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From now on you can find it at www.mindfulbalance.wordpress.com

Balance in mind and body

The first three pillars of the MBSR Programme are awareness of the body, awareness of emotions and awareness of thoughts. All of these need to work together in harmony for us to have a healthy and positive life.

The first pillar is awareness of the body, both in the way stress manifests itself in the body and how a healthy lifestyle requires a healthy body. One way this is cultivated in the MBSR programme is through Mindful Yoga exercises.

The importance of physical fitness for the mind has been supported in a recent study by Laura Baker and her colleagues at the University of Washington, published in the Archives of Neurology. It found that older adults who engaged in regular exercise showed improved concentration and multi-tasking skills. Another study, this time conducted by Charles Hillman PhD, and published in journal of the American College of Sports Medicine showed that a 30 minute aerobic workout significantly improved the accuracy of memory on administered tests. Finally, a recent Duke University study found that middle-aged participants who worked out for 30 minutes, three to four times a week, showed a 30% improvement in mental function after 4 months. As Dr Hillman stated: “data shows that getting regular exercise over time can increase both gray and white matter in the brain and make a huge difference in how well you process and track information, stay on task and allocate your mental resources”

Laura D. Baker, PhD, et al., Effects of Aerobic Exercise on Mild Cognitive Impairment : A Controlled Trial, Arch Neurol. 2010;67(1):71-79.

Sunday Quote

We often ask, "What's wrong?" Doing so we invite painful seeds of sorrow to come up and manifest. We feel suffering, anger and depression and produce more such seeds.

We would be much happier if we tried to stay in touch with the healthy, joyful seeds inside of us and around us. We should learn to ask "What is not wrong?" and be in touch with that".

Thich Nhat Hahn, Peace is Every Step

Home

We can travel a long way and do many different things, but our deepest happiness is not born from accumulating new experiences. It is born from letting go of what is unnecessary, and knowing ourselves to be always at home. True happiness may not be at all far away, but it requires a radical change of view as to where to find it.

Sharon Salzberg, Loving Kindness

How to tackle a long task

"My son, every day work on only as much ground as your body takes up in space lying down,and your work will progress gradually
and you will not lose heart"

When he heard this, the young man
acted accordingly,
and within a short time the field was
cleared and cultivated.
Do the same, work step by step
and you will not lose heart.

Sayings of the Desert Fathers.

These sayings from the 4th Century have a lot of wisdom in them. In this one the young man gets discouraged because the field is hard to plough. He does not have the strength and feels paralysed. He does not know where to start and as a consequence leaves everything just lying around. We are like this when we have to face a difficult or long task, or indeed a difficult person.

The old man gives the best advice. Do not consider the whole field, just do as much ground as you would sleep on in the night. That can be done easily. And so the young man begins, slowly, but soon the whole field gets done.

Each day we can think that we have a mountain of tasks ahead of us. And if we get tired or stressed they seem even greater. The advice is to start at one place and work slowly, not considering the whole of the task. If we look at the whole day and the extent of work to be done, we can get discouraged and make no progress. Just do one thing after another, step by step....we can all do that without being overwhelmed.

It is the same with our inner life. If we get frightened by our faults or difficulties and think that we will never change, we will never get started. We give up on ourselves. It is enough to do a little piece of work each day, such as a short sitting, and not concern ourselves with the whole field. This way progress happens, without us even noticing it.

The way we live

The value of a life
does not depend on
the place we occupy;

It depends on the way
we occupy that place.

Therese of Lisieux

The other side of the world

Happiness is not a place that is found
outside of where we are right now.
If you wanted to find a perfect get-away
from all your stress and unhappiness,
where and how far would you go?
To the other side of the world,
to the International Space Station,
or just the nearest bar?
Your body would be somewhere else,
but still, you would be taking your
stressed, unhappy mind with you

Thich Nhat Hahn

Thoughts

Coming, going,
the waterbirds
don't leave a trace,
don't follow a path.

Dogen, On Non-Dependence of Mind

Moving towards a Mindful Society

Jon Kabat Zinn recently gave an interesting and thought-provoking interview to the Buddhist Magazine Shambhala Sun about developing mindfulness in the whole of sosiety. In it he talks about the benefits of developing greater awareness, for ourselves and for society as a whole:

Genuine awareness can modulate our thinking, so that we become less driven by unexamined motivations to put ourselves first, to control things to assuage our fear, to always proffer our brilliant answer. We can create an enormous amount of harm, for example, by not listening to other people who might have different views and insights. Fortunately, we have more of an opportunity these days to balance the cultivation of thinking with the cultivation of awareness. Anyone can restore some degree of balance between thinking and awareness right in this present moment, which is the only moment that any of us ever has anyway. The potential outcomes from purposefully learning to inhabit awareness and bring thought into greater balance are extremely positive and healthy for ourselves and the world at large.

The full interview is well worth the read. You can access it directly by clicking on the title to this post or by finding it here:

http://www.shambhalasun.com/index.php?Itemid=0&id=3493&option=com_content&task=view

Every moment
and every event
of every person's life on earth
plants something in their soul.

Thomas Merton

Just

Practice is just hearing, just seeing, just feeling.
This is what Christians call the face of God: simply taking in this world as it manifests.
We feel our body; we hear the cars and birds.
That's all there is.

Charlotte Joko Beck

Every day

"Make of yourself a light,"
said the Buddha,
before he died.
I think of this every morning
as the east begins
to tear off its many clouds
of darkness, to send up the first
signal-a white fan
streaked with pink and violet,
even green.

An old man, he lay down
between two sala trees,
and he might have said anything,
knowing it was his final hour.
The light burns upward,
it thickens and settles over the fields.
Around him, the villagers gathered
and stretched forward to listen.
Even before the sun itself
hangs, disattached, in the blue air,
I am touched everywhere
by its ocean of yellow waves.
No doubt he thought of everything
that had happened in his difficult life.
And then I feel the sun itself
as it blazes over the hills,
like a million flowers on fire-
clearly I'm not needed,
yet I feel myself turning
into something of inexplicable value.
Slowly, beneath the branches,
he raised his head.
He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd.

Mary Oliver

The mind like the sky

Teachers often suggest considering your thoughts to be like clouds in the sky. Some are dark and stormy, some are beautiful and fat, while others are wispy and ethereal. Sometimes there are no clouds at all. No matter. Just like clouds in the sky, thoughts pass through your mind. And just like the sky, your mind can contain it all.

We are accustomed to identifying with every large or small thought that comes along. But you can train in identifying as the sky instead. When you do, tremendous confidence arises. You see beyond doubt that you can accommodate it all —sunshine, storms, mist, fog, hail —and never give up.

Susan Piver

Increasing happiness

A recent study found that happiness significantly increases as people pass their 50th birthday. It seems that stress and worry fade after the landmark birthday and people begin experiencing greater daily joy than younger adults. A 2010 survey of more than 340,000 people published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found overall feelings of wellbeing improve as we pass middle age.

Dr Arthur Stone, a psychologist of Stony Brook University, New York, said the findings were "striking".

You would think as chronic illness threatens life would get worse but that is not the case because people don't focus on the threats. They focus on the good things in life like family and friends.

The researchers found positive and negative emotions varied with age similarly in both sexes – although women reported greater stress, worry and sadness at all ages. Variables such as having children, being unemployed, or being single did not affect age-related patterns of well being.

Stress and anger reduced in the 20s but worry and anxiety remain a significant issue. Peter S. Kanaris, Ph.D., a psychologist and coordinator of public education for the New York State Psychological Association, observes: Prior to midlife, people are building families, paying mortgages, developing in their careers at a time when there is much more uncertainty than usual. This creates a great deal of stress.

By contrast, the 40s and 50s are actually a time of contentment: People in midlife have reached a time where they are a little more settled and established, he says. With levels of stress and worry all dropping significantly in the fifties, the levels of happiness and enjoyment increase.

Dr Carlo Strenger, of Israel's Tel Aviv University, gives further food for thought: If you make fruitful use of what you have discovered about yourself in the first half of your life, the second half can be the most fulfiling. Most people can anticipate a second life, if not a second career.

The right time

To truly be kind to others (and ourselves for that matter), it helps to abandon time slavery and try to notice what place others are keeping, to notice their face and their gesture, to know when they are ready to hear something, ready to be quiet, ready to come, to go, to be led, to be followed.

So many times I have been unable to listen or to notice what someone was going through or where they were headed because it didn’t meet with my schedule. Patience and timing are inextricably linked. Patience, which we can regard with such excruciation, offers a hidden reward. When we stop watching the pot, we may learn that it boils right on time.

Sometimes my father would forget to wind the big clock, the weights would fall, and time would stop. We wind the clock. It does not have to wind us.

Barry Boyce, What Time is Now?

Some thoughts on illness

Loss and anguish, bereavement and grief, anxiety and despair, as well as all the joy available to us, lie at the very core of our humanity and beckon us to meet them face-on when they arise, and know them and accept them as they are.

It is precisely a turning toward and an embracing, rather than a turning away or a denying or suppressing of feeling that is most called for and that awareness embodies. Awareness may not diminish the enormity of our pain in all circumstances. It does provide a greater basket for tenderly holding and intimately knowing our suffering in any and all circumstances, and that, it turns out, is transformative and can make all the difference between endless imprisonment in pain and suffering and freedom from suffering, even though we have no immunity to the various forms of pain that, as human beings, we are invariably subject to.

Jon Kabat Zinn

Eyes to see

The real voyage of discovery
consists not in seeing new landscapes
but in having new eyes

Proust

The Wrong Trousers

Sometimes we get little reminders that our way of seeing the world is not always completely objective. We see the world not as it actually is, but as we are.

I recently bought some clothes, thinking that they looked nice. Shortly afterwards I was informed that the colour did not suit me and that they were a strange choice. For a moment I took refuge in the fact that maybe I have better taste, that I have an interesting dress sense, and anyway I don't have too much interest in criteria like colour. I had a certain notion of how these clothes were right. Normally when our judgment is questioned we need to rationalize and reduce some dissonance between our "good judgment" and others' opinions. However, I soon admitted to myself that others are probably more objective and that I was more than likely wrong.

I know that in most things, I see through my own subjective filters, so it is likely the same for my dress sense. We think we see something as it is. But really it is we see it through our own conditioning and history, and often through the story which is dominant in our life at that moment. Indeed, most thinking is not pure thought, but is rather a self-focused emotional activity. A similar process applies to the words we use. Something may be said to us with the best of intentions but we hear it through the emotional place we are standing. Or similarly, a simple email or text message which we send can be understood completely differently by the person receiving it, because of where they are at, and as a result they move to an interpretation which was never intended.

Practice is essentially clarifying our vision. We learn to sit still, to befriend ourselves. We return to sit each day in order to see through our mental processes, with all their noise; and to increasingly enter into reality as-it-actually-is. We see that we can hardly take a breath without a thought or opinion or judgment going through our head. We see that we prefer to relate to life through our thoughts and frequently our fears. Our natural calm mind is often clouded by the limited self-image created by habitual, obsessive, neuronal patterns. Practice works on this, allowing us let go of the fears that drive our thoughts, getting closer to the moment as it is. We observe the mind in order to not get lost in it. We learn to relate simply with the thoughts, feelings and experiences that arise as we sit. Slowly we get to see the world more objectively. To see things as they are, not as I want them to be.

Swimming

Have been taking swimming lessons the past few weeks. Some things are best learned early, but I never learned how to swim as a child. It is going so well; the secret is to relax and let go. I don't know if I will ever swim like a fish but am already pleased with being able to keep my head under the water and move forward across the pool. For me it is such a freedom to float on the water and not be afraid.

Learning to swim contains a lot of lessons which can be applied to practice and to life. In many ways we can approach our practice as if we are there to correct or fix something. We often start from the deep-down assumption that there is something wrong with us, that we need to change or get away from. So we seek out personal development programmes or practice in order to change ourselves, to get away from what we are not at ease with. Or we can seek outside ourselves, in work, projects or relationships, for something that will complete us.

What swimming teaches is that somethings go better when we just relax and let go. We can stop striving. We can release the need to 'control' everything in our lives. When we tense up and try to fix things, we create a whole new set of problems. Often when we are stressed out, we attract more stress into our lives. We end up trying to make ourselves different than how we actually are. Freedom starts with accepting ourselves and letting go, trusting that the water, or that life. will actually support us. We can let go of our fears.

Sometimes, in order to let go we must "unlearn" many of the things we have spent our entire life learning and which have been reinforced in relationships and life's experiences. From an early age, we have been conditioned to worry about our family, our relationships, our jobs, our security, and everything else in our lives that we want to improve. We are taught to compete and to overcome our anxiety by doing better and striving harder. Ironically, when we stop the worry, stress, and fear, we allow our natural rhythm to flow into us and we drop into our deep inner resources. The greatest truth we learn from practice is that we are already perfect, just as we are. Nothing needs to be added to us in this moment. We can just float and let go.

Hiding

People who are suffering want to change, but they do not know how. They feel...that they have to go into their problems, or get rid of them entirely. They do not know that to bring about true healing they have to learn to see themselves as they truly are.

......powerful emotional reactions have the capacity to take hold of us and drive our behavior. We believe in these reactions more than we believe in anything else, but they become the means by which we both hide from ourselves and attempt to cope with a world of ceaseless change and unpredictability.

Mark Epstein, Going on Being:Buddhism and the Way of Change.

Paying attention or rushing

Attention or awareness is the secret of life and the heart of practice....

Every moment in life is absolute itself. That's all there is. There is nothing other than this present moment; there is no past, there is no future; there is nothing but this. So when we don't pay attention to every little this, we miss the whole thing. And the contents of this can be anything. This can be straightening our sitting mats, chopping an onion, talking to one we don't want to talk to. It doesn't matter what the contents of the moment are; each moment is absolute. That's all there is, and all there ever will be. If we could totally pay attention, we would never be upset. If we're upset, it's axiomatic that we're not paying attention. If we fill our days and we miss not just one moment, but one moment after another, we're in trouble.

Charlotte Joko Beck

Confusion

My work often reminds me that a lot of people have, to a greater or lesser degree, some amount of confusion within with regard to their identity. And often the roots of that confusion are to be found in the messages received from parents when they were children. For the most part these parents did their best to love and provide for their children. However, having unresolved emotional issues themelves they inevitably conveyed mixed signals, saying or doing one thing, but unconsciously expressing in their energy or mood something else. In my experience, this sends the signal that the child's emotional independence and autonomy are subtly not accepted. As a result the child grows into an adult with a clear internal message of not being fully lovable. This can then manifest itself in persistent anxiety that seems to be present without reason, in depression, self-doubt, repeated failed relationships or the belief that one has to push hard to achieve any sense of worth.

Jung reminds us that whatever we do not pay attention to, or is lacking within ourselves, we compulsively seek in the outer world instead. So when we encounter something or someone that corresponds to our archetypal inner schema, we can often rush to compulsive solutions for the inner lack. He went on to say, in his seminar on Nietzsche's Zarathustra, The self is relatedness. Only when the self mirrors itself in so many mirrors does it really exist. . . You can never come to your self by building a meditation hut on top of Mount Everest; you will only be visited by your own ghosts and that is not individuation. . . .Not what you are, but what you do is the self. The self appears in your deeds, and deeds always mean relationships."

Putting these thoughts together, he seems to suggest that the lacks we inherit inside ourselves from our relationships with our parents can become manifest in the relationships we choose to have as adults. We can only travel with another person as far as we have travelled by ourselves. The stronger the dynamic is from childhood, the more likely it is that we will see it being played out in later relationships.

Our substitute life

We all follow some strategy to escape feeling the fears that silently run our life. Yet even when we know all about these fears, most of the time we don't want to have anything to do with them. For example, do you try to maintain a sense of order and control, to avoid feeling the fear of chaos, of things falling apart? Do you try to gain acceptance and approval, to avoid the fear of rejection, of not fitting in? Do you try to excel and attain success, to avoid the fear of feeling unworthy? Or do you seek busyness in adventure or pleasure, to avoid the deep holes of longing and loneliness? All of these strategies have one thing in common: they keep us encased in our artificial or substitute life.

Perhaps this sounds pessimistic and discouraging, but it doesn't have to be. In fact, it's only by realizing the extent to which we are asleep—the extent to which we are driven by the vanity of our endeavors, the smallness of our attachments or the urgency of avoiding our fears—that we can wake up, out of our state of sleep, out of our substitute way of living.The essence of the practice life involves cultivating awareness.

Ezra Bayda

Paying attention

I discovered the secret of the sea
in meditation upon the dew drop.

Kahil Gibran

Triumph

Berlin, like many of the great European cities, has its triumphal arch, the Brandenburg Gate, topped with a chariot and four horses, driven by the Roman goddess of victory. It represents a certain vision of human progress where victory is achieved by force and triumphs are celebrated in proud buildings. In this vision, we gather our strength, make our plans, apply ourselves and move forward. At moments like this, growth feels exhilarating, like a triumph, with all the elements moving together in harmony. We look up, we ascend and consciously move forward.

However, at other times. a different type of hard work is required for inner growth. A lot of people I encounter are struggling because of difficulties in relationships, family loss, health issues, and economic pressures. And through the course of a lifespan nobody can be completely immune from such burdens. We have all had periods where we have seen our dreams shattered and our life goals made more distant. It can feel like we are going backwards or nothing is happening. Or we have been with someone going through moments of pain, feeling their world come crashing down, and we have not known how to respond. There is risk involved at every moment of human life, simply because we are human. Our family relationships can cause us to worry. Our bodies may not function as well as they once did. Even in good relationships and friendships, in order to trust each other, we are required to live with a relatively high degree of risk. And sometimes that can be betrayed.

Elizabeth Lesser writes in her book Broken Open : How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow that moments of difficulty can be deep moments of growth: We too can reproduce ourselves from the shattered pieces of a difficult time. Our lives ask us to die and be reborn every time we confront change – change within ourselves and change in our world. When we descend all the way down to the bottom of a loss, and dwell patiently, with an open heart, in the darkness and pain, we can bring back up with us the sweetness of life and the exhilaration of inner growth. When there is nothing left to lose, we find the true self — the self that is whole, the self that is enough, the self that no longer looks to others for definition, or completion, or anything but companionship on the journey. This is the way to live a meaningful and hopeful life — a life of real happiness and inner peace.

The Brandenburg Gate model of progress and power, so esteeemed in today's society, is not a reliable one on which to base our life's work. Sometimes we are required to be an observer, as life's direction moves in a way that we did not anticipate. We may not feel in control of the power that is being manifested. We need, at times, to descend, rather than ascend, in order to grow. However, as Heminway reminds us, we are often stronger at the places where we have been broken. The surprising nature of life's path is part of its wonder, when we have eyes to see it. Life, as the animals in Narnia said of Altan, is "Oh no....not tame, but is good" As Lesser puts it, being broken is just one aspect of being open:

Over and over we are broken on the shore of life. Our stubborn egos are knocked around, and our frightened hearts are broken open - not once, and not in predictable patterns, but in surprising ways and for as long as we live. The promise of being broken and the possibility of being opened are written into the contract of human life.

The days I like best....

...are like today, filled with unexpected joys. Simple encounters. The kindness of friends. Good news. Real progress in plans.

Every day brings new experiences and change. Our practice is all about training the mind, and moving towards greater contentment that way. It means that we work on accepting whatever way things work out. However, when things go well, like today, the sense of contentment can be very deep. Practice works on how we see ourselves and life's events. It helps us to see positive events as common, and positive aspects of ourselves as permanent. It allows us see negative events as mainly filtered through negative thinking, exceptions to the general rule, not affecting our sense of self. It gradually works on the fear which is always lurking in our lives and relases its grip on our actions and our view of ourselves.

Joy does not simply happen to us.
We have to choose joy
and keep choosing it every day.

Henri Nouwen

Repeating patterns

We all have well-established habits
of thought, emotion, reaction and judgement,
and without the keen awareness of practice,
we're just acting out these patterns.

When they arise, we're not aware they've arisen.
We get lost in them,
identify with them,
act on them
— so much of our life is just acting out patterns.

Joseph Goldstein

GPS

I used the GPS once or twice in the past weeks to get to a destination on the other side of Geneva that I was unfamiliar with. However, I did not use it wisely, preferring to follow my own way for the first part of the journey, intending to pay attention to the GPS only for the last complicated bit. This succeeded in confusing the system as I ignored instruction after instruction. So for most of the journey all I could hear was "Turn Left .... Recalculating...turn right ....recalculating.... recalculating ....... recalculating...". If a device could be said to be frustrated this one certainly was.

I could have done with some sort of system in Berlin. I did not know the city at all and the traffic was quite intense. I could pass the same landmark a few times from different directions without knowing where I was. Then I would see it and say, "Ah yes, there's the Potzdamer Platz, I know where I am".

For a lot of the time it can feel as if our lives are like a busy street full of traffic, with cars, buses and trams going in every direction. It can be confusing, even disorientating. Maybe sometimes we can move in a straight line, like on the highway taking us home, but although we get there faster we still feel as if we have been running. Things are moving and changing almost continually so it is hard to step back and get our bearings. I certainly like to think I know where I am going, on a straight line with a clear direction and a firm sense of inner coherence. However, life often slips through my fingers, as much as I want to hold onto it, and assume that it is in my control. I can go round in circles for a period. Worse, I can ignore a deep inner voice thinking that I now know the way better.

However, gradually, if I stop and step back, I see gaps in the traffic. No matter how fast things seem to move, I am aware of myself as the one who is travelling, underneath all the movement. I can step back and slow down. In reality, on a day-to-day level, I think I am like the confused GPS. I spend most of the time recalculating. And I am at ease with that. Starting over and over again seems to be to be the heart of pratice. I have given up on the belief of a fixed consistency, pushing on towards a definite goal. I now can see that, even when confused, I am learning something from a different but still a sure kind of knowing. A kind of knowing that guides us when we are travelling blind, because many things in our lives do not become clear until much later. And, in the end, the way we travel is more important than the destination.

Anxiety

Underneath our nice, friendly facades
there is great unease.
If I were to scratch below the surface of anyone
I would find fear and anxiety running amok.
We all have ways to cover them up.
We overwork, over-drink, overeat;
we watch too much television,
we look for relationships.
We are always doing something
to cover up our basic existential anxiety.

Charlotte Joko Beck

On seeing a large office building in Berlin

We prefer our Big Macs and our Whoppers, our food portions supersized, our big cars and sprawling cities, our enormous football players, our big breasts and big houses (up from an average of 1,200 square feet in 1950 to 2,216 square feet today), our big armies with big reach, and, though we complain about it incessantly, big government that spends big money running up big debt (more now than at any other period in our history). That we allow corporations to grow to outrageous size is just another symptom of the disease. Bigness worship permeates every layer of the culture; it is racked into our brains with every turn of the advertising screw; it is a totalizing force.

Christopher Ketcham

Waiting

I went on a short work-related trip to Berlin recently. It was my first time visiting that city and my stay, albeit very short, was a lovely one, filled with the kindness of people. The flight took just one hour and twenty minutes, but to get on the plane required turning up much earlier and waiting. As always, the flight was delayed by the predictable "delay to the incoming flight", so a short eighty-minute journey took five hours out of the day.

Airports are not the worst place to wait. It is easy to sit there, and pay attention, to what is going on inside us and to what is going on around. The truth of human life is that we must spend quite a bit of time waiting. Not just on the physical level. At a deeper level we are all waiting for something or someone. For a possibility of healing, of a real contact, of meeting without pretence or the need to hide behind masks. These possibilities, large and small, await us — at the end of a journey, in a new relationship, in a change in how we are dealing with our life in this world. Sure, we all are anxious to get to our arrivals. But often we are in an in-between place, still in our waiting, and we have to have the courage not to go anywhere except the places where our lives are now, places we occupy until real contentment comes.

While waiting it can be a temptation to fill our lives with whatever we can to rob time of its tediousness. We can be afraid of being just with ourselves, in-between. We rush to fill the gap by doing too much, by not staying still. But when stillness comes our way – we can find it in an airport, in the slow reading of a good novel, in a quiet walk or in our sitting practice - it allows us to stay and taste the richness of the present moment as it opens our hearts to the inner beauty of life. A beauty as simple as having a glass of strange-coloured local beer in a square under the trees, which gave a sense of connection; it eased and gave meaning to the larger waits of life.

When we are not aware

When we practice,
we get aware and acquainted with ourselves
how our lives work
what we are doing with them.

Anything of which we are unaware will have it's fruits in our life
one way or another.

Charlotte Joko Beck

Our mortal heart

A lovely poem by Mary Oliver. She sees a dead tree and it remindes her of something or someone she has lost in her life. She talks of the tree which she loved. There are other trees. But this one she loved. It can be the same for all the losses in our lives, since everyday we lose something, as Stephen Levine reminds us.



Every day
on my way to the pond
I pass the lightning-felled,
chesty,
hundred-fingered, black oak
which, summers ago,
swam forward when the storm

laid one lean yellow wand against it, smoking it open
to its rosy heart.
It dropped down
in a veil of rain,
in a cloud of sap and fire,
and became what it has been ever since--
a black boat
floating
in the tossing leaves of summer,

like the coffin of Osiris
descending
upon the cloudy Nile.
But, listen, I'm tired of that brazen promise:
death and resurrection.
I'm tired of hearing how the nitrogens will return
to the earth again,
through the hinterland of patience--
how the mushrooms and the yeasts
will arrive in the wind--
how they'll anchor the pearls of their bodies and begin
to gnaw through the darkness,
like wolves at bones--

what I loved, I mean, what that tree--
tree of the moment--tree of my own sad, mortal heart--
and I don't want to sing anymore of the way

Osiris came home at last, on a clean
and powerful ship, over
the dangerous sea, as a tall
and beautiful stranger.

Mary Oliver, The Oak Tree at the Entrance to Blackwater Pond

Alone

Sometimes it is healthier to be alone. There are times in life when it is right to choose it - to move from the fear of being alone, to the ability to savour it. Mastering this ability is all about living a life in which we can feel whole and happy inside ourselves, and can take care of ourselves emotionally.

This capacity to be alone is one of the most important signs of maturity in emotional development. In Winnicott's theory of the development of the self, our ability to be alone is formed through the awareness of a stable loving presence. When we are secure in the knowledge of being cared for, we develop the capacity to be by ourselves. If that knowledge was not formed fully when we were little, we can sometimes throw ourselves into relationships and activities in later life because we do not like being with ourselves. Being able to be alone is the best preparation for healthy relationships because it is founded on a security deep inside and we are not using the relationship to run away from our insecurities.

Therefore, the best model for later life is the child playing contently by itself. Maybe this is why sitting practice is so effective; through it we learn to sit with ourselves, allowing our fears and anxiety arise and pass away without giving them undue space. We can develop strong roots, content in ourselves, at home in the silence, not running, planted firmly.

Therapy is completed when a child can play alone
Winnicott

Do not judge each day
by the harvest you reap
but by the seeds
that you plant.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Working with unpredictability

We have been born into an imperfect world, characterized by unpredictability and adversity, as finite human beings who change their minds, make mistakes, get confused, and think irrationally. There is much to contend with, and our ability to prevent or circumvent difficulty is quite limited. We aren’t omnipotent beings, and while we try to protect ourselves and maintain order in our lives, we simply don’t have the ability to safeguard ourselves from its disasters.

Things happen, and there may be nothing we can do to change that, but we can control our responses to them. We don’t have to despair in the face of disaster. We can either continue to respond in the way we’ve always done and get progressively worse, or we can turn things around and use our misfortune to aid our inner growth. We grow more quickly if we are open to working with difficulties rather than constantly running away from them. We learn to face unfavorable circumstances and “take them as the path” so that we are working with our problems rather than against them.

Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche, Training the Mind to Transform Adversity into Awakening

Letting go of projections

One of the biggest drives within us is for wholeness. It is a process which goes on all through our life but which maybe accelerates as we get older. We often feel divided and conflicted. We wish to integrate all the contrasting parts inside ourselves and develop a greater harmony within, a sense of direction that is solid and does not change from week to week. The first step in achieving this is to listen deeply to our own interior intelligence and find out what it is seeking.

One place we can see what it requires is where it projects onto others or onto something outside what it needs to notice for its own growth. For a while our interior need is attached to another person or to our work or some ambitions. In other words, we demand that the other person or the outside event fill in the missing parts of ourselves, rather than looking to grow within ourselves. We project the unconscious stage of our development onto another, and then act as if that person is what we imagine him or her to be. The person is actually a mirror of our needs, which we have not yet come to recognize in ourselves. As I have written before, our relationship with others reflects the current confusion or maturity of our relationship with ourselves.

It can be a great liberation to let go of projections and realize that they actually represent our interior unlived capacities. We turn within for what we sought outside. We can grow, because a part of us which was hidden is now coming to light. Sooner or later in life, we come face to face with the question of who we really are. If we do not run away but face this question in ourselves, it can be the beginning of the greatest adventure in our lives. We can find the missing pieces inside ourselves, and in this way let go and move on to becoming whole.

Just as we tend to assume that the world is as we see it, we naively suppose that people are as we imagine them to be. Although the possibility of gross deception is infinitely greater here than in our perception of the physical world, we still go on naively projecting our own psychology into our fellow human beings. In this way everyone creates for himself a series of more or less imaginary relationships based essentially on projection.

C. G Jung

The truth one cannot deny

Sometimes we have to trust our deepest feelings,
or go with what we know deep in our heart.

The center that I cannot find
is known to my unconscious mind.

Auden

Finding a new path

The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.

M Scott Peck

The Angel who comforts

One of my favourite stories from the Old Testament is that of Elijah who, threatened with death, fled out into the barren dry desert. Elijah is a strong, forceful character, but after a confrontation with the priests of Baal, he became depressed and frightened. He lost his motivation and courage and lay down in the shade of a tree, wishing he would die. Suddenly an angel touched him gently and gave him bread baked on coals and water, telling him to eat or else he will not be able to continue on his journey. He ate but had only the energy to sleep again. Again the angel gently touched him and encouraged him on his journey. Eventually Elijah rose and walked for forty days and nights to the Mountain of God.

As I have said before, these stories can be read on a number of levels. We can learn general themes about life in the individual story of this man. Elijah is like a lot of us when events or people turn against us. It can lead us to doubt ourselves and the direction we had taken. Sometimes we feel we cannot go on by ourselves. It is at that point, that frequently an "angel" comes to comfort and support us, someone whose encouragement or understanding simply gives us the strength to go on. The angel is gentle and wakes Elijah up slowly. In our lives we notice that often others do not give up on us as easily as we give up on ourselves. They provide the nourishment we need at that time, often simply just by listening. In the story the bread is baken on coals, symbolishing the ashes of the past experience. The angel opens our eyes and shows us what is right beside us to eat, which we had not seen up to that point. Even in the desert there is bread. Encouraged, we move on for forty days, forty being the biblical number for transformation, leaving behind the past, moving on to a deeper sense of self.

Choosing and Unchoosing

This weekend I have been reflecting on two different aspects of choice.

The first comes from my work with people who are wrestling with difficulties in their life. One area which I focus on is helping them with decisions. What is sometimes hard to accept is that when we choose something, it means that we un-choose something else. The root meaning of the word decision comes from the latin decisio meaning to cut or split. Inevitably something is cut out or let go of. What we work towards is that the person makes the choice and is able to stand over that choice. In other words, we are on this planet for a lifetime, and we wish to arrive at our final days with a realization that our choices have not led to regrets.

However there is a second reflection on choice. Sometimes people arrive at a stage in their life having let go of something or made choices for one aspect of their life over another. They have neglected deep aspects of themeselves or not developed all of their potential, out of fear or by following normal conventions. In these cases, the unchosen parts of their lives, if not fully processed, become the problem, by going underground and reappearing later to cause difficulties. What we need to realize is that true fulfillment only comes by integrating all the aspects of our selves into our choices, not by neglecting them.

Let go and be Happy

Each of us has a notion of how we can be happy. We could make a list of what we think we need to be happy: “I can only be happy if…” Write down the things you want and the things you do not want. Where did these ideas come from? Are they only your notions? If you are committed to a particular notion of happiness, you do not have much chance to be happy.

Happiness arrives from many directions. If you have a notion that it comes only from one direction, you will miss all of these other opportunities because you want happiness to come only from the direction you want. You say, “I would rather die than marry anyone but her. I would rather die than lose my job, my reputation. I cannot be happy if I don’t get that degree or that promotion or that house.” You have put many conditions on your happiness. And then, even if you do have all your conditions met, you still won’t be happy. You will just keep creating new conditions for your happiness. You will still want the new relationship, the higher degree, the better job and the more beautiful house.

Please remember that your notions of happiness may be very dangerous. Happiness can only be possible in the here and now. Go back and examine deeply your notions and ideas of happiness. So let go of what you believed yesterday. Let go of what you thought last week you needed to be happy. The conditions of happiness that are in your life now are enough.

Thich Nhat Hahn

A Dark Night

The classic story of the night journey is the Biblical tale of Jonah. ...Jonah was in the belly of the fish for three days and nights before it spewed him up on land. In your dark night you may have a sensation you could call "oceanic" - being in the sea, at sea, or immersed in the waters of the womb. The sea is the vast potential of life, but it is also your dark night, which may force you to surrender some knowledge you have achieved....

...to regress in a certain way is to return to origins..... You return to the womb of imagination so that your pregnancy can recycle. You are always being born, always dying to the day to find the restorative waters of night. In the dark night something of your makeup comes to an end - your ego, your self, your creativeness, your meaning. You may find in that darkness a key to your source, the larger soul that makes you who you are and holds the secrets of your existence. It is not enough to rely on the brilliance of your learning and intellect. You have to give yourself receptively to the transforming natural powers that remain mysteriously dark.

Being shaped by your darkness, like Jonah, you become the sun rising out of the night water. You are always being reborn, always slipping back into the sea. Your dark night may feel stagnant and unrhythmical, but it has its subtle movements. The movement in your darkness may be difficult to sense, but it may be present nonetheless. You may not be advancing, but you are in quiet motion. There you are, suffering your fate, stuck in some container that keeps your precious life at bay, and there you have a special beauty, a pulse that can be felt only in the dark.

Thomas Moore Dark Nights of the Soul

Vulnerable Warrior

To be a spiritual warrior,
one must have a broken heart;
without a broken heart
and the sense of tenderness and vulnerability
that is in one's self and all others,
your warriorship is untrustworthy.


Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior.

Work

Connectedness is another hallmark of the soul. Its important in our work not only to be excited about being successful and making money, but also deeply concerned about the value of what we're doing and having a stake in the outcome of the product. If you can take romanticism and sentimentality out of the word, you can say that it is necessary to love what we're doing and what we're making. People who are frustrated with their work often say they simply don't love what they're doing and therefore feel unmotivated to get to work. Love is the impetus that propels us toward our life work.

Thomas Moore, A Life at Work

Confidence in our real selves

As philosopher Alain de Botton points out, our work has become so closely tied up with our identity that the first question we often ask new acquaintances is not where they come from, but what they do. We invest our energy in our work, and it nourishes our heart, to a greater or lesser extent, and gives meaning to our lives. At the end of the day, our outer life is where we grow in our inner life. When we work in an area that touches other people, we can find that there is a harmony between our outer selves and the inner work we are doing. All of us look to be coherent and not fragmented in our relations with the world. We strive to find the role in life that nourishes the sources deep inside us, makes us feel complete, and where we can be our true selves. Unfortunately, many people can underdevelop their talents and potential, or even deny parts of themselves out of fear of what others may think. Sometimes we need to be daring and believe. Our life's mission is to bring all the key aspects of our being into our daily life or else we will not be fulfilled. We know when that happens because we feel alive, and real energy begins to flow. The question comes down to what we want to create with our lives.

Life is not easy for any of us.
But what of that?
We must have perseverance
and above all confidence in ourselves.
We must believe that we are gifted for something
and that this thing must be attained.

Marie Curie

Weather

What is up with the weather this week? Just one week ago one could not sleep with the heat and had to open windows to let some air in. This week people are talking about turning the heating back on. Wet and windy, even cold, more like late autumn than the summer of last week.

It points to a useful teaching. It alerts us to the natural tendency to try and hold on to. and make permanent, things that are going well. However, the only real reality is change. It is our basic instinct to search for happiness. And we can often think that a certain set of circumstances are necessary to achieve it. But then we find that the circumstances change. People change. Commitments change. It reinforces the basic truth that we face every time we sit: things arise and pass away.

Every time we have an experience that brings us face to face with the reality of impermanence, such as when someone moves away, we lose something we care about, or we hear something that changes completely our understanding of a situation, it is good that we take time to reflect on it, and on the way change happens in our life. The more we do that the more we find we are able to let things go. Everything is in transformation. When we can see that with a calm mind, and with an attitude of kindness, we can accept that change is inevitable, and move forward in peace. We can let go of last week and accept this week as it is.

Of course we all know that things change, that nothing endures. No one I know likes to go to the dentist, but everyone goes, more or less relaxed, even for complicated procedures. No one would go at all if appointments were open-ended, with no expectations of when, or even if, we would emerge. We remember things change when we go to the dentist, but we forget when we are confused. Grief confuses us, and loss and sadness frightens us. If we can keep at least a bit of the mind clear about temporality, we can manage complicated , even difficult, times with grace.

Sylvia Boorstein,
It's Easier Than You Think - The Buddhist Way to Happiness

The Swallows' Journey

The swallows are back. It always raises the heart when one sees them. They swoop with joy and energy. Whether they are the same ones as last year, which we are led to believe, or new ones, they let us know that warmer times are coming. However, they do more. They remind us of consistency and faithfulness because they seem to return year after year, and have some unseen sense of purpose and direction.

We look up at them and marvel. They know how to get from someplace far away to here and are equipped with all they need to do that, having an interior map and courage. They challenge us. We too may be capable of setting out on a long journey, of flying to other countries, but interiorly we frequently lose our way and, more often than we would like to admit, we cannot even get off the ground. And when we do we are not as consistent as the swallows - we change our mind and our mood from week to week. Life is, in many ways, a long trek, and we all have times of difficulty communicating who we are or where we really need to go, or even where we come from. There are no maps, nor is there a fortune-teller which can give us the definite answers to the mysteries of life. And yet there are kilometres and kilometres ahead of us.

I think that most of us at times can feel lost. We work hard at finding the way. However, increasingly I see that a sense of direction can also come when we let go, and allow someone or something greater than ourselves find us. Finding and knowing our way may not be as important as being found, being truly known. We get our sense of being on the right way because of that. It gives us a sense of belonging, of home.

Being gentle with ourselves as ones who get lost is necessary, because sometimes this has to happen in order for us to realize what we were really looking for or realize where we most feel ourselves, most feel at home. We may not be like the swallows, unerringly finding the way year after year. We are a mix, we make mistakes but we recalculate. We deviate, but know when we are home.

As long as anyone believes that his ideal and purpose is outside him, that it is above the clouds, in the past or in the future, he will go outside himself and seek fulfillment where it cannot be found. He will look for solutions and answers at every point except where they can be found - in himself.

Erich Fromm

More on the effects of mindfulness

Apparently, even a few days of meditation can have a marked effect on the mind and on how we deal with pain. Research conducted at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, published in The Journal of Pain in November 2009 found that a single hour of meditation spread out over a three day period can produce an analgesic effect on pain.

Simply stated, the profound improvements that we found after just four days of meditation training are really surprising, psychologist Fadel Zeidan said in releasing the study. It goes to show that the mind is, in fact, easily changeable and highly influenced, especially by meditation.

These findings support earlier research studies that found differences in pain awareness and other mental activities among long-time practitioners of mindfulness meditation techniques.

Not wanting to live

We can easily forgive a child
who is afraid of the dark;
the real tragedy of life
is when men are afraid of the light.

Plato

Drop in Session and Retreat

Just as a follow up to yesterday's post on setting aside some extra time for practice, there will be a Evening of Mindfulness Practice on Wednesday, 12th of May, at 19.30 hrs, Webster University (room above the Cafeteria). There well also be a Retreat Day on Saturday the 26th of June, from 9.30 to 16.00 hrs to give a chance for longer practice.

Permission

Was noticing yesterday how we can often give others a lot of control over how we act and change our normal behaviour because of our anticipation as to how they may react or think about us. In other words, we have an internalized thought or belief as to what others or our peers or society would approve of and modify what we do because of that. Often these changes are fear-driven and limit our freedom to do what we would normally do. The speed of this reflex to "check in" with others is astonishing and most times we do it even without noticing. However, because as humans we always have a need to be consistent, we find ourselves commenting to ourselves in order to justify this change in behaviour. We make excuses for our inconsistency. During my years of training to be a therapist one experienced therapist said to me in Supervision "Always watch the excuses". And when we notice the excuses in ourselves we often see that we are seeking permission from or consulting with scripts or models in our heads and measuring our behaviour against those models, and then making up a story to justify the gap.

One of the reasons why we practice meditation and other forms of mental training is to see the models which exist in our minds - the stories we tell ourselves - and to reduce their power over us. What mindfulness focuses on is increasing our inner freedom in order to reduce the sources of inconsistency and suffering. We try to be able to stop and ask "Who am I in this moment" and "what do I actually want". In this way we drop more into the present and notice the reflexive asking of permission. We make our choices based on ourselves not on looking to others. If we can do this, we increasingly act out of love not fear, regradless of the consequences or what people think.

Forgetting

I've learned that people will forget what you said,
people will forget what you did,
but people will never forget
how you made them feel.

Maya Angelou