Month: November 2011

Breaking down our identification with what is passing…

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Awareness watches the sensations that occur with the natural coming and going of the breath. When we bring attention to the level of sensation, we are not so entangled in the verbal level where all the voices of thought hold sway, usually lost in the “internal dialogue.” The internal dialogue is always commenting and judging and planning. It contains a lot of thoughts of self, a lot of self-consciousness. It blocks the light of our natural wisdom; it limits our seeing who we are; it makes a lot of noise and attracts our attention to a fraction of the reality in which we exist. But when the awareness is one-pointedly focused on the coming and going of the breath, all the other aspects of the mind/body process come automatically, clearly into focus as they arise. Meditation puts us into direct contact – which means direct experience – with more of who we are.

We see how thoughts we took to be “me” or “mine” are just an ongoing process. This perspective helps break our deep identification with the seeming solid reality of the movie of the mind. As we become less engrossed in the melodrama, we see it’s just flow, and can watch it all as it passes. We are not even drawn into the action by the passing of a judgmental comment or an agitated moment of impatience. When we simply see  – moment to moment  – what’s occurring, observing without judgment or preference, we don’t get lost thinking, “I prefer this moment to that moment, I prefer this pleasant thought to that pain in my knee.” As we begin developing this choiceless awareness, what starts coming within the field of awareness is quite remarkable: we start seeing the root from which thought arises.

Stephen Levine, A Gradual Awakening

…and create room for joy

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We create room for joy as we move beyond “shoulds” and “musts” to an expansive state where we accept our capacity to be both powerful and gentle, expansive and reclusive, delighted and bored, wise and confused, passive and assertive, giving and receptive, generous and withholding, frightened and adventuresome, angry and loving. As we become accepting of ourselves we are more able to reach inside and speak our truths: Yes, No, I want, I can, I feel, I believe, I see, I love. This is a form of self-love that creates unity and peacefulness within because we are living at one with our wisest self.

Charlotte Kasl, Finding Joy

This Sunday, stop, be aimless…..

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Does the rose have to do something? No, the purpose of a rose is to be a rose. Your purpose is to be yourself. You don’t have to run anywhere to become someone else. You are wonderful just the way you are. We already have everything we are looking for, everything we want to become. Just be. Just being in the moment in this place is the deepest practice of meditation. The Heart Sutra says that there is “nothing to attain.”  We don’t need to search anywhere. We don’t need to practice to obtain some high position. We can enjoy every moment. People talk about entering nirvana, but we are already there. We have everything we need to make the present moment the happiest in our life, even if we have a cold or a headache. We don’t have to wait until we get over our cold to be happy. Having a cold is part of life. I am happy in the present moment. I do not ask for anything else. I do not expect any additional happiness. Aimlessness is stopping and realizing the happiness that is already available.

Thich Nhat Hahn

Sunday Quote: Looking within

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I can give you nothing that has not already its origins within yourself.

I can throw open no picture gallery but your own.

I can help make your own world visible…. that is all.

Herman Hesse

Quietening the mind

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Inside me a hundred beings are putting their fingers to their lips and saying,

“That’s enough for now.  Shhhhh.”

Silence is an ocean.   Speech is a river.

When the ocean is searching for you, don’t walk

to the language-river.

Listen to the ocean,

and bring your talky business to an end.

Rumi, Send the Chaperones Away

Stop fixing and choosing and doing and making….

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The engine that makes this go is taking a step back and trusting the body, trusting the breath, trusting the heart. We’re living our lives madly trying to hold onto everything, and it looks like it might work for awhile but in the end it always fails, and it never was working, and the way to be happy, the way to be loving, the way to be free is to really be willing to let go of everything on every occasion or at least to make that effort. So the practice really works with sitting down, returning awareness to the body, returning awareness to the breath. It usually involves sitting up straight and opening up the body and lifting the body so that the breath can be unrestrained. And then returning the mind to the present moment of being alive, which is anchored in the breath, in the body.

Then, of course, other things happen. You have thoughts, you have feelings. You might have a pain, an ache, visions, memories, reflections. All these things arise, but instead of applying yourself to them and getting entangled in them, you just bear witness to it, let it go, come back to the breathing and the body, and what happens is you release a whole lot of stuff in yourself. A whole new process comes into being that would not have been there if you were always fixing and choosing and doing and making. This way you’re allowing something to take place within your heart.

Norman Fischer