Not waiting for some future perfection

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Maybe we think that someday we will have gained perfect maturity from the lessons of our lives. Subconsciously,  we are lured by the expectation that we will reach a stage where we don’t have to fix anything ever again. One day we will reach “happily ever after” We are convinced of the notion of “resolution”. It’s as if everything that we’ve experienced up until now, our whole lives up to this moment, was a dress rehearsal. We believe that our grand performance is yet to come, so we do not live for today. For most people this endless managing, rearranging, upgrading is the definition of “living”. In reality we are waiting for our life to start. When prodded, most of us admit that we are working toward some future moment of perfection – retirement in a log cabin in Kennebunkport or in a hut in Costa Rica. Or maybe we dream of living out our later years in the idealized forest landscape…serenly meditating …..overlooking a waterfall and koi pond.

Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse, What makes you not a Buddhist.

The basics of Mindfulness practice 5 : Becoming a witness

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Mindfulness is cultivated by assuming the stance of an impartial witness to your own experience. To do this requires that you become aware of the constant stream of judging and reacting to inner and outer experience and learn to step back from it.

When we begin practicing paying attention to the activity of our own mind, it is common to discover that we are constantly generating judgments about our experience.

Jon Kabat Zinn

Faith in the possibilities of this day

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Being alive necessarily means uncertainty and risk, times of going into the unknown. If we withdraw from the flow of life, our hearts contract. We hold back so much that we feel separate from our own bodies and minds, separate from other people, even people we really care about. In the grip of other intense emotions, like grief and jealousy, we might feel anguish, but fear shuts us down, arrests the life-force. To be driven by fear is like dying inside. When the suffering is overwhelming, we may try to recoil from how bad it feels by numbing our reactions. Many of us survived childhood in just this way. But, ultimately, cutting ourselves off from what is happening locks us into fear and makes us unable to see that we might find another way to respond outside the small section delineated by the dots, defined by our assumptions.

Faith, in contrast, reminds us of the ever-changing flow of life, with all its movement and possibility. Faith is the capacity of the heart that allows us to draw close to the present and find there the underlying thread connecting the moment’s experience to the fabric of all of life. It opens us to a bigger sense of who we are and what we are capable of doing.

Sharon Salzberg, Faith

How to live with what is

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The way of wisdom is not the way of “why”, but the way of “what”. The Hebrew word [for wisdom] – chochma –  can be read as choch ma – “what is”. Wisdom will not tell you why things are the way they are, but will show you what they are and how you can live in harmony with them.

Rabbi Rami Shapiro, The Divine Feminine in Biblical Wisdom

The basics of Mindfulness practice 4: Patient Practice

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Too many meditators get discouraged at the beginning because their minds won’t settle down. But just as you can’t wait until you’re  strong before you start strength training, you can’t wait until your concentration is strong before you start sitting.  Only by exercising what little concentration you have will you make it solid and steady.

Thanissaro Bhikkhu, Building your mental muscles

From time to time,check in with the senses

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To orientate ourselves to the present moment we can do this simple exercise. We pay attention to the doors of the eyes, ears, nose, mouth and body to see what exactly is happening there. Just as the captain of a ship checks his compass to determine his position; so we can check each of the sense-doors to determine our position – which is, of course, the present. If we are not careful, these inner worlds of ours easily become choked with troublesome thoughts, perceptions, memories and characters. But are these private worlds we drag around a true reflection of the outside world? Aren’t they just based largely on our own mistaken perceptions? How many times do we pass judgement on something, only to have it promptly overturned moments later? Our inner worlds are – for the most part – disconnected from reality, from what is actually going on right now.

And so it is crucial that we learn to be mindful of what is happening around us; that we pause to pay attention to what is occurring, in the present, at each of the sense-doors. The sense-doors are our windows to the world, and to stop the creation of more mental proliferation we must be vigilant and learn to just observe. To be mindful of what is actually happening around us puts a break on these meanderings of the mind and we become aware of what is right in front of our noses. This practice serves to help remind us of the simplicity of the moment.

Ajahn Manapo, Dhamma Diary Blog