Just go into the room, and put one chair in the center. Take the one seat in the center of the room, open the doors and windows, and see who comes to visit. You will witness all kinds of scenes and actors, all kinds of temptations and stories, everything imaginable. Your only job is to stay in your seat. You will see it all arise and pass, and out of this, wisdom and understanding will come.
Ajahn Chah
Never forget:
We are alive within mysteries.
Wendell Berry, Life Is A Miracle : An Essay Against Modern Superstition
Two writers, from different traditions, speaking of our most important journey – coming to terms with the basic restlessness and unease at the core of our being – and being able to rest there.
To live an inner life we must first find the courage to enter into the desert of our loneliness and to change it by gentle and persistent efforts into a garden of solitude. The movement from loneliness to solitude, however, is the beginning of any spiritual life because it is the movement from the restless senses to the restful spirit, from the outward-reaching cravings to the inward-reaching search, from the fearful clinging to fearless play.
Henri Nouwen, Reaching out
As I look out of my eyes at the world, I see that a lot of us are just running around in circles pretending that there’s ground where there actually isn’t any ground. And that somehow, if we could learn to not be afraid of groundlessness, not be afraid of insecurity and uncertainty, it would be calling on an inner strength that would allow us to be open and free and loving and compassionate in any situation. But as long as we keep trying to scramble to get ground under our feet and avoid this uneasy feeling of groundlessness and insecurity and uncertainty and ambiguity and paradox, any of that, then the wars will continue. It’s like the matrix of creative potential. The matrix of the spiritual life. It’s like if we could rest there, which I suppose would be the description of enlightenment or the mystic, you know. Rest in that place, and is completely happy. That’s why, you know, they always say, with someone who’s very, very awake… the walls could start crumbling in and they wouldn’t like freak out or something. Because they’re kind of ready for anything to happen.
Pema Chodron, Interview with Bill Moyers, Faith and Reason, 2006.
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.
Meditation practice is a period of self-reflection that offers an opportunity for us to feel. To feel is to be present, which allows for depth and insight to occur. By learning to feel, we can contact the inherent openness of our being – known…in the Shambala teachings as basic goodness. This universal nature is characterized by kindness and compassion. A successful meditation practice is one in which we intimately connect with this naturally occurring love in our hearts and then embody it in our lives…. Resting in this space is self-empowerment minus the ego. By contacting that open feeling , the inherently pure stream at the depth of our being, we are laying the seeds for those feelings of love to grow within our own consciousness. Then those potent seeds will materialize in our life.
Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, Stop, Relax, Wake up
So many of us have been trained to think that being particular about what we want is indicative of good taste, and that not being satisfied unless our preferences are met is a sign of worldliness and sophistication. Often, this kind of discernment is seen as having high standards, when, in actuality, it is only a means of isolating ourselves from being touched by life, while rationalizing that we are more special than those who can’t meet our very demanding standards.
The devastating truth is that excellence can’t hold you in the night, and, as I learned when ill, being demanding or sophisticated won’t help you survive. A person dying of thirst doesn’t ask if the water has chlorine or if it was gathered in the foothills of France. Yet, to be accepting of the life that comes our way does not mean denying its difficulties and disappointments. Rather, it means that joy can be found even in hardship, not by demanding that we be treated as special at every turn, but through accepting the demand of the sacred that we treat everything that comes our way as special.
Mark Nepo, Being Easily Pleased
