Category: Be fully present

Here I am

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“Hineyni”  for me is the most powerful word in the Book of Genesis. Abraham says it to God. It means “Here I am”, but it is not a geographical answer.  It is the response to the challenge to acknowledge the truth of the present moment, to recognize what needs to be done and to be prepared to do it. Abraham says “Hineyni” three times in the most terrible of circumstances.

Mindfulness is also “Here I am, not hiding” and it is also an expression of freedom. Even when experience is painful, especially when it is dire, mindfulness is freedom from extra anguish, from the extra pain of futile struggle. “This is what is true. These are the possibilities. I understand the necessary response”.  And sometimes “There are no possibilities other than surrender.  I surrender”

Sylvia Boorstein, That’s Funny, you don’t look Buddhist.

The secret of life: Being fully in the moment with our history

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Sometimes meditation practice can be used just to dampen down anxiety or to run away from facing difficult aspects in our lives or our history. As a strategy this is doomed to failure, sooner or later. The only way to full wholeness is to allow all things to be held in awareness, including the parts of ourselves or our life histories that frighten us, the things that disturb our “calm”. As the previous quote from Pema Chodron reminds us, all that comes into our life – including the experiences of our childhood  and subsequent difficult moments – remain in us until they have taught us something and we have integrated the teaching. So our most important practice is allowing and acknowledging all the parts of our life,  thus increasing our capacity to be free in their presence.

If, then, we want to be let in on the secrets  of life, we must be mindful of  two things : first, there is the great melody, in which things and scents, feelings and past events, dawns and dreams, all contribute their part; and second there are the individual voices which augment and complete this full chorus. And to lay the foundation for a work of art — that is, an image a life lived more deeply –  of our more than daily experience — we have to put both voices, – the voice of this moment and the voice of the group of people living within that moment  – into a proper relationship and reconcile them.

Rilke, Notes on the Melody of Things

Another sunny morning in Geneva

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Another beautiful day of sunshine dawns. We have been so blessed these past weeks.  LIfe starts over again with new possibilities, new experiences, and is lavish in its possibilities. This day is exactly as it should be; are we open to receive it, or too preoccupied with other concerns?
Have you ever seen
anything in your life more wonderful
than the way the sun, every evening,
relaxed and easy, floats toward the horizon  and into the clouds or the hills, or the rumpled sea, and is gone—
and how it slides again
out of the blackness,
every morning, on the other side of the world,
like a red flower streaming upward on its heavenly oils,
say, on a morning in early summer,
at its perfect imperial distance—
and have you ever felt for anything such wild love—
do you think there is anywhere, in any language,
a word billowing enough for the pleasure
that fills you,  as the sun reaches out,
as it warms you as you stand there,
empty-handed—
or have you too turned from this world—
or have you too gone crazy  for power,  for things?

Mary Oliver, The Sun

Where you are, and not judging it

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The path is something we cultivate. We have to know where we are and not try to become something that we think we would like to be; we have to practise with the way it is now, without making a judgement about it. If you’re feeling tense, nervous, disillusioned, disappointed about yourself or whatever, then try to recognise that what is in the moment is enough. Be willing to just admit, to acknowledge the way it is,  rather than to indulge in believing that what you’re feeling is somehow an accurate description of reality, or to feel that what you are feeling is wrong and you shouldn’t be feeling like that. Those are two extremes. But the cultivation of the way is to recognise that whatever is subject to arising is subject to ceasing. And this isn’t a put-down or cold-hearted way of cultivating the path, even though it might sound like it.

Ajahn Sumedho

The world is complex – deal with it

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It is through the messiness of our own individual histories –  and the complexity of the world  with all its divisions and differences of opinion – that we come to a full contentment in our lives, not by running away or denying parts of ourselves or what has happened in the past:

The way through the world

is more difficult to find

than the way beyond it

Wallace Stevens

Ending confusion: How to find the meaning in life

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Separated by centuries and traditions,  but the same message:

The meaning of life is to see

Hui Neng ( Chinese Zen monk, 7th century).

The whole of life lies in the verb “seeing”

Teilhard de Chardin, (Jesuit priest, 20th Century).

Devotion proceeds through various stages of unmasking until we reach the point of seeing the world directly and simply without imposing our fabrications.

Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche