For my wife, on our anniversary
Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear,
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye
clear. What we need is here.
Wendell Berry
Our minds are such that we are often more asleep than awake
to the unique beauty and possibilities
of each present moment as it unfolds.
Jon Kabat Zinn
We get a lot of opportunities in our lives to practice with difficult events we do not understand or experiences that we do not know how they will turn out in the end. So there is a constant dialogue between emptiness and form, with the mind preferring to have definite form most times. We like to be able to give things a definite name, even, paradoxically, preferring to put words like “I’m falling apart” on an experience of confusion or doubt, rather than leave it as an unpleasant feeling. We quickly like to compare experiences with words like “not as good as”, or “went really well” becoming fixed early or immediately after some event. The problem with this is that the mind tends to solidify around the naming and fix the experience there, even though its full meaning has not yet come to light. So there is a wisdom in not naming, in being able to hold a space around an experience which in ongoing. The main ongoing skill in mindfulness practice , which we return to over and over again, is being present in the present moment. We are between what has happened ( which is now a memory, but may be quite active in our emotions and fears, influencing our naming) and what could happen (which is at this moment just a thought). We are in the present, which is really the only time there is. We try to ground our whole sense of balance there, instead of creating fears and what-if’s in our rush to have meaning. Everything else is uncertain.
In-between is where humans always are,
that’s 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
A new MBSR group started last evening. However, new or experienced, young or old, the practice is the same: intentionally seeing what is present each moment before our eyes, tuning in to the richness of what is already there, switching off the leaning in our being and in our doing.
Non-doing has nothing to do with being indolent or passive. Quite the contrary. It takes great courage and energy to cultivate non-doing, both in stillness and in activity. Nor is it easy to make a special time for non-doing and to keep at it in the face of everything in our lives which needs to be done.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
It’s natural to move toward what feels good and away from what doesn’t, natural as well to have values, principles, and morals. But when these healthy inclinations become internal rules – “shoulds,” “musts,” and “gottas” – then there is a big problem. We feel driven, righteous, or like a failure. At bottom, “shoulds” are not about events. They’re about what you want to experience (especially emotions and sensations) if your demands on reality are met, or what you fear you’ll experience if they’re not. Whether your “shoulds” are shaped by neural programs laid down when dinosaurs ruled the earth, or when you were in grade school, they often operate unconsciously or barely semi-consciously – all the more powerfully for lurking in the shadows. Plus, in a deep sense, your “shoulds” control you.
Rick Hanson
In 1929 the British Broadcasting Corporation decided to start broadcasting “live silence” in memory of the dead instead of just halting transmission for two minutes every day; it was important, it was felt, to hear the rustle of papers, the singing of the birds outside, an occasional cough. As a BBC spokesman put it, with rare wisdom, silence is “a solvent which destroys personality and gives us leave to be great and universal.” It permits us, in short, to be who we are and could be if only we had the openness and trust. A chapel is where we hear something and nothing, ourselves and everyone else, a silence that is not the absence of noise, but the presence of something much deeper: the depth beneath our thoughts.
A chapel is where you can hear something beating below your heart.
Mindfulbalance 