A Journey into the Depths of Our Minds
The story of a workshop titled Dealing with Distractions and Transforming problems with Sarika Bajoria at Kadampa — Center for Meditation in New York
The Italian Version of this post.
Translation by Alexia Jolie Villa
New York, August 3rd, 2019 — It cannot be a coincidence that my office is three doors from the Kadampa Meditation Center in New York, on the same block. It cannot be a coincidence that thanks to the daily half-hour of meditation that I started practicing every day at 12.15, my creative block magically dissolved and I started writing again. For now I’m dealing with scattered thoughts, but I feel I have all I need to try to connect to the web world, the world to which I have dedicated all my professional life, with the support of bioenergetics and meditation, which have added and are adding so much to my personal life.
Today’s workshop was led by Sarika Bajoria, a Senior Meditation Teacher at Kadampa Meditation Center New York City. Sarika is also the Founder of Mindful Architect(TM) and a Senior Architect and Designer in New York City.
The meditations and teachings during the workshop provided experiential insights into the nature and function of our mind as taught by Geshe Kelsang Gyatso and how we can bring that profound wisdom into every area of our daily life through mindfulness and alertness. As an architect, Sarika integrates these practices in her professional life, as she describes in this journal essay below:
The topic was decidedly complex: Dealing with Distractions and Transforming Problems.
And what is more useful to our lives, especially today?
We live in a world of continuous distractions, distractions that do not allow us to tap into the infinite depths of our mind. The metaphor that Sarika used was based on the ocean and its waves. We live in a stormy ocean but, if we concentrate only on the surface, if we only observe every single wave and let ourselves be distracted by its arrival, by its incessant and continuous ascent and descent, if we do not accept its height and do not let our mind understand and accept the continuous flow and then let the wave depart, we will never discover the infinite beauty and vastness of the surrounding sea, and — an even more serious issue — the immeasurable beauty of life and nature in the depths of the abyss will probably be lost on us.
This is not exactly what Sarika said, but her analogy with the ocean has led me to think about the beauty and depth of what is hidden in the abyss of our existence. An abyss that we very often decide not to probe, contenting ourselves with the surface and imagining it as our entire reality.
The meditation that she proposed seemed to be dedicated to me and to what I most needed at that moment — and not only in that moment.
Meditation of the Clarity of the Mind.
That name.
Can there be a better name? But what does “Clarity” mean?
Sarika read us the definition from a book, one of the many books by Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, The Oral instructions of Mahamudra.
“Clarity is something that is empty like space, that can never have form and that is the basis for perceiving objects.”
“Clarity” as an empty space, in a world based on filling.
As we live, we continuously experience a process through which our lives, our minds are filled. I really feel a connection with this explanation.
Before engaging with the meditation of the Clarity of the Mind, Sarika invited us to try to observe our life, its distractions, its flow, in the manner of National Geographic documentaries. In these documentaries, we are able to observe the beauty of a dewdrop or the beauty of a giraffe in the same non-judgemental way, the same ecstatic focus devoid of any attempt at evaluation.
Beauty as beauty.
I like the analogies that Sarika chose. They are immediately understandable. They are immediately testable.
They lead you to live the experience instead of trying to understand it intellectually. They lead you to observe life, its distractions and even its problems from another perspective. With a new mind.
And the mind is “boundless,” that is, without boundaries, infinite, unlimited. But the mind is not the brain, as we have been accustomed to thinking. We know nothing that is not known by our mind yet we know little or nothing about the mind itself.
What is the mind then? — she asked us. The mind is not just our thought, it is not just our body, but it is the whole universe, it is the whole world around us, it is the awareness of our existence. The mind is the basis for perceiving every object, every animated and inanimate reality, every situation in our existence. And the infinite power of this mind lies in each of us.
Here comes the most difficult part to accept.
The problems are inside our mind because the problem is the awareness of the problem, the way we decide to react.
We have infinite freedom and immense power of transformation.
We are not forced to live in a claustrophobic space, we can enter the infinite depths of our mind and discover vast and uncontaminated landscapes. We can swim in the depths of the ocean and activate our infinite creativity. We can tune into the mind that has no boundaries, resonate with it. Accept the empty space with a clear mind.
“Clarity is something that is empty like space, that can never have form and that is the basis for perceiving objects.”
“Clarity” as an empty space, in a world based on filling. That is the nature and function of our mind.
A problem cannot be separated from its perception just as a reflected image cannot be separated from the mirror in which it is reflected.
So then what? If we have a problem, what can we do?
Sarika’s proposal is increasingly difficult to understand and implement.
The first step is to patiently accept it.
Only if you patiently accept the agitated mind that arises due to a problem, you can transform it. If you repress the mood that arises in response to a problem, it will recur in an even more acute form. We must not suppress it, we must accept it. Every problem perceived by our mind generates anxiety, fear, pain. Only by accepting the agitated mind can we let it go.”
The second step is to let it go away from our mind.
Without acceptance, a problem will recur or, if we try to repress it, as we often do, it will generate physical tensions. The body will defend itself by strengthening its shell and, to be heard, the problem will have to “scream” louder and louder.
And now here is the peak of the difficulty.
We need to be aware that we can accept it and send it away. Our mind has the power to accept and let go of that negative state and leave space, a small empty space where we can try to build a new state of mind. We can try to rebuild something in the empty space left by our departed anger, fear, pain, negative reactions. Starting from that simple empty space, we can ensure that our mind does not waste energy to react, but uses it all to accept, let go and build new thoughts that can take us to the calmest places in this troubled ocean.
The third step is to create new thoughts. Create. Change our mind and the way we look at a problem.
Buddha and Einstein, at different times, came to the same conclusion:
“We cannot solve a problem with the same mind that sees it.”
We need to change our mental state: we cannot change the person who generated it, we cannot change the situation, we cannot change the exterior, but only change something within us, in our mind.
Only we can choose whether to stay on the surface in the rough waters of a storm or reach the bottom of the infinite depths of the beauty of nature.
“The storm cannot destroy the sky.”
Nor the ocean, I’d add.
