Tag: heart

On learning from nature

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There is often an unspoken assumption that things should go smoothly in life, or that the Universe has a direct plan for us, and that it communicates it easily. Consequently,  we get upset that things are not always that straightforward. When things go wrong we can often regard it as a violation of some supposed natural entitlement to order and predictability. However, if we look at the natural world we do not find complete support for this underlying assumption. The recent turbulence in the weather, and the natural disasters of this past year,  demonstrate that things in nature are frequently unpredictable and disruptive.  So we should not expect anything different in our lives. Bad things can happen and our lives can change, in ways that we cannot predict. Things happen in indirect ways, and reasons are not always immediately evident. Patience is needed if we wish to understand or work out what is our path.

Clouds are not spheres,  Mountains are not cones, 

Coastlines are not circles and bark is not smooth,

nor does lightning travel in a straight line. 

Nature exhibits not simply a higher degree but an altogether different level of complexity.

Benoit Mandelbrot, French-American  mathematician.


Sunday Quote: A still mind, not fixing….

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God, rest in my heart,

Fortify me

Take away my hunger for answers.

Mary Oliver

Discovering the world anew

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Some more words from Jacques Lusseyran, who as I said in an earlier post, was blinded in an accident at age eight. He writes about the way this allowed him to develop his capacity for paying attention which goes far beyond just the ability to see and think :

[Those who can see] commit a strange error. They believe that we know the world only through our eyes. For my part, I discovered that the universe consists of pressure, that every object and every living being reveals itself to us at first by a kind of quiet yet unmistakable pressure that indicates its intention and its form. I even experienced the following wonderful fact: A voice, the voice of a person, permits him to appear in a picture. When the voice of a man reaches me, I immediately perceive his figure, his rhythm, and most of his intentions. Even stones are capable of weighing on us from a distance. So are the outlines of distant mountains, and the sudden depression of a lake at the bottom of a valley.

This correspondence is so exact that when I walked arm in arm with a friend along the paths of the Alps, I knew the landscape and could sometimes describe it with surprising clarity. Sometimes; yes, only sometimes. I could do it when I summoned all my attention. Permit me to say without reservation that if all people were attentive, if they would undertake to be attentive every moment of their lives, they would discover the world anew. They would suddenly see that the world is entirely different from what they had believed it to be.

….And unlearning

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Love is what we are born with.  Fear is what we learn.

The spiritual journey is the unlearning of fear and prejudices and the acceptance of love back in our hearts.

Love is the essential reality and our purpose on earth.

To be consciously aware of it, to experience love in ourselves and others, is the meaning of life.

Meaning does not lie in things. Meaning lies in us.

Marianne Williamson

New to Mindfulness Practice 3: Patient learning….

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[Learning to meditate…..] is like a child who is learning to write. At first she doesn’t write nicely – big, long loops and squiggles – she writes like a child. After a while the writing improves through practice. Practicing meditation is like this. At first you are awkward… sometimes calm, sometimes not, you don’t really know what’s what. Some people get discouraged. Don’t slacken off! You must persevere with the practice. Live with effort, just like the child: as she gets older she writes better and better. From writing badly she grows to write beautifully, all because of the practice from childhood.

Ajahn Chah

Stopping for breath

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The difficulty most of us face is that we’re afraid of our humanity. We don’t know how to give our humanity space. We don’t know how to give it love. We don’t know how to offer our appreciation. We seize upon whenever difficult  emotions or painful thoughts arise – in large part because we have been taught from a very early age that life is a serious business. We’re taught that we have to accomplish so many things and excel at so many things because we have to compete for a limited amount of resources. We develop such high expectations for ourselves and others, and we develop high expectations of life. Such a competitive, goal-orientated approach to life makes us very speedy inside. We become so tight physically, mentally  and emotionally as we rush through each day, each moment, that many of us forget – often quite literally – to breathe.

Tsoknyi Rinpoche, Upgrading our Practice