A small ray glided past in the clear water of the bay, effortlessly skimming just below the surface, like a breath of peace just beneath the clutter of the mind. I watched it, not thinking about anything in particular, just paying attention to the way its wings danced through the water, the dappled reflection of the sunlight, and the gentle lapping of the waves. Trees swayed overhead. I felt the warm breeze against my skin and the ropes of the hammock gently supporting the muscles of my back. I took a deep breath, letting it out with a long sigh, and felt my body relax completely.

My 12-year old son and I had just finished a 3-day hike on the Queen Charlotte Track on the northern tip of New Zealand’s South Island. I was tired from the exertion and happy to be laying in a hammock at this little hostel, my legs relieved of the weight of my pack, the hours of walking. It had been a glorious, if difficult hike. At each turn of the track, the view opened to a vista across the sounds of lush hills flanked by turquoise bays. We had discovered tree ferns and wekas, small chattering birds that followed us as we hiked, patiently (or sometimes aggressively) catching any crumbs we dropped from our granola bars. We laughed at their antics and even made up rhymes about them to recite as we walked.

My son was a trooper. Carrying his own backpack almost 10 miles a day, he barely complained. I had him in training for a longer, more strenuous hike in the next few weeks, and he had handled this one with skill and pleasure. Now he was relaxing, too, playing cards in the main room of the lodge where we had landed for the night. He was content.

_______________________________________________________________________________

I was a type-A mom: working full-time, raising a child, taking care of the house, the garden, the family, cooking, cleaning, making sure my son had his homework done and his guitar practicing completed before falling into bed exhausted at the end of each day. I was so busy I rarely had time to put my feet up, let alone enjoy the luxury of quiet, alone time.

But nine months earlier, I sold my business and took my son out of school to do something we had always dreamed of…travel the world for a year together. In these past months, we had climbed castles in Ireland, mountains in Switzerland, and temples in Cambodia. We rode horses in Mongolia, scuba-dived in Thailand, walked the Great Wall of China, and surfed the waves of Bali. We ate reindeer curd with Siberian herders, sukiyaki with monks, and pastries with poets. We had just finished skydiving over the volcanoes of New Zealand and were headed south to climb glaciers and hike the Southern Alps.

The planning and effort that went into this trip was Herculean. Every day involved making countless decisions about where we were going, how we were getting there, what we were doing when we got there, what and where we were eating, and where we were sleeping that night, all in a foreign language in a different country. On top of it, I had to make sure my son got his homeschooling homework done, and his guitar practicing in, as well as work on whatever freelance article I had to complete by a deadline. While the educational and fun value couldn’t be surpassed, in some ways, it was even more exhausting than our life at home!

And I hadn’t realized how tired I was until this very moment.

Laying in the hammock, for the first time in my life that I could remember, I suddenly realized I had nothing to do, nowhere to go, nothing that had to be planned, reviewed, or imagined, nothing to worry or fret about, no one I had to talk to, no phone calls to make or emails to send. I didn’t have to be mom, tour guide, cook, author, or teacher. My son was fine where he was — safe, fed, and content — and I was fine where I was. I could stay in this hammock all afternoon if I wanted.

That first epiphany came softly, like the breeze. It was simply this: I didn’t have to do anything. I didn’t have to be anything. I could just BE!  That was it! As quiet as that realization was, it was louder than an atomic bomb. There, lying in a hammock, watching a ray skim past, for the first time in my almost 40 years, I just WAS. And every cell in my body breathed a long sigh of relief.

______________________________________________________________________________________

I had heard “Just BE” for decades — the mantra of the neo-Buddhist, the spiritual seeker. In my mind, it was akin to the dictum of “drink water” — something you HAD to do to be healthy or happy. Truth is, in spite of reading plenty of books, going to classes and workshops, and spending hours contemplating it, I never really knew what it meant, let alone how to achieve it.

And I was certain I had never experienced it, even though I tried for years. I sat for hours in meditation, watching the endless cascade of thoughts run through my mind – the obsessions, the review of past events or conversations, the random images and ideas that popped into my mind from nowhere, trying always to dismiss each thought without following it and return to the breath. I failed miserably at it.

There is something so absurd about sitting still, trying not to think. It’s the complete opposite of what we do everyday. We have busy bodies and busy minds. The mind wants to be active, to observe and to think. That’s its job. It wants review the conversation you just had with your spouse, to fantasize, to plan for tomorrow or next week, to complain about how much your left knee hurts, or the itch on your shoulder. The Buddhists call this incessantly active thinking “Monkey Mind.”

I felt like I had a whole barrel of monkeys inside my head. Often times, I found myself thinking about my thinking, judging it. “Really? THAT’s what I am thinking about? How ridiculous!” Sitting and watching the mind so disappointing.

I once had a meditation teacher who used the metaphor of the Zamboni – the machine that clears the ice on an ice rink, pouring a thin layer of water on the ice to fill in the grooves and chips, creating a smooth surface that thoughts could skate across without getting stuck. So when I found myself thinking, I would bring out the Zamboni and visualize it smoothing the surface of my brain. And then, for a few seconds I might find the quiet in the spaces between the thoughts, but as soon as I did, I got excited, and the next thought would arise: “Oh, I’m not thinking!” The moment was lost.

Being still and quiet was such hard work. And part of me thought it was boring. I liked thinking! I began to view myself as a failed meditator, a hopeless Spiritualist. How could I ever achieve that supposedly ideal state of profound stillness, of “No Mind?” And did I really want to?

______________________________________________________________________________________________

Years ago, I taught English to Tibetan monks in Dharamsala, India. It was monsoon season, and the rains were endless and torrential. The red dirt roads of the village ran like muddy rivers, my clothes were always soaking wet. Mold began to grow on the walls of my small cement block room and between my toes. I grumbled and groused. I had just begun learning to meditate, and when I tried to sit and clear the mind, all I could think of was how much I wanted to be dry, to be elsewhere. And yet everyone I passed, the monks and nuns, had this beautiful quality of contentment. They were smiling and laughing all the time, not complaining like I was. I was envious of their easy joy and peacefulness and I was determined to learn their secret.

So I asked Yeshe Nyima, one of the young monks I taught each day. Nyima had become a monk at age 6, when he and an uncle fled Tibet, walking over the Himalayas to the sanctuary of India. He already spoke passable English and wanted to be a Buddhist teacher in the West, so our classes involved taking walks through the village as he taught me about the foundations of Tibetan Buddhism. I would simply correct his mispronunciations or grammatical errors.

“What is the secret to successful meditation, Nyima?” I asked as we huddled together beneath an umbrella slogging though the muddy street toward the Dalai Lama’s temple for prayer session.

“There is no success,” he replied with a smile, presenting me with one of the Koan-type lessons Buddhists are famous for. “There is only practice.”

“But how do you still the mind?”

“The mind is only still when there is nothing important to think about.”

“You mean, ‘if.’ ‘If’ there is nothing important to think about.”

“No. I mean ‘when.’ Mostly, what you think is of no great concern. You must discover disimportance.”

I wanted to correct his last word, but I didn’t know another word for what I thought he meant. The only word I could think of was “insignificance,” and I balked at it. We walked a bit further in silence, as I tried to think about how what I thought was unimportant. I thought everything I thought was important! After all, I had gone to school to learn to think important things and had a great deal of respect for people who thought about important things. Wasn’t everything we thought about important?

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

What is a thought? It is simply a creation of the mind. The mind cannot process what it experiences without words and images, so it creates them to organize experience. At it’s most basic, the mind is naming sensory experiences: “this is cold” or “that is red.”  As children, this is the vast majority of our mental activity – learning to name our sensory experience. As adults, most of that type of thinking is below our awareness. It happens automatically.

But the bulk of what we think about as adults is comprised of random thoughts about what we ate for dinner, what our boss said at work, what we might do tomorrow, obsessing over some detail of our day. Much of it is fear, worry, control, justification, defense, or a form of self-talk. In fact, if we pay attention to what we think, 95% of it is, as Nyima said, “of no great concern.” We are either reviewing the past or planning the future, either of which take us immediately out of fully experiencing the present. The mind cannot do two things at once: it cannot think about the past or the future, and think about the present at the same time. If we are thinking about the past or future, then we are NOT in present moment.

Of course there are times when we need to think: when the application of our mental skill is necessary – at work, when cooking, writing, driving, fixing something, or when we need to figure something out in the present moment. That’s useful thinking. But most of the time, our mind is just chattering to itself like an insane person wandering the empty hallways talking to herself all day.

In and of itself, thinking isn’t bad, it’s just that it prevents us from fully experiencing the present. From just BEING. We aren’t “being,” we are “thinking.” Even commenting on our present experience is a form of thinking that prohibits full experience. You can’t experience something and think about it at the same time.

We can EXPERIENCE the present moment without thinking about it, and without commenting on it. The Buddhists call this, “Beginner’s Mind,” meaning that each moment can be experienced as if for the first time, before we name, categorize or classify it. In other words, we can just BE with our experience. And it doesn’t take practice, or hard work; it only takes a profound kind of letting go, an “Effortless Effort.”

But how does one do THAT?

My body was tired and achy from the hike, but suspended in the hammock, the joints didn’t feel the fatigue or the pain, just a sweet exertion; the pleasure of working. The next few hours and days were completely planned and organized so I had no need to think about details of destinations or travel. The memories of the hike were pleasant, but fading quickly, leaving only lingering sensations. In other words, I really had nothing to do; I couldn’t think about the past or the future, so I just relaxed, and began to enjoy the gentle swing of the hammock, the sights and sounds, just experiencing the moment, listening and hearing. I was just BEING and it took no effort at all.

And that’s when I finally grasped what Nyima was trying to teach me all those years ago. When you realize that what you think is largely unimportant, then thinking becomes uninteresting, and the mind stills without effort. And then you can simply be with your experience.

All those years of struggling with meditation, with trying to understand MENTALLY what is essentially a non-mental experience were swept away on the breeze. For me, the experience of a stilled mind took only a second — and it was simply about stopping. And surprisingly, it was the opposite of boring. It was rich and full and deeply pleasurable. The ray swimming in the bay became exquisitely beautiful. I felt the sun as if I had never felt warmth, the breeze as though my skin had never been touched. And I felt myself part of a greater reality – beyond my own petty concerns and small life. I was deliciously at peace, happy, and the most fully myself I had ever been.

I don’t remember how long I lay in the hammock like that. It could have been only minutes, or it could have been hours. Time was irrelevant and I lost track of it. At some point, my son found me and we went inside to cook dinner. Even in the process of chopping and cooking in a crowded hostel kitchen was a peaceful one, filled with sights and sounds and smells and conversations that made an otherwise onerous task perfectly enjoyable.

I went to bed that night relishing the softness of the mattress, the warmth of my sleeping bag, and the quiet of the evening…and I dozed off to the sound of lapping waves.

I didn’t know it at the time, but my life changed utterly from that experience in the hammock. Once I had experienced “No Mind,” or “Just Being,” I felt I finally knew what all those books and spiritual teachers were talking about. Just BEING was the richest, most profound experience I had ever had, and all the other experiences of daily life suddenly became boring. No, that’s not it: life’s experiences actually became more vibrant, more pleasurable, more alive. It was the thinking about them that became boring.

I vowed I would never go back to being caught up in the thinking again. All I had to do was stop. Just stop. I had already done it once, so it should be easy. Once you know something, you can’t un-know it, right?

Or so I thought…