Thoughts on Mindfulness, Identity, and Right & Wrong

The Journal of Don Boivin: Volume IV

Hello. I’m Don Boivin and this is Shy Guy Meets the Buddha. Thanks for being here. If you like what you are about to read, please consider a small token of appreciation; a tip or paid subscription would be very generous and so helpful. Thank you! 🙏 (“Buy Me a Coffee” is an online tipping platform where you can tip as little as $5 to your favorite hard-working writer 😊)

Walden Pond, Concord, Massachusetts 2016

Below are recent entries from my personal journal, where I record thoughts, insights, and ideas, mostly about mindfulness, meditation, and the nature of self. These entries are often later expanded into Substack Notes or posts.

3/31/2025

Lately I’ve been able to face any feeling I have with acceptance. I’ve gained a tool, and that is the knowledge that my feelings aren’t telling the truth about what is. They are just temporary arisings that come and go and come and go. Even if I feel terrible, the world outside of those hormones that are racing around my body is the same. My body is the same. Everything is the same. I can be in the feeling because it’s just something that happens in this world, like a rainstorm or a breeze or a birth or a death. I don’t have to change it and it’s not going to change me.

And part of it, too, is knowing the actual nature of this me. Knowing that I am one of billions of human animals in this world, not special, that my consciousness and my feelings about who I am, my identity, are just actions of the body. Body’s feel angry. Bodies feel scared. Bodies feel sad. I roll with it.

And then sometimes I forget, and when I feel bad, I really believe things are bad, and oh no, whatever am I going to do, my kids don’t love me, my wife isn’t treating me right, I don’t want to be a carpenter anymore. And it brings me down down down. And I think I will never feel better again. Basically the problem here is I am resisting the feelings. I’ve forgotten my tool, my power, my knowledge that it’s okay because this is what bodies do, so allow it. Just allow it.

4/5/2025

I want to write about the ways in which Buddhism, meditation, and mindfulness (and “letting go”) are misinterpreted, and how that leads to attachment, resistance, and suffering rather than freedom, non-clinging, and peace.

—Misinterpreting mindfulness
—clinging to non-clinging
—spiritual materialism
—forced breathing
—believing you have to “apply” the principles instead of letting understanding do its work
—memorizing methods
—feeling guilty because you haven’t lived up to your beliefs or principles
—goals instead of presence
—believing Buddhism and mindfulness are about learning how to rise above suffering
—so many people respond in my notes and posts that they are working on such-and-such a mindfulness method, but "it isn’t easy." I think this is a point of note to look at. If it isn’t easy, I think you’re doing it wrong. It should be easy! (Or they may think it’s not easy because they’re not seeing “results.” So their approach is wrong in the first place; they’re setting goals, still comparing now to what they want in the future, and finding now lacking.)

I want to be able to put this whole issue into one clear and concise statement, to sum it up nicely into an impactful expression that really slaps you awake, makes you realize and not forget that you’re unintentionally turning the whole concept of non-resistance/non-clinging on its head and turning it into resistance/clinging. Freedom into imprisonment.

THE VERY ATTEMPT TO BE FREE AND AT PEACE IS LEADING TO ITS OPPOSITE. Instead of pursuing freedom, peace, love, harmony, equanimity, compassion, community, unity, we must pursue truth alone. The truth of the very self that is seeking.

THIS: UNDERSTANDING is the key and the sole concept that is necessary. All other Buddhist concepts are results, not methods—compassion, peace, letting go, love, equanimity, etc. By seeing the absolute base, the foundation of all our problems, the rest takes care of itself.

What is that key, that foundational insight? I think it’s loosening our hold on self. Krishnamurti saw it as seeing that we are conditioned, which is the same thing. Seeing that all our problems are not problems, they are views or beliefs; illusions.

It’s not our feelings that get us into trouble, it’s the unchallenged beliefs we allow to arise in the wake of those feelings.

5/6/2025

Things that you cannot hold in your hand, look at, or possess in any way:

· A song
· A walk
· A joke
· An idea
· A dance
· Happiness
· A relationship
· A “self”

4/11/2025

Idea for essay: The eyeball.

· I always loved charting it in my grade school science classes
· Every animal has them
· So complex and yet how did it end up so prolific?
· Because we are all part of one life
· Explain how “oneness” may seem hokey but is actually just science
· Think about a human being on the other side of the planet who has all the same organs as me, who is 99.9% genetically similar to me.

4/12/2025

I know this might sound obtuse but I just figured out why my desire to write as well as whomever I happen to be jealous of at the moment is so tragic. It’s because I’m naively faulting myself for not being someone else.

Of course I can’t write like them because I am not them.

My writing isn’t just a skill I develop. Everything that has ever happened to me is threaded through my creative work—every loss, every love, every thought, every feeling. Every book I’ve read, every heartbreak I’ve endured, every walk I’ve taken, sunset I’ve witnessed, and conversation I’ve enjoyed is behind the voice of my work. My writing cannot be matched by any Tolstoy, any Vonnegut, any Letter from an American, or any viral Substack Note writer.

(No, I’m not jealous of any of these authors today; it was a book review I was reading on Goodreads that shook my confidence. But writing about it helps tremendously.)

That feeling of ineptitude I experience the moment I compare myself to another writer—it makes sense, because it’s based on truth; I absolutely cannot write like that person.

I can only write like me.

As long as I remember that, and appreciate that, I’ll be okay.

4/13/2025

Mindfulness is understanding that my feelings, emotions, impressions, and beliefs are quite often NOT accurate reflections of reality, and in fact can be rather biased (sometimes in my favor, sometimes not). Allowing my unexamined feelings and biased views to guide my actions seldom leads to a sustainable sense of peace and well-being, or to healthy relationships. Therefore, I resolve to pay attention, objectively, courageously, and without judgment, to what is happening here and now, in my own mind/body and in my environment, without trying to deny, interpret, change, or resist what I see in this moment.

Note that this definition comprises two parts:

1) Conceiving and accepting that my perceptions may be wrong

2) Paying attention, objectively and without judgment

Importantly, there is no number three: gaining Ultimate Truth, achieving wisdom, transcending suffering, becoming someone I’m not, etc.

Mindfulness, for me, is based on a powerful respect for truth and clarity, for recognizing any illusions I may be operating under, whether self-imposed or not; but, notably, clarity is the end goal. The desire to gain higher levels of consciousness, to be wise, enlightened, or beyond suffering, is a materialistic goal that surely must fit under the original illusions of which I’m intent to escape.

I think it’s enough to remove illusions, and that it’s best to let whatever comes after that come of its own. That said, I do believe we’ll find that it was those illusions that were motivating or triggering most of our poor behavior, psychological suffering, and unhappiness.

4/13/2025

Say a reliable authority—God or some wise priest—assures me with one-hundred percent certainty that when I die, my soul will be reincarnated into another human being, the only caveat being that my memory and my sense of self will die with my body; it will not carry on into the new life.

My question is this: how is this different—for me, here and now, for my security and peace of mind and lived experience—than simply knowing that after I die, babies will continue to be born around the world?

4/13/2025

Here is a groundbreaking question that occurs to me today:

Could it be possible that nothing is wrong? Not with the Trump administration, not with my kids’ estrangement from me, not with my car breaking down, with running out of money, with waking up on the wrong side of the bed, with being criticized or slandered, with sickness or death?

Nothing is wrong. Hmmm. I’m going to give this some thought.

Is right and wrong all in my head? And I mean, ALL in my head?

Is my entire perception of the world all in my head?

What if there is no such thing as right and wrong?

4/14/2025

I’m sitting with a new perspective, a new insight, which I gained during tonight’s meditation, a longer-than-usual meditation. I may have “known” or realized this before but it’s hitting me in a new and visceral way tonight. I want to hold onto this insight, and I realize that’s clinging to knowledge, but I’m going to write it down anyway.

It’s that there is no self separate from my experience. There is only experience.

There is no self separate from my thoughts. There is only thoughts.

There is no self separate from my feelings. There is only feelings.

There is no self separate from my pain. There is only pain.

This explains why it’s so hard to try, in meditation, to find or observe or understand or know myself. I can’t observe myself because that would be separating myself into two: one who observes and one who is observed. It can’t be done. That would be like trying to look at my own eyeballs, as Alan Watts used to say.

So I can do two things:

1) Give up trying to observe myself (yay!)

2) Remember this

This puts into perspective, for instance, my last essay, in which I wrote about not resisting your feelings. I didn’t put it this way and I think I should have: that you can’t resist your feelings because that would be creating the illusion of a separate self that can somehow resist feelings that are being experienced by another self that is not “you”, as if you are some operator of the self (a little man in the cockpit with his hands on the control levers), not actually the self.

When you have a feeling, anger for instance, that feeling is a wholeness. There is only the feeling, not a person who possesses the feeling. When you feel pain, you are pain. The pain isn’t separate from you.

I could go on but I think that’s enough for now. I’ll see if I still feel this truth deeply tomorrow.

—Also, I want to remember that when I say there is no self separate from experience, that means there is no self at all; there is only experience. The experience is the self (Another reason I can’t see or identify my self when I try).

4/15/2025

There’s a picture show coming alive in this brain. At all times. That picture show is my entire experience, my consciousness and the contents of my consciousness, and my entire experience IS my everything, is my self.

DB

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