Let everything happen to you:
beauty and terror.
Just keep going.
No feeling is final.
Rilke, Book of Hours
Tag: heart
Meeting and disengaging
Most of the work of the practice then is just about noticing what stimulates, alarms or otherwise pushes our buttons, and working with that. It’s about restraining the free-wheeling mind, turning away from sources of powerful attraction, checking the impulse and reactions, softening the ill-will and tension and widening into the body to release the energy of the activation. And more subtly, it’s about meeting and disengaging the ‘should be’s’. So: I walk up and down my meditation path feeling nothing special and practise staying with that; facing a group of school children and wanting to bring something into their lives that will withstand the floods of commercialism, I hold and relax with that; or, at a management meeting, I listen to the gloomy analysis of the monastery’s finances, without dismissing or panicking over that. Meet it, disengage from the script of it even as you widen to receive its wave – and let that move through you. Then trust what arises within when the self-impression passes.
Ajahn Sucitto, Reflections.
Seeing today for the first time
Do not say, ‘It is morning,’
and dismiss it with a name of yesterday.
See it for the first time
as a newborn child that has no name.
Every child comes with the message
that God is not yet discouraged of man.
Everything comes to us that belongs to us
if we create the capacity to receive it.
Faith is the bird that feels the light
when the dawn is still dark.
From the solemn gloom of the temple
children run out to sit in the dust,
God watches them play and forgets the priest.
I have become my own version of an optimist.
If I can’t make it through one door,
I’ll go through another door – or I’ll make a door.
Something terrific will come
no matter how dark the present.
Rabindranath Tagore
Editing ourselves
One of the members of our group worked as an editor for a local magazine. She arrived often carrying bundles of page proofs from her still-unfinished work at the office. One wintry evening she was the first to speak: “It’s like we’re all trying to be editors over our emotions. We look ourselves over and decide what gets to stay and what has to go. We move from first drafts to smoothly polished paragraphs by crossing out certain grammatical mistakes and supplementing the weaker parts of the prose. When it comes to feelings and meditation, we’re all desperately trying to edit ourselves for improvement!“
Gaylon Ferguson, Natural Wakefulness
On staying open today
A lot of the time we practice with what we don’t know, rather than what we do. Some situations in life, or in our day, are not clear. Our practice is to hold open a space, not rushing the answer, allowing the situation or the person to go through the necessary process at its own pace.
The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning.
Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.
Erich Fromm
Bare awareness
If everything is noted, all your emotional difficulties will disappear.
When you feel happy, don’t get involved with your happiness.
And when you feel sad, don’t get involved with it.
Whatever comes, don’t worry. Just be aware of it.
Dipa Ma, Knee Deep in Grace
