When things don’t work out

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Sooner or later, everyone will face not getting what they want. How we respond to this unavoidable moment determines how much peace or agitation we will have in our life. In truth, this is the moment that opens all others. For it is our acceptance of things as they are and not as we would have them that allows us to find our place in the stream of life. Free of our entitlements, we can discover that we are small fish in the stream and go about our business of finding the current.

This deeper chance to shed our willfulness doesn’t preclude our sadness and disappointment that things aren’t going the way we had imagined. But when we stay angry and resentful at how life unfolds beyond our will, we refuse the gifts of being a humble part in the inscrutable whole. When we stay angry and resentful that —and you can fill in the blank— the stock market didn’t reward our conscientious investing or the hurricane destroyed the truck we were going to inherit or the promotion we earned was given to someone else or the person we love so deeply doesn’t care in the same way, we risk getting stuck.

Eventually, we are asked to undo the story we’ve been told about life — or the story we have told ourselves — so we might drop freshly into life. For under all our attempts to script our lives, life itself cannot be scripted. It’s like trying to net the sea. Life will only use our nets up: tangle them, sink them, unravel them, wear them down, embed them in its bottom. Like the sea, the only way to know life is to enter it. How then do we listen below our willfulness?

Mark Nepo,  Not Getting what We Want

The basics of Mindfulness practice 3: Use the breath to centre yourself

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 Breath is the bridge that connects life to consciousness, which unites your body to your thoughts. Whenever your mind becomes scattered, use your breath as the means to take hold again.

In our community, where people are practicing the mindfulness of doing laundry, washing dishes, eating, walking and so forth, everybody learns to use breath as a tool for restoring mindfulness.

Thich Nhat Hahn

Today, Notice what goes right

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Each of us is like a mosaic, with lots of lovely tiles, some that are basically neutral, and a few that could use a little – ah – work. It’s important to see the whole mosaic. But because of the brains negativity bias, we tend to fixate on what’s wrong with ourselves instead of what’s right. If you do twenty things in a day and nineteen go fine, what’s the one you think about? Probably the one that didn’t go so well.

Your brain builds new structures based on what you pay attention to. Focusing on the “bad” tiles in the mosaic that is you keeps feeding an underlying sense of being mediocre, flawed or less than others. And it blocks the development of the confidence and self-worth that comes from recognizing the good tiles. These results of the negativity bias are not fair. But they’re a big reason why most of us have feelings of inadequacy or self-doubt.

Rick Hanson, Just One Thing

Being stuck in the past

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Whenever the disempowering lens of history falls over our eyes, the present reality is subverted to the dynamics of the past, and one remains a prisoner….once again. Learning to find ones own truth, hold to it, and negotiate with others seems easy enough on paper. In practice, it means catching reflexive patterns while they occur, suffering the anxiety caused by living more consciously, and tolerating the assault of anxiety-driven “guilt” afterwards. (This guilt is not genuine; it is a form of anxiety aroused by the anticipated negative reaction of the other person). Such reactions for the child were enormously distressing and are still debilitating for the adult. Over the years we tend to believe that this old familiar system is who we really are, and, by and large, such a system so frequently presented to the world becomes how the world sees us, Being nice has, however, ceased being nice.

James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life

Noticing when we are bothered today

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An interesting reflection by Ajahn Chah on the way we let things get under our skin and bother us. We often allow events to annoy us because of our fixed idea of how things ought to be, or following an ideal schedule which we have made up, and then blame reality for not following it. Most suffering is caused by our mind  having a set idea of how things should be and clinging to that thought,  or by repeating patterns triggerred by events in our past, rather than tuning in to how things actually are.  We can see if this is the case when we get bothered today,  and maybe drop the idea we have in our heads, tuning into a more direct experiencing of what is going on.

In our practice we think that noises, cars, voices sights are distractions that come and bother us when we want to be quiet. But who is bothering who?  Actually we are the ones who go and bother them. The car,  the sound,  is just following its own nature. We bother things through some false idea that they are outside us and clean to the ideal of remaining quiet, undisturbed. Learn to see that it is not things that bother us, that we go out to bother them. See the world as a mirror. It is all a reflection of our mind. When you know this, you can grow in every moment, and every experience reveals truth and brings understanding.

Ajahn Chah, A Still Forest pool.

Staying open in our work

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You must remain open to the possibilities and resist the temptation to make a closure before your life has run out. This means always keeping your very identity open-ended, because a life work defines you. Spiritual writers sometimes say that all finite loves point to an infinite love, and so there is always a yearning for more. The same could be true of a life work. Any finite task or career points to another beyond it. Your sense of what you are meant to do with your life has to remain open-ended, no matter how much or how little you feel you have accomplished. You never know fully what you are called to do.

Thomas Moore, A Life at Work