Linda Graham, MFT

The mindfulness we practice on our cushion in the morning is the same mindfulness we practice to notice our reaction when our spouse frowns at us or our boss yells at us., and to notice our reactivity when we are frowning or yelling at them! The compassion we practice in a weekly class or a daylong is the same compassion we practice when we or someone we love loses a job, or a relationship, or a home, or their health.

Anchoring our wise effort in the Dharma—cultivating the wholesome and letting go of the unwholesome — informs the choices we make about the food we eat, the time we spend playing with our kids, how we vote, how we mobilize to deal with global warming, racial inequality and economic injustice, and how we face old age, dying and death.

Mindful empathy allows us to be present to the experience that is happening in the moment, aware of it but able to step outside it. With practice, we can notice any thought as a thought, any pattern of thoughts as a pattern. We can notice any feeling as a feeling, any cascade of feelings as a cascade. The same is true for any state of mind, even multi-layered, richly complex (tortuous) states of mind; for any process of the brain.

When we deeply believe any idea about ourselves, we can become so closely identified with that belief that we don’t even see it as a construct: we see it as an integral part of our nature, not a choice or pattern that was learned and can be unlearned. Sometimes a pattern is established so early that it gets encoded only in implicit memory; we don’t even know we believe it. That view of our self has become invisible to us.