By Daniel Chapelle, author of Meditative Self-Care
Meditative Self-Care brings more lightheartedness into our lives by reducing any dissatisfaction we may be experiencing.
Its starting premise is what the Buddha discovered: We suffer from who we think we are. From moment to moment, we believe we are somebody or another. That self-perception is made up of a combination of parts that are stable and conscious and others that are less so. As we will see, it is the source of all our unhappiness. If we want to lighten the load of dissatisfaction in our lives, we must let go of previously unrecognized beliefs about who we are. Meditative Self-Care helps us do that.
There are different levels of self-perception. The first concerns what the Chinese philosopher Confucius considered our role in the world. Here, we define ourselves in familiar terms: employer or employee, parent or son or daughter, student, married or not, retiree, etc. This is who we believe we are. Meditative self-care promotes what Confucius and the Buddha taught: If we want to live a good life, we must perform our role as well as we can, even if—especially if—that role is challenging. The way to do that is to perform it with precision and almost as if it were a personal ritual. A task we may otherwise dislike becomes less unpleasant, even pleasant, when we perform it to the very best of our ability. That is because there is no room to be unhappy when we are fully focused or “in the flow.” An artist can be unhappy before and after his creative work but not during it. The same goes for all of us when we are fully focused on the here and now of our activity at hand.
At the next level of self-perception, things become fuzzier around the edges. If, for instance, we are nurses or teachers, do we tend to be generally kind and generous with our time, attention, and interest? Or are we often impatient and less than friendly? Here, we are talking about habitual behavior patterns or stable personality traits. These give us our reputation among those around us and our familiar and repeated experience and behavior patterns. Meditative self-care shows us things about those patterns and ourselves we may not have realized before. That benefits both us and others.
At a more transitional level, our usual experience and behavior patterns can fluctuate. For instance, even the kindest nurse can have a bad day, and the friendliest teacher can sometimes be impatient. Meditative self-care helps us better understand the cause of these fluctuations, allowing us to reduce the undesirable ones. It shows us that change and personal development are possible.
At the next level of self-perception, things are more fleeting and less easy to notice unless we learn to pay attention. This is the level of changeable feelings, sudden mood swings, thoughts, and impulses that, like lightning, appear suddenly in our experience and seemingly out of nowhere. Meditative self-care makes us aware of all that flits through our minds. It is where learning how our minds work begins in earnest. Here, it becomes personally conducted consciousness science in the strictest sense. This involves the meditation part of meditative self-care. It is where the slow process of personal change happens. We can compare it to learning to play a musical instrument: The learning is slow and never finished, and it requires the three Ps of Practice, Patience, and Persistence.
There is one last and radically different level of awareness. But before we go there, we must look at the actual practice of meditative self-care.
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That actual practice involves meditation as its active ingredient. Here, we sit in a quiet place and turn our attention inward. In a typical scenario, we focus on the physical sensations of just sitting and breathing. There is nothing else to do and nowhere else to be. There is nothing to figure out, analyze, understand, or solve. There is only focusing on the physical sensations of just sitting and breathing. There is nothing to strive for or accomplish, nothing to hope for, and nothing to expect.
This seemingly easy thing—for it means not doing anything—is not so easy but a challenge. That is because our mind compulsively wants to do something. It wanders to other things, like a hyperactive monkey leaping from one thing to another. The challenge is to keep bringing our attention back to the physical sensations of just sitting and breathing again and again.
At first, when we discover how hyperactive our monkey mind is, this seems almost impossible, and we may think we are unfit to meditate. But eventually, our attention slows down and begins to rest instead of jumping around from this to that. It becomes easier to stay on the meditation object longer. Feelings of quiet and calm eventually set in. This is pleasant enough when it happens, but it is not the goal of meditation or meditative self-care. But what, then, is the goal? The goal is to stop identifying with who we think we are.
We begin by recognizing that our untrained mind tends to chase everything that appears in awareness. Like a dog, we chase after every stick thrown before it. Instead of staying focused on just sitting and breathing, we find ourselves distracted by and reactive to other things that appear in our awareness: thoughts of things we have to do, problems we are having, conflicts, flitting ideas that seem to come from nowhere, sadness that hangs over us like a dark cloud, negative and angry or hostile thoughts, or wounded feelings we are still nursing long after a painful event, etc. The mental content of this lived experience keeps us and our psychotherapists busy. As Freud put it, it is the grist for the mill of psychological analysis. It is the material that goes into self-perceptions built on largely unconscious self-images. And it is the belief in the reality of these self-images that makes up our unhappiness. Hence, “we suffer from who we think we are.”
The challenge is recognizing “who we think we are” at any moment when something bothers us. Are we perhaps like spoiled children who get irritated and angry when they don’t get their way? Are we overly sensitive to actual or perceived insults and injuries? Are we like entitled royalty expecting everybody to bow to our every wish? Becoming more aware of these things improves our lives and relationships—with others and with existence itself. But there is more. Once we can clearly see these unhelpful and less than fully conscious identifications, we can more easily let go of them. They don’t have to stick to our best personality traits like annoying Velcro that sticks to our favorite clothes.
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We now come to the real goal of meditative self-care, which is about more than feelings of relaxation or well-being and improved self-observation. And it is about more than freeing us not only from specific unhappy-making self-identifications or beliefs about who we are. It is about beginning to end the very habit of forming these identifications.
We begin by seeing that we have been clinging to made-up ideas about ourselves by believing them. For many of us, these unhappy-making self-images are our most original and unique creations, for we do not need a teacher to learn how to make ourselves unhappy. We do that spontaneously and creatively with the self-images we choose to believe. As others have said, we are always practicing something, and what we practice most is our unhappiness. Not only can we let go of those beliefs by recognizing that they have been imaginings, but we eventually realize that even the idea of having or being a definable personal self is a misconception.
How do we get to that view? By looking closely at our experiences as we live them and seeing that they are nowhere but in “awareness-itself”—“Rigpa” in Tibetan. But what is this “awareness-itself?”
When we look at anything around us or any part of our body, we ask the most penetrating meditative question: “Where is it?” The answer seems obvious: “Right there.” But then we ask: “Where is that there, that thereness?” Here we are stumped. We realize that there or thereness is a concept, an idea, not a thing or even a quality we can point at. When we counter: “I know it is there because I can see it,” again, we ask: “Where is that knowing, that seeing?” What we are looking at or thinking about exists as an appearance in awareness-itself. The philosopher Schopenhauer said this in the opening line of his famous book, “The world is my perception”—“Die Welt ist meine Vorstellung” in the original German.
When that realization becomes clear and a directly felt experience, not just another intellectually fabricated idea, the notion and belief that we are an identifiable and definable self, an entity that exists as an independent being, dissolves. Instead, we discover that we are not an independently existing being or entity but awareness-itself. And that awareness-itself, that Rigpa, is insubstantial. It is more like nothing than something. Yet it gives us everything that is our life.
Awareness-itself makes all knowledge possible, but it cannot be known as an object of knowledge. We cannot know Rigpa or awareness-itself as an entity alongside other entities. We can only know it by likening it to or by analogy with things presumed to be better understood. A traditional analogy is that of space. Just as space itself cannot be grasped or pointed to even though it is everywhere and contains everything in it, so too can awareness itself not be known even though it includes all that we can know or experience. Or it is like silence that underlies and contains all sound and fury—or like an eternal stillness that contains all motion, commotion, and drama, or like a mirror that can reflect everything without being affected by any of it.
That is the ultimate goal of meditative self-care: a state of mind or consciousness that transcends our usual perceptions and self-perceptions, leading to a profound understanding of our true nature, which is awareness-itself. Since our usual perceptions and self-perceptions dissolve at this point, all feelings of unhappiness associated with our self-images dissolve along with them. This is what the Buddha meant by liberation from samsara, the unhappiness of everyday life.
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For more information, see the book Meditative Self-Care. The author can be contacted on his website, meditativeselfcare.com, or at
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