Tag: heart

Thanksgiving : We start by simply noticing

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Developing an ongoing habit of gratitude starts by taking the time to be with ourselves and to notice the beauty that is all around us:

Do we need to make a special effort to enjoy the beauty of the blue sky? Do we have to practice to be able to enjoy it? No, we just enjoy it. Each second, each minute of our lives can be like this. Wherever we are, any time, we have the capacity to enjoy the sunshine, the presence of each other, even the sensation of our breathing. We don’t need to go to China to enjoy the blue sky. We don’t have to travel into the future to enjoy our breathing. We can be in touch with these things right now. It would be a pity if we are only aware of suffering.

We are so busy we hardly have time to look at the people we love, even in our own household, and to look at ourselves. Society is organized in a way that even when we have some leisure time, we don’t know how to use it to get back in touch with ourselves. We have millions of ways to lose this precious time – we turn on the TV or pick up the telephone, or start the car and go somewhere. We are not used to being with ourselves, and we act as if we don’t like ourselves and are trying to escape from ourselves.

Thich Nhat Hahn, Peace is every step

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