It was cold and grey outside as I walked by the bottom of an imposing mountain. It felt as though fall had turned into winter in just a few hours. Snow was falling on my face as I walked—silently and slowly—beneath still-colourful trees. Leaves crackled under my weight as my foot hit the ground. I heard water moving over rocks in the small stream just a few feet to my left. In that moment I was completely awake to life. My body relaxed, my brow unfurled. Something just happened, but I wasn’t doing anything. I just let it be. The landscape looked crisper, my breath in the cold air entranced me. It felt as if a cloud had lifted from my eyes. I had no desire to be elsewhere—no thoughts about a better place. There was nothing to achieve or anything to prove to anyone else. I didn’t have to defend a political position and felt no need to prove my self-worth through running for office. I didn’t need to win an argument or drive a point home. I didn’t crave affirmation. I was… OK. I literally just was.
In so many ways the depth of mindfulness I was now experiencing contradicted my worldview, my belief in the need to be the one to “make it happen.” But the feeling I experienced was not forced. Rather, I seemed to have allowed it to happen. As I continued walking that blissful moment of awareness slipped away. I realized, though, that I had tasted something I’d never experienced before. That fleeting moment left me with a level of clarity I’d never known. The clarity was not something created as much as discovered; something that had been there all along. I began to see my thoughts and examine them with an awareness similar to—but not quite as profound as—the awareness that had just dissipated.
They began coming up, rapid-fire:
Where did that feeling go?
How do I get it back?
Why was it so elusive?
What did I do wrong?
My body began to tighten, my forehead wrinkled and my mind was running like a wild horse. There are hundreds of events I could be at if I were home where I should be. If I don’t get home, I’ll probably lose thousands of votes and maybe my next election. If I lose my election, my political career is dead. Will I ever reach my full potential? Will I live up to the expectations of my family and friends? And so on. The inner voice was shrill and harsh: What just happened? How did things take such a quick turn for the worse?
Fortunately, after days of practice and instruction at a Power of Mindfulness retreat led by Jon Kabat-Zinn at the Menia Mountain Retreat Center in upstate New York in November 2008, the training had taken root. The runaway horses of my mind were pulled to a halt, and I just breathed in and out. The retreat began with all of us—busy people with hectic lives and lots of responsibilities—trying to get in touch with what was happening in our bodies at any given moment and how our thoughts have a direct effect on them. For example, we were each given a raisin to look at, examine and put up to (but not in) our mouths. Have you ever just looked at one raisin? I’m normally inclined to rip open a box and dump them in my mouth. Here, we had to gaze at them, and as I put the raisin close to my lips, my mouth began to water. The raisin was not in my mouth, yet my body was preparing for it. The point was that what we see, hear and think about in our mind has a direct effect on our bodies.
After becoming aware of the body-mind connection, we began over the course of five days to slowly reduce how much we talked. We observed extended periods of silence during which Jon guided us in mindfulness meditation. Some of us sat in chairs and some on cushions with our legs crossed. We followed our breath, in and out, in and out, for 30 or 45 minutes at a time. We spent an equal amount of time in walking meditation, inside or outside. I always chose outside, regardless of the weather. It was just so pleasurable to be out in the elements, appreciating nature without taking out my Blackberry and snapping a picture. During walking meditation we walked very slowly and deliberately, focusing on all of the movements our bodies made as we walked: the foot slowly lifting up, the knee pulling the lower part of the leg, the foot gently hitting the ground, heel first, then the middle of the foot, then the toes, becoming more grounded in the body. The process is very much like the attention that a long-distance runner or cyclist needs to bring to all of the body’s systems in order to have an overall awareness of how things are going.
Whether walking or sitting, though, my mind would wander off to family or work. Highly charged emotional thoughts would sometimes take me for a ride for an entire 30-minute session. I would open my eyes afterward and think to myself, I just spent a half-hour somewhere other than right here! At times, it seemed so absurd I had to just laugh at myself.
We were taught to become aware of when our mind was wandering—and then, without judgment, to gently place our attention back on our breath or our bodies. It seems simple enough, but many times the wandering mind wins the day. You find yourself having conversations with people who are not even in the room; you’re having heated arguments with people 400 miles away. I was not actually arguing with anyone, but I was making a story up in my head that took my body and psyche on a fantastical emotional rollercoaster.
Have you ever woken up thinking about someone you’re going to deal with that day and set off a chain reaction of thoughts about past encounters, sights and irritations? By the time you see them that day, you’re not meeting them with an open mind. Your thinking is predetermining the outcome. And before you know it, you’re arguing. A little bit of awareness, I was discovering, helps us to see the process and to understand that we have a choice. We can respond with conscious choices to life’s challenges rather than simply react and overreact based on habitual (and often negative) thought patterns.
Many of the thoughts and arguments cooked up in my head were advanced to protect the idea of who I thought I was. My idea of self, my ego, has this story of who I should be: Congressman, rising star in politics, former quarterback, everybody likes me, smart…all these things. If a negative thought threatened this story, like someone told me I was stupid once, I would confront the thought and argue the ego’s side of the story: “I am smart and here are three thousand reasons why… Take that!” I felt a lot of tension rise in my body in response to this torrent of thoughts.
Throughout the retreat, we were reminded to come back to our breath and surf on it without working too hard to pay attention to it. Jon gently suggested that we might begin to notice how tiring it is to keep up our big-deal story. As the week moved on, we spent an entire 36 hours in silence. (Imagine that on Capitol Hill!) As we reached the heart of the retreat, it became clear how much time and energy we all waste in our inner World War over nothing. We fight and defend and argue—all in an imaginary world in our heads. And then we wonder why we can’t sleep at night or why we have high blood pressure or anxiety or are cranked up on stress hormones. The deeper the silence became, the deeper I realized the inanity, even the insanity, of putting so much effort into fictional story lines rather than listening to and noticing what’s happening in and around me at any given moment.
Many times we turn on ourselves for having “bad thoughts.” Mindfulness teaches that this is just how our mind works. It is the nature of the mind to generate thoughts. No need to beat ourselves up over it. Be kind to yourself. Don’t judge. Let it go. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t use our brains to evaluate and analyze thoughts and issues. There is a time and place to use the analyzing brain. But the brain works for us; we do not work for our brain. Our brain is here to serve our hearts, not the other way around.
Our society suffers, I think, from an overemphasis on the intellect and an aversion to matters of the heart—as if they were somehow un-American. Jon used poems and stories to illustrate the potency of the heart. The less chit-chat that was in my brain, the more the poems touched me. Having my heart opened up like that reminded me of my oldest nephew, Nicolas. He’s five and attends a Catholic preschool with the Oblate Sisters in Youngstown. After school one day Nicky’s teacher told his mother that at the end of every school day, she plays classical music as they all clean the classroom. And every day Nicolas cries when he hears it. Sister says that it “just touches him so much.” How beautiful! How do we as a society teach our kids, our parents, everyone, to maintain that connection to the miracles all around us? Perfectly composed music or art, the wonders of nature, even our own ability to breathe, all are miracles. To feel that, we have to stop living only in our heads and also live in our hearts.
Some of the poems Jon read were from American giants like Thoreau or Emerson. I started to see mindfulness as very much in line with the values of America. Our founding fathers acted from the heart when they transformed our world by stating that “all men are created equal, endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights” such as life, liberty and happiness.
It seems to me it would do us all good to act from our heart more often. We’ll be surprised how small acts of attention and kindness can release the energy, enthusiasm and imagination bottled up in our overstressed minds and bodies. We have tried a million times to think our way to a better society. But our thinking doesn’t work so well if it’s not aligned with what we feel deep in our hearts, our inspirations and aspirations, our innermost desire. We need to realign ourselves the way a GPS in a car recalibrates the route. When our wandering mind takes us away from our heart, we need to pause and realign ourselves with the values we have stored there. We can then remember what motivates and inspires us to get up and take on the challenges of each day. I learned that for myself up on the mountain.
[su_panel background=”#f2f2f2″ color=”#000000″ border=”0px none #ffffff” shadow=”0px 0px 0px #ffffff”]Tim Ryan was first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2002, at the age of 29, and is currently serving in his fifth term representing Ohio’s 17th Congressional District. He has been an outspoken advocate for promoting mindfulness practice as an aid to dealing with the variety of complex problems facing the nation.
