This topic will be a two-part post. In part 1, I'll be talking about Taoism and my experience with mindful meditation, including some critiques with mindfulness. In part 2, I'll be detailing three active Tao influenced visualization concepts I've created to managing chaos.
First encounter of Taoism
Back around 2002, while in college, I've been dealing with much mental stress, trying to pass my classes, taking care of drama at home while trying to be accepted by my peers. As I began to observe and dive off the deep end into existential philosophy, I also began suffering something called a quarter-life crisis. I turned to religion and friends, but it felt like a fake blanket trying to cover up uncontrolled internal feelings and depression - little did I know how unhealthy it was to suppress our emotions, which was also pretty common through out time up until the last decade.
Chaos arises at any time and has severe attachments to its meaning and how we value that meaning. Examples include: losing your wallet when it's your time to pay at a restaurant, forgetting your homework at home the day it's due, computer shutting off as you were about to finish your 5-page unsaved document, or maybe being confronted by a friend whom you thoughtlessly hurt. Our response, depending on the person, is a state of panic. By pure chance, my programming professor recommended a book that had hardly anything to do with the class he was teaching called the "Tao of Pooh" by Benjamin Hoff. It was such an excellent book because it helped me understand Taoism's complex subject matter, using Winnie the Pooh characters. I loved the concepts because I was gaining a new perspective on life. Admittedly, it became short-lived as it's hard to get rid of old habits. We'll return to this topic of Tao again as we visit part 2.
Mindfulness
Fast forward to the last couple of years where I've been going on and off about mindful meditation. My particular favorite app for this has been using the "Waking Up app" by Sam Harris. His guided meditations have helped me gain insight into myself and the current world around me - both embodying the current state of my consciousness. The app is full of inward to outward introspection explained via interviews with experts in philosophy - and listening to them is pretty invigorating. However, lately, I've been unable to meditate as much as I'd like. When I do, I'd feel something hampering my efforts - different than when I first started. Then, somehow, I'd lose the motivation to get back into it again, and I would go months without meditating until a peer asks a question that would remind me of the practice. Why is this difficult to do?
To get a fundamental understanding of mindful meditation, please observe the image above. In a nutshell, the practice would last for about ten to twenty mins, where you'd spend the entirety closing your eyes (or leaving them open), and all you'd do is pay attention and observe without judgment. Any sound that comes in - you notice, any thought that comes in - you'd notice that too, then you dissipate them into the empty space of your conscious. Breathing is essential here as it's a consistently repeating and non-interfering occurrence - so when you notice your mind wandering, you'd see it, ask of its origins, and let it go, then return to the breath.
Placebo alert! Please note that mindful meditation isn't an attempt to fix your emotions, like providing happiness or any positive vibes. If that's what you are looking for, do not expect to get happy after doing a ten min session. However, practitioners may use the consistency of this daily approach to increase or guide us to improve our overall well-being, thereby facilitating our happiness.
So you might ask yourself, why would we want to do this? What's the endgame? Well, there's a lot to digest if you haven't done this kind of thing before. But to give you a gist, it's a daily training regiment to provide you with the ability to observe yourself and catch you in one of your automation. By becoming a daily practitioner, you will notice more details of the world in effect, causing you to be a bit more hyper-reactive to the environment you're in and your place in it. I get why this is necessary; I've met many people who go through life until they get old, not noticing the years go by and not living it to their fullest potential. I know what that's like because I was like that too. As we neglect our life, the phenomenon I've seen is that we bring our attention to the details of our problems as something that needs fixing constantly. But that's my take; if you feel you're one of these people I'm describing, then give the mindful meditation a shot.
Confronting Chaos with Mindfulness
Now allow me to go back to the central theme of this blog post: chaos. For someone who has taken life for granted, where I overreacted to the simplest things, mindful meditation has gotten me to stop and notice my responses. But now, let's say a loved one passed away, you're thousands of dollars in debt, your spouse wants a divorce, or you lost a job because you accidentally wiped out their entire database. Oops! Or how about having a bunch of random events that keep ruining your day? A guy driving too slow, the restaurant doesn't have that sandwich you love anymore, telemarketers and spammers calling you 13 times in one day. There's just no way I can react casually, and if I do, how would I tell that my daily meditation is ever working? How does my newly robotic persona begin to fathom how to deal with these problems, or should I walk away from them?
Unless you are a bunch of stoics, no one will fully prepare for any of this stuff. The art of mindful meditation is rather challenging to master, explain, conceptualize, and is too open-ended. They need to be guided by an expert, and they need to cater person to person. But what are the measures of its impact? There seems to be minimal ROI in the long run when it comes to this because of how long it takes to see any results - usually weeks to months. It is not easy to prove a direct correlation between the practice and the positive effects on the practitioners' lives. It's also challenging to establish a correlation on whether it causes some detrimental impacts to our emotional state. To start it and to stay motivated, you'd need a leap of faith and trust in the process.
To add to the difficulty in analyzing the positive effects, I also feel that mindful meditation caters to a specific audience: people who can afford to spend time thinking about the existential world and become depressed in a prosperous time. These people are already well off in society - and often, that can give a false sense of belief in the practice. Like a karate "master" that spent their life practicing shadow boxing, kicking punching-bags, or breaking wooden blocks, their overconfidence can crack under pressure when faced with a real-life situation of defending against an aggressor at a bar. You will feel shocked, stunned, panicked, confused, and that can, in turn, create a distraction that will ruin your meditation.
In part 2 of this two-part series, I will address 3 visualization exercises I created in how I handle chaos and supplement mindful meditation.
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