Tag: Awareness

Being, before doing

Karl Duffy2 Comments

When you are feeling overwhelmed, you’re trying too hard. That kind of energy does not help the other person and it does not help you. You should not be too eager to help right away. There are two things, to be and to do. Dont think too much about to do – to be is first. To be peace. To be joy. And then to do joy, to do happiness – on the basis of being. Being fresh. Being peaceful. Being compassionate. This is the basic practice. It’s like a person sitting at the foot of a tree. The tree does not have to do anything, but the tree is fresh and alive. When you are like that tree, sending out waves of freshness, you help to calm down the suffering in the other person.

Thich Nhat Hahn, Be Beautiful, Be yourself

Keeping our attention firm, no matter what experiences we have

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Sometimes you may feel that you have amazing, tremendous meditation, and at other times you may feel that you have no meditation at all. This characterizes experience, which fluctuates a great deal. Realization, which is distinct from experience, does not change, but experiences can fluctuate a great deal or alternate between good and bad. There will still be times when you will have what you regard as good experiences and, in contrast, what you regard as bad experiences. When that occurs, just keep on looking. Don’t get distracted or sidetracked by the experience. Whatever meditation experience arises, you should recognize that it is transitory. As is said, “meditation experience is like mist, it will surely vanish.”

Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche

Bare Attention

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The Old Pond. A Frog jumps in. Plop. Matsuo Bash0, 1644 – 1694

How do we tame our minds? How do we train ourselves to stay open to our experience from moment to moment? The answer lies in the mind state called  “bare attention”. “Bare” means simple, direct, without trappings of judgment or interpretation. “Attention” means mindfulness, awareness; not forgetting to be present. A famous Zen haiku reads: “The old Pond. A Frog jumps in. Plop”

This is a wonderful description of bare attention. The old pond is not necessarily beautiful or covered with lily pods or green or blue. 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, noninterfering.

Joseph Goldstein, Bare Attention

Creating ourselves by our choices

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Michelangelo stated that his sculptures were already present in the stone and all he had to do was carve away everything else. Our understanding of identity is often similar: Beneath the many layers of shoulds and shouldn’ts that cover us, there lies a constant single true self that is just waiting to be discovered. We think of the process as a personal excavation. We dig deep, getting under the surface, throwing away the extraneous, to reveal our everlasting self. And the tool by which we unearth this piece de resistance is none other than choice. Your choices of which clothes to wear or which soda to drink, where you live, which school to attend or what to study, and of course your profession all say something about you, and its your job to make sure that they are an accurate reflection of who you are.

Shena Iyengar, The Art of Choosing

The mind and direct experience

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The challenge is to let go of our ideas about life, in order to more fully live. Our stories and mental images can often create a frame which dictates how we relate to each moment, or create expectations which we then use to judge how we are doing, causing frustration and self-doubt. The direct experience of each moment leads us into unfamiliar but rich territory. We practice letting go of our ideas and making room for what is here in this moment, a space to listen outside the confines of our fears and internal scripts.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of possible choices. We live entirely by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ideas by which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

Joan Didion, The White Album

Create life a day at a time.

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The present moment is all we have, and it becomes the doorway to true calm, your healing refuge. The only place you can love, or heal or awaken is here and now, the eternal present. Create life a day at a time. You cannot know the future. But you can plant beautiful seeds here and now and learn to tend them with the love, courage and survival instinct that is inborn in you. Somerset Maugham once said “There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are”. He wrote marvellous novels, the only way we can, a page at a time.

Jack Kornfield, A Lamp in the Darkness