Metta, Meet Mister Softee

On Thursday, I ventured to the Jaya Yoga Center to hear Sharon Salzberg, who was making a rare Brooklyn appearance. Salzberg, a big name on the Buddhist circuit, is best known for teachings on “metta,” or “lovingkindness,” and I enjoyed listening to her.

As Salzberg sat quietly in a chair beside her microphone, waiting for the event to begin, she was startled by the sound of a Mister Softee ice cream truck. The windows were open to a balmy evening; the truck was rolling slowly down Eighth Avenue, endlessly recycling its jangling tune.

(It would linger again at the close of her remarks—the evening’s bell of mindfulness.)

Salzberg threw back her head and laughed—at first, she said, because she thought that the jingle was on someone’s cell phone, and then because it brought back fond memories of a Manhattan childhood. (I had one of those, too—I seem to recall my father wishing he had a rifle, so he could go down and shoot Mister Softee with it.)

Like Pema Chodron and several other Buddhist speakers I’ve heard, Salzberg has a lively sense of humor. Unlike Chodron, Salzberg does not appear to favor the monastic life. She can make wry remarks about switching to “the metta channel” while in a fit of rising irritation over a slow line at Whole Foods.

Salzberg said many interesting things, but I liked her idea of meditation as a kind of skills training in both mindfulness and compassion.

She said—I think—that the scientists who are now busy wiring the brains of meditators have discovered that different centers light up with different types of meditation.

(Mindfulness meditation seems to mean bringing your focus to a single object of concentration, like the breath; compassion meditation involves exercises in which you send wishes for health and well-being to friends and enemies in ever-widening circles.)

Apparently the research is indicating that compassion can be cultivated.

Salzberg expressed surprise that this was news to the scientists, but for a long time it would have been news to me. I’d always imagined that compassion was something that arose spontaneously, not something you could work at.

With either form of meditation, you may increase the odds of taking a moment to examine the wisdom of your initial thoughts and impulses. As Salzberg put it, quoting a fifth grader, “mindfulness is not hitting someone in the mouth.”

A Buddha and a Beer

For the truth is, however admirable mindfulness may be, however much peace, grounding, stability and self-acceptance it can bring, as an experience to be shared, it’s stultifyingly boring.

It is selfish, undoubtedly, to want to hold onto the ragged edges that make me feel genuinely connected, not perhaps to humanity, but to the people I love.

—Judith Warner (both quotes from “Being and Mindfulness," a post on her New York Times blog, March 5, 2009)

The other day in therapy, I was (in my own stultifying way) exploring my own ambivalence (which is not unrelated to Warner’s) about my continuing journey through the places that scare me to the path with heart.

“Loving-kindness, blech! I am sick and tired of being sincere, I’ve had it with being wholesome and life-affirming, I want 13 glasses of wine and 6 cigarettes!”

“Maybe you can have both,” B. says, in her patient way.

“So anyway,” I tell her, “I was walking to your office, I was thinking all this, and then I pick up the Voice to look at Rob Breszny’s astrology column. And listen to this!”

I unfold the paper as theatrically as possible, and begin to read:

“TAURUS: Your key theme for the week is "Healthy Obsessions." Not "Melodramatic Compulsions" or "Exhausting Crazes" or "Manias That Make You Seem Interesting to Casual Bystanders," but "Healthy Obsessions."

I roll my eyes, making sure the long-suffering therapist is catching that Mr. Free Will Astrology is talking directly to me. It appears that she is. The oracle continues:

“You will have to take really good care of yourself as you concentrate extravagantly on tasks that fill you with zeal. This may require you to rebel against the influences of role models, both in your actual life and in the movies you've seen, who act as if getting sick and imbalanced is an integral part of being true to one's genius.”

Oy! I toss the paper up into the air. (Thankfully, it’s now stapled, so the pages don’t fly all over the room.)

Okay, so maybe I’m stuck with the consciousness and the spirituality and the community and all that gunk. But I don’t want to lose the ragged edge, either. I go off on a long, hyperbolic rant about why my friend who just the other day was rooting for the Dow to drop—“Come on, baby, 300! Do it for me!"—is frequently more appealing than people who talk about love all the time.

If you move toward mindfulness, how do you tell a joke? Can you really not gossip anymore, ever? How can you possibly practice criticism?

Although on the other hand, I can think of two people right away who seem funny, edgy, quick-witted, endlessly good-spirited and supremely alive. In both cases their virtues seem to arise from an apparently effortless practice of observation—or attention, as they might say in the mindfulness trade. They are so alert to the world—so present—and they are so generous in offering it up. I like this! You might like that! Look at that! Isn’t that interesting? There’s nothing mushy—or ragged—about it.

In my earnest moments, I declare that I have realized that when I act out of my own fear and habits of self-protection, I can cause other people pain, and somehow, finally, I just don’t want to do that anymore.

In other words, I guess, I want to open my heart, and to try to bring love rather than hurt into the world. This is where it starts to feel icky. Who am I, Pollyanna? And where does this line of thinking end?

If I start thinking about pain, I find myself saying, I have to include the animals. It starts with the dog and moves on to the birds, and before you know it it’s chickens and cows. You’ve read about industrial farming, you finally (after years) let yourself absorb what that is, and now what are you going to do? Sometimes it makes me think about all the people who had inklings of the Holocaust. How do you know what you know and turn away without acting?

“I want a burger and beer!” I yell to my therapist.

There’s no particular resolution to this thing. Okay, I think at the end of the session, I’ll stick with this path. Later, I go out for dinner with a friend who is so kind as to treat, and I show no hesitation in consuming her out of a big chunk of her income. I have a Scotch at the bar. Then I order a huge steak, medium rare, with frites. We both drink three glasses of wine.

By the end, I do not feel well. I am just at the edge of that point where things start to spin. Luckily, I have almost two miles to walk. If the police stopped me, could I walk a straight line? For a while I follow the sidewalk cracks, and then I veer into a crust of snow.

I look up into the crisp night, see twinkling stars, and then feel an urge to just close my eyes. Lurching, I open them again, this time taking in the soft green of the traffic lights glowing along the planks of the park benches. Boy, wouldn’t it be nice to just lie down?

No, not a good idea.

I make it home, guzzle water from my new eco-friendly metal bottle with the elaborate plastic sip top, and collapse into bed.

It’s not a great night, what with a car alarm going off for hours, but when I wake up, it’s not so bad. I’m grateful. More water, a muffin, some coffee, a Tylenol. Geez, why did I want to poison myself?

I walk to the yoga center. I should feel bad, but on the other hand, sometimes there’s nothing like a hangover. Life gets too stimulating, and right now it feels good to have energy for nothing beyond climbing this hill.

When I get to class, my body does what it is asked to. It is so forgiving, so much better to me than I deserve, I could cry. Leaving, I feel as if I have been granted a reprieve. I walk home feeling solid on the earth and once again bouncing like helium balloon, buoyed by something that feels really good and clean. I want to go deeper, I want to be mindful, I want to live!

Ah, well. It is what it is.

Happy ♥ Day!

It’s still VALENTINE'S DAY. Maybe because we’re all so grateful for what we’ve still got, the occasion seems unusually festive this year. I’ve seen men clutching paper cones of flowers, children holding giant red helium balloons, and neon hearts in windows all over the neighborhood. I’ve seen such an unusual number of couples I’m tempted to find them an ark.

I actually like Valentine’s Day, and I’m quite fond of the ♥ symbol. Recently, however, it occurred to me that it doesn’t look a whole lot like a human heart. So where does it come from?

The answer is that nobody knows. There’s some speculation that it’s supposed to look like a woman’s vulva or a cow’s heart, and a more compelling theory that it looks just like the seed of the silphium, a now extinct fennel (related to Queen Anne’s lace) that had a heyday as a Greco-Roman contraceptive.


♥ Ancient silver coin from Cyrene depicting a silphium seed or fruit .




♥ Heart-symbol-vulva-shape hypothesis illustration.



This question actually came up for me while I was sitting in a brief meditation session at the local yoga center, something I try to do two times a week. I used to sit with a man named T., who’s recovering from heart surgery. We rarely talked, but I miss him.

Lately, I sit with whichever of the yoga instructors is teaching the next class. Often this is J. Normally I set my blankets up at a slight angle to hers, which means that I can face her, politely, but also avoid staring at her directly. Ideally, I’ll train my fuzzy gaze on some knot in the floorboard.

The first time I went last week, I unexpectedly wound up sitting with R. I had already settled on my bolsters when she came in. She chose a spot only about eight feet away and faced me head-on! I took a fragmentary look, observed her relaxed and upright posture, noted that she looked both beautiful and blissful, and became completely unnerved.

I decided that this might be the day to meditate with my eyes closed.

It was a lovely morning, a harbinger of spring. Periodically I felt the brightening of the sun through my eyelids. The birds had resumed their chatter in the trees outside. The truck traffic seemed uncommonly low.

I’m usually quite aware of sounds when I sit. For much of the winter, the hissing of the radiators had reminded me of the swelling sounds of danger on a movie soundtrack.

I once heard a meditation instructor explain that you had to give the monkeys in your mind something to do—something other thinking out loud inside your head, that is. Ever since, I’d been stationing them at the sides of my skull, just inside my eardrums. Their job was to listen.

As the house sparrows chirped to the monkey in my right ear, it suddenly dawned on me that all my attention was going to my right or my left. Maybe some days it wandered to the source of a pain, which was likely to be in my back or my shoulders or my legs. It was anywhere but out front.

And that was more or less deliberate, I realized. Lately I’ve been thinking I have no idea what people mean when they talk about the energy among people, and maybe this is an example of why. I might as well have erected a big glass pane between me and my opposite number.

And so entered the heart. Eyes closed, I decided I might as well try to acknowledge that R. was there. I could relax my chest muscles and try to imagine that if there were to be a sense of awareness between us, I wouldn’t block it out. I might even send her a good thought.

Which I did, from the shelter of my closed eyes. My chest began to feel warm and somehow unsettled, as if my flesh were a pot that was being gently stirred. I experienced a rising, swelling sensation: something fierce and vulnerable, pushing outward.

So that was it. When I visualized that feeling that was pushing from somewhere behind my sternum, behind my breasts, and tapering down to my belly, it seemed to be shaped like a big heart—“a Valentine’s heart,” one of the monkeys observed. “Yeah, but that doesn’t look like heart at all,” said the other.

“Thinking,” my meditating self chimed in. “Thinking about hearts.”

Soon enough, the session ended. R. unfolded herself and stretched. “That was really pleasant,” she said. “It barely felt like 45 minutes at all.”

It hadn't hurt me, either.

Intrigued, I tried my opening-the-chest experiment again the next morning, this time with J. It was another pretty day. We often exchange thanks as we finish, but this time she added, “That was nice.”

“I thought so, too,” I said.

“I don’t know why--maybe because there weren’t any jackhammers outside,” J. said.

Who knows?

Happy Valentine's Day.