What we need is to be interested and to watch, but not interfere or be caught up in what we are thinking. Don’t think of the past, don’t anticipate the future, don’t get fascinated by the present.
See it as it is. Just be there with it. A thought is just a thought. An emotion is just an emotion.
It is like a bubble. It will burst and another one will come up.
Ani Tenzin Palmo, Reflections on a Mountain Lake
One or two posts these days on how to work with difficult and frightening emotions: Awareness is the key to living fully in each moment, even if the moment contains difficult emotions. It is the same practice – insofar as it is possible – to spend time with and hold emotions in a non-judgmental awareness without making them into a statement about ourselves or the direction of our lives. Gentleness, kindness and self-compassion are the key to this work, leading to a genuine friendliness toward ourselves and towards whatever passes through the body-mind.
With radical accountability, all emotions are observed as experiences only, pointing nowhere, implicating no one and signifying nothing. Though it is no one’s fault that we have an emotion, it is still essential to hold the emotion fully within awareness without wavering. Emotions need observation and allowance, not our analysis or fixation. The story that accompanies the emotion dies with accountability. The story was never true to begin with; we needed it to provide relief from the pain of being “me”. Though we did not know it at the time, sustaining the story’s untruth through inattention was causing even greater suffering than if we had allowed the pain to express itself in awareness. Radical accountability allows all experience to be itself.
Rodney Smith, Stepping out of Self-Deception
We prepare to die by pushing ourselves to love less narrowly.
In that sense, readying ourselves for death
is really an ever-widening entry into life.
Ron Rolheiser.
As I have said before, I often find in Ajahn Sumedho’s writings a clarity which cannot be matched. It is the case here. Simply stated, it gets to the heart of the dynamic which causes us so many problems – our tendency to add on to and identify with what passes through the mind and make it into a criticism of ourselves. I recognize these phrases he uses here as ones I use myself and which I frequently hear in talking with people.
You can’t get more simple than mindfulness because it is not anything you can create. It is just a matter of paying attention and being present, it’s not a complicated technique or a complexity. It’s so simple, but we are conditioned for complexity, so we tend to make things complex all the time. You are sitting and observing and then a negative thought arises in your mind and you think “That’s bad”. ‘That’s a compounding. The act of judging it, of putting the label “bad” onto it, makes it more than what it is.
Mindfulness is just aware of presences and absences. It is not concerned whether they are good or bad. It is not looking at them from that critical position. So “bad” is a criticism, or “that’s good”, “that’s right” and “that’s wrong”. And then it goes into “I’m good”, “I’m bad”, “I shouldn’t feel like this” , “I shouldn’t have these thoughts or desires”, ” I should be more compassionate and patient”. So you see it gets increasingly more complicated with judgments, criticisms and a sense of self that is identified with these different conditions. It gets even more complicated. If you have a bad thought you think “I am bad, I am a bad person, I am not very good…[then] These thoughts arise because people are inconsiderate and don’t respect me. And because of their lack of sensitivity and understanding, I have these bad thoughts”, so it gets increasingly more complicated.
Ajahn Sumedho, The Sound of Silence
Spring comes with ten thousand flowers,
Autumn with the moon,
Summer with the cool breeze,
Winter with snow.
When your mind is not filled with unnecessary concerns,
that’s your best season.
Wu-Men, Chinese Chan Master, 1183–1260
The past is a memory of a former now; the future is a mental projection of an expected now. Strictly speaking, nothing ever happened in the past; it happened in the now. Nor will anything happen in the future; it will happen in the now. It sounds almost simplistic or meaningless, and yet there is a deep truth in it: that life and now are one. Eckhard Tolle
As this quote reminds us, there is a value in staying in the immediacy of the present moment. However, this can be quite difficult. We frequently carry into the present habits and roots from the past, which can be tied up with fearful emotions and inhibit our freedom. Or we find ourselves scanning for danger, warning ourselves about the dangers in proceeding based on past experiences. We find ourselves always moving away from the present moment into an imagined future that we give more importance and credence to, or creating possible scenarios based on how our mood is in this moment. This worrying about the past or living already in the future frequently puts one at odds with the actuality of the present moment.
We all wish to enter fully into life, to live as if our lives can make a difference. However, so many of these mental habits lead us away from fully being here. We often see this moment as a means towards some other end, rather than complete in itself. To work with what is in front of us, in this moment, and then let go and start again, is the way to making the most of our life, not waiting for something dramatic to come along in the future.
Mindfulbalance 