The universe is composed of subjects to be communed with, not objects to be exploited.
Everything has its own voice.
Somehow we have become autistic.
We don’t hear the voices.
Thomas Berry
Month: October 2013
Listening to all the senses…
Meditation is really about paying attention, and the only way in which we can pay attention is through our senses, all of them, including the mind. Mindfulness is a way of befriending ourselves and our experience. Of course, our experience is vast, and includes our own body, our mind, our heart, and the entire world.
Jon Kabat Zinn
Fully involved
This quote comes from a different tradition than the meditation quote earlier, but is essentially saying the same thing. It is from Charlotte Selver, an extraordinary woman and one of the greatest influences on body-orientated psychotherapy today. She lived a long life – was teaching still at age 101 – and emphasized that we should being fully present in each moment, seeing it as completely new, being open to all the riches it could contain. This requires a full commitment, not standing on the fence, not watching the moments with tired eyes. She taught this by teaching movement in the body, being fully in touch which its action:
It is not first this, then this, then that – the whole person comes into motion.
There is nowhere where it stays as is, when I begin to allow movement.
When you have to laugh, there’s nowhere where you don’t laugh. Or you are only partly involved with laughing?
Nowhere, when you are crying, where it isn’t crying in you.
Does that make sense?
In other words, to give myself to something means not to go point by point.
Charlotte Selver
The Body doesn’t lie
Practising meditation morning and evening is very important to help us to understand how our mind works. We are then able to recognise that we need to be present. Can we pay attention to the feeling, come back to the feeling – how you feel in the body when you are standing, talking to someone, or sitting, or walking? This is mindfulness, awareness, attention – bringing awareness back to the present. The body doesn’t lie; it never lies. The body always tells you the truth about where you are. But if you listen to your mind, that is where you go wrong. The body is the best tool you can have because it is always there with you, each moment you come back to the body to see where you are, how you feel. That is your support to stay present, to be able to receive life without trying to control it. And if we forget, instead of getting upset or being critical toward ourselves, we just feel grateful to remember. This is very important: ‘Thank you for remembering. I can start again….’ This is the beauty of the practice, of the teaching. We can start again. We can drop the past and start afresh.
Ajahn Upekkha, Being Present
An autumn poem
The last few days have turned much cooler in Ireland, and this year’s late arrival of autumn progresses with a little more intensity, with leaves turning colour and beginning to fall. This year the natural world is slow to move towards its conclusion, preferring to hold on to the period of growth and warmth. And yet a different type of growth awaits, with new lessons to be learned.
Lord: it is time. The huge summer has gone by.
Now overlap the sundials with your shadows,
and on the meadows let the wind go free.
Command the last fruits to swell on tree and vine;
grant them a few more warm transparent days,
urge them on to fulfillment then, and press
the final sweetness into the heavy wine.
Whoever has no house now, will never have one.
Whoever is alone will stay alone,
will sit, read, write long letters through the evening,
and wander along the boulevards, up and down,
restlessly, while the dry leaves are blowing.
Rainer Maria Rilke
translated by Stephen Mitchell
The source of well being
For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. Matthew 6: 21
In general, the basic attitude that works best in meditation is to let go of how things should be, and address how things appear to be. Addressing what arises through an attention based on good-will, empathy and letting go helps to lead the mind from a good position, and that in itself can ease the mind out of a hindrance. When we really find value in good will and letting go, then there’s much less room for hindrances to breed. Regard the mind as a treasure to be guarded, valued and polished: with this attitude one gets to live with the most reliable source of well-being.
Ajahn Sucitto, Meditation
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