The only real prison is fear,
and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.
Aung San Suu Kyi
Tag: Freedom
Sheltered from the wind
Experience follows intention. Wherever we are, whatever we do, all we need to do is recognize our thoughts, feelings, perceptions as something natural. Neither rejecting or accepting, we simply acknowledge the experience and let it pass. If we keep this up, we’ll eventually find ourselves becoming able to manage situations we once found painful, scary or sad. We’ll discover a sense of confidence that isn’t rooted in arrogance or pride. We’ll realize that we are always sheltered, always safe and always home.
Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, The Joy of Living
Growing old but not growing hard
There are different ways of saying the same thing when we speak about being mindful. We can say, as Jon Kabat Zinn frequently does, that we try to stay just in this moment, because this moment is the only moment we have to work with, as we “are only alive in this moment”. Or we can say that we try to approach each experience with a “beginner’s mind” or the “eyes of a child“- always fresh, not stuck in our preconceived ideas. Or we can pay attention to what is happening in the body and in the mind at any given time. Or simply we stay with this breath, and then the next breath, and the next breath.
All of these say the same thing. We define ourselves in each moment as something new, something fresh. We welcome each moment like a child – experiencing each new event in life as directly as possible without always mediating it through our thinking about it. The more I work with this, the more I realize that life is best seen as a series of experiences, which arise one at a time and then pass away immediately. We can experience great freedom and compassion when we see things this way – a series of moments of consciousness arising in succession. What we present to the world as something solid – our ongoing “identity” – is in actual fact subjective events experienced in the mind and the body. We like to tell our life story as a coherent narrative. What we notice when we sit in meditation is that we frequently go back to the story we are telling about our life, embellishing it, with its villains and victims. To us it constitutes a solid reality, but it is worth reflecting on what elements we have chosen to solidify.
For example, by which elements from our past do we allow ourselves be defined today? Research shows that the brain has a preference for storing and recalling negative experiences, bringing them to the mind in thoughts about ourselves and the reliability of others, and as an emotional tone towards events. Hurts or disappointments from the past can feel so real, and leave a mark in such as way that they can dominate the mind in a solid fashion, and cause us to identify with them. Because of this, the story we tell about ourselves today can be strongly coloured by the negative events and words of the past, even those which happened when we were very young and which now have an influence deep within our cells.
If you look at it more closely, this negative identification is often fixed in nature – almost frozen and solid – and it resists attempts to approach it by signalling anxiety. Thus we can have a tendency to stay the same through time, not to heal past hurts, not to look forward but to be hooked in the past. If the event is recent or can be recalled clearly, then moving on is tough because the hurt, pain and sense of betrayal caused reminds the mind that it is not safe to go back, even in our thoughts.
Now, it is right to have regret about past actions, when we have been in the wrong or hurt others. But it is also good to distinguish between the emotions connected to an event in the past and the way they influence our sense of self in the present – producing self-judgements which are experienced now as lack of self-esteem or worthlessness. We tend to place great importance on some experiences, thus making someone or something from the past responsible for our present life. So it is good to let go of some of the solidity we put into thoughts and emotions from the past, and see them as energies that arise and can pass away. In other words, we can stop getting lost in what happened and simply learn to observe the effects in this present moment. As Charlotte Joko Beck reminds us in Everyday Zen , there is a big difference between saying “He (or she) really let me down” and “Having a thought that he (or she) really let me down“.
If we stay with the first way of seeing things, we allow situations harden and define us. We attach some of our identity to them – and the narrative that accompanies them – and become stuck. If we work with the second way of seeing things, we remain fluid and soft, and let go more easily. We have more energy and space to see each new moment freshly. We are here, now, not trapped in our story. It stops us wasting time in this short life on regrets and opens us up to the fulness of life as it is available to us.
Another factor we cultivate in the transformative process of meditation is attention to this very moment. We make the choice, moment by moment, to be fully here. Attending to our present-moment mind and body is a way of being tender toward self, toward other, and toward the world. This quality of attention is inherent in our ability to love. Coming back to the present moment takes some effort but the effort is very light. The instruction is to “touch and go.” We touch thoughts by acknowledging them as thinking and then we let them go. It’s a way of relaxing our struggle, like touching a bubble with a feather.
Pema Chodron
The child’s energy
We need to rediscover the energy that was in us as a child, before we got caught up in our roles and masks. This freedom, that comes from deep within, is needed to cross the obstacles that face us and overcome the limitations which our fears impose upon us. We sometimes have to dare to reach out. If not, we stay trapped where we are, divided, unable to reach beyond the hurt or the problem we find ourselves in.
As once the winged energy of delight
carried you over childhood’s dark abysses,
now beyond your own life build the great
arch of unimagined bridges.
Rilke
Celebrate life: Jump in rain puddles – Christina Taylor Green
The little girl Christina Taylor Green who was killed in the Arizona Shootings last weekend was born on September 11th, 2001. Along with other babies born on that day, she was featured in a book called “Faces of Hope.” In it we see a photo of her, with, on either side, simple wishes for a child’s life. She expresses the wish, “I hope you jump in rain puddles.”It is a lovely thought, made all the more poignant by the tragic nature of her passing.
This probably would not be my normal response when coming across a puddle on the path. “Jump in, splash around“? My sensible mind would protest: “It would ruin my shoes. People will be watching. I would look daft”. We have a sense of wonder and adventure in us as children before we cover it over as we “mature” and divide ourselves into what is seen and what we keep to ourselves. Somewhere along the way to adulthood we learn to hide ourselves, to appear reasonable, not spontaneous, to prefer order and routine to surprise. We become preoccupied the day-to-day problems of our lives and set out in the morning with a set of implicit or explicit goals. When the unexpected happens, like snow or rain puddles, it is seen as an inconvenience or a detour. We get so goal-orientated, as if everything has to be won, that we do not see the fun that can be had in simply playing the game. Things can become difficulties or obstacles and not opportunities for play and spontaneity. We even can treat our recreation or sport as something to be “done”, serving some other aim. It is as if being surprised or spontaneous is dangerous or makes us weak. We mask our sense of play out of fear of being judged as immature or too emotional.
Keeping the heart open with the eyes of a child is the key: Enlarging our vision of all the things that happen in the day- for surprise and for wonder – even the things we see a thousand times. And then giving voice to that sense of astonishment. To jump into the things that life brings, without holding back. To be open to all, even that which we would prefer to avoid. The gospel tells us that the kingdom of heaven – the fulness of life – belongs to those who welcome it like children. The shortness of little Christina’s life reminds me not to let life pass me by, to let go of those things which block my heart, to see things and people as if for the first time, to stop dwelling in the hurts of the past or the schemes of the future and to see wonder now.
We inhabit ourselves without valuing ourselves, unable to see that here, now, this very moment is sacred; but once it’s gone – its value is incontestable.
Joyce Carol Oates
Happiness is found wherever we are
What we have to do is really feel the motivation that arises, not from trying to change ourselves but from trying to be ourselves as fully as we can.
Barry Magid, Ending the Pursuit of Happiness
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