Minding Everyday "Micro-Endings"
A favorite practice here at Becoming Jackson Whole goes like this:
Give yourself a moment to transition between activities.
Pause for up to three full, deep breaths, noticing how it feels to fill your lungs on the inhale and visualizing any tension in your body draining away on the exhale.
Practice now, as you finish this sentence. Try it again before you enter a room, dial the phone, pick up a new task.
As we transition into fall here in Jackson, we’d like to add a dimension: Consider that for every ‘new’ task, there is something—an activity, a thought, a project—that’s just ended.
As humans, we’re really good at looking ahead, anticipating the next thing, especially what lies literally in front of us. In fact, our modern bodies are conditioned to this forward momentum, with our shoulders and heads bent toward our screens. Metaphorically, too, we often punish ourselves for the very notion of stepping back, as though moving any direction but on is a small failure.
But attention to the “micro-endings” we experience daily, via transition, holds huge benefit, writes Shinzen Young, a meditation teacher and neuroscience collaborator with Harvard Medical School, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Vermont.
“Most people are aware of the moment when a sensory event starts but seldom aware of the moment when it vanishes,” he writes in The Power of Gone. “This is natural because each new arising represents what we need to deal with in the next moment. But to always be aware of sensory arisings and hardly ever be aware of sensory passings creates an unbalanced view of the nature of sensory experience."
By strengthening our ability to notice when things end, we make “micro-relief constantly available,” he explains. This builds the skill to navigate “capital ‘T’” transitions—illness or injury, sudden loss, panic, even our own death—with more equanimity.
“You can think of equanimity as the ability to quickly and deeply say YES! to each new sensory arising,” he writes. “Quick and deep openness to an experience facilitates quick and deep goneness of that experience. This creates a positive feedback mechanism. The more equanimity you have at arisings, the easier it is to detect passings. The more you detect passings, the easier it is to have equanimity at arisings. This loop exponentially accelerates your learning.”
To build this equanimity muscle, Young recommends a practice he calls “Just Note Gone,” which reverses our habit of turning toward each new thing that arises, in favor of noting each new thing that passes:
Whenever all or part of a sensory experience suddenly disappears, note that. Clearly acknowledge when you detect the transition point between all of it being present and at least some of it no longer being present. If it helps, you can use a mental label for each ending: “Gone.”
If nothing vanishes for a while, Young writes, that’s fine. Just hang out until something does. If you start worrying about the fact that nothing is ending, note each time that thought ends. “That’s a ‘Gone.’ If you have a lot of mental sentences, you’ll have a lot of mental periods—full stops—Gones!”
Whether you find time or patience to notice many endings or just a few, thank you for joining us in this subtle practice. It’s all progress—yours and our community’s—at moving more skillfully together through change, one transition at a time.
What We're Trying: Embracing Transitions with Cory Muscara (Mindfulness.org)
Try this 10-minute meditation from Mindfulness.org, led by Cory Muscara, for practice resting in the moment between, the still point suspended by an ending and a beginning.
Cory has plenty of experience with transitions, as a former monk, then advisor to The Dr. Oz show, and now an instructor at the University of Pennsylvania.
How We're Practicing: Awareness of Sound
During this 8-minute practice Kirsten Corbett asks, “What are the sounds of this moment?” Let’s find out, by cultivating an awareness of the sounds around us. Just listen. That’s all.