Tag: Awareness

Genuine happiness comes from gently working with the mind

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If we could put as much effort into cleaning up our minds as we do sweeping our houses, washing our clothes and doing the dishes, we would likely be at ease. But when we talk about cleaning like this, people don’t know what we are getting at…I’ve come to think it’s because people don’t seek their own dwelling place. We scrub and sweep elsewhere. We don’t make our minds clean, so there is always confusion. We are always looking outside.

…These days there is only force and hurry. Mangoes are never sweet now. They are forced. Before they are ripe they picked and artificially ripened. This is done because people want to get them in a hurry. So when you eat them you find they are sour. To get something good, you have to allow it be sour first, according to its own natural way. But we pick them early and then complain that they are sour. For the most part things are imitations. We grasp the things that are false and uncertain as real…If the mind does not see and realize, there is no path to clarity. 

Ajahn Chah, Being Dharma

How we avoid meeting our deepest needs

Karl Duffy3 Comments
“Hundreds of shoppers flood Oxford Street, London, before 7am” Daily Mail,  December 26th 2011

It is curious how modern people will go to almost any length to stay busy and thereby avoid examining unlived life. Contemporary people have an almost insatiable appetite for amusements and addictions – to drugs, food, television, shopping, wealth, power, and all the other diversions of our culture. For many years I believed that our avoidance of soulful engagement is the result of a fear of being overtaken by “uncivilized” qualities from the unconscious. But I have come to understand that we resist our highest potentials even more persistently than we reject our so-called primitive energies. Much of what remains undeveloped in us, psychologically speaking, is excluded because it is too good to bear. We often refuse to accept our most noble traits and instead find a shallow substitute for them. For example…. instead of our god-given right to the ecstatic, we settle for temporary highs from consuming something or possessing someone.

We all have places where we cut ourselves off from potentially exciting and fulfilling experiences due to habit, fear or laziness. A simple way to locate some fo your complexes (which are by definition, unconscious) is to reflect upon the past week and notice what situations disturbed you. Where did you have a run-in with someone? When and how did you procrastinate or avoid something? In what ways did you fail to engage life fully? There are a diverse number of complexes, as many as there are typical situations in life. These clusters of experiential energy are trying to protect you…by drawing on past experiences, but they also limit your freedom and bind you to the past.

Robert A Johnson, Jungian Analyst, Living your Unlived LIfe.

Running on tracks laid down by others

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Like a lot of people I know, I struggle with taking too much on, with doing too many things, with moving too fast, with overcommitting, with overplanning. I have learnt that I  must move, quite simply, at the pace of what is real. While this pace may vary, life always seems vacant and diminished when I accelerate beyond my capacity to feel what is before me. It seems we run our lives like, trains, speeding along a track laid down by others, going so fast that what we pass blurs on by. The we say we’ve been there, done that. The truth is that blurring by something is not the same as experiencing it.

So, no matter how many wonderful experiences come my way, no matter the importance placed on these things by others who have my best interests at heart, I must somehow find a way to slow down the train that is me until what I pass by is again seeable, touchable, feel-able. Otherwise I will pass by everything – can put it all on my resume – but will have experienced and lived through nothing.

Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening

Tenderly holding whatever you touch

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Tenderness is the language of the body as a mother holds her child, as a nurse touches a patient’s wound, or as an assistant bathes someone with a disability. Recently in a buddhist monastery, I watched a sister as she served us food and tea with great delicacy; it was as if the meal itself was sacred, revealing a presence of God. And so it did, because it was treated so.

Tenderness is the language of the body speaking of respect: the body honours what it touches. It honours reality. It does not act as if reality has to be changed or possessed; reality belongs to humanity and to God. Is not this the way we should relate to all living beings, plants, animals and the earth?

Jean Vanier,  Becoming Human

Sunday Quote: Sitting, without speaking

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The whole of practice can be simplified on this day: To be able to sit quietly with where our life is, and be at ease there.

Silence is pure and holy.

It draws people together

because only those who are comfortable with each other

can sit without speaking.

Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook

How to get the most from the holidays: Do all things deliberately and with attention

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“Conquer haste”, the Zen masters say. The writer Joe Hyams, describes how he learned that lesson in a meeting with the master Bong Soo Han. The two were having tea when a letter arrived from the teacher’s family in Korea. Hyams says: ‘Knowing he had been eagerly anticipating the letter, I paused in our conversation, expecting him to tear open the envelope and hastily scan the contents. Instead, he put the letter aside, turned to me, and continued our conversation. The following day I remarked on his self-control, saying that I would have read the letter at once.’

“I did what I would have done had I been alone,” he said. “I put the letter aside until I had conquered haste. Then when I set my hand to it, I opened it as though it were something precious.”  I puzzled over this comment a moment, knowing he meant it as a lesson for me. Finally I said I didn’t understand what such patience led to. “It leads to this,” he said. “Those who are patient in the trivial things in life have the same mastery in great and important things.”

Philip Toshio Sudo.