Contemplative Self-Care by Daniel Chappelle
Self-care through meditation can bring more ease into our lives by reducing any frustrations we may be experiencing.
The starting point is what the Buddha discovered: we are tormented by our ideas of who we are. We believe we are someone from moment to moment. That self-awareness is made up of a combination of stable, conscious parts and less so parts. As we can see, it is the source of all our unhappiness. If we want to lighten the burden of dissatisfaction in our life, we must let go of our previously unconscious beliefs about who we are. Self-care through meditation can help us do this.
There are different levels of self-knowledge. The first level has to do with what the Chinese philosopher Confucius considered our role in the world. Here we define ourselves in familiar terms: employer or employee, parent, son or daughter, student, married or unmarried, retired. This is who we believe ourselves to be. Self-care through meditation promotes the teachings of Confucius and Buddha. If we want to live a good life, we must do our role as best we can, even if that role is difficult, or especially difficult. The way to do this is to perform it precisely, as if it were a personal ritual. Even a task that we dislike, when performed to the best of our ability, becomes less unpleasant and even enjoyable. That is because when we are fully focused or “in the flow”, there is no room for unhappiness. An artist can be unhappy before or after a creative activity, but not during it. The same is true for all of us when we are fully focused on the activity that is here and now.
At the next level of self-awareness, things get more fuzzy. For example, if we are a nurse or a teacher, do we tend to be generally kind and generous with our time, attention, and interest? Or are we often impatient and not very friendly? We are talking here about habitual patterns of behavior or stable personality traits. These result in our reputation among the people around us and our familiar recurring patterns of experiences and behaviors. Self-care through meditation informs us about those patterns and ourselves that we may not have noticed before. It benefits both ourselves and others.
On a more transitional level, our usual experiences and patterns of behavior can fluctuate. For example, even the kindest nurse can be moody, and even the friendliest teacher can be irritable. Self-care through meditation can help us better understand the causes of these fluctuations and reduce unwanted fluctuations. It shows us that change and personal growth are possible.
At the next level of self-awareness, things are more fleeting and difficult to notice unless you learn to pay attention to them. This is the level of changeable emotions, sudden mood swings, thoughts, and urges that appear suddenly and out of nowhere like a bolt of lightning. Contemplative self-care helps you to be aware of everything that comes to your mind. This is where learning how the mind works really begins. Here it becomes a science of awareness that is done personally in the strictest sense. This includes the meditation part of contemplative self-care. This is where the slow process of personal change occurs. It can be likened to learning to play an instrument. Learning is slow and never-ending. It takes the three Ps: practice, patience, and persistence.
Finally, there is a radically different level of consciousness. But before we get there, we need to look at the actual practice of self-care through meditation.
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Its actual practice includes meditation as its active ingredient. Here, you sit in a quiet place and turn your attention inward. A typical scenario is to simply sit and focus on the physical sensation of breathing. There is nothing else to do, no other place to be. There is nothing to unravel, analyze, understand or solve. Simply sit and focus on the physical sensation of breathing. There is nothing to strive for, achieve, hope or expect.
This seems easy at first glance, but it is not easy because it means doing nothing, but rather a challenge. It is because our mind compulsively wants to do something. It wanders off to other things, like a hyperactive monkey that jumps from one thing to another. The challenge is to keep returning our attention again and again to the physical sensation of just sitting and breathing.
At first, as we become aware of how active our monkey minds are, this may seem almost impossible, and we may think this is not good for meditation. But eventually our attention slows down and begins to rest instead of jumping around. It becomes easier to dwell on the object of meditation for longer. Eventually, a feeling of quiet and calm comes over us. While that is pleasant enough when it happens, it is not the goal of meditation or meditative self-care. So what is the goal? The goal is for us to stop identifying with who we are thinking about ourselves.
First, we recognize that the untrained mind has a tendency to chase everything that appears in consciousness. Like dogs, we chase every stick that is thrown in front of us. Instead of simply sitting and concentrating on breathing, we find ourselves distracted and reacting to other things that appear in our consciousness: the things we have to do, the problems we have, the conflicts we have, the thoughts that come to us out of nowhere, the sadness that hangs over us like a dark cloud, the negative, angry or hostile thoughts, the hurt feelings that we still carry long after the painful events. The psychic content of this lived experience keeps us and our psychotherapists busy. As Freud said, it is the raw material for psychoanalysis. It is the material that goes into a self-knowledge that is built mainly on unconscious self-images. And it is our belief in the reality of these self-images that constitutes our unhappiness. Thus, “we suffer according to who we think we are.”
The challenge is to recognize the “me we think we are” whenever something bothers us. Are we like spoiled children who get annoyed and angry when they don't get their way? Are we overly sensitive to real or perceived insults and injuries? Are we like entitled royalty who expects everyone to submissively submit to our every wish? Becoming more aware of these things will improve our lives, our relationships, and our relationship with others and with existence itself. But that's not all. If we can clearly recognize these unhelpful and not fully conscious identifications, we can more easily let them go. They don't have to stick to our best personality traits like that pesky Velcro that sticks to our favorite clothes.
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This brings us to the real purpose of meditative self-care: it's more than just a sense of relaxation or happiness or increased self-observation, more than just liberating yourself from certain self-identities or beliefs about who you are that bring you unhappiness. It's about beginning to unleash the very habits that form these identifications.
First, we realize that by believing fictional stories about ourselves, we are attached to them. For many of us, these self-images that bring us unhappiness are our most original and unique creations, because we don't need a teacher to learn how to make ourselves unhappy. We do it spontaneously and creatively with the self-images we choose to believe. As others have said, we are always practicing something, and what we practice the most is unhappiness. Recognizing that those beliefs were imaginations not only allows us to let go of them, but also ultimately realizes that even the idea of having or being a definable personal self is a misconception.
How do we arrive at that view? By observing it carefully in our experience and understanding that it exists nowhere else but in Consciousness Itself, or Rigpa in Tibetan. But what is this “consciousness itself”?
When we look at something around us, or at any part of our body, we ask the most penetrating contemplative question: “Where is it?” The answer seems obvious: “Right there.” But then we ask: “Where is there, what is there?” Here we are puzzled. We realize that there and what is there is a concept, an idea, not even an object or a quality that we can point to. If we counter: “I know it is there because I see it,” then we ask again: “Where is that knowledge, that perspective?” What we see, what we think, exists as a manifestation of consciousness itself. The philosopher Schopenhauer states this at the beginning of his famous book “The World is My Perception,” which in the original German translation reads: “The World is My Perception.”
When that realization becomes clear and becomes a directly felt experience rather than merely an intellectually crafted idea, the concept and belief that we are an identifiable, definable self, an entity that exists as an independent being, dissolves. Instead, we see that we are not an independently existing being or entity, but consciousness itself. And that consciousness itself, or rigpa, has no substance; it is more like nothing than something. Yet it gives us everything that is life.
Consciousness itself makes all knowledge possible, but it cannot be recognized as the object of knowledge. We cannot recognize rigpa or consciousness itself as an entity alongside other entities. We can know it only by analogy or likeness to something that is assumed to be better understood. A traditional analogy is space: it is everywhere and contains everything, yet cannot be grasped or pointed to. Similarly, consciousness contains everything we can know and experience, yet cannot know itself. Or it could be like silence, underlying and containing all sound and intensity, or eternal stillness, containing all movement, commotion and drama, or like a mirror, capable of reflecting everything without being affected by anything.
That is the ultimate goal of meditative self-care: a state of mind or consciousness that goes beyond ordinary perception or self-awareness, leading to a deeper understanding of our true nature, which is consciousness itself. At this point ordinary perception or self-awareness dissolves, and so all the unhappy feelings associated with our self-image dissolve with it. This is what the Buddha described as samsara, or liberation from the unhappiness of everyday life.
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For more information, check out the book Meditative Self-Care. To contact the author, please visit meditativeselfcare.com or .
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