When you refrain from habitual thoughts and behavior, the uncomfortable feelings will still be there. They don’t magically disappear. Over the years, I’ve come to call resting with the discomfort “the detox period,” because when you don’t act on your habitual patterns, it’s like giving up an addiction. You’re left with the feelings you were trying to escape. The practice is to make a wholehearted relationship with that.
Pema Chodron, Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change
Consciousness is said to be a field, a plot of land in which every kind of seed has been planted, seeds of suffering, happiness, joy, sorrow, fear, anger, and hope. The quality of our life depends on which of these seeds we water. The practice of mindfulness is to recognize each seed as it sprouts, and to water the most wholesome seeds whenever possible.
Thich Nhat Hahn
In Ireland the Gaelic name for October is Deireadh Fomhair, meaning the “last harvesting” – the last days of gathering whatever was planted earlier in the year. It marks a change in energy, a winding-down for those who work on the land as they prepare for the dark days of winter. For us too, it can be a moment to look back on the work we have done this year, the way we have expended our energy, on how we have used our time. So, as our focus naturally turns more inward, we can use it as a season to reflect and find our balance between our past and our future. We can take stock of what we are investing in and harvesting in our lives. We can begin to create space, recognizing unwise activity and busyness that only creates more distraction in our minds, keeping us running a lot but ultimately feeling more empty and less productive.
Naturally there are different species of laziness: Eastern and Western. Western laziness ……consists of cramming our lives with compulsive activity, so there is no time at all to confront the real issues. This form of laziness lies in our failure to choose worthwhile applications for our energy.We are so addicted to looking outside ourselves that we have lost access to our inner being almost completely. We are terrified to look inward, because our culture has given us no idea of what we will find. So we make our lives so hectic that we eliminate the slightest risk of looking into ourselves. Even the idea of meditation can scare people. When they hear the words egoless or emptiness, they think that experiencing those states will be like being thrown out the door of a spaceship to float forever in a dark, chilling void. Nothing could be further from the truth. But in a world dedicated to distraction, silence and stillness terrify us; we protect ourselves from them with noise and frantic busyness. Looking into the nature of our mind is the last thing we would dare to do.
Sogyal Rinpoche
Being silent doesn’t require being in a quiet place and it doesn’t mean not saying words. It means “receiving in a balanced, non-combative way what is happening”. With or without words, the hope of my heart is that it will be able to relax and acknowledge the truth of my situation with compassion.
Sylvia Boorstein, That’s Funny, you don’t look Buddhist
Sometimes you may think that to sit is very difficult. But when you are able to stop and be at peace it is very easy…While sitting I make almost no use of my intellect. I don’t try to analyze things or solve complex problems by thinking about them. Thinking requires strenuous mental work and makes us tired. This is not the case while resting in awareness, or recognizing thoughts and emotions as they appear, or even taking the time to look deeply into them. We have a tendency to think that meditation demands a great mobilization of grey matter, but that’s not really the case. Meditation is not hard labour. Meditation rests the mind
Thich Nhat Hahn, Making Space: Creating a Home Meditation Practice
The danger in meditation practice is the habit of grasping at things, grasping at states; so the concept that’s most useful is the concept of letting go, rather than of attaining and achieving. If you say today that yesterday you had a really super meditation, absolutely fantastic, just what you’ve always dreamed of, and then today you try to get the same wonderful experience as yesterday, but you get more restless and more agitated than ever before – now why is that? Why can’t we get what we want? It’s because we’re trying to attain something that we remember; rather than really working with the way things are, as they happen to be now. So the correct way is one of mindfulness, of looking at the way it is now, rather than remembering yesterday and trying to get to that state again.
Ajahn Sumedho.
