Overlapping Worlds
Notice how the sense of a self and your surroundings can seem both distinct and blurred.
The title poem from Maggie Smith’s new collection, A Suit or a Suitcase, contains a delicious question that resonates with a puzzle I’ve been playing with in my mindfulness practice:
my body hasn't traveled with me.
I've traveled inside it. Do I wear it
or does it carry me? Is the body a suit
or a suitcase? She’s trying to locate herself — the “me of me,” she calls it — and finding that the borders are genuinely unclear. She’s not trying to be evasive.1 She means it.
I don’t know what to call it.
I find this reassuring, because too often mindfulness instruction gives the opposite impression: that the self is a fixed entity, a trick of perception, or an illusion to be seen through and moved beyond. While there’s some truth in that perspective, the framing can create its own confusion. If the sense of self is an illusion, it’s an extraordinarily useful and persistent one. Going to war with it doesn’t help. Trying to eliminate it isn’t realistic. What helps — at least in my experience — is developing greater intimacy with it. When I observe it closely and with less interference, it becomes more tangible and almost legible. The paradox is that we can only see through it by looking at it — over and over.
What I’ve come to notice is that the sense of self isn’t fixed; it’s more like a weather system—more like a verb than a noun. During my meditation a few mornings ago, I sat outside listening to the sounds from our backyard. My attention moved almost like a tide: sometimes pulling inward toward bodily sensations and the low hum of concerns and plans, then releasing outward toward shifting light, the creak of tree trunks, a distant ambulance. There were moments when I heard birds singing, and after a few seconds of savoring their music, I’d catch myself thinking about buying a feeder, where I might hang it, and then a growing list of yard-related tasks. The activity of my mind, set off by the singing, would quickly mute the soothing sounds. Sometimes, though, the two weren’t separate at all. There were moments when the two worlds overlapped rather than competing for my attention: I was briefly aware of the bird choir and myself as its attentive audience at the same time.
The same thing happens in less comfortable circumstances. I recently swam with other adventurous travelers in a beautiful lagoon in Mexico. The conditions were ideal, but these swim trips, while easy for my husband, are just beyond my ability.2 The sensation of turquoise water enveloping my body was delicious, and the rhythm of breathing and moving felt soothing. But eventually, I realized I was falling behind the others in my group of “least-fast” swimmers, and that awareness drew my attention away from swimming and into my mind.
The story of being the weakest swimmer — an informal ranking that shifted depending on who was in the water — made me wonder how others were assessing me. Was I slowing them down? Etiquette prevents anyone from ever admitting it, so the data I wanted was unknowable, and the need to know felt emotionally charged. That’s the thing about the self-narrative: it’s compelling, and it’s often partly right, but it tends to reach for information it can’t actually have.
The struggle of being caught in this existential undertow was a sense of my self getting tangled up with my sense of the other—specifically, my thoughts and feelings blending with those I imagined the other swimmers were having. While invisible to everyone else, those are some choppy-ass waters to swim in.
Shinzen Young, whose work has shaped how I approach untangling all of this, invites practitioners to simply notice — moment by moment — whether present experience appears to be focused on self, other, or both at once. There’s no preference between the three. No goal of eliminating any of them. It’s about developing intimacy with the possible configurations and learning to erode your resistance to whatever is happening.
That’s what the exercise below invites you to explore. It’s a practice of noticing, not solving. The self doesn’t need to be banished. It needs to be seen — in all its flickering, shifting, sometimes-useful, sometimes-sticky aliveness.
In the middle of her poem, Maggie wonders if she could breathe deeply enough to distribute herself more fully throughout her whole body:
I’ve always thought of who I am as being concentrated in my head & chest, as if there’s a waterline at my ribcage & contrary to their density, thoughts & feelings stay afloat. You asked what I’ll miss about this life, & now I’m way down a rabbit hole, wondering if I could breathe deeply enough to redistribute my mind more evenly throughout my body—or soul rather than mind? Or self? I don’t even know what to call the me of me. I imagine filling my body completely, filling it, every inch, to the skin. Shh. Listen. Ideas are whispering in my wrists & all along the slopes of my calves.
What a confounding and liberating riddle! A puzzle we don’t have to solve, but can live in and keep unpacking for the rest of our lives.
Exercise
This exercise invites you to notice how your sense of self and your awareness of the outside world overlap and influence each other.
Circumstances for learning this attention exercise
Swimming in a lagoon in Mexico
Listening to birds sing at dawn
Walking around your neighborhood
Wondering what other people are thinking about you
