Meditation is about letting the mind be as it is and knowing something about how it is in this moment.
It’s not about getting somewhere else, but about allowing yourself to be where you already are.
Jon Kabat Zinn, Wherever you go, there you are
Just the wind blowing: allowing life to move through this moment:
Take a comfortable position,
Now imagine you are in a beautiful place in nature. Surrounded by beauty you can feel the wind blowing around you
Let all of your conscious experience — sounds, sensations, thoughts, emotions, everything — become the wind.
Feel all of it moving and changing, arriving, moving around and over you, and then going.
Notice how the wind takes on different qualities — soft, strong, harsh, gusty, gentle.
Relax as the wind blows around you.
Let it come and go in all its forms. You remain here, in calmness, abiding.
Jeffrey Brantley and Wendy Millstine, Daily Mediations for Calming Your Anxious Mind,
We do not need some ideal or romantic fairy tale of what would be best for us.
What we need most is what is already given to us: the actuality of things as they are in the only moment we will ever have – this one.
Jon Kabat Zinn, Mindfulness for Beginners.
For my wife, on our anniversary
Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear,
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye
clear. What we need is here.
Wendell Berry
Our minds are such that we are often more asleep than awake
to the unique beauty and possibilities
of each present moment as it unfolds.
Jon Kabat Zinn
We get a lot of opportunities in our lives to practice with difficult events we do not understand or experiences that we do not know how they will turn out in the end. So there is a constant dialogue between emptiness and form, with the mind preferring to have definite form most times. We like to be able to give things a definite name, even, paradoxically, preferring to put words like “I’m falling apart” on an experience of confusion or doubt, rather than leave it as an unpleasant feeling. We quickly like to compare experiences with words like “not as good as”, or “went really well” becoming fixed early or immediately after some event. The problem with this is that the mind tends to solidify around the naming and fix the experience there, even though its full meaning has not yet come to light. So there is a wisdom in not naming, in being able to hold a space around an experience which in ongoing. The main ongoing skill in mindfulness practice , which we return to over and over again, is being present in the present moment. We are between what has happened ( which is now a memory, but may be quite active in our emotions and fears, influencing our naming) and what could happen (which is at this moment just a thought). We are in the present, which is really the only time there is. We try to ground our whole sense of balance there, instead of creating fears and what-if’s in our rush to have meaning. Everything else is uncertain.
In-between is where humans always are,
that’s what we have to welcome,
a story with an uncertain ending.
And this condition is interesting if you inhabit it;
it’s alive.
If I’m facing something that I don’t know what to do,
the “not knowing” is what is true,
and the resources that I have,
deeply ignorant that I am,
will have to be enough.
John Tarrant
