Your up and down emotions are like clouds in the sky;
beyond them, the real, basic human nature is clear and pure.
Lama Zopa Rinpoche
Tag: Awareness
Practices that stretch us
There is nothing I dislike
Linji, died 866, founder of the Rinzai school of Zen
In Zen, koans or phrases such as this are taken on and allowed sink into consciousness to challenge and stretch us and provoke responses other than our habitual ones. Two commentaries by different authors might be useful:
What does that mean, to dislike? Dislike could mean that you are feeling a strain between how things really are and your story about how things are.
John Tarrant, Bring me the Rhinoceros (and other koans to bring you joy).
‘There is nothing I dislike’ rearranges us profoundly, when we offer ourselves to its energy, its scrutiny, its disturbance in us. This practice is not about tidying up the world and making it clean and bright; it’s about recognizing the world as it is and finding right there the radical freedom of being. The alternative is a kind of carefully scaled-down life. One that is still extravagantly rich in detail and variety and shot through with beauty despite all our efforts, since we live on the blue-green planet, but a scaled-down view of what it was we really wanted while we were here, so very briefly.
Susan Murphy, Upside-Down Zen
Who you already are
Don’t go looking elsewhere. Let go of all those ideas about lacking something or needing to attain something
The core essence of it all [life].. is to be who you already are – rather than get lost in who you are afraid you are, or think you might be and want to be – in the only moment we ever get, which is just this one. That’s easy to say, but it’s a non-trivial thing to actually engage in.
Jon Kabat Zinn
Be strong then, and enter into your own body;
there you have a solid place for your feet.
Just throw away all thoughts of
imaginary things,
and stand firm in that which you are.
Kabir
More than our fears
In Ireland, Summer is officially over at the end of August, and, as if to acknowledge this, yesterday began foggy and grey. Typically, however, the rest of the day turned out better than most of the Summer. The fog passed through, the sun came out. Today, we are told to expect heavy rain. Small upsets or bigger storms…the sky can hold whatever passes through it.
It is essential to understand that an emotion is merely something that arises, remains and then goes away. A storm comes, it stays a while, and then it moves away. At the critical moment remember you are much more than your emotions. This is a simple thing that everyone knows, but you may need to be reminded of it: you are more than your emotions.
Thich Nhat Hahn, Healing Pain and Dressing Wounds
Not giving up on our dreams
We should never give up on our dreams or let them be blocked by the limitations of our own or others fears; but rather believe in that voice within and trust our capacity to achieve it.
Since the powers of nature in this dreamer, in that dreamer, and in the macrocosm of nature itself, are the same, only differently inflected,
the powers personified in a dream are those that move the world.
All the gods are within you
Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God
per Laura V, ritrovata dopo molti anni ma mai veramente andata dal cuore
The difficulty of just being still
Here in my head, language
keeps making its tiny noises.
How can I hope to be friends
with the hard white stars
whose flaring and hissing are not speech
but a pure radiance?
How can I hope to be friends
with the yawning spaces between them
where nothing, ever, is spoken?
…What can we do
but keep on breathing in and out,
modest and willing, and in our places?
Mary Oliver, Stars
Mindfulbalance 