Tag: Joy

Using the weather today as a metaphor for life

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The warmth of the Spring weather this year means that plants and fruits are in bloom ahead of time and any memories of winter is far behind. We can look at the weather and nature today and be reminded of a number of lessons, which help us live our life mindfully:

Spring is a metaphor for transitions. It moves from lifelessness to life and we move from lifelessness to life in each cycle of breathing. If we know change is going to occur we are in a better place to accept it. If we expect things to stay constant we are vulnerable to frustration, disappointment, and resistance.

Spring is also a metaphor for forgiveness. Whatever happened in the last season, life begins anew with no carryover resentment from the past. Spring reminds us, as Pema Chodron says, to start where we are.

Spring shows us the cycle of living and dying on a bigger scale do. Everything comes into being and goes out of being — changing its form.  Spring invites us not to become attached to things, even the most precious things in our life. The invitation is to love things wholeheartedly with the awareness that they will not be with us forever. And, indeed, we, ourselves, will not be here forever. The invitation is to not be afraid to grieve when that grief becomes necessary. Grief is, at times, the admission price to the present moment.

The renewal of spring is the healing from grief, from the inexorable impermanence of things. Spring also demonstrates the tenacity of life and encourages us to persist in whatever we are doing.

So welcome spring and your multifaceted metaphors for mindful living!

Arnie Kozak, on Beliefnet

Life is the best teacher

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Nothing ever goes away

until it has taught us everything it has to teach us.

Pema Chodron

Things fall apart

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Not everything goes smoothly everyday or in our life history. However, it seems to be a fact that painful situations have the capacity to help us reflect better than pleasant occasions when everything is going smoothly and positively. Indeed, our quest for an easy life without change is a mistaken one, as change is inevitable, even on a daily level. Wisdom comes when we begin to see that our full growth can include holding the painful aspects of our lives in awareness and not pushing them away, as our natural instinct sometimes demands. It is not only pleasant insights that lead to growth. To grow whole we have to go beneath the surface of neat appearance and enter deeply into our hearts and our history.

Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.

Pema Chodron

Where you are, and not judging it

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The path is something we cultivate. We have to know where we are and not try to become something that we think we would like to be; we have to practise with the way it is now, without making a judgement about it. If you’re feeling tense, nervous, disillusioned, disappointed about yourself or whatever, then try to recognise that what is in the moment is enough. Be willing to just admit, to acknowledge the way it is,  rather than to indulge in believing that what you’re feeling is somehow an accurate description of reality, or to feel that what you are feeling is wrong and you shouldn’t be feeling like that. Those are two extremes. But the cultivation of the way is to recognise that whatever is subject to arising is subject to ceasing. And this isn’t a put-down or cold-hearted way of cultivating the path, even though it might sound like it.

Ajahn Sumedho

What is, is good enough.

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In both Western and Eastern traditions, happiness is less about feeling good than about an attitude of acceptance of life the way it is. Happiness comes from accepting what is , in contrast to pursuing what is not yet. To penetrate life means to get into it with a focused power and precision, like a laser beam. As Thoreau indicated, it means “to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life”. If we truly practice his favorite principle –  less is more, simpler is better – we sooner or later come upon the subtler principle it reveals: what is,  is good enough.

 Less is more, simpler is better, works precisely because whatever exists without our inflating and overcomplicating it, is good enough. Zen alludes to this principle when it says  “The beauty of a mountain is that it is so much like a mountain, and of water, that it is so much like water”.  Simply stated, life is simply good.

Michael Gellert, The Way of the Small

Ending confusion: How to find the meaning in life

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Separated by centuries and traditions,  but the same message:

The meaning of life is to see

Hui Neng ( Chinese Zen monk, 7th century).

The whole of life lies in the verb “seeing”

Teilhard de Chardin, (Jesuit priest, 20th Century).

Devotion proceeds through various stages of unmasking until we reach the point of seeing the world directly and simply without imposing our fabrications.

Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche