When things come up, deal with them according to the occasion. Be like the stillness of water, like the clarity of a mirror. Whether good or bad, beautiful or ugly approach, you don’t make the slightest move to avoid them. Then you will truly know that the mindless world of spontaneity is inconceivable.
Ta Hui (1088-1163)
When we learn to move beyond mistaken concepts and see clearly, we no longer solidify reality. We see waves coming and going, arising and passing. We see that life, composed of this mind and body, is in a state of continual, constant transformation and flux. There is always the possibility of radical change. Every moment – not just poetically or figuratively, but literally – every moment we are dying and being reborn, we and all of life.
Sharon Salzberg, Loving-Kindness – The Revolutionary Art of Happiness
The last month of this year begins. Sometimes we can be more conscious of the passing of time, as when we visit home after being away, or go back to a place where we used to live and find that things have changed. We can sometimes find that the event or the return did not live up to what we had looked forward to. Often what happens is that we form fixed ideas or expectations about some things in the future or we look forward so much to seeing someone or doing something that we play out in our minds how it will be. When the actual event turns out differently, we can find that our mood changes. Such expectations are part of a normal mechanism of the mind which thinks that happiness depends on conditions turning out exactly as we imagine or want them to be. We attach our happiness to a fixed expectation, and close out other possibilities. We do it unconsciously many times each day, fixing the manner in which things should turn out. But, as Philip Moffit reminds us here, we are continually changing, and by the time we arrive at any future moment a whole set of conditions have altered. Let us practice today being open to whatever way things happen, not fixing possibilities into determined expectations.
Always the rationalization is the same -“Once this situation is remedied, then I will be happy.” But it never works that way in reality: The goal is achieved, but the person who reaches it is not the same person who dreamed it. The goal was static, but the person’s identity was dynamic.
Philip Moffitt
We practice so that every moment of our life becomes real life. And therefore when we meditate. we sit for sitting. We don’t sit for something else. If we sit for twenty minutes, these twenty minutes should bring us joy, life. If we practice walking meditation, we walk just for walking, not to arrive. We have to be alive with each step, and if we are, each step brings real life back to us. The same kind of mindfulness can be practiced when we eat breakfast, or when we hold a child in our arms. Each breath we take, each step we make, each smile we realize, is a positive contribution to peace, a necessary step in the direction of peace in the world.
Thich Nhat Hahn, The Heart of Understanding
Your practice of mindfulness has taught you that it is not your mental states themselves that make you uncomfortable, but your attitude toward them. You may have the idea that mental states are part of your own personality, part of your existence. Then you try to reject the unpleasant ones as if they were foreign bodies. But you cannot really reject them because they were not yours in the first place. Your best response is to maintain a steady practice of observing the mind, without reacting with clinging or aversion to anything that comes up, but skilfully working to free the mind from all unwholesome states.
Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, Eight Mindful Steps to Happiness
If we surrender
to earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.
Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.
So, like children, we begin again
to learn from the things
because they are in God’s heart
they have never left him.
This is what the things can teach us:
to fall patiently, to trust our heaviness
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.
Rilke, Book of Hours, II, 16
