by Katharine Bierce

Do you feel stuck in your meditation practice? Do you find yourself striving to be a “better” meditator and feeling frustrated when you think you’re “doing it wrong?” If so, keep reading. Beginner’s Mind is a concept from Zen, but you can also apply it to whatever meditation practice you have. 

Suzuki Roshi discusses beginner’s mind at length in the book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind, there are few. When you pay attention to something with the eagerness and curiosity of a beginner, what becomes possible compared to when you bring a bunch of ideas about how things are “supposed” to be? If you ask a class full of kindergarten kids who is a dancer, a painter, a singer, most of them will raise their hand. As we grow up, only adults who work in those professions or have those hobbies may say, “Yes, I’m a dancer” because adults typically assume you have to be an expert at something to do it. 

In that way, beginner’s mind is like embracing childlike enthusiasm and wonder to explore the world with a fresh perspective, every moment.

Beginner’s Mind is Non-Striving

A lot of times, in meditation as in everyday life, we’re trying to get somewhere else: to be calmer, to be more focused, to be a “better person.” The problem is, trying to get somewhere else, especially in meditation, creates physical tension and mental stress. In his book Be Here Now, Ram Dass writes about the importance of being present, saying, “Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.” The beginner’s mind view of this is that as we wake up, we learn to do even our usual activities paying attention to the actual activity itself, being present, rather than caught up in our ideas, expectations, or beliefs. 

I recently experienced beginner’s mind while I was recovering from a concussion. Near the end of December 2020, a car door hit me in the head and I spent January until the end of March recovering. For a few weeks, it was really hard to focus my attention in the way that I was used to in meditation. Trying to focus on the breath with close attention felt anywhere from extremely difficult to impossible. Was I a bad meditator because I couldn’t practice anapanasati, or mindfulness of breathing? Was all the expertise I had cultivated in more than a decade of formal meditation practice suddenly gone? No. Even though my attention came and went, I still had awareness (which is distinct from attention, as noted in The Mind Illuminated). I still remembered the attitude I had cultivated prior to my accident that being kind to myself was important. So I was able to embrace a perspective that concussion-mind offered: being present in each moment as a meditation.

Beginner’s Mind and Openness

In another Zen story, a student goes to the teacher to ask for teachings. The teacher pours tea into the student’s cup, but doesn’t stop pouring it – the cup soon overflows. A cup is useful when it’s empty. If it is already full of tea, no more can be added, just like how the student is coming with preconceived notions about meditation, so the teacher can’t add anything useful for the student. Being open is also discussed in Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching (I like Ursula Le Guin’s translation) where Lao Tzu discusses how a room or a cooking pot are useful when they’re empty. Flipping one’s perspective from focusing on a thing to focusing on the space within the thing is one example of the perspective shift that beginner’s mind can help with.

 Beginner’s Mind and Letting Go

Unless we practice beginner’s mind, as we get older, our ideas about ourselves and the  world tend to solidify. As a bumper sticker might say, “Enlightenment is not what you think.” Meditation isn’t even about attaining the perfectly peaceful state of mind: the Buddha said that what he taught was just about suffering and the end of suffering. States of mind come and go, so in cultivating beginner’s mind, we can be present with whatever is happening without getting stressed out about what “should” be happening. 

Beginner’s Mind is Not What You Think

Another Zen saying says, “The finger pointing to the moon is not the moon.” Ultimately, the irony is that whatever I say about Beginner’s Mind, it’s still not it exactly (“the moon”), because you have to experience it for yourself. It’s a paradox similar to Suzuki Roshi’s saying, “You’re already perfect, and you could use a little improvement,” which points to the fact that we already have a mind, a body, and everything we need to wake up, but we still benefit from formal meditation practice anyway. 

Ideas for a beginner’s mind meditation practice

• Do The Work by Byron Katie: it’s a way to use your thinking to potentially go beyond thinking. When you find yourself stuck in an unhelpful thought, such as one that provokes anxiety, contemplate these four questions: 
• • Is it true? 
  • How do I really know it’s true? 
  • Who am I when I believe that thought? 
  • Who would I be without that thought? 
• As you eat your lunch, just eat your lunch. Don’t multitask. Eat one bite at a time and put down your fork between bites. What does each bite taste like? Can you notice your lunch with each of your senses: sight, sound, smell, taste, touch? 
• When you sit, sit; when you walk, walk; when you eat, eat; when you sleep, sleep. When you notice yourself trying to be somewhere else, or someone else, congratulate yourself for noticing, and try dropping or setting aside the “need to fix.” What remains?
• As you listen to someone speak, just listen to them. What are their body language and words communicating? Notice when you try to plan your response to them, and see if you can let that go and just be present with them. 
• Create space by shifting time: Add 5-15 minutes to your usual activities for one day, to allow extra time, and at the end of the day, see how you feel. For example, if you normally take 30 minutes to drive somewhere, try allowing 35 or 45 minutes and notice if you feel more relaxed when you arrive.
• As you watch your breath in meditation, see if you’re judging yourself for “doing it right” or “wrong.” See what happens when you allow thinking, judgments, etc. to just be there without trying to believe them or push them away, and come back to the physical sensations of breathing, as if you are noticing the breath for the first time.

I hope these practice suggestions are helpful. If you need more inspiration for beginner’s mind, go to a dog park and watch the dogs run around. No matter how many times they go to the same place, dogs eagerly sniff the ground as if it were the first visit. It’s good meditation inspiration!

Katharine first learned about meditation at an event with free food during college in Chicago in 2009. After attending classes with Shambhala, she started an almost-daily practice in 2012 while working in consulting in New York City. Her influences include Nikki Mirghafori, Pema Chödrön, Vipassana in the style of S.N. Goenka, Tucker Peck, Culadasa, Jeremy Graves, The Mind Illuminated, Rev. angel Kyodo williams, somatic meditation with Neil McKinlay and Norman Elizondo, and the insight meditation teachers at Spirit Rock. In March 2020, she completed a month-long meditation retreat, which is her seventh retreat of a week or more. Katharine works full time in technology marketing at a Fortune 100 company in San Francisco and also teaches yoga on evenings and weekends with Business Casual Yoga.

by Rich Panico

Emotions are the motive force of the mind. They get the vrittis spinning and turn samskara from building material into a destiny. In current psychological parlance, successful regulation of emotions correlates with virtuosity in relationship, career, and individual existential satisfaction. Emotional regulation protects individuals from the acquired aspect of mental illness and is important in the treatment of established depression and anxiety disorders. 

When mindfulness is added to contemporary psychological efforts to address emotional regulation, “possibility” arises as an inherent property of mindfulness practice. Possibility is of course the antidote to “stuckness” and on the street is known as freedom. Freedom and its hard earned acquisition, as Richie Havens tried to tell us, has in turn side effects that you just have to learn to put up with: joyfulness, resilience, trust in self, exploratory behavior, gratefulness, whole-hearted engagement, creativity, and so on.

Regulation of emotions is a fairly simple affair but…(I know you saw this coming) it is not easy. It involves understanding and cultivating a set of skills, a willingness to “look under the hood,” and  the discipline to develop a practice.

The Yoga Sutra suggests that Yoga (and mindfulness meditation) is in fact a process of seeing, stilling, and disidentifying on multiple levels of experience, allowing the mud and confusion to settle so that “seeing” becomes clear, and action and inaction become a wise and skillful choice based on that clarity. Add a little intention and you have a life worth living, a durable vehicle to cross the sea of existence, working skillfully with the weather and currents that may arise and — this is important — have navigational skills and a sense of where you’re going.

My goal in offering this class is to have fun. The path to liberation can get serious, heavy and even grim. This path is too important to take seriously. We will discover that accessing emotions from a psychological perspective involves play as well as reaccessing and amending developmental entanglements with emotion. Some level of childlike delight becomes one of the more helpful attainments necessary to pull this off. It’s hard to develop delight without some level of fun.

Please join us for a free introductory talk followed by a four-week class on meditation for emotional regulation. See HERE for details.

Rich Panico is an artist, yogi and physician known for his humor and clarity in teaching. He has practiced meditation and yoga since 1970 and began teaching mindfulness woven into pottery making classes in the late 70’s. He he has taught mindfulness formally, in medical, academic and art related settings for over 20 years.