Letting Go In Miksang

"Hi Julie,

I noticed that very few people seem to be asking questions related to practice on your blog. I am not sure why this is so, as I know you are more than willing to share your thoughts on a variety of topics. But regardless, I thought I would ask you about an experience that seems to occur in my practice somewhat often.

I am on vacation in Pittsburgh right now, and went on a shoot this morning after a peaceful meditation session earlier on. As I walked out into the city, I felt as though the peace and calm I had been experiencing should continue into my Miksang practice. However, the speed and bustle of the streets were very distracting and I found it very difficult to maintain that sense of clarity and relaxation. My mind seemed to jump from one place to the next, and I found it really hard to relax. Then I remembered what Michael said about walking slowly, but not too mindfully. That helped for a little moment of clarity, and I was able to see more clearly. I seem to really struggle with this question of how to rest my mind. How do I rest without becoming stagnant? How do I keep momentum without rushing past my perceptions but instead, allow them to emerge and exist on their own?

Maybe you could share some thoughts on this anxiety that seems to be such a problem at times.

(Two Weeks later)

Julie, in the time since I sent you this message things seem to be going better for me. I find that I can be more relaxed and present sometimes when I am not trying too hard. It helps to remember that there is no "Miksang Police" that are watching around the corner to make sure I am being genuine or authentic. No one cares if I captured that last perception that I thought was so important and is weighing on me. In fact, letting that one go and opening again to what's next can be the best part of the practice.

Peace, Cody"

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Hi Cody. I know it’s been long enough since your first email that you have come to some good insights on your own. You brought up letting go of some of your projections about your experience, and I thought it might be helpful to talk about letting go as the way to work with whatever comes up for us when we are out shooting or even whenever we feel a sense of struggle with what we want and what is happening. We can hold on to our thoughts about what we wish or want, or we can let them go. We can be conflicted about our experience or let go of our point of view. This is always our choice. When we do let go, we enter into an open situation, full of possibility. This is where fresh, unfiltered visual perception arises.

The Miksang Journey as a whole could be described by saying that in each step of the way we are developing the ability to let go of whatever is coming between us and our ability to perceive in an open, direct way.

Gradually as we work with our Miksang discipline, our understanding and awareness of what comes up in our minds as we attempt to stay still and steady becomes more refined and precise. This is the result of our assignments and discussion in classes, as we look at our process of discernment and where we stray or stay in the continuity of the original flash of perception. As we become able to be still long enough to actually notice when the labeling is happening or the thoughts crank up, we can recognize and let go of them in that moment of recognition. This is the pith of the Miksang practice, letting go of our habitual patterns and tendencies as we make our way through each stage of the journey.

This letting go is the active intention, the active principle, which allows us to open out and to be still so that we can perceive more deeply. Without letting go we can’t be still, because even if we want to stand there and look at our perception, our minds are still producing thoughts, still perceiving, still thinking about what has been perceived, still deciding whether it is good bad, ugly, whatever. Through our intention to see, we turn our awareness outwards, we make ourselves available. Then our intention to let go of what stands between us and seeing is activated. We let the thoughts come and go without disturbing our equanimity. The intention to let go is the basis of the effort in this practice. It keeps us rooted in an open, fully present state of mind. We let go into right now.

Letting go is the doorway to perception. It strengthens our sense of stillness and stability. We let go, we open, and then we receive. This is how the whole thing works. It is the ground, the path, and the fruition of this practice. This is what we are always developing throughout our Miksang Journey.

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Lately I have been watching some really great letting go happening by students in various courses. In Opening the Good Eye, I have seen them letting go of their ideas of what they are looking at, their impulse to want to improve upon what they are seeing, their attachment to the product of their labors. This is a lot of letting go— it’s the first big bite of the Miksang pie. First we notice what we are doing to distract us from our perception, and then, as we develop the ability to notice more, we become more still and able to see more of our world. It takes effort and motivation every day of our Miksang practice to continually come back to these first lessons so that our practice doesn’t become a new way to hold onto what we have accomplished, a subtle expression of a new database of acceptable Miksang perceptions. Those of you who have been doing this practice for a long time know what I mean. What we learn in this first Level is the basis of everything that we work on in subsequent courses. As we go along, it is always helpful to hit the refresh button in our practice by coming back to the basic orientation presented in our first Miksang course.

It takes the wisdom of experience and some humor about ourselves to realize that the fundamental genuineness of direct visual perception that we have worked so hard to fully manifest and express in our practice and images was fully presented to us at the beginning of our journey, in our first introduction to Miksang practice. The first course is presented simply, and yet it is not something to get through as quickly as possible to move onto more “advanced” courses. This is why Michael and I feel that the first Miksang course is so crucial, so profound, and why we want our Miksang Level One instructors to have a good deal of experience practicing Miksang and incorporating the discipline of direct perception into their beings before they teach. To manifest the importance of letting go of their own habitual tendencies and ideas and preferences about what they see, they must demonstrate a deep allegiance to freshness in their shooting. To transmit the importance of having a still mind, they need to manifest the qualities of a still mind. They must have gentleness, openness, and confidence.

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And Cody, how do we have a still mind when we are distracted, restless, and ill at ease? Give the whole thing some room to aerate, to breathe. Feel your basic being, standing there, feeling the ground, the sky above, the air around your body. Relax, let your mind open out into the space around you. Gently work with yourself to let go, to expand your awareness into your environment. Remind yourself why you are out shooting with your camera.

Why are we willing to let go, to be so bold, and to explore beyond our zone of comfort? As you realized for yourself, it is because we have found that our strategies are only good so far. At some point along the way, as we are trying to do what we think is being asked of us, what we feel we must do, we realize that the struggle is not actually going to solve the underlying situation. It’s not going to solve the fundamental issue of not fully participating in our world. It is just not going to do it. At some point it’s choice-less. We just let go. In that moment of our journey on this path, the Miksang practice of seeing and connecting, letting go, is where the opening occurs, where real perception and real meeting takes place.

This is where we experience the sense of poignancy about our lives, that we try so hard, we all try so hard, we all try so hard to be good, and we all try so hard not to experience more suffering. We always try to make ourselves feel better. At some point, maybe it is the moment we die, who knows, or maybe it’s the moment we realize that all of our strategies are really not accomplishing what we want them to fundamentally— we give up, we surrender and we let go. And when we do, there is something else there. There is tenderness, an open-heart quality. Just a sense of - “I’m here. I’m just here. I’m here. Someone, some thing, will you play with me? Will you come be with my tender heart? Will you love me?”

That is the longing, the basic longing that we all experience, and that has all come about because we actually let go. It doesn’t matter what we let go of, we could talk about it, we could write books, what are we letting go of? Letting go is a primal situation. It’s really where we cross the border between what we want, and how we’ve lived, and who we are. We cross the border into another unknown and undefined region where anything is possible and we don’t know. And this is where our actual wisdom starts to shine. It shines through and reaffirms our fundamental sense of well-being. It is good to be a human, here on this earth, right now in this moment. That’s how it happens, over and over.

Beyond the Obstacle of Continuous Distraction

In the first level of Miksang Training we talk about the two primary obstacles to seeing. The first of these is not being available to see and connect with our world. The most extreme example of this is when we daydream and are completely absorbed in our own internally produced movies. We are completely distracted and perceptually blind. We don’t see anything outside of ourselves. To varying degrees, this is how we live our lives day to day. Through working with this obstacle in a simple way, we begin to shift our orientation so that our awareness, our attention, is facing outwards rather than inwards. The second obstacle is our habitual ways of superimposing our labels and preferences upon what we see. In order to work with this we begin to train ourselves to pay attention to the visual experience we have before our labeling mind kicks in.

The process we work with and the path we take as Miksang practitioners is to deepen our connection to the unconditional experience of direct perception. We consciously choose to cultivate the ability to recognize moments of direct seeing and to maintain our connection with them for as long as we are able. With practice, diligence, discipline and delight, we begin to find that we are able to play in the world of direct seeing for increasingly longer periods of time without reverting to habitual patterns of relating with our world and our relationship with it. This is the promise, practice, and fruition of Miksang.

Why would we want to undertake this practice in the first place? I have no doubt that for most of us it is because we have had a glimpse of it. We have experienced a piercing, penetrating moment of visual connection or we wouldn’t have taken the time out of our busy lives to come to a Miksang course. We want to be able to connect with our world and express our experience. We have a hunger to slow down and experience simple being.

I would like to talk about an additional obstacle to this journey that is atmospheric, cultural, and pervasive. We have various degrees of involvement with it, and for some of us that is dependent upon the kind of work that we do. It amplifies and propagates the very influences which undermine our ability to have a still and peaceful mind, to be fully in the present moment for any duration. I am calling it the Obstacle of Continuous Distraction. This is not the same as the distraction of being inwardly absorbed. It is more about what happens to us as we engage with the world. It is helpful to acknowledge this obstacle and clarify our relationship with it, for without this clarity, Continuous Distraction will undermine any attempts we make to live a deeply satisfying life. This obstacle is called continuous because between the constant texts, phone calls, Twitter texts, Facebook comments, new products, emails, and the sense that all this must be kept up with, we are always having to accept or reject attempts to capture our attention for long enough to get a message across to us.

Because of the unrelenting quality of continuous distraction, it is a challenge to relax and settle our minds. We can often feel off-balance, overwhelmed, with a sense that something needs to be done or happen. This vague sense of dissatisfaction plays upon the restlessness of mind and amplifies it. With an itch and scratch approach, we relate with stimuli with only a fraction of our available attention and don’t really relate with what anything actually is. Because we are distracted we haphazardly label what we see and sometimes completely mistake what is really there. We don’t experience fully, and we are never satisfied. When you contrast this to a sense of peace, contentment, and joy, it is clear that this modern technological age can bring about enormous suffering arising from a basic sense of dissatisfaction. By participating in the consensual view that the distraction is a necessary part of living today, we can lose our sense of our own experience and what really matters to us in our lives. Continuous Distraction can become by default a lifestyle choice. On the other hand, working with Continuous Distraction may be the greatest challenge of our age and what defines how we emerge from it as human beings. It is worth the effort.

Being Deliberate Can Be A Life-Style Choice

Miksang is about being deliberate – deliberately being open and fully present, beyond like and dislike. We have a constant choice in our lives generally as humans and specifically as photographers. We can muddle through, constantly distracted and disengaged from our experience, or we can keep our eye and mind synchronized throughout our day. We can feel the texture of the moments of our lives. Bringing Miksang practice fully into our day-to-day experience is a potent and profound way to neutralize the perpetual distraction and restlessness that characterizes the modern techno-world in which we live. We do not have to talk on our cell phones as we walk down the street or as we stand in line to pick up our food. If we carry our camera with us it can remind us to notice our world. We can always choose to experience our experience instead of being continually distracted.

How the Practice of Miksang Disrupts Continuous Distraction

The ground from which direct perception arises is our open, undistracted mind. Without having a mind that is available, we cannot make the electric connection of mind, eye and the objects of perception. When we are reminded to notice our world, our Miksang training activates and we simply shift our attention to the present moment and its visual aspects. When we do this, our basic orientation catalyzes a sense of clarity about what we are doing. We become deliberate in how we approach the activity of looking, seeing, and photographing. As distractions occur, we stay on track and don’t allow our thoughts and emotions to become the focus of our attention. Our cell phones may ring, but we don’t have to answer. If we choose to answer we will lose our connection with our perception. Once we notice this interruption has taken place, we can bring ourselves back once again to being open and available in the present moment (and hey, why not turn off our cell phone while we practice?). It’s challenging enough to stay still and present without allowing Continuous Distraction to disrupt the stability of our Miksang discipline.

When we do experience a direct perception, we physically stop and look at what stopped us. We want to understand, to contemplate with a still mind. Without a still mind, we cannot maintain the continuity of our experience of the flash of freshness. It becomes lost in vagueness and indecision. This is because being distracted separates us from ourselves, from our experience, and we are unsure about what we saw and how we feel about it. We are not sure if it is good enough and our restless mind looks for solutions to the problem of distraction.

At this point, if we re-apply our intention to stay with the perception, to rest with it in stillness, this can pacify a distracted mind. We apply our intention to come back to the perception and our distracting thoughts evaporate. We can always come back, and when we do, if we cannot re-connect with our perception, we can just walk away and start fresh once again. Every moment is a new opportunity to start new.

When we sit down at our computers to review our images, once again we settle our minds so that we can see our images with fresh eyes. Without an open mind as we view our images, we may apply judgment and labels to them. We may have doubt and want to make them better. We may not be able to reconnect with our original flash of perception. That is why we always begin editing with a mind free of distraction and preoccupation.

If our mind was open and available when the perception first appeared, and remained still and stable during the understanding and photographing of it, the resulting image is a pure expression of our moment of perception. It is complete. It is not diminished by one hair’s breadth of distraction. This is the hallmark of an accomplished Miksang shooter. I encourage you all to pay particular attention to Michael’s images once again with this in mind. Each one demonstrates a complete experience and expression of one moment of perception.

There is no doubt that if we integrate Miksang practice fully into our lives that Continuous Distraction will lose its seemingly seamless, relentless quality of presence in our lives. We will inevitably develop the possibility, and really the promise, that our continually distracted state of mind will be abruptly interrupted and penetrated by moments of sudden, shocking, vivid, brilliant, absorbing visual perception. We can stop and appreciate our world. It can be truly inspiring for us to be reminded that there is such a thing as living beyond Continuous Distraction.

Allowing Ourselves the Space to Be Undistracted

For those of us who meditate, many of us find the time that we carve out each day to connect with our basic being and unwind our mental preoccupations to be “the pause that refreshes”. We create boundaries around our practice time within which we decide we will not answer the phone or send or look at text messages. We know that if we don’t consciously make decisions about what interruptions we will allow, we will end up sacrificing our practice time to the demands of others.

I encourage all of us to contemplate how we regard our Miksang practice. We can come to a workshop and go through the motions of doing the exercises and assignments. But as long as we believe that Miksang is a hobby and not a practice, we will never allow ourselves the space for Miksang to develop and deepen. If we are continuously distracted and interrupted as we work with this discipline, we cannot be still and experience our experience. We stay outside looking in. Because our mind is unsettled we cannot fully process the dimensions of our experience.

We can allow our Miksang practice the same boundaries and protection from external distraction that we allow for our meditation practice. If we honor our Miksang journey in this way, it becomes an integral part of how we experience our world, just as the boundary between our post-meditation experience and our meditation practice gradually becomes less apparent.

© Julie DuBose. 2010

Essential Simplicity

Hello Julie,

I was touched by your remark in your last blog: ‘The obstacle of familiarity and labeling is a root of not being able to shoot a product with freshness....’

That’s exactly the point I’ve been wrestling with for the last month.
I was feeling so much resistence (hate..hate!) against ‘already seen’ Miksang images.
Even if I had a real ’yes’ flash while editing, I couldn’t be glad about it any more.
At a matter of fact I couldn’t see any more bicycles, glasses, mannequins (sorry Michael!!), cups of coffee, half legs, mac mouses and after Michaels ‘sink in the kitchen’ also my kitchen became a forbidden area!!

On the other hand I came back to myself in the images of other miksang photographers,
That made me feel less bad.

Then I asked if it is my my fear of losing myself, losing my authenticity?
And then a little bit later I asked myself.
Does real authenticity exist ?
Does pure authenticity in perception exist??

I know, we are not only individualist, but also social beings. We are influenced our whole lives by where we come from and what we have learned and experienced
conciously or unconciously.
So, perhaps it’s my ‘big ego’ that wants to be authentic.

And I decided, I cant’t release myself if I keep on fighting!
As long as I feel resistence and keep my eyes closed ,my heart and mind are closed too.
I’m fighting against myself.
So I try to say to myself...
Let it be as it is, don’t walk away, be quiet , stay where you are..
Perhaps that’s a way to go BEYOND.....

So there’s the rest of your sentence, Julie
‘As usual we need to get beyond this limiting view’
Is it that also what you meant to say?

Yours
Margriet

Hello Margriet.

Thank you so much for your very thoughtful question.

Authenticity is not so much about expressing an experience that has no reference points to any other experience, but it is more that we express our experience without drawing upon reference points to interpret it. These reference points are our labels, our point of view. They are identical to what happens after you are tapped on the shoulder, you open your eyes wide, and just see. Then a split second later the labeling process kicks in. So while your attempts to know and be certain that you are not emulating the expressions of others or drawing upon perceptual clichés are based upon all good intentions of doing this practice whole heartedly, they involve the imposition of an external arbitrator whose job is to determine if our perception is an imitation or derivative from anything else. The observer is no other than our conceptual mind.

The obstacle of familiarly doesn’t mean that we don’t want to shoot what is familiar to us, it means that we don’t really look at our everyday world because we assume that it is not worthy of looking at due to it’s familiarity. Our habitual pattern is to believe that we have to go somewhere new and unfamiliar in order to have interesting perceptions. In your case, your observer is rejecting the familiar as subject matter because you think you are drawing upon a database of familiar subjects and images you have seen all of us shoot. This is reverse discrimination, but it is still discrimination. The problem is not that you are seeing things that have been shot before, many times, but that you are not seeing those things through fresh eyes. The issue is never with what is being perceived, but with the state of mind that is perceiving. Your reference point is kicking in really fast, almost as quickly as the perception is arising in your mind, and that can be truly annoying. You are experiencing the obstacle of ‘second thought’ and then many more thoughts about the second thought. The result is frustration.

You have been wrestling with this conundrum with the determination of a dedicated student. As with all contemplative arts, the process or path is the point, not your final realization about all of this. Because once you think you have realized something about your process, you solidify that and now you have a new guideline or reference point about whether you are doing a good job at this. This is still not an open mind.

Fortunately for all of us, the end result of this struggle is its abandonment. It is just too much mental work to figure out whether we’re having a perception that is new to us. We would all like to get back to the basic enjoyment of our world. There is a simpler way in to this, an approach not based upon the watcher judging what we do. The watcher splits us off from the moment and our experience, and is actually counter productive.

Go with how a perception makes you feel. Stick with the qualities of the flash. I would memorize them. You can say to yourself, ”am I shocked, disoriented, did the perception come out of the blue, is the experience buoyant and joyful?” Just go back and forth between the words, what they mean, and then check in with how you are feeling. In time when you recognize the familiarity of a perception, your appreciation of it will be there as well. And because you are confident and relaxed, you can let go on the spot of the back and forth, the self doubt, the second thought. But if you are unable to simply let go of all of it, this could be an excellent time to turn away from the perception, close your eyes, turn back, and then look again in a fresh way. This is just like ‘hitting the refresh button”. If when doing the refresh you can connect with the perception once again, then you may want to continue. At some point in your process you may decide to abandon the relationship, that you don’t feel motivated to actually seal the experience. Or you may photograph it. In the end, what does it matter?

Are you fooling yourself? How do you know? When the experience is flat and you are working hard at it, not feeling confident, then you are not seeing, you are looking too hard. That is a sign that you are busy observing and editing your version of your experience. Whether or not we are having a fresh perception is not a problem that we have to solve with our conceptual minds. It’s only a matter of being fully present. Coming back fully to the present moment, clearing our minds, is the antidote for the conceptual knot of second thoughts. All of the thoughts about our experience of our perception do not exist. They are just our thoughts. Let them go. Dissolve the layer of judgment and observer in your mind. Be patient, take your time, relax and enjoy.

The discipline of Miksang Training is quite simple. It is always simple. In the advanced courses it is even more simple. You do not have to be really smart to do it. You actually have to abandon your strategies of success.

Warm regards,

Julie