Tag: Acceptance

Noticing when we are bothered today

Karl Duffy1 Comment

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

Karl Duffy2 Comments

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

Combining effort and allowing

Karl Duffy1 Comment

The combination of stillness and movement is a spiritually effective style for how we live our lives. We refuse to be caught up in activity but are committed to frequent pausing, taking time to let things unfold. [This] combination of opposites characterizes us when we find psychological health and enter the spiritual realm, the twin goals of our evolution towards wholeness. We combine our psychological work, which takes effort, with our spiritual work, which takes allowing. The ego-Higher Self axis that happens in such individuation is visible in the combination of action and acceptance. A statue is motionless, but movement bursts forth, not only in the how the sculptor’s imagination brings it to life, but in the mysterious sense of motion he has achieved. This may be what he poet Rilke meant by “outer standstill and inner movement”

David Richo, Being True to Life

Not always struggling with our sadness

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As I have written before, modern society is not very comfortable with any nuances in happiness.  It invariably prefers to portray people’s lives as always happy and show that successful people have gotten it all together. There is  no real place for  a narrative that contains moments of struggle or periods when less obvious forms of growth are nurtured. This can mean that we fall in to the trap of interpreting all sadness or mundane moments as an indication that we are doing something wrong, or that our life is on the wrong track. Frequently we fail to see that a lot of the models presented to us are not valid representations of our lives. And many images we see can easily turn into thoughts of an idealized future where we will be happier, thinner, more popular, and these thoughts may undermine the place we are actually called to be. This can be especially present in the weeks after Christmas and New Year,  moments that some people find tough and when the media is full of  strategies, advice and initiatives to improve our life and achieve greater success. A different strategy is cultivated in mindfulness practice, based on staying close to where we actually are, acknowledging that a sense of groundlessness or loneliness is normal in humans,  and that part of practice is learning to sit with this.

If we are feeling unhappy, what is called for is a willingness to simply be with that unhappiness. If we’re not careful, we say something’s wrong, though it doesn’t really help to say that. We say it either inwardly or outwardly. This projecting of blame is a consequence of having made an inner mistake of misperceiving our unhappiness, sadness or suffering as being something wrong. We don’t receive it just as it is. We don’t acknowledge it and feel it, allowing it to happen; we don’t have the ‘knowingness’ to see it as activity taking place in awareness.  Because we don’t have that perspective, we struggle to do something about our suffering, to deal with it in some way. To say that something has gone wrong and that it’s somebody’s fault is a heedless way of dealing with our unpleasant experiences. The habit of consistently doing this is a symptom of what I call the compulsive judging mind.

Ajahn Munindo

The Beauty in the cracks

Karl Duffy1 Comment
The world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong at the broken places. Hemingway

Most of us are trying to live an authentic life. Deep down, we want to take off our game face and be real and imperfect. There is a line from Leonard Cohen’s song “Anthem” that serves as a reminder to me when I get into that place where I’m trying to control everything and make it perfect. The line is, “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” So many of us run around spackling all of the cracks, trying to make everything look just right. This line helps me remember the beauty of the cracks (and the messy house and the imperfect manuscript…). It reminds me that our imperfections are not inadequacies; they are reminders that we’re all in this together. Imperfectly, but together.

Brene Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection

Befriending the wandering mind

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From a different tradition than yesterday – this time from a former Catholic monk and friend of Thomas Merton –   similar instructions on how to work with thoughts in meditation. He recommends a patient, gentle attitude towards ourselves, or toward the inevitable swings in thoughts and moods which we experience, not over-identifying with that which arises and passes away. This gentle, non-judgmental, befriending is the key to ongoing practice.

As we patiently learn to listen to the thoughts that arise, endure,  and pass away within us, we come to a deep experiential knowing of ourselves as we really are. We learn to befriend our own wandering mind, neither abandoning it through daydreaming or sleepiness nor invading it with more thoughts about the thoughts that are already there.  By quietly persevering in sustained nonthinking meditative awareness, we come to a new groundedness within ourselves. The meditative mind that neither thinks,  nor is reducible to any thought. grows stronger, calmer and more stable. In time we learn to listen with God’s ears to our wandering mind while at the same time passing beyond all that our wandering mind can comprehend