To be at peace with myself means to accept myself the way I am; to reduce the split that is created by the image of what I would like to be and who I really am; to be patient with myself, especially in regard to what conflicts with my idealized self.
Anselm Grun
We human beings have a great need to tell our life stories in a coherent and, we believe, in a complete way. Thus, we like to see that where we are now makes some sense, and we spend a lot of our time internally discussing where we are, justifying our choices and the turns that our life has taken. What we often find when we sit in meditation is that we prefer to go back to our stories rather than just sit there with what is in the present. I know that most of my distractions are me telling – to myself – the “Karl story” with its usual embellishments and drama. What I fail to notice is that this story is really a fiction as it tends to select the parts of my current life or history that were painful or that I have elaborated on – or chosen to magnify – because I see them as successes and like the direction they show my life to be headed in. However, it can help if we see our lives as always a work in progress, and that we can never be sure of the meaning behind certain events until we reach the last chapter. It is good to challenge the notion that our ongoing story needs to be somehow complete to save us from getting trapped in our own stories. This can free us to approach each moment with fresh eyes.
All that we are is the result of what we have thought.
The mind is everything.
What we think we become
The Buddha
We train ourselves to see that what we have is rich enough, by coming back to this breath and letting go of our stories. In this way we content ourselves with what really going on and let go of what we think would be good for us, what would actually make us happy.
If you can’t see what you are looking for,
see what’s there.
It’s enough.
Mark Nepo
Drink your tea slowly and reverently,
as if it is the axis
on which the world earth revolves
– slowly, evenly, without
rushing toward the future;
Live the actual moment.
Only this moment is life.
Thich Nhat Hahn
Mindfulness is the aware, balanced acceptance of the present experience.
It isn’t more complicated than that.
It is opening to or receiving the present moment, pleasant or unpleasant, just as it is, without either clinging to it or rejecting it.
Sylvia Boorstein
On an evening when an Irish golfer needs to stay focused, some thoughts on a key early practice in meditation. Being mindful means we work on our capacity to simply watch our thoughts and emotions, allowing them pass through a stable field of awareness without disturbing it excessively. To do this we need to strengthen our capacity to let go of distractions and the running after happiness by creating a calmness and constancy in the mind that observes good and bad with an equal ability to accept things as they are. This capacity to focus – to be one-pointed in our attention – is at the heart of our freedom from anxiety:
Concentration is the cornerstone of mindfulness practice. Your mindfulness will only be as robust as the capacity of your mind to be calm and stable. You can think of concentration as the capacity of the mind to sustain an unwavering attention on one object of observation.…….. A calmness develops with concentration practice that has a remarkable stable quality to it. It is steadfast, profound, hard to disturb, no matter what comes up. You can look deeply into something if you sustain your looking without being constantly thrown off by distractions or the agitation of your own mind.
Jon Kabat Zinn, Wherever you go, there you are.
