The best way to ‘get somewhere,’ to make progress in meditation — and that’s a dangerous way to think about it — is to just begin to pay attention, moment to moment, with less judgment.
Jon Kabat Zinn
Tag: Awareness
The heart of our practice
You have to trust this simple ability that we all have to be fully present and fully awake, and begin to recognize the grasping, and the ideas we have taken on about ourselves, about the world around us, about our thoughts and perceptions and feelings. The way of mindfulness is the way of recognizing conditions just as they are. We simply recognize and acknowledge their presence, without blaming them or judging them, without criticizing them or praising them. We allow them to be, both the positive and the negative.
When I started practicing meditation I felt I was somebody who was very confused, and I wanted to get out of this confusion and get rid of my problems and become someone who was a clear thinker and might one day become enlightened. But then, reflecting on this position that “I am somebody who needs to do something,” I began to see it as a created condition — it was an assumption that I had created: “I am somebody who needs to do something in order to become enlightened in the future.” Just by recognizing this as an assumption I created, that which is aware knows it is something created out of ignorance, or not understanding. When we see and recognize this fully, then we stop creating the assumptions. Awareness is not about making value judgments about our thoughts or emotions or actions or speech. Awareness is about knowing these things fully — that they are what they are, at this moment.
Ajahn Sumedho
Wonder, evening and morning
Here dies another day
During which I have had eyes, ears, hands
And the great world round me;
And with tomorrow begins another.
Why am I allowed two?
G.K. Chesterson, Evening
Life as a long party
Please think about this as you go on. Breathe on the world. Hold out your hands to it. When morning and evenings roll along, watch how they open and close, how they invite you to the long party that your life is.
William Stafford, American Poet, A Valley Like This
Watching our “add-on’s”
No, no! The adventures first, explanations take such a dreadful time.
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
A famous Zen haiku reads: “The old Pond. A Frog jumps in. Plop” This is a wonderful description of bare attention. The poet, Basho, goes directly to the essence of his experience: the pond, frog, plop. We can say that in meditation we are developing “plop mind”. We are stripping away everything that is extraneous to our immediate experience and simply being present with what is happening. This is bare attention: direct, essential, non-interfering.
Joseph Goldstein, Bare Attention
Being true to the possibilities
And from a more recent Irish writer:
All the possibilities of your human destiny are asleep in your soul. You are here to realize and honor these possibilities. When love comes in to your life, unrecognized dimensions of your destiny awaken and blossom and grow. Possibility is the secret heart of time.
John O’Donohue, Anam Chara
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