Today it’s my pleasure to bring to you Bodhipaksa, a longtime meditation teacher, author of Living As a River: Finding Fearlessness in the Face of Change. Bodhipaksa also started a wonderful site called Wildmind that has a number of self paced guided meditation courses and an ongoing blog to help us sew our seeds of mindfulness and compassion. As a short note, Bodhipaksa means “wings of enlightenment.”

Today Bodhipaksa shares with us what it means to live as a river, how we might gain freedom from seeing the ever changing nature of ourselves and what we can do when we’re suffering.

Elisha: What does it mean to live as a river?

Bodhipaksa: To me, living as a river means accepting the reality of impermanence and also recognizing the reality of anatta, or non-self. Our minds try to “fix” things and to see them as more permanent, static, and separate than they actually are. And one of the “things” that we treat in this way is ourselves.

Over the course of our lives we’ve been labeled or labeled ourselves as a glass half full or empty kind of person. But what if the glass was already broken? That’s the lesson that Ajahn Chah gives to a group of students including Psychiatrist Mark Epstein, author of Thoughts Without A Thinker.

Ajahn Chah was a highly respected Buddhist Teacher, maybe well known to some as Jack Kornfield’s teacher. What was he talking about when he said the glass is already broken and how does that relate to our lives?

The musical Rent that came out in a New York City Workshop in 1994 reminded us to question how we measure our years on this planet. The cast sings that there are 525,600 minutes in a year, and that some people measure in sunsets, cups of coffee, laughter, or tears of joy. The song brings focus to the concept that we can bring awareness to the moments of our lives and how very precious they truly are.

Joni Mitchell sings the song Big Yellow Taxi where the lyrics say:

Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you got till it’s gone
They paved paradise, and put up a parking lot

While this song is talking about the loss of natural environmental beauty to an uprising of concrete jungle, the theme of not knowing what we have until it’s gone is a common experience.

The reason so many of us are drawn to the idea of getting unstuck is because feeling stuck in life is such a common experience. Maybe we continually get distracted at work as projects mount or get hooked into the same arguments in our relationships, or just can’t seem to get back on the treadmill.

Feeling stuck is part of the human experience. So how do we get unstuck?

Whether you’re struggling with anxiety, depression, addiction, ADHD, complex trauma or any myriad of life’s challenges, there seems to be a prevalent underlying voice of self-hatred that perks its head up at times more than others. I think the Dalai Lama has a good take on this.

Jack Kornfield shares the Dalai Lama’s story in a recent edited book The Buddha Is Still Teaching. The Dalai Lama said when he first heard the word self-hatred he was confused. He said that self-hatred was a very dangerous attitude and he and his fellow Buddhists work quite hard to overcome their self-centered attitudes.

The antidote to this was to understand that all people (and beings) have what he calls “Buddha Nature.” In other words, everyone inherently has the capacity to wake up to a sense of clarity about what helps and hinders them in their lives. Everyone has the innate capacity for compassion, empathy and wisdom.

This is very counter to some other views.

After spending a weekend with Jon Kabat-Zinn, one of the greatest gifts he gave me was the piece of advice:

“Perhaps one of the greatest gifts we can give ourselves is to be able to sit in not knowing.”

So often in life we feel like we need to have the answer and the truth is, often times we don’t have it.

This is especially true in parenting, relationships and well, I guess many aspects of life.

The more we are unsure of ourselves or don’t have the answer, the greater the insecurity. When we feel insecure, the mind goes into overdrive trying to reach into the past and draw on experiences to anticipate the future.

So what we come to realize is that we’re actually not in the most important place which is here. There is no other time than now and no other place than here, but we spend so much of our mental energy in the past and future.

In a recent op-ed column in the NY Times, Nicholas Kristof explores recent research that suggests the period we all spend in the womb has a critical impact on our level of physical, emotional and mental well-being throughout our lives.

He says:

“The result is children who start life at a disadvantage — for kids facing stresses before birth appear to have lower educational attainment, lower incomes and worse health throughout their lives. If that’s true, then even early childhood education may be a bit late as a way to break the cycles of poverty.”

This is another example of research finding what many have figured was already intuitive. In a period of time when our brains and mental models of the world are being formed a stressful environment will have an impact on how we react to life later on.

Today I bring to you Allan Lokos to give us some hints on how short practices throughout our daily lives can make big change.

Allan is the author of the book Pocket Peace: Effective Practices for Enlightened Living and is the founder and teacher at the Community Meditation Center in New York City. Allan has published numerous articles in various areas and studied with teachers that you may be aware of such as Sharon Salzberg, Thich Nhat Hanh, Joseph Goldstein, among others.

Elisha: What are Pocket Practices, and how can they help people find peace?

Allan: Pocket practices are concise, incisive versions of the Buddhist teachings known as the “Parami” (Pali) or “Paramitas” (Sanskrit) that can help us think, speak, and act wisely under pressure. They are compact but effective practices that we develop slowly so that we can call upon them quickly, instinctively. They are light, responsive, and powerful.

There is a poem by Portia Nelson called 5 Short Chapters that speaks to the natural unfolding of learning that happens when we work with becoming more aware of the mind traps in our minds. What are mind traps?

Mind traps are those habitual thinking styles we get caught in that inevitably trap us into a cascading snowball of reactivity that leads us to greater distress. Look this over, see if you identify with any of them and then we’ll get back to 5 Short Chapters.

These include, but are not limited to:

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Here is an adapted version of a post I wrote over a year ago and it is an oldie but a goodie so I thought I’d bring it back into awareness. Enjoy!

There’s a funny print cartoon that has a man and woman sitting on the couch staring at a TV screen and the caption below reads, “It’s 12 O’clock, do you know where your mind is?” As time goes on and we grow up from children to adolescents to adults, for many of us, somewhere along the way life begins to become routine.

Day in and day out whether we’re walking, driving, talking, eating, going to the grocery store, or being with our families our minds get kicked onto auto-pilot and continue to develop their habitual ways of thinking, interpreting, expecting, and relating to other people. These habits of the mind can keep us stuck in stress, anxiety, depression, or even addictive behaviors.