April 2016, Mindfulness

Dear friends,

If someone would have told me a few months ago that they have something that can reduce anxiety, raise self-esteem, soothe depression, curtail addiction, and help avoid breakdown of significant relationships, I would have thought they are dreamers. Not only have I recently discovered something that ticks all these boxes and so much more, but it is not an expensive or nasty pill but rather a most basic ability every breathing human being is capable of.

I am referring, of course, to the practice of meditation. Up until very recently the concept of meditating was something as foreign to me as a Buddhist monk in the Himalayas. An attractive proposition with no way to engage with it. But what I’ve recently learnt is how far this is from the truth.

The most basic technique of the Mindfulness Meditation I’ve been practicing is the focus on the breath. We all breathe all the time but we hardly ever pay attention to it. Our minds are machines that run amok incessantly churning out ideas, opinions, beliefs, fears, solutions, commentary, arguments, and justifications. And we, therefore, don’t have the time and space to sit still and be present.

I for one only consciously breath when I run out of breath leading my speech to get progressively higher in pitch, faster in tempo, and less in volume. Part of that may have to do with coming from a large family where stopping to breathe may have cost you the opportunity to be heard. Partly, no doubt, it is intensity of personality. But above all, when I wasn’t noticing my breath I wasn’t appreciating what the breath is and its capacity to anchor us physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually.

In the story of creation of Adam in the Torah, it says that God blew into his nostrils the breath of life. It would follow that connecting to the breath is a way of connecting with our souls, our spiritual selves. It is interesting to note that the Hebrew word for soul is Neshama, the root of which is Noshem – breathing.

And indeed this is what I discovered. After spending half an hour or so systematically scanning my body for sensations while riding the waves of my breath, I hear the guide talking about absorbing the feeling of the body as a whole, how we are part of the whole, and at this point connected with the whole.

Different people refer to this as different things – Nature, Whole, God, or Force – but the idea is the same. For me, connecting with the Divine means stepping out of our ego, with its desires, its striving, and insecurities, and bringing our attention to the most basic fact of life, that we are breathing. It enables us to transcend judgement, excite our curiosity and helps contextualise the skewed perspective we often lose ourselves in.

Next week we celebrate the exodus from Mitzrayim – Egypt. In the Haggadah we say that in every generation one must see themselves as if they personally went out of Egypt. The Kabbalah teaches that on a deeper level Mitzrayim – Egypt, comes from the root of Meitzar – a narrow place, a place of restriction and constriction. This refers to our own individual spiritual battles, which we feel locked into and unable to let go. We may even feel literally enslaved.

Pesach is a time, of course, to celebrate freedom as a nation memorialised by Moshe’s demand ‘Let My People Go’. And it is also a time to recognise the importance of freedom of the individual from their own darkness and spiritual afflictions. In the words of the great Bob Marley – ‘Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our mind’.

Happy meditating.

Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Shneur