Tag: Meditation

A steady orientation

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I find myself more and more teaching what seems most essential; to help people access intelligent and comfortable awareness. If this awareness becomes a steady orientation, it’s possible to live and grow in this personal world; here is a sense of safety with its fundamental goodwill. The tricky detail being that it is not personal; it’s before the personal conditions arise.

And this means that the sources of the programs and attitudes that become a person get revealed: dis-ease, restlessness and having to do something, or feeling guilty and inadequate that one isn’t doing (or in fact being) whatever it is that one should be – while not knowing what that is. Not that any of that is your fault. Essentially this dukkha (suffering) is not personal, not specific; and it isn’t resolved by doing anything other than tackling its program. It’s non-specific because its source is the pressurised space of one’s unsettled awareness. That then colours everything that the personality forms out of.

Ajahn Sucitto

Stay in the middle of it

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Anxiety, heartbreak, and tenderness mark the in-between state. It’s the kind of place we usually want to avoid. The challenge is to stay in the middle rather than buy into struggle and complaint. The challenge is to let it soften us rather than make us more rigid and afraid.

 Pema Chödrön,  The In-Between state

Being useless

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It takes time and patient practice to develop qualities that make for a lasting effect. This idea is not easy to hold on to in a society that prizes immediate results. Emptying the mind of the need to be noticed, or thought as special,  allows us to just be ourselves in a simple way:

The sage Chuang-Tzu was walking with a disciple on a hilltop. They saw a crooked, ancient tree without a single straight branch. The disciple said the tree is useless, nothing from it can be used. Chuang-Tzu replied: That’s the reason it is ancient. Everyone seems to know how useful it is to be useful. No one seems to know how useful it is to be useless. 

Sunday Quote: Wisdom

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The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge

faster than society gathers wisdom.

Isaac Asimov

Beyond limitations

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Souls get big from opening out beyond the limitations of human knowledge and control.

Everyone is called to be a mystic of some sort, and being open to mystery and myth, the intuitive and the non-rational, to art and ritual, to nature and animals, to absurd ideas and outrageous fantasies gives the soul room to fashion a lovable and thoughtful human being. However simple your life, however ordinary and retiring, you can have a mega-soul, a vast source of vitality, and the capacity for pain and failure as well. You can be noble in your simplicity and deep and wide in your ability to contain life.

Thomas Moore

Masks

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Everyone has a life that is different from the ‘I’ of daily consciousness, a life that is trying to live through the ‘I’ who is its vessel. This is what the poet knows and what every wisdom tradition teaches; there is a great gulf between the way my ego wants to identify me, with its protective masks and self-serving fictions, and my true self. The soul is like a wild animal; tough, resilient, savvy, self-sufficient, and yet exceedingly shy. The soul speaks its truth only under quiet, inviting, and trustworthy conditions.

Parker Palmer, Let your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation