Tag: Be fully present

The important things cannot be rushed

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Too often, our results-oriented mood also spills over into our spiritual practices. We want to get as much as possible, as quickly as possible, from as little commitment as possible. I pick up on this after the meditation sessions I lead where people get a glimpse into how unpredictable and completely scattered their minds are. Even though everyone tries their level best to keep the mind focused, the mind escapes to a thought, a plan, a conversation, or a fantasy without the individual even realizing that it went somewhere. This experience often inspires them to ask me, “How long did it take you to control your mind?” My response every single time is, “I’m still trying.”

It seems as if we have a need to accomplish something. We’re always trying to reach the finish line so that we can feel a sense of completion and move on to something else. However, meditation and spirituality are never quite like that. The other day, someone wrote me a question on Facebook: “What is the fastest way for one to remove one’s bad karma?” I responded by saying, “I wish there was a fast way to burn off karma. The purpose of karma is not only to give us a reaction for our positive or negative actions, but also to teach us valuable lessons about life, our character and behavior, and our interactions with others. These things in life usually can’t be rushed. Otherwise, we wouldn’t learn from them.”

Gadadhara Pandit Dasa, Fast Food Spirituality in the Huffington Post, 19 June 2012.

Thoughts while working in the garden

Karl Duffy1 Comment
Patience is the ability to watch something until it changes. Ajahn Sucitto

Each day there are plenty of opportunities to practice patience in our lives. However, for both inner and outer reasons, staying still does not come easy for most of us.  This is firstly because there is always active in the mind a strong tendency towards becoming, which translates as a desire to move on to the next thing. This can mean that there is always activity going on in thoughts, sometimes useful, sometimes less so, but always leaning forward. Past memories can also rise up and move us,  meaning that stuff which happened yesterday or last year can make us feel restless and anxious for resolution now. The energy is always flowing and we tend to get caught up in it. And because the mind is always moving, the body tends to want to move also, and we end up believing that unless we are in some way active we are wasting our life.

It is also true that society today encourages us to see any delay as a waste of time. We have gotten so used to instant results, faster broadband, instant downloads and so on  that we are tricked into thinking that this model applies to everything, such as our interior life, or how to respond to setbacks such as illness or job loss, or other transitions in life.  However, nature reminds us of a different rhythm, as when we are working in the vegetable garden and observing the tomatoes as they slowly move towards being ripe. Or waiting for the right time to re-seed a lawn, as the weather now is too hot and I will have to wait for a month or two. There is nothing we can do to hurry things up or change the pace at which it is right to go.

If you really aren’t trying to get anywhere else in this moment,  patience  takes care of itself. It is a remembering that things unfold in their own time. The seasons cannot be hurried. Spring comes, the grass grows by itself. Being in a hurry usually doesn’t help and it can create a great deal of suffering – sometimes in us, sometimes in those who have to be around us. Patience is an ever-present alternative to the mind’s endemic restlessness and impatience. Scratch the surface of impatience and you will find lying beneath it, subtly or not so subtly is anger. It’s the strong energy of not wanting things to be the way they are and blaming someone (often yourself)  or something for it.

Jon Kabat Zinn, Wherever you go, There you are

Noticing the extraordinary in the ordinary

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Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone. As if life

were a progressive and cunning crime with no witness to the tiny

transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny

the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,

even you, at times, have felt the grand array;

the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding

out your solo voice. You must note the way the soap dish enables you,

or the window latch grants you freedom.

Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation. The kettle is singing

even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots have left their arrogant aloofness and

seen the good in you at last. All the birds and creatures of the world are unutterably

themselves.

Everything is waiting for you.

David Whyte, Everything is waiting for you

Missing the view, now

Karl Duffy1 Comment

The chief obstacle to our happiness is our concept of happiness. Above all we tend to think that certain conditions must be present for us to be happy. We think we cannot be happy until we meet certain life goals. All  of this future-orientated thinking, instead of making us happy, becomes a reason for us to be unhappy now. And if we aren’t happy now, the postponement of our happiness regresses into an infinitely receding future. We chase the horizon in endless anticipation and continual frustrations. We never get there, because we always hope to arrive there someday. It’s as if we are on a beautiful hiking trail, where there are spectacular mountains, lush meadows, cool streams, quiet lakes and beautiful trees, but we’re unhappy because we’re caught up in the concept that the view around the next corner will be better, while the one surrounding us is nothing at all.

Thomas Bien, The Buddha’s way of Happiness

Doing nothing

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There are times, then, when in order to keep ourselves in existence at all we simply have to sit back for a while and do nothing. And for a man who has let himself be drawn completely out of himself by his activity, nothing is more difficult than to sit still and rest, doing nothing at all. The very act of resting is the hardest and most courageous act he can perform: and often it is quite beyond his power. We must first recover the possession of our own being before we can act wisely or taste any experience in its human reality.

Thomas Merton

Not working it out, but being with

Karl Duffy4 Comments

We have been battered by modern times into obsessive problem solvers, but as life pares us down into only what is essential, it becomes clear that the deepest sufferings of heart and spirit cannot be solved, only witnessed and held. I have struggled with this constantly. Just recently, after being away for two weeks, I returned to a tender partner who loving uttered, “I really missed you.” Instantly, I reacted by scanning for ways to solve the feeling – to limit my travel or call more often. I instantly tried to change my patterns of being away from the relationship, rather than just feel the poignancy of being loved enough to be missed.

Frequently, this reflex to solve, rescue, and fix removes us from the tenderness at hand. For often, intimacy arises not from any attempt to take the pain away, but from a living through together; not from a working out, but from a being with. Trust and closeness deepen from holding and being held. I am learning, pain by pain and tension by tension, that after all my strategies fail, the strength of love waits in receiving and negotiating; in accepting each other and not problem solving each other; in listening and affirming each other, not trying to fix those we love.

Mark Nepo