“That man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest.”
~ Henry David Thoreau
Good morning friends. I’m happy to be back from an extended freelance assignment, serving as a stewardess aboard a 146 foot, $50 million mega yacht. I was part of a crew of nine service personnel, with only the owners aboard. It offered me a perfect opportunity to engage in my mindfulness practice, watching and staying present with not only myself, but those around me.
And here’s something that a net worth of $200 million dollars can’t buy. It can’t buy you out of boredom.
Integral to the Buddha’s teaching is that most of our lives are spent seeking. We seek out and are attached to pleasure, and we push away and are adverse to all that is unpleasant. In this way, the mind is in a constant state of agitation. We can never find deep rooted happiness and peace while seeking.
Midway through the 12 day charter, we ran into a string of days with uncharacteristically bad weather. The heavens opened, and it poured for hours on end. The seas were all churned up. There was nothing to do, but to wait it out.
Jay Michaelson writes in “The Gifts of Boredom”: “Normally, when we are bored, we’ll do just about anything to make the boredom stop.”
We forget how fortunate we are to even have the luxury to be bored in the first place!
“Our minds and our bodies fight desperately to push the boredom away, sometimes restlessly, other times angrily, and sometimes with an apathy that makes life seem barely worth living. Then again, sometimes it’s just irritating. And this is exactly why we’re bored: because we’re trying so hard not to be. In this way, and others, boredom is like enlightenment. What’s needed is not an additive, but a subtractive. Here’s the exercise: Just surrender and let it happen. Drink in the boredom, taste it, come to know it, let it just wash over you in waves and waves of dullness. Let yourself get really, really bored. And see what happens.”
I was very pleased with my own response and ability to rest in boredom. My years of yoga and meditation practice … sitting and watching the sunrise each morning … it must be working! Most of my days were spent in a confining laundry room, washing and pressing crew uniforms. I was able to observe that my mind was tired, and to see how badly I needed a break from “thinking”. I gave myself space to zone out, and then would pull myself back into mindfulness, and enjoy the sway of the boat, the hum of the machines, and the pulse of my iron as it carried across the board for hours on end. I took an afternoon nap each day. I stood at attention for hours after dinner service, resting in boredom, prepared to assist the owners if needed. And I was light-hearted with happiness.
My yoga teacher taught us to become very aware of body language, as a silent aid to help us understand our student’s mind-body habits.
I watched as the dreary weather caused the crew to become restless, and begin counting the days until the charter would finish. Moodiness arouse. Bickering ensued.
With the owners, their shoulders became tense, and they literally began twitching looking for something to entertain them. They apparently don’t carry kindles or ipods. No board games or cards were pulled from the shelves. It was too rainy even to hit the beach bars for an afternoon swim and cocktail. How much senseless television can one watch? Nit-picking began, and small side projects were assigned to the staff.
Jay Michaelson writes further: “We have boredom exactly backwards. Our minds are so conditioned to be always busy and interested, that when there’s nothing interesting (we think), we get really irritable. Sometimes maybe even nervous. Personally, my next step is try to find something interesting to do, or watch, because who wants to be worried, bored, or irritable? So I’ll put more information into my head in order ‘to relax’. Sometimes it’s not even pleasant information; I find there are times when I’d rather get stressed out about some future plan than just be bored with the present. In any case, the usual response to boredom is to put in something interesting, to get rid of it.”
“When people are bored, they’ll start to fidget, moving their bodies around to try to somehow stimulate something for the mind to be interested in. You know, you’ll crack your knuckles, or roll your tongue around your mouth — movements that are usually quite silly, really, but remember — you’re desperate. And yet, this just makes it worse.”
So the next time you find yourself bored in your middle-class existence, watch yourself really, really closely. And remember the opening quote by Thoreau.
Money cannot buy happiness. But it does slowly erode one’s ability to enjoy all the simple pleasures in life. It encourages a life of constant stimulation and entertainment, but it does nothing to settle the mind, to allow one to rest in happiness in the omni-present.
Zen teacher Genpo Roshi likes to ask his students to act from their “non-seeking, non-desiring minds.” The desire to be excited, happy, enlightened, more comfortable, whatever. Let it go. Just stop seeking. Can you do it?
The dzogchen texts speak of this as “old man, basking in the sun” because it’s just gaping, stupid awareness, with no agenda. It’s where you go when you stay bored, and get more bored, and then finally allow yourself to get so bored that you don’t want anything other than this lovely blissful boredom, peaceful, quiet, radiant awareness, mirror-like mind, gazing, gaping, just hanging there, doing nothing, non-seeking, non-desiring.
With practice, when you can sit and rest in peace in boredom, you are really, really close to Nibanna.
This is the maturing of spiritual practice, to master non-reactivity to any and all arising phenomena. Just as the Buddha did, sitting under the bodhi tree all those years ago. And as Christ did, fasting for 40 days and 40 nights.
To quote Jack Kornfield of meditation practice:
“After the ecstasy, the laundry.”
Reference: http://realitysandwich.com/10251/gifts_boredom/
