Meditation on a Leaf Blower

On a sunny Friday morning, my son Eamon’s 16th birthday, I sat down in our suburban den to listen to a recorded meditation session from Dharmaseed.org on my iPhone. Over the last decade, I had listened to at least a hundred of these dharma talks, but it had been several months since I had last sampled one of these excellent guided meditations or instructions on buddhist teachings. The thirty-minute session I selected was the first in the playlist, by a teacher named Jill Shepherd recorded at the Southern Insight Meditation retreat. That group, as it turns out, is based in New Zealand, not the American South, and the episode had just been published that day, June 10th. The session was labeled Jill Shephard: 19: meditation: equanimity and appeared to be the 19th episode from the retreat, which was being held at a facility named Staveley Camp in the foothills of New Zealand’s Southern Alps.

Shepherd was a graduate of the Insight Meditation Society training program in Barre, Massachusetts under Joseph Goldstein and Gil Fronsdal, two widely known leaders of the American buddhist meditation movement. Shepherd had been on the staff at IMS as well as the Spirit Rock meditation center in Marin County, California, so while I was only vaguely familiar with her name, I’m sure I’ve come across some of her many recorded dharma talks over the years.

I landed on this particular session about equanimity for no other reason than the central role that fostering balance and repose through meditation plays in buddhist practice. I was also drawn by the brief description of the episode:

“Practising with choiceless attention, simply opening to whatever experiences arise moment to moment and orienting to the stable, steady awareness that knows it all (including the strong winds swirling around the mediation hall.)” 

Shepherd began the session by encouraging people to settle into the space and ground themselves. As I followed along, I noticed a good deal of background noise or hissing room tone from the quality of the recording equipment, and then later from the winds blowing outside the retreat center. The hiss and wind noise wasn’t particularly distracting, but I did make note of it as Shepherd soothingly suggested that we sit “like a mountain” like those outside Staveley Camp and allow whatever weather or surrounding conditions might swirl around it.

Just as I began to anchor myself and sink into stillness, eyes closed and legs crossed on the sectional sofa in our den, the whirr and whine of two leaf blowers started up just outside the window. Workers from the same lawn care service we and several other people on our suburban block used were getting started at our next door neighbors.

I immediately felt the grating sound of the gas-powered blowers in my body and mind, a reverberation that generated a kind of synesthesia: it seemed like I could almost see the buzzing pattern of the blowers in my mind’s eye like some kind of sonic Rorschach patterns. The recoil against the invasive noise was equally visceral, a mix of physical and emotional distaste and annoyance. Leaf blowing, ride-on lawn mowers and the rest of the aural assault of the landscaping business was a seasonal bane of suburban life. It had become especially tiresome and disruptive since I had spent a portion of my career over the last decades working from home. The racket seemed to always coincide with conference calls or, increasingly, video meetings. And here it was again, barging in on my effort to cultivate a little piece of mind.

At the same time, Shepherd was asking her listeners to simply receive whatever experience was naturally presenting itself. “Opening to this everchanging flow, moment to moment,” she urged before taking an extended pause.

The leaf blowers continue to howl, their tone and volume rising and falling in a banshee duet that felt almost purposefully intended to frustrate and bedevil my serenity. Still I was struck by the coincidental nature of Shepherd’s guidance to make space and allow for whatever was appearing in the here and now. 

“This,” she said softly, as the noisemakers roared just outside the windows and echoed within my thoughts and feelings like angry giant insects.  

The next thought that sprang up was that rather than resist and react against the onslaught and distraction of the blowers, I could try to just let go and accept the sound as part of this present reality. 

At first I tried to block off or ignore the instinctive, repellent reflex that rose and fell with each burst of the leaf blowers, yet trying to stifle that negative reaction just seemed to amplify it. The throb of vexation would spike each time the blower ramped up or the noise came closer. That pungent sensation would then fade away as the machine throttled down or the operator took a pause.

Shepherd suggested that if one wasn’t feeling particularly equanimous in the moment to be accepting of even that sensation. This allowing for equanimity about an absence of equanimity struck a chord with me, like a curtain falling. 

I tried to imagine surrendering to the clamor rather than fighting it. What if I reframed the noise as something interesting or pleasant? Didn’t I love the vibration and thrum of the two vintage motorcycles I was working on? Could I pretend that the buzz was some rare, precious exhibition of a swarm of mystical bees? Was it within my power to choose not to find the blower roar awful and intrusive?

Before long this shift of mind started to work. I focused my attention on the sound, without judging or forming an opinion about it, and made that active listening a kind of mantra. I followed the sound just as I might follow my breath, or a key phrase I liked to repeat in my mind’s ear in some meditation sessions.

The whine of the pair of blowers started to become just part of the whole tapestry happening in my field of awareness. A thought bubbled up – who cares about the noise? — that triggered a flash of insight. Obviously the egomind cared. It didn’t like the sound and felt it as a personal affront to my noble effort to seek equanimity. Base awareness, the selfless seat of consciousness, the more primeval and foundational state of sentience and being, didn’t care about the noise. It didn’t have to care, or assign a positive or negative value to the sense experience. It just took the information in without having to make a distinction about whether it was pleasant or unpleasant. 

I could consciously try to hear the blower noise in a new light to trick the egomind and handle the circumstances more skillfully. But I could also pull the curtain back to apprehend another deeper truth: the field of consciousness behind the thinking/feeling mind doesn’t pass judgment on every sensation, feeling or thought. It operates in a space where there is no judge to do the judging. That is being the mountain. That is the way to soften beyond the self.

The blowers continued to squeal and shriek, and my surface reactive mind continued to twitch in negative response every time they spooled up and trailed off. But the gap that had opened up in my relationship to the sound enabled a new perspective on the very idea of equanimity or balance. The reflexive, negative response to the wail – what an awful sound! –might be what appears in my thinking/feeling mind, but the raw sense information has no value judgment attached to it. Sound is just input. It might have a frequency, volume or waveform, but to the brain’s most basic function, sound waves are just data in. Indeed, the brain doesn’t and can't feel anything directly.

The more fundamental awareness that is bedrock consciousness doesn’t have an opinion about everything. What we think or feel about a sight, sound, smell, person, place or situation is just the product of a reaction to and relationship with those experiences. Our brain takes in the whine of a landscaper’s leaf blower the same way it processes the trill of a mockingbird or the vibration of a guitar string. The sensing brain is a blank canvas beyond caring or not caring. It is only the reactive mind layer above it that is entrained over and over to like some things and not others, to slot all incoming messages into Good, Bad and Neutral categories.

Shepherd’s guidance gradually trailed off toward the middle of the meditation, leaving space for silence and the sound of the wind outside to become the focal point. In my own physical here and now, the leaf blowers continued to ebb and flow, roar and retreat, just like all sensations that would rise and fall like the breath, the rhythm of day into night, the coming and going of all passing phenomena. The noisy lawn machines never stopped being a little jarring, but my mind became more at ease with that imperfect state. Eventually, I noted, the blower noise too would die away.

Indeed, after the guided meditation concluded with the traditional ringing of a bell, I continued to follow the leaf blowers to extend my equanimity exercise. After a few minutes, the workers finally did shut the noisemakers off, and in the ensuing silence a deep sensation of relief rolled through my mind and body. I spent some time noting how pleasant the secession of the discordant sound felt, an example of how we suffer while wishing for a disagreeable experience to end. As I was contemplating this hard truth, the blower engines fired back up, and I once again felt the rush of exasperation. How dare these racket-makers even disrupt an insightful conclusion to the session! I felt so indignant that I got up and marched out onto our front yard to confront the landscapers.

“How much longer are you going to be,” I asked, testily. “I’m trying to work right in there,” pointing to the den. 

Then, to my surprise, I noticed that the two landscapers weren’t operating leaf blowers, but hedge trimmers with long extended clippers to reach the upper parts of a tree that they had beautifully sculpted into an elegant hemisphere. The trimmers were no less jarring, but the fact that the distraction was even slightly different than I had imagined stopped me in my tracks. Something shifted with that realization.

“We were asked to trim this tree today,” the landscaper said matter-of-factly. “I don’t know what to tell you.”

I hadn’t escaped this last bit of reactive discomfort, but as I walked away, I felt something skillful come into focus. Just when you think you may have mastered some measure of equanimity, another challenge to that equilibrium may be just a moment away. Peace of mind isn’t an end result or destination. Equanimity isn’t a noun, it is a verb: an ongoing process subject to the same impermanence and fluctuations that govern all experience.

When you become aware of and ok with that simple fact, and open to the reality that, like all things, equanimity itself comes and goes, you are one step closer to finding the stillness in the maelstrom.

#equanimity #Jill Shepherd #meditation #buddhism