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

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.

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

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

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

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

The two wolves

A Native American grandfather was speaking to his grandson about violence and cruelty in the world and how it comes about. He said it was as if two wolves were fighting in his heart. One wolf was vengeful and angry, and the other wolf was understanding and kind. The young man asked his grandfather which wolf would win the fight in his heart. And the grandfather answered, “The one that wins will be the one I choose to feed.”

So this is our challenge, the challenge for our practice and the challenge for the world — how can we train right now, not later, in feeding the right wolf? How can we call on our innate intelligence to see what helps and what hurts, what escalates aggression and what uncovers our good-heartedness?

Pema Chodron, Taking the Leap

Letting go of your cows

We all have different ideas as to how to get to happiness. Mindfulness practice helps us see that it can be increased if we stop trying to hold onto our idea of what life should be like, and instead move towards what life actually is like. This means we have to let go, including letting go some of some ideas we have about happiness and the conditions we feel must be fulfilled in order for happiness to come.

There is an old story from the Buddhist tradition which illustrates this, here told by Thich Nhat Hahn:

One day the Buddha was sitting in the forest with some monks when a farmer approached them. The farmer said, "Venerable monks, did you see my cows come by? I have a dozen cows and they all ran away. On top of that I have five acres of sesame plants and this year the insects ate them all up. I think I am going to kill myself. It isn't possible to live like this"

The Buddha felt a lot of compassion toward the farmer. He said "My friend, I am sorry, we did not see your cows come this way". When the farmer had gone, the Buddha turned to his monks and said "My friends, Do you know why you are happy? Because you have no cows to lose"

I would like to say the same to you. If you have some cows you have to identify them. You think they are essential to your happiness, but if you practice deep looking, you will see that it is not these cows that have brought about your happiness. The secret of happiness is being able to let go of your cows.

Ups and downs

Today it has gotten really cold again with a sharp north wind. The poor crocus who bloomed in last week's mild weather is closed and bent over and the olive tree is back under its covers.

A lot has changed over the last few weeks, and not just in terms of the weather. We feel growth in life is best supported when the outside conditions are constant, when we have support and warmth. Sometimes, instead, we find inconsistency and even hard winds, those whom we rely on are not there, things do not go as we wished and we falter.

However, even if at times it is difficult, this type of change is good because we learn that we are not in charge of what happens over a period of weeks, even over a period of hours. Often we cannot choose what happens, just as we cannot choose the weather when we step out of work in the evening. However, what we can choose is how we respond. We naturally have a preference for the pleasant over the unpleasant, but the practice is to come back to what is happening now and to keep cultivating a mind that is not fighting with it.

Practice

The essence of practice is always the same:
instead of falling prey to a chain reaction
of revenge or hatred,
we gradually learn to catch the emotional reaction
and drop the story lines.

Pema Chodron

Underneath

Meditation is one of the keys
to unlocking the natural generosity of the heart.

Underneath the greedy
and selfish thoughts and feelings
that are part of the human condition
lies a pure desire to help.

We experience this in our mindfulness practice.

When we let go
there is a natural acceptance
and feeling of care.

Noah Levine

Defense Mechanisms

As the previous post reminds us, mindfulness practice essentially simplifies space, drawing together the scattered parts of our mind and our life and helping us in the process of integrating our lives. It does this by holding in awareness all the parts of our lives, even those which we find frightening or threatening. We try to sit with events in our lives - or parts of our selves - that are difficult and we work on the mind's tendency to flee. It seems that personal growth happens more quickly if we are open to working with difficulties rather than trying to constantly run away from them. Mindfulness helps us to see that whenever we feel that we are really stuck, it is because we have not looked deeply enough into the nature of the experience.

However, simply looking at things can be difficult, especially in times of crisis or turbulence. It is in these moments when we feel overwhelmed, that we are most likely to judge ourselves or others most harshly. We have a tendency to identify with a difficulty and that affects how we see ourselves or how our life is going.One way of dealing with feelings provoked by this is to split the world into "good" and "bad", them and us, solidifiying our sense of self, maximizing distance in order to increase a sense of safety. Splitting is a defense mechanism which can be activated when we are threatened, and means that we are unable to see complexity in the situation or the person, rather seeing them as all bad. There is no grey area, histories are frozen into a moment and we let that moment define us or the other person. We solidify the most negative core beliefs about ourselves or others and let them define our life, seeing it as threatened or hopeless.

Mindfulness practice can help us be aware of these defense mechanisms arising, see fear and anger forming, and help us notice the desire to withdraw appearing, normally accompanied by a kind of defensive story-line. If we can spot this happening we may have enough of a gap to see the whole drama transparently. If so, we can question what is feeling threatened, whether it is really actually me, or some story which I have about myself and my life. If we can resist the tendency to split or identify we can come to see that everything is workable. We can then experience for ourselves that it is ultimately possible to work with everything, and to keep a compassionate heart open to others and to all that occurs in our lives

Simplifying Space

Sitting [in meditation] is essentially simplifying space. Our daily lives are in constant movement: lots of things going on, lots of people talking, lots of events taking place. In the middle of that, it’s very difficult to sense what we are in our life. When we simplify the situation, when we take away the externals and remove ourselves from the ringing phone, the television, the people who visit us, the dog who needs a walk, we get a chance to face ourselves.

Charlotte Joko Beck

Instructions on how to live

Instructions for living a life:

Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

Mary Oliver, Sometimes

A soft day

In Ireland the term " a soft day" is used to describe a day with very light rain. Traditionally people would say "It's a soft day, thank God", even if it had been raining for weeks and was miserably cold ...which probably demonstrates that - or maybe explains why - the Irish are entirely mad. Today, there has been gentle snow falling all day, an alpine equivalent of the Irish soft rain. It falls gently, persistently, on top of the snow already lying on the garden, without a sound, snow on snow.

When we practice we try and take a light touch, not taking ourselves too seriously. We also try to lightly use the breath as an anchor, not thinking of the breath but gently dropping in on it, like the gentle touch of this soft snow. We also soften our posture as we sit, not needing to force or strain, as sitting is dropping into the natural and gentle calm that exists inside us. We just let ourselves settle gently.

It is good to work in this way; It is so easy to be harsh with ourselves, in practice and in life.

Sunday morning

Calmness
comes from the ability
to let the mind
be at ease and relaxed
in whatever the situation.

Let go

The river flows rapidly down the mountain, and then all of a sudden it gets blocked with big boulders and a lot of trees. The water can’t go any farther, even though it has tremendous force and forward energy. It just gets blocked there. That’s what happens with us, too; we get blocked like that.

Letting go at the end of the out-breath, letting the thoughts go, is like moving one of those boulders away so that the water can keep flowing, so that our energy and our life force can keep evolving and going forward. We don’t, out of fear of the unknown, have to put up these blocks, these dams, that basically say no to life and to feeling life.

Pema Chodron,

Monkey mind

The biggest hindrance to (mindfulness) is constant intrusive thoughts.

This is normal for everyone and from the beginning you should expect it. The nature of our mind is to think, and it is childish to imagine that we can simply turn that process off when we wish to.

Our minds have been almost completely out of control for most of our life.

Recognizing this can help us to be practical and patient—it may take us some time and a lot of skillful practice to tame the crazy “monkey mind.”

Bob Sharples

Desert Fathers and Mothers

The name Desert Fathers and Mothers is given to those early monks in the Christian Tradition who went into the desert in Egypt in the third century. Even though life then was probably much simpler than now, they were convinced that they could develop their inner life better in the quietness of the desert rather than in the distractions of the city.

Their thoughts on the practice of meditation and prayer have been passed down to us in the form of short sayings and stories. Many of these have strong resonances with the practice of mindfulness meditation. They emphaisize paying attention to thoughts, staying in the one place or the one activity, patience with one's self, compassion for others.

Abba Anthony said:
"When you sit quietly alone,
you escape three sources of distaction,
hearing, speaking and seeing.
The only thing you will fight the whole time
is with your own heart"