A stormy, peaceful night

The weather has been unseasonably warm, even until late. So last evening I just sat out, listening to the wind and looking up at the sky. It was the right way to wind down at the end of the day. It was so lovely sitting there, for a few moments, being grateful for all that had happened that day, listening to the sound of the wind, not saying anything, not even thinking.


We can be so self-involved that we fail to hear the sounds all around us, birdsong during the day, wind chimes in the evening. We do not notice the wonder of a sun rise or sun set. We do not take the time to look up in the darkness and be entertained by by a large slow cloud passing over. We can do this looking over the fields or looking out from a balcony, as long as we take the time to do so. When we do, the moment becomes special, as it did last night.

Slowing down doesn't necessarily mean meditating. Slowing down means paying more attention to the space in your life - inside and out. It means not running off to the movie theatre or becoming a zombie in front of the TV whenever you have free time. Do something more natural to slow down: Take time to rock in a rocking chair or sit in the garden and look at the lilies.

Dzigar Kongtrul, It's up to You

The music in our heart

If I was the song that entered your heart
then I was the music of your heart, that you wanted and needed
and thus the wilderness bloomed, with all its
followers; gardeners, lovers, people who weep for the death of rivers

And this was my true task, to be the
music of the body.
Do you understand?
For truly the body needs
a song, a spirit, a soul. And no less, to make this work,
the soul has need of a body,
and I am both of the earth and I am of the inexplicable
beauty of heaven
where I fly so easily, so welcome, yes,
and this is why I have been sent, to teach this to your heart.

Mary Oliver, A Red Bird explains herself

Dandelions

Sometimes it is just the simple things. A walk on a country lane, the good weather, a field full of wild flowers. A riot of colour. Even King Solomon in all his riches was not dressed as beautifully as they are. Nothing needed to be added to that moment.

The ironic thing is that this beautiful colour came from a field of dandelions. Weeds. Often considered a nuisance, dug up, overlooked, while we value other flowers, other scenes. Our life is sometimes like that. We often ignore what is right in front of us while seeking what we think is our path. We cannot turn to what is right beside us. The problem with this is that our actual life is the only one we have. We search for meaning and happiness in ideas, in other places, in other people, in the future. This perpetuates our preference for relating to life through our discursive minds, our planning minds. Meanwhile, right in front of us, our actual life offers happiness. If we have the eyes to see it.

No goal

Acknowledging what is, with honesty and compassion; continually training in letting thoughts go and in softening when we are hardening— these are steps on the path of awakening. It is how we develop trust in the basic openness and kindness of our being. When we train in letting go of thinking that anything — including ourselves — is either good or bad, we open our minds to practice with forgiveness and humor. And we practice opening to a compassionate space in which good/bad judgments can dissolve. We practice letting go of our idea of a "goal" and letting go of our concept of "progress," because right there, in that process of letting go, is where our hearts open and soften — over and over again.

Pema Chodron

Practice is patient work

God won't be in life like a bright morning.
We have to go down into the shaft
And through the hard work of mining
bring up the earth's abundance.
We have to stand hunched over
And in tunnels dig him out.


Rainer Maria Rilke

How to overcome

Conquer the angry man by love.
Conquer the ill-natured man by goodness.
Conquer the miser with generosity.
Conquer the liar with truth.

The Dhammapada

Living in the future

When we look ahead, when we look to the future, somehow we get dazzled by all the possibilities that are there waiting for us.....
As if the next event in our lives, the next situation, the next project, the next reationship, the next meal, even in meditation the next breath.....
we live our lives in anticipation of the next hit of experience as if the one that’s coming will finally do it for us.

What’s so strange is that nothing up until now has brought that sense of real completion or fulfillment.
So why are we so seduced into thinking that the next one will?

Joseph Golodstein

Knowing

Don't ask how
what you hope for will be,
don't let anyone
name it for you

H.A. Murena,
El demonio de la armonia

Starting over, again and again

Today I rose early and was fortunate to be able to sit outside just after dawn. It was a lovely clear morning. I do not know if it is because the past winter was long and hard, but nature seems full of vitality these days. The birds sang in a loud chorus and there was a bright sense of joy. The rest of the day saw beautiful sunshine. In the afternoon I had an unexpected visit from some friends and we sat and enjoyed the unusually early warmth.

The brightness of this weather makes it easy to feel clear and spacious within. And when we do, we find it not so difficult to be kind. It makes it possible to believe in the natural goodness deep inside us. However, even on bright days like this I notice that the mind can get confused and dark. When a combination of circumstances come together that frighten me, I become flustered and defensive. It is humbling to see the mind's capacity to struggle with the way things are and create suffering and narrowness on such a clear day.

In sitting practice we are reminded to practice "starting over" - to return again and again to the breath when the mind wanders, without being harsh with ourselves. It is a lesson for life also. We get lost. We wander away from the natural kindness that exists when we are calm. So we simply try to start over again. We do not need to add the extra judgment about how unworthy our behaviour makes us to the existing situation. We acknowledge honestly and simply that we have gotten lost, or are in the wrong, and then go back to start over again.

Loving another person

For one human being to love another;
that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks,
the ultimate, the last test and proof,
the work for which all other work is but preparation

Rilke

Rilke's words draw our attention to a key aspect of our practice. We sometimes imagine that the inner life develops best in quiet times, or when we can walk in the mountains or do a retreat. However, the place that best challenges and matures our practice is our relationships and encounters with others. It is there that life becomes our best teacher.

Sometimes however, we do not want to be taught, especially if it is through misunderstandings, disappointment or difficulty. We have a tendency - and this is reinforced by modern society - to expect a lot from relationships. And we have to admit that many of the most painful moments in our lives come directly from our relationships, with partners, parents, family members, friends, work colleagues. What we often fail to see that most relationships have an element of projection in them, where we unconsciously externalize some of our internal dynamics and place them in the other person. We often want the other person to complete us and in many ways to perfect us. And therefore, inevitably, since the other person is just human - a mix of good and bad - they are not able to sustain the projection indefinitively, and some form of disappointment enters. Our practice may tell us that most difficulties arise because we want the other person or something to be different than they are at this moment. However, knowing that does not always help, especially when we feel that our own emotional needs are not being met. At moments like that we tend to split into "them" and "us", and see the other person as being at fault. Our most instinctive, response to our own insecurity and fear is to assign blame and seek to place its source in another person.

However, often our most fundamental needs are revealed in these moments, and this is why relationships are the place for serious practice. They lead us face to face with our deepest selves, if we have the courage to turn towards our fears rather than run away from them. If we can be forgiving of ourselves and how we react to our fears then we realize better how to be with others who have the same fears.

In the garden

Everything that slows us down
and forces patience,
everything that sets us back
into the slow circles of nature,
is a help.

Gardening is an instrument of grace.

May Sarton

Not making the moment complicated

Mindfulness, seeing clearly,
means awakening to the happiness
of the uncomplicated moment.
We complicate moments.
Hardly anything happens without the mind
spinning it up into an elaborate production.

It’s the elaboration
that makes life more difficult than it needs to be.

Sylvia Boorstein

Beware

Beware the barrenness
of a busy life

Socrates

Perspective

Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime,
Therefore, we are saved by hope.

Nothing true or beautiful or good
makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; Therefore, we are saved by faith.

Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone. Therefore, we are saved by love.

No virtuous act is quite a virtuous
from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own;
Therefore, we are saved by the final form of love
which is forgiveness.

Niebuhr

Crazy

One needs a little madness,
or else we never dare cut the rope and be free.

Kazanzakis

Connect

Admit something:
Everyone you see, you say to them, “Love me”
Of course, you do not do so out loud; otherwise
Someone would call the cops
Still, though, think about this, this great pull in us
To connect.
Why not become the one who lives with a full moon
In each eye that is always saying,
With that sweet moon language,
What every other eye in this world is dying to hear?

Hafiz

Practice gratitude

An indepth study on gratitude has been carried out by psychologist Robert Emmons and colleagues at the University of California, Davis. He examined the effect of noting the good things that happen regularly. To conduct the study he set up three groups. One kept gratitude journals. One recorded daily hassles. The third wrote down neutral events.

He found that the group keeping the journal exercised more regularly, reported fewer physical symptoms, felt better about their lives as a whole, and were more optimistic about the upcoming week than the other groups. A second study found that the gratitude group enjoyed higher levels of alertness and energy compared with the others. A further benefit was observed in the realm of personal goal attainment: Participants who kept gratitude lists were more likely to have made progress toward important personal goals (academic, interpersonal and health-based) over a two-month period compared to subjects in the other experimental conditions.

If you want to try this exercise in your own lives you can do so very easily. You can choose to follow these simple instructions from Dr. Emmons : “There are many things in our lives, both large and small, that we might be grateful about. Think back over the past week and write down up to 5 things in your life that you are grateful or thankful for.” In actual fact it was found that those who wrote in their gratitude journals every day got far more benefits than those who did so weekly, so it is best to keep a small notebook and write up to five good things that happened during the day.

Or for those of you that have an iPhone and want to keep a gratitude journal, you can download the app "Gratitude": http://itunes.apple.com/app/gratitude-journal-positive/id299604556?mt=8

See more at http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/labs/emmons

Following your path

We have to dare to be ourselves,
however frightening or strange
that self may prove to be.

May Sarton

A Joyful day

Joy in the context of spirituality
is not the same as happiness.
Happiness is a feeling that,
like all feelings, comes and goes,
while joy is a more fundamental attitude toward life.

This joy doesn’t change your circumstance;
it embraces it.
Joy doesn’t make your situation other than it is;
but reveals the greater reality in which it is.
Being aware of the greater reality
always manifests as joy.

The more narrow the attention,
the more focused we are on fleeting moments
of happiness and sadness.
The wider our attention becomes
the more aware we are
of an unending flow of joy.

Rabbi Rami Shapiro

Pause and Wake up

When we learn to face the fear we habitually avoid, we begin to awaken from a trance.
By pausing and accepting our experience, we free ourselves to respond to our circumstances
in ways that bring genuine peace and happiness.

In a pause, we simply discontinue whatever we are doing.
We become wholly present, attentive
and, often, physically still.

Try it now: Stop reading and sit there,
doing "no thing," and
simply notice what you experience.

Taking our hands off the controls and pausing
lets us clearly see the wants and fears that drive us.
We become conscious of how the feeling
that something is missing or wrong
keeps us leaning into the future.
We can continue our futile attempt to manage our experience,
or we can meet our vulnerability
with the wisdom of what I call "radical acceptance."

Tara Brach

Speeding up

Aspects of life in modern society can become ingrained in our brains and cause people to hurry, whether or not they are pushed for time. Researchers at Toronto University found that people today move faster and hurry after a brief exposure to the logo from famous fast-food restaurants. In other words, our brains are told to speed up, even if a person does not need to do so.

Fast food represents a culture of time efficiency and instant gratification,” said Chen-Bo Zhong, assistant professor of organisational behaviour at Toronto University The problem is that the goal of saving time gets activated upon exposure to fast food regardless of whether time is a relevant factor in the context.

Rush

Sometimes nature gives us little glimpses of perfect joy, complete, with no struggle or strain. These can be a beautiful, silent, sunset or the quiet of a hedgehog crossing the road. Time slows down. We know we do not have to add anything to that moment for our happiness to be full.

It is in contrast to the pace that sometimes accompanies our working day.


I cannot tell if what the world considers 'happiness'
is happiness or not.
All I know is that when I consider the way they go about attaining it,
I see them carried away headlong, serious and obsessed,
in a general rush,
unable to stop themselves or to change their direction.

And all the while they claim to be
just on the point of attaining happiness....

Chuang-tzu.

To belong

Consciousness begins when brains acquire the power,
the simple power I must add,
of telling a story.

Antonio Damasio

We construct our personal identity out of the experiences which we have had in our lives. As I have written before, we begin to put these experiences into a narrative from teenage years onward and this narrative guides our behaviour in every moment. It provides a frame for how we see the past and, even more importantly, how we see the future developing. We use this as a means of providing some degree of coherence and purpose to our everyday lives. Part of our story comes from where we feel we belong, our family and place. As I was in the concert the other evening I heard melodies which evoked feelings of home, memories of places and a sense of belonging.

This need to belong is a very strong part of each one of us. It is linked with our sense of identity, of who we are. The music reminded me of the roots of my identity. However, I notice as we grow older, we tend to link that identity much more to relationships and get our sense of belonging there. We still want to find our place, yes, but much more we seek it in the lives of others. We seek to be remembered, to leave a mark. Growing as adults does not cancel that fundamental need. We are always looking for that mirroring or holding which shows that our own deepest self, our full story, is being heard.

Right Now

The seed of mindfulness is in each one of us, but we usually forget to water it. We think that happiness is only possible in the future - when we get a house, a car, a Ph.D. We struggle in our mind and body, and we don't touch the peace and joy that are available right now - the blue sky, the green leaves, the eyes of our beloved.

Thich Nhat Hahn

Wealth

Who are the happiest, richest people you know?... These are the people who are living joyful, enthusiastic lives, regardless of their possessions or lack of possessions. These people possess something more precious than material goods. They possess a spark of God that radiates in all they do.

Shoni Labowitz, Miraculous Living

Magic

A tone of some world
far from us
Where music and moonlight
and feeling are one

Shelley



On Thursday evening I was at a concert of Altan, one of the greatest live acts to play traditional Irish music and currently Ireland's biggest name in such music. They were incredible in their individual performances and the music they produce together as a group. The energy of the dance music contrasted with the beauty of Mairead Ni Mhaonaigh's voice as she sang songs of loss and love songs from the North West of Ireland. In the small theatre where they played it made for an unforgettable, magical experience.

I find that when I am listening to great music or standing before a work of art, a quiet inner space opens up, in which a full range of human experiences are felt. On Thursday this was linked to the music which evoked a sense of place, a feeling of home, the ideas of love and loss and belonging. The chatter of the mind ceased, a texture of silence was created, and the awareness of deep creativity deepened, much like what happens during meditation. Time slowed down and an instinctive awareness of what is really important emerged. In times like this, things are reduced to the fundamentals. Your own sense of the world and of yourself are touched, and sometimes changed.

Hidden

It is a joy to be hidden
but a disaster not to be found.

D.W. Winnicott

Miracles

People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don't even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child -- our own two eyes. All is a miracle.

Thich Nhat Hahn

Loss

Loss is a fact of life. Impermanence is everywhere we look. We lose loved ones. We lose our health. We lose our glasses. We lose our memory. We lose our money. We lose our keys. We lose our socks. We have to come to terms with this reality. How we deal with them is what makes all the difference. For it is not what happens to us that determines our character, but how we relate to what happens.

Lama Surya Das, Working with Loss

Noise

We have a lot of control over our responses to things, even things that provoke spontaneous reactions inside us, such as noise, traffic problems, heat or irritating work environments. We can learn from the response of Ajahn Chah, the Thai meditation master, who was meditating in his hut when a noisy celebration erupted outside. This can apply to external noise, but also can be applied to internal noise and chatter:

If my mind does not go out to disturb the noise,
the noise won't disturb me.

The Second Arrow

The Buddha once asked a student, “If a person is struck by an arrow is it painful?” The student replied, “It is.” The Buddha then asked, “If the person is struck by a second arrow, is that even more painful?” The student replied again, “It is.” The Buddha then explained, “In life, we cannot always control the first arrow. However, the second arrow is our reaction to the first. This second arrow is optional.

We do not have to wait long for life to bring us moments of difficulty or challenges. These can give rise to difficult emotions of greater or lesser intensity, such as sadness, anger or hurt. For as long as we live we will encounter such moments. Therefore, one of the most useful skills we can develop is how to work with such events and the subsequent emotions.

The Buddha's teaching, quoted above, is a useful strategy to remember. He distinguishes between the pain we naturally feel in life, and the pain that we shape ourselves. For example, we may naturally fall ill by picking up a virus or some illness that is doing the rounds. However, we may then add to our problems by the way we respond to the illness or the way the illness gives rise to a host of negative thoughts about ourselves or how our life is going. In other words, the pain is natural, but we create suffering by how we perceive the event and the physical sensations, how we judge them, and how we respond to them.

When something difficult happens to us, we have a tendency to commence a whole bunch of mental processes that can lead to more difficulties and create suffering — often thus adding more pain than there was originally. We dont like what is happening, and then start finding fault in ourselves or others, blaming, judging, and generally feeling sorry for ourselves.

This teaching is grounded in our mindfulness practice. We are trying to develop the skill to be able to open up to these strong emotions without either letting them discharge themselves in blame or self-pity, or running away from them or distracting ourselves from them as is easy in today's society. In doing this we just try and let the moment be, without adding. Because life is complex we will encounter many situations in which elements are not ours to control, or in which things happen without malicious intention. Paradoxically, sometimes it is right and appropriate just to be sad.

Making our world

We tend to consider imagination too lightly, forgetting that the life we make, for ourselves individually and for the world as a whole, is shaped and limited only by the perimeters of our imagination. Things are as we imagine them to be, as we imagine them into existence. Imagination is creativity, and the way we make our world depends on the vitality of our imagination.

Thomas Moore The Re-enchantment of Everyday Life

Being in the moment: Life as Jazz

Those who love life are tolerant of its ups and downs,
its reversals and leaps forward.
Those who love life, enjoy playing it by ear, engaging life without a printed score, simply flowing with its melody.
By keeping our agendas flexible and minimizing our demands, life can be a melodic song.
Whenever circumstances interrupt the normal rhythm of life,
those who cultivate patience and inner freedom are able to improvise with a life situation like jazz musicians,
making up music as they go along.
The emphasis in playing it by ear is on playfulness.

Edward Hays The Great Escape Manual

Glory

Look at everything
as though you were seeing it
either for the first
or the last time.
Then your time on earth
will be filled with glory

Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Overcoming

Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet.
Only through experience of trial and suffering
can the soul be strengthened,
ambition inspired,
and success achieved....
All the world is full of suffering.
It is also full of overcoming.

Helen Keller

Losing our way

Our culture invariably supposes
that action and accomplishment
are better than rest,
that doing something - anything - is better than doing nothing.
Because of our desire to succeed,
to meet these ever-growing expectations
we do not rest.
Because we do not rest we lose our way.
We miss the compass points that would show us
where to go,
we bypass the nourishment that would give us succor.
We miss the quiet that would give us wisdom
We miss the joy and love
born of effortless delight.

Wayne Muller,
Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal
and Delight in our Busy Lives.

Staying with painful emotions

The more we practice, the more we are able to see our instinctive reactions to difficult moments, such as disappointments or inconsistency. These can provoke fear, annoyance or irritation in us. Because we practice, such emotions signal to us the places where we can grow.

Painful emotions are like flags going up to say, "You're stuck!" We regard disappointment, inconsistency, irritation, and fear as moments that show us where we're holding back, how we're shutting down. Such uncomfortable feelings are messages that tell us to perk up and lean into a situation when we'd rather cave in and back away.

When the flag goes up, we have an opportunity: we can stay with our painful emotion instead of spinning out. Staying is how we get the hang of gently catching ourselves when we're about to let resentment harden into blame, righteousness, or alienation.

Ordinarily we are swept away by habitual momentum. We don't interrupt our patterns even slightly. With practice, however, we learn to stay with a broken heart, with a nameless fear, with the desire for revenge.... We can bring ourselves back to the spiritual path countless times every day simply by exercising our willingness to rest in the uncertainty of the present moment — over and over again.

Pema Chodron

Come home to the Present

Mindfulness helps you go home to the present.

And every time you go there
and recognize a condition of happiness that you have,
happiness comes.

Thich Nhat Hahn

Let go of the past

Just as a snake sheds its skin,
so we should shed our past,
over and over again

The Buddha

From the moment we are conceived, to the day we die, we are continually changing and developing. This constant, ongoing, change can produce anxiety, and we have a natural tendency to try an reduce this by stabilizing our life and looking for as much certainty as possible. We like to have identifiable projects and clear plans. Above all, we like to have a coherent narrative, a life story that seems to make sense, at least to ourselves. So we talk to ourselves from late adolescence and young adulthood to create our own personal myth that will give us a unity and purpose in the psychosocial world. The main poles of this myth are community or relationship and agency or purpose, and each one of us positions ourselves somewhere on a spectrum between these.

This desire for a coherent narrative or unitary self seems so necessary at some times in our life. However, there may be alternative ways of working with life. When we sit, we notice that it is hard to rest in just pure awareness. We much prefer to go back to our story. However, our story is selective, it emphasizes certain themes and ignores others. It often selectivley remembers the things that have gone wrong and which have been stored in our unconscious as worry and anxiety. Thus, it may be best to let the story go. Mindfulness training draws attention to the fact that all things arise and pass away: all things are impermanent. Our life is continually changing and it may be better to see our selves as a succession of selves and just rest in how we are, in this moment. We can drop the story, the continual commentary on how we are doing, the wondering how we measure up in terms of this myth we - or others - have crafted for us. We can move on.

This can save us from the the tendency we have, as we grow, to compare and notice. We compare our stories to the dominant stories in society, which tell us what "success" or "happiness" should be at our age. We compare ourselcves with ourselves, often noticing the loss of what we no longer have, such as youth, activites, friends, relationships. This can lead us to overlook the fact that happiness in life comes not from holding onto the past but by living in the present with appreciation. If we see this we resist the tendency to make things permanent - "this will always be so" - and free ourselves to delight in life as it presents itself each day.

If I am not who I think I am; and I am not who everybody I know has been telling me I am; and I am not the story in my head; and I am not the beliefs, the accumulated experiences, the memory traces - then who am I? Every answer to that question is dangerous because every word that one might use will create another concept. The reality of who you are can never be expressed in words. Words are only signposts that point the way.

Eckhart Tolle

Within

Seek not the good from outside:
seek it from within yourselves,
or you will never find it.

Epicetus

Change

Change of one sort or another is the essence of life, so there will always be the loneliness and insecurity that come with change. When we refuse to accept that loneliness and insecurity are part of life, when we refuse to accept that they are the price of change, we close the door on many possibilities for ourselves; our lives become lessened, we are less than fully human.

If we try to prevent, or ignore, the movement of life, we run the risk of falling into the inevitable depression that must accompany an impossible goal. Life evolves; change is constant. When we try to prevent the forward movement of life, we may succeed for a while but, inevitably there is an explosion; the groundswell of life’s constant movement, constant change, is too great to resist.

Jean Vanier, Becoming Human

Three things

Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.

To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

Mary Oliver.

Disappointments

Life is a great teacher, and provides regular opportunities for us to grow. Somtimes these can come in the shape of things not working out or people letting us down. Our initial reaction may be to see these as negative, but the focus in our practice is how we work with what is happening:

When there’s a disappointment,
I don’t know if it’s the end of the story.

It may be just the beginning of a great adventure.

Pema Chodron

The real mystery

People travel to wonder at the height of the mountains,
at the huge waves of the sea,
at the long course of rivers,
at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars;
and they pass by themselves without wondering.

St. Augustine

Feeling Safe

Many of us look outside ourselves for affirmation and some sense of worth, often turning to our careers or possessions to give us value. We can do the same in relationships, often expecting others to fill gaps we perceive in our self, which we can find hard to accept fully. This can be a well-established pattern by the time we reach adulthood. It can take the shape of us feeling we need to earn acceptance, or taking care of others at the expense of of own emotional needs. Freud wrote about a repetition complex, which is our need to seek out people who re-enact earlier emotional experiences, rather than necessarily people who allow us be loved just for our own sake.

It is only when we feel safe that we begin to relax with ourselves, as we are, and we can drop these early roles, or the ongoing commentary on how we are doing. Often this happens when we find ourselves with someone who accepts us or listens with real empathy. We find that we do not have to work to deserve love, we do not have to perform, but that we are lovable, deep down, before anything we do. A necessary prerequisite for growth is unconditional acceptance. Receiving such acceptance is like a gentle touch with a feather, warm and caring. It allows us reverse some of the patterns we have established and heals our inner self. It creates a safe haven from the storms of life.

Easter Monday: Open our eyes

In Italy, the Monday after Easter Sunday is known as La Pasquetta ("Little Easter") or Lunedì dell'Angelo ("The Monday of the Angel"). Ir is a day for relaxing outside, for going for a walk and having a picnic. It probably has it roots in ancient Spring festivals, when people would gather outdoors to celebrate. It was a day when a journey, a walk, or even a drive in the car had to be made. The religious meaning given to it, at least as it was explained to me, was to remember the journey made by Jesus' two disciples on the road to Emmaus on Easter Day.

These two disciples set out on Sunday for the village of Emmaus, a walk of a few days. As they were going along, Jesus joined them. They did not recognize him. They were replaying the events of the past - the days of the Crucifixion - and were worrying about what was to happen to them. Their concerns and chatter, their fear-driven desire to run away, did not allow them recognize that God was actually walking with them. In this way, they are just like us, caught in worries about the past, or running away or basing our view of the future on fears. Like us, we often fail to recognize the richness of our life lies in the present moment, when all we can experience is right with us. Often, to be fully alive, all we have to do is see what is being offered to us, right in this moment, rather than thinking our joy lies somewhere else, sometime else. It is sad if we are so focused on getting to a destination, we do not notice who is right beside us now.

The present moment
contains past and future.
The secret of transformation,
is in the way we handle this very moment.

Thich Nhat Hahn, Understanding Our Mind

Easter

In Ireland and elsewhere, the Lily is a symbol of Easter, being associated with new life and a pure offering to God.
In this simple poem, Mary Oliver sees the flower as silently following night and day, darkness and light, the up's and down's of life, trusting, knowing that the dawn will follow the night.
This trust is the perfect attitude, the perfect prayer, the attitude we try to cultivate in sitting.


Night after night
darkness enters the face
of the lily
which, lightly,
closes its five walls
around itself,
and its purse of honey,
and its fragrance,
and is content to stand there
in the garden, not quite sleeping,
and, maybe, saying in lily language
some small words we can’t hear
even when there is no wind
anywhere,
its lips are so secret,
its tongue is so hidden –
or, maybe,
it says nothing at all
but just stands there
with the patience
of vegetables and saints
until the whole earth has turned around
and the silver moon
becomes the golden sun –
as the lily absolutely knew it would,
which is itself, isn’t it,
the perfect prayer?

Mary Oliver, The Lily

Accepting diversions

All the stress in your life comes
from your fixed notion of how
the Universe should behave
and from your inability to accept
the merry diversions
the Universe takes from your agenda.

In fact, you generally take these
diversions from your script
as a personal affront.

Srikumar Rao, Are you Ready to Succeed?

Holding on: A dog and bone story

Just some thoughts prompted by recent days' meetings. I am trying to break down my emotional life time into smaller and smaller units, and see that most states of mind only last for a short period of time. What I mean is that events have the power to hook and disturb me, causing an agitated reaction in the mind. Practice does slow that down but does not eliminate it. The natural, spontaneous, response to a painful event is to try and eliminate the source, as we move to maximize safety and minimize vulnerability. Sometimes we do that by attacking - complaining and blaming in our mind and replaying the scene, or by withdrawing. However, what I am concentrating on is the afterwards - letting go much more quickly than before, catching the reaction early by creating space in the mind.

In thinking this I remembered a sermon I heard given by an Augustinian priest in Dublin many years ago. He said that some people hold onto hurt like a dog who has buried a bone and goes regularly to dig it up and lick it lovingly. We can see this often in family disputes. At moments of hurt, strong emotions - such as anger and resentment - touch us so deeply inside that they can dominate the mind in a fixed fashion, and cause us to identify with them. This identification is static, so we tend to stay the same through time, not moving forward, but looking back. Sometimes the hurt is so deep that we have no choice but to let the event process slowly within us. In these cases moving on or forgiveness is very difficult because the event that caused the need for forgiveness has also meant that the mind is covered by pain, loss, and sometimes a sense of betrayal. However, it is also true, in many day-to-day hurts and slights, we have quite a lot of control over the amount of holding on we want to do.

No matter what the situation is,
we are responsible for our own mind states

Joseph Goldstein

Life events as our teacher: a cat story

One day I was sitting on my bed meditating, and a cat wandered in and plopped down on my lap. I took the cat and tossed it out the door. Ten seconds later it was back on my lap. We got into a sort of dance, this cat and I...I tossed it out because I was trying to meditate, to get enlightened. But the cat kept returning. I was getting more and more irritated, more and more annoyed with the persistence of the cat. Finally, after about a half-hour of this coming in and tossing out, I had to surrender. There was nothing else to do. There was no way to block off the door. I sat there, the cat came back in, and it got on my lap. But I did not do anything. I just let go. Thirty seconds later the cat got up and walked out.

So, you see, our teachers come in many forms.

Joseph Goldstein