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