We're All Bananas
One of the most valuable benefits of mindfulness—equanimity, or calm on the seas of living—is also a skill we have to practice. It’s the ability to stay clear-eyed and centered when things change, for good or otherwise, while accepting what is, moment to moment.
Naturally, the trickier end of this spectrum is accepting things that threaten us: bad news, disappointment, loss, pain in our bodies and in those we love. “Some things just hurt,” says acclaimed meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg. We can't avoid pain, but we can diffuse our suffering by mindfully managing our reaction to it.
The healthiest—most equanimous—response, Sharon writes in an essay for On Being with Krista Tippett, is to move toward each Bad Thing with openness and curiosity, accepting what is actually true breath by breath, while loosening our grip on the idea that we can control it, or deny it altogether, as if refusing to feel will make unpleasant things cease.
This impulse is strong—our brains are hard-wired to resist things that hurt, or that might hurt. But we can get so focused on what’s happening to us that we forget to look down and see what’s still with us. What still is.
“Autumn is...the season of revelation, for the seeming loss unveils a larger reality: Chlorophyll is a life-force, but it is also a cloak,” writes Maria Popova, founding essayist at The Marginalian. She points out that leaves don’t change colors. As cooler temperatures trigger trees to shut down photosynthesis each fall, the fading of their (green) chlorophyll reveals the yellow, orange, red and purple it had been masking all along. “How can this not be a living reminder that every loss reveals what we are made of,” she writes, “an affirmation of the value of a breakdown?”
It’s the same with bananas, Maria explains. As they ripen (and their chlorophyll is metabolized), yellow xanthophyll is revealed. Scientists have discovered that ripe bananas also produce a blue fluorescent compound—part of the spectrum of light beyond what humans can detect (though butterflies and reindeer can!).
Maybe this should nudge us most mindfully of all: our banana-selves, always mid-change, hold still more—far more—than ever meets our own bleary eye.
What We're Trying: 10 Days of Lovingkindness Practice with Sharon Salzberg
This series of 10 guided lovingkindness practices, made available by Sounds True, explores the direction of compassion: toward ourselves, toward others (including difficult others), and toward all living things.
Sharon Salzberg has been teaching vipassana (insight) meditation since 1974 and is a founder of the Insight Meditation Society, with Joseph Goldstein, in Barre, Massachusetts. She's the author of several books, including Real Life: The Journey from Isolation to Openness and Freedom, and hosts The Metta Hour podcast.
How We're Practicing: Awareness of Emotions
This 12-minute practice, led by Becoming Jackson Whole mindfulness trainer Kirsten Corbett, is designed to build resilience for accessing and managing emotions (even the big and/or persistent ones).