A lot of our difficulties comes from the “name” we put on our experiences, how we label what is happening to us. This applies particularly to how we talk to ourselves in the moments that something is occurring, as this Sutta from the Buddhist tradition tells us:S. 1.61
When snow falls and slows down the traffic, we get plenty of opportunities to practice mindfulness, here explained in its simplest form. Often our way is blocked and we are forced to stay where we are for a long time. Being with our life “as it is” is the key to our practice, even when we don’t particularly want to be there:
You don’t need to try to get anywhere when you practice meditation. You only need to really be where you already are and realize it (make it real). In fact in this way of looking at things there is no place else to go, so efforts to get anywhere else are ill-conceived. They are bound to lead to frustration and failure. On the other hand, you cannot fail to be where you already are. So you cannot ‘fail’ in your meditation practice if you are willing to be with things as they are.
Jon Kabat Zinn, Full Catastrophe Living
A lot of the time we practice with what we don’t know, rather than what we do. Some situations in life, or in our day, are not clear. Our practice is to hold open a space, not rushing the answer, allowing the situation or the person to go through the necessary process at its own pace.
The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning.
Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.
Erich Fromm
The meditation orientation is not about fixing pain or making it better. It’s about looking deeply into the nature of pain — making use of it in certain ways that might allow us to grow. In that growing, things will change, and we have the potential to make choices that will move us toward greater wisdom and compassion, including self-compassion, and thus toward freedom from suffering.
Jon Kabat-Zinn, At Home in our Bodies.
You work with what you are given,
We must be content to live,
without watching ourselves live.
Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island
