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?
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…
If your mind becomes firm like a rock and no longer shakes,
As a young doctor, I thought that serving life was a thing of drama and action and split-second judgment calls….larger than ordinary life,and those who served were larger than life also. But I know now that this is only the least part of the nature of service. That service is small and quiet and everywhere. That far more often we serve by who we are and not what we know. And everyone serves whether they know it or not. We bless the life around us far more than we realize. Many simple, ordinary things that we do can affect those around us in profound ways: the unexpected phone call, the brief touch, the willingness to listen generously, the warm smile or wink of recognition. All it may take to restore someone’s trust in life may be returning a lost earring or a dropped glove.
