This is the first, the wildest and the wisest thing I know:
that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness
Mary Oliver
Category: Be fully present
Hitting the pause button
A reporter asked a boy who was participating in the [mindfulness training] program to describe mindfulness. “It’s not hitting someone in the mouth”, the eleven year-old said.
His answer is wise, wide and deep. It illustrates one of the most important uses of mindfulness – helping us to deal with difficult emotions. It suggests the possibility of finding the gap between a trigger event and our usual conditioned response to it, and of using that pause to collect ourselves and change our response. And it demonstrates in a very real way that we can learn to make better choices……Working with emotions during our meditation session sharpens our ability to recognise a feeling just as it begins not fifteen consequential actions later. We can then go on to develop a more balanced relationship with it – neither letting it overwhelm us so we lash out rashly, nor ignoring it because we are ashamed or afraid of it.
Sharon Salzberg, True Happiness.
Running away from things, we do not live life directly
It seems the more we express, that is, the more we bring out what is in, the more alive we are. The more we give voice to our pain in living, the less build up we have between our soul and our way in the world. However, the more we push down and keep in, the smaller we become. The more we stuff between our heart and our daily experience, the more we have to work through to feel life directly. Our unexpressed life can become a callous we carry around and manicure, but never remove…..Just as flowers need healthy root systems in order to blossom, feelings can only express their beauty when they are rooted cleanly within us, breaking ground in some manner, sprouting outside us.
Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening
If we stopped moving…
If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.
Paolo Neruda, Keeping Quiet
Noticing the space around
Most of our suffering comes from habitual thinking. If we try to stop it out of aversion to thinking, we can’t; we just go on and on and on. So the important thing is not to get rid of thought, but to understand it. And we do this by concentrating on the space in the mind, rather than on the thought.
Our minds tend to get caught up with thoughts of attraction or aversion to objects, but the space around those thoughts is not attractive or repulsive. The space around an attractive thought and a repulsive thought is not different, is it? Concentrating on the space between thoughts, we become less caught up in our preferences concerning the thoughts. So if you find that an obsessive thought of guilt, self-pity, or passion keeps coming up, then work with it in this way — deliberately think it, really bring it up as a conscious state, and notice the space around it. This way, we begin to have a perspective on the impermanent nature of thinking.
Ajahn Sumedho
Sunday Quote: Reflections after welcome rain
The body endures the storms of the present only,
the mind those of the past and future as well as the present.
Epicurus
