Dropping the storyline

What does it look like to drop the story line of “me”? There was a baseball movie out recently in which a star pitcher is facing a star batter at a crucial point in the game. The pitcher is having a hard time focusing. He’s thinking about what would happen if the batter got a hit. He’s distracted by the fifty thousand fans shouting and waving. Then he says to himself, “Clear the mechanism.” All of a sudden the sound level in the movie drops into silence. Even though the fans are still moving and waving, you no longer hear them, reflecting what the pitcher is experiencing as he disengages from his own emotional noise. Then he says to himself, “Now just throw the ball to the catcher, like you’ve done a million times before.” In “clearing the mechanism” he was turning away from his preoccupation with the mental noise of “me,” from his fear-based thoughts about imagined results, about himself as a star, as someone special. Then he could enter the direct experience of simply throwing the ball.

Ezra Bayda, How to Live a Genuine Life

The extra tension in the mind

Suffering can be differentiated from pain. There is pain in life, without doubt, but suffering is the extra tension in the mind that is unable to accommodate change and accept the truth of its experience. 

The first two noble truths are that life is difficult and that suffering is the tension in the mind that insists an experience be different from the way it is.

It’s the imperative in the mind that this moment be different that causes our suffering

Sylvia Boorstein, Greet this moment as a Friend

More than your sorrow

The seed of suffering in you may be strong, but don’t wait until you have no more suffering before allowing yourself to be happy.

Suffering is not enough. Life is both dreadful and wonderful…

How can I smile when I am filled with so much sorrow?

It is natural – you need to smile to your sorrow because you are more than your sorrow.

Thich Nhat Hahn

Sunday Quote: Aware

it is a serious thing
just to be alive
on this fresh morning
in the broken world

Mary Oliver

Quality time with yourself

Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but ‘steal’ some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.

Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951–1959

Light

If you discover a very thick and deep shadow,

be sure that there is, somewhere within you, a great light.

You must learn to use one to reach the other.

Mirra Alfassa, 1878 – 1973, collaborator of Sri Aurobindo