Month: June 2014

Trying to make things correspond to our ideas

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When one composes one’s mind and looks inwards, there is a sense of coming to one point. If we are not caught in the thinking process, we can be aware of the here and now, the body, the breath, mental states, moods; we can allow everything to be what it is.  The attitude of many people is that there is always a need to change something. When we practise meditation with this idea of getting something, then even the word ‘meditation’, can bring up the reaction of: ‘There’s something I’ve got to do. If I’m in a bad mood I should get rid of that mood. I’ve got to concentrate my mind.’ If the mind’s scattered and we’re all over the place, ‘I should make it one-pointed; I’ve got to concentrate.’ And so we make meditation into hard work and there is a great deal of failure in it because we’re trying to control everything through these ideas.

[Instead]….Try looking inwards with an attitude of observing whatever is present. Just notice what kind of mood or feeling you are in. So now put yourself in this position of the Buddha – Buddho, the knower—not the judge — and just look.

Ajahn Sumedho, Developing an attitude toward meditation

Learning from the Masters

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File:Wild-flower.jpg

But I always think that the best way

to know God

is to love many things

Vincent Van Gogh

photo anilmahajan19

Losing our way and finding our home

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File:Swallows' nest.jpg

When we moved into our house last autumn there was the remnants of a swallows nest in the porch over the door. And shortly after the first swallows  were seen back in Ireland this year, two of them started rebuilding the nest and getting it ready for use once again.  We look up at them and are heartened. They know how to get from somewhere far away all the way back here. They are faithful to a place and constant in their determination. And that clarity seems to us to be something desirable. We frequently lose our way and – more often than we would like to admit –  change our mind and our mood, sometimes from hour to hour. For most of us,  finding the correct path seems quite hard. We do not get it right unerringly year after year. We are a mix, we stumble, make mistakes and often have to change direction. Life is, in many ways, a long trek, and we all have periods when we are not sure who we are or where we are going, or even where we have come from. There are no maps, no clear GPS directions. And furthermore, there is no-one with a crystal ball who can show us the future or guide our current choices or give us the best answers to the mysteries which confront us.

So firstly, we have to be gentle with ourselves as ones who frequently get lost. But we also have to be clear on how much certainty and control we can get on our journey. The notion that we can ever find a full sense of security,  a firm hold on where we are going may not, in fact,  be as important as letting go and being found, of having something that holds us. It may be the case that trust in the present moment, rather than full knowledge, is the way we travel here. Even if it feels shaky, here and now is always the steadiest place to start, not our ideas about how we are doing. We can have an awareness of whatever is happening, including the sense of being lost, and that awareness is our place of refuge. It give us a sense of groundedness which is a necessary counterbalance to the constant sense of movement which is associated with time. Gradually it becomes a spacious home inside ourselves, even as we travel along  – a place of inner peace,  that the changing mind states on our journey  cannot trouble.

My real dwelling

Has no pillars

And no roof either

So rain cannot soak it

And wind cannot blow it down.

Ikkyu, 1394 – 1481, Japanese Zen Buddhist monk and poet

Undoing

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let go

When meditation frees us, ot does not turn us into something better or different, nor does it get us somewhere. Rather, meditation allows for an undoing of our controlling behavior, an undoing of limiting beliefs, an undoing of habitual physical tensing, an undoing of defensive armoring, and ultimately, an undoing of our identification with a small and threatened self.

Tara Brach

One step at a time

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feet_walking_on_beach

We waste a lot of time seeking someone to tell us what life will be like once we live it. We drain ourselves of inner fortitude by asking others to map our way. At the end of all this stalling, though, we each have to venture out and simply see what happens. The instructions are in the living,

Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening

Time out

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time33

There must be a time of day when the man who makes plans forgets his plans, and acts as if he had no plans at all.

There must be a time of day when the man who has to speak falls very silent.

And his mind forms no more propositions, and he asks himself: Did they have a meaning?

There must be a time when the man of prayer goes to pray as if it were the first time in his life he had ever prayed;

when the man of resolutions puts his resolutions aside as if they had all been broken,

and he learns a different wisdom

Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island