A harbor for awareness

Feeling distracted? Depleted? This mindfulness practice can help to guide you home.

Barnstable Harbor, 2021.

If you browse any modern meditation app, you might be forgiven for thinking that there are approximately one million ways to meditate. You may have even tried half a million yourself. But if you’re bringing your attention to some ever-changing aspect of the body or mind, like the breath, you’re likely practicing just śamatha-vipassanā meditation. (Samatha means “tranquility;” vipassanā means “insight.”)

Samatha is about training one’s focus, bringing one’s attention back to a point of focus from where it has been wandering. Vipassana is linked to the often-concurrent or -complementary action of noticing how things in one’s awareness shift and transform. Taken together, they show us that we can establish a still point amidst the constant flow of change.

A bit of background

While the practice of śamatha-vipassanā meditation is thought to have arisen in some form in the early days of Buddhism¹, it has recently been popularized in the West by teachers and writers like Joseph Goldstein, Tara Brach, Jack Kornfield, Sharon Salzberg, and Yung Pueblo. It has also heavily influenced the development of Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), a secular meditation program developed by the clinician John Kabat-Zinn for those suffering with chronic pain. “Vipassanā-style” silent meditation retreats, such as the one I attended recently at Omega Institute, and those offered regularly at Insight Meditation Society and Spirit Rock, often focus on helping attendees to learn and refine this technique.

In the following meditation, offered during our first In Tending online gathering, we talked about how this method can invite you to bring in the “boats” of your thoughts and reactions into the “harbor” of the body and breath.

This style of meditation is popular for a few good reasons:

• If your goal is to grow your ability to concentrate and focus — no easy feat for phone-addled Westerners — then it offers a mental workout for wresting your attention away from devices and back to the present moment.

• If you’re feeling a sense of depletion and overwhelm — as many of us tired caregivers do daily — sitting down for a few minutes and checking in with the body can offer a much-needed sense of grounding and physical rest.

• If you’re fearing that your current difficulties will extend infinitely into the future tense — common among cPTSD survivors, including myself — becoming aware of just how much the body and thoughts can change in a half-hour serves as a reminder that change is a constant.

• It is incredibly simple. I sometimes liken it to the #2 pencil or chef’s knife of mindfulness techniques. No chanting, no bowing, no steps to memorize.

In the following meditation, offered during our first In Tending online gathering, we talked about how this method can invite you to bring in the “boats” of your thoughts and reactions into the “harbor” of the body and breath.

At the same time, I offered a simple, MBSR-inspired² modification for folks who may not feel quite at home in the body in this moment — i.e. people who are ill, in pain, postpartum, suffering from PTSD, or in other physically challenging situations.

May this practice be of benefit to all who are feeling distracted, depleted or fearful, in this season of constant change.

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A Harbor For Awareness

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Note: Paid subscribers, you’ll also get access to the script for this meditation below, which will allow you to offer it in your own spaces if you like.

Free subscribers are invited to upgrade here ($5/month, $30/year); these donations help me continue to offer inclusive meditations like these to people who may need them.

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