Tan, Chade-Meng - Search Inside Yourself - The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace)

“I got you this book on mindfulness meditation instead of an Xbox. It’s just as fun!”

The final feature, closely related to the third feature, is that in either meditation it is possible to get into a very good state of ease and flow. When you are engaged in an activity you are very good at, such as skiing, dancing, or writing code, and if you are in a state where your full attention is on the activity and it is fun, easy, and sufficiently challenging at the same time, then you may get into a state of flow in which you are performing at your best yet your mind is at ease. Similarly, with enough practice, it is possible to become skillful at playing with attention and getting into a state of flow when it feels fun and easy at the same time, just by sitting. Very cool.

Zen and a Walking Baby

One of the best analogies I have ever come across for meditation practice is a baby learning to walk.

I remember my daughter taking her first step when she was about nine months old. One beautiful step. One step was all she could manage before she would fall, in the über-cute way that only babies can fall. (Everybody say, “Awwwww.”) Eventually, she graduated from one step to two steps. And then she plateaued for a while. For a couple of months, she could walk no more than one or two steps before she would fall. (Awwwww.) Then a few days after her first birthday, I noticed her walking four steps. That same day, she doubled that achievement and maxed out at eight steps. (Yes, I measured—I’m an engineer.) The next day, she seemed to plateau at eight steps, but in the late afternoon, she managed sixteen steps before she fell. In the evening, she exceeded thirty steps. Once she broke that barrier, she could walk. On that day, she mastered walking. (Awwwww.)

I found an important similarity between that experience and my own meditation practice. There seem to be two stages in one’s meditation progress. I call the two stages “initial access” and “consolidation.” The initial access stage is when you find yourself able to access a certain state of mind, but you cannot maintain that mind for very long. For example, you may serendipitously find yourself in a state of mind where you are very calm and alert, and feel a deep sense of joy permeating your mind, but after just a few minutes, you lose it. This stage is like a baby taking her very first step. The baby is finally able to access the experience of walking. She finally knows what it feels like, but it only lasts a single step, maybe two, and then it is over.

The consolidation stage is the long process of going from walking one step to being able to walk around the house. For a meditator, it is becoming able to bring up a state of mind on demand, at a desired intensity and duration. Progress in this stage seems to be an exponential function that looks like a hockey stick on a graph, which means that you go for a frustratingly long time seemingly without any meaningful progress, and then suddenly— boom —within a very short period, you make huge progress and arrive at full consolidation. It’s like my daughter plateauing at two steps for months and then suddenly, in the space of two days, becoming able to walk. To the casual observer, it may look like she learned to walk in just two days, but in reality, she did it over three months. It is her constant practice over three months that enabled the last two days of sudden progress and mastery.

I think the lesson to be learned is to avoid feeling discouraged when your meditation does not seem to be progressing. If you understand the process, you may understand that when change does come, it will come suddenly, and every moment of effort brings you a little closer to that point. The classical analogy is ice breaking up on a frozen lake. To a casual observer, the breakup seems like a sudden phenomenon, but it is actually due to a long period of gradual melting of the underlying ice structure. In Zen, we call it gradual effort and sudden enlightenment.

So the next time you see a baby learn to walk, pay some attention. That baby is really a Zen master teaching you a thing or two about progress in your meditation. (Everybody say, “Awwwww.”)

“She’s very advanced.”

CHAPTER FOUR

All-Natural, Organic Self-Confidence

Self-Awareness That Leads to Self-Confidence

You cannot solve a problem with the same mind that created it.

—Albert Einstein

Once upon a time in ancient India, a thief running away from guards noticed a beggar sleeping in a dark alley. He secretly put the small but priceless piece of jewelry he had just stolen into the pocket of the beggar. He then ran away, intending to come back and steal from the beggar after he outran the guards. Overnight, the thief was accidentally killed during a struggle with the guards. The beggar was now a rich man. In his pocket, he had enough wealth to live comfortably for life, but he never once checked his own pocket, so he never knew. He lived the rest of his life as a beggar.

You never know what you will find when you look within—there may be hidden treasures.

Clarity

This chapter is about looking within ourselves. If the whole chapter can be encapsulated in a single word, that word is clarity . Deepening self-awareness is about developing clarity within oneself. There are two specific qualities we like to develop—resolution and vividness—as illustrated by the pictures above.

The picture on the right is different from the picture on the left in two ways. First, the resolution is higher, so we can see a lot more details. Second, there is more brightness and contrast, so we can see the image more vividly. The combination of resolution and vividness makes the image more useful to us. In the same way, the practices in this chapter will help us perceive our emotions more clearly in two ways. Firstly, we can increase the resolution (or precision) at which we perceive our emotions, so we can see emotions the moments they arise and cease, and subtle changes in between. Secondly, we increase their brightness and contrast so we can see them more vividly than before. This combination will give us very useful high-fidelity information about our emotional life.

About Self-Awareness

Daniel Goleman defines self-awareness as “knowing one’s internal states, preferences, resources and intuitions.” 1I like this description because it suggests that self-awareness goes beyond insight into one’s moment-to-moment emotional experience; it expands into a broader domain of “self,” such as understanding our own strengths and weaknesses and being able to access our own inner wisdom.

Self-awareness is the key domain of emotional intelligence that enables all the others. This is because self-awareness engages the neocortex (the thinking brain) in the process of emotion. Self-awareness maps onto areas of the thinking brain that have to do with self-focused attention and language, so when we are engaged in strong self-awareness, those areas of the brain light up, and that can mean the difference between screaming at some guy or being able to stop and tell yourself, “I cannot scream at that guy; he is the CEO!” Our engagement of the neocortex in every experience of emotion is a necessary step in gaining control over our emotional lives. Mingyur Rinpoche has a poetic metaphor for describing it, he says the moment you can see a raging river, it means you are already rising above it. Similarly, the moment you can see an emotion, you are no longer fully engulfed in it.