Outside and Inside

There are many wrong tracks in society, but they are all basically the same:
They all take us outside of ourselves to satisfy our inner needs.
Whether they take us toward material goods
or towards social relationships and emotional codependence,
they all ignore the mind's own potential to provide us with happiness and peace

Dzigar Kongtrul, It's Up to You

Ants

The other day I threw out into the garden the end of a pear I had eaten. I had hoped that it would be food for the songthrush and blackbird who visit. However, a few minutes later I noticed that it had been discovered by ants, who were working incredibly fast to extract its goodness and bring it back to the nest. In a straight line they worked quickly, back and forth, organized, one following the trail left by the last, with one purpose, focused on a clear goal.

This dull Sunday morning I can reflect on direction and purpose. My Sunday roots are in Catholicism. When I was young we dressed in our best clothes which were all laid out in preparation on the night before. Saturday night was the time to polish shoes, so that there was a heightened sense of ritual and specialness about going to Church on the Sunday morning. It was a place set apart. It anchored the week and was clearly the moment which gave meaning to it. In my young eyes it was a place of certainty and continuity, an outer form that was bigger than me and gave the impression of being a container where all of life's questions could be answered and complexities resolved.

However, despite such clarity when little and despite having invested all the years since to developing the inner life in different ways, I cannot say that life has become more certain. Ants can move consistently in a straight line. As a young adult I felt that my life plan moved in the same way. However, I see now that such a need for straight lines and a definite script came from anxiety and has been replaced by trust. Life is complex and I have moved, and continue to move, in more meandering ways. What I have come to realize, is that in spite of those seeming changes in direction and complexity of experiences, whatever meaning there is to be found comes to me slowly, sometimes unexpectedly, and I am content with that.

I am dressed more casually this Sunday morning, but it is no less special because of that. Meaning can be found inside and in the ordinary. It is not necessary to always be as busy as the ant to find direction. One does not have to know the end point on the map to be going in the right way.

Inside or Outside: Where to look

I may not hope
from outward forms to win
The passion and the life,
whose fountains are within.

Coleridge

Practice

In your light I learn how to love
In your beauty, how to make poems

You dance inside my chest,
where no one sees you

but sometimes I do,
and that sight becomes this art...


Rumi

Richard Davidson on how the brain can change

An excerpt from Dr. Richard Davidson's keynote address on contemplative neuroscience at the Center for Mindfulness 7th Annual International Conference, March 2009

Healthy Minds

I have already written about the work of Richard Davidson Ph.D on the effects of meditation on the shape and function of the brain. He is now the Director of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is learning that the brain can be trained and shaped to be more positive and resilient.

On May 16th, the Dalai Lama will inaugurate there the Centre for Investigating Healthy Minds, which has as its focus contempklative neuroscience - "the study of healthy qualities of mind". It aims to study how meditation practices can play a role in changing the mind in a positive manner.

Learning to understand how positive qualities such as attention, concentration, clarity, cooperation and kindness can affect the brain will allow scientists to develop interventions to nurture these capacities in children and adults so that they can be more attentive, focused, loving, forgiving and compassionate.

Check out their website: http://www.investigatinghealthyminds.org/index.html

Opposites

... Without darkness
Nothing comes to birth,

As without light
Nothing flowers.

May Sarton

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