Welcome the present moment as if you had invited it.
It is all we ever have, so we might as well work with it rather than struggling against it.
We might as well make it our friend and teacher rather than our enemy.
Pema Chodron
Year: 2013
When we get stuck
From time to time we come to a stuck place … After a while, the doing, fixing mind gets to the end of what it can accomplish and becomes the problem rather than the solution. Then we get stuck. And that sense of stuckness spins out into blaming our apparent self, our system of practice… we assess our character, our heart, our history, our past, our flaws, and our virtues. We fidget, become distracted, and jump to conclusions that will cement the stuckness into a situation...We can note that the stuckness, having eluded our attempts to get rid of it or gloss over it, takes us to an ‘edge.’ We want to hold on to some identity, or to a conviction in our practice tradition, but we can’t quite do it. We are taken to a place of uncertainty, a place where there is a feeling of not being anything solid but where there is still a hankering to be something. This is the edge.
The stuck stuff captures and convinces by its power to stimulate the mind… [but] if we can see them for what they are… these energies won’t stick. We realize that the stuck state is just a pattern of energies that we weren’t fully aware of; and when that fullness of awareness is brought to bear, the self is taken out of it and it becomes unstuck. And it takes us to a [place that is] more intimate and comfortable than our personalities.
Ajahn Sucitto
Clinging or rejecting
The purpose of meditation is to develop a sane relationship to experience. The struggles we have in life – shutting down, pushing away, feeling overwhelmed, and all the neurotic attachment — arise from the confusion we harbor about how to relate to the rich energy of the mind. When eating, we ingest, process, and eliminate food. But how do we digest our experience? It’s not so clear…The practice methods […] are designed to bring us into a sane relationship with our experience. As the great Tibetan Buddhist master Tilopa said to his disciple Naropa, “Son, it is not experiences themselves that bind you, but the way you cling to or reject them“
Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel, Are we Really Meditating?
Projecting
Silence allows us put a little distance between ourselves and all that, quite literally, occupies our lives, our time and our minds. To be silent is to put things into perspective. It is to let go of our needless preoccupation about the past and the future, and become aware of the still centre behind the internal commentary. By cultivating silence, we draw aside the curtain on which we project the ephemeral fantasies and obsessions of our so-called “normal” life, a life characterized by being anywhere and indeed everywhere but here and now.
Nicolas Buxton, Tantalus and the Pelican: Exploring Monastic Spirituality Today
Simply as it is
All of us, without exception, have been thoroughly conditioned to react immediately to what is happening in and around us by thinking about it — talking to ourselves and to others in judgmental ways, often repeating these thoughts over and over again. Thoughts evoke emotions, tensions, excitement and stress, and can bring on exhaustion and sickness. Awareness reveals this simply to be so. Awareness is freedom from wanting to improve oneself or to put oneself down. It … opens one up to whatever else is happening this instant: breathing, a bird singing, a motor humming, the wind blowing, thoughts moving, the body tensing and relaxing…
Toni Packer
image from yalin note website
Doing what we love
Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
Rumi
Mindfulbalance 