If I had my life to live over again,
I would ask that not a thing be changed,
but that my eyes be opened wider.
Jules Reynard, French Author, 1864 – 1910
Tag: Life
Permanance and impermanence
Stars and blossoming fruit trees:
Utter permanence and extreme fragility
give an equal sense of eternity.
Simone Weil
photo il conte di luna
Speeding up or slowing down
What I’ve noticed is that there are two main ways that fear of uncertainty affects us, at least initially. One is that we speed up and the other is that we get very lazy. As I’ve talked with people many of them share their experiences of how a basic level of nervousness causes them to speed about even in their own homes, bouncing from room to room and task to task and never quite finishing anything. People talk about going back and forth between one thing and another, emailing and calling people on the phone. …Lazy is the other way to go. It is the opposite of speed, and yet these two seeming opposites are both about the same thing: avoiding being present with our fear of uncertainty. You procrastinate. You feel unworthy. Laziness has a frozen quality. You spend hour after hour on the computer, not as a form of speediness, but just distracting yourself, trying not to feel what’s underneath what you’re feeling, trying to avoid touching the uncertainty and uneasiness.
Pema Chodron
photo trishna datta
Life is like this
Life is like this. You can’t say it’s a banquet all the time. Breath going in… I wouldn’t describe that as a banquet, or that the sound of silence is life at its best, where it’s just one laugh after another. It’s just like this. Most of our experience is neither one extreme nor another; it’s like this…[yet]..there are ways of noticing that even within what can be physically unpleasant – like cold, dampness and things like this – that we find unpleasant as sensory experiences, that the real suffering is the aversion: “I don’t like this. I don’t want life to be like this. I want to be where there are blue skies and sunshine all the time.”… When you’re seeking happiness and trying to get away from pain and misery, then you’re caught in always trying to get something or hold on to happiness. That leads to an extreme again — wanting, always grasping after the ideal of some refined conscious experience.
Ajahn Sumedho, Intuitive Awareness
Without effort
With no mind, flowers lure the butterfly;
With no mind, the butterfly visits the blossoms.
Yet when flowers bloom, the butterfly comes;
When the butterfly comes, the flowers bloom.
Taigu Ryokan, Japaneses Zen Poet, 1758 – 1831
The process of working with difficulties
As a practice, this process can be summarized. First of all there is the matter of view. This means acknowledging……that the anxiety……however reasonable, is causing you suffering. There’s a tightness in your chest, an unsettledness in your belly, a tendency to go into red alert. Now the point is not to say “I shouldn’t worry” or “It’s a natural concern” but just to acknowledge your feeling of anxiety. Then there’s the practice: you are actually experiencing anxiety as it is happening, as an embodied feeling, with no should or shouldn’t about it. The next aspect is to steady your awareness around that feeling and let go of interpreting it, dismissing or trying to fix it. Just be with that feeling. Then breathe into the feeling, widen and soften your awareness. Relax a little, give yourself time, ease the energies associated with that feeling. Then tune into the spaciousness, the empathy and the direct clarity of the awareness of that feeling and let the feeling do what it needs to do in order to be felt.
Ajahn Sucitto, Turning the Wheel of Truth
