Day 18 - Selective Touching
Living Christ Sangha - Advent Ango Practice Period
Readings
(click the header to view the readings)
Isaiah 9:8-17
2 Peter 2:1-10a
Mark 1:1-8
Reflection
On Monday, I looked how our minds work according to Buddhist psychology. We saw that there are four layers in the mind (sense consciousness, mind consciousness, store consciousness, and manas) and that mental formations arise in mind consciousness as the result of unconscious “seeds” in the store consciousness being touched and activated.
On Tuesday, I explored the idea of a nutriment, which is what touches and activates the seeds in the store consciousness. The post discussed two categories of nutriments (external and internal) each containing two types of nutriments. The external categories consists of physical nutriments and sensory nutriments. The internal category consists of volition and consciousness.
Today, I want to build on these two reflections by sharing a three-step process we can use to tend to our minds. These are done through the skillful use of mindfulness and intention. They may take some practice and time to develop, but we can all do it. Our aim is to be “picky eaters” when it comes to the nutriments that we take into our bodies and minds.
1 - Become Aware: Recognizing the Nutriments We Ingest
The first step in skillfully managing our mental and physical states is to become aware of what we are ingesting. This requires the practice of mindfulness.
Awareness of physical nutriments requires that when we eat, drink, or ingest other items, we know what we are ingesting. We seek to avoid mindless grazing or being unaware of the portions we are consuming.
Awareness of sensory nutriments requires us to be mindful when we take in news or other information, seek entertainment via TV shows, movies, or games, or use social media. We increasingly engage with all of these sources of sensory nutriments via digital technology, and it is very common for us to be in foraging or binging modes, not really sure what we are looking for and equally unaware of everything we are taking in. Becoming aware of our sensory nutriments may be our most significant challenge, and we may need to give ourself some time and change our usage patterns to gain this awareness.
Awareness of volition requires us to carefully look at our deepest values, interests, and aspirations, ensuring that we understand them clearly. These values, interests, and aspirations are the nutriments generated by volition.
Awareness of consciousness requires that we develop an awareness of our thoughts and habits of thought. Some Buddhists refer to this as cultivating “big mind.” Neuroscientists refer to it as metacognition. It is a very interesting process whereby we become aware of the activity of our minds and are able to reflect upon it. We all do this at times. For example, when we say “I am worrying about tomorrow’s test” we are in a state where we are aware of our own mental activity.
At this step, we are simply becoming aware of the nutriments that we ingest. In the next step, we seek to understand the effects they have on our mental state.
2 - Look Deeply: Identifying the Effects of Nutriments
Once we have some significant awareness of the nutriments that we ingest, we can begin to explore what their effects are on our physical and mental states. In this section, I highlight three ways we can do this, moving from the most straightforward to the most challenging.
Direct Recognition
Sometimes after you ingest a nutriment, the effects of it upon your body and mind are obvious. If it is a toxic physical nutriment, you may feel ill. If it is a toxic sensory nutriment, you may enter an unpleasant mental state such as anger, agitation, fear, or sadness. Toxins from volition and consciousness may also lead to these unpleasant mental states. In this case it is straightforward to recognize that the nutriment you ingested is toxic. It should be avoided if possible, and if that isn’t possible, we should be very compassionate, mindful, and aware of our reactions as we experience the nutriment. Mindfulness can be a very strong anchor when we know that we must ingest a nutriment that could cause distress.
Learned Insight
There are nutriments that we ingest that don’t have an immediate effect on our body and mind, so it can be challenging to determine whether they are nourishing or toxic. In these cases, we may recognize the effects slowly as they accumulate over time. For example, we may find that a poor physical diet is leading to weight gain or aches and pains. A poor sensory diet may be leading us to increased anxiety or depression. This is a subtle process, but once we have some sense that something we are ingesting may be harming us, we can investigate further and decide if it is something that we should eliminate or reduce.
There may also be insights available to us from other sources, such as information from health studies. These may save us a lot of suffering if we learn about them and take them to heart. For example, there are many studies that show that partially hydrogenated oils in food are particularly harmful. Foods that have these added oils can often be quite tasty and appealing, so understanding what has been learned in studies is useful to help us avoid these nutriments. Similarly, there are well-designed studies that show that people in certain populations are at increased risk of mental health issues from social media use. In a manner that is analogous to partially hydrogenated oils beings tasty, social media usage can feel good in the moment. However, social connections that are deeper and more nourishing can be adversely affected by prolonged social media use. In spite of an every-increasing number of social networking platforms, the USA is now in the throes of a devastating epidemic of loneliness.1
Recognizing Ruts
There are complex scenarios where a behavior combined with a given nutriment results in harm that the nutriment alone may not cause. Many of these have a compulsive or addictive quality to them, and the person suffering from this type of harm may often be stuck in a habitual rut. For example, one beverage containing alcohol is unlikely to lead to serious physical or mental problems, but when a person develops a substance-use disorder, the same single drink can create a cascade of behavior and nutriments that cause immense suffering. The challenge of these situations is that they often seem tolerable for some time, and even after they become intolerable, the person finds it extremely difficult to abandon the behavior and the nutriments. These are cases where medical treatment or recovery programs may be warranted.
Once we have looked deeply into the effects of our nutriment “diet,” we can move to the final step of cultivating positive physical and mental states by exercising choice regarding which nutriments we ingest.
3 - Select: Choosing Nourishing Nutriments
There are two final practices to learn once we’ve come to understand what we are ingesting and the effects it is having on us. The first is to seek to ingest nutriments that touch beneficial seeds and encourage positive mental formations to arise. The second is to embrace and lovingly tend to our negative mental formations when they happen to arise.
Encouraging Beneficial Mental Formations
While we don’t have total control over whether we ingest any of the four types of nutriments, we have enough ability to manage them that we can definitely create a positive influence on our physical and mental health. Choosing to avoid the nutriments that cause us difficulty and to ingest the ones that create well-being is what Thich Nhat Hanh calls “selective touching.”2
When we practice selective touching, we seek to ingest nutriments that create peace, understanding, and love. We show care and concern for our bodies by minding what we eat, drink, and consume. We show care and concern for our minds by being mindful and careful of the sensory nutriments we ingest, by nurturing healthy and meaningful aspirations, and by becoming aware of and managing our thoughts and thought patterns.
Embracing Non-beneficial Mental Formations
When a mental formation arises that is not conducive to our health and well-being, we should do our best not to act it out nor suppress it. We do not go to war with our troubling mental formations, because they are us. The anger we feel when someone speaks unkindly to us is our anger. The anxiety we feel before a challenging conversation is our anxiety. The best way to manage a troubling mental formation is to embrace it with compassion, letting it know that you are here to take good care of it. In essence, we can speak to our troubled states: “Hello, anxiety. I know that you are here and I am going to take good care of you. I will look deeply into what is causing you to arise and do my best to stop ingesting that nutriment so you can rest again.” This is non-violence.
Tomorrow we will look at some exercises for cultivating joy that are based on these principles, and on Friday we will explore practices for sharing joy with others.
Prayer
Giver of insight and effort, help me to see and understand the nutriments that I ingest and their effects on me. Give me courage and diligence to guard my body and mind, so that bit by bit my afflictions end. Amen.3
Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching, Chapter 9: Right View.
The second line of this prayer uses concepts from a gatha for making the bed. Gathas are short mindfulness verses to be recited silently to help us recollect ourselves during specific activities. The bed-making gatha and many others are available in a wonderful collection from Thich Nhat Hanh called Present Moment, Wonderful Moment.