Tag: Be fully present

Not always pleased

Karl Duffy1 Comment

So here is the ongoing question that is my gauge for measuring my level of confusion – “In this moment, am I able to care?”. Not “Am I pleased?”

There are all sorts of things I don’t like. And in response to what I find unpleasant I often feel dismayed or impatient or annoyed or disappointed or grieved. What I try to so is to keep my mind from fighting with my experience, confusing and isolating itself in self-centred despair. The contentious mind is, by definition, confused. It hasn’t remembered that struggle creates suffering and a grateful response creates clarity. I am trying to stay unconfused and connected to my own kindness. Whenever I do, I relax, see what my options are and choose the nest of them. I wont always be pleased, but I’ll be happy.

Sylvia Boorstein, Happiness is an inside Job

Holding plans lightly

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Who makes these changes?
I shoot an arrow right.
It lands left.
I ride after a deer and find myself
Chased by a hog.
I plot to get what I want
And end up in prison.
I dig pits to trap others
And fall in.

I should be suspicious
Of what I want.

Rumi

Saturday silence

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Silence can be a plan
rigorously executed
the blueprint to a life
It is a presence
it has a history a form
Do not confuse it
with any kind of absence.

It was an old theme even for me:
Language cannot do everything

Adrienne Rich, Cartographies of Silence, 3 and 7 [extracts]

Transfiguration

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Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration.

You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see.

Only, who could have the courage to see it.

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

Open the mind and heart

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We have a choice. We can spend our whole life suffering because we can’t relax with how things really are, or we can relax and embrace the open-endedness of the human situation, which is fresh, unfixated, unbiased.

So the challenge is to notice the emotional tug of shenpa when it arises and to stay with it for one and a half minutes without the storyline. Can you do this once a day, or many times throughout the day, as the feeling arises? This is the challenge. This is the process of unmasking, letting go, opening the mind and heart.

Pema Chödrön

Interesting

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In Zen they say: If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. Eventually one discovers that it’s not boring at all but very interesting.

John Cage, quoted in Mark Epstein, Going on Being