As you start the practice, you have a sense of your body and a sense of where you are, and then you begin to notice the breathing. The whole feeling of the breath is very important. The breath should not be forced, obviously; you are breathing naturally. The breath is going in and out, in and out. With each breath you become relaxed.
Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche
God, rest in my heart,
Fortify me
Take away my hunger for answers.
Mary Oliver
Some more words from Jacques Lusseyran, who as I said in an earlier post, was blinded in an accident at age eight. He writes about the way this allowed him to develop his capacity for paying attention which goes far beyond just the ability to see and think :
[Those who can see] commit a strange error. They believe that we know the world only through our eyes. For my part, I discovered that the universe consists of pressure, that every object and every living being reveals itself to us at first by a kind of quiet yet unmistakable pressure that indicates its intention and its form. I even experienced the following wonderful fact: A voice, the voice of a person, permits him to appear in a picture. When the voice of a man reaches me, I immediately perceive his figure, his rhythm, and most of his intentions. Even stones are capable of weighing on us from a distance. So are the outlines of distant mountains, and the sudden depression of a lake at the bottom of a valley.
This correspondence is so exact that when I walked arm in arm with a friend along the paths of the Alps, I knew the landscape and could sometimes describe it with surprising clarity. Sometimes; yes, only sometimes. I could do it when I summoned all my attention. Permit me to say without reservation that if all people were attentive, if they would undertake to be attentive every moment of their lives, they would discover the world anew. They would suddenly see that the world is entirely different from what they had believed it to be.
The difficulty most of us face is that we’re afraid of our humanity. We don’t know how to give our humanity space. We don’t know how to give it love. We don’t know how to offer our appreciation. We seize upon whenever difficult emotions or painful thoughts arise – in large part because we have been taught from a very early age that life is a serious business. We’re taught that we have to accomplish so many things and excel at so many things because we have to compete for a limited amount of resources. We develop such high expectations for ourselves and others, and we develop high expectations of life. Such a competitive, goal-orientated approach to life makes us very speedy inside. We become so tight physically, mentally and emotionally as we rush through each day, each moment, that many of us forget – often quite literally – to breathe.
Tsoknyi Rinpoche, Upgrading our Practice
Jacques Lusseyran was a French writer and member of the Resistance, who continued to organize groups against the Nazi authorities even after he was sent to Buchenwald concentration camp. His work was all the more courageous because he had become totally blind at the age of 8, following an accident at school. He wrote about his early life in the book And There was Light: Autobiography of Jacques Lusseyran, Blind Hero of the French Resistance. This extract compliments the quote from Mark Twain this morning. Our discovery of the world begins with our active steps, which sometimes need courage and involve risk. However, we also need to know when to receive, and allow things to happen. The world is an accomplice in this work of growth and continually presents moments when we can grow. Ironically, we frequently resist what happens to us each day, thinking that life is to be found elsewhere.
If I put my hand on the table without pressing it, I knew the table was there but knew nothing about it. To find out, my fingers had to bear down, and the amazing thing is that the pressure was answered by the table at once. Being blind I thought I should have to go out to meet things, but I found that they came to meet me instead. I have never had to go more than halfway, and the universe became the accomplice of all my wishes.
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed at the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do.
So sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails.
Explore, Dream. Discover.
Mark Twain
