Category: Working with difficult moments

The process of working with difficulties

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As a practice, this process can be summarized. First of all there is the matter of view.  This means acknowledging……that the anxiety……however reasonable, is causing you suffering. There’s a tightness in your chest, an unsettledness in your belly, a tendency to go into red alert. Now the point is not to say “I shouldn’t worry” or  “It’s a natural concern” but just to acknowledge your feeling of anxiety. Then there’s the practice: you are actually experiencing anxiety as it is happening, as an embodied feeling, with no should or shouldn’t about it. The next aspect is to steady your awareness around that feeling and let go of interpreting it, dismissing or trying to fix it. Just be with that feeling. Then breathe into the feeling, widen and soften your awareness. Relax a little, give yourself time, ease the energies associated with that feeling. Then tune into the spaciousness, the empathy and the direct clarity of the awareness of that feeling and let the feeling do what it needs to do in order to be felt.

 Ajahn Sucitto, Turning the Wheel of Truth

A simple three part practice

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First, come into the present. Flash on what’s happening with you right now. Be fully aware of your body, its energetic quality. Be aware of your thoughts and emotions.

Next, feel your heart, literally placing your hand on your chest if you find that helpful. This is a way of accepting yourself just as you are in that moment, a way of saying, “This is my experience right now, and it’s okay.”

Then,  go into the next moment without any agenda

Pema Chodron, Living Beautifully

Change and Patience

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In my hermitage in France there is a bush of japonica.  During the night a cold snap arrived and brought with it frost. The next day I noticed that all the buds on the bush had died. A few weeks later the weather became warm again. I saw new buds on the japonica manifesting another generation of flowers. I asked the japonica flowers: “Are you the same as the flowers that died in the frost or are you different flowers?” The flowers replied to me: “We are not the same and we are not different When conditions are sufficient we manifest and when conditions are not we go into hiding. It’s as simple as that.”

When conditions are sufficient things manifest. When conditions are no longer sufficient things withdraw. They wait until the moment is right for them to manifest again. Just because we do not perceive something, it is not correct to say it doesn’t exist.

Thich Nhat Hanh

Shift focus

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To gain composure at stressful moments,  we can apply the mindfulness effort of letting go – abruptly shifting our attention from our thoughts to the immediacy of our physical environment. By simply being mindful in this way. we discover a visceral stillness, an “emotional space” of not knowing, like opening a door to an unfamiliar room or leaping from a diving board. When we are mindful in the immediate moment, the chaotic flood of emotions no longer view for our attention like a crowd of load, unruly voices. Instead they settle into a physical feeling, unclear and murky, but no less powerful – a vague softness around the heart or an openess in the throat.

Michael Caroll, At Times of Stress, Cultivate Stillness

Letting it blow through

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tree

Like everyone I’d rather not experience the undercurrents of life, but the challenge is not to shun them, but to accept that over a lifetime will have our share of them. Avoiding the difficult aspects of living only stunts our fullness. When we do this we are like a tree that never fully opens to the sky. And dwelling on our difficulties only prevents them from going on their way. When we do this, we are like a great tree that nets the storm in its leaves. The storm by its nature wants to move on and the trees’ grace is that it has no hands. Our blessing and curse is to learn and relearn when to reach and to hold, and when to put our hands in our pockets.

Mark Nepo, The Book Of Awakening

Sometimes waiting is good

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Many people believe that emptiness is a lifeless void of nothingness that leads to emotional or mental paralysis.

However, emptiness, when timed correctly in the healing process, leads to freedom…

It serves as the space of transition…

Donald Epstein, The 12 Stages of Healing