Interview with Singhashri Gazmuri

Singhashri Gazmuri’s life was transformed after she discovered meditation at the age of 21. She is now employed as programme director at Breathworks.

Here she describes her mindfulness journey and how she is helping to bring Breathworks to the USA.

Singhashri was interviewed by Jon Wilde in May 2015.

Everyday Mindfulness: Growing up, did you have any interest in meditation or spiritual seeking of any kind?

Singhashri Gazmuri: I was raised first generation American in the suburbs of Boston, my parents having emigrated from Chile which is a very Catholic country. So I was brought up in the Catholic faith. I went to Catholic schools for thirteen years.

From an early age I felt very connected with the mystical. I enjoyed contemplating the mysteries of life. I remember being nine or ten. We had a forest at the back of our house. I would sit there quietly and imagine the Virgin Mary appearing to me. I also remember telling one of my teachers that I wanted to be a nun and she told me to say ten Hail Marys every day. I don’t think I had much idea about what a nun’s life would entail. I was just drawn to a life that involved being completely committed to some higher ideal, living a true life.

EM: Were there any big turning points in your childhood?

SG: My mother passed away from breast cancer when I was sixteen. That was a big turning point for me. She taught me a great deal about love and a great deal about being of service in the world. Those qualities had been instilled in me from a young age. I always knew that I’d end up in a profession that involved service, helping people in the community.

After my mother had passed away I went through a grieving process. I was definitely looking for meaning at that time in my life. I had renounced Catholicism. I no longer felt I had the tools I needed to work creatively with my mind from that tradition. Largely because of the pain of bereavement, I was searching for something. I was doing everything I could to alleviate that pain. I turned to drugs and alcohol, generally seeking as much pleasure as I could.

EM: Do you remember when you first meditated?

SG: I started when I was 21. I’d moved to San Francisco. I was doing some yoga and I started to notice that my mind was much stiller after a yoga session. My intuition was to look into meditation to see if I could continue to work in that way. Around this time I was reading books like Larry Rosenberg’s Breath By Breath and Pema Chodron’s When Things Fall Apart. They had a big effect on me. Later on, Sharon Salzberg’s Lovingkindness, Sangharakshita’s Living with Awareness: A Guide To The Satipatthana Sutta and Know Your Mind, and Vidyamala Burch’s Living Well With Pain And Illness were key books for me.

EM: How quickly did you “take” to meditation?

SG: Pretty much immediately. It was a revelation to me that I could be objective about my thoughts, that I didn’t have to believe them. I could see that this wasn’t some new-agey idea of positive thinking.

Turning towards my thoughts, I could see that the majority of them were negative. The act of noticing them took the power away from them. Then there was space for something else to happen. In that space, we see that we have a choice.

Also, it comes back to the idea that we think what we thunk. A thought usually arises because we’ve had that thought before. So we’re conditioned to have the same thought or the same kind of thought again. It’s habitual thinking. If we can see that habit clearly, we have the option of becoming unhooked from it.

Given all that, I knew intuitively that meditation was what I needed in my life. It wasn’t a casual thing. From the time I first meditated I knew I was on a journey.

EM: What form of meditation were you engaged with back then?

SG: I discovered meditation in a Buddhist context, so I was practicing mindfulness of breathing, a four-stage meditation practice that includes counting to mark the breaths. I was also taught metta bhavana, a loving-kindness meditation.

EM: What difference was this meditation practice having on your life? In what ways did you find it transformative?

SG: I started to feel much more in touch with myself, in touch with the crisis of being a human being in the world at that age. I was beginning to see that the mind proliferates around suffering but it didn’t have to be that way. I began responding to my thoughts and my feelings in a different way, and started to relate differently to the external world – the things that are coming at me every day.

EM: Did you encounter any particular challenges in the early days of your meditation practice?

SG: When I started to meditate, I began to learn how to love myself in a way that I hadn’t learned before. That was something of a challenge. Previously, I was aware of the person I wanted to be but I was also aware that I wasn’t that person. I found that very painful and difficult but I had no idea how to move through that. Looking back, I realize I was probably depressed at that time. I started to realize that I couldn’t be of service to others or love others unless I first learned how to love myself.

When I started to turn towards myself with kindness, I just couldn’t do it. I found it very difficult to bring a non-judgmental attitude towards my own experience. I remember telling my teacher that I found this really hard. Rather than colluding with me and saying “poor you”, she said, “That’s really interesting.” That was a light bulb moment. I realized that I needed to get interested, to bring a quality of curiosity to any underlying guilt or shame I might feel. That curiosity inherently has a kindness to it. Any kind of interest is ultimately kind, if it’s genuine interest. It was really useful for me to have that mirrored back by my teacher. When we turn towards difficulties in our experience, doing that with kindness and openness, that can be transformative in and of itself without necessarily providing an answer as to where that might take us.

Of course, turning towards that which is difficult is so contrary to how most of us have been conditioned to behave. But what’s the alternative? Haven’t we tried everything else? Perhaps going through might provide a way out.

At this time I was coming out as a lesbian and the scene in San Francisco was very much based around socializing and partying. As soon as I started meditating, I realized that I wasn’t likely to find people in that scene who I could talk about meditation with. However, the Buddhist centre I learned to meditate at very much emphasized friendship in the community, so I was making new friends who shared my new interests. Without those people I doubt that I could have kept going with the meditation.

EM: How was your career shaping up at that point?

SG: At the time I was working in youth development, running a community centre and I was interested in the possibilities of bringing meditation into my work with young people. We had some wellness programs for 11-13 year-olds and I was always looking for ways to bring mindfulness into those, including mindful eating to address the problems of obesity and other issues. I worked in that community until 2005. Then I started working in a training and development role for an organization that ran state-funded training programs for those who work with young people. Then I moved into diversity work at a community college level, helping leadership teams to better serve their most underserved students.

EM: Have you always managed to sustain a regular meditation practice?

SG: Yes, I have. Most days I will sit for meditation, for anywhere between twenty and forty minutes. Some days I’ll do body scans. Some days I’ll do yoga. I also go on at least one, preferably silent two-week retreat per year. But I think of my weekly practice as more my every-moment practice. It’s all practice. I can’t really say when it stops and when it begins. It’s all of it a flow, being with whatever is arising in the moment – pleasurable, difficult and everything in between. It’s never-ending. It seems that the more I learn the more there is to learn.

I think of the meditation cushion as a kind of laboratory for what goes on in the rest of our lives. What we learn to do on the cushion or the chair, such as returning to the breath when the mind wanders, we learn to do out in the world. So daily life is the practice. Meditation is practicing to practice.

But that doesn’t mean that I’m always mindful. In terms of mindful eating, for instance, I’ll sometimes go through a whole meal and not actually have been aware that I’ve been eating. But, of course, each and every moment is an invitation to be mindful.

EM: One common obstacle for people is understanding that mindfulness is not a goal-oriented practice.

SG: One thing we say at Breathworks is, “In order to get from A to B, you have to be at A.” Inevitably, people come to mindfulness with some kind of goal in mind. They want to be happy. They want to be less anxious. They want to be more productive. They want to feel more peaceful. Or they want their pain to go away. Slowly, as people develop their practice, the goals tend to drop away. In the case of pain, for example, they might start to realize that their pain isn’t necessarily about to go away, but they might learn to relate to their pain in an entirely different way. By realizing that they are not their pain, just as they are not their thoughts, they learn how to manage their lives in a way that they get their lives back.

So much of that is to do with the skill of the teacher in meeting students where they are, with gentleness and understanding. Part of that understanding is realizing that people are going to have those goals. There’s really nothing wrong with having goals. It may be that, in the process of changing with the help of mindfulness, that goal also changes.

EM: For some, mindfulness can all too easily become another form of striving.

SG: That can be a real danger. People can get trapped in that striving. It’s important that a good teacher spots that happening and can work creatively with people to help them get around that striving.

When people turn mindfulness into another form of striving, judgmentally comparing today’s meditation with yesterday’s, noticing that and working with it becomes an important part of the practice. That’s the beauty of mindfulness. You can become interested in anything that arises.

EM: At what stage did you decide to become a Buddhist?

SG: When I first started going to my meditation class I was so enamored of it. I knew this was something I wanted to do with the rest of my life. And I wanted to know more so I started going along to Buddhism classes. As I started to learn about the teachings of The Buddha and the ethical foundations of Buddhism. Pretty quickly I realized that I was a Buddhist. The underlying principles and beliefs of Buddhism strongly resonated with a lot of things I’d already figured out about the world and how it works, particularly in terms of impermanence. I was ordained in 2010.

EM: As a Buddhist, what are your views on mindfulness being taught in a purely secular fashion?

SG: Buddhism has a 2500-year history and has always changed and adapted to the cultures in which it has found itself. Some people would even argue that it’s impossible to call the whole tradition “Buddhism” because it’s so different from country to country and the way it has evolved. So I take the view that mindfulness as we now know it is just another way that Buddhism has evolved in the west. It’s teaching people to be more aware and kind in the world, and that has to be a good thing. The world needs that desperately.

EM: If mindfulness becomes too divorced from its Buddhist roots, is there a danger that the teachings will become diluted so that we end up with a kind of mindfulness-lite?

SG: The quality of teaching is hugely important. As the field develops, we do need to ensure that teachers are offering mindfulness in a skillful way. As it stands right now, I believe the mindfulness courses on offer do have a lot of integrity. That goes for the MBSR/MBCT courses as well as adaptations like Breathworks. The design of those courses have remained true to the way Buddhists have taught mindfulness.

EM: Generally speaking, our lives are becoming faster-paced, more and more anxiety-driven. The need for mindfulness in our lives seems to be greater than ever.

SG: The Buddha taught that being deluded is like not realizing your turban is on fire, and mindfulness can be a practical solution of putting that fire out – if we just turn towards our experience, we can find a way out. Our lives are becoming more frantic. But nature is always trying to correct itself. With the rise of technology, the fact that our lives are becoming increasingly fast-paced and that there are ever-increasing ways that we can distract ourselves, it was inevitable that something like mindfulness would gain in popularity. Of course, in many ways, modern technology is amazingly useful. The fact that people have access to so much more information than they used to is so liberating. But any tool used incorrectly or unwisely can be dangerous. Technology needs to be used mindfully, in a way that doesn’t make us even more stressed out.

EM: When did you first get involved with Breathworks?

SG: Three years ago I decided to move to the UK and got in touch with Vidyamala Burch, the founder of Breathworks, whom I’d met on a meditation retreat ten years prior. I was interested in what she was doing with Breathworks, especially in terms of bringing meditation to a secular audience. In 2012 she was interested in expanding the Breathworks training program. I had a background in organizational development so it was a good fit. That’s when I realized that mindfulness could be a right livelihood for me, the Buddhist principle of one’s work aligning with the Buddhist values of generosity, kindness and awareness.

I’m now the programme director at Breathworks. I’m a member of the leadership team so I help make strategic decisions. I also lead the programme team, working with the founder directors and associates to put together our annual programme which includes our eight week courses, training programme and events for health professionals. It’s a lot of work but I love it, so it doesn’t feel like work.

EM: As we speak, you are in America with Vidyamala on Breathworks duties. What are you involved with in the US?

SG: We’re here for the launch of You Are Not Your Pain, the American version of Mindfulness For Health, which Vidyamala co-wrote with Danny Penman, and which was published in 2013 in the UK.

We’re also involved in related events, introducing members of the mindfulness community and the general public to Breathworks. As part of that I’ll be leading an introductory four-day retreat in Santa Cruz, California.

EM: How big a presence does mindfulness have in the US right now?

SG: It’s pretty big out here. MBSR and MBCT are very popular. The Breathworks program hasn’t really made it to the States until now. The main model of how we spread the word about Breathworks is through our teacher training program and, right now, about half of our 215 accredited teachers are in the UK, with the rest in 24 other countries. But the time feels right to expand into the US.

I think it’s fair to say there are pockets in the US where mindfulness is popular, particularly in urban areas. I don’t have any data to back this up but, because there are some parts of the States that are quite Christian, I wonder whether mindfulness would be perceived like a foreign religion. There’s certainly been some resistance to mindfulness being introduced in schools in certain areas. In the States, there can be more sensitivity around this than, say, in the UK which is a more secular society.

Also, in the UK there’s a lot more willingness to be innovative and try things out that don’t necessarily have that much of a research base. In the US, the healthcare system is very different and people want a lot more actual proof before they’ll fund something.

The way Breathworks has grown has been very organic. We’ve now got accredited teachers in 24 countries and it’s growing all the time in the right way. There’s exciting times ahead.

EM: Finally, how would you describe the impact of mindfulness on your life?

SG: Meditation has made me far more equanimous, far more grounded and deeply-rooted. It’s enabled me to respond to life with wisdom, rather than aversion and grasping. I’ve been able to make better choices in my life. I’m a much happier, healthier person, much more able to navigate the ups and downs of life without feeling overwhelmed.

For more information on Breathworks: http://www.breathworks-mindfulness.org.uk

You Are Not Your Pain by Vidyamala Burch and Danny Penman is published by Flatiron Books in the US.

The same book is published under the title Mindfulness For Health in the UK.