Mindfulness-Based Wellnes: Day-Long Retreat

This weekend we had our first day-long Mindfulness-Based Wellness meditation retreat on campus! Thanks to Sherry, Martha, and Ron for joining me... It was a lovely day for walking meditation outside on the new patio. Below is the text for my dharma talk (I have been giving a lot of thought, lately, about the popularity of the term "transformation"):

TRANSFORMATION AND TRANSCENDENCE

In popular culture there is no more powerful phrase or word than “transformation” (unless it is the phrase “effortless weight loss”)… and of course the two are closely related. Lately I have been intrigued by the frequency with which the word “transformation” ( or “transformative”) appears in the titles of books (especially self-help and spirituality books, but also books in many other fields). I decided to run a search on Amazon; here are a few of those I found:

• Transformation: Turn Your Life Around Starting Today!

• Transformative Curriculum Leadership

• Transformation: How Glocal Churches Transform Lives and the World

• Transformative Dimensions of Adult Learning

• Exploring the World of Music (Sound, Music, and the Environment, The Transformative Power of Music and Memory)

• The Transformative Power of Women's Philanthropy: New Directions for Philanthropic Fundraising

• Transformation: Change the Marketplace and You Change the World

• Transformative Relationships: The Control Mastery Theory of Psychotherapy

• The Promise of Mediation: The Transformative Approach to Conflict

• Core Transformation: Reaching the Wellspring Within

• More Than Money: Portraits of Transformative Stewardship

• Transformative Meditation

• Doing Anti-Oppressive Practice: Building Transformative, Politicized Social Work

• The Transformative Power of Crisis: Our Journey to Psychological Healing and Spiritual Awakening

• Rapid Transformation: A 90-day Plan for Fast and Effective Change

• Transformative Rituals: Celebrations for Personal Growth

• Mindful Dreaming: A Practical Guide for Emotional Healing Through Transformative Mythic Journeys

• The Giving Heart: Unlocking the Transformative Power of Generosity in Your Life

• The Mindful Traveler: A Guide to Journaling and Transformative Travel

• Transformation Through Kundalini Yoga

• Liberating Rites: Understanding the Transformative Power of Ritual

• Transformative Meditation: Personal & Group Practice to Access Realms of Consciousness

And then, there are the cosmetic and other tools for personal transformation:

• Suki Transformative Facial Clay

• Transformation System Silk Infusion

And this is my personal favorite, which also appears on the list of items that you get on Amazon when you run a search for “transformation:”

• Bitty Bum Padded Hipster Panty: Our low-rise padded panty is just what you’ve been looking for! Fabulous under jeans or pants that hit below the navel, our hipster-style shaper looks so natural! The front is firm spandex to flatten your tummy. The entire back is shaped just like a perfectly contoured round fanny on the outside complete with the perfect division in the middle. The inside is a bit concave so your OWN bottom fits snugly against it for the most believably real look possible. The effect is amazing?..go from flat to fantastic in seconds. Get the curves you’ve always wanted or as we like to say at LoveFifi: get booty-full!

One would think, looking at all these products, that we don’t like ourselves very much, and/or that we do not very much like our lives… And this is confirmed by our voracious appetite for self-help books. There is a seductive power to the promise that we can be changed, radically changed… “transformed”!

I suspect that this desire is closely connected with the word “transcendence,” and the concept it represents: i.e., another very powerful yearning that we have always seen within the human heart. All the major religions have stories, or myths, that represent our yearning to leave this difficult and sometimes tedious existence, to go somewhere else… There is nothing wrong, of course, with the yearning for something sublime, something unsullied, something bigger and much better than what we experience in our daily lives. The problem is that our yearnings are so easily hijacked, misdirected, sidetracked… for example into a silly and juvenile desire for a Bitty Bum Padded Hipster Panty… or a flat-screen TV, or yet another new exercise machine that will give us a beautiful body, effortlessly, in 10 days…

Maybe it behooves us to recall that the flip side of transcendence is immanence, or the understanding that the divine, or what is most fundamental and real and whole/holy is not inaccessibly beyond us, beyond our reach, and transcendent, but instead it is RIGHT HERE in this moment. And this seems to be what Jesus was talking about all the time. Scripture tells us that Jesus said that God is right here with us, in our hearts and in our gatherings together. In the breaking of the bread and in the lilies of the field…

That point of view is well-represented in Buddhism, which is generally a very earthy form of spirituality. There is in Buddhism (especially Zen) an insistence on orienting oneself to the here and now, to what we can see, hear, feel, and taste. Perhaps the idea is that we were given these sensory modes as our primary (perhaps only) ways to understand whatever we can understand about God, or about what is ultimately real, and about our connection to each other and to the ultimate.

I, too, yearn for transformation. And, as a psychology professor, I am in the business of helping people to change, and helping them to learn how to assist others in changing important aspects of their lives. But I also believe that, if the name of the game is transformation, then REAL transformation we are looking for is ATTITUDINAL: From impatience with ourselves and others… From dissatisfaction with the way things are in our lives… toward a deliberate posture of compassionate acceptance with EVERYTHING that arises within us. And this includes all that seems to be “outside of” us, i.e., the people around us all their irritating shortcomings.

In this kind of transformation, we do more INTERNAL work than EXTERNAL work. Instead of buying a Bitty Bum Padded Hipster, we take a gentle but disciplined look at our own internal world of thoughts, feelings, impulses, and mental habits. In looking at them compassionately, we begin to loosen our attachment to them (because we see that they are not direct pipelines to Truth and Wisdom). And we begin to move from a strong attachment to our preferences, likes, and dislikes, which are sometimes hardened into a “that’s just not me” attitude, because we realize that these preferences and attitudes are actually STANDING IN OUR WAY. For example, a person might want to change some things in her life, and so she enrolls in a MBW course, in which she is taught meditation. But she doesn’t “like” meditation; she says, “I want to change, but I can’t do it this way… that’s just not ‘me’.” Jon Kabat-Zinn says, about mindfulness practice: “You don’t have to like it. You just have to do it.”

Sometimes it is my attachment to my preferences, and to my idea of what is or is not “me,” that has been standing in my way, all along… Sometimes it is worth taking a little time to refrain from operating in a knee-jerk fashion (whenever possible, honoring my preferences), and to compassionately look at them, instead?... To look at how they operate in my life, perhaps seeing that they keep me tied up in a very small and uncomfortable box…

One of the fundamental teachings of Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism (and maybe all religions) is that we are not who we think we are. We are much more than what and who we think we are; there is a fundamental wisdom to which we have access, and it is not fairly represented by the superficial chatter, mindless habits, and essentially childish preferences that occupy our minds for so much of our lives.

And paradoxically this attitudinal shift may very well result in perceptible CHANGES in WHO and HOW we seem to be, and in our worlds, because our world changes dramatically in accordance with the notions and expectations and attitudes and POINTS OF VIEW that we bring to it.

And so I encourage us all to compassionately observe our longings for transformation, and to observe how we channel them, and what our minds tells us will satisfy them (perhaps, for example, something I keep seeing on TV?). I encourage us all to observe the cause and effect we can see when we chase after one target, and another, and another, that promises to give us the transcendence for which we yearn. I encourage us to gently and persistently re-train our mental habits so that we are more often living in the NOW, feeling what life feels like right now, in all its amazing splendor. Perhaps this is, after all, the transformation we have been searching for.