Mixing Your Mind with Space

Mindfulness has become ubiquitous as a practice. Yet according to meditation teacher Andrew Holecek, mindfulness is not enough to meet the challenges of the modern world. 

Holecek is a teacher in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition who leads workshops on meditation, dream yoga, and preparing for death. In his new book, I’m Mindful, Now What?: Moving Beyond Mindfulness to Meet the Modern World, he lays out the limitations of mindfulness and offers an overview of a variety of meditation techniques that can lead to deeper transformation, including the esoteric practices of reverse meditation and bardo yoga.

In a recent episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sat down with Holecek to discuss why meditation is the most natural thing we can do, how we can learn to nurture our meditation by destroying it, and the importance of “waking down” into the wisdom of the body.

Sometimes meditation can be described in terms of transcendence, but you suggest that it’s equally about subscendence, which you also describe as waking down into the messiness of embodied life. Can you say more about the power of subscendence and waking down into the wisdom of our body? The notion of subscendence, or waking down, ties into the highest levels of Buddhist tantra and nondual traditions. According to these traditions, you already have everything you could possibly want. Don’t try to go out into some place that is other than right here. Don’t try to have an experience other than what you’re having right now. Simply experience what you’re experiencing fully, 100 percent. Open your eyes, and what you’re looking for is hiding in plain sight.

As they say in the Mahamudra tradition, it’s so obvious you don’t see it, it’s so simple you don’t believe it, it’s so easy you don’t trust it. How do you actualize something you already have? You can’t. Trying to achieve it prevents you from achieving it. It’s like trying to achieve your feet: You already have them. What do you have to do? You just open, relax. That’s it. And then what happens? The mind falls into itself. The mind subscends. It drops into the nature of its being. And then you have what T. S. Eliot says: to arrive where you started and see it as if for the first time.

One practice you suggest is to ask ourselves, “What am I feeling right now that I just don’t want to feel?” Can you say more about this practice? This is the anticomplaint meditation. In addition to the formal practices that I introduce in the book, I also pepper the book with a number of these meditative snacks, these brief emergency meditations. The anticomplaint meditation is one of my favorites. The idea here is whenever you feel the urge to complain, the invitation is, before you express your discontent, pause for a second, turn the lens of your mind in, and take a brief inquiry: What am I feeling right now that I just don’t want to feel?

In any moment of duress or discontent, you will find some level of contraction. And so the invitation is to drop in and realize, “Whoa, there it is again.” Then what do you do? The practice is to stay with it and be with it. Simply being with it starts to transform it.

Then you go even further: Go into that contraction 100 percent. Stay embodied, and turn the lens of your mind and heart back in. Stay with whatever you’re feeling. Be mindful of it. And when you go into it very fully, guess what? The contraction will self-liberate. It will open, and you will actually find openness within the contraction.

This is colossal: You do not need to have any special experience to be free. You just need to relate 100 percent fully with whatever you’re experiencing—the good, the bad, and the ugly. This is amazingly empowering. It’s like, “Hey, wait a second, I’ve already got it. It’s all right here.” If I’m in a heap of hurt, and I relate to that heap of hurt properly, there’s liberation right here, right now.

You say that open awareness mixes the mind with space and that a lack of space is at the heart of all suffering. What do you mean by that? I would just say to look at your own experience. Look at those instances when you’re feeling a sense of levity, and you will almost always find some quality of openness, some quality of acceptance. When we start to contract away from our experience, the quality of spaciousness is lost and the mind becomes congested, contracted. I would argue that we suffer in direct proportion to that contraction.

[Open awareness] is mixing your mind with space. This is why the medium of the breath is so beautiful, using the relationship of inner space to outer space. One of my favorite meditations is the one-breath meditation session, where during the course of one inhalation and one exhalation, you take a sip of space. The next time you’re starting to feel a little contracted, a little congested, a little speedy, a little reactive, pause for a second and take a little sip of space. By taking a brief one-breath meditation session, see what happens to your relationship to the contents of your mind and the contents of your experience. You’re going to create a heightened sense of perspective and a heightened sense of accommodation and receptivity.

When you mix your mind with space, it creates a sense of distance and perspective from the contents of your mind. The contents are still there. Everything’s still there. But your relationship is radically altered. Everything now is much more spacious and accommodating, and from that is born responsibility, kindness, love, and compassion, because you’re more open and sensitive to others.

Space has amazing properties. On one level, it’s the softest thing in the world; on another level, it’s the most indestructible. You can’t cut it. You can’t bomb it. You can’t hurt it. And so by mixing your mind with space through open awareness practice, you develop this kind of industrial-strength mind not through a tough guy approach but through the indestructibility of space itself. You develop this kind of indestructible armor that allows you to handle anything that arises. You become indestructible by using the softest thing in the cosmos, which is space.

OK, Andrew, I’m going to take you back to the beginning. In the introduction to the book you pose a question: “What’s the point of meditative practice? To self-improve out of reality? To follow your bliss into heavenly states while the rest of the world goes to hell?” So I’d like to turn that question back to you. What is the point of meditation, particularly when it feels like the world is going to hell? This is super important. The point of meditation, to summarize it, is to wake up and to help others to wake up. If what I’m doing with my teaching and my writing isn’t of benefit to this world, it’s irrelevant. And I really mean that. If I’m just sitting here spewing out all this stuff as a talking head, what’s the point?

The journey of meditation is to get to know your mind and heart. This is where everything becomes wondrous: By coming to know your mind and heart so deeply, you come to know the mind and hearts of all sentient beings. This is no small thing. This is the true basis of compassion: the ability to literally suffer with others, to feel their pain as if it were your own.

When you allow your mind and heart to become open, as you mix your mind with space, you’re actually eventually mixing your mind with reality itself and all the beings that inhabit it. From that come all the bounties of infinite empathy and compassion that arise naturally from being in contact with others. The fruition of this is you become a representative of a reality, a servant of peace, and you act on reality’s behalf because you’re so in tune with it, you’re so at one with it, that it leads to this magnificent nondualistic realization that we really are all the same.

The meditative journey takes us to that ultimate unity. And from that ultimate unity, we spontaneously, effortlessly act on behalf of others. Suzuki Roshi said it so beautifully: “Strictly speaking, there are no enlightened people; there is only enlightened activity.” So the fruition of these practices is not what comes out of your talking head. The fruition of these practices is what you do with your life when it’s fully incorporated: You’ve ingested it, digested it, metabolized it. You live and breathe the teachings. They’re in your system. To me, that’s the fruition.

This excerpt has been edited for length and clarity.