Tag: heart

Difficult moments in our lives

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In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us.  Rilke

Every shift in our life comes courtesy of the friendly forces; every catastrophe can offer us exactly what we need to awaken into who we really are. It’s difficult, though, when you are in the middle of a painful transition to mine the experience for inner growth.  And when your life falls apart,  it’s a lot easier to blame someone,  or to rail against fate, or to shut down to the hopeful message carried by the winds of change. Sometimes when friends try to help by saying “There’s a reason for everything” or “It’s a blessing in disguise”, you just want to run away or you  want to say” Yeah, if it’s such a blessing, then why does it hurt so much?” So forgive me when I say that everything in life is a blessing – whether it comes as a gift wrapped in happy times or as a heartbreak, a loss, or a tragedy…. It helps me to remember that everyone is confused when the friendly forces come knocking; there is no one alive who did not want to go back asleep instead of making a big change; and the journey from Once-Born innocence to Twice-Born wisdom is never easy.

Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open

Keep your practice simple

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In meditation, the practice of calming, resting, and dwelling  happily in the present moment can be difficult at first, because our minds are always racing. The more you try to stop your racing mind, the more it resists. Mindfulness is not meant to suppress or get rid of the racing mind, but simply recognize its presence. First you need to recognize that thinking nonstop has become a strong habit for you. The easiest way to stop that habit from taking you over is to learn how to breathe in a sitting position for a short time, for just five or ten breaths. If you think you have to practice meditation for too long a period of time, there is no way you will maintain a daily practice. Instead throughout the day, use the ringing of the telephone, or the sound of your watch, or any other cue,  to stop all doing and thinking  for a moment. Just enjoy your breathing. Our son started sitting when he was three or four years old. He sat for ten breaths every morning. And if a little child can do that, I am sure we grown-ups can do it as well.

Nguyen Ann-Huong, Walking Meditation

Becoming a friendly audience to your experience

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Here’s a definition of mindfulness: it’s a strengthening of your concentration so that you can be more precise and clear in recognizing your experience. It’s also a strengthening of your equanimity—your ability to be relaxed and open in the face of your experience. The concentration part of mindfulness is a little like drinking a cup of coffee; it kind of wakes you up. It’s like the straight spine of arousal or awareness. The equanimity part is like the relaxed limbs of the body. The spine is straight, and the limbs are relaxed. This relaxation part is a receptivity and acceptance to things as they are. It’s a kind of “friendly audience” to your own experience; a sort of “Hello. Wow! OK.” attitude—a gentle, matter-of-fact awareness of your experience, rather than a reactive pulling back. All mindfulness practices cultivate both of those, the concentration and the equanimity, so that you can be clearer, more precise and more relaxed in the face of whatever is happening to you—whether it’s loud noises coming in from a jackhammer running in the next building, or a pain in your knee, or your emotions about your spouse.

Polly Young-Eisendrath, Jungian Analyst, Personality Type in Depth

How we grow and mature

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Healing does not mean that one will reach an end-point where all is clear and conflict free. How could we imagine that the attitudes of one stage of our life would be adequate for subsequent stages and altered realities? While it is the secret hope of the nervous ego to fix the world and make it more predictable and secure, all is in flux. Finding the secret sources of our distress, and being enlarged by the suffering of this conflict, is how we grow and mature. As Jung notes, “Suffering is not an illness; it is the normal counterpole to happiness”.  Our goal is not happiness, which is evanescent and impossible to sustain; it is meaning which broadens us and carries us toward our destiny

James Holllis, Creating a Life: Finding your Individual Path.

Trusting the deeper wisdom

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Whatever form of meditation you practice, it is in essence simply a method for detaching yourself from thinking (which tends to reinforce the egoic process) long enough for you to begin to trust this other, deeper intelligence moving inside you. It provides you with another way to think: from “beyond the mind” — which, incidentally, is what the word metanoia, usually translated as “repentance,” actually means.

 Cynthia Bourgeault,  Mystical Hope

Fully here, now

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It is not easy to be fully in the moment, every moment. What we notice is that we have a host of  thoughts,  ideas,  expectations, preconceptions, hopes and fears working as a filter between us and the moment  – or the person – that stands before us. The ability to be right-here-now is what we practice each day; the capacity to choose between the world in our heads or the real world before us. It is true that we rarely see the world, or another person, as they actually are, but we see them as we are in that moment. So in order to be right here with whatever is going on we need, in one sense, to empty ourselves, to create space. The best way to do that is to pause and focus your attention before beginning something, such as a new task,  or a meeting,  or indeed, a conversation. Take a few conscious breaths today before you begin something, to allow a gap to open and the mind to relax enough in order to have the  space to welcome.

If my eye is to receive an image, it must be free from all other images; for if it already has so much as one, it cannot see another, nor can the ear hear a sound if it be occupied with one already. Any power of receiving must first be empty before it can receive anything.

John Tauler, 14th Century German mystic and preacher.