Tag: Joy

Midway

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Every man has to learn the points of compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations. Thoreau, Walden

In the old Celtic and Gaelic calendar,  today,  February 1st, is the start of Spring. It was the Celtic feast of Imbolc,  which centred around the lighting of fires, celebrated because it is halfway between the winter and the spring solstices.  Similarly tomorrow,  the feast of Candlemas,   traditionally involved a procession of candles and the blessing of candles for use in the home. It would seem that there was a need for people to remind themselves of warmth and light around this midway point – when the cold weather can return with a vengeance as it has this year –   as encouragement that  new growth will soon be here. It is the same for us today, for we all can find ourselves at midway points from time to time, not sure where we are arriving,  but too far away from where we started from to recognize it and go back.  We have no overall map for this journey, we can lose our sense of direction and easily get lost. It can feel,  as Dante says, as if we are “midway in this way of life we’re bound upon …. in a dark wood, where the right road was wholly lost and gone”.

It is no surprise that journey narratives appear so frequently in all wisdom traditions and mythologies. We are never really in just one place, even when things are quite stable, but always somewhat in-between. Still,  whenever we’re moving into anything new we often feel a hesitancy within and tension or unease  arises because we prefer to stay as we were, where we felt comfortable. And the brain tends to  interpret our underlying unease as anxiety and therefore as negative, leading us to be afraid because something new is demanded. And this can feel like darkness and being lost. However, what these ancient feasts remind us is that this darkness is often the gateway from one place to another, and a natural part of a cycle that leads to new depths. Trust is needed as is mindfulness, which allows us to hold the feeling of unease in awareness, without reactivity, and without the need to run away or fix it.  We can thus tolerate the experience of being lost  without believing the story of being lost. This holding of awareness is like holding a candle in the darkness – it allows us stay in the darkness without fear until it teaches us what we need to learn.

A new day, a new week

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Abba Poemen said Abba Pior
made a fresh start every morning.

Sayings of the Desert Fathers

Each Morning we are born again.
What we do today is what matters most

Jack Kornfield

Being Quiet

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Being quiet in the midst of a frenetic life is like picking up a new instrument. If you’ve never played the violin and you try to play it for the first time, every muscle in your body hurts. Your neck hurts, you don’t know how to hold that awkward wavy thing called a bow, you can’t get your knuckles round to touch the strings, you can’t even find where the notes are, you are just trying to get your stance right. Then you come back to it again, and again, and suddenly you can make a single buzzy note. The time after that, you can make a clearer note. No one, not even you, wants to listen to you at first. But one day, there is a beautiful succession of notes and, yes, you have played a brief, gifted, much appreciated passage of music.

This is also true for the silence inside you; you may not want to confront it at first. But a long way down the road, when you inhabit a space fully, you no longer feel awkward and lonely. Silence turns, in effect, into its opposite, so it becomes not only a place to be alone but also a place that’s an invitation to others to join you, to want to know who’s there, in the quiet.

David Whyte, The Questions that have no right to go away

Which angle will you take this afternoon, this weekend?

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What is life but an angle of vision?    A person is measured by the angle at which he looks at objects. Ralph Waldo Emerson

The basis for equanimity is called “wise attention”, namely,  recognizing the power of our own attention and the crucial importance of how we relate to events. Wise attention is the antidote to the delusional thinking that replaces our direct experiences with projections and interpretations. Equanimity is central to this state of non-delusion, because it does not resist the truth of what is happening. It’s spacious enough to see happiness as happiness and suffering as suffering, without judgments or attempts to control them

Sharon Salzberg, Equanimity

Taking today as it is, how it is

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Meditation is not about trying to get anywhere else.

It is about allowing yourself to be exactly where you are and as you are,

and the world exactly as it is in this moment , as well

Jon Kabat Zinn

Bare Attention

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The Old Pond. A Frog jumps in. Plop. Matsuo Bash0, 1644 – 1694

How do we tame our minds? How do we train ourselves to stay open to our experience from moment to moment? The answer lies in the mind state called  “bare attention”. “Bare” means simple, direct, without trappings of judgment or interpretation. “Attention” means mindfulness, awareness; not forgetting to be present. A famous Zen haiku reads: “The old Pond. A Frog jumps in. Plop”

This is a wonderful description of bare attention. The old pond is not necessarily beautiful or covered with lily pods or green or blue. The poet, Basho, goes directly to the essence of his experience: the pond, frog, plop. We can say that in meditation we are developing “plop mind”. We are stripping away everything that is extraneous to our immediate experience and simply being present with what is happening. This is bare attention: direct, essential, noninterfering.

Joseph Goldstein, Bare Attention