Shinzen Young, an incredibly gifted mindfulness teacher of mine, tells the story of visiting the laboratory of a biologist stem cell researcher. Shinzen walks into this lab and sees that they’re washing a pig heart, that they taken a pig heart and washed it in a chemical detergent that strips the cellular matrix off of the scaffolding of the heart.
Imagine this. Before washing, the heart is fleshy. It's got heart tissue made of heart cells on it and the scaffolding beneath is like a kind of cartilaginous structure. After the scientists have given this pig heart a bath, it basically has no cells left on it. It’s just scaffolding — a translucent shape of a heart.
Why do the scientists do this? Well, they want to see if they can regenerate heart cells. They coat the scaffolding with stem cells and sit and wait.
What happened in this particular laboratory is that after going through this process of stripping a pig heart of its heart cells and then essentially “re-coding it” with stem cells, it once again became a functioning beating pig heart.
This would be an interesting story in and of itself, but what Shinzen pointed out to me is how the scientist humbly described the process. He said, “Well, it's really a matter of just setting up the right conditions and letting nature do the rest.”
This is a bomb of a teaching. It has served me deeply over the years. And it reminds me that when I think I have to micromanage every last aspect of life and prevent the sky from falling, I can just set up proper conditions.
Nature will meditate us. That’s the take-home. And that's hard to remember a lot of times because the first thing we do when we're getting in trouble in our meditation practice, or when we’re getting in trouble in life, is to think that we have to intervene. We think we have to tinker, that we have to do something. So there's incredible wisdom in just learning the basic conditions that we can set up to allow nature to do what nature does so well.
What does nature do so well? There's a concept in Taoism of wu wei, which can literally translate as doing not doing. And it's the spirit of when we really just relax into the flow of nature, the flow of who we are at the deepest level, good things just start to happen. We enter the Tao, we enter the great flow, the great way of things. And even when we’re exerting tremendous effort, we have the experience of effortlessness. And that is very much the intention behind this teaching. It’s the territory that the teaching is disclosing.
You’ve heard the concept and hopefully just hearing the concept, you get a sense of, ‘oh yeah, this territory is alive in me. I know what it means to set up the right conditions and let nature do the rest.’ And oh, by the way, you are nature. Let’s practice.
Use this script as a meditation you might read to yourself or others:
*Begin Practice*
Take a moment to just settle in. Allow yourself to come to stillness. Even if you're in motion in this moment, you can find the stillness in the motion.
Let go of the breath and just allow the breath to breathe you. You don’t have to do anything. Just intend to come to stillness. Nature will do the rest.
Breathing in, oxygen saturates the lung cells and the bloodstream picks up the oxygen and delivers it to every cell in your body, nourishing you, sustaining your life. And you don't do any of this. Nature just does it.
You are awareness, the light of mind and heart. You don't try to be aware, you don't have to learn to be aware, you’re just aware. Awareness and the words of Plotinus, is the fountain ever on, it just flows, it gushes. And through this awareness, this intelligence we experience human life. it just happens. It’s a gift.
You breathe out carbon dioxide, the plant world takes it in as nutrients, breathing out more oxygen. In relationship with us, human world interwoven with the plant world, interwoven with the world of animals and the minerals, the mountains, the streams.
The Earth itself revolves around the sun at the perfect distance. Too close to the sun we would incinerate, too far away from the sun we would freeze solid. But as it is, the Earth revolves at the perfect distance that allows this incredible gift of life to roll-on.
The part of us that feels like we need to manage things and make things happen and if we become too infatuated by that mentality, we forget the stillness, the simplicity from which everything issues. Paradoxically when we enter the stillness, we're invigorated with life force, we have the capacity to spring forward into action when necessary, when appropriate. We do without doing, we exert effort without effort-fullness.
Feel the body breathe, the heart beat. Feel the quickness of the mind, the light of intelligence. Feel the ground beneath you, always supporting you.
Feel the richness, the hyper abundance of life itself, nature itself, in this moment. We participate in nature, we draw our breath from creation and we are never separate from it like waves on the surface of the ocean, we are always wet as the ocean. As expressions of nature just happening we’re never not nature.
Take a final moment to savor the stillness. To be the stillness. And to be all the beauty, all the creativity that springs out from the stillness.
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