Eyes to see

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

Proust

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

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

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

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.

Beware

Beware the barrenness
of a busy life

Socrates

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

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

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

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

In between

At every moment we are all in mid-process.

We are between what has happened (and which is now just a memory, but may be quite active in our emotions and fears) and what might happen (which is at this moment just a thought). We are in the present, which is really the only time anything is. This may lead us to feel divided. However, it is actually a richness which can help us respond to life in creative and new ways. For example we can break down the future, which can sometimes overwhelm and frighten. We do not have to live the whole of the future. Just this step. Then the next step.

It changes our attitude towards ourself also. If we can be mindful in this moment, we bring a gentle non-judgment to ourselves and to our life. This helps us soften in the moment, and resist the natural tendency to become rigid, especially if we are going through a difficult period. It goes against a primitive defense mechanism, which Melanie Klein referred to when she said that one problematic way of dealing with anxious thoughts is simply to avoid them and remove them from awareness. Unfortunately this only prolongs the problem. Awareness can help us break repeating unhelpful or frightening patterns of thinking, or slow down intrusive and unpredictable feelings. It allows us move beyond the categories of whether someone is right or wrong, by focusing on just being with what is going on inside ourselves at this moment. Gently. Without adding the extra burden of bad self or bad other.

This is not so easy, because if we notice stong emotion in the moment it normally means that we are already caught or hooked by a reaction. However, contrary to our normal instinct, it is by learning to become more open to others and to what is happening that we grow stronger. It has been said that the whole of the inner life begins with generosity in the heart, because that is about creating space. Space for this actual moment. It softens us rather than freezing us into what Srikumar Rao calls the "if - then" model. "If only this moment was different then I would be happy"....If only such or such happens then I will be happy"

Being present in the present moment is a skill, that we try to cultivate in our practice. I find that life continually gives me occasions for practicing this skill and a lot of time I fail. However, when I do, I find I do not add to life's difficulty by struggling with it, or by resenting it, or by resisting it. I find my mind relaxes when I remember to be generous and non-judgmental, firstly towards myself and then towards others and the world.

In-between is where humans always are,
thats what we have to welcome,
a story with an uncertain ending.

And this condition is interesting if you inhabit it;
it's alive.

If I'm facing something that I don't know what to do,
the "not knowing" is what is true,
and the resources that I have,
deeply ignorant that I am,
will have to be enough.

John Tarrant

Facing up to the truth

The reason why silence is so disturbing to us [is this]: As soon as we begin to become silent, we experience the relativity of our ordinary everyday mind. With this mind we measure our space and time coordinates, we calculate probabilities and count up our mistakes and successes. It is so useful and familiar a state of mind that we easily think it is all there is to us: our whole mind, our real selves, our full meaning.

Life, love, and death frequently teach us otherwise. We bump into silence at many unexpected turnings on the road of life, in unpredictable ways, in unexpected moments. Its greeting has an effect which is both full of wonder and yet often terrifying. Our thoughts, fears, fantasies, hopes, angers and attractions are all rising and falling moment by moment. We automatically identify ourselves with these fleeting or compulsively recurring states without thinking what we are thinking. When silence teaches us how unreliably transient these states really are, we confront the terrible questions of who we are. In silence we must wrestle with the terrible possibility of our own non-reality.

Laurence Freeman

Relating to problems

We cannot always change the perplexing conditions of our lives

– but we can change how our minds relate to them.

Tara Bennett-Goleman

Instructions on how to live

Instructions for living a life:

Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

Mary Oliver, Sometimes

Media use and distractions

The Kaiser Family Foundation is a non-profit, private operating foundation focusing on the major health care issues facing the U.S. They conduct research on issues affecting health, including the effects of media usage on young people. This month they published a study which found a huge increase in TV, music, phone, computer, and video game usage among 8-18 year olds compared to just five years ago. The rate of increase also accelerated over those years. What was also interesting was the increase in multi-tasking in that age range, where people are using two devices at once, such as texting while watching YouTube videos or talking on the phone while watching TV.

This would seem to be the situation with adults also. It is quite easy to observe today that as soon as the television programme, meal or meeting gets less interesting, people pull out their Blackberries and iPhones and starting checking messages, mail or the net. Now that laptops are much smaller it is possible to work on them while watching TV, and working on them may entail social networking while actually writing a report.

It is clear now that the speed of technological advances is not going to slow down. If anything it will get faster, and we will increasingly live in a connected and media-saturated world. Although many of the advances are helpful it is not clear that all lead to a greater sense of calm. Indeed many studies show links between increased stress and the breakdown in work-life and home-life boundaries.

Mindfulness encourages us to pay attention to what is happening and to simplify our focus of attention. Continually practising being divided in our attention only strengthens the possibility of being scattered and having no sense of being centred. It can increase our sense of anxiety. So we can become aware of our urge to immediately check emails or send that text right now. It can be useful to interrupt the urge and see if our life will actually fall apart.

Fresh eyes

"I think it pisses God off
if you walk by the color purple in a field
and don't notice it."

Alice Walker, The Color Purple

Sometimes we can get caught up in the rush of every day or the familiarity of our routines. We can fail to notice the beauty in ordinary experience. Imagine if we we visiting a place for the first time and were struck by the vibrancy, the energy and the qualities of the people. In that situation everything would seem more real, more alive. There would be such a sense of wonder.

Today let us look at each experience as if for the first time: Open our eyes, pause, wonder, notice the details, celebrate life.

Letting go of fear

Awareness is born of intimacy. We can only fear what we do not understand and what we perceive from a distance. We can only find compassion and freedom in intimacy. We can be afraid of intimacy because we are afraid of helplessness; we fear that we don’t have the inner balance to embrace it without being overwhelmed. Yet each time we find the willingness to meet fear, we discover we are not powerless. Awareness rescues us from helplessness, teaching us to be helpful through our kindness, patience, resilience, and courage. Awareness is the forerunner of understanding, and understanding is the prerequisite to bringing suffering to an end.

Christine Feldman

Walking the Dog

"One of the best ways to learn to be mindful is to take the dog for a walk. Dogs are always in the moment. They can take the same walk for 10 years and still experience grass in an entirely new way each day. They're not worried about the past ("Why didn't my people give me some of that chicken they had for dinner?") or the future (" I wonder if my people will give me any chicken when we get home?"). All they think about is what is right in front of them: the smell of the grass, the basset hound in the yard next door, the squirrel in the tree across the street"

Alice Domar & Alice Lesch Kelly: Be Happy without being Perfect: How to break free from the Perfection Domination

Making Space

Don't fill the Gaps:

"Gaps between activities allow our minds to reopen, expand and have original, often time-and-effort-saving big ideas. So don't walk with your head down, lost in thought. Don't just text and call folks when you're driving or waiting. Don't read the newspaper when you're in the bathroom. Allow a little space in your life. Doing nothing is the foundation for doing anything - and it's one thing we Americans are really, really bad at. So let go of one or two minutes of entertainment a day - and look out upon this life and world"

Waylon Lewis, Huffington Post

Distractions

There is a lot of research going on these days into the effects and benefits of meditation. Psychologists at John Moores University, Liverpool, tested meditators and non-meditators to see how effectively they could tune out distractions and complete a detailed task, as well as to see how well they could override their automatic thoughts and behaviours. They found that experienced meditators performed significantly better than those who had never meditated. Thus it seems that meditation promotes the flexibility needed to accomplish more and stay calm in stressful situations.