Category: Be fully present

….. or following our dreams

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Birds make great sky-circles of their freedom. How do they learn it?

They fall, and falling, they’re given wings.

Rumi

When we stop clinging to the known and allow our dreams to become instruments of change, we learn to practice meditation in action at the deepest level. In these moments, we must risk taking a joyful leap with no guarantee of being caught as we fall.  In Zen practice, we call it stepping off of the hundred-foot pole — living fully without clinging to anything. Students often speak to me of the great fear that arises even contemplating taking a leap into not-knowing from the cliff top of their old life.  All we can rely on, after the joyful leap, is the reassuring discovery of what truly sustains us. I am still in freefall but sometimes I feel the comforting arms of “just this.”

Melissa Myozen Blacker, The Joyful Leap

Holding a conversation with life

Karl Duffy1 Comment

 

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation. The kettle is singing even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots have left their arrogant aloofness and seen the good in you at last. All the birds and creatures of the world are unutterably themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

David Whyte, Everything is waiting

Being happy to stay with the now

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Joy is exactly what’s happening minus our opinion of it.

Charlotte Joko Beck.

Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.

Robert Frost, A Prayer in Spring

We live a lot of the time in the future

Karl Duffy1 Comment

A nice reminder here from Joseph Goldstein as to how the mind continually falls  into the trap of raising expectations about future events, even though it sees that not all events in the past lived up to their hype. Wisdom lies in a balanced understanding of the true nature of things. Practice consists of staying in the now and letting things unfold without an agenda, staying open to how they actually are when they arrive in the present.

When we look back at our experience, we can see so clearly its ephemeral, dreamlike nature. Yet when we look ahead, when we look to the future, somehow (and this is the great enchantment) we get dazzled by all the possibilities that are there waiting for us as if the next event in our lives, the next situation, the next project, the next relationship, the next meal, even on meditation the next breath … we live our lives in anticipation of the next hit of experience as if the one that’s coming will finally do it for us. What’s so strange is that nothing up ’til now has brought that sense of real completion or fulfillment. So why are we so seduced into thinking that the next one will? This is a very strange phenomena.

Joseph Goldstein

We always want something different

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Suffering is the desire for more choices than reality offers, but reality is without options. Our mind creates mental alternatives when there are none in reality, and we do so by bargaining with reality through our desires and fears. The sense-of-self comes into play when we think that reality can be altered. As we consider the options we take ourselves out of the state of abiding within the moment into acting on the moment. When the moment becomes adversarial, we become self invested and determined to do something about it. This creates a sense of someone being on one side and reality being on the other, as if life was happening to us.

Rodney Smith, Stepping out of Self-Deception

What shapes our mind, our thoughts, our moods

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

 

My experience is what I agree to attend to,

Only those items I notice shape my mind.

William James, American psychologist and philosopher.