Month: March 2012

Not knowing can be good

Karl Duffy1 Comment

In our practice we keep returning to the present moment, trying to pay attention and stay there. Life continually gives occasions for practicing this skill and especially for noticing how many times we are away. The present is really the only time there is and the more we practice with it,  the more we see how each moment is special, and to a certain extent complete. However, in another important sense, our practice allows us see that the present is fluid and incomplete and that being open to this also holds a real richness. It allows us hold a space, between the past and the future, ready for all possibilities, not needing to know the whole picture but rather trusting that it will appear in its own time:

In-between is where humans always are,
thats what we have to welcome,
a story with an uncertain ending.

And this condition is interesting if you inhabit it;
it’s alive.

If I’m facing something that I don’t know what to do,
the “not knowing” is what is true,
and the resources that I have,
deeply ignorant that I am,
will have to be enough.

John Tarrant

Reducing the big picture down to what is in front of us

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It seems that the key to the practice is maintaining vision and focus. Vision keeps an overview of what one is doing and the greater context in mind. Focus is concerned with the specific task at hand. The whole thing is too big to focus on at once but I can start with one simple thing, the floors. I like sweeping the floors. I know how to do it. I don’t feel anxious about it. I find it relaxing. And most days, people haven’t taken away the dust pan and broom so it is actually possible to do. When I’m sweeping the floor, I enjoy it. I relax into the movement, feel my body and breath and focus on the bit of floor I’m sweeping. But I keep the whole floor in mind. So the vision is the whole floor and the focus is the little bit I’m working on.

Ajahn Thanasanti, Maintaining vision, while Focusing

Being content with what you have

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Reflecting on life in this human form: it is just like this, it’s being able to sit peacefully and get up peacefully and be content with what you have; it’s that which makes our life as a daily experience something that is joyful and not suffering. And this is how most of our life can be lived – you can’t live in ecstatic states of rapture and bliss and do the dishes, can you?    That’s why whenever we contemplate cessation, we’re not looking for the end of the universe but just the exhalation of the breath or the end of the day or the end of the thought or the end of the feeling. To notice that means that we have to pay attention to the flow of life – we have to really notice the way it is rather than wait for some kind of fantastic experience of marvelous light descending on us, zapping us or whatever.  Can you trust that? Can you trust in just letting everything go and cease and not being anybody and not having any mission, not having to become anything?

Ajahn Sumedho, Being Nobody

Becoming more awake

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We don’t sit in meditation to become good meditators:

We sit in meditation so that we’ll be more awake in our lives.

Pema Chodron

Spring: The Narrative reappears

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It might be liberating to think of human life as informed by losses and disappearances just as much as by gifted appearances, allowing a more present participation and witness to the difficulty of living. What is real can never be fully taken away; its essence always remains. It might set us a little freer to believe that there is no path in life – in the low valley, … or abroad in the mountain night, that does not lead to some form of heartbreak when the outer narrative disappears and then reappears in a different form. If we are sincere, every good marriage or relationship will break our hearts in order to enlarge our understanding of our self and that strange other with whom we have promised ourselves to the future. Being a good parent will necessarily break our hearts as we watch a child grow and eventually choose their own way, even through many of the same heartbreaks we have traversed. Following a vocation or an art form through decades of practice and understanding will break the idealistic heart that began the journey and replace it, if we sidestep the temptations of bitterness and self-pity, with something more malleable, compassionate and generous than the metaphysical organ with which we began the journey. We learn, grow and become compassionate and generous as much through exile as homecoming; as much through loss as gain, as much through giving things away as in receiving what we believe to be our due.

David Whyte, The Poetic Narrative Of Our Times

The key is paying attention

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The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice there is little we can do to change, until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.

R.D. Laing