The subtle suffering in our lives may seem unimportant. But if we attend to the small ways that we suffer, we create a context of greater ease, peace, and responsibility, which can make it easier to deal with the bigger difficulties when they arise.
Gil Fronsdal Living Two Traditions
In meditation …. meet what arises in the mind. First meet it and include it, whether you like it or should be experiencing it or not. While stepping back, be curious, be more fully conscious. How is this anger, how does it feel? How am I with it? What’s it like when I don’t stiffen against it, lecture it? What’s it like when I don’t believe in the stories it tells me about them and me and how it should be, but distill all that down to one reference point: anger, simmering, burning? Can I see it as a trapped energy that needs some generous handling? Visualize it – what does it look like? Above all prioritize present engagement, feel it in your body, breathe into it. Abandon the idea of getting through it, or that you should be some other way. Then, when I’m not superior or inferior to my anger; when I am neither denying not justifying it – then I’m not overwhelmed and the anger is held with mindfulness. Deprived of further food, it reconnects to bodily vitality. So the mind becomes calm and bright.
Ajahn Sucitto, Spiritual work is Play
Our culture is so focused on … youth, that we don’t have a good model for what aging and dying could be like. All we feel is the lack of things: we’re not as youthful as we were, we’re not as limber as we were, we’re not as this, we’re not as that. Almost everything that we hear and see in the media is about how to maintain your youth as long as possible. All this focus on stopping aging implies that someone made a big mistake in the universe. It’s as if we should be getting younger instead of older.
But we’re missing a very important point. There’s something beautiful about quiet and peace. There’s something beautiful about not trying to do anything, but simply, in some way, your heart joining the whole world. There’s a time in life for building something up in this world: a family, an institution, a business, a creative life: there’s a time for that. There’s also a time for becoming quiet, a time for slow conversations with people that we love, and a time for reflecting on all the things that we’ve seen in many years of living. When the time for those things comes, it’s beautiful.
Norman Fischer, Suffering and Possibility
photo ian mckenzie
This is what we notice when we simply sit quietly with ourselves for even a few moments: we experience the accumulated momentum of mental noise, booming and buzzing. We notice how strongly we are trained to want something different from what is happening. We notice that our minds are very well-trained in dissatisfaction and distraction. Almost always our focus is on something else — not this. We seek another moment of greater happiness — not this moment. Contentment seems always elsewhere — never here.
Gaylon Ferguson, Natural Wakefulness
Heavy rain this morning in Ireland, after a bright autumn day yesterday. An easy lesson in the inevitability of change and that our real work lies in becoming familiar with movement, not in standing still. Moreover, this constant change allows us develop insight into another learning, namely that we should never expect to really arrive at a competed work and that, as Theologian Karl Rahner said, in this life “all symphonies remain unfinished”. Sitting with this allows us relax in the knowledge that things are never quite perfect, yet still can be complete for that moment:
We realize this life as something always off its balance, something in transition, something that shoots out of a darkness through a dawn into a brightness that we feel to be the dawn fulfilled. In the very midst of the continuity our experience comes as an alteration. ‘Yes,’ we say at the full brightness, ‘this is what I just meant.’ ‘No,’ we feel at the dawning, ‘this is not yet the full meaning, there is more to come.’ In every crescendo of sensation, in every effort to recall, in every progress towards the satisfaction of desire, this succession of an emptiness and fullness that have reference to each other and are one flesh is the essence of the phenomenon
William James, A Pluralistic Universe
At the end of the day, we discover that humility
– the strength to separate our sense of the meaning of life from what we do –
is the only real answer to lifelong happiness.
Joan Chittister, Aspects of the Heart
photo xlibber
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