Uncovering strength, here, within

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I have discovered, just as my teachers always told me, that we already have what we need. The wisdom, the strength, the confidence, the awakened heart and mind are always accessible, here, now, always. We are just uncovering them. We are rediscovering them. We’re not inventing them or importing them from somewhere else. They’re here. That’s why when we feel caught in darkness, suddenly the clouds can part. Out of nowhere we cheer up or relax or experience the vastness of our minds. No one else gives this to you. People will support you and help you with teachings and practices, as they have supported and helped me, but you yourself experience your unlimited potential.

Pema Chodron, Taking the Leap.

When complicated gets in the way

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What I encourage is a moving toward simplicity, rather than complexity. We’re already complicated personalities. Our cultural and social conditioning is usually very complicated. We’re educated and literate, which means that we know a lot and have a lot of experience. This means that we are no longer simple. We’ve lost the simplicity that we had as children and have become rather complicated characters….What is most simple is to wake up – it’s as simple as that. The most profound teaching is the phrase “wake up”. Hearing this, one then asks, “what am I supposed to do next?” We complicate it again because we’re not used to being really awake and fully present. We’re used to thinking about things and analyzing them; trying to get something or get rid of something; achieving and attaining.

Ajahn Sumedho, Intuitive Awareness

Sunday Quote: No feeling is final

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Let everything happen to you:

beauty and terror.

Just keep going.

No feeling is final.

Rilke, Book of Hours

Meeting and disengaging

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mazeMost of the work of the practice then is just about noticing what stimulates, alarms or otherwise pushes our buttons, and working with that. It’s about restraining the free-wheeling mind, turning away from sources of powerful attraction, checking the impulse and reactions, softening the ill-will and tension and widening into the body to release the energy of the activation. And more subtly, it’s about meeting and disengaging the ‘should be’s’. So: I walk up and down my meditation path feeling nothing special and practise staying with that; facing a group of school children and wanting to bring something into their lives that will withstand the floods of commercialism, I hold and relax with that; or, at a management meeting, I listen to the gloomy analysis of the monastery’s finances, without dismissing or panicking over that. Meet it, disengage from the script of it even as you widen to receive its wave – and let that move through you. Then trust what arises within when the self-impression passes.

Ajahn Sucitto, Reflections.

Ordinary circumstances

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It is natural to look for things you want outside of where you are now. That is the whole point of a journey. Yet this moment is all anyone has. So if freedom, love, beauty, grace, and whatever else is desirable are to appear, they must appear in the now. It would be nice if they appeared in the now you have now. And if they are to appear and endure they will have to be found in ordinary circumstances, since ordinary circumstances fill most of life.

John Tarrant, Bring me the Rhinoceros and other Zen Koans

Not getting tired

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I saw a programme recently on G.K Chesterson and was reminded of this quote, similar in theme to the poem published yesterday morning.  In it he encourages us to have eyes like children, seeing things as if for the first time, not tired and dulled by the fact that we have seen them before:

Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.

G.K Chesterson