As we have said before, one do not have to wait to be completely satisfied with everything before one can be content. Similarly, everything does not have to be just as you would like it in your life for you to be grateful. One just has to give up the automatic tendency to judge oneself and ones life, fixing on imperfections, and the interpretations of our life which follow that tendency. Noticing small positive things each day, and being grateful for them, is a skill that can be practiced, and it develops our capacity to be just in the present moment. Being happy for the whole of our lives can start with us appreciating the moments of our life, now. And there are a variety of simple things each day which we can stop to notice and be grateful for – the changing colours on the leaves, a cup of coffee in the morning, a small act of kindness by a colleague, the taste of simple food. Each day presents new opportunities to just notice, no matter what our situation is.
Tag: inspiration
Letting go of striving
Happiness is like a butterfly:
the more you chase it, the more it will elude you.
But if you turn your attention to other things,
it will come and sit softly on your shoulder
Thoreau
New to Mindfulness Practice 13: Don’t react
In the process of focusing on our breathing and watching our thoughts come and go, we learn that they don’t have to react to every thought that comes into our minds, that just because the mind is jumping around and agitated at times doesn’t mean we have to jump with it. With practice, we become more comfortable with silence and sitting still.
Jon Kabat Zinn
Moments when we see
Sometimes, admittedly, the world can still of a sudden assume a resonance beyond
the one-dimensional, as the sun sometimes breaks through the Irish summer’s ample blanket of cloud cover.
And sometimes even in the rain there comes a moment when
the bird on the neighbouring roof is an ancient symbol or a hieroglyph
in the book of the riddle’s meaning.
And this is poetry, when the bird preaches to you, and you respond
By preaching strictly for the birds.
Ciaran O’Donnell, A Former Franciscan visits Assisi
Moving into disorder
In human beings there is a constant tension between order and disorder, connectedness and loneliness, evolution and revolution, security and insecurity. Our universe is constantly evolving: the old order gives way to a new order and this in its turn crumbles when the next order appears. It is no different in our lives in the movement from birth to death. Change of one sort or another is the essence of life… when we try to prevent the forward movement of life, we may succeed for a while… but inevitably there is an explosion.
To be human is to create sufficient order so that we can move on into insecurity and seeming disorder.
In this way we discover the new.
Jean Vanier, Becoming Human
Accepting our emptiness
Following on from yesterday’s post, and applying it to our notions of psychological growth and maturity. Just as in nature, we need to be able to tolerate – and stop fighting with – the complexity, disruptions, reversals and emptiness which are part of the normal human condition, and stop seeing them as unusual or as enemies to growth. In this way we move away from trying to get rid of them, to accepting and authenticating them.
In our zeal to eliminate the ghosts of our childhood, to nourish the empty places of emotional insufficiency and to achieve the pinnacle of psychological development…we were treating feelings of emptiness as something that needed to be fixed and cured, and therefore losing the ground upon which we rest. Our aversion to emptiness is such that we have become experts at explaining it away, distancing ourselves from it, or assigning blame for its existence on the past or on the faults of others. We contaminate it with our personal histories and expect that it will disappear when we have resolved our personal problems. Thus. Western psychologists are trained to understand a report of emptiness as indicative of a deficiency in someone’s emotional upbringing, a defect in character, a defense against overwhelming feelings of aggression, or as a stand-in for feelings of inadequacy. Since most of us share one or more of these traits, it becomes easy to pathologize a feeling that in Buddhism serves as a starting point for self-exploration.
Mark Epstein, Going to Pieces without Falling Apart
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