When green leaves turn in the wind
I vow with all beings
to enjoy the forces that turn me
face up, face down on my stem
Robert Aitken Roshi, The Dragon Who Never Sleeps
Tag: Be fully present
Working with “waiting” today
When we look closely, we find that we pass a great deal of time within the mental frame of being “on our way to the next thing”— completing a task that has been hanging over us, getting to our next meal, disengaging from a phone conversation. Now is not as important as doing something to relieve the stress we feel from unmet wants and gnawing fears. We don’t like the feelings that arise inside us when we are forced simply to wait.
But in life we have to wait a lot. According to one study, the average person in our culture spends eleven days a year just waiting in lines — and this doesn’t count time in planes and cars waiting to “get there.” Nor does it include hours of listening to electronic messages or waiting for TV commercials to end so that we can get back to the main feature. Throughout our day, red lights get in our way. Waiting is stressful, but it is part of the life of all creatures. As long as we have wants and fears, we are waiting for fulfillment or relief. The big question in spiritual practice is, how do we react to biological and psychological stress? Do we think having to wait and tolerate discomfort is a mistake, a glitch in the system?
Tara Brach, Blessings of a Patient Heart
Learning to stay
Meditation is a way of training in learning to stay, or as one student put it more accurately, learning to come back, to return to being present over and over again.
The truth is, anyone who’s ever tried meditation learns really quickly that we are almost never fully present.
Pema Chodron
Just seeing whatever is, today
The goal of meditation is to see things as they are; it is a state of awakened attention. And this is a very simple thing. It isn’t complicated or difficult or something that takes years to achieve. It is so easy, in fact, that you don’t even notice it. When you think in terms of having to practise meditation, you are conceiving it as something you have to attain …….. you have to control your emotions, you have to develop virtues in order to attain some kind of ideal state of mind. You might have images of a lot of yogis sitting in remote places on mountain tops and in caves. ….. and it all sounds very remote and very far from what you can expect from your life as a human being. The point is to look at meditation as awakenedness and awareness throughout daily life in whatever way we live and in whatever conditions. There is in that the sense of allowing things to be in this present moment, allowing whatever way the body is or the emotional and mental states right now to be the way they are. Just be the observer of whatever is. Right now the mood is ‘this’, ‘I feel this’. Just be aware whether you are confused, indifferent, happy, sad, uncertain or whatever. Be that which allows things to be what they are.
Ajahn Sumedho
This moment is the most profound
True honesty also means relating to each moment completely. When you are dishonest, you miss this moment because you are thinking of the next moment, or the last moment or next week’s moments. And therefore you are failing to relate to this moment, to the reality that is right in front of you. By not paying total attention to this moment, you are disrespecting this thought, this energy, taking this moment for granted. Now, when we ignore the present moment in this way, there are consequences… we create suffering. If we live this moment only fifty percent, the fifty percent we failed to live will surely cause us difficulties later. So when we say “be mindful” in this tradition, we are simply saying: this moment is more profound than anything else on earth.
Venerable Shyalpa Rinpoche, A Path of Honesty
Where the tension in our lives comes from
The moment we stray from where we are, we create a tension between two places – where we are and where we are thinking of being. It is this tension that blocks us from the sensation of being fully alive, because being split in our attention prevents us from being authentic – even though managing many tasks at once (being skilful in splitting our attention) is considered intelligent.
For most of us, straying from where we are and coming back is a never-ending task, very much like blinking and breathing. When we incorporate the fullness of attention into our daily lives, we seldom notice it. But if we should interrupt our flow of being, we will stumble just as surely as if we were to stop seeing or breathing. That we stray from the moment is not surprising. The more crucial thing is that we return.
Mark Nepo, The Book Of Awakening
