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DISCLAIMER: As you read this article, I encourage you to implement those suggestions that you find helpful and beneficial, and ignore any ideas that do not serve you. Let your inner wisdom — which you can most easily hear when the mind, heart, and body are alert, balanced, open, and calm — be your guide.
Right now, we are all experiencing a lot of change. New norms need to be followed that upset our routine. For those of us fortunate enough to be able to shelter at home, we need to socially isolate ourselves from our friends, relatives, and colleagues. For those of us who are unable to shelter in place, we need to navigate interacting with people in ways that are hygienic and safe.
But these are just the start of the changes we face. We may be dealing with the loss of someone who has already died from COVID-19. We may be dealing with sick friends and family members and trying to navigate a chaotic health-care system that is overwhelmed and under-resourced. We may have lost our source of income, and be unable to pay our bills or buy our groceries. We may be needing to learn new skills to allow technology to keep us connected and able to do our jobs. In these and an infinite number of ways, we are all experiencing dramatic change in our lives.
All this change can be unsettling, disorienting, confusing, and difficult. Thankfully, we can draw on our mindfulness practice now to find our inner peace amidst the mental and emotional storms that may be raging.
By remaining mindful, we can connect with our inner peace, patiently acknowledge our experience, and compassionately hold all the unpleasant, fearful thoughts the mind generates, and all of the unpleasant, anxious feelings the body and mind generate. As we hold them in our awareness, we can compassionately notice how our thoughts, feelings, and mental states are simply unpleasant, temporary, and impersonal.
Mindfully Notice the Patterns of Unpleasantness in the Mind and Body
When we encounter thoughts, feelings, mental states that are unpleasant, we can see that they do not serve us.
When we feel unpleasantness, we can notice how fearful, untrue, and self-defeating thoughts in the mind proliferate. We can notice how these thoughts, when believed, create even more unpleasant feelings in the body and mind. We can also notice that when these thoughts are mindfully seen as merely impersonal, temporary, and unhelpful thoughts, they can be experienced with a greater sense of peace and ease.
When we feel unpleasantness, we can notice how our body wants to react by acting out unskillfully in ways that harm ourselves or others. We want to fight, flee, or freeze. Or we want to gratify our sense pleasures with unhealthful addictions to food, drugs, alcohol, sex, shopping, television, gambling, or whatever our addictions of choice may be.
In this way, we can mindfully and compassionately, without aversion or attachment, see how these unpleasant sensations of body and mind do not serve us.
Mindfully Notice Impermanence
Given that thoughts, feelings, and mental states are temporary, we need not react to them with a desire to push them away (aversion), or by acting them out unskillfully (greed). Because they are temporary, they will go away on their own as is their nature to do. Moreover, they tend to go away faster when we do not engage in them and simply see them as impersonal thoughts, feelings, and mental states.
Mindfully Notice the Impersonal Nature of Thoughts, Feelings, and Mental States
We can put our hands in a flowing river and experience the coolness and wetnesses of the water, but we do not mistake the river to be who we are. The river is not us because we do not have full control over her. We can’t command her to flow uphill, feel dry, be warm, and have her obey us. Still, we have some influence over the river. We can drink the water, splash it, swim in it, and so no, but that does not confuse us into thinking that we are the river. So we can say the river is impersonal.
In the same way our thoughts, feelings and mental states are impersonal. They are not who we are, because we do not have full control over them. We can’t command our thoughts to be only loving, and have them obey us. We can’t command our body and mind to only feel pleasant feelings and have empowered and energized mental states, and have them obey us.
Just like the river, we can experience our thoughts, feelings, and mental states, and to some degree we can gently influence them, but we do not fully control them. They too are impersonal. We are the awareness that can know the river, the thoughts, the feelings, the mental states. But we are not anything that we know. That is why all that we know is impersonal.
Yes, we experience our thoughts, feelings, and mental states very intimately and powerfully, but for our benefit, we must avoid mistaking these experiences as being who we are. We are the awareness that knows these thoughts, feelings, and mental states, while the thoughts, feelings, and mental states are merely the objects of our awareness.
When we recognize the impersonal nature of these objects, we can relate to them with a relative sense of peace, ease, and calmness, even if objects themselves are unpleasant, chaotic, and messy. By mindfully remembering that we are the awareness, and that everything else is impersonal, we can navigate life with far more love, peace, wisdom, and skillfulness.
Uprooting Falsehood
Every thought, feeling, and mental state contains a deeper story and often an entire world-view. Given that thoughts, feelings, and mental states are impersonal, we need not believe their stories at face value.
Be mindful of these stories and critically investigate them. How does this story feel in the body: pleasant, unpleasant or neutral? If it doesn't feel pleasant or neutral, in what way is this story false and untrue? Does it contain futuring, pasting, self-view, fixed-view, greed (lust, craving, clinging, wanting, etc.) or judgment (aversion, fear, etc.)? How does this story undermine me, cause me to suffer, and harm me and others? What’s another way of seeing this situation that is free of falsehood, that supports and nourishes me, and that feels supportive, empowering, and pleasant in the body and mind?
Over time, we replace the untrue stories with the true stories. We replace the false stories that do not serve us, with the realities that do. We know this progress is happening, because the more we live in alignment with the truth, the more we can feel our inner love, peace, compassion, and joy as we move throughout our day.
Truth and Love
As we let go of the false stories of judgment and greed, we experience less fear, hatred, and frustration, and more of our radiant inner peace and love. We come to appreciate the people, animals, and nature all around us. Our relationships improve, not only with ourselves, our family and friends, but also with strangers, and even those we once considered to be our “enemies.” We see and enjoy the beauty and wisdom in the birds, squirrels, trees, clouds, lakes, and flowers that surround us.
Having witnessed how judgement, hatred, and bitterness does not serve our body, mind, and spirit, we notice a gradual shift away from them into a more respectful and loving attitude towards ourselves and others. As we connect more with our radiant inner love, we find that our inner love loves loving. The more we love, the more we are inspired to love.
Out of love for ourselves, we remain mindful of our impersonal thoughts, we see that lots of them are self-critical, mean-spirited, and judgmental towards ourselves. Seeing this we stop believing those impersonal, unhelpful, and untrue thoughts that feel unpleasant in the body, and replace them with kind, supportive, helpful, truthful thoughts. No longer do we let our mind beat us up emotionally. Slowly over time, we learn to love ourselves unconditionally.
Out of love or ourselves, we remain mindful of falsehoods in the mind. In this time of pandemic, we see our mind believing a frightening story of the future, and feel the anxiety and depression in the body that arises. This reminds us to be mindful and come into the present moment. We mindfully label this experience “futuring” and remind ourselves of the truth that “the now is all there is.” That imagined future does not exist anywhere but in our mind. It causes us to suffer and respond unskillfully so why bother believing it or taking it personally? We are more resourceful, creative, and skillful, when we respond to our unfolding reality from a place of inner love and peace. So rather than live in the fear and dread of a false and imagined future, we mindfully choose to live in the relative peace and safety of the present moment.
Out of love for ourselves and others, we relate to those who are unskillful with compassion. During this time of pandemic, our ego may relate to politicians, and other authorities, who it feels are acting too slowly or making poor decisions with judgment, hatred, anger, and bitterness. But we know the pattern of this story. As the old saying goes, “Hatred harms the hater not the hated.”
We experiment with relating to these people with compassion, kindness, and blessings. Rather than seeing them as free people consciously making bad choices, we see them as victims of circumstances, unconsciously trapped in their ego, who are suffering from the same root causes of greed, fear, and falsehood that we used to (and, at times, often still do) suffer from.
Knowing the healing power of love from our own experience, we bless them with love, seek to show them love, and hope they experience love, that they too may be healed. For all who are healed with love, come out of at least some of their misery and confusion, become more loving, and behave more skillfully.
The same energy that had been used to judge, condemn, and curse our enemies, is now used to send them blessings, such as: “May (insert name of person or group of people here) know unconditional love through me, and those around them, and be healed.” It feels awkward, and maybe even unnatural at first. But we keep practicing. Slowly over time, the tumultuous feelings of bitterness and hatred we feel, are replaced with the warm, joyful and connecting feelings of compassion, friendliness, and peace.
Truth brings us to love. Love brings us to truth. They both work together to make our lives a blessing full of peace and joy, regardless of the situations we find ourselves in.
Love and Service
As we shed our fearful, judgmental, greedy ego, and come to know our own power and deep love for our life, we naturally want to serve all life around us. We use the skills and talents we have been blessed with, to serve and benefit others.
In this time of pandemic, out of love for ourselves and our community, for those of us who are able to, this means we shelter in place. Rather than let our mind obsess about what is wrong with the situation, we see the benefits, opportunities, and goodness that can come from it.
Even in our confinement, we look for ways and opportunities to help and serve others and all life. Maybe we donate to worthy organizations, or volunteer our services, or call people we know are going through rough times to share our love with them. Whatever services we can do from our home, that our inner wisdom calls us to do, we do, and we do them with an inner sense of peace, love, and ease. If we do them with stress, fear, and frustration, we are either doing them with the wrong intentions (guilt, obligation, greed, etc.) or if your motives are pure, we are trying to do too much and may need to scale back our efforts.
For those of us unable to shelter in place, we go out into the community to serve others. We take all appropriate precautions to not contract or spread the disease. We mindfully note our fearful thoughts, but we don’t take them personally or seriously and become entangled in them. Instead, we have faith that this life will give us what we need to grow spiritually, to learn to live mindfully, with truth and love, and in service to all life.
Yes, we may get sick, we may even die, but it is only our impersonal body that dies. The awareness who we are is eternal, unborn, and undying. The you that you are cannot be harmed by COVID-19 or anything else. The same goes for all of your loved ones. From this understanding, our love for others can give us the courage to do what needs doing, take the risks that need to be taken, and accept the consequences peacefully, come what may.
Granted, this is all easier said that done. But wisdom teachers from all wisdom traditions have been telling us this in one way or another for millennia.
Mindfulness, Truth, Love and Service
Thus, Mindfulness — kindly paying attention to our inner thoughts, feelings, mental states, and actions to see the patterns of how they work and interact, while reminding ourselves of their fundamentally unsatisfying, impermanent, and impersonal nature — leads us to live in Truth, Love and Service.
Even now, even with our world changing so dramatically, the eternal wisdom of Mindfulness, Truth, Love, and Service can guide as we face the numerous uncertainties that lie before us. If you have a mindfulness practice, maintain it. If you don’t have one, start it today.
Wishing you, and all beings, a mindful, creative, loving, and flexible mind and heart, that we may compassionately respond with wisdom to the vicissitudes of life we face. May we all be free of suffering, and the root causes of suffering: greed, fear, and falsehood. May we all be safe and protected, peaceful and happy, and healthy and strong. May we all be mindful, see with truth, abide in our inner love, and kindly serve one another.