The attempt to look at your attitude — what you are feeling and thinking and the frame that holds it –
and then your attitude to your attitude,
is one of the routes to freedom
John Tarrant, In the Wild Places
Tag: Awareness
Not going anywhere in life
I have tried to stress the critical importance of the non-dual aspect of meditation by emphasizing that it is not about getting anywhere else. This of course immediately brings up a lot of bewilderment in people, because almost everything we do seems to be about trying to get somewhere else. Why on earth would you not want to get somewhere else? If you’re in a lot of pain, or if you have some kind of illness or whatever, you always want to get back to where you were, or get to some better place in the future. It sounds almost un-American just to settle for what is, but that is a misunderstanding of the potential for living in the present moment. It’s not a matter of settling. It’s a matter of recognizing that, in some sense, it never gets any better than this.
Jon Kabat Zinn.
Noticing what’s here
People go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, the huge waves of the sea, the broad streams of rivers, the vastness of the ocean, the turnings of the stars — and they do not notice themselves.
St Augustine, Confessions
Being present
Since in order to speak,
one must first listen,
learn to speak by listening.
Rumi
No need to journey
Sometimes we take quite a journey – physically or mentally or emotionally – when the very love and happiness we want so much can be found by just sitting down. We spend our lives searching for something we think we don’t have, something that will make us happy. But the key to our deepest happiness lies in changing our vision of where to seek it. As the great Japanese poet and Zen master Hakuin said, “Not knowing how near the Truth is, people seek it far away. What a pity! They are like one who, in the midst of water, cries out in thirst so imploringly.”
Sharon Salzberg, Lovingkindness
Holding it all
What if you are already complete? What if it were possible to hold the whole of it in awareness and allow it to be just as it already is. That would be an incredibly radical act and it would be an act of profound wisdom […] But actually investigate the way things actually are, and you might find that inside of the sadness, the grief, the despair lies something else too — lies some kind of beauty, some kind of humanity, some kind of human understanding, that understands that things are impermanent, that nothing stays the same, that there is loss, that it is not possible to control the whole universe, that even in terms of our body, this is something that is to a large extent a mystery — but it’s not all ugly, it’s not all black. Even in the midst of utter darkness, there’s this other element of beauty, of symmetry, of the natural world.
Jon Kabat Zinn.
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