Tag: Be fully present

Walking right beside us

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In Italy, today –  the Monday after Easter Sunday – is known as La Pasquetta (“Little Easter”) or Lunedì dell’Angelo (“The Monday of the Angel”). Ir is a day for relaxing outside, for going for a walk and having a picnic. It probably has it roots in ancient Spring festivals, when people would gather outdoors to celebrate. It was a day when a journey, a walk, or even a drive in the car had to be made. The religious meaning given to it, at least as it was explained to me, was to remember the journey made by Jesus’ two disciples on the road to Emmaus on Easter Day.

These two disciples set out on Sunday for the village of Emmaus, a walk of a few days. As they were going along, Jesus joined them. They did not recognize him. They were replaying the events of the past – the days of the Crucifixion – and were worrying about what was to happen to them. Their concerns and chatter, their fear-driven desire to run away, did not allow them recognize that God was actually walking with them. In this way, they are just like us, caught in worries about the past, or running away or basing our view of the future on fears. Like us, we often fail to recognize the richness of our life lies in the present moment, when all we can experience is right with us. Often, to be fully alive, all we have to do is see what is being offered to us, right in this moment, rather than thinking our joy lies somewhere else, sometime else. It is sad if we are so focused on getting to a destination, we do not notice what is right beside us now.

The present moment
contains past and future.
The secret of transformation,
is in the way we handle this very moment.

Thich Nhat Hahn, Understanding Our Mind

….and of becoming our true self

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As soon as a man tries to escape every risk and prefers to experience life only in his head, in the form of ideas and fantasies, as soon as he surrenders to opinions of ‘how it ought to be’ and, in order not to make a false step, imitates others whenever possible, he forfeits the chance of his own independent development. Only if he treads the path bravely and flings himself into life, fearing no struggle and no exertion and fighting shy of no experience, will he mature his personality more fully than the man who is ever trying to keep to the safe side of the road.

Jolande Jacobi, Jungian analyst and author

Steps

Karl Duffy4 Comments

In order to have peace and joy, you must succeed in having peace within each of your steps.  Your steps are the most important thing.  They decide everything. But often in our daily life, our steps are burdened with anxieties and fears.  Life itself seems to be a continuous chain of insecure feelings, and so our steps lose their natural easiness.  Our earth is truly beautiful.  There is so much graceful, natural scenery along paths and roads around the earth!   They are all available to us, yet we cannot enjoy them because our hearts are not trouble-free, and our steps are not at ease.

Thich Nhat Hahn

Being happy to stay with the now

Karl Duffy1 Comment

 

Joy is exactly what’s happening minus our opinion of it.

Charlotte Joko Beck.

Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.

Robert Frost, A Prayer in Spring

We live a lot of the time in the future

Karl Duffy1 Comment

A nice reminder here from Joseph Goldstein as to how the mind continually falls  into the trap of raising expectations about future events, even though it sees that not all events in the past lived up to their hype. Wisdom lies in a balanced understanding of the true nature of things. Practice consists of staying in the now and letting things unfold without an agenda, staying open to how they actually are when they arrive in the present.

When we look back at our experience, we can see so clearly its ephemeral, dreamlike nature. Yet when we look ahead, when we look to the future, somehow (and this is the great enchantment) we get dazzled by all the possibilities that are there waiting for us as if the next event in our lives, the next situation, the next project, the next relationship, the next meal, even on meditation the next breath … we live our lives in anticipation of the next hit of experience as if the one that’s coming will finally do it for us. What’s so strange is that nothing up ’til now has brought that sense of real completion or fulfillment. So why are we so seduced into thinking that the next one will? This is a very strange phenomena.

Joseph Goldstein

Every moment is a new opportunity

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In Zen, we have a saying that if you haven’t seen somebody for two minutes, don’t assume he or she is the same person. Maybe that person has changed, or maybe conditions have changed. The important thing is to see what I can do now. If you and I are not bound by our past conditioning, we can see things afresh. Then every moment contains a new opportunity.

Bernie Glassman, Instructions to the Cook