queen in Tim Burton’s film, Alice in Wonderland. (You can find it on YouTube).

PASSENGER PRACTICES Another nondual practice is looking out into the world as a moving passenger such that, instead of believing that you are an object moving through physical space, try visualizing the scene like you are a stationary subject and all of space and all things are moving through you, entering through your visual field like a vacuum and disappearing. This can be practiced while walking or as a passenger in a vehicle. It also works well when standing on a moving escalator. Another way to do this practice, without moving, is to focus your gaze on any object and visualize all space as two dimensional, and that there is no physical distance between your seeing and the object itself. An additional feature to that practice is to toggle back to 3D and imagine that you can see waves of light shimmering between yourself and the stationary object, even as you know those particles are imperceptible to the human eye.

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EDDIES IN THE STREAM, THAT IS WHAT WE ARE Rick Hanson explains nonduality with reference to how the neurons in our brains move in patterns. He uses the metaphor of “eddies in the stream”: Broadly defined, an eddy is a patterning of something that is stable for a time and then disburses. A cloud is an eddy of the atmosphere, an argument is an eddy in a relationship, and a thought is an eddy in the stream of consciousness. Alan Watts (20th Century philosopher) describes this natural order in the universe and in our minds as wiggling. That’s how we each get through life: Nature is wiggly. Everything wiggles: the outlines of the hills, the shapes of the trees, the way the wind brushes the grass, the clouds, tracts of streams. It all wiggles. And for some reason or other, we find wiggly things very difficult to keep track of. Common to all these wiggly patterns in the physical world is that they develop into systems that are inherently impermanent, compounded, and interdependent—and this includes the conditions that create our sense of “me.” “Eddies of matter and eddies of mind have the same nature. They are impermanent and compounded, and they arise and pass away” (Hanson 2020, p. 230). So each of us is a patterning of waves and particles over a lifetime, from the atomic level to the cellular, to your family, to society, to history and the universe: all things pattern for a temporary stable period of time and then disburse like entropy.21 21. Legal observers see this pattern unfold in real time, in the wiggly progress and unravelling of a woman’s right to privacy and bodily autonomy in America. After being stable for half a century, even constitutional laws are revealed to be merely 116

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s mentioned, nonduality invites a spiritual element; many world religions accommodate this dimension. That is why this chapter is titled “and other holies.” Sam Harris is an atheist and says that every time he “cuts through the illusion of self,” it is a “spiritual” experience. Spiritual experiences can only arise in a present moment. At the front edge of now emerges a field of effectively unconditioned possibility. To me, that’s what spiritual is: the unconditioned possibility manifesting at the slowest edge of a moment presenting a feeling that the impossible, in reality, is also possible. I sometimes think that the phrase suspending disbelief is the other side of the same coin as dispelling belief. And by dispel, I mean courageously uncasting oneself from any spells which contain you in a trance of thought. Alan Watts, again: “The only way to handle danger is to face it. If you start getting frightened of it, then you make it worse because you project onto it all kinds of bogies and threats which don’t exist

compounded by past efforts, interdependent on current events, and remarkably impermanent: see the unwinding from Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973) to Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992) through, most recently, Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, No. 19-1392, 597 U.S. ___ (2022). 117

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in it at all. Whenever you meet a ghost, don’t run away. When confronted with a ghost, walk straight into it. And it will disappear” (Waking Up app). It seems to me that nonduality is a gateway to allow us to believe in magic, as a matter of subjective and shared experience. That is human nature since time immemorial, and demonstrably not irrational. One of my teachers, Vince Horn, teaches a mindfulness meditation class with his partner, Emily Horn, called “Heart Magic.” He pointed me to the equation, “Consciousness plus intention produces magic,” from Daniel Ingram’s opus, Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book (Revised and Expanded Edition, 2018).

GAMES WITHOUT FRONTIERS What is there if we do not “exist”? In short, awareness, experience, and intention. What is the benefit of accepting this hypothesis? In Buddhism, when you experience non-self, that is an awakening into a stream of awareness. Sam Harris recalls that when he realized the truth of the illusion of self, he described that as the most important and liberating thing he has ever learned. As for me, I’ll let you know when I get there. There are clearly benefits to being open to a non-self or emptiness perspective. First, there is a ready-made self-compassionate lens for forgiving yourself, including for harms you’ve caused to others. Knowing that you are not driving the bus facilitates taking actual responsibility for your behaviour and relieves the undue burden of unnecessary suffering. Second, letting go of the hold on “I” allows you to gently release attachment and possessiveness (“that is mine”), as well as conceit (“I

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am better than you”). That is the same smacking of superiority that leads to contempt and harming of others. Third, non-self allows you to experience a sense of common humanity in all beings, interpersonally, interconnected—indeed all things—and grateful for what you have on whichever land you may occupy. It also invites you to reflect again on the need to hold onto resentments and anger for harms done to you. Fourth, approaching mortality becomes less difficult to face. Understanding impermanence naturally leads to a sense of timelessness that transcends our own being. As meditation teacher Joan Tollifson states: The true understanding of impermanence is that there is no impermanence because the flux is so thoroughgoing that nothing ever actually forms in any kind of persisting way to be impermanent and that almost sort of makes the self with a capital S, and that of emptiness, the same in some fundamental way (Waking Up App). All this said, there are important limits and warnings with this lesson. For one, although some people may live very happy lives as “extreme nondualists”22, other people can understandably misunderstand the concept and purpose of “emptiness” and wrongly equate “I don’t exist” with nihilistic tendencies. That could lead to devastating self-harm, and careless or even dangerous behaviour around others. Intervention and help may be advisable. Further, there is the risk of spiritual bypass, where the excitement of existential liberation can lead to complacency or avoidance of unfinished psychological business from traumatic experience or

22. For one example of this, listen to Sam Harris’ conversation with Jim Newman on Waking Up App. 119

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childhood adversity. For this, we need heartful self-compassion and probably also therapy.

PERSONAL REFLECTION This lesson ends with some quantum physics and how I discovered its metaphoric connection to mindfulness meditation, in particular the notion of unconditioned possibility existing at the edge of each present moment. I’m also going to share my generational trauma. In the past year, I read two books on quantum physics. First, Stephen Hawking’s last book, with Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design, and then Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution by physicist Carlo Rovelli. These scientists write that modern physics supports the existence of a sort-of multiverse, with no single history. That view is called “M-theory,” where every possible version of the universe exists simultaneously in each moment. This “spectrum of possibilities” is called a “quantum superposition.” Rovelli explains, “A quantum superposition is when two contradictory properties are, in a certain sense, present together. An object could be here but at the same time elsewhere. In a sense it is in both places” (Rovelli, 2021, p. 45-6). That in and of itself blew my mind. Yet there’s more: Quantum physics tells us that no matter how thorough our observation of the present, the (unobserved) past, like the future, is indefinite. [This] means that observations you make on a system in the present affect its past (Hawking & Mlodinow, 2010, p. 84). When I read this, I half-seriously told my adult children that Everything Everywhere All at Once could probably be a true story. Two of them, engineers, playfully mocked me; lawyers don’t know physics like they do. 120

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And yet, I have pondered (not alone) about whether and how quantum theory applies to our consciousness, neurological patterns, and also time travel. We already know that what happens in your mind can change your brain, and that mindfulness can help build neural tissues. And there are quantum mechanics at play in the matter of those tissues. Regarding physics and consciousness, I appreciate that the science is not there yet. Indeed, one of Rovelli’s messages in Helgoland was to disentangle quantum theory from the questions raised by consciousness (and by extension, philosophy and spirituality). He argues that (and please excuse the triple negative here) the best way to not get confused about quantum mechanics is not by “referring to our consciousness, but to not referring to it.” (Rovelli, 2022).23 For me, I shamelessly refer to the magic of quantum mechanics to find meaning in my conscious experiences. As I told in the Incident of the Fish at the Dinner Table (and the Dog Who Ate It), when I tried Focusing, I connected with that experience of shame from childhood. Through non-verbal metaphor, I made a repair which cascaded as blips through my body carried forward to the present. To me, that was not strictly “mental time travel.” As a matter of direct first-person experience, I imagined that the wave particles from the present and past universe interacted and irreducibly collapsed in a single moment. What remained of the experience was

23. Rovelli has expressed his feelings about cross-fertilizing physics and consciousness/spiritual: “It is with sadness that every so often I spend a few hours on the Internet, reading or listening to the mountain of stupidity dressed up with the word ‘quantum.’ Quantum medicine; holistic quantum theories of every kind; mystical quantum spiritualism and so on and on, in an almost unbelievable parade of quantum nonsense … The world is sufficiently complex to account for the beauty of Bach's music and the good vibrations of our deepest spiritual life, without the need to resort to the strangeness of quanta” (Rovelli, 2021, pp. 159-61). 121

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like a butterfly effect, as if the incident did not even happen to the me living in this universe. The experience was oddly similar to how Rovelli describes quantum entanglement, namely: the phenomenon by which two distant objects maintain a kind of weird connection, as if they continued to speak to each other from afar. They remain, as we say, “entangled,” linked together. Like two lovers who can guess each other’s thoughts when apart. It has been well verified in laboratories (Rovelli, 2021, pp. 89-90).

My mother was born in a refugee camp in 1946, in Landsberg am Lech, Germany. Her parents were from Czestochowa, Poland.24 My grandparents married before the war and miraculously survived, even as their parents and 70% of their siblings and cousins were murdered by their government and countrymen. Somehow, my grandparents reunited at the Landsberg Displaced Persons Camp. In mid-1945, nine months before my mom was born, the camp’s commandant reported that there were no children between the ages of one and five living in the camp. He further reported: With few exceptions, the people of the camp themselves appear demoralized beyond hope of rehabilitation. They appear to be beaten both spiritually and physically, with no hopes or incentives for the future.25 24. Czestochowa is also the place of origin of the family of Art Spiegelman, who won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize (Special Award in Letters) for his Holocaust graphic novel, Maus. 25. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/landsberg-displaced-persons-camp 122

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Fast forward to 1971, in Toronto. When I was born, it was barely a quarter century since my family and a third of the world’s Jewish population were legislated into genocide with the apparent support or acquiescence of millions of Europeans. Now in my early 50s, I am one of the oldest persons living with third generation (3g) Holocaust trauma. There are hundreds of thousands of us, from generation x, “born in or on the edges of the 1970s [affected] by their grandparents’ encounters with Nazism, and by their own Holocaust-related family histories of war, immigration, and survival” (Aarons, 2017, p. 4). Known as the “hinge generation,” we are the last to have heard the stories of survival directly from their source, namely our grandparents, even as we navigate a re-created past and fill inexplicable gaps using inexact, approximate maps, and broken narrative (Aarons, 2017, p. 4, 69). As Toronto writer Alison Pick discloses in her aptly titled novel, Far To Go, we have spent our lives reconstructing family events from “only a fraction of the story” (Pick, 2010, p. 85).

In 1980 I went to Sunday Hebrew school in the Toronto suburb of North York. As the holiday of liberation approached, Passover, my teacher shared an allegorical rendition of the tale of the Four Sons recounted in the Haggadah. In context, the teacher was a teenaged survivor of the Holocaust, and told us this parable while in his 50s: Children, as you know, there are four sons mentioned in the story of Passover: one who is wise, one who is wicked, one who is simple, and one who does not know to ask a question. The wise son is the generation of the Holocaust. They were righteous in their ways, kept the Torah, and were murdered like lambs to the slaughter.

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The wicked generation are the children of those survivors. They shunned tradition and honoured neither their parents’ suffering nor the memory of our martyrs. You, children, are like the simple son who ask simply, “what is this?” You are simple because your wicked parents have sent you here to Sunday school instead of to cheder (full time Jewish day school). Your children will be like the fourth son, who does not even know how to ask a question. I have thought about this rendition of the parable a lot over the decades. The meaning has evolved in time. Initially, at age nine, I understood the teacher to be saying that he believed my parents were bad people, that I was ignorant, and my future children would be illiterate. I remember feeling defensive and protective of my mother, who at the time was in her 30s and beginning a decade stint as a single mom with a high school degree raising her family on an annual salary barely above the poverty line. With respect to the teacher calling my generation stupid, I recall feeling not anger, rather sympathy. I knew he was a Holocaust survivor and, by then, I had direct experience of the suffering of my loving grandparents and heard bits and pieces of story regarding some of the unimaginable horrors of their respective experiences during the War, such as my bubbie’s 12 year old cousin in Poland who had a pacifier in his mouth when he was shot by the Nazis because he happened to be in a grocery store buying bread when the authorities came in to arrest the shopkeeper. Knowing that this teacher was younger than my grandparents, and yet of that “silent generation,” I pretty much shrugged at his take on the Four Sons. I have never reheard that allegorical take on Passover.

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In After Such Knowledge: Memory, History and the Legacy of the Holocaust, Eva Hoffman writes that “the deep effects of catastrophe … continue to reverberate unto the third generation.” This is because conditions were created “for fraught self-reckoning and anxious expression, an anxiety born from their awareness of their woefully incomplete knowledge and their likely transgression, a fear of intrusion and fraudulent appropriation” (Aarons, 2017, pp. 6, 147). Over the past quarter century, numerous novels have been written that have as their subject the Holocaust from a third-generation perspective. Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated tells the moving story of a young adult in search of their grandfather’s past.26 These narratives bear witness to: anxiously motivated patterns of attachment and pursuit, narrative journeys, both imagined and real—both physical and psychic—back to the point of traumatic origin … There is a very distinct sense among the writing of the third generation that time is running out … Unlike Lot’s wife, the third generation runs the risk of turning into pillars of salt if they do not look back (Aarons, 2017, pp. 6-7, 11). As I learn more about myself and reflect on the common experiences reported by other 3g people, which are similar to mine, I find my mindfulness meditation practice to be indispensable for my mental health and wellbeing. As I mentioned, I pretty much grew up without knowing the embodied qualities of anxiety. My first episode was after the 2018 Tree of Life Synagogue attack in Pittsburgh, where Jewish

26. Other novels that fall into this genre include Julie Orringer’s The Invisible Bridge, Nava Semel’s And the Rat Laughed, Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love and Great House, Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay, Rachel Kadish’s From a Sealed Room, and Sara Houghteling’s Pictures at an Exhibition. 125

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parishioners were attacked during prayers and 11 of them shot dead by a man with a gun who echoed a conspiracy theory uttered a few days earlier by the then-U.S. President blaming “globalists” for supporting refugee immigrants. Through mindfulness, I now know how to get through these episodes. I try to dispassionately observe the anxious patterns of energy passing through me and dispel. Using Focusing, I imagine the quantum physics of my experience and the wavicles of embodied matter momentarily entangling with those of my ancestors, speaking words of comfort to each other from afar. I resource myself by visualizing my wife’s luminous smile, as Viktor Frankel did. As I close this reflection, the longest in the Handbook, I want to share a truth of what is most dear and tender to me about my generation’s “affective access” to our experiences. The third generation understands the Holocaust “as an indirect part of the narrative, one balanced by other, also important histories.” We live with “negotiating the Holocaust as a parallel event to other, more contemporary, tragedies.” When we say, “never again,” we imply “both a Jewish and a universal impact,” and “an obligation to the future,” to turn the “history of the Holocaust into a measure of the world we live in now … situating it in a space of emotional proximity that allows and even demands ethical responses.” In short, we are on a “reverse journey—from present to severed past and from New World to Old” (Aarons, 2017, p. 11, 12, 35, 36, 37, 65). Personally, I take comfort that so many other people with similar experiences to mine share these values and virtues. I believe this is why I connect with Valarie Kaur’s story of Sikh generational trauma and how to push through grief with open eyes and hearts and which can be reimagined and transformed. When I read her compassionate mention of the Tree of Life shooting alongside the chilling retelling of the Sikh gurdwara shooting on August 5, 2012, in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, I immediately felt a sense of shared humanity identical to the Ubuntu saying, I am because you are and because you are, I am. 126

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I believe that sharing my ongoing reckoning with identity and meaning in history and family fits with the nondual theme of Class 5. This is real human trauma, and: Symptomatic of such traumatic displacement is a kind of psychic breakdown of the distinction of self and other … a recurring pattern of identity formation, of affectively imagining oneself in others, others in oneself (Aarons, 2017, p. 24). These days when I think back to the teacher involved in what I come to call the Incident of the Telling of the Parable of the Four Sons (And their Generations), what comes to mind is, firstly, deep compassion for myself and the teacher. Regarding him, my heart now melts as I remember how he referred to the first son—himself and his generation—in the third person. I imagine how separated he must have felt as he walked through the rest of his life, like Mr. Duffy. Second, I feel a lightness of being even in the nostalgia of being there. I am reminded of Viktor Frankel’s imperative to try to find laughter in the face of unbearable absurdity, since “humour is another of the soul’s weapons in the fight for self-preservation.” (Frankel, 1992, p. 54). When you “lose yourself in the moment,” being especially vulnerable alongside someone you like and trust, you can sometimes truly recognize that consciousness exists prior to self. When we experience our unconditioned nature, deconditioned, preconditioned, prior to conditioning, unconditionally, a greater consciousness can be observed that is universal, open, clear, spacious, radiant, mysterious, and lovingly aware. It makes me think of the “bright and hollow sky” visualized by Iggy Pop in “The Passenger” and the message that everything is made of you and me.

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SUDDENLY PURE To sense the ebb and flow of the tides is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be. —Rachel Carson, Under the Sea Wind

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his final class is titled Suddenly Pure. In it, we learn the theory and practice of natural awareness, a universal method of meditation that is closely aligned with the nondual experience of non-self (Class 5). We also learn the difference between so-called “gradual” and “sudden” approaches to mindful wellness and present some maps and schemas which are available and that you can also create for yourself to aid in practice, as you move forward in your life and establish your own, maybe regular, and maybe habitual, mindfulness meditation practice. 129

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WHERE WE ARE IN THE COURSE This is the final lesson of Toronto Method Mindfulness. To summarize this course in a chart: CLASS

TITLE

THEME

ARC

LEVEL

1

Seeds

Sensation

Mind

Beginner

2

Festival

Emotion

Heart

Beginner

3

Valence

Paradox

Body

Intermediate

4

Damage

Trauma

Child

Advanced

5

Holies

Wonder

Identity

Universal

6

Purities

Nature

Eternity

Universal

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his meditation is called trizone. Here we bring into awareness three embodied centres modeled around the mind, heart region, and lower body and gut. I learned these three aspects from a meditation teacher in California named Adyashanti. By meditating on these three zones of awareness—head, heart, and body—you are invited to feel some essential qualities of consciousness:

Practice 9: https://www. torontomethodmindfulness. com/practice9

• The mind: open, clear, bright, spacious • The heart: radiant, connected, present, warm, friendly, benevolent • The body (belly/torso): deep, calm, mysterious, quiet, wonderous, timeless As you contemplate awareness around the trizone regions, it can help decentre from thoughts, emotion, and sensations and dissolve for a moment your sense of attachment to a sense of self. INSTRUCTION #1: Find a comfortable posture on your chair or cushion. Find a place for your hands. Rest your eyes. Feel grounded in your place. Notice the weight of your body. Feel your breath expanding your body and releasing, all by itself. 131

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INSTRUCTION #2: Take a moment to acknowledge your place and space around you. Notice your immediate environment, the land you are inhabiting in this moment, how you benefit from it, acknowledging those who lived here before you and may also still be here. INSTRUCTION #3: Bring your attention to the head region, not inside the head but imagining the space around the outside and above your head. Visualize your mind as a wide-open dimension, a clear and expansive space, like the sky—luminous and bright. Take a moment to notice any sensations you feel in your body, as in the Six Sense Noting practice (Class 1). Just noting whatever arises in awareness: hearing, seeing, touching, breathing, coolness, vibration, humming, pressure, temperature, just noting to yourself the sensation or experience with a word or phrase. Allow the image of your body to dissolve. Hold an awareness of your whole sphere of consciousness as an infinitely large, twodimensional sheet on a bright open field, reflective, luminous. Every experience is a point on the plane, a punctuation of light. Imagine this plane above your head, like in the sky. And every point of sensation just arises, records itself on the moving plane, scrolling past above your head, like clouds. A point of light, glimmering, which releases as soon as it is noticed. Denote each experience and how it eventually dims and passes through. This is your mind—your life—spacious, open, clear, bright, whole, being and flowing. INSTRUCTION #4: Knowing that when your mind is busy, distracted, working—and whatever you may be believing in the moment, you may sometimes feel constricted, contracted—gently draw awareness to that, to the 132

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narrows, kindly, approaching, welcoming that tightness. And may you be answered from the open space of awareness. Here and present with an awakened mind, you may always return, knowing the goodness that resides within your core and extends outward and around you. This is your awareness of the mind, and your sensations are expanding and contracting like your lungs, organically, automatically. INSTRUCTION #5: Notice the qualities of your mind. Adyashanti says that when we’re aware of the mind, of mindfulness, “what we're looking at here is our own true nature, who we really are, what we really are.” Being unidentified with and unattached to the contents of your mind— being seen, and known, and passing through, like patterns in a stream. This is your bright and spacious impartiality, where pleasant and unpleasant co-exist and become known. Say to yourself, May I know I am good. INSTRUCTION #6: Speaking now from the heart, invite your awareness to your chest area. Imagine your heart region in and around the chest. Visualize ultralight beams of sun rays warming your heart-centre, bringing you alive. Feel that you are pulsing as a beating heart, with oxygen and life. If you like, place your hands over your heart or cover the chest region. Gently press and feel the comfort of the touch, the pressure, like being held or cradled by a friend. Imagine that you can feel a quality of loving presence and radiant awareness. Relaxed. Some people describe the chest region, when we bring awareness and attention to this zone, as evoking a different quality of existence than of the mind. Whereas the mind presents as open, vast, and luminous, the heart zone has a more intimate quality of awareness, 133

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of connectedness, radiance, presence, lovingness, the heart is concerned with existence, unity, completeness. This is the “awakened heart,” which feels like an intimacy with all of existence. INSTRUCTION #8: Feeling the radiance emanating from your chest, let its warmth carry you, receiving presence, a sense of benevolence, here and now. The heart is your source of trust, of friendliness, kindness, trusting yourself that you are loved and may feel loved and lovable. Trust your curiosity, connection, and creativity. Sit with that for a moment. Say to yourself, May I feel I am loved. INSTRUCTION #9: Bring your attention deeper into your belly, breathe down into your body, your lower belly. Feel a sense of “groundness,” or foundation, beneath you. Like you are touching the earth. Imagine this region as an inner sanctum, non-conceptual, part of the mystery and cosmic body you inhabit. Here in your belly, you can sense a deep quiet, non-verbal knowing. You may glimpse what is unconditioned and possible, yet to be and already is. Here you can access a deeper wonder, that is empty of thoughts and emotions, not pushing them away, rather a reorienting of your awareness resting in a deeper region of your belly, one without noise or storyline. Contained here is a knowledge with no words, an unknowing knowing. Nonconceptual, mysterious, accepting, intuitive. INSTRUCTION #10: Visualize yourself near the bottom of a dark, quiet ocean, with bubbles of awareness breathing into your lower belly. Know that the waves or storms of emotion that move along the surface of the ocean 134

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are at a distance, while down below it is just deeply calm, restful, mysterious, timeless, eternal. Sometimes, meditating from the lower region can evoke a reactive instinct, like the brain stem responsible for automated survival processes. When your sense of self dissolves, this can sometimes generate fear, or disillusionment. If this happens, use your breath to breathe fully in and out of the belly, as an anchor to restabilize. And if that still presents as fear or anxiety, you may titrate and shift attention to your radiant heart zone or luminous mind region. When you feel stable again, feel the comfort of resting in the quiet, dark, calm space, full of your own wonder and mystery. This letting yourself go at a deepest core, this root of being, is your awareness of body and ground. Say to yourself, May my day be filled with wonder. INSTRUCTION #11: In this last minute of the meditation, see if you can visualize awareness as a vertical beam, that connects your head, heart, and belly. You may use your breath and imagine as a visual metaphor a straight line from the back of your throat through your esophagus or larynx down to your lower belly, channelling a single field of awareness inside you. As you breathe, imagine a flow of energy moving along the vertical beam from your bright and clear and open mind and head area, your zone of conscious, wise awareness, through your radiant warm and present heart zone, down deep into your lower belly, your well of wonder and timeless un-knowing, unconscious awareness. INSTRUCTION #12: Whenever you are ready, you may end the meditation sit, and if your eyes are closed, you may open them and return to the physical world.

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MAPS AND SCHEMAS AS PRACTICE TOOLS Here in Canada, spring comes late. I take a sip of tea. Stoke the fire. Smile. We navigate in an uncertain sea of colours and have at our disposal good maps with which to orient ourselves. But between our mental maps and reality there is the same distance as between the charts of sailors and the fury of the waves crashing against the cliffs, where the gulls hover and cry. That fragile web, our mental organization, is little more than a clumsy tool for navigating through the infinite mysteries. —Carlo Rovelli,

Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution

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ur mindfulness meditation knowledge base includes a robust number of maps and schemas as ways to help you organize your practice of navigating emotions and sensations and the mysteries of the nature of mind. These maps can be especially useful when you are on your own and not listening to a guided sit or when you are caught up in a moment and your day begins to feel overwhelming. Acronyms and mnemonics can help you orient toward mindful experience, with easy to remember steps. In this course, we have learned the steps of RAIN (recognize, allow, investigate, nurture) and GAP (ground, aware, present). I also like using STOP—stop where you are, take a breath, observe your sensations, emotions, and thoughts, and then proceed with your day in a way that supports yourself. Similar to STOP is SOLAR: stop, observe, let it be, and return to your activity. 137

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Some people like the APPLE technique: Acknowledge your feelings; Pause and Pull back (centre then decentre); Let it be and then Explore your reflections on the experience. I am also grateful for the meta-acronym GRASS, which stands for GAP, RAIN, APPLE, STOP, and SOLAR. In addition to the steps of GRASS, there is another good acronym to know: TIES. When you feel caught up, distracted, or just tied in a knot, remember to observe your TIES: thoughts, images, emotions, and sensations. Check in on your family ties with kindness and allow them to be known and then pass. I like TIES because it includes all Six Senses (seeing, hearing, thinking, touching/feeling, tasting, smelling), which is every object of awareness that can be experienced in consciousness during any of the steps in GRASS. One monster mnemonic to help you remember all the previous ones: GRASS TIES. Even shorter, the next time you crave a G&T (gin and tonic), instead order yourself a Grass Tie. Other kinds of meditation maps visually represent territory. The trizone practice is one such map. There we contemplate three regions of the body within which to explore the terrain of consciousness. Sometimes when I meditate on the trizone, it reminds me of Plato’s tripartite soul consisting of reason (logos), located in the head; spirit (thymos), located in the chest; and appetite (eros), located in the stomach. Other times, I map Plato onto the evolutionary systems of the brain that we can see in a fist: the cerebral cortex (fingertips) and its neomammalian wisdom, the paleomammalian emotional heartcentre (thumb), and the mysterious and wonderous reptilian brain stem (wrist). I then meditate on this triad of triads.27 There are many body-oriented mindfulness maps, including:

27. While the Trizone metaphor is helpful as a mindfulness tool, current research challenges the neuroscience of that model: see “You Have One Brain (Not Three)” (Feldman Barrett, 2020). 138

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The “subtle body” map system of chakras (focal points) and nadis (meridians) found in Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Taoism within which the flow of breath (prana, or ki) is directed. We noted this in the trizone meditation during the final instruction minute in which we visualized awareness as a vertical beam connecting your head, heart, and body from the back of the throat down to the belly.28

(Michaelson, 2007)

The Kabbalah map containing ten “sephirot” (emanations, or attributes), grouped in three triads: (1) mind (keter/ crown, hochma/wisdom, bina/understanding); (2) heartcentre (hesed/lovingkindness, gevurah/strength or judgement) and tiferet/harmony or beauty); and (3) body (hod/ splendor, wonder, inspiration), netzach/eternity, yesod/foundation), plus the final, tenth “sefira” at the bottom, known as malchut/kingdom. Sometimes when I meditate, I visualize myself as Turtle Island, the Indigenous representation of North America. Doing so is a powerful way for me to decentre from self, particularly from possessive concepts such as property, entitlement, and other attributes of attachment. I recall my social location and how I benefit daily as a beneficiary in a system of colonial settlement and displacement. I recall the beauty of the Great Lakes region, where I live, 28. The subtle body model has been cross-referenced on modern maps of the central nervous system for purpose of providing a “user friendly embodied, interoceptive neurofeedback aid” (Loizzo, 2016). 139

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and reflect on my social responsibility to uphold the values of the Dish with One Spoon Treaty, that we are all custodians invited to share the territory, striving to avoid conflict and domination in the spirit of peace, friendship, and respect. “When we draw lines between provinces and between territories, we have to acknowledge that those lines are being drawn over other ways of seeing this landmass that we call Turtle Island,” Ry Moran, Founding Director, National Centre for Truth Attribution: unknown origin. and Reconciliation, Manitoba. Reproduced from @LakotaMan1 (Twitter) of the Ogala Lakota First Nation (South Dakota).

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his final lesson is on the mindfulness method known as natural awareness. The premise of natural awareness is that your awareness, your consciousness, is always present just waiting for you to recognize it, and that can be a source of great joy. There is an “intrinsic freedom in consciousness” in that it is always suddenly available to you. All you need to do is Be. Here. Now. and do nothing. This method is also known as the “direct approach,” or “effortless” mindfulness. Natural awareness is regarded as distinct from the so-called “gradual” approach to meditation, which is goal-oriented and effortbased. The metaphor associated with this path is of climbing a mountain to reach the top. Sam Harris is critical of what he calls a “gradualism” approach in classical mindfulness meditation, in which he considers the stated goals to be inherently contradictory, confusing, and dualistic (there is a “you” and there is a mountain to climb). This is why he centres nondual practices so prominently in his method: The self is already an illusion, and that truth can be glimpsed directly, at the mountain’s base or anywhere else along the path. One can then return to this insight, again and again thereby arriving at the goal in each moment of actual practice (Harris, 2014, p. 126).

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A good resource on natural awareness is The Little Book of Being: Practices and Guidance for Uncovering Your Natural Awareness by Diana Winston (2019). She teaches a method which she describes as the “spectrum of awareness”, summarized as follows: • Focused awareness: at one end of the spectrum is concentration, like when you are focusing attention on an anchor, like concentrating on the breath. Anything can be an anchor for the purpose of practicing focused awareness, for example, an itch on your elbow, a dot in a circle, letters on a page, the hum of the furnace, or a parked car outside your window. As long as your attention is focused on an object in your awareness, that’s focussed awareness. This practice stabilizes your mind, builds neural tissue, and takes some effort. When the mind wanders, just notice that, and gently come back to the anchor, the focused awareness. • Flexible Awareness: in the middle of the spectrum is where you loosen up from an anchor and allow your attention to touch whatever you happen to notice. Allow something to grab your attention, stay with that new object of focus, and allow your curiosity to explore or investigate what is around the attachment to the new object. When your investigation no longer maintains your attention, move to another one. For example, if you are looking out the window and focused on a stationary car, notice when your attention is captured by a person walking by, or a tree swaying in the wind, or a mailbox. In between, and in no particular order, return to your breath or other anchor. • Natural awareness: at the other end of the spectrum is where you fully completely take in the whole scene out the window all at once, without fixing on any particular object. Here you take in every experience and sensation in a relaxed, spacious, open, and impartial way, without judgement. This is effortless, objectless; literally, doing nothing. A water metaphor: If flexible awareness is like being a scuba diver observing the 142

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different array of fish and plant life below the surface, natural awareness is when you experience yourself as the whole ocean.

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here are many types of “glimpse practices,” which you can do at any time during your day as soon as you remember to access recall awareness. They can also be integrated in an intentional meditation sit. We learned several of them in this course, in Class 5 the nondual practices of stop thinking, off with your head, and the passenger. In The Little Book of Being, Diana Winston collects dozens of them for you to mindfully “marinate” in. Two additional ones include: • Do Nothing. One of my favourite online meditation activities is the “do nothing project” with Jeff Warren. From his home in Toronto, Jeff broadcasts a weekly “do nothing” sit where you can meditate while literally doing nothing with thousands of other people, live, from around the world. To me, this is the essence of natural awareness combined with community. • The Journey is the Destination. This is a seven-minute walking practice developed by Dawn Mauricio (2020), a Montreal-based meditation teacher who was also my mentor in my teacher training program. Over the past two years, I met with Dawn and my peer group. This meditation is found in Dawn’s book, Mindfulness Meditation for Beginners: 50 Meditations to Practice Awareness, Acceptance, and Peace. To practice, create a pathway of 15 to 20 steps, along which you walk back and forth mindfully, feeling the sensation of each step. This allows you to “get out of the mind-set of ‘going’ somewhere.” Try fast walking when you feel agitated or sleepy, or walking slowly when the mind is calm and alert. 145

PRACTICE: NATURAL AWARENESS INSTRUCTION #1: FOCUSED AWARENESS Bring your attention to your breathing, focusing attention on it as an object of awareness. This can help you stabilize and bring some clarity to your mind, releasing it of discursive thoughts. You may silently count as you breathe, or say “in” (when you inhale) and “out” (on the exhale). When attention wanders, which it will, okay—come back to your anchor.

Practice 10: https://www. torontomethodmindfulness. com/practice10

INSTRUCTION #2: FLEXIBLE AWARENESS As you continue with your breath, allow your awareness to note your immediate sensations. Is there something that you notice in particular is grabbing your attention? When something pulls you away from the breath, be curious as to what that is—attend to it, kindly, gently. Is there something that has you thinking about your plans for the day? If so, what are you feeling as it arises? Is there a sensation in your body—tightness or a pressure, or a tingle, sounds in the room, hum of the ventilation. Is there an emotion, shifting through? If so, feel that. Pay attention to what draws your awareness, with curiosity. Notice that as you pay attention to a thought or emotion, or sensation, it brings on its half-life, and naturally lets go, like a balloon

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floating away. When this object no longer holds your attention, come back to your breathing, your anchor and primary focus. INSTRUCTION #3: NATUR AL AWARENESS If you feel comfortable, let go of your breathing anchor and allow your consciousness to be wide open. Allow your field of vision to be very wide and spacious, whether your lids are open or closed. Allow every sensation to be known, all at once, as if you are simply the space in which all contents of consciousness appear and let go. Let whatever is happening in your body and mind happen, in no order, without controlling them or doing anything. Observe as a dispassionate witness each moment’s ebb and flow as if you are a passenger in the front seat of the continuous unfolding of the big bang. Allow this naturally arising spectacle of consciousness to feel joyous. As you sit in spacious nothingness and everythingness, allow your awareness to expand beyond your present locus. Imagine you are floating above your place like a balloon. Can you hear the sounds at the edge of your neighbourhood? Two kilometres away…ten kilometres? Tap into what is there. Take a glimpse of the vast, spacious, connecting wide-open space. INSTRUCTION #4: RETURN TO ANCHOR In the last minute of the sit, bring your awareness back to your breathing or other anchor. Notice the quality of any residual energy in your body. And whenever you are ready, end the meditation.

PERSONAL REFLECTION Natural awareness was not emphasized in my mindfulness meditation training. Both Sam Harris and Diana Winston have expressed their frustrations on long retreats that stressed striving-based meditation. 148

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Personally, I have a different experience in learning mindfulness meditation, both when I was an early practitioner and in the rigor of my training as a certified teacher. For one, the way I have been taught has been mostly stripped of doctrinal or dogmatic features. Second, most of my guided and group practice have been online. The availability of meditation apps has changed the playing field on which to learn and practice mindfulness meditation, including for day-long or multi-day retreats. At the beginning of my training, I attended a deeply meaningful six-day silent retreat, online, while recluse in a house on the mountainside at Tremblant, Quebec. For me, to decide between “gradual versus natural” awareness, or “effort-based versus effortless” meditation, is the wrong question. In my method, I strive for baby steps of healing, through regular practice and compassionate gentle effort. I find that labels like “gradualism” mean less to me than how the various practices animate my progress. I agree with Diana Winston that “classical mindfulness meditation and natural awareness practices go hand in hand. They complement and shape each other.” Like her and many others, I integrate both. I suppose that I do not necessarily buy into the idea that there is a dichotomy between a gradual and direct approach, though I understand and respect why some people look at it that way, especially given their own lived experiences. The way I combine the approaches is as follows: first, my most direct and immediate path to spacious awareness is when I remember “I am here,”29 followed immediately by a non-dual practice or glimpse

29. Often I will say this phrase to myself in Hebrew, hineni, which literally means “here I am” and is often translated as “I am ready” or “I am present.” Hineni appears in the Torah when Abraham is called upon to sacrifice his son, Isaac (Gen 22:1, 7, 11), when Jacob is called to in his dreams (Gen 31:11, 46:2), when Joseph is called upon to meet his brothers (Gen 37:13), when Moses is called for at the burning bush (Ex. 3:4), and when the prophet Samuel is called to his son (3:4-6). Leonard Cohen sings “Hineni, I'm ready, my Lord” in his swan song, “You Want It Darker” in the same year that Jonathan Safran Foer published his novel, Here I Am (2016). 149

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practice. I have discovered that it is a lot easier to access spacious awareness very quickly when I conceptually presume a nondual mindset. This is the crossover, bridge, where conceptual thinking leads directly to mindful experience. Often I am then primed to sit and marinate in embodied awareness experience for a period. But that is not the whole story. Throughout this Handbook, I describe my method of intentionally integrating clinical mindfulness-based interventions into my experiences. To be clear, without mindful self-compassion and emotion focused mindfulness, I know that I would perpetually bypass my deepest buried pain. I have discovered that to heal takes a lot of effort, as well as therapy. I take baby steps into wellness on a lifelong path with a pressure-free knowledge that there is no mountaintop, nor even any mountain to climb.

CORE VALUES As we conclude this course, I want to share my core values that I discovered while taking the Mindful Self-Compassion program in 2021. Developing one’s own core values is a central project of MSC. May You Know

You Are Good

May You Feel

You Are Loved

May Your Day

Fill with Wonder

I say these phrases to myself usually daily, especially when I feel anxious. I also sometimes incorporate them into a trizone practice, since it elegantly maps onto the three regions of mind, heart, and body, as well as the Hebrew tradition of loving with “all your heart, all your being, and all your doing” (Deut. 6:5). I silently direct these phrases toward someone who I love and care for, or to a friend or 150

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neutral person in my life. I also rotate the phrases between first-person “I,” second-person “you,” and third-person “they.” Sometimes I carefully wish these phrases upon those with whom I have a complicated or difficult relationship. I sometimes feel better afterward, but not always. And that’s okay, in a moment.

CONCLUDING WORD But there is a dawn of wonder and surprise in our souls, when the things that surround us suddenly slip off, and their strangeness opens like a gap that no words can fill and all power and beauty are straws in the fire of pure vision. —Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, Moral Grandeur Having purified the great delusion, the heart’s darkness, the radiant light of the unobscured sun continually rises. —Dudjom Lingpa Rinpoche, meditation teacher from the Tibetan Dzogchen tradition. And in that moment, there were she and I and the pleasure of pure being. We were together, separate, joyful, and connected, and nothing was amiss. —Diana Winston, The Little Book of Being: Practices and Guidance for Uncovering Your Natural Awareness Purify the colours Purify my mind And spread the ashes of the colours Over this heart of mine —Arcade Fire, “Neighbourhood #1” from Funeral

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REFERENCES

Aarons, V., & Berger, A. L. (2017). Third-Generation Holocaust Representation: Trauma, History, and Memory. Northwestern University Press. Applebaum, A. (2020). Twilight of Democracy: the Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism. Penguin Random House Canada. Brach, T. (2003). Radical Acceptance: Embracing your Life with the Heart of a Buddha. Bantam Books. Brach, T. (2019). Radical Compassion: Learning to Love Yourself and Your World with the Practice of Rain. Viking. Brown, B. (2021). Atlas of the heart: Mapping meaningful connection the language of human experience. Random House. Darnell, R. (2019). “Reconciliation, Resurgence, and Revitalization: Collaborative Research Protocols with Contemporary First Nations Communities,” in Asch, M et al (eds), Resurgence and Reconciliation (pp. 229–244). University of Toronto Press. Davis KL. and Montag C. (2019). Selected Principles of Pankseppian Affective Neuroscience. Front. Neurosci. 12:1025.

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Feldman Barrett, L. (2017). How emotions are made: the secret life of the brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Feldman Barrett, L. (2020). Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Frankl, Viktor E. (1992). Man's search for meaning: an introduction to logotherapy, Fourth Edition. Beacon Press. Frost, A. (2022). You Are Medicine: 13 Moons of Indigenous Wisdom, Ancestral Connection, and Animal Spirit Guidance. Hay House. Gai, C. (1992). Masa Leyad-Ḥana (Back to Yad-Hannah). Am Oved Publishers. Gayner, B. (2019a). Emotion-focused mindfulness therapy. PersonCentered & Experiential Psychotherapies, 18(1), 98–120. Gayner, B. (2019b) Touching the Earth: Exploring a New, Secular SelfHelp Mindfulness Group Approach. Secular Buddhist Network. https://secularbuddhistnetwork.org/touching-the-earth-exploring-a-new-secular-self-help-mindfulness-group-approach/. Gendlin, E. T., Parker, R. (Foreword). (2018). A process model. Northwestern University Press. Goldberg, S. B., Lam, S. U., Britton, W. B., & Davidson, R. J. (2022). Prevalence of meditation-related adverse effects in a population-based sample in the United States. Psychotherapy Research, 32(3), 291–305. Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional intelligence (25th anniversary ed.). Bantam Books. Gouveia, S. (2022). Philosophy and Neuroscience: a Methodological Analysis. Palgrave Macmillan, p. 233.

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Hanson, R. & Mendius, R. (2009). Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love & Wisdom. New Harbinger Publications, Inc. Hanson, R. (2020). Neurodharma: New Science, Ancient Wisdom, and Seven Practices of the Highest Happiness. Harmony Books. Harris, S. (2014). Waking up : a guide to spirituality without religion (First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition.). Simon & Schuster. Hawking, S. W., & Mlodinow, L. (2010). The grand design. Bantam. Ingram, D. (2018). Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book (Revised and Expanded Edition). Aeon. Joyce, J. (1914). Dubliners. G. Richards. Kaplan, A. (1985). Jewish Meditation: A Practical Guide. Schocken. Kaplan, W. (2017). Why dissent matters: because some people see things the rest of us miss. McGill-Queen’s University. Kaur, V. (2020). See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love. OneWorld/Random House. King, R. (2018). Mindful of race: transforming racism from the inside out. Sounds True. Langer, S. K. K. (1967). Mind; an essay on human feeling. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. Lau, M. A., Bishop, S. R., Segal, Z. V., Buis, T., Anderson, N. D., Carlson, L., Devins, G. (2006). The Toronto Mindfulness Scale: Development and validation. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 62(12), 1445–1467.

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Locker-Biletzki, A. (2015). Judaism and communism: Hanukkah, Passover, and the Jewish Communists in Mandate Palestine and Israel, 1919–1965. Journal of Israeli History, 34:2, 141-158. Loizzo, J.L. (2016). “The subtle body: an interoceptive map of central nervous system function and meditative mind-brain-body integration”, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. 1373 (1): 78–95. Magee, R. V. (2019). The inner work of racial justice : healing ourselves and transforming our communities through mindfulness. TarcherPerigee. Matei, A. “Nostalgia’s Unexpected Etymology Explains Why It Can Feel So Painful” Quartz, Oct 22 2017, https://qz.com/1108120/ nostalgias-unexpected-etymology-explains-why-it-can-feel-sopainful Maunder, M., & Hunter, M. (2021). Damaged : Childhood Trauma, Adult Illness, and the Need for a Health Care Revolution. University of Toronto Press. Mauricio, D. (2020). Mindfulness Meditation for Beginners: 50 Meditations to Practice Awareness, Acceptance, and Peace. Rockridge Press. McDargh, J. (2011). Imagining the Real: The Art of Poetry and the Art of Pastoral Attending. Pastoral Psychology, 60(3), 451–465. Michaelson, J. (2009). Everything is God : the radical path of nondual Judaism (1st ed.). Trumpeter. Neff, K. and Germer, C. (2018). The Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook: A Proven Way to Accept Yourself, Build Inner Strength, and Thrive. Guilford Press.

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Nussbaum, M.C. (2008). Upheavals of thought: the intelligence of emotions. Cambridge University Press. Pattakos, A. (2010). Prisoners of Our Thoughts: Viktor Frankl’s Principles for Discovering Meaning in Life and Work (Second Edition). Berrett-Koehler Pick, A. (2010). Far to go. Anansi. Polley, S. (2022). Run towards the danger: confrontations with a body of memory. Hamish Hamilton Canada. Rovelli, C., Segre, E., & Carnell, S. (2021). Helgoland : making sense of the quantum revolution (First North American edition.; E. Segre & S. Carnell, Trans.). Riverhead Books. Science and Wisdom Live (2022, February 9). What is Consciousness? - Carlo Rovelli debates Buddhist monk Geshe Namdak. [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/DG5JYC-4sAU (9 Feb 2022). Selassie, S. (2020). You Belong: A Call for Connection. HarperOne. Siegel. (2010). Mindsight : the new science of personal transformation. Bantam Books. Stern, J. “You’ve Probably Seen Yourself in Your Memories.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 29 Aug. 2022, https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/08/ memories-third-person-perspective-psychology/671281/ Treleaven, D. A. (2018). Trauma-sensitive mindfulness : practices for safe and transformative healing (First edition.). W.W Norton & Company. Winston, D. (2019). The Little Book of Being: Practices and Guidance for Uncovering Your Natural Awareness. SoundsTrue.

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his handbook originated from my practicum-in-training in the Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program offered by Sounds True, the Awareness Training Institute, and the University of California at Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center. I would like to acknowledge my teachers in that program, Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield, from whom I learned so much on how to practice and teach mindfulness meditation. I am grateful for the support of my mentor Dawn Mauricio and the heartful metta of my group colleagues, Lalique Gangcuangco, Udita Gangwal, Katayoon Hemati, Laura Mora, and Rita Naomi Moran. Also during the MMTCP, we had additional key teachings in diversity, equity, inclusion, and access, which were helpfully integrated by Konda Mason, Kate Johnson, Crystal Johnson, and Kitsy Schoen. The lesson by Rabbi Mordechai Liebling on antisemitism and creating welcoming spaces was quite comforting. The name “Toronto Method” came to me gradually and crystalized when I was learning with Vince Fakhoury Horn of the Buddhist Geeks Network and he spoke about regional retreats and differences between west coast and east coast American mindfulness traditions. Vince and his teachings helped me hone in on this project. I taught my practicum online to 49 registered participants in two cohorts during the spring and summer of 2022. These folks patiently 159

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received my program and offered me highly useful feedback, which I have integrated into this Handbook. I am deeply appreciative to all of them for their practice. I also thank Aviva Chernick for her wisdom, support, and opportunity to go deeper in my teachings with her neySHEV Jewish meditation community. I want to acknowledge the professional team at FriesenPress including editor Jessica Torrens, designer Jenny Engwer, audio producer Mark Shipman, web designer James Stewart, and publishing contact Kayla Lang. The six chapter icons were designed by Eva Katz. Thank you also to my Professor, Thomas Telfer of Western University, who kindly agreed to read this manuscript and provide valuable feedback, and to Bill Gayner for his feedback on the excerpt on Focusing. On a personal note, I have dedicated this book to generation z (those born between 1998 and 2012). That is because I have learned so much giving from the vibes of my favourite gen zs, namely my adult children, my sons Zakhary, Isidor, and Gabriel, stepdaughters Tashyana and Jamea, and daughter-in-law Hannah. I would not have taken this training had my wife, Dr. Melissa Melnitzer, not forwarded me the information in pre-COVID 2020. Melissa inspires me daily to grow in baby steps and remember to breathe underwater. Her love and support is a well of healing. Finally, I acknowledge the land that I live on. I honour the traditional territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, Chippewa, Haudenosaunee, and Wendat peoples, also home today to diverse First Nations, Inuit, and Métis people. And the important point is “also home today.” Indigenous People have continuously inhabited this land for thousands of years, and are still here, and we share this land, which I state in the spirit of mutual respect, care, and friendship. I am conscious that one mile from where I am writing this, what is now Davenport Road is an Indigenous trail and trading route that extends from Montreal to Niagara. There are campsites along here which have been dated to the end of the last 160

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Ice Age, 12,000 years ago, long before the first European, Samuel de Champlain, recorded the trails in 1615. I also am conscious of the waters nearby, and that this whole region is filled with hidden and not-so-hidden ravines, creeks, and rivers. Toronto’s ravines formed thousands of years ago after glaciers compressed the land and the water wore away the soil. We are literally in a trench within a valley system. And beginning about 300 years ago, these waters slowly became hidden and drained when settlers cleared the land for farming. Seventeen percent of Toronto’s area is ravine land, and we are in the largest urban ravine system in the world. Before the British named the rives, and before their descendants buried these bodies of water underground to serve as Toronto’s wastewater system, this land was inhabited. Which raises another aspect of my consciousness of the land, namely how much it has benefited me even as I bear witness to its pain and injustice. It strikes me to pause to think of inhabitants who, like the waters, are hidden in plain sight because of colonial activities. When I walk two kilometres from my house to office, crossing the former Russell Creek and Taddle Creek buried underground, it serves for me as a reminder for how many thousands of First Nation residents still have no clean drinking water in their communities. And that experience of shared trauma of people having been genocided on their own land is also embodied in my DNA, generationally, which I feel in my heart. So when I stop at Christie Pits Park, it brings to mind scripture from my own faith, of Joseph the dreamer, and how he was the object of resentment by his brothers, and they stripped him of his clothes. And it is written (Gen 37:24): vayashlichu otoh haborah, vehabor rek, eyn bo mayim; “and they cast him into the pit, which was empty, there was no water in it.” It strikes me to pause when I am walking in my neighbourhood and am conscious of what this land has witnessed, in addition to unclean water: how 35% of Indigenous adults in Toronto experience homelessness and 1 in 4 do not have enough to eat in their 161

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household; how almost 60% of Two-Spirit Indigenous adults have attempted to die by suicide; I think of the hundreds and thousands of murdered and missing Indigenous women. And the truth of that injustice makes me angry and motivates me to action, shared presence, and joint purpose.

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ARI KAPLAN is a lawyer and dispute mediator, as well as a certified mindfulness meditation instructor. His book Pension Law won the Walter Owen Book Prize for outstanding new contribution to Canadian legal literature, and he is currently pursuing a PhD in Law and Emotion. His six-lesson meditation course that culminated in this book is accredited by the Law Society of Ontario and approved by the Family Dispute Resolution Institute of Ontario. He lives in Toronto with his family and their Newfoundland dog Pablo.