Читать книгу Mental Resilience - Kamal Sarma C - Страница 8
ОглавлениеWe will only understand the miracle of life fully when we allow the unexpected to happen.
PAULO COELHO
THE INITIAL IDEA TO WRITE THIS BOOK began with a trip to my local bookstore. I was looking for a book on meditation, not just any kind of book or any kind of meditation. I did find a lot of books on meditation but none that fit the bill. There were books by enlightened sages or saints of some religious persuasion. Those by New Age authors featured pages packed with soft-focus photos and lists of affirmations that promised a personal nirvana. Those written by philosophers and academics had lengthy eulogies on the theoretical aspects of meditation but failed to address the very practical steps people would need to take if they asked, “So how do I start meditating? What do I do next? How will it affect my life? How do I know I am doing it right? How will this make me mentally resilient?”
I have practiced meditation for the past twenty years and have taught it for the past eight. Since recently starting to teach it in corporations, I realized that a book could provide a tool kit, a practical guide for my students’ ongoing reference and practice.
With this book, I hope to fill a gap that I found when looking for a plainspoken guide. My approach to teaching meditation is to provide information free of jargon or hype. This book will give you the tools to begin a meditation practice and, through it, develop a more resilient and clear mind. I call this technique Mental Resilience Training.
How to Use This Book
This book contains two parts: “Theory” (see part 1, chapters 1 through 4) and “Practice” (see part 2, chapters 5 through 12). If you are eager to get started, start with “Practice” and return to “Theory” when you’re ready.
To help you get started, an audio download with Mental Resilience Training exercises accompanies this book. (Go to www.mentalresilience.com to download the files. The exercises are at various levels and are designed for different purposes. You can use the audio in conjunction with the explanations in the book or on its own. If you have always wanted to try meditation but weren’t sure how, simply find a comfortable place to be, put the audio on, listen, and away you’ll go.
You can start using these techniques immediately. I have deliberately kept the theory light, but it shows how the process of meditation works, what signposts you may encounter, and what others have experienced along this amazing internal journey.
The audio is also a resource you can return to whenever you need some support in your practice. When you use it with the book, you have the complete tool kit to help you learn to meditate.
Why I Wrote This Book
First, let me confess that I am not a saintly man. I am an ordinary workingman, making my way in the mesh of activities and relationships that comprise a management role in a commercial environment. Yet I have found the practice of meditation to be my most valuable skill. In fact, I believe meditation is more relevant for managers, mothers, and entrepreneurs — ordinary people — than it is for monks and nuns. Meditation is more pertinent for people living in the world, who are not sitting high in the mountains trying to figure out the meaning of life. As I wrote this book, my wife and I had to deal with a brain-tumor scare, two babies in intensive care, the breakup of a business, and living with a chronic illness.
Mental Resilience Training: My Approach to Meditation
My meditation practice has helped me through both personal and professional crises. Let me explain why I approach meditation the way I do.
I was born in Assam, in northeastern India, near the border between Tibet and Burma. Because my family moved to Australia when I was five years old, I was desperate to be a normal Australian young boy. Life was full of meat pies, Vegemite, sports, movies, and girls — the usual stuff.
When I was thirteen, my father accepted work as a missionary doctor in Karnataka, so the family moved back to India. My parents were very protective of me and, fearing I would give in to peer pressure (illicit drug taking, in particular), sent me to a monastery (ashram) to continue my education. Instead of living the normal life of a suburban Australian teenager — going to a coed school, enjoying family holidays at the beach, driving around in a big car — I found myself in a very different world. Life in the monastery meant sleeping on a concrete floor, getting up at 4:30 AM, taking cold showers, giving up eating meat, and following a life of poverty. To say this was a culture shock would be an understatement.
While at the monastery, I learned to read and write Sanskrit and studied major religious texts — the Bible, including the Torah; Bhagavad Gita; and Koran. Although it was predominantly a Hindu ashram, we were encouraged to study all the major texts so that we could see how similar most religious approaches were. This discipline and study were all too much for me. As a thirteen-year-old, I really just wanted to read comics, not the Vedas (ancient Indian sacred texts). Frustrated with the rules and regulations that were part of monastery life, I sometimes sneaked out and vented my teenage angst by taking long treks in the nearby hills. On one of these expeditions, I met Nanda, an ascetic who lived alone in a small, simple hut near the monastery. It was Nanda who introduced me to meditation and influenced my eventual development of Mental Resilience Training.
Nanda had studied yoga and meditation for many years. This gave him a supple body and calm approach to life, and though I never knew his age, I’m certain he was far older than he looked. Although I was bucking against the authority of the monastery, I found myself fascinated by Nanda. When he offered to teach me a deeper level of yoga and meditation, I jumped at the chance. I always struggle when I try to describe Nanda, because he is so hard to summarize. More than anything, Nanda was at peace with himself and his surroundings.
I figured Nanda was about eighty-five years old, but he looked about fifty. His skin was taut, with a beautiful glow, and his face had a gentle, feminine quality. The whites of his eyes were very white and clear, with a piercing quality. He did not look strong and was instead a bit scrawny, but he could hold a handstand for over ten minutes on a cliff’s edge. Most people would consider him handsome in a grandfatherly way. But perhaps the most intriguing and, for me, important aspect of Nanda was that he had more faith in me than I had in myself.
Nanda was a very erudite man. He could quote Shakespeare and Socrates, and relate their ideas back to the mind and how it works. He had been trained in physics and mathematics, and thus used many scientific analogies in my training. Nanda taught me how to be aware of the power of my emotions, how not to be overwhelmed by the extremes I sometimes felt. During my lessons, he often said that there was no textbook for my mind, that I had to find my own way.
“A teacher can only show the way,” he said, “but you have to climb the mountain yourself. So, the less emotional baggage you take up with you, the easier it is.” Nanda told me to be wary of people who claimed to be more spiritual than me, who might claim that they could “take me up the mountain” on their backs. He was a tough taskmaster, who did not allow me to be lazy with my practice.
These early lessons provided me with the keys I had craved so that I could discover the full potential of my mind. I learned to stretch both my body and mind in ways I had not even imagined possible. A lot of teenagers spend time in the gym pumping iron and taking care of their developing bodies. I took this approach to my mind. As Nanda said, “You have a beautiful, resilient, and radiant mind; you just need to take care of it.”
I stayed in the ashram for five years, running off to see Nanda almost every day. I sometimes practiced with him for over twelve hours a day, spending very little time on my academic studies. However, due to his training, I found that I could perform well without spending much time with my books. Since my mind was so clear and focused, I could study for only a little while, confident that I could recall the knowledge at will.
Although I regarded Nanda as very special, I did not realize how lucky or blessed I was to train with him. As a teenager I did not recognize the true value of what he was teaching me. Only later did I realize that Nanda had planted seeds in my mind that “only would fertilize with the manure of life” (his words). I never forgot Australia, and I missed it dearly. I always felt that Australia was home, so I hankered to return there.
At the age of nineteen, I returned to Australia and went to a university. I studied economics and earned an MBA. Drawn to the promises of corporate life, I followed the herd after graduation. My first serious job was with one of the world’s leading management-consulting firms, McKinsey and Company. McKinsey provides advice to organizations around the world, and in my role, I presented strategies for multimillion-dollar projects to very influential people in powerful companies, advising them on how to increase profitability. I flew business class across the world, staying at five-star hotels and paying for it all with my corporate expense account. I had come a long way from living a life of humility and poverty in a monastery.
As with many similar professional organizations, McKinsey’s corporate culture was one of “work hard, play hard.” Many work-days began at 7:30 AM and finished at 11:00 PM. I had desperately wanted to be successful, and while at McKinsey, I thought I was. I lived the corporate jet-setter life, centered on the next flight, the next deadline, and the next hotel room. But during this time I also forgot the benefits of being still, both in body and mind.
I have discovered that all human evil comes from this: man’s being unable to sit still and quiet in a room alone.
BLAISE PASCAL
McKinsey was a great training ground, because my life was focused on adding value for the shareholders and putting clients’ needs before my own. I was engrossed by it all. I was also amazed by the inordinate amount of power that such large, globally active corporations had. It excited me but frightened me too. In some situations, our work had the potential to drastically change the economy of communities, or even nations, and could impact future generations. What also frightened me was the mental state that some of these executives were in while making these huge decisions. I remember a CEO who was going through a messy divorce. He felt very bitter and twisted by the whole saga, and mentioned that he had trouble sleeping, could not think straight, and felt depressed. He would come into the office dressed in an Armani suit and cuff links, appearing supremely confident, but every now and then he admitted that he felt as if he were falling apart at the seams. On top of all this, he was asked to make decisions that would likely change the lives of thousands of people and the environment for many years to come.
One of the most important lessons I learned during my time with McKinsey was a new way to approach problems, a technique that underpins my business career to this day. I learned that effective decision making requires a hypothesis. The path that leads to a particular decision is guided by research and analysis to support or disprove the hypothesis. At that point, my life was completely based on analysis and logic. My younger life was based on faith, which had allowed me to just believe something was true, but this was no longer valid. Now, I was deeply immersed in a world where facts, logic, and reason were the ultimate evidence.
Some years after leaving McKinsey, I married my university sweetheart, a doctor who practices medicine in Sydney. We bought a house and settled down. I was living the suburban dream and busily climbing the corporate ladder. Life was fantastic.
But when I was about thirty, my life hit a massive brick wall. My wife was pregnant with our first child, and we were as excited as any young couple could be. She is very devoted to her medical practice in one of the more socially and economically challenged parts of Sydney. On a routine check seven weeks before our baby was due, her obstetrician admitted her to the hospital for bed rest; because my wife is a dedicated doctor, bed rest would guarantee the rest she needed. On her second night in the hospital, I got a call in the middle of the night that indicated she was delivering. During the thirty long minutes it took me to get to her, my wife had to undergo an emergency Cesarean section.
On reaching the hospital, I was told that I was extremely lucky: my wife had suffered complications, but the surgical team had managed to save her life. They also told me I was the father of a baby girl, but due to complications she was in intensive care. My heart racing with excitement and hands clammy with stress, I simultaneously felt joy and dread.
At 3:00 AM, the doctors told us that our daughter was in bad shape and they would need to monitor her closely. But by late morning she was much better. Things looked positive and we all felt relieved. I remember touching my child for the first time and realizing how incredible it felt. I also remember the pain of seeing her tiny body with tubes and needles inserted into her soft skin.
After three days in the hospital, her condition deteriorated so severely that we had to make the painful decision to remove her life support. That night was the most devastating night in my life. The sounds and smells of that night are chiseled into my psyche. Such moments define your life, and everything you thought was important falls away.
I can still remember the piercing beep of the monitor that tracked the fluids being pumped into her tiny body; the lightness, almost nothingness, of the weight of her body; the pinkness of her beautifully formed lips; the sharp smell of the hospital antiseptic; and the cries of healthy babies in the ward who wanted to be nursed by their mothers. The total despair of that night was unforgettable. Looking down at her, I realized that a wonderful being who had been a gift was now being taken away from us, and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it except cry. As the sun rose, our beautiful baby daughter died silently in my arms. Suddenly my life had become horrific.
My wife and I struggled to maintain both our sanity and our marriage. The grief and guilt were overwhelming. When we came back from the hospital, the grief started to mix with depression, and my life began to nose-dive. I wanted to stay in bed and curl into a ball and cry. When the crying stopped, I felt numb. I struggled to get up and go to work. When I eventually got there, I was incapable of doing much. At that time I worked in investment management with Australia’s largest fund manager. I had to deal with senior executives from top organizations daily. I needed to make significant decisions. I needed to perform 100 percent of the time. Being unproductive for a few hours was bad, but being paralyzed with grief and guilt for a whole day was a disaster. I was in real fear of losing my job. My mind felt dull and sluggish, causing me to slip into a continual state of mental blur. The heaviness in my chest just would not go away, and the void in my stomach just kept getting deeper.
Nothing I did could relieve the helplessness I felt. I tried alcohol, but it just made me feel sick. I contemplated drugs and psychiatric medication but knew that they just masked symptoms and would leave me feeling even hollower. My body seemed to be falling apart; I lost around thirty pounds in less than two weeks. I wanted the overwhelming feeling of depression to go away, but nothing would get rid of it. I thought of suicide on a number of occasions.
I felt as if I were trying to put my mind into gear, but all I could hear was the crunching of the gears. How could I get my mind to bounce back? How could let go of this pain? I did not want to numb my mind; I wanted to regain my clarity and focus. I wanted to regain my mind’s ability to make decisions, to serve me so that I could serve people around me. I knew my mind had been resilient before; I knew that if I could somehow stop this incessant chatter, I could do the things that had been so easy before. But from my viewpoint at the time, I could not even begin to imagine that it would ever be possible.
During those dark days, one option that kept occurring to me was meditation. I wondered if I could use it to regain the mental resilience I realized I had lost. It had been years since I had practiced, as if a lifetime had passed since I had trekked out to Nanda’s hut for my lessons, but somewhere deep in my mind, I had a sense that meditation might be the solution to my grief and depression.
Desperate for something to wrench me out of my despair, I read some meditation books to remind me of the techniques, but I found that they no longer had any resonance. The techniques seemed to be full of mumbo jumbo and relied on a foundation of faith. I needed something different now; I needed a tool to discipline my mind so that I could return to the everyday world with a new practice, one that was experiential and grounded in the practicality of ordinary life.
I read all that I could get my hands on and tried to strip all the information to its bare bones to uncover the fundamentals of the meditation being espoused. In dissecting the information I was gathering, I began to release the ritual cats that made meditation confusing (see the following box). What I ended up with was a simple practice that focused on developing mental resilience and clarity. I call this method Mental Resilience Training.
RITUAL CATS
Once upon a time, there was a teacher who had a pet cat. When he and his disciples sat down to meditate in the evening, the cat would make a lot of noise. This distracted the students terribly, because they did not have the same ability to concentrate as their master. To be kind to his students and assist in their practice, the teacher decided the cat should be tied up before the meditation practice. This went on for many years. When the teacher passed away, the cat continued to be tied up during the meditation sessions. Once the cat grew old and died, another cat was brought into the monastery and tied up. After many generations, the teacher’s decendants wrote scholarly texts on the religious significance of cats and their importance to the meditation process.
My return to meditation ultimately lifted me out of my downward spiral. I still felt pain and grief over the loss of our daughter, but through my practice I was able to compartmentalize this grief so that it no longer paralyzed me. My mind regained its original power and focus, and I began to function again and enjoy my life.
I now practice meditation daily and teach it to my friends and colleagues, from successful entrepreneurs to stay-at-home mothers and fathers overseeing busy households. The members of this diverse group have several things in common: they engage in relationships, face conflicting demands, have little time, have to meet difficult deadlines, get sick, and feel angry or sad — just like me. The meditation practice I teach provides the skills to cope with these day-to-day pressures, fostering greater mental resilience.
When the mind is at peace, the world, too, is at peace.
J. KRISHNAMURTI
Frequently Asked Questions
Why Mental Resilience Training? Many people are put off by the word meditation, due to the religious or New Age connotations. However, these same people have no qualms about going to a gym when they feel physically weak. Meditation is about keeping the mind strong, clear, and resilient. I call this technique Mental Resilience Training because it helps keep the mind clear and strong without religious implications.
Can I learn to meditate without a teacher? When I learned to meditate, I was fortunate to have a private teacher. My teacher got to know my psychological makeup and then developed a meditation practice based on these traits and my personal hot spots. I was extremely lucky to have had such a personalized practice.
However, it is still possible to acquire a strong and effective meditation practice without personal instruction. The techniques described in this book and the exercises provided on the audio are suitable for anyone facing pressures and stress in work and personal life. They are suited to anyone who wants to learn how to delve into the mind; stop the seeming chaos and clutter; and find the right tools to increase clarity, resilience, and, ultimately, peacefulness and productivity. You can achieve a very effective practice by using the techniques in this book. However, if you want to pursue your meditation practice further, it can help to attend a weekend or week-long meditation retreat.
How long will it take me to learn how to meditate? Studies show that most people take twenty-one days to transform new behaviors into new habits. So, while I cannot promise mystical results or a magic potion that can heal all your ills, I can promise that if you commit to twenty-one days of practicing meditation (using this book and the audio with the suggested program in chapter 12), you will definitely realize these benefits: clarity of mind and mental resilience. It is written in the Vedas, “If you want to dig a well, it’s no use digging a few meters and then stopping and trying somewhere else. You have to keep at it for a while.” This adage applies to your journey with meditation. We live in an age where gratification is often instant. The latest news is online or on the television or radio. If we want to communicate with a friend or colleague overseas, we pick up the phone or send an email. When hungry, we grab fast food. As a result, we have become increasingly impatient. Meditation is not an instant thing; unlike with coffee, the buzz is unlikely to come immediately.
For meditation to have the required results for your well-being, you need to take the time to slow down and see what’s really going on inside. Just as if you were rediscovering a long-lost friend, learning about yourself takes a while to happen.
I know meditators who have practiced for twenty years and still consider themselves beginners. Each time they sit for meditation, they find something new and wondrous about themselves that makes them even more resilient. However, even if you meditate for one minute or even one heartbeat, you will start receiving some of the benefits. Just as setting down a heavy bag for a moment gives you relief, so will a mere moment’s meditation provide calm. It will also enable you to carry that heavy load even farther.
