A lot of the time we practice with what we don’t know, rather than what we do. Some situations in life, or in our day, are not clear. Our practice is to hold open a space, not rushing the answer, allowing the situation or the person to go through the necessary process at its own pace.
The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning.
Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.
Erich Fromm
I am continually amazed by the quality of some of the blogs out there and the creative ways that people reflect on their lives. Here is a new project for this year which you may like to bookmark. Called A Year of Being Here, they have set out to publish a mindfulness poem, one for each day of the year, to bring a space for reflection and inspiration into our lives. It is well worth reading.
You can find them at http://www.ayearofbeinghere.com/
The meditation orientation is not about fixing pain or making it better. It’s about looking deeply into the nature of pain — making use of it in certain ways that might allow us to grow. In that growing, things will change, and we have the potential to make choices that will move us toward greater wisdom and compassion, including self-compassion, and thus toward freedom from suffering.
Jon Kabat-Zinn, At Home in our Bodies.
You work with what you are given,
We must be content to live,
without watching ourselves live.
Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island
Our Mindfulness practice, whether it is on the cushion paying attention to the emotions and thoughts that weave between the breath and bodily sensations, or whether it is in the world paying attention to our actions and behaviors which emerge from our emotions and thoughts, is always a reminder that in order to change any unhealthy or harmful patterns – in order to transform any suffering – we have to first become aware of the patterns themselves. We cannot change anything that we are not aware of…. On a personal level this may show up within the experience of intense emotions. Often we are driven by unconscious motivations of our emotional landscape. How often do we feel lost in the rage or the upset that sometimes arises? The impact that Mindfulness brings is that the experience of being aware of the rage is not the rage itself. Being mindful of all the sensations of rage or anger is not being lost in or consumed by the fire. How often do we actually feed the experience of anger without examining what is really happening? …Our practice simply invites us to do the best we can – to be as mindful, aware and kind to whatever arises, even our intense emotional landscapes.
Larry Yang, Now More than ever We need Mindfulness, Huffington Post
