Category: Be fully present

Keep your mind calm….

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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.

…..and learn to let go

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The incredibly warm weather means that the birds are everywhere and active. The first swallows have returned. Birdsong fills the air at dawn and dusk. And they are busy….finding worms, building nests and testifying to life. We can learn so much about what leads to real happiness from how Nature works. When we are close to nature ,  in the mountains or in the garden,  we touch into a wisdom within our deepest selves, as Mark Nepo did, observing a robin building a nest:

It was a small thing, watching the robin carry a twig too big for its nest. It tried once, then twice to use it, and somehow…it knew it was no good. It simply flew off and picked another.

I went and found the twig. I rolled it in my hand and thought of the times I’ve labored, trying to make things too big fit. So often what we want is like that twig, too big to be of use, and we stay lodged in an unhappiness created by holding on to something that cannot complete our nest.

It was humbling to watch a small bird work, singing as it went, leaving what it couldn’t use as it found it. If we could only treat each other with such simple kindness.

from The Book of Awakening

Today, can you….

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Right now, can you make an unconditional relationship with yourself? Just the height you are, the weight you are, with the intelligence that you have, and your current burden of pain? Can you enter into an unconditional relationship with that?

 


Pema Chodron, Comfortable with Uncertainty

Just let go and fall into the now

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If we can let go for just a moment, if we can relax, if we can fall into the center of now, we can encounter directly the freedom that we’ve all been seeking. It is right here, right now. It doesn’t lie in the future. It’s not going to come when life changes, when the circumstances of our day-to-day reality become different. Freedom is something that’s right in the midst of this moment. When we begin to surrender our demand that life change, that life alter itself to suit our ideas, then everything opens. We begin to awaken from this dream of separateness and struggle, and we realize that the grace we were always seeking is actually right there at the center of our own existence. This is the heart of spiritual awakening: to realize that what we have always yearned for is the very thing, in our deepest source, that we have always been. Freedom is always available to us. In those very moments when we know we don’t know, when we take the “backward step,” heart wide open, we fall into grace. Adyshanti

Always running is a kind of aggression

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The most fundamental aggression to ourselves, the most fundamental harm we can do to ourselves, is to remain ignorant by not having the courage and the respect to look at ourselves honestly and gently

Pema Chodron

Teens Day 7 : Health is related to paying attention

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The dynamic balance we call heath

involves both body and mind

and can be enhanced by specific qualities of attention

Jon Kabat Zinn