For the past twenty months, I’ve been feeding myself through a tube. I’m not able to eat through my mouth because of a complication with swallowing that carries food to my lungs instead of my stomach.
During this mouthless feeding period, I’ve spilled my meals and found that accidents like these are not uncommon for PEG tubers like me. PEG, shorthand for percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy, is a medical procedure in which a tube is passed into a patient’s stomach through an incision in the abdominal wall, most often to provide a means of nourishment when intake by mouth proves inadequate. Once the tube procedure is complete, a patient can return home, with new instructions on how to eat and nourish the body through the tube system. Eating works like this: Formula, or food blended and mixed into a liquid (for me, that liquid is milk), is funneled into the barrel of a syringe. Then, formula is pushed through the syringe into the PEG tube secured at the feeding port on the stomach, and food passes directly into the gastrointestinal tract.
As I feed myself in this manner, patience sadly runs thin. Especially when a tube is inserted too loosely. Or when I want to save myself some money by not buying another meal syringe, and I keep reusing it. And then I need to pull the syringe plunger harder because the lubrication aiding its suction has dried up.
So I pull harder.
Until the syringe breaks apart and blended food spills all over my body and the kitchen floor.
In these moments I lose my patience for being a patient.
When is enough enough? I feel so done with milk, with eating that has transformed into feeding. The process feels like having a baby who will never grow up, whom I am obligated to give formula for the rest of my life.
Then I realize so many people—those experiencing chronic illness, those living with a disability, or simply anyone who has been told to mindfully attend to their emotions and struggles—undergo something like this. Not the milk spilling, necessarily. But the repetition of actions, the same old shit again and again, from which frustration arises.
Combined with losing patience for being a patient, I can run out of patience for mindfulness, too.
But if you are mindful, how can you become impatient? Isn’t that contradictory?
Though we might attach ourselves to a wholesome ideal of the Buddha’s teachings, we lose our “mind” when the milk spills, and seem to forget all our practices.
Yet, with every repeated mess, my mind becomes a little more aware. Sometimes I am mindful enough not to place the “I” at the center of an unfortunate accident with my PEG tube. At other times, I let the mind run and my emotions take over, and I pull a syringe too forcefully.
I remember a story from Theravada Buddhist teacher Ajahn Brahm. When asked what he would do if someone flushed a Buddhist holy book down a toilet, he joked that he would, first, call a plumber. I find his response full of humor and efficiency amazing. Becoming annoyed or angry when practice is spoiled or disrupted is useless. Mindfulness such as Ajahn Brahm’s takes a lot of practice. And so I practice.
But after years of habitual responses and conditioning, it’s hard to stay mindful all the time. I can become disappointed, annoyed, or reach a point of feeling that life is meaningless. Still, I believe we have choices in how we respond, and whether or not we will continue a cycle. The question then becomes: After time and again of spilling milk, how can I end my impatience and stay mindful?
The answer is practice.
When I spill milk from my feeding tube, I take one deep breath. Slowly, I plan the next step efficiently: Inspect every corner where the milk has spilled, clean thoroughly, and repeat these actions to make sure the area is extra clean.
At these times, mindful awareness combined with the dharma’s lessons have been helpful in interrupting cascades of reaction that cause me to suffer. For me, it seems, the point of mindfulness is not to stop the milk spilling from my PEG tube. Mindfulness is an opportunity to notice how much suffering I am about to spill inside myself, and knowing I don’t have to. By cultivating wisdom in the mind, I’ve avoided the bitter and sour influence of Mara—the Buddhist personification of obstacles on the path to spiritual awakening.
The four foundations of mindfulness—kāya, vedanā, citta, and dhammā—rooted in the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, are useful on this path. They provide a systematic and logical framework for directing our attention to the body, feelings, the mind, and mental objects.
Rather than understanding them only as concepts, I find them more useful when I can recognize them in something as ordinary, and sometimes upsetting, as my daily feeding.
Mindfulness of the Body (Kāya)
Kāya invites us to come back to the body—to notice the breath going in and out, whether we are walking, sitting, standing, or lying down, and physical sensations such as pain, tension, or heat.
When something goes wrong during feeding, my mind can be everywhere at once. If milk has spilled, I am already thinking about the cleaning I now have to do, and the formula I will have to prepare again. And on and on.
So I start with what is actually here.
Where am I standing? What am I holding?
I notice the shape of my hands gripping the syringe. I notice the tension in my hands from holding it tightly. And that my hands are sticky. And my feet are rooted on a patterned floor. I notice my breath going in and out. This grounds me in the body as it is, rather than in the many other places my mind has already travelled to.
And yes, I also notice there is milk all over my shirt.
Mindfulness of Feelings (Vedanā)
Then I notice how the experience feels.
This is vedanā, which invites us to notice whether an experience feels pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. In Buddhist practice, vedanā does not necessarily mean emotion in the way we commonly use the word “feeling.” Instead, it is the immediate tone of experience.
Milk formula everywhere? Unpleasant.
As someone who likes things clean, I become irritated almost immediately when a feeding accident occurs.
Yet the practice continues after noticing that first unpleasant feeling: What does my mind immediately want to do with it?
The spilled milk is already there. Does becoming angry make it less spilled? Does frustration clean my shirt? No.
I try to catch the unpleasantness before my mind transforms it into something much bigger. I notice my breath going in and out.
Mindfulness of the Mind (Citta)
Feelings and states of mind can seem indistinguishable because one follows the other so quickly. But if I pay attention, I can sometimes see the sequence.
Wanting to throw the syringe across the room? Noted.
Then the mind jumps ahead: Great. Now I have more cleaning to do on top of everything else I have to accomplish today.
And suddenly, there is frustration.
This is citta: noticing the state of the mind itself. Is it angry? Calm? Distracted? Greedy? Clear? Frustrated?
Pretending I am not frustrated isn’t the practice. The practice is recognizing the mind’s state without immediately becoming consumed by its state. Instead of becoming the frustration (I am frustrated), I can notice there is frustration here.
I am also learning to resist attributing my feelings and judgements to the objects at hand. The syringe that spilled the milk did not contain frustration. My mind supplied that.
This small distinction matters.
Mindfulness of Mental Objects (Dhammā)
The spilled milk becomes a very ordinary place to observe suffering being constructed.
This is where dhammā takes us beyond simply noticing the body, the unpleasant feeling, or the frustrated state of mind. We begin observing the patterns and teachings operating in and shaping our experience and consciousness.
These include the natural expressions of heart and mind known as the hindrances: sensual desire, ill will, torpor, worried restlessness, and doubt. We can also observe the aggregates of clinging, craving, and aversion; the sense bases, or what arises through sensory contact; and the four noble truths that tell us duḥkha, or suffering, is pervasive, that there are causes and conditions for suffering, that suffering is temporary and the awakened mind is always available, and there is a path to freedom from suffering.
These four foundations of mindfulness are not supposed to happen in the fixed order laid out above. Mindfulness is rarely that tidy. Whichever comes into my awareness first is where I begin. I notice what is asking for my attention and use any one of the foundations that helps me see the present moment more clearly. From there, another foundation may naturally reveal itself. When I remove some of the ego and the “I” from whatever I’m experiencing, it becomes easier to be mindful. Not easy. Easier. Mindfulness is not a checklist. It is simply learning to recognize what is happening while it is happening.
If none of this analysis seems to ground me in the moment at hand, then I ask myself a much simpler question: After all this aversion, frustration, and self-inflicted suffering, do I still have to clean up the milk?
Unfortunately, again, yes. And I can clean while suffering, or I can clean without carrying quite so much duḥkha with me.
The post Some Days, I Have No Patience for Mindfulness appeared first on Lion’s Roar.
Recent Comments