Month: February 2011

Sunday Quote: Choosing

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You are what you want to become.

Thich Nhat Hahn

Realities which make life beautiful

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I was talking earlier today with someone about time spent I spent in the Ecumenical community in Taize in France many years ago, when the founder, Br. Roger,  was still alive. His extraordinary simplicity and humanity was very striking, managing to combine a deep inner life with an understanding of what makes for full human growth. He witnessed a time of hatred and war in his youth and went on to create a community that healed divisions. Many of his words, like these ones, reduce life down to its essence, away from the fears which make us lose faith in each other.

Are there realities which make life beautiful and of which it can be said that they bring a kind of fulfillment, an inner joy? Yes, there are. And one of these realities bears the name of trust. Do we realize that what is best in each of us is built up through a simple trusting? This is something even a child can do.

Br Roger.

First steps in Mindfulness: Strengthen concentration

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Too many meditators get discouraged at the beginning because their minds won’t settle down. But just as you can’t wait until you’re  strong before you start strength training, you can’t wait until your concentration is strong before you start sitting.  Only by exercising what little concentration you have will you make it solid and steady.

Thanissaro Bhikkhu, Building your mental muscles

How meditation leads to kindness

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Think of Mindfulness as the habit of seeing things in an uncomplicated way. We generally don’t. Based on our individual histories, our memories, and our fears, we often make up our reality out of a projected worry and frighten or discourage ourselves. Mindfulness is seeing things as they actually are,  not as we imagine them to be.

Mindfulness practice… supports our ability to best serve. It keeps our motivation going. I say, “When we see, even in the simplest circumstances, how difficult it is to stay content, how easily irritated we become, how many worries we have, how hard it is to relax — we intuit that that must be true for other people as well. All other people. And we start to be kinder. We are kinder to ourselves and, ultimately, more forgiving of others. The world would get happier if everyone relaxed and forgave each other.” Usually people think about that a moment. Then they smile and say, “I think you’re right.”

Sylvia Boorstein

The essential rule for life and happiness

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In the different wisdom traditions we find attempts to reduce down to their simplest all of the instructions about living a full life: What is the essence of practice? What leads to true contentment?  We can see that is this tale from the Jewish  tradition, which resembles the simple direct presentation of wisdom found in the Christian Desert Fathers and in the Zen tradition. We are told that a man approached Rabbi Hillel and promised to convert to Judaism if the Rabbi managed to recite the whole of the Jewish teaching, while standing on one leg. Rabbi Hillel stood on one leg and said simply: That which is hateful to you, do not do that to your neighbour. That is the essence of the Law. Everything else is just a Commentary. Go and Study it.

Book Review: Beyond Happiness

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Will do some book reviews over the next few weeks. I always like Ezra Bayda’s writing, especially At Home in the Muddy Water. He is from the Zen tradition,  having trained with Charlotte Joko Beck, at the Ordinary Mind Zen School. He is a student of meditation since 1970 and currently teaches at the  Zen Center in San Diego. His latest book is entitled Beyond Happiness: The Zen Way to True Contentment. It was nominated as “one of the best books of the year” by the magazine Spirituality and Health.

This book bases itself on the most recent research on happiness, such as that found in The How of Happiness by Sonja Lyubomirsky, where we learn that external circumstances, such as our career, relationships and prosperity are not as important in our overall happiness as we may think. Rather,  we are born with a certain predisposition to happiness and then can work on our happiness by the way we deal with our everyday circumstances. In other words, our  “intentional activities”are largely responsible for how happy we are –  mindful actions that we do every day to achieve a happier life. Eric Bayda develops this concept by asking three key questions:  Am I truly happy right now? If not, what blocks it? And, can I surrender to what is? At the end of the day he comes up with two key ways that we can work at developing our sense of contentment and removing the things that block and poison our heart, namely, cultivating gratitude and  actively forgiving.

This is a nice book in the current trend of applying Buddhist principles to the psychological areas of growth in our lives and practical ways of developing contentment.

Perhaps one of the commonest places we get stuck and consequently one of the places that most prevents happiness is holding onto resentments. If there is even one person we cannot forgive, it closes our hearts in bitterness and will prevent us from experiencing the equanimity of genuine happiness….It may be easy for us to be kind, and also forgiving, when life is going well. But it is only when life gets difficult that the depth of our spiritual practice is revealed. For our kindness to be real it cannot depend on how others treat us, or how we feel at any given moment.