Year: 2017

Practices that stretch us

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There is nothing I dislike

Linji, died 866, founder of the Rinzai school of Zen

In Zen,  koans or phrases such as this are taken on and allowed sink into consciousness to challenge and stretch us and provoke responses other than our habitual ones. Two commentaries by different authors might be useful:

What does that mean, to dislike? Dislike could mean that you are feeling a strain between how things really are and your story about how things are.

John Tarrant, Bring me the Rhinoceros (and other koans to bring you joy).

‘There is nothing I dislike’ rearranges us profoundly, when we offer ourselves to its energy, its scrutiny, its disturbance in us. This practice is not about tidying up the world and making it clean and bright; it’s about recognizing the world as it is and finding right there the radical freedom of being. The alternative is a kind of carefully scaled-down life. One that is still extravagantly rich in detail and variety and shot through with beauty despite all our efforts, since we live on the blue-green planet, but a scaled-down view of what it was we really wanted while we were here, so very briefly.

Susan Murphy, Upside-Down Zen

Always leaning forward

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Are you so busy in getting to the future that the present moment is reduced to a means of getting there? Stress is caused by being ‘here’ but wanting to be ‘there,’ or being in the present but wanting to be in the future. It is a split that tears you apart inside

Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

Like a blank sheet on a coffee table

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The aim of meditation then, is to let go of the conditions of the mind. This doesn’t mean denying, getting rid of, or judging them. It means not believing them or following them. Instead we listen to them as conditions of the mind that arise and cease. We learn to trust in just being the listener, the watcher, with an attitude of awakened, attentive awareness, rather than be somebody trying to meditate to get some kind of result. Then through mindfulness we are able to get beyond the conditioning of the mind to the pure consciousness that isn’t conditioned, but which is like the background, the emptiness, the blank sheet on which words are written. Our perceptions arise and cease on that blank sheet, that emptiness.

Ajahn Sumedho, True but not right, Right but not true

Solid

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File:Cottage furniture.JPG

One of the fundamental ways of bringing the mind into the present moment is to focus on how we sense our own body. This bodily sense – that is awareness of the sensations and energies that manifest in the body – is something immediate that we can contemplate. It gives us ground and balance. It gives us the sense of being where we are. Although this may seem basic and obvious, much of the time we are not grounded in where we really are. Instead we are ‘out there’ in a world of changing circumstance and reactions to that, without having a central reference.

Ajahn Sucitto, Meditation: A Way of Awakening

photo helenonline

Who you already are

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Don’t go looking elsewhere. Let go of all those ideas about lacking something or needing to attain something

The core essence of it all [life].. is to be who you already are –  rather than get lost in who you are afraid you are,  or think you might be and want to be – in the only moment we ever get, which is just this one. That’s easy to say, but it’s a non-trivial thing to actually engage in.

Jon Kabat Zinn

Be strong then, and enter into your own body;
there you have a solid place for your feet.
Just throw away all thoughts of
imaginary things,
and stand firm in that which you are.

Kabir

Sunday Quote: What keeps us going

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“Grace is everywhere” were the final words of the priest in Bernanos’ book Journal d’un Curé de Campagne. Some weekends we see it easily in nature. Other times in the presence of a friend:

It is light that matters,
The light of understanding.
Who has ever reached it
Who has not met the furies again and again?
Who has reached it without
Those sudden acts of grace?

May Sarton, The Angels and the Furies