Seeing Clearly with Mindfulness Coaching

Seeing clearly can help us to have insights and open our hearts with greater compassion to whatever arises in our lives. I’ve come full circle back to the collage work. I tried to force something to be a photograph, but its deepest longing is to be collage.

Last weekend’s yoga workshop in Asheville brought some of this up, with all of the heart work. When the heart opens more deeply, most of us find ourselves face to face with layers of whatever we haven’t made the time or commitment to be present with that needs our further attention. And sometimes in order to bring something into the light, we need to become willing to enter the darkness.  

Lately I’ve been engaging in deep inquiry with and study of the Buddhist concept of clear seeing. This concept relates to a clear awareness in which we are able to see clearly what is happening with ourselves, cultivate a nonjudgmental attitude, and see our experience without conceptual analysis. In conjunction with this inquiry, I’m also undertaking a deeper study of the four foundations of mindfulness, beginning with the first foundation, mindfulness of the body.   

I’ve become quite curious about the interplay between clear seeing through nonconceptual awareness and how this relates with clear vision through the eyes. Dr. Roberto Kaplan states, “When you make the inner commitment to see the truth of your life, your eye tissue can heal. “ He also states, “90% of your vision happens in your mind, and only 10% in your eyes.” The older I become, the deeper my experiential understanding of the relationship between the mind and the body becomes. It’s clear that when my vision or awareness of my internal landscape is occluded, my visual perceptual ability becomes less clear.  

Being willing to see the truth of our lives is a serious undertaking that requires a willingness to relate with things as they are instead of our habitual pattern of relating with things as we would like them to be. Mindfulness as a continual practice of bringing our attention back home to the breath, to sensations, feelings, thoughts, and mental objects is a foundational practice that can keep us grounded in a commitment to see the truth of our lives and to relate with things as they are.  

I continue to work with making these little background papers. This week during a meditation in which I deepened my inquiry into the relationship between clear seeing as clear nonconceptual awareness and clear visual perception, an image came to me. I was so struck by the image that I cancelled my plans the following day to attend a seminar and stayed in my studio putting the image into a collage.  

Dr. Kaplan states, “In order to see, you need to face your fears of what you are afraid of losing. By being in darkness, you are facing the very thing that you are afraid of…”  Sometimes all it takes is willingness to enter the darkness.