This thing we tell of can never be found by seeking,
yet only seekers find it.
Abu Yazid Al-Bistami
Tag: growth
Ash Wednesday
Today is Ash Wednesday, the start of the Christian season of Lent, a period of simplification and fasting. Just as this morning’s saying simplified practice down to its very basic, this whole season encourages us to reflect on all the different inputs which come into the Body-Mind, not just those in the form of food:
The past decade has seen an unparalleled assault on our capacity to fix our minds steadily on anything. To sit still and think, without succumbing to an anxious reach for a machine, has become almost impossible… Our minds, no less than our bodies, require periods of fasting.
Alian de Botton
Most people today seems to think that sacrifice means giving something up. This is how shallow our religious sense has become. Sacrifice really involves the art of drawing energy from one level and reinvesting it at another level to produce a higher form of consciousness.
Robert Johnson, Jungian Analyst
Not falling into default judgments
I think of moments of pressure and difficulty as like this – as gateways, the beginning of a journey…It’s easy to forget to be curious, and to grab an off-the-shelf knowledge, something like “This is awful”. Not reaching for off-the-shelf understandings, though, is an important skill. The whole of the ancient, master teachings on suffering come down to this: Suffering is the notion “This isn’t it” and its variants, such as “It shouldn’t be happening” and “I have to know how this will turn out”. Freedom, waking up, and fearlessness comes down to the simplicity of “Wait a minute, what if this is it” and its variant “I don’t know”
John Tarrant, You don’t Have to Know
Real wealth
We are so trained to think of money as our wealth, or ’our capital.‘ But there are so many kinds of ’capital‘ besides money, and some are more available and even more valuable. For example, whenever we gather to make something happen, we need someone who has wisdom capital, and another who has compassion capital; some bring ‘knowledge-of-the-community’ capital, some have time capital, and finally, some contribute financial capital. But it’s only when you combine all that capital that you create true wealth. Then all of a sudden there’s no giver and no receiver, it’s just everybody bringing what they have to the table, and somehow taking away exactly what they need. I have never met someone so broken they had nothing to offer. All of us are broken from time to time, and feel we can’t give back very much. But then, in another season, we find we can once again come to the table, bring whatever we have to offer, and it is more than enough. This is true regardless of how much money we have. Our real capital is the fundamental wholeness of the human spirit.
Wayne Muller
On a Journey
Yesterday was the Celtic feast of Imbolc, celebrated because it is halfway between the winter and the spring solstices. It was marked by the lighting of fires, and this passed into the important Irish feast of Saint Brigid, whose monastery kept alight a sacred eternal flame. In a similar way today’s feast, the Christian feast of Candlemas, traditionally involved a procession of candles and the blessing of candles for use in the home. It would seem that these two celebrations, one older than the other, testify to a need for people to light a fire around this time, to remind themselves of light and warmth around this midway point of winter, to give some encouragement when the cold and darkness may seem to be never-ending.
It we look closely we see that we too can say – at any moment – that we are midway between two points. We cannot truly see how the future will develop and we know we have to leave the past behind. We too need moments of light and warmth to encourage us on the way, moments of rest when we nourish our inner self. In this way we announce warmth and light in the dark time of winter. This helps us see that darkness and not-knowing are natural parts of life’s cycle, just as are periods of cold and lack of growth. Stepping into the dark, into unknown territory, is necessary from time to time on our journey forward.
Life is a good teacher and a good friend. Things are always in transition if we could only realize it. Nothing ever sums itself up in the way that we would like to dream about. The spiritual journey involves going beyond hope and fear, stepping into unknown territory, continually moving forward. The most important aspect of being on the spiritual path may be to just keep moving. Usually, when we reach our limit, we freeze in terror. Our bodies freeze and so do our minds. Rather than indulge or reject our experience, we can somehow let the energy of the emotion, the quality of what we’re feeling pierce us to the heart. This is a noble way to live. It’s the path of compassion – the path of cultivating human bravery and kindheartedness.
Pema Chodron.
…and expanding our range
The crucial factor influencing how we can respond in a given situation seems to be the level of mindfulness we can bring to bear upon the moment. If we don’t care to be present, unconscious decision-making systems will function by default to get us through to the next moment, albeit in the grip of (often flawed and suffering causing) learned behaviors and conditioned responses. If, on the other hand, we can increase the amount of conscious awareness present by manifesting mindfulness, we expand the range of our possible responses. Even if disposed to anger, we can choose to act with kindness. This is the essence of our freedom in an otherwise heavily conditioned system.
Andrew Olendzki, Unlimiting Mind
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