After 25 years of police and criminal justice work, Cheri Maples co-founded the Center for Mindfulness & Justice to coordinate her work in criminal justice training, organizational consulting, and mindfulness workshops. Cheri has worked as a police officer and detective in Madison, Wisconsin,

Wisconsin Assistant Attorney General, and head of Probation and Parole for the Wisconsin Department of Corrections. In 2008, she was ordained a dharma teacher by Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, her long-time spiritual teacher, prolific author, poet, and peace activist.

In the course of my chaotic journey to becoming a “mindful street cop,” about which you can read elsewhere on this web site, I slowly learned several lessons that seem essential to truly mindful living. I think of them as the seven lessons from my own spiritual transformation. In this article, I discuss two of these lessons: developing fierce as well as gentle compassion and learning that violence does not resolve violence.

Whether an act is violent or compassionate in nature depends by the intention behind the action, not the action itself. The action itself can be smooth and gentle, but if the motivation behind it is manipulative, it is still negative and violent. Likewise, fierce actions done with a positive intention are non-violent in nature. Sometimes fierce compassion is required to protect ourselves, to protect others, and to protect our relationships. With real understanding and compassion and a tender heart, we can be both gentle and fierce. We can develop good boundaries and the wisdom to enable us to be firm and kind at the same time in our personal lives, our work, and in community relationships.

Fierce compassion in our personal relationships requires establishing boundaries that are necessary and that we can keep. If we waffle on the boundaries we set, we can destroy the integrity that boundaries may offer to protect and restore the relationship. We see this in organizations a lot when someone is charged with violating an obscure, poorly defined policy. Rules and policies should not be created unless there is firm commitment to them. Fairness and consistency also are essential to enforcing rules and regulations. This applies especially with those we love.

What I’ve found in this area is that less is more. Boundaries should exist not just to avoid exploitation, but also to protect our relationships with others. Without good boundaries, our hearts begin to contract, which limits the future of a relationship. When compassion turns into enabling behavior, Buddhists call it “idiot compassion.” Well maintained boundaries help us understand on a very deep level that when I take care of myself, I take care of you; and when I take care of you, I take care of myself.

The litmus test of any form of spirituality is how it affects your relationship with others. It is very easy to be compassionate when we’re in a cave all by ourselves; a little harder when we’re with other people and our stuff starts to rub up against theirs. Compassion is a very active and important concept to Buddhism and compassion should be in everything we do.

What Thay (Thich Nhat Hanh) would say is that sometimes there’s a gentle-faced Bodhisattva of compassion and sometimes there’s a fierce-faced Bodhisattva of compassion. Wisdom is knowing which one is called for, and when. As a cop, if I have a compassionate intention in my heart, if my intention is to really serve and protect and to breathe life into the values that a democracy is built on, and if I have to use some form of force to prevent somebody from hurting somebody else, that is fierce compassion. However, if I’m angry and irritated and I’m sick of doing this stuff and I want to get on to the next call and I respond from that place, that’s violence. So compassion always begins with me, but engaged Buddhism also means recognizing where injustice exists; not making other people the enemy, but compassionately and wisely working for change.

A closely related lesson of spiritual transformation is learning that it is impossible to end violence with violence. Working for peace and justice requires an unwavering personal commitment to nonviolence in our own lives and the environment. Probably the single most important thing that happened to me over time was that even as a cop who carried a gun on a daily basis, I became committed to learning how to be more skillful about not contributing to violence or aggression in any form. Over time, what Thay inspired in me was the strong belief that even something like carrying a gun for a living can be an act of love if one is also armed with fullness in compassion and intention. There were many people on the left who can’t see past the uniform and don’t recognize a potential ally, which was very sad to me.

We all need to be aware of our own judgments, what categories we’re placing people in, and whom we might be missing as a potential ally. The first and most important way to eliminate violence is by skillfully not contributing to any form of aggression ourselves with our actions or speech. In order for each of us to do our part to end violence, we have to recognize its many forms. It doesn’t just show up in obvious ways, such as killing, greed, lust, and war, but in more subtle ways such as righteousness, dogma, criticism, irritation, anger, blame, and how we talk to each other. We often make the mistake of thinking our partners and family members, neighbors or coworkers are responsible for our anger, but mindfulness practice teaches us that anger is first of all, our business and that we are primarily responsible for our anger and all our emotions.

I grew up in a family where the habitual energy of anger was very strong. We tossed grenades at each other. Everybody vented and it was taken for granted that was how things were done. We believed that the hurtful things that were said would be forgotten, and this venting certainly provided some temporary relief. But in the long term by continually venting and expressing anger, we were not getting rid of it. In fact, we were feeding it, watering its seeds, strengthening its roots. In other words, we were rehearsing anger rather than releasing it.

Meditation is a very powerful tool for understanding and paying attention to our assumptions and our judgments, our internal storylines, and the seeds that we water in others and ourselves with our language. Right speech teaches us the art of pausing and refraining by learning to put space between our thoughts and our words. What a novel concept-every thought or feeling I have doesn’t have to be either repressed or expressed. We learn the art of pausing and refraining, and then we learn to apply it to other areas of our lives. For me, right speech is probably the most important piecework that I engage in right now. Only in an open space where we’re not all caught up in our own version of reality can we see and feel and hear who others are. This allows us to be in authentic communication and a respectful relationship with them.

When we hold on to our opinions with aggression, no matter how valid our cause, we are simply adding more aggression, leading to more violence and pain. Right speech does not mean watering the seeds of peace within others and ourselves at the expense of injustice or exploitation. It is important to examine who will suffer if we do not speak up. If we see injustice, we should avoid complicity, on the one hand, or demonizing and making others the enemy, on the other.

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If you are interested in learning more about Cheri Maples views on the seven most important elements of spiritual transformation, you can find them in articles on this web site. We suggest reading them in the order they appear in the table below. Click on the article title in the lefthand column to which you wish to go directly.

After 25 years of police and criminal justice work, Cheri Maples co-founded the Center for Mindfulness & Justice to coordinate her work in criminal justice training, organizational consulting, and mindfulness workshops. Cheri has worked as a police officer and detective in Madison, Wisconsin, Wisconsin Assistant Attorney General, and head of Probation and Parole for the Wisconsin Department of Corrections. In 2008, she was ordained a dharma teacher by Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, her long-time spiritual teacher, prolific author, poet, and peace activist.

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In the course of my chaotic journey to becoming a “mindful street cop,” about which you can read elsewhere on this web site, I slowly learned several lessons that seem essential to truly mindful living. I think of them as the seven lessons from my own spiritual transformation. In this article, I discuss two of these lessons: developing fierce as well as gentle compassion and learning that violence does not resolve violence.

An essential part of any mindfulness practice or spiritual transformation is learning to water the seeds of joy. It is important to take back our lives by participating in things that bring us joy. Thay (Thich Nhat Hanh) continually brings inspiration to those of us who are his students by talking about using mindfulness to water the seeds of joy.

I remember him telling a story about how a visiting friend suggested that it really was a waste of Thay’s time to be gardening and growing lettuce. He should be using his time, the friend said, to write poetry and books for others to read, because what he had to say was very important. Thay’s response was that if he did not grow lettuce, he could not cultivate the energy of mindfulness that produces the poems and books he writes. In other words, enlightenment is not separate from growing lettuce, if that is what brings you joy and wonder and the ability to be present in the moment. We all should think about what activities bring us in touch with the tenderness and mystery of life so that you fall into a space of joy and gratitude when participating in those activities.

These are the doors to a mindfulness practice. When we enter into any activity with our whole heart, we awaken, deepen, and sustain the contemplative experience in the present moment. These are what I call our Zen activities, because we are completely absorbed in the moment when participating in them. These activities develop the same quality that a mindfulness practice does for concentration: a deep sense of enjoyment, gratitude, and the ability to be completely in the present moment.

My first Zen activity was baseball. I started playing baseball when I was 5 or 6 years old and I started rooting for the Milwaukee Braves at about that age. When I couldn’t play baseball, I used my little, tinny transistor radio and took it out in the backyard, behind my trailer, and turned it on, and I picked one player to be. If it was Eddie Matthews, I went to the bench when Eddie Matthews went to the bench. I went to the on-deck circle when he went to the on-deck circle. I went to the plate when he went to plate and I took the field when he took the field and I had a blast. Later, I played competitive, semi-pro fast pitch. I coached my kids’ teams. I coached other teams. I enjoyed being a spectator, and a fan, and now I love playing fantasy baseball-I was a half a point away from beating the 12 other guys in my league. Very disappointing, but a lot of fun!

After all, what better Buddhist activity is there to enjoy than baseball. It is the only sport in which there is no clock and the goal is to come home. If you go to our Center for Mindfulness & Justice web site, I am proud to say that you will find a link to Major League Baseball under “Resources.” Our Zen activities can be sports, gardening, cooking, being in nature, or any activity that resonates for us personally and nurtures a sense of faith, joy, and gratitude. If we are faithful to the practice and the things that bring us joy, our practice will be faithful to us. And when we participate in the things that we enjoy deeply, we’re participating in our own enlightenment.

Now here’s the ironic and paradoxical thing about this-if you wait until you feel like doing the things that bring you joy, given the frantic pace at which most of us are living, you won’t do them. So this is the trick I’ve learned and I urge all of you to do this. I bought my 2010 calendar in July or August and I put in it all the things that I want to do in 2010. Now I can schedule everything else around dates and they are no longer at the mercy of the things that just come up. Doing this requires some proactive time management. Go get your 2010 calendars now and put in it all the things that you want to do. It’s the most important trick that I’ve discovered for making sure that the things that matter the most are not at the mercy of the things that matter the least.

Mindfulness can also be found in the mundane activities of our daily life. It’s the old Zen lesson that enlightenment can be found in how we chop wood and carry water. It can also be found in how we drive, how we do the dishes, and especially in how we engage with others. For example, when you do the dishes, can you feel the water or you are you lost in thought? This is how we miss our life, by not being aware of what we are doing in the present moment.

If we can be truly present to our own lives, then we can find the courage to have our hearts broken open in love, rather than protected. We can enjoy feeling deeply and to continually work on the capacity to understand and love others. We can do this by simply planting the intention to do so in our minds and hearts. Our intention always sets the course.

We can simplify things a great deal by simply asking ourselves if what we are saying or doing in any given moment is making us kinder, more understanding, and more loving. My partner has one of the most wonderful mothers, even though she’s deceased now, that I have ever met in my life. Mary Brady’s spirit is alive every day and in every way through her eight wonderful children. She told them that every time they walked out to the door in the morning to be kind to everybody. We can simplify things a great deal by asking ourselves if what we are saying or doing in any given moment is making us kinder, more understanding, and more loving.

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If you are interested in learning more about Cheri Maples views on the seven most important elements of spiritual transformation, you can find them in articles on this web site. We suggest reading them in the order they appear in the table below. Click on the article title in the left column to which you wish to go directly.

After 25 years of police and criminal justice work, Cheri Maples co-founded the Center for Mindfulness & Justice to coordinate her work in criminal justice training, organizational consulting, and mindfulness workshops. Cheri has worked as a police officer and detective in Madison, Wisconsin, Wisconsin Assistant Attorney General, and head of Probation and Parole for the Wisconsin Department of Corrections. In 2008, she was ordained a dharma teacher by Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, her long-time spiritual teacher, prolific author, poet, and peace activist.
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In the course of my chaotic journey to becoming a “mindful street cop,” about which you can read elsewhere on this web site, I slowly learned several lessons that seem essential to truly mindful living. I think of them as the seven lessons from my own spiritual transformation. In this article, I discuss one of these lessons: develop a sense of openness to whatever arises.

There are multiple spiritual doors; truth is many sided and can be approached from multiple perspectives. The sense of openness I am talking about is not simply being open to the viewpoints of others, but it is also a commitment to exploring the mystery in life’s non-dualities. It is learning to hang out in the gray areas and finding the middle way between fear and faith, between self-acceptance and self-indulgence, between inertia and compulsion, between doing the right thing and righteousness, between opening one’s heart endlessly and accepting the limits of what one can do, between caring without being overwhelmed and being unable to cope because of that caring. Most important of all, openness requires learning to find a good balance between doing and being.

To me, any door that helps people lead an ethical and compassionate life is a legitimate spiritual door and as a student of the teachings, my challenge is to discover the door or doors that work best for me. For me, it is Buddhism because I rely on my direct experiences and it urges me to do that. I have also begun to creatively blend its teachings with my own roots because that works best for me. It doesn’t have to be one or the other. From a continual adult learner perspective, it makes sense to take what I can use and let the rest go.

As a spiritual teacher, my challenge is twofold. First, it is to find and invite people to the spiritual doors to which they can relate by translating the teachings into a language they can understand.

I have a special affiliation with people in the criminal justice system because I have worked in different parts of the system for a long time. I have worked as a police officer, as the head of probation and parole for the Wisconsin Department of Corrections, and in the Wisconsin Department of Justice, so I understand the culture and the language of that system. I can help people in that system find another way to do things and relate to things by using my experience. Likewise, everyone has special skills and experiences upon which they can draw in relating to others.

My second challenge as a spiritual teacher is to encourage people to take responsibility for their own learning, not to turn it over to somebody else. Part of the challenge in helping others is to trust yourself enough to question and investigate what you are being told–to trust your own experiences and find the unique doors that work best for you.
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If you are interested in learning more about Cheri Maples views on the seven most important elements of spiritual transformation, you can find them in articles on this web site. We suggest reading them in the order they appear in the table below. Click on the article title in the lefthand column to which you wish to go directly.

After 25 years of police and criminal justice work, Cheri Maples co-founded the Center for Mindfulness & Justice to coordinate her work in criminal justice training, organizational consulting, and mindfulness workshops. Cheri has worked as a police officer and detective in Madison, Wisconsin, Wisconsin Assistant Attorney General, and head of Probation and Parole for the Wisconsin Department of Corrections. In 2008, she was ordained a dharma teacher by Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, her long-time spiritual teacher, prolific author, poet, and peace activist.

The following article was adapted from a public presentation by Cheri Maples at St. Catherine University, St. Paul, MN, on November 13, 2009.

Mindfulness is a flexible, moment-to-moment, non-judging awareness that enables us to be more present to our experiences. By slowing down and paying attention, we learn to recognize each thought, each thing, each feeling for exactly what it is. We recognize it with tenderness and a non-judging attitude. This puts us at greater ease for life’s ups and downs. It cultivates a sense of balance and equanimity that is extremely important these days when most of us live our lives on fast forward.

To me, mindfulness has always been a fearless proclamation about what’s possible for us as ordinary people. It’s about learning to be aware of what we do, what we are at each moment, recognizing how energy follows though. Then we internalize the understanding that we are all co-creators and we all have the ability and opportunity to participate in our own resurrection, with whatever larger force we take refuge in.

, seven years into a 20-year police career. I was an unlikely candidate, but discovering mindfulness was the most important blessing of my life, because it made possible the wonderful life that I now enjoy.

I want to share aspects of my own spiritual transformation and practice that have been most important to me. But first, I want to set the stage by providing just a little background information.

I grew up in a poor, working class family with two alcoholic parents. That experience produced an unconscious rage, and I fueled that anger by literally fighting for social justice as a young adult. I was a very young, self-righteous, leftist rebel.

When I became a cop, I became the enemy to my peer group. I continued to fuel my childhood anger even more with my perceptions of their misunderstanding and my exposure to the violence, poverty and racism to which I bore witness each night. I was a delightful person to be around. When I think about my own painfully slow transformation from an angry, cynical, alcoholic cop with the armor of a closed heart, I immediately fall into a space of gratitude.

Slowly my mindfulness practice brought about a sense of balance, acceptance, equanimity, and, most importantly, an ability to be more present to others and myself. When I reflect on my experiences as a cop, I see the hyper vigilance that went with the job of being a street cop. In that role, you are always suspicious. You’re taught to do this as part of the job of serving and protecting the public. You are always alert for the unexpected.

Meanwhile my life kept up a frantic pace. I was working full time at night from 11:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. During the day, I was going to law school plus raising two sons. I lived on surges of adrenalin from this frenetic lifestyle. When you live on such surges, temporarily you may feel alert, energetic, humorous, and involved, but what goes up must come down.

At work, I rose through the ranks, from street sergeant to street lieutenant, detective lieutenant and then captain. I would take responsibility for setting up crime scenes, delegating responsibilities and boom, boom, boom. I’d come home from work and stop at the grocery store; the clerk would say paper or plastic and I couldn’t decide. Or I’d come home and somebody would ask me a tough question like, “What should we eat tonight.” I don’t know, you decide. But when somebody made a decision, I didn’t like that decision. Crashing from a biological roller coaster, I’d feel tired, detached, isolated, and apathetic. The bottom part of that cycle, which some of you can relate to, actually mimics the symptoms of depression.

If you mix the cynicism that comes from seeing people at their worst every night with the adversarial training of a lawyer, you’ve got a recipe for burnt toast.

I can tell how long a person has been a cop by how many times they say bullshit in any given day. I call it their cynicism ratio. Hey, what’s the in-service about? I don’t know, some bullshit. Hey, did you hear about that bullshit the brass pulled today? If you work nights like I did and you don’t run into a sober person for several nights in a row, you start to interview people about what happened and you say to yourself , bullshit, before anything even comes out of their mouth.

Now, mix in the ingredients of cutting yourself off from former networks as a result of work hours and the desire to hang out with those who don’t consider you the enemy, and you get a recipe for disaster. You develop what I call the “I Used to Syndrome.” You know the syndrome: I used to camp, I used to bike, I used to garden. You give up all the activities that you deeply enjoyed at one time and you develop a smaller and smaller lens through which you view the world. You start to rely on a variety of dysfunctional coping mechanisms and addictions that offer quick but temporary ways to cut the edge. However, the cost is high; they also close down and sap the energy of your heart.

The form is different from person to person and from job to job, but I see this recipe for disaster repeated throughout many different kinds of paid and unpaid work. The risks I’ve noticed can be particularly acute for crisis responders and caregivers whose job is to help others manage crisis and navigate through trauma, framing the meaning of their own suffering.

For some, trauma is obvious and it occurs as the result of a particularly horrific or frightening encounter. But for others, it’s more insidious because it’s experienced over time, in incremental waves that often go unnoticed. Either way, without good navigation tools, that trauma eventually takes its toll, physiologically, emotionally, and spiritually. Physiologically, it is the biological roller coaster that I described earlier. Emotionally, it often appears as anger, depression, or both. And spiritually, it can manifest as an armor numbing the heart.

During this time, I was literally stumbling across the path of mindfulness that would have provided me with the tools to navigate my way out. When I did discover it, mindfulness gave me the resiliency to bounce back more quickly, because it cultivated my ability to notice and observe my inner world more clearly. For me it continues to provide refuge and freedom from the tornado of negative energy that used to violently toss me around.

What mindfulness actually brought to my own life is protection in the form of an awakened heart and a commitment to set my life up to cultivate equanimity and water the seeds of joy. Mindfulness brought me faith in my ability to make friends with whatever happens. It gave me the confidence and inner integrity that come from leading a more ethical life and being more present to others.

That is my story.

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If you are interested in learning more about Cheri Maples views on the seven most important elements of spiritual transformation, you can find them in articles on this web site. We suggest reading them in the order they appear in the table below. Click on the article title in the lefthand column to which you wish to go directly.

After 25 years of police and criminal justice work, Cheri Maples co-founded the Center for Mindfulness & Justice to coordinate her work in criminal justice training, organizational consulting, and mindfulness workshops. Cheri has worked as a police officer and detective in Madison, Wisconsin, Wisconsin Assistant Attorney General, and head of Probation and Parole for the Wisconsin Department of Corrections. In 2008, she was ordained a dharma teacher by Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, her long-time spiritual teacher, prolific author, poet, and peace activist.
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In the course of my chaotic journey to becoming a “mindful street cop,” about which you can read elsewhere on this web site, I slowly learned several lessons that seem essential to truly mindful living. I think of them as the seven lessons from my own spiritual transformation. In this article, I discuss one of these lessons: suffering can be your strength.

This lesson I sometimes call the “CliffsNotes version” for the Four Noble Truths, which is one of the most fundamental teachings of Buddhism. Here is the essence of the CliffsNotes version: “The crap in your life is the compost of your enlightenment.”A very famous Tibetan teacher said that hell is not punishment, it is training. This simply means that we can work effectively with the things that drive us crazy. They will free us. There is nothing redemptive or healing about the suffering itself. Freedom comes from non-reliance on the things that make us suffer.

Transformation is not found in the pain but in our relationship to it and the openness that we are able to cultivate in response. Haven’t we all experienced pain in our lives that in some way has been a catalyst for softening our hearts? When we look back, we can we see what an incredible gift it has been. That is our practice; being able to identify our suffering and be with it, take good care of it, look deeply at it, and learn other ways to interpret it.

When we learn how to understand and frame our own suffering, we develop compassion for others and ourselves. This allows us to accept our own fractured being and understand the holiness of our human perfections. Then we are able to help others frame the meaning of their own suffering. Over and over, life just keeps coming at us. It is what it is. We lose people that we love to illness, divorce, death, or just the ending of relationships. We have chronic illnesses and our loved ones are addicts or they live with a debilitating physical or mental illness.

All these things produce suffering, but if we begin to automatically assume we did something wrong to cause the negative events, what we do is to add a second and unnecessary layer of suffering over the existing suffering. We add suffering to suffering and that second level is where a mindfulness practice is very important, because it allows us to pause, to note it, and then go on. Eventually we learn to stop doing it.

When we add the second layer of suffering to existing suffering, we also sacrifice the present moment to the past. For example, maybe you have a child who is very challenging as a teenager or is an addict or is in prison or has a mental illness and you spend your time reliving the past and about whether it’s your fault, whether you were a good parent or a bad parent. But the opportunity to transform the relationship is not in the past, it’s in the present moment. You can’t go back and change the past, but how you relate to your child in this moment accumulates and it plants the seeds of transformation for the future.

I find that when I focus my energy on what did or did not happen in the past, my fears and my projections collapse the possibilities that I have to transform the relationship. I find myself closing down to protect my heart. Mindfulness practice enables us to let go of this kind of ruminating and perseverating by teaching us not to over identify with our thinking. The beginning of freedom is the realization that we are not our thoughts. My favorite bumper sticker is the one that says, “Don’t believe everything you think.”

No matter how much we want it to be otherwise, the truth is, we are not in control of the unfolding of our experiences. Most of us would prefer something other than what’s been handed to us. What I’ve noticed is that if we have pig shit, we want cow shit, and if we get cow shit, we want chicken shit. What’s important is how we relate to whatever simply is.

The great Indian sage, Krishnamurti, who was known for his unwillingness to provide specific guidance, surprised his students one day by asking them, “Do you want to know my secret?” Everybody’s eyes lit up. Everybody was at attention. Finally, this guy is going to tell us something. He’s going to tell us his secret to enlightenment. And he looked out at this audience and he said, “I don’t mind what happens.” In other words, every moment is simply an opportunity to be with, and learn from, whatever comes up, in whatever form it shows up, without judgment, without reactivity.

The unique beauty and kindness in a mindfulness practice is just a side benefit. Mindfulness doesn’t demand that you experience anything other than what you experience. The spirit is one of integration, of using the daily circumstances of our life to wake us up so we can fully experience the nature of life, taste its holiness, its birthlessness, and its deathless nature. We eventually learn about relaxing with hopelessness, with grief, and with death, and not resisting the fact that things end. Everything is changing all the time. When we can surrender to what simply is, our life will become a very rich tapestry, because we will understand that whatever occurs in our life, no matter how wonderful or how painful, it is part of our path and all things are workable.

Meditation is great for cultivating the ability to not over identify with our thoughts, because it helps us recognize that a thought, an opinion, or a judgment is simply what it is, and to not get caught in it. It enables us to create a gap that allows us to refrain from habitual behavior. That gap is where freedom begins. With practice, we get a glimpse of the sense of vastness that comes with this gap; first, just for a second or two, and then for a minute, and then for longer and longer periods of time as we learn more about the nature of impermanence. We develop the ability to watch our thoughts come and go like clouds in the vast blue sky. We learn how to ride the waves of our lives with the understanding that we are the ocean as well as the waves. As our practice develops, we can begin to notice all of the little ways that we perpetuate violence on ourselves and begin to let go, not only of our stories about why we are not good enough, but our notions about gaining or losing as a result of what did or did not happen to us.

Let’s take the Buddha, for example. The Buddha was the transmitter of an incredible path of insight. His understanding and compassion have been a source of inspiration for millions of people. However, the Buddha also left his wife and child behind to pursue a spiritual path, so you could consider him the most famous deadbeat dad in history. But if you need the Buddha to be perfect, you’re caught in the shadow side of devotion. If we cannot accept the Buddha’s imperfections or the imperfections of any teacher, we cannot accept our own imperfections and then we get caught in our notions about the truth.

Eventually we learn to simply let go, not from a place of resignation, but from a profound understanding of the holiness of imperfection and the nature of our humanity. This kind of letting go is accompanied by a desire and a willingness to tear down the ego that we have spent more than half of our lives trying to build up. We learn a profound appreciation for being ordinary rather than a need to be special or to compete with others.

Mindfulness is not a self-improvement project. If you approach it with that kind of project mentality, it will be an impediment to your practice. Rather than developing the ability to be present with whatever is, you will spend your time wishing it was different and it will turn into one more thing in which you are not good enough. Life is life. It is challenging and joyful, sometimes sweet, sometimes bitter, but always a little messy. Trying to tie up all of the loose ends and finally getting it together is futile.

In contrast to a self-improvement project, a mindfulness practice gives us the ability to hold it all and not get so caught up in what we see and feel in any given moment. We also begin to learn how to selectively water the seeds of thoughts and behaviors in ourselves that we want to grow. Thus, we grow stronger within ourselves and with others. With the practice of mindfulness, we begin to realize on a very deep level that we will never change the world unless we really begin to believe in our own preciousness. Then we begin to see and believe in the preciousness of others, which plants the seeds of compassion in others and toward ourselves.

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If you are interested in learning more about Cheri Maples views on the seven most important elements of spiritual transformation, you can find them in articles on this web site. We suggest reading them in the order they appear in the table below. Click on the article title in the lefthand column to which you wish to go directly.