Month: June 2013

Entry points

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waiting for the elevator

If the intention is to bring awareness to the direct experience of the present moment, with fresh eyes, then life itself becomes the practice. What’s so powerful about understanding that wherever you are that is the entry point is that it frees us of this false belief that we need to be in a certain head space to train our minds toward mindfulness. In the moments you are doubting, agitated, restless or bored, these are the entry points to the present moment…no matter what is happening in your life at any given moment, that is what you can practice being mindful with.

Elisha Goldstein, A Key Mindful Lesson for us all

You do not have to wait

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????????

Wherever you are,

that is the entry point

Kabir

Doorways

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door_closing

Standing in a doorway you are forced into the imagination, wondering what you will find on the other side. It is a place full of expectant fantasy. This is the key point about thresholds. . . In their narrow confines you may find fantasy, memory, dream, anxiety, miracle, intuition, and magic. These are the means by which the deep soul prospers – neither in life nor entirely out of life. This is a good place from which to make a decision and get a hunch. It is the true home of creativity. It is also the claustrophobic place of greatest fear. Anything of moment takes place in these interstices – in the tunnels and passages and waiting periods.

Thomas Moore

We do not see clearly

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glasses-see-clearly-7

Mystery presents itself to us in the mode of withdrawal, of silence, of distance

so that speaking about it, if that is to make sense,

always requires listening to its silence.

Karl Rahner

Re-parenting

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gentle

Meditation practices are a form of spiritual reparenting. We are transforming deeply rooted patterns of inner relating by learning to bring mindfulness and compassion to our life. An open and accepting attention is radical because it flies in the face of our conditioning to assess what is happening as wrong. We are deconditioning the habit of turning against ourselves, discovering that in this moment’s experience nothing is missing or wrong.

Tara Brach, Awakening From the Trance of Unworthiness

Stopping the verbalizations

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File:Préault - Le Silence - Roblès 05.jpg

The greatest support we can have is mindfulness, which means being totally present in each moment. If the mind remains centered then it can’t make up stories about the injustice of the world or one’s friends, or about one’s desires, or one’s lamentations. All these mind-made stories would fill many volumes, but when we are mindful such verbalizations stop. “Mindful” is being fully absorbed in the moment, leaving no room for anything else. We are filled with the momentary happening, whether that may be standing or sitting or lying down, being comfortable or uncomfortable, feeling pleasant or unpleasant. Whichever it may be, it is a non-judgmental awareness, “knowing only,” without evaluation.

Ayya Khema, All of Us

photo 9jules9 of Le Silence, d’Antoine-Augustin Préault.