The moment at which a feeling of pleasure or pain begins to turn into a disturbing emotion is the point at which meditative awareness can be most effective. Before we describe or explain feelings to ourselves, how do they feel? What do we actually experience before we name them and are caught by them? Meditative awareness helps us to know and come into contact with that basic aspect of our experience of feeling.
Martine Bachelor
Love means to look at yourself the way one looks at distant things
For you are only one thing among many.
And whoever sees that way heals his heart, without knowing it, from various ills –
A bird and a tree say to him: Friend
Czesław Miłosz, Polish poet
If your compassion does not include yourself,
it is incomplete.
Jack Kornfield
Last evening it snowed here in Ireland. Not a real fall of snow such as you would see in Switzerland but enough to stick on the ground for a while and prompt thoughts of having to travel to work in more difficult circumstances, of getting stuck by bad roads. It does not take much sometimes for the mind to feel trapped and blocked, not seeing a way out. And frequently thoughts shift to ones of blame as we feel we should be stronger and able to dig ourselves out of the difficulty we are in, However, strange as it seems, getting out of narrow places sometimes requires that we accept that we are stuck. Most blocks come from fear; getting out requires that shift our relationship towards it .
What shuts down the heart more than anything is not letting ourselves have our own experience, but instead judging it, criticizing it, or trying to make it different from what it is. We often imagine there is something wrong with us if we feel angry, needy and dependent, lonely, confused, sad, or scared. We place conditions on ourselves and our experience: “If I feel like this, there must be something wrong with me… I can only accept myself if my experience conforms to my standard of how I should be.”
Meditation cultivates unconditional friendliness through teaching you how to just be—without doing anything, without holding onto anything, and without trying to think good thoughts, get rid of bad thoughts, or achieve a pure state of mind. This is a radical practice. There is nothing else like it. Normally we do everything we can to avoid just being. When left alone with ourselves, without a project to occupy us, we become nervous. We start judging ourselves or thinking about what we should be doing or feeling. We start putting conditions on ourselves, trying to arrange our experience so that it measures up to our inner standards. Since this inner struggle is so painful, we are always looking for something to distract us from being with ourselves.
In meditation practice, you work directly with your confused mind-states, without waging crusades against any aspect of your experience. You let all your tendencies arise, without trying to screen anything out, manipulate experience in any way, or measure up to any ideal standard. Allowing yourself the space to be as you are—letting whatever arises arise, without fixation on it, and coming back to simple presence—this is perhaps the most loving and compassionate way you can treat yourself. It helps you make friends with the whole range of your experience.
John Welwood
photo kenneth allen
I am struck by how sharing our weakness and difficulties is more nourishing to others
than sharing our qualities and successes
Jean Vanier, Community and Growth
Meditation, simply defined, is a way of being aware. It is the happy marriage of doing and being. It lifts the fog of our ordinary lives to reveal what is hidden; it loosens the knot of self-centredness and opens the heart; it moves us beyond mere concepts to allow for a direct experience of reality. Meditation embodies the way of awakening: both the path and its fruition. From one point of view it is the means to awakening; from another it is awakening itself.
Lama Surya Das, The Heart of Meditation
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