In essence, mindfulness is about wakefulness.
Our minds are such that we are often more asleep than awake
to the unique beauty and possibilities of each present moment as it unfolds.
Jon Kabat Zinn
Tag: Joy
Notice your life, today….
No one has to master living in the now. It’s impossible to live anywhere else. Just as you can never leave now, no one will ever take away your past or withhold your future. Effortlessly, your past accumulates. Instantly, your future arrives. What matters is that you notice your life while you can still call it “alive”. That’s now.
Karen Maezen Miller, Hand Wash Cold
Busyness is offered
Busyness pervades every aspect of modern life, often presented as a virtue or even a benchmark which demonstrates that we are succesful. In this poem, Mary Oliver reminds us that it comes to us from outside – it is “offered” to us. We can have a lot to do each day. However, busyness or “speeding up” comes from our relationship to what we have to do. We do not have to accept it but can protect ourselves from it by creating space. It does not have to be as extreme as the Chines poets . It can be quite simply some quiet time each day, or some time in nature.
Wherever I am, the world comes after me.
It offers me its busyness. It does not believe
that I do not want it. Now I understand
why the old poets of China went so far and high
into the mountains, then crept into the pale mist.
Mary Oliver, The Old Poets of China
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
Noticing, right now, this morning
Normally, fantasies are spinning out , one after another, usually about being someplace else or being different from what we are right now. What about a moment of stopping and checking whether this is going on right now? Simply waking up this moment to what is taking place right now, opening up to……nothing special. Just wind blowing, windows rattling, birds calling, breath flowing in and out, bright sunlight flowing through the shades making patterns on the floor. When that happens it is clear that no wishing has brought it about! Being here and now in unadorned simplicity is our true state – whole and inseparable from anything else.
Toni Parker, The Silent Question
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
