Ordinary Wonder – Zen Life & Practice by Charlotte Joko Beck is a book that I read at the beginning of my sobriety journey that has had a profound impact on both how I approach my meditation practice and my everyday life. Beck’s writing style is incredibly approachable. Right out of the gate she dismisses any notion that meditation is a walk in the park or some shortcut to enlightenment. At times her approach can come across as affrontive. If you are able to accept her perspective, you’ll find there’s real honesty in her message. And you may come to truly appreciate what it is she’s trying to communicate. I sure did.
We have a life that’s happening all the time… The secret to experiencing the whole life is just to be whatever we are experiencing. Say we manage for a few minutes to feel whatever we feel as opposed to running from it, thinking about it, taking a pill, getting drunk, or whatever we do so we don’t have to feel it. If we can truly rest with it… we can begin to transform. – Charlotte Joko Beck
Since I began my sobriety journey and started to recast my relationship with pot and alcohol, I had no idea, no feeling, of how numb I had become. I had been through the death of my mother-in-law, my father (at the height of Covid) – both from cancer. Like you, I dealt with Covid 19. There was also a crazy hostile work environment going on at the same time. Yet, through it all, I was numb. If I felt anything, it was anger, frustration, exhaustion.
Today, as I type this, I am at Meditation Day: 115. And while this blog entry isn’t concerning all of the various affirming changes I’ve experienced (you can visit here to learn about those) during this short meditation window, one very profound change is how I now experience feeling emotions. The five amazing lessons I learned from Ordinary Wonder help me appreciate so many things. I can now feel emotions, truly experience them, and identify, embrace, and release them after they’ve served their purpose.
1. There is only snow falling
You’ll notice a haiku in the sidebar of this website. It reads:
There is neither heaven nor earth,
only snow falling incessantly.
This haiku by Kajiwara Hashin, is deceiving in its simplicity. What Beck suggests is by replacing the second line with whatever is right in front of you, at this very moment, is all there is. For me, it might read: There is neither heaven nor earth, only this blog I’m typing. Or more appropriately, only this weed I shouldn’t smoke. For you it maybe something different.
The concept that there is only now, this moment, is foreign to many of us. I know it was for me. As a young man, old age and death seemed an eternity away. Yet, here I am, middle-aged, having drank and smoked some of my best years away. While I could make myself miserable over this, there is only snow falling. The past is gone. The future exists in our imaginations only. This is it. Right now. This is where change and transformation happen, amidst the falling snow.
2. Ordinary Wonder and The Core Belief
Frankly, I’m still trying to wrap my head around the core belief, not the concept, but understanding and dealing with my own. The core belief is a central tenet of Ordinary Wonder. Charlotte Joko Beck does an excellent job of weaving it into her lessons throughout.
Essentially, Beck posits that the core belief forms in us as young children. The core belief initially serves the purpose of shielding us, protecting us, from what you perceive as that which is ‘out there’, separate from ‘us’, from ‘I’. It is never something true. It is always negative, and is a product of our separate self, our ego. As adults, it runs in the background as part of our operating system. It places us on autopilot.
Charlotte Joko Beck cites “you can’t make me do anything” as one of the most hardcore of core beliefs. I know this certainly rings true for me. Why? Because I’ve resisted so much in my life (a prime symptom of this particular belief). Beck advises that you can begin to gain awareness of these automatic strategies by noticing situations when you get everything you want, but something still doesn’t feel right. Whenever you’re upset about something, your core belief is there.
The core belief is a self centered and myopic life view, and in my opinion there are few things as self centered, myopic, and on autopilot as addiction and use disorder. Under the control of your core belief, you can’t see or experience the world as it is. But it’s not the existence of the belief that’s the issue. It’s that you believe in its existence, despite that fact that consciously, you don’t even realize it’s there, lurking just below the surface.
Bringing meditation practice to the exploration of my core belief has helped me overcome my resistance to being of service to others. Really looking at and experiencing those things that upset me has exposed my core belief and opened up my self awareness. If I’m asked or told to do something (by my wife, boss, whoever), I take myself out of it and get ‘er done.
3. Meditation is Work
Now before you let this heading scare you away from meditation, let me qualify that statement. Meditation is where the work happens. The work happens in the space between the way you think you should be and who you truly are. It’s in understanding that while you may long for pleasurable things like success, the easy life, material excess, life doesn’t care about your pleasures. Yet you want life to please you at every opportunity. This is the work of your core belief.
The work, the struggle, is the point of meditation. Without struggle, there is no learning, no growth. When you sit, you confront those things about yourself that have remained in the shadows, or been suppressed by vice, all your life. While you may never win the war within, as you practice, you will find moments of peace and clarity. You’ll know you’ve arrived when you can find yourself in the middle of a mess, experience it, but not become ensnared by it.
Ordinary Wonder teaches us that meditation “practice takes courage because we don’t want to move off our usual position. It takes courage to stop doing things the way you’ve always done them, and make a choice to do something different.” Understandably, this cannot be accomplished without putting in the work.
4. Noticing
How often do you stop and notice the neverending parade of thoughts stomping through your mind? Until I began practicing, I was a victim of ‘monkey mind’. In other words, my brain jumped from thought to though like a monkey swinging from branch to branch. Sure, I might stick with one for a little while if it was urgent or important, but otherwise it was just a stream of consciousness. Thoughts, emotions, memories, regrets, hopes, and dreams flowed on through in no particular order.
Our practice is to be aware of what’s going on as soon as we can… with practice the caughtness doesn’t stay as long. We notice we’re caught, in the noticing, the constriction loosens.
-Charlotte Joko Beck, Ordinary Wonder
If there is a thought ‘conductor’ or ‘traffic cop’, it’s the core belief. The core belief is sitting at the switchboard, throwing all kinds of stuff at you. Its favorite thing to serve up is a hot juicy emotion so it can sit back and be entertained by your dramatic emotional response.
When you take time to notice the flow, you can begin the process of labeling. This thought is the past, this one is regret, this new thought is worry, this one is anger, etc. Once you can label them, you can get separation from them. Are you angry or are you experiencing anger? From there you can separate the feeling from the object itself (your boss, your spouse, the guy that cut you off). Noticing gives you space and in that space you can decide how you should react rather than reacting on autopilot (and potentially making matters worse).
5. 99.4% of Our Problems
Yourself is the only person you get to spend every waking moment of your life with. But what if there isn’t a self?
99.4% of our problems come from a concern for the self. And there isn’t any self.
– Wei Wu Wei
Charlotte Joko Beck makes the assertion that there can’t be a separate self because everything in the universe is connected. We’re all part of a giant energy field. Quantum mechanics has essentially confirmed this theory. The challenge here is that we exist on the material plane as little packages of you, me, that homeless guy outside of Safeway, your mom’s cat…
Society layers on additional expectations that further drive home this idea of separateness. We live in separate boxes comprised themselves of smaller boxes (rooms). You are told that you are special when your box is bigger than someone else’s. Your separate self feels compelled to stand apart and pursue individual, and often, self serving goals. You buy more and more stuff, but you are never satiated. Never satisfied.
You do this because it’s what you are told you are supposed to do from the moment you can hold a pacifier. When you are challenged, your core belief flares up and you feel slighted, angry, and put off.
Meditation practice can help you move past a self serving life that’s falsely driven to one that is compassionate and meaningful. Now that I’ve pulled the ‘me’ out of my daily interactions, I find I am less anxious, more curious about others, more generous with my money and time, more patient, and less driven by my core belief. It’s still there, but I’ve stopped feeding it.
Ordinary Wonder
When you arrive at a place of ordinary wonder, you drop the illusions that have been running your life. You accept that you can’t fix the things outside of your mind without first fixing your mind. You let go of your expectations of what will happen and understand that you are constantly arriving at this very moment – the ever present now. To get this this place requires work and patience, potentially a lifetime of both. But with practice, the serpentine grip of your core belief and the shroud of illusion you’ve wrapped yourself in gives way to a new life centered perspective (as opposed to a self centered one). When this happens you become a beneficial presence in the world. You become liberated.
