Happy Friday!
I’m excited to share the first episode of The Balcony View Podcast, available on Spotify, Apple, Pocketcasts, TuneIn, Stitcher and more. For all you audio readers out there, you’ll be happy to hear that all of TBV's audio articles will be shared directly to the podcast feed too. And for those of you who enjoy reading interviews the old-fashioned way, you’ll find a full transcript of the episode below.
If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and share the love.
Have a great weekend :)
Katie x
In this episode, I talk with Mark Ovland about the Ways of Looking approach, a framework for meditation. What if your deepest happiness and freedom had less to do with what happens and more to do with how you're relating to what happens? Across this conversation, we explore the Ways of Looking framework as developed by the late meditation master Rob Burbea and discuss the impact that different lenses can have on our lives. We investigate the idea that the way we relate to the world affects our perception of it - for instance, bringing more ease, freedom, and joy into our experience - and, thus, how this approach can create more flexibility, expansion and empathy in our lives. In this discussion, we focus more on the everyday application of the approach than on the formal meditative training behind it all.
Mark Ovland began practising meditation in 2008 and is currently training to teach within the Buddhist Insight Meditation tradition. He has lived and worked in various monasteries and retreat centres around India and the UK and has spent around two years on intensive silent retreats himself. Mark helped to pioneer mindfulness courses within the UK prison system and was one of the co-founders of Freely Given Retreats, a charity that runs weeklong silent meditation retreats on a donation basis. In 2013 he and some friends set up DANCE (the Dharma Action Network for Climate Engagement), and in recent years, he has been particularly engaged with environmental and social justice issues. Mark was a close student of the late meditation master Rob Burbea.
This was a fascinating conversation, and I’m excited to share both the Ways of Looking approach and also Mark Ovland, who has an amazing way of breaking down complex meditation concepts into relatable and digestible chunks.
Episode 1: Ways of Looking with Mark Ovland
Key
KC – Katie Churchman
MO – Mark Ovland
KC – Mark, welcome to The Balcony View podcast. I am delighted to have you on the show today. Welcome.
MO – Thank you, Katie. Delighted to be here.
KC – And I know today we’re covering a big topic, meditation, and specifically the Ways of Looking approach, and I wonder if we could start by talking about some of the ways meditation has impacted your life, perhaps more in the sort of everyday ways, the practical things that happen off the cushion you could say.
MO – Well, I guess there are layers to that; there are different levels. If you were to Google the benefits of meditation, then yeah, all of that stuff, well, it’s quite documented. I’ll do well to pick out a couple of examples. You know, you always hear meditation helps with stress and less stress. For me, I mean, a different way or another way of putting that would be when there’s some kind of collectiveness in the being, when there’s, doing meditation, there’s a bit of stillness, generally, in one’s life. The mind tends to create less problems. It’s like problems aren’t inherently real, the mind creates problems as part of whatever is in front of us, and I find happily meditated that the mind just does that less. So there’s less stress built up, engaging with whatever situation and adjusting the way of looking at it, how can I see this in a way that’s productive, how can I learn from this, whatever it is, without making it a problem. So that’s actually quite big, leads to a more peaceful life, and more presence, mindfulness, attention, it’s amazing that the world appears differently when we, speaking for myself when I’m present with it when I’m not off thinking about other stuff, I’m actually with this person in front of me, I’m looking into their eyes, have a sense of yes, here, me, you, there’s something so alive in that. So these sorts of things are classic benefits of meditation. I think on another level, and this is really kind of where the Ways of Looking approach comes in (that my teacher Rob brought across), what meditation’s really shown me is that whatever’s in my heart and mind actually changes the experience in front of me. And so that’s radical, that’s really huge the ramifications of that, but even on the everyday level, you know, I know in my bones that if I approach this moment with kindness, with generosity, with love, then my very experience of the world is better, is different than if I were to approach it through frustrated. When I look through the eyes of kindness when that’s how I’m relating to the world, I have a better experience of life and a better experience of myself, of other people, and now I just know so deeply in my being, and that’s what meditation has really shown me, it’s like you’re working on inside, it’s kind of knowing where the deepest happiness comes from, that’s at the bottom of it. Knowing that it doesn’t come from the stuff that I used to think that it comes from and society tells me it comes from, it’s like there’s something so deeply wound up in our hearts and the qualities that we’re cultivating in our hearts and in our minds, that is where we find happiness, that’s where we find peace, love, this and these qualities, and yeah, I think that for me is what I see in my everyday life.
KC – And to use your word, it does feel radical when you say it like that because it feels like we have more agency in the way we experience our lives. I think so often we sort of expect to get what we get, and then that’s how we feel, that’s how we show up that day, but the Ways of Looking approach, it gave me a sense that we can choose more actually which way we look for each day, not just on the cushion when we’re meditating the inner lives, and I wonder if you can introduce this approach to who might be new to it? Certainly, I was a couple of months ago, and it’s been radical for me.
MO – Sure, thanks, Katie. Well, it’s exactly that; we’re not. We can find that we’re not at the mercy of the world, of the external conditions around us. You know, we, in our culture, we’re brought up to feel like the stuff that happens in life is what makes us whatever it is, happy, sad, depressed, joyful blah blah blah, all our inner life and our emotions we feel are caused but the stuff around us, external things, and what the Ways of Looking approach shows us is actually all of those emotions, the happiness, the sadness, all of that, comes more from how we’re relating to our experience than the experience itself. So actually, whatever it is could be happening in front of me, but what’s in my heart as I relate to that, I relate to it with openness, with kindness, with generosity, whether I’m kind of contracted in my heart and mind and I look through suspicious eyes etc etc, that actually changes the experience and it gives me a different felt sense, and it can be the difference between, to put it crudely, happiness and sadness. The Ways of Looking approach kind of acknowledges this and works on cultivating particular Ways of Looking, particular ways of relating to our experience that create less suffering, less problem, less contraction, more beauty, joy, love, ease, kindness, all of that. So we see that actually, yeah, we do have a big, big say in how the world appears to us. We’re not at the mercy of external conditions.
KC – What I love about this is we know it on one level. I think there are so many psychology studies where that show that if you’re researching a new car, you start to see that car everywhere in the street, and suddenly your reality is changed because of what you’re looking for. Yet we know this in certain ways, and yet we don’t seem to apply it to perhaps the things that matter most and maybe we bring a challenges lens to something that doesn’t actually have to be challenging at all, and yet suddenly we’re seeing perhaps a Christmas with the in-laws or a birthday party with a friend that maybe you’re not so close with anymore as a challenge as opposed to something that could bring so much joy and reconnection.
MO – Absolutely. And you know, there’s a lot about reframing here. I mean, this works on all sorts of levels and gets very, very profound, even at a reframing level. The way I think about this gathering with the in-laws or whatever it is, it’s like, can I just myself reframe that as whatever it might be, whether it’s simply in the service of compassion, like knowing this is something they would like, I’m putting myself in a position of service, of giving, that that’s, I’m in a very healthy way making it about that rather than me and how I’m going to feel, I just kind of swap it around. And that does something in the heart, it does something in the mind, and it makes the experience unfold differently. If I turn up to a gathering with a kind of I don’t want to be here mindset, then what happens in that gathering probably isn’t going to be that great. But if I go along, if I manage to frame it in a way where actually my heart’s a bit more open, I’m actually much more likely to have a nice time anyway as it unfolds in a different way.
KC – And I wonder then how the brain’s negative bias impacts then the types of lenses that show up for us then on default because typically we’re more negative than positive because historically negative experiences pose more chance of danger, obviously that mechanism’s not so useful to us anymore, but it’s still there, and do you seem to find that the lenses that show up on default for us when we’re not paying attention are more negative?
MO – Oh, absolutely. That negativity bias, well, I guess, most people in my experience, for instance, have this voice of the inner critic, this saying, you know, it can be pretty constant for people, berating us, we’re not doing enough, it should be this way, it should be that way. I mean, really, you could say that’s a way of looking, that’s a particular way of relating to our experience; that is my default that feels like it’s real. Like this is what’s going on, this is me, and this is my voice, and I’m really hopeless, and we’re so entrenched that we fail to see that it’s a way of looking. It actually just isn’t very helpful. And it’s so entrenched, and so it does take a lot of practice to cultivate the Ways of Looking that are more positive, that open up the experience a different way to treat ourselves, for instance, with self-compassion rather than with criticism. So yeah, I mean, a fact is it’s a lot of work, but if we think, you know, what do we want to spend time on in our lives? When we’re on our deathbed, hopefully, a long time in the future, and we’re conscious enough to be reflecting on our past, what is it that would have led to a life well-lived? What was it doing? Spending time on? And for me, there’s something about cultivating these beautiful qualities of heart and mind, creating beautiful perceptions, experiencing the world, it’s just priceless. It’s like yeah, that is something worth practicing, worth spending time on.
KC – It really makes me think of Viktor Frankl’s work around between stimulus and response. ‘There is a space, and in that space, there’s our power to choose our response and in our response lies our freedom and our growth.’ And I’ve sat with that for a long time, but I think this framework, this Ways of Looking framework has helped me actualize that a bit more because it gives you, in many ways, a tool, a toolkit because obviously, there are countless lenses, you can look through, to then start to apply this to your life, particularly when challenges come along. That’s what I’ve found, when things are particularly challenging, what lens am I defaulting to and actually, what lens is going to serve me better?
MO – Great, yeah. Exactly, it can flesh out Viktor Frankl’s work in a particular way, then that would be this paradigm, and it’s exactly that. And the Buddha, a lot of people would look at his teachings through a kind of medical model, it’s like ok, here are some problems, here’s suffering, what can I do to alleviate it? Because Buddhism is just, the Buddha said all I teach is suffering and the end of suffering. It’s like what to do with this, what he called dukkha in our lives, this disease, this dissatisfaction on whatever level, so absolutely, that’s skilful. It’s like, ok, here’s some uncomfortableness I’m feeling. What can I adapt to my way of looking? How can I relate to this experience differently that will allow some dissipation of that contraction, that difficulty? And that, it’s so empowering, you know, when we see this over and over and over again, that, oh wow, my way of looking, my way of relating really does affect my experience, and there’s a confidence that comes in there, and maybe we can learn eventually, if we practice, to face anything, whatever comes up in my life, inner, outer, emotional, my experience, I know I have the resources, the capacity to hold that in a particular way, to turn it, to see it in a certain way that will liberate any kind of suffering.
KC – And what I find with this practice, and I’m very new to it, and I’m starting to realize as well it’s quite vast in terms of where you can go with this, but I’ve noticed even just in terms of applying it to certain conversations so, my husband and I have brought different lenses, say, to different conversations, we’ve been having, particularly conversations that we’re well versed in, and it just opens up a whole different dimension, it expands your reality in some ways and is that your experience from this? Suddenly your world feels much bigger when you apply a different lens to the same old situation.
MO – Absolutely, I mean, I think most of us, probably, certainly in kind of inverted commas “modern Western” cultures, not thinking about indigenous people, but us moderns, I think we’re stuck in this monodimensional way of looking, way of relating, like we just see what we see and we think that’s the truth, that’s the only way that things are, and yes with my partner, with my spouse, with my child, whatever it is, this is the way they are, and we kind of think we know that and we box things in, people, situations, what Ways of Looking has done, exactly as you’re pointing too, it just explodes that whole thing open into like a million fragments, it’s like wow, there are infinite dimensions here. Whichever way of looking I take will open up a different way of experiencing this world, and there are infinite Ways of Looking. And that just, for me, just makes the whole exploration of life and relationships, relating with others, so rich, so fertile, it just, uh, delicious!
KC – That’s so exciting, isn’t it? Because I think so often we end up focusing on the big moments in life, maybe it’s a big holiday or a wedding or an event, and then we start to dismiss the everyday as sort of humdrum and ordinary, and this seems to add a whole different way of living life because I think to use Annie Dillard’s quote; “how we live our days is how we live our lives”, and I think many of us are sleepwalking through a big chunk of life because we’re waiting for those exceptional moments, we’re missing the sort of everyday ordinary moments.
MO – Of course, that’s what we’re taught. Where happiness comes from is these incredible experiences, and that’s why, you know, we might fly off to the other side of the world, kind of ignoring the devastating effects of climate change because there’s something in I need to be happy and this is how I get happiness, there can be kind of a desperate search for that and what the Buddha was saying it’s like, there can be some happiness in that, for sure, but it won’t be long lasting and it won’t be that great, you know, compared to what’s possible through this cultivation of different qualities in the heart, what this does in my experience, I mean it’s on a whole other level. The experience of contentment, of joy, of peace, of love that I’ve experienced through my meditation is, it’s like nothing you find in experiences, just from experiences. It’s something very different.
KC – Yeah, experiences and possessions feel to be such a focus in some ways in our modern lives, and yet what you find so often is people who have the modern success equation sorted out in terms of money, possessions, and experiences don’t always seem that happy! And that says something, doesn’t it, that it’s not always about the outward, and I guess this really works with that inner landscape because you could be in the most amazing location on the planet and be having a miserable time if you’re not looking through the right lens, and you could also be in, perhaps, a really miserable place and be having a wonderful time if you’re bringing a different lens. Is that how you’ve sort of experienced it yourself in your practice?
MO – It really is. It struck me many years ago, 10, 12 years ago, I was living out, working at a small Buddhist retreat centre, and there’s a view down over the river that, for me, is just spellbinding. It’s just one of my favourite views in the world, and I was standing out there one day with one of the people on the retreat just commenting on how gorgeous this was, and she said I just see grey, I just see grey, and there was a complete deadness in her view, in what she was seeing, and we were talking about it afterwards and her, what was going on for her in her life yes, she was not in a great place, there was depression there in the mix, and it just really struck me that time, it was like wow, the world really is a different place depending on how we’re seeing it. But coming back to your point about autonomy and agency, it’s like, yes, it’s gonna take some practice; we can’t just snap out of it without practicing this stuff, but we can reach that place where it could be relatively quick to change between a way of looking that’s just really not helpful to one that really is, and that’s amazing, that’s really amazing.
KC – It feels like almost putting on different glasses like you’re in the opticians, and they try on different lenses to see sort of which one’s right, and this feels like this approach where you can literally take off some glasses if they’re not working and put on some others that may brighten the world. I think a lot about my husband’s grandparents, so my grandparents-in-law, you could say. They are so positive but in such small and wonderful ways, so Ron, my husband’s grandad, will talk about his walk, and he’s talked about this walk so many times – it’s gorgeous, and I go around the block, and then I get a sausage roll – and it’s a sausage roll from Greggs, it’s not a fancy sausage roll, but the way he talks about this sausage roll, and I’m a vegetarian, but he pretty much sells this sausage roll to me, you know it’s just this absolute joy in everyday stuff, and I think that’s what’s kept them so alive and happy and vital, and I try and take on their lens when I’m with them because it’s just such a gorgeous way of living.
MO – Beautiful. And a lovely example of how, without even coming into contact with these teachings, you can kind of see, yeah, the Ways of Looking being adopted, maybe unconsciously, by habit, but it’s obviously a way of looking that works for him, that presents, and that’s great, we can be inspired by others, and we can see that. And I think there’s a real face to that, you know, the people that we hang out with and the kind of maybe default Ways of Looking that they use, it’s like, oh, this person really sees a different world than I do and they seem really happy and peaceful, and it does, kind of by osmosis I think we can pick up other Ways of Looking. And I feel at this point, I don’t know how deep we want to go with this, but I feel like I need to add into the mix - the picture of lenses in the opticians is brilliant, and I use that a lot actually when I’ve taught in the past to really bring this idea across, you know, different coloured lenses, you put on your pink sunglasses and the world appears differently, in green or blue etc, but there’s something, I mean all analogies will be limited eventually, and there’s something that I feel does need to be pointed out which is if we only keep at that level if we’re putting on different sunglasses, it can feel like there is an objective reality out there and we’re kind of choosing to see it differently in a way that’ll make us feel better. Which, in itself, can be useful, isn’t that radical, and criticism might come in that actually that could be dismissive of the harm of the difficulties that exist because we’re just putting on our rose-tinted glasses and saying, oh, everything’s fine, and actually it’s not in objective reality. And I think, you know, at the basis of Buddhism and this Ways of Looking approach is the idea that we can find out through our own meditation practice the fact, you could say, that there is no objective reality, it’s not like there’s a world there that we’re choosing to look at differently. It’s that, actually, the world is created by what we perceive; our perception of the world is created through the way of looking. It’s like the two are inseparable. So using this way of looking creates a certain reality that we perceive. And someone else creates a different reality that they perceive, but there’s no kind of inverted commas “real” reality in the middle of that.
KC – I love that you’ve landed that point because, in some ways, now the glasses analogy feels a bit gimmicky, and it doesn’t allow the practice to go as deep as it really can. And it reminds me of how I used to be an actress, and that got me really interested in storytelling in lots of different ways. And I used to sort of, and I still hold this idea that we often wait for our lives to happen in order to tell the story, but actually, the stories we tell ourselves now create our lives. And I feel like this pretty much sits with that, it’s the which is coming first, and I think so often we have this sense of, well, that is reality, but there’s also like the whole, it’s the world created within us too, are we in co-creation with the universe in this approach? And that’s a very exciting dance to step into.
MO – Absolutely. I won’t read it out, but I’m looking in my van at the last two paragraphs of my Buddhist teacher’s book around all of these themes. I’ve got them framed just on my wall, they touch me so deeply, and they speak to exactly this point in how, you know, what’s in our heart and mind really shapes the reality and the reality of our perception of the world and vice versa, our perception of the world shapes our way of looking, the two are in this complete dance, constantly. Us, the universe, all kind of shaping each other moment by moment, and there’s so much mailability in that, so much choice, and it’s astounding, the deeper you go into this, like wow. The reality that I perceive, there’s almost no limit to what’s possible. We’ve kind of exploded into very, very different ways of perceiving life in ourselves, and yeah, I can get kind of lost in the revery of it, and I just want to kind of bow, I just want to put my hands and bowing to the universe just at this incredible mystery.
KC – Yeah. I think what I love about this approach is it holds that relationship with life, the universe- whatever we wanna call it. I come from a coaching background now. I work a lot with teams and individuals, and coaching primarily holds that we have an internal locus of control; we can happen to the world as opposed to the world happening to us. And I love that approach because it really does help the world to find agency. And it also sometimes dismisses the fact that life has its own plans. You might be thinking about a certain path, but then life will bring something else along. And I think this approach allows that co-creation together, it’s not just you and it’s not just the universe, this wonderful world of relationship happening, and I think we’re often not acknowledging that and not leaning into that. And this helps us to look towards or turn towards the relationship there.
MO – Absolutely. Very beautifully put, and it is all in the relationship, and the Buddha kept pointing back, everything, everything is in the relationship, we could say, yeah, in-between us and the universe. It is really wonderful, and you can pick up, even this where we’re talking, and this is kind of where it starts to spin the mind out a bit, but even the Ways of Looking approach is (in inverted commas) “just” a way of looking. It’s not real, either. Through these teachings, we’ll see that no way of looking is ultimately true. It’s like, which is helpful in this moment, and coming back to some of the stuff that you’re saying there, we could choose a way of looking that sees us as having complete autonomy and agency, we could choose a way of looking that feels like maybe for those more spiritually minded or religious among us that everything, every moment is, let’s say, God’s grace is given to us and things unfold, you know, outside of our control. Just to kind of take two dreams, and both of those are completely valid ways of looking and will unfold our experience in different ways, and then there are all sorts of possibilities between those two. So it’s not to kind of land on one or the other and say ok, this is how I’m going to relate to the world. It’s having the flexibility to say ok, well, what happens at this moment, this day and this week if I relate to my life through this lens or through this lens? Incredible exploration, really fascinating.
KC – Yeah, that holds both. It’s not an internal locus of control, it’s not an external locus of control, it’s very much both, and I wonder about this approach in terms of, so it feels like more and more we’re getting divisive as a society, it seems like conversations go to a very binary space and this almost allows maybe a leaning in in a way that often isn’t possible right now. Do you feel like this could potentially be a practice that would help us have better conversations when there’s conflict as well?
MO – Oh, absolutely. If only our leaders and politicians, just for a start, were to grasp this idea that, you know, the people that they’re up against, for instance, are looking at the world through certain eyes, and that’s giving them a certain sense of reality. And they’re looking at it this way, they’re looking at it that way, there can just be far more space and compassion and understanding, it’s just like ah, ok, we’re actually just perceiving different worlds and maybe we’re all acting in the best way we think is possible, with our condition, and rather than fighting up against each other and thinking there is one right way to see the world and this is what’s happening, it can just be, yeah, far more collaborative. I think, in fact, her name was Donella Meadows, I don’t know much about her, but I think she was kind of a systems change or a systems thinker. I can’t remember the term she uses, I’ll have to search for her, but I remember she was mentioned a lot when I was doing some stuff with Extinction Rebellion and she kind of points out the leverage points where we can change, make a big change in a system from kind of very small superficial changes and policies and things down to what she saw as the most important and effective way of being able to create change which is exactly this, it’s having people understand and know, she didn’t use the term way of looking but something similar, no way of looking is ultimately true. But if we can each understand that, then oh wow, we can open up to other people’s perspectives, and that’s just a very different kind of relation in politics, in thinking there’s one way, and I’ve got to prove to this other way that my way is that way.
KC – It seems to create an alignment at a deeper human level, perhaps. Maybe it goes deeper than that. Maybe it connects us to the planet, perhaps in ways that we’re just not really looking at right now. But I noticed that, so I work primarily as a Systems Coach, and something that we hold is that all voices are a voice of the system, and that really is the idea that everyone’s got a piece of the jigsaw puzzle, but we’re not all holding the whole thing. This approach seems to hold that too. Not one lens isn’t the reality. It’s one sort of part of that massive jigsaw puzzle that makes up this wonderful, chaotic, beautiful life. I think that’s way more useful as both an approach for living and also for leading too.
MO – Absolutely, it reminds me of this GIF that I was sent on my phone. It’s, I think it’s Gene, no, not Gene Hammond, the guy that plays Willy Wonka in the Charlie Chocolate Factory film, and it just says, he’s kind of leaning in with a quizzical look, and it says ‘ah so your perspective is the only correct perspective in the world, fascinating!’.
KC – That’s brilliant. It’s sad to say, but that is how so many of us are living our lives, or certain ideas and opinions that we hold, and that’s closing us down, that’s closing us down, and we’re not able to let so much in from those spaces.
MO – Well, it’s so understandable. Why wouldn’t we think that the way we’re looking at the world is how it is and that it’s true? And so many of us will have strong opinions about the world and what’s happening, and we just assume, well, if someone else isn’t seeing this, then they’re wrong, and I need to educate them. You know, it’s quite counterintuitive to think that this other person is actually perceiving a different world to us because of their way of looking, which is also true. It creates a very different meeting space to actually collaborate when we can appreciate that.
KC – So would you say the Ways of Looking- I don’t wanna say it’s a tool because there are so many tools within this tool kit - does it help to create empathy in individuals because you’re suddenly just opened up to the fact that your way isn’t the highway?
MO – Yeah. So I think that’s a huge part of what it can offer. Empathy, both for other people’s perspectives and Ways of Looking and, therefore, behaviours. You know, I think of, I used to teach in prisons, I taught mindfulness courses in prisons, and what strikes me with that, for me, the prison was very much a sad place, not so much scary, in my experience, but just sad, a lot of people, I only worked with men, for me, a lot of men that had had very difficult lives, you know, very difficult experiences, that if I were them, if I’d had the conditions that they’d have faced, it would have been me in prison. Just seeing through different lenses and rather than just this kind of judging, ok, he’s done this bad thing, it might be a horrendous thing that they’ve done, just kind of labelling that and judging that bad person I could put on a lens, a way of looking, that sees the conditions instead. I could see where this action has come from, what’s led to this, and in a way, it kind of drains out a lot of the blame and the judgment, and it just opens up empathy and compassion for this person in front of me. I think what’s really important in that isn’t to get stuck then in that lens and only see conditions and never be able to hold people accountable for their actions. It's to hold both. Like I can look through the way of looking of yeah, this person has committed a crime in which there needs to be (in inverted commas) “punishment” or they need to be taken away from society because they’re dangerous, so that’s seeing that lens, and bringing that other lens of seeing why that’s happened and so that allows us to bring in compassion. So it’s like, yes, we can put this person away from society, but then we don’t need to treat them like an animal. We can treat them with compassion, we can see the reasons they’re there.
KC – And I think what this holds as well is a paradox because life isn’t this or that, good or bad, right or wrong, and I’ve found myself really tired of mainstream journalism over the last, well, the last decade but particularly the last five years, it just feels so quick to box people and label things, and it just doesn’t hold, it doesn’t hold nuance, it doesn’t hold paradox, and I love what you held there, that it’s both.
MO – Thank you for bringing in the word nuance. What you were speaking to earlier about the polarization, both in the media and in the social media, and there being a kind of lack of nuance, it’s really interesting the sort of theory behind how we polarize and then just get entrenched in those views. And exactly what we’re missing now and what would help so much is that, is the colour in the spectrum. I feel it’s so lacking and so important, and maybe you’re about to speak to that a little bit now.
KC – Well, I love that you’ve flagged that because I’m wondering as well whether, I know, we mentioned about the fact that we tend to have more so-called negative lenses if we’re not paying attention, but I wonder, as a society, do you think we have some default lenses that we’ve inherited and really looking through that many lenses we don’t have that much diversity in our thought or thinking or Ways of Looking – is that something that you’re aware of or you think might be happening to our world and our, yeah, our world at large?
MO – For sure. I think there are different levels to that because, at one level, we do have lots of Ways of Looking. We might not be conscious of them, but in a way, each emotional state that we have puts us into a different way of looking. We see the world differently, so at one level, we all have lots of Ways of Looking, and we bounce in between them constantly but not seeing them as such, which is confusing, disorienting etc. But there’s absolutely on a bigger, more conceptual level of, you know, who we are and what life is and what this means to me, what this situation is and what a human being is. I think we’ve lost so much, we’ve kind of been reduced to a particular scientific paradigm, and this isn’t to dismiss or belittle science at all, wow, at what it’s given us. And if we take it as the only way, the only arbiter of what’s true, for me, that’s so limiting and so limited and squashes so much possibility. There’s a word – epistemicide – my teacher Rob discovered and loved, and it really speaks to this. Epistemology, the philosophy around what we can know, how we know anything and epistemicide, just the way over the past 100s of years, ways of knowing the world, valid ways of knowing have just been killed off, we’ve just not allowed, you’re kind of being reduced just to this scientific, materialist, reductionist kind of way of understanding things.
KC – And then to add another way that we look, it seems like the growth lens there, the consumer lens is one that’s very powerful and all-consuming, both in terms of people not taking care of people but also the planet, as you mentioned before, and I notice that often we don’t feel like we have a choice, we have to get the job to earn the certain salary to, you know, have the certain life with the house and the kids, and it’s like no one’s really questioning that! And I wonder if it’s because the lens is just so powerful and it’s so ingrained and inherited that it’s hard to sidestep and sort of choose something else.
MO – It is, and that’s a problem! It is difficult when we’re all stuck in this delusion around where happiness comes from, which is, you know, one way of looking at what the issue is here, and we’re all chasing a certain thing of what we think will bring well-being and security and ease and all of that, it’s very hard to step out of that. For someone to really know, really, deeply, that happiness and security in the future and all of that comes from the quality in one’s heart, I mean, that is so not what we’re told growing up, so not what we think as a society so we do just keep people in the same actions and consume, consume, consume, and even though it doesn’t bring us the happiness we don’t seem to clock that for some reason. It’s hard, I don’t know how to create that shift and open up a different idea for people of where to look.
KC – Yeah, it makes me think of the title of this podcast, The Balcony View. I think those moments in life or those moments, perhaps, where we’ve had an illness, or someone’s died, or we’ve had a huge life shift, perhaps we lost a job, or we’ve moved country, they can offer us a balcony view, but I feel like this practice can help us step there too, it’s like that step back from our life from a moment, where we can be in the ballroom with the emotions, with the people, with the experiences, but also have that wider perspective and I feel like that’s such a powerful practice for that everyday balcony view that I think we need, just to check that are we aligned, is this an alignment with what I want in my life? Does this serve me, and what brings me happiness? And I think without that, we just end up on the path that has been decided for us.
MO – That’s really well put, and I love that phrase, The Balcony View, the title of this podcast. I think it’s interesting, you know, stepping outside of our country, I travelled a bit before I kind of knew about climate change, and it’s amazing being outside of one’s country and one’s life in a sense, the life we normally live, the perspective that that brings. And just as you say, we can get perspective and think, oh, there are different ways of viewing this because whatever country we’re in, they live differently. It’s like, oh wow, this isn’t the only way to live. How do I want to live? And what is a life? And exactly that, I think this Ways of Looking approach. I hadn’t thought about it like this before but being able to see that the way I’m relating to the world is just a way of relating, and I can step outside of that can give the same perspective as going to another country. We step outside just our normal way of relating but just internally instead of having to enact that in the external world. And I think that’s huge getting that perspective. There are so many of us, and I think this is such a profound point that you point to. So many of us live underlined lives. We’re just kind of batted around by the various conditions in our lives, what society tells us we should be doing, and there’s hardly any space to breathe and reflect on that. It’s just moment, moment, moment, go, go, go. And part of me wonders if we were all somehow, in some magic situation, able to really sense in ourselves our values, what’s important, how we want to live our lives and have the courage to do that, I suspect we wouldn’t have the whole poly-crisis we have in the world right now. We wouldn’t have the environmental and ecological breakdown. We probably wouldn’t have such a ridiculous disparity in wealth and problems in inequality. We wouldn’t have the same problems with race and oppression. I think there’s something, when we’re really living according to our truest values, it just carves open a very different perspective on the world that’s full, in my experience, always full of love and compassion for others.
KC – It makes me think about that story of the fisherman who fishes in the morning and then goes back and spends time with his family, and one day, a businessman comes along and says oh, you know you could get like a group of fishermen to help you out, and you could run that business, and by the afternoon you could go home and play with your family, and he’s like well I’m already doing that. And I think so many of us are in that never-ending growth cycle, but we’re not really sure why. And it’s hard to step out when everyone around you is doing the same when everything is pointing to that success. That’s the north star. And so, do you find that meditation is a space for us to reflect in the way that you mentioned? Because many of us don’t have that much space to stop and even check, does this feel right? How does this sit in my body?
MO – Yeah, absolutely. There are two things for me there. Like I think about retreats which, sadly, most of the time, are very expensive, I mean, the retreats tend to offer bursaries and really don’t want to turn people away because of cost, and there are charities like Freely Giving from the retreats that offer, yeah, for retreats, you give a donation if you can. But there’s something about just stepping aside from one’s life, even if it’s for a day, and just being in the quiet. And I think there are two things- one is the time to reflect, for sure, and actually use the mind, use the conceptual brain, one’s own intelligence and think through things and reflect in a way that we don’t have time for. But there’s also in that science, when we stop trying to work it out, there’s an innate, intuitive intelligence and wisdom in our being that if we just allow it if we just allow that silence will speak up. But it just doesn’t have the chance to, in the momentum of our lives, it just doesn’t have the chance to be heard. You know, it can be quite a quiet voice. And I think, for me, there’s something in that meditation that isn’t about working stuff out. That’s just allowing what’s already there to be heard.
KC – And that can be quite scary, can’t it? To really sit and listen to what’s there because, in some ways, it’s looking in the mirror. It’s not always nice to look in the mirror. So what would your advice be to someone who perhaps hasn’t had the best relationship with meditation and is thinking about stepping into the practice again?
MO – Thank you, well, there are a couple of things again there. I mean, I would say, firstly, depending on what the difficulties with meditation have been or could be, if there’s trauma in the body, for instance, there can be a slightly different way of approaching the practice that is really mindful that we don’t just want to have a gung ho approach and you know, I just want to go into my body, I want to go into my thoughts, and it’ll be fine because maybe it won’t be, actually maybe at its worst it can be re-traumatizing, so just having a sensitivity around and just putting a toe in, stepping back if it’s too much, finding someplace in the experience that is a good centre for attention which could be the body for some people, it could be the breath, it could be sounds and the environment, that could be the kind of stable anchor. So there are different ways, and there are books and stuff out there on how to practice sensitivity to those sorts of experiences. But for those people who might have dabbled in meditation and not really found it was what they wanted or what was helpful, my main advice really is to, if you want to, come at it again but with a real sense of play and experimentation. We can get stuck in quite a rigid sense of ok, this is what I’m supposed to be doing. If I’m not doing that if I’m not with my breath, then I’m a failure, then I’m not meditating well. We kind of set ourselves up for failure by having this rigid idea of what it is we do and then not being able to do it as we like. And then, for me, that’s one of the biggest things that my teacher Rob instilled in me. It’s like, why do I have to approach it like that? We could, for instance, approach it as we’re explorers, explorers of consciousness, explorers of our inner world, and that allows for so much more creativity, it allows for instance, for going down a dead end, for trying something out and actually, it not really working and rather than berating ourselves and saying oh I can’t meditate, this is wrong, say oh no, we’re exploring, of course, you’re going to come across dead ends, you then come back out, you try something else. For me, that can keep the whole practice alive because approached in a certain way, this really can be and should be fun! It should be interesting. It shouldn’t just be something we think we can do. And if we do, if we sit down on the cushion like it’s a chore that’ll make me a better person, then it probably won’t unfold fruitfully.
KC – Yeah, if our listeners take away anything from this podcast, I hope it’s that. That’s helped me so much. I’ve spent the last decade fighting meditation, you could say? It’s been a real love/hate relationship, and I remember in my very early 20s, I went to a 10-day silent retreat because it felt like something I had to do, and it was really sort of a fist clenched like I’m gonna do this because I want to put it on my spiritual CV, and I dropped out after 26 hours, and there was always this real sense that I had to do it because this was what good people do, and after working with you and doing the course I just feel so much more open to it, it’s like this is going to be fun today, I’m going to see what shows up but it’s not this I’m good, or I’m bad, it’s right, or it’s wrong, and that has transformed my practice, and I would say for so many people they’re probably coming at it with the lens of oh I have to do meditation this morning, or I should do this thing, and how does that then impact your experience of the meditation?
MO – Exactly, that’s just what I was going to say. I mean it’s- and this is where the Ways of Looking understanding comes in again- if we do approach meditation in that way, as a chore, and the being and the mind are a bit kind of contracted as we sit down, that’s only going to unfold in a certain experience, it isn’t open, there isn’t curiosity, it doesn’t allow the openings that it would do if we sat down and, for instance, what I tend to do nowadays when I sit down to meditate, the first thing I do is just allow the acknowledgement really in my body, not just the conceptual thing, but allow my body to feel that what I’m doing by sitting down and meditating, it’s an act of kindness and I, you know, it might take 5 seconds for me to align with that, it might take 2 minutes, but until it is I don’t start my meditation. I sit there, and I let it percolate through the being that what’s happening here is an act of kindness to myself and, through that, to the world. When my body hears that and acknowledges that and feels that, expresses that, then I meditate, and then it opens up very differently.
KC – And I think to take it back to the experience off the cushion and in our lives, I’ve noticed that this hasn’t transformed my life in big and obvious ways, but it’s given me those spaces to choose, and then that has sort of had those day to day 1% shifts that add up, and so over the past six months, I’ve seen some huge shifts in my ability to respond as opposed to react. And I sometimes notice now that I’m telling this tired story, I’m looking through my day-to-day through this maybe challenges lens, and is that serving me? And I think having that choice point, that little space that meditation opens up, just gives us more freedom, and do you find that that space opens up even more the more you meditate and the more you understand this in yourself?
MO – Precisely that, and I think you know what you’re expressing is so wonderful, the fruits that are coming just from this very simple idea of oh yeah, there’s some agency here, I can look, I can take away the challenges lens, I can bring in this, bring some of the reactivity out, fantastic and I think that’s a huge point that I certainly want to bring across to everyone starting out with this. It’s like it’s not a case of this is only helpful when you’re really experienced at it and have been doing it for years, and it totally changes your perception of reality and your semblance of what a human being is and everything. It’s like no, that’s possible, that’s there, and every little step along the way brings its own liberation, brings its own joy, it’s like, oh wow, when we’ve been entrenched in certain Ways of Looking and relating to the world and just some little nugget changes, the freedom that can bring the heart, and then we see ah, this has changed something and that give us more impetus to practice more, oh, what else could I bring out? That then snowballs when we really start to begin trusting in this process. So yeah, absolutely, our kind of toolkit, to use the phrase you put out there, just grows and grows and grows and over time can include more and more Ways of Looking and Ways of Looking that go deeper and deeper in transforming, yeah, our sense of reality. And it’s all good, all of its treasure.
KC – I wonder what it would be like to do this in groups, say, as a family or as a team around. Perhaps there’s a challenge at work, maybe there’s a big reorganization within the department, and if you had, say, six lenses that you chose specifically just to look through as a group, imagine the different wisdom that could emerge from that kind of conversation that holds these different perspectives. I don’t know what this is like to do in those kinds of relationships, but yeah, I imagine it might stimulate different discussions.
MO – And I imagine you’re right. I mean, it’s an alien environment to me, doing this in the corporate world. I mean, I’m sure it would make offices more compassionate. There’d be more perspective. I kind of am loathe to say yes, it will make companies more effective. It’s interesting to see how these timeless, priceless teachings can be co-opted by the capitalist, consumerist default world, like yeah, this can make us even more effective, this can do this, it’s like oh, hang on, hang on. It’s like, sure, yes, I’m sure it would make, but that, for me, wouldn’t be my intention for wanting to spread the teachings, I guess.
KC – That’s so true, so maybe it would still be looking through a lens of how can we be more efficient and create more growth as opposed to, yeah, that’s interesting. I mean, maybe bringing it back to the family example where there’s less, potentially, less like, higher agendas in place. I just wonder about some of those challenges that show up for all families having different lenses to look through as a group, particularly if there are some tired conversations that have been going around and around. I think the Gottmans say in every relationship, 69% of our problems are perpetual; it means they’re not going away. Yeah, and I just wonder how this might help us to open up different parts of ourselves and different wisdoms within that relationship.
MO – It makes me think, actually, we’ll bring it into the family. It makes me think of the way that actually, in a lot of my circles, I’m thinking of actually Extinction Rebellion a few years ago, particularly, you know, when we would have a meeting, often online, not always, and the first thing we would do before we got into any business is we would check in and say how we’re doing, and you can see how this was just a nice thing to do, but actually for me, that’s a really important part because then I see ok, well this person is feeling tired because they haven’t slept or whatever, this person’s angry because this has happened and I know that that’s going to impact what they say and how they feel, how they receive what is said. So that’d be the same in the family if we know that this person didn’t sleep last night; it’s like the frame of mind they’re in and what they’re saying is going to be very different from if they did, so we relate to them and judge them differently. It’s like I know, for instance, when I’m frustrated and tired, the sorts of thoughts that I have and how I see the world isn’t how I would like to, and I kind of just know to dismiss them. It’s like I know that I have a tired, frustrated mind, and I just don’t listen to myself. I just let the mind do its thing, and I just don’t give it any attention because I know it’s coming from a certain place, and if I can see that in somewhere else, can see where their thoughts are coming from rather than just thinking this is them, this is how they’re thinking and making it very concrete, it’s like no this is my child, I express themselves after a sleepless night with this going on in their life, you know, it just brings a lot more space and compassion into it.
KC – I love what you’re saying there. It speaks to something in systemic team coaching, we talk about meet the system where they’re at or meet the system where it’s at because the system could be nature. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a group of people. But so often, we’re tasked focus that we forget about the relationship. This seems very relational. This practice, it seems to bring us into relationship with ourselves, but then also it gives us a sense of what’s going on for other people too. And, my gosh, if anything, we need more relationship-orientated leadership in our lives, both in our personal and professional spaces.
MO – Can you imagine that, wow.
KC – Yeah. Mark, this has been the most fascinating discussion. I’m certain you’ve opened up whole ideas and Ways of Looking in our listeners today, so thank you so much for bringing this to us.
MO – A real pleasure to have this conversation. Thank you, Katie.
KC – And take care, Mark. We’ll speak soon, no doubt.
Ep.1 Ways of Looking with Mark Ovland