365 True Things: 200/SIFT (Mindfulness)

A friend told me about an approach to meditation today that I'd never heard of. She calls it mindfulness meditation, and it may be what Jon Kabat-Zinn teaches, I really don't know. I read some of his book Wherever You Go, There You Are ages ago—and did it leave an impression? No. Though whatever he was saying (like most things Buddhist) sounded good at the time. Or should I say, in the moment.

Anyway, I have a desultory meditation "practice," and I'm always ready for a new hint on how to make it more of an actual practice (without the quotation marks).



It's not that meditation is hard. It's not. But then there are those moments when, as Ruth Ozeki (or her character Nao) explains in A Tale for the Time Being, you get "totally distracted by all your crazy thoughts and obsessions, and then your body starts to itch and it feels like there are millipedes crawling all over you." I don't know about the millipedes, but the aching knee and the itchy nose and all those damn barking dogs—or just your own damn barking dog—and leafblowers!!! I never even get to my thoughts and obsessions.

Okay, not true. They fill in the rest of the space.

Which leaves no room for my breaths and counting to ten (or two, as the case may be—and then, start over). Which is what I should be doing. 

So mindfulness meditation, and SIFT: standing for sense—image—feeling—thought. As in, pay attention to what comes up, and attach one of those four labels to it.

I tried it today, sitting in my friend's front room in Pacific Grove. There was plenty of ambient noise: a ticking clock, cars, rustling leaves, the memory of a guy talking loudly on his cell phone a few minutes before (though that, in fact, would be a thought). The instruction was to say out loud whichever SIFT flitted into my mind. At first, I only heard sounds. Soon, though, my mind seemed to realize the sounds were kind of similar, maybe even predictable, and it started attaching images. The ticking became a grandfather clock. The leaf skittering across concrete was orange: sycamore. And then my mind caught on and said, "Hey, sound + image—that's a thought!" Bam bam bam, sound-image-thought. I'd hear, I'd envision, I'd think. It became something of a game.

Which is not the point.

But I didn't do it for very long.

Just before we quit, I did get to a point where my mind grew a little bored with the game and was seeing a flowing indigo blue field, and wanted to go there. Maybe there's something beyond SIFT. Like P, for peace—even in the midst of the sound and hurry.

I'll give it another try. It was interesting. And I like tools for centering. So now I've got a new one in my quiver.

And who knows: I might even get to feeling, if I just sit long enough. . . .