Tag: heart

Simple daily practices: Pause

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Our habits are strong, so a certain discipline is required to step outside our cocoon and receive the magic of our surroundings. The pause practice—the practice of taking three conscious breaths at any moment when we notice that we are stuck — is a simple but powerful practice that each of us can do at any given moment.

Pause practice can transform each day of your life. It creates an open doorway to the sacredness of the place in which you find yourself. The vastness, stillness, and magic of the place will dawn upon you, if you let your mind relax and drop for just a few breaths the storyline you are working so hard to maintain. If you pause just long enough, you can reconnect with exactly where you are, with the immediacy of your experience.

Pema Chodron, Waking up to your World

Just being aware

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This quote, from a essay by Anne Dilliard, is as good a description of the simple  – but difficult – act of paying attention, that moment before we add words to what we are experiencing. It is something which we keep working at, slowing down the continual commentary which accompanies everything in our mind, working on our capacity to just let thing be:

This is it, I think, this is it, right now, the present, this empty gas station, here, this western wind, this tang of coffee on the tongue, and I am petting the puppy, I am watching the mountain. And the second I verbalize this awareness in my brain, I cease to see the mountain or feel the puppy. I am opaque, so much black asphalt. But at the same second, the second I know I’ve lost it, I also realize that the puppy is still squirming on his back under my hand. Nothing has changed for him. He draws his legs down to stretch the skin taut so he feels every fingertip’s stroke along his furred and arching side, his flank, his flung-back throat. I sip my coffee. I look at the mountain, which is still doing its tricks, as you look at a still-beautiful face belonging to a person who was once your lover in another country years ago: with fond nostalgia, and recognition, but no real feeling save a secret astonishment that you are now strangers. Thanks. For the memories. It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our creator – our very self-consciousness – is also the one thing that divides us from our fellow creatures. It was a bitter birthday present from evolution, cutting us off at both ends.

Annie Dilliard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Letting go of objectives

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Now if the practice [of meditation] is so good for us, why is it so difficult to maintain a steady practice? It may be that the notion that practice is “good for us” is the very impediment – we all know we can resist what is good for us at the table, at the gym, and on the internet. This mechanical notion of practice – “if I practice then I will be (fill in the blank)” – leads to discouragement because it is not true that practice inevitably leads to happiness, or anything we can imagine. Our lives, like the ocean, constantly change,and we will naturally face great storms and dreary lulls. How then do we put our mind in a space where practice is always there, whether tumultuous or in the doldrums? It requires a completely radical view of practice: practice is not something we do, it is something we are. Seeing our practice as our life, we just let go and do it.

Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara, Like a Dragon in Water

Tired eyes

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I was recently away on retreat in Massachusetts and noticed that, as it has before, travelling stimulated the senses and moved the mind to notice new things – or things with fresh eyes. I was reflecting on this as I passed through different airports, when I always find that impressions are more intense. Or it could be that I am more open. Because it seems to me that being in airports and travelling is an exercise in “who I am” and identity, an experience in which the normal containers in which I act, and am perceived by others,  gets moved around and suspended for a while, until I land and get back into reasonably familiar places, like hotels, and into roles and routines that I can determine myself. In the airport I find myself in a space where I am not – and nobody else really is – “at home”:  everything is fluid, my identity reduced to that of a person-in-movement, defined only by passport and boarding card. The normal familiar people, places and roles that hold my life together are not around. And mostly I find it a very open, stimulating experience.

So I emerged from a flight, through the scrutiny of passport control and various checks, to stand with the others to wait for that other comforting element of my identity to slot back into place, the suitcase. Opposite me were two small twin brothers, travelling with their parents. They were lively and excited, and for the first moment my mind labelled the delighted sounds they were making as “too much noise”. However, soon their excitement focused on the conveyor belt and each tumbling-down piece of luggage brought cheers of surprise and delight. Not just the first one, but the tenth and the twentieth brought gasps of amazement and amusement as they waited for their one to arrive. It was very funny to see their faces and their wonder at the technology, seeing it probably for the first time.

And it struck me how much wonder we lose at the things which happen everyday,  simply out of force of habit or being in a hurry. Now, I am not saying that we should get back to a condition where routine things, like the operation of a conveyor belt, fills us with surprise and awe each time we see them. It is simply not possible to get back into that fresh state.  But it did impress on me that we miss so much, either out of familiarity,  or due to  the wariness with which we approach strange situations,  or maybe because of the fact that life has betrayed and hurt us and we have learned not to open our hearts. Thus, sadly, the innocence, openness and wonder of children is not normally our everyday mode of relating to things.

Thankfully from time to time something new, or something of beauty, comes along and cuts through the habitual mind and the defensive heart. Like this American Robin which I saw foraging for food every morning as I sat on a bench after breakfast in rural Massachusetts. I have been an amateur birdwatcher since my childhood, so seeing a new species is always interesting.  And the movement of this bird – although called a robin in homage to its redbreast – reminded me of the European thrush with which I am more familiar. It appeared each morning, always timid, searching for worms with some success.  So this hesitant bird,  which for some reason has evolved to be wary and cautious, became my companion for the days of retreat, and its tender vulnerability  helped me to see with new eyes and a more open heart.

Maybe this is the key. Moments of beauty  and changes from fixed patterns open the heart, making it gentle and vulnerable. But not only the beautiful or the surprising. It struck me that I should be also be open to the arrival of unexpected difficulties or to upsets in life,  as moments which challenge the habitual, and force new ways of thinking. They too come to visit me, maybe to stir me up and  allow me see where I am stuck. Where I have gotten too much into a routine. In some ways,  life will never cease to provide me with occasions for growth if I can just be awake to what is presented. I do not have to go out of my way to seek them. I just have to have fresh eyes that can see.

Having two hearts, and a choice

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The early Church Fathers had a simple way of expressing our struggle. They taught that each of us has two hearts, two souls:

In each person, they affirmed, there is a small, petty heart, a pusilla anima. This is the heart that we operate out of when we are not at our best. This is the heart within which we feel our wounds and our distance from others. This is the heart within which are chronically irritated and angry, the heart within which we feel the unfairness of life, the heart within which we sense others as a threat, the heart within which we feel envy and bitterness, and the heart within which greed, lust, and selfishness break through. This too is the heart that wants to set itself apart from and above others.

But the Church Fathers taught that inside of each of us there was also another heart, a magna anima, a huge, deep, big, generous, and noble heart. This is the heart we operate out of when we are at our best. This is the heart within which we feel empathy and compassion. This is the heart within which we are enflamed with noble ideals.  Inside each of us, sadly often buried under suffocating wounds that keep if far from the surface, lies the heart of a saint, bursting to get out.

Not everything can be fixed or cured, but it should be named correctly. Nowhere is this more important than in how we name both the size and the struggles of the human heart. We are not petty souls who occasionally do noble things. We are rather noble souls who, sadly, occasionally do petty things.

Ron Rolheiser, The Size of our Hearts

Everything comes down to how we work with time

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Everything comes down to time in the end – to the passing of time, to changing. Ever thought of that? Anything that makes you happy or sad, isn’t it all based on minutes going by? Isn’t happiness expecting something time is going to bring you? Isn’t sadness wishing time back again? 

Anne Tyler, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant