Meditation strengthen our steadfastness to be with ourselves. Whatever arises – pain, boredom, sleepiness, wild thoughts or emotions – we learn to stay with it. We come to see that meditation isn’t about attaining some ideal state. It’s about being able to stay with ourselves, no matter what.
Pema Chodron
When pain or distress arises in our bodies, our conditioned reaction is to pin it down and solidify it with concepts. We say “my knee,” “my back,” “my illness,” and the floodgates of apprehension are opened. We predict a dire future for ourselves, fear the intensification of the pain, and at times dissolve into helplessness and despair. Our concepts serve both to make the pain more rigid and to undermine our capacity to respond to it skillfully. We are caught in the tension of wanting to divorce ourselves from a distressed body while the intensity of pain keeps drawing us back into our body. Meditation offers a very different way of responding to pain in our bodies. Instead of employing strategies to avoid it, we learn to investigate what is actually being experienced within our bodies calmly and curiously. We can bring a compassionate, accepting attention directly to the core of pain. This is the first step towards healing and releasing the agitation and dread that often intensify pain.
Christine Feldman, Suffering is Optional
We experience our lives through our bodies, whether we are aware of it or not. Yet we are usually so mesmerized by our ideas about the world that we miss out on much of our direct sensory experience. Even when we are aware of feeling a strong breeze, the sound of rain on the roof, a fragrance in the air, we rarely remain with the experience long enough to inhabit it fully. In most moments, an overlay of inner dialogue comments on what is happening and plans what we might do next.…The basic meditation instructions …. were to be mindful of the changing stream of sensations without trying to hold on to them, change them, or resist them….Being mindful of sensations does not mean standing apart and observing like a distant witness. Rather, we directly experience what is happening in our bodies.
Tara Brach, Come to your Senses
This vanishes, that vanishes, but that which knows
their vanishing doesn’t vanish. . . .
All that remains is simple
awareness, utterly pure.
Ajahn Maha Boowa
Being silent doesn’t require being in a quiet place and it doesn’t mean not saying words. It means “receiving in a balanced, non-combative way what is happening”. With or without words, the hope of my heart is that it will be able to relax and acknowledge the truth of my situation with compassion.
Sylvia Boorstein, That’s Funny, you don’t look Buddhist
Above the mountains
the geese turn into the light again
painting their black silhouettes
on an open sky.
Sometimes everything
has to be
enscribed across the heavens
so you can find
the one line
already written inside you.
Sometimes it takes
a great sky to find that
first, bright and indescribable
wedge of freedom
in your own heart.
Sometimes with
the bones of the black
sticks left when the fire
has gone out
someone has written
something new in the ashes
of your life.
You are not leaving
you are arriving.
David Whyte, The House of Belonging
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