Tag: Awareness

Not depending on something else to make us happy

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In Tibet they have a saying, “The joy of a king is no greater than the joy of a beggar”.  It isn’t what we possess — it’s what we enjoy. This means the experience of genuine cheerfulness cannot be bought or sold. What makes it genuinely cheerful is that we are free from fixation and attachment. We are free of having to depend on something else to make us happy. We can bask freely in the natural radiance of our mind. This is the equanimity of true cheerfulness — nothing more, nothing less.

Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, The Power of Being Cheerful

Running after our life

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When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.  Lao Tzu

At some point, our life can become machine like. We find ourselves running on automatic pilot, without any clear sense of purpose – our momentum fuelled by a chronic sense of need, a vague feeling that something is missing on our life. Nothing is enough to relieve the pressure that we feel. So we keep on with our superhuman efforts to design a life that looks like the happiness we imagine. But when it depends on material things or external valuations, happiness has a history of being short-lived.

Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, Erring and Erring, we walk the Unerring Path

The freedom of letting some things go

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I may not hope from outward forms to win, The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.    Coleridge

For some people, Ash Wednesday is a day of fasting.   These days  we are quite familiar with the latest diets and slimming fads  – and consequently put a lot of pressure on body conscious people – and they harmonize quite well with a culture preoccupied with image.  The idea of fasting, and the related notion of restraint or renunciation, however, seems somewhat alien. Because of this we lose a link to a deeper process than dieting, rooted in the unconscious. Fasting, like the silence and stillness of meditation, allow us let go of some of the normal practices of each day and we can see then what then arises in the mind. Ceasing some activities or changing routines which have become second nature can be a useful way of reminding  us to turn towards our inner life rather than distracting ourselves from it. We are challenged to declutter our busy life and see where our real priorities lie, to travel lighter.  So, “letting go”, in this sense, means not buying into automatic habits and patterns of mind, which limit us into kinds of contraction, and seeing what can be done differently. We become more fluid and can experiment with the space which this gives to act with greater creativity.

Sacrifice is an important concept for anyone interested in leading a religious life, but most people today seems to think that sacrifice means giving something up. This is how shallow our religious sense has become. Sacrifice really involves the art of drawing energy from one level and reinvesting it at another level to produce a higher form of consciousness.

Robert Johnson, Jungian Analyst

The one who knows

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Every time I reacted negatively, pushing things away, that action implied that there was something to fear. That this feeling or this thought was dangerous; that it was going to really hurt me, or invade me; that it was something that was really me and mine. As I began to welcome it all I realised that when you accept everything, only then can you sense that, after all, there is nothing to fear. None of it really belongs to a self or comes from a self. It cannot touch the mind which knows, cannot affect its nature. Whatever shape of vessel you pour the water into, with this same total accommodation, the water changes to the shape of the bottle. It doesn’t say: ‘I will not be poured into a square bottle, square bottles are not my scene. Round bottles only, please!’  When there is complete acceptance, there is just the sense of being the knowing, being that which is aware of all that comes through the mind.

Ajahn Amaro

Lost in thoughts

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Without a development or training of the mind, we find that much of our life is lost in thoughts and that we take these thoughts to be reality. How often do our thoughts condition reactions in the mind, as though the thought itself had substance? Yet the thought of a friend is not the friend; it is a thought. How many life scenarios have we created, directed and starred in and, for those moments, taken to be the experience itself? We also may get carried away by the intense nature of our emotions, swept up in a typhoon of the mind and body. To be lost in emotions is not to be mindful of their energy; and when there is a strong identification with them, there is no space in our mind for seeing clearly what is happening.

Joseph Goldstein and Jack Kornfield, Seeking the Heart of Wisdom

Standing still and withdrawing your consent to fear

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In our practice we cultivate awareness –  the capacity to hold even the events and thoughts and fears that bother us with kindness and non-judgment.  This means, as Christine Feldman tells us here, that we create enough of a gap between us and our fears that we no longer allow them to define our sense of self, or let them mean that we are doing something wrong:

It is a great relief to stop running from pain. In standing still and receiving life with all its adversity and sorrow, you have withdrawn your permission for suffering to define your life. You have also withdrawn your consent to living in fear. Something profound happens in your heart when you turn with kindness toward all the circumstances of pain which you have previously repressed, dismissed or fled from. There is a softening, an opening, a deepening capacity and willingness to understand sorrow and its cause. You come to understand that your willingness to be present with difficulties is the midwife to compassion.

Christine Feldman, Compassion