Mindfulness for Divorce Transitioning
This may be your first, second, or even third divorce. I've had my own obligatory divorce, but I've also had 500 plus other folks' divorces as well. Patterns repeat since the experience of divorce is essentially the same. I know something of what you're feeling, thinking, how you are likely responding at times, and where things may be heading when we don't recognize the trance of reactivity. I have watched lots of needless suffering and when I was part of the attorney herd I helped cause my share. Suffering and causing suffering develops out of an ignorance that it is avoidable.
Suffering in divorce is particularly mind-induced. Suffering cannot be sustained without the mind's stories about the suffering, or the perceived causes of that suffering. Certainly we must all experience a thing for ourselves in order to know it. So we must explore for ourselves. Suffering exists, but how much of the influence and control it exerts upon us is dependent on our denial, at one end of the spectrum, or our belief that we are powerless to end it, on another end? Or, in the middle, how much does suffering feel like we just aren't trying hard enough to overcome it?
Mindfulness is a key to freeing ourselves from the tyranny of our minds. It offers an invitation to stop suffering. Right now.
What is tyranny of mind? The reflexive thinking aptly called "trance" which often feels like a chaotic jumble of voices in our heads that pretty much go where they seem to want.
A great experiment to demonstrate this is to attempt to force your mind to become quiet. Can you sit at your computer for ten seconds without a thought?
The harder we struggle to not have a thought, to blank our minds, the noisier minds become. We cannot force our mind into silence because minds are like a film that never, almost ever, stops, or a screaming child in the midst of a tantrum. This is why people sometimes express frustration with meditation: Popular culture tells us that everything will just go silent if we do it right, and it we cannot achieve silence we have failed - or not concentrated hard enough!
"Mindfulness," instead, invites us to cease struggling. The mind is, after all, a kind of muscle (often in spasm). Consider a closed fist. With a closed fist we can grasp tightly, or we may strike out. Now imagine opening your fingers wide, palm facing the sky. Do you feel the release of tension? It is kind of like a flower opening to the sun - does the flower tense up and concentrate, grrrrr, "I am going to ... OPEN UP!"
Perhaps it is "the opening" that opens up.
The tyranny of mind is what creates and destroys relationship. If you want to survive your divorce or other family relationship dispute, you may accept the invitation of mindfulness itself to explore more deeply for yourself.
Divorce presents a huge opportunity. It is a kind of dying. There can be a spinning and helpless suffering in relationship breakup, and there can be a reactivity that attempts to impose control or force the suffering away, which often assumes the suffering comes from outside us. This is like the concentrating with great effort to stop thinking. Is it going to work?
Or, with mindfulness, there may be another choice that we rarely notice because our minds are so busy that we take everything that happens between our ears as all there is and therefore what is true. What is this other option to explore? Releasing the fixation on controlling the mind and trying to manage the forces that seem to be, but might not in fact be, the root causes of our distress.
We can just stop. We may open our palms to the sky. We can release the tension in our hands. We can cease fixating. We don't need try to do anything. And we don't try to do nothing. We don't try anything at all.
We can investigate surrendering the illusion that we are in control (if we were in control, we wouldn't be suffering, eh?). And, most importantly, we can consider allowing the mind to just do what it does and to let it to continue doing it - while watching it all with loving kindness and compassion. Poor little … poor, poor busy little mind. "I know you can't help it. I am grateful that you do most of what you do, because I do need you after all, minds like you can be quite useful in my day to day affairs."
In this moment of surrender a question may arise that goes like this: "If I can watch my mind and let it run then what is it that is doing the watching?" Who or what is it that is watching this mind, my mind? Is the mind watching the mind, or do we sense something much larger is watching everything - all at once?
This is one inquiry. This is an invitation. The mind relaxes. Silence comes.
And perhaps we discover, experientially, that we are not just our minds. Isn't this a relief?
And so we arrive at the rabbit hole. As one teacher likes to say: Recognition be a seed or a bomb. It takes whatever time it takes.