Being present …even with difficult emotions

welcome-mat

In meditation …. meet what arises in the mind. First meet it and include it,  whether you like it or should be experiencing it or not. While stepping back, be curious, be more fully conscious. How is this anger, how does it feel? How am I with it? What’s it like when I don’t stiffen against it, lecture it? What’s it like when I don’t believe in the stories it tells me about them and me and how it should be, but distill all that down to one reference point: anger, simmering, burning? Can I see it as a trapped energy that needs some generous handling? Visualize it – what does it look like? Above all prioritize present engagement, feel it in your body, breathe into it. Abandon the idea of getting through it, or that you should be some other way. Then, when I’m not superior or inferior to my anger; when I am neither denying not justifying it – then I’m not overwhelmed and the anger is held with mindfulness. Deprived of further food, it reconnects to bodily vitality. So the mind becomes calm and bright.

Ajahn Sucitto, Spiritual work is Play

Reacting or responding?

No matter what the situation is,
we are responsible for our own mind states

Joseph Goldstein

Trying to hold on

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Although this is as true as the sky is blue, we keep trying to make gain permanent in order to try to bring about happiness for “me.” We think, “If only So-and-So would love me, I would be happy,“ “If only things would change, I would be happy,” “If only things would stay the way they are, I would always be happy,” and it only leads to heartache. This kind of wanting involves a lot of hope and fear, all based on denial of a simple truth: all the pleasure the world can offer eventually turns to pain. Trying to hold onto pleasure only causes more pain.

Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, Easy Come Easy Go

photo Lewis Collard

Push and pull

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Meditation practice provides the perfect context for observing our beliefs and recognizing the tug-of-war we have with our experience. Just sit quietly for five minutes and watch what happens. Unless we have some accomplishment in meditation, we won’t know what to do with all the activity. We become overwhelmed by the energetic play of the mind, pummeled by our own thoughts and emotions, bewildered by our inability to sit in peace. We will want to do something. And we really only have two means of escape from all this mayhem: we can either spin out into thought, which is an exaggeration of reality, or we can suppress or deny it.

Exaggeration and denial describe the dilemma we have with mind, and not just in meditation. Exaggeration and denial operate in conjunction with all our fantasies, hopes, and fears. When we exaggerate experience, we see what isn’t there. And when we deny it, we don’t see what is. Both exaggeration and denial are extraneous to the true nature of things, the nature we experience when we can just stay present.

Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel, The Power of an Open Question

wanting to be a pleasant feeling

Our attitude is frequently one of wanting to get it done, wanting to have it finished in order to be peaceful, to relax, or to enjoy ourselves….

We want to be a feeling.

Rushing along to be something in the next moment, we fail to open and appreciate this moment.

Ajahn Sucitto, Turning the Wheel of Truth

A pure space of bare attention

File:2007-07-09Aquilegia01.jpgWe have never, not for a single day, the pure space before us, in which flowers
unendingly burst open.

It is always world and never nowhere without no:
that pureness, that unwatched, which one breathes and
endlessly knows and never wants

Rilke, Duino Elegies