Mark Westmoquette - Mindful Thoughts for Stargazers

Mindful thoughts for

Find your inner universe

Mark Westmoquette

At 18, I decided to go to university to study astrophysics. Looking back, I can see my decision to study astronomy was partly motivated by wanting to escape, after a very traumatic childhood, to the furthest reaches of the Universe. After my undergraduate degree I was swept along into a PhD and ended up spending ten years doing research with my head buried in space.

During that time, I took up yoga and later Zen meditation. I remember my intellectual mind initially being quite resistant to all the what seemed like woo-woo nonsense in these Eastern practices, but my subconscious brought me back to the classes week after week. Over time, I rediscovered the forgotten lands of my body and the subtle contours of feeling and sensation. With mindfulness, I started to see the patterns of behaviour and ways of being I had adopted as methods for avoiding any more pain. With guidance from my Zen teacher and my psychotherapist I began to understand how these very patterns had now become the source of my suffering.

Meditation showed me how to allow strong emotions to arise, without feeling like I had to do anything about them or find out why they were there. Slowly I realized I didnt need to escape into space any more. I experienced first-hand the Buddhas teaching on suffering. Suffering arises, he said, because when we experience a difficulty we either wish it wasnt there, or we just deny or ignore it. I was very happy to find this has been codified into an equation: Pain Resistance = Suffering.

A few years ago, I decided to end my astronomy research career and take up teaching yoga and meditation full-time. It has taken me quite some time to see how astronomy that often-cold realm of maths and physics that I had escaped into can actually be a tool for connecting us more deeply with life here on Earth. And thats the intention of this book: to explore various aspects of the stars, the planets and the Universe to help us live with more presence and awareness of our own two feet on the ground. The first half of the book focuses on the practical side of mindfulness dealing with the mind and thoughts, navigating our life and dealing with emotions. The second half looks at the bigger picture, including the deeply interconnected nature of the Universe, life and death.

I used to think when I was working in astronomy that if we stopped and actually thought about what we were studying wed fry our circuits on a daily basis. Just think of the distances, sizes and timescales involved. The nearest star after the Sun, Alpha Centauri, is 42 trillion kilometres away a totally inconceivable distance. It takes light almost four and a half years to travel that far. This is why astronomers call this distance 4.4 light-years, four being a much easier number to deal with than 42 trillion. Astronomers come up with all sorts of units for distance, time and energy, just to make them more comprehensible and less mind-bending to work with.

The night sky is as mysterious and awe-inspiring to us modern humans as it has been to any animal that has ever had the capability of looking up and wondering. When we gaze up at the stars we are sharing that view with all our ancestors. Imagine an early human out on the savannah, stepping away from the evening fire after a meal of antelope and foraged vegetables, glancing up at the perfectly dark sky and being totally captivated. Black thats blacker than black, spaciousness extending to infinity, and tiny, bright sparks dotted everywhere, twinkling silently. Eyes wide, head tilted, and just the sound of his or her own quiet breathing and the crackling of the fire. And maybe later, once everyone else has gone to sleep, this man or womans mind starts questioning: Whats up there? What are all those bright dots? How far away are they? Is that where we come from? What kind of power (or deity) keeps it all going?