Mindfulness and a room with 2 doors

[Happy Buddha]

Imagine there is a room with two doors. Door A is always open, door B is normally closed. Imagine also there is a queue of people at door A, entering into the room. The people never stop entering, the queue is moving constantly – so, as you can see, at some point it starts to get overcrowded. It becomes very claustrophobic and sooner or later even the walls come under strain. I wonder what happens next in your scenario? 

As you may have guessed, the room represents ourselves. The open door A represents life and life never stops happening; that is why the people never cease entering the room. The closed door B is our unwillingness to experience life as it is. I am talking here mainly of the more painful emotions, such as fear, anger, sadness, grief, etc. We close door B because we feel life is too much or that there is something wrong with feeling like this. 

Mindfulness meditation is not about trying to close the first door so we don’t feel anything unpleasant – it is about opening the second door. All experience wants simply to be experienced for a duration then allowed to pass away. This is healthy and brings an ease of being and a joy to life. However, we tend to make a problem out of emotions that seem threatening. We don’t like to feel sad, for example, because we may appear weak, or it seems to point to something being wrong and life not going our way. So what we do when they show their little heads is to try to shove them back down again; we close the door on them. If we keep closing the door on our emotions, at some point the ‘walls’ will come under strain and – well, we know what may happen next. 

We open the door by turning toward the emotions that arise in the body; by giving them space and keeping the door open, we then allow them to pass on. Sadness, for example, is a natural response to some events in life and actually ‘seasons our soul’. Sadness opens our hearts to allow others to enter. Experiencing sadness connects us to others because the wisdom of experience shows us that we all suffer sadness. Sadness and pain are not some sort of mistake, they are essential – if there were no pain and sorrow, there would be no connection and compassion. They reveal our common humanity. If we close the door on sadness, we remain locked away in our own little experience of life and the result is emotional claustrophobia. 

When we shut out sadness and other experiences, we also shut out something else, and that something else is joy and happiness. Most people think that if they keep hurtful or sad feelings out of awareness that they will be well, but this is not the case. To experience the joy of life, we need to be able to experience the sadness of life too.

Our work with mindfulness is firstly to observe how we turn away from painful emotions and allow the thoughts to run rampant. We can then take our attention away from the thoughts and into the felt experience of the emotions in the body. To open the door means to experience life moment by moment, whether it be joy or sorrow – because they are the same.

Extract from Suryacitta's latest book - Mindfulness and Compassion - embracing life with loving kindness

Suryacitta explains A room with 2 doors on 3 minute [youtube][/youtube]

[Sensi]

Thank you, Happy Buddha, for the beautiful text.

I just finished meditating and came to the computer and the first thing I happened to click on was your post. As it happens, sadness came up a lot in my meditation today. If felt like much constriction around my throat. When I felt into it, there seemed to be movement up and down my throat. After a little while is dissipated.

Thank you again for the words, it helps and I'm glad that, at least, my first response to your question about what to do when the room gets too full was to get up and open door B. I trust that at least I seem to have some intuition to give stuff some room.

Sensi

[Gareth]

Wonderful words as usual, Suryacitta. I'll bump this topic and also give it some coverage from Twitter too.

Thanks.