Tag: balance

Seeing that change is just part of life

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Just as there are seasons in the world around us, so there are in our interior life.     Teresa of Avila

We can learn a lot around the change of the seasons, as in these days when Winter gives way to Spring. Not just the ongoing lesson about change and impermanence but from the fact that there is a parallel between our interior rhythm and the movement of the seasons. Winter is a time for conserving energy and reducing activity, whereas,  in some Eastern Wisdom traditions,  Spring is seen as having an energy which is expansive and outward moving. It is a time of new beginnings and potentially a renewal of spirit. And all around us we begin to see this, as there is a delicate but still fragile sense of renewal and new life. We see seeds beginning to sprout, flowers bloom, and the sun gently warming the earth. And we begin to see that despite the darkness and cold much has been going on unseen and underground for months. However, we also see the harm which the severe cold has done to some of the plants, who need cutting back or digging up. We too start again, making room for change, moving towards a sense of lightness, letting go of unhelpful habits of mind which hold us back or no longer give life.

There are seasons in your life in the same way as there are seasons in nature. There are times to cultivate and create, when you nurture your world and give birth to new ideas and ventures. There are times of flourishing and abundance, when life feels in full bloom, energized and expanding. And there are times of fruition, when things come to an end. They have reached their climax and must be harvested before they fade. And finally, of course, there are times of cold and cutting and empty, times when the spring of new beginnings seems like a distant dream.

These rhythms in life are natural events. They weave into one another as day follows night, bringing, not messages of hope and fear, but messages of how things are. If you realize that each phase of your life is a natural occurrence, then you need not be swayed, pushed up and down by the changes in circumstance and mood that life brings.

Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, How to Rule

Some neuroscience links to practice

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I was reading recently neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s work on the development of our sense of self. I find his emphasis on the body harmonizes very well with our practice, especially with how we work with difficult emotions. We frequently carry into the present unworked material from the past,  which can be tied up with fearful emotions and inhibit our freedom. Our emphasis is on holding the emotions as they manifest in body sensations in awareness without feeling the need to fix them or judge them or push them away. This is because the body has a wisdom which is broader than the thinking, fixing part of the mind, and we can make use of the way our past manifests in the body, as it is the “pivot around which the conscious mind turns” and allow us get in touch with our primordial experience.

You may not yet be able to bring your unconscious mind activity into awareness as thoughts, but it will always be reflected in the body as an emotion, and of this you can become aware.

Eckhart Tolle

The body is a foundation of the conscious mind … the special kind of mental images of the body produced in body-mapping structures, constitute the protoself, which foreshadows the self to be … the body is best conceived as the rock on which the protoself is built, while the protoself is the pivot around which the conscious mind turns….I hypothesize that the first and most elementary product of the protoself is primordial feelings, which occur spontaneously and continuously whenever one is awake.  They provide a direct experience of one’s own living body, wordless, unadorned, and connected to nothing but sheer existence ……..all feelings of emotion are complex musical variations on primordial feelings.

Antonio Damasio, Self comes to mind.

Our overactive minds

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Most times that I fret and chafe about an upcoming engagement, someone cancels; most times I dread a coming moment,  the moment never comes. It’s not the world that I need to change, but the mayhem that my overactive mind makes of the world. It’s more than capable of seeing a blue car stationary, and constructing out of it a six-act melodrama

Pico Iyer, The Folly of the Weather Forecast

Learning from the return of Spring

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If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving
and for once could do nothing
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.

Pablo Nerudo, Keeping Quiet

Living in-between

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We tend either to feel once removed from what is happening, or to become entirely lost in it. Both tendencies leave us with a sense of artificiality, however dramatic and sensational the situation may be. My understanding …is that it is possible to live in-between these two modes of limited being. We remain one with experience – not torn apart by a commitment to an image. Through abiding in the in-between we discover a subtle kind of personal confidence. It is not “my” confidence because it is a confidence that belongs to reality. The struggle of moving from finding security in false identities into realisation of limitless abiding beyond personality is difficult. It feels like it will cost us everything. But [instead]…we find there are more and more situations in which we remember ourselves more quickly. We are now more likely to be able to accord with whatever situation we are in as we move through the world – not because we have become more liberal or compromising, not at all, but because we don’t hold ourselves so tightly.

Ajahn Munindo, Unexpected Freedom

Holding the contradictions within

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Ours is a time of anxiety because we have willed it to be so. Our anxiety is not imposed on us by force from outside. We impose it on our world and upon one another from within ourselves. Sanctity in such an age means, no doubt, traveling from the area of anxiety to the area in which there is no anxiety or perhaps it may mean learning….to be without anxiety in the midst of anxiety. Fundamentally, as Max Picard points out, it probably comes to this: living in a silence which so reconciles the contradictions within us that, although they remain within us, they cease to be a problem.

Contradictions have always existed in the soul of man. But it is only when we prefer analysis to silence that they become a constant and insoluble problem. We are not meant to resolve all contradictions but to live with them and rise above them and see them in the light of exterior and objective values which make them trivial by comparison.

Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude