Tag: Gentleness

Tea without leaves

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Sometimes people think that when they meditate there should be no thoughts and emotions at all; and when thoughts and emotions do arise, they become annoyed and exasperated with themselves and think that they have failed.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  There is a Tibetan saying: ‘It’s a tall order to ask for meat without bones, and tea without leaves.”  So long as you have a mind, there will be thoughts and emotions. 

Just as the ocean has waves, or the sun has rays, so the mind’s own radiance is its thoughts and emotions.  The ocean has waves, yet the ocean is not particularly disturbed by them.  The waves are the very nature of the ocean.   Waves will rise, but where do they go?  Back into the ocean.  And where do waves come from? The ocean.  In the same manner, thoughts and emotions are the radiance and expression of the very nature of the mind.  They rise from the mind, but where do they dissolve? Back into the mind.  Whatever arises, do not see it as a particular problem.  If you do not impulsively react, if you are only patient, it will once again settle into its essential nature. 

Sogdal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying

Following our heart or security

Karl Duffy1 Comment

A multitude of forces in this world certainly conspires to divide us against ourselves, our power and authenticity, our voices, even our ability to simply listen to ourselves and believe what we hear…”Nature places a simple constraint on those who leave the flock and go their own way” say David Bayles and Ted Orland in Art and Fear. “They get eaten! In society it is a bit more complicated, but the admonition stands: Avoiding the unknown has considerable survival value. Society and nature…tend to produce guarded creatures” The upshot is that we often end up trading our authenticity for what we perceive as survival, terrified to swap security for our heart’s deep desires, which is the imperative of all callings and one of the dominant fears in responding to them. Saying yes to the calls tends to place you on a path that half of yourself thinks does not make a bit of sense, but the other half knows your life won’t make sense without.

George Michael Leroy, Calling: Finding and Following an Authentic Life

Welcome to being you

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You will have many ideas about what meditation is supposed to be and your experience in meditation will not match your ideas. You will believe that the important point is to get your experience to match your ideas of what your experience should be like. When you are unable to do this you will say that meditation is difficult. You will be ready to give up. But when you can just sit, having the experience you are having, whatever it is, without comparing it to what it should be, you will have true ease. No longer busy with chasing after some imagined perfection, you rest in the moment. You “own” your body and your mind….This is called “No more worry about not being perfect”. Welcome to being you.

Edward Espe Brown, Zazen: The Practice of Freedom

Changing our attitude towards ourselves

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Here – as always in his wise and clear way – Ajahn Sumedho gives us the practical way of working each day with this desire to fix ourselves. Not investing energy in our self-obsessive patterns is the best way of removing their hold on us:

We may not be the way we would like. There are many things about my personality that I can be very critical of. I don’t like myself that much or approve of myself on a personal level. I now see that as part of the path, not as an obstruction. So no matter what way you are right now – no matter how critical you might be, or how inadequate you might feel – change the attitude to one of learning from the way you are right now. Rather than trying to become something – rather than trying to get rid of the negativity, restlessness and confusion because you think these are flaws or defects that block you from enlightenment – just don’t believe any of that. Your conditioned mind will say anything, it is completely untrustworthy. That which we can really trust is the awareness.

Ajahn Sumedho, The Sound of Silence

Working with difficulties – not looking for resolution

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Patience is a way to de-escalate aggression and its accompanying pain. This is to say that when we’re feeling aggressive — and I think this would go for any strong emotion — there’s a seductive quality that pulls us in the direction of wanting to get some resolution. We feel restless, agitated, ill at ease. It hurts so much to feel the aggression that we want it to be resolved. Right then we could change the way we look at this discomfort and practice patience.

Pema Chodron

Noticing what is here, not what we would like to be here

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Similar thoughts to yesterday morning’s post – this time from the Zen tradition – on staying close to what is actually happening, moment by moment, rather than worrying about what may happen. Sometimes it may not be what we would want, so our practice is to see if we can open to it and acknowledge it’s happening, even if we do not like it.  It also encourages us to meet every person today with fresh eyes, rather than immediately reducing them to  history which we have had with them, or to what we have come to “expect” from them.

The aim of Zen is to focus our attention on reality itself, instead of our intellectual and emotional reactions to reality – reality being the ever-changing, ever-growing, indefinable something known as “life,” which will never stop for a moment for us to fit it satisfactorily into any rigid system of pigeonholes and ideas.

Alan Watts