Somewhere we know that without silence words lose their meaning,
that without listening speaking no longer heals,
that without distance closeness cannot cure.
Henri Nouwen
Tag: Meditation
A way of direct experience
The way that can be spoken is not the eternal way
That which can be named is not the eternal name
Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, 1
“Talking about a path is not walking that path.
Thinking about life is not living“.
Directly experiencing life is not something we do easily. By the time we are adults, our experience is mediated through a multitude of conceptual filters that provide a constant commentary about our life, but that ignore the thing itself. This process is so deeply conditioned in most of us that we don’t even notice it. We wander through day after day with our minds spinning an endless stream of thoughts, judgments, hopes, fantasies, critiques, and plans, all mixed with a babble of advertising jingles and fragments of television shows. Lao-tzu suggests that this habitual commentary on life, though a natural part of being human, is not the same thing as a fully lived life. At the same time, he does not totally discount the conceptual thinking process. We make a certain kind of sense out of our life through the use of categories, thoughts, and words. But, he suggests … these thoughts and words are gateways to life, not life itself.
Commentary on the Tao Te Ching by William Martin in A Path and A Practice
photo: without you
Substance and weight
How often do our thoughts condition reactions in the mind, as if the thought itself had substance? Yet the thought of a friend is not the friend; it is a thought. How many life scenarios have we created, directed and starred in and, for those moments, taken to be the experience itself? We also may get carried away by the intense energy of our emotions, swept up in a typhoon of the mind and body. To be lost in emotions is not to be mindful of their energy; and when there is a strong identified involvement with them, there is no space in the mind for seeing clearly what is happening.
Joseph Goldstein, in Seeking the Heart of Wisdom
photo autumn wind by jojo
Release from effort
Remind yourself to loosen up your opinions about what you think you are doing or where you think you are going. This is a practice that can be done informally, with regular reminders to yourself throughout the day. Or you can do a formal ‘wandering’ practice: Sitting in an upright posture, allow yourself to be with your breath, your body and all your sense perceptions, thoughts and emotions. You can notice how all these experiences come and go, as long as you don’t try to hold onto any of them. This is a practice of release from effort, and allows a sense of peace and not-knowing to arise naturally.
Melissa Myozen Backer Roshi in Richard Fields, A Year of Living Mindfully
photo: brookie
Where to let go
A big change in the Irish weather these last few days. Wet and very windy, and consequently the leaves are finally giving up their clinging and letting go. It prompts me to reflect on whether a certain lightness in how I hold some things – like how I turn my opinions into a solid identity or how I try to fix into a definite storyline as to how a meeting or a process should turn out, how I like things fixed in a world that is always changing – can reduce some of the emotional charge which arises from time to time.
Every year, everything
I have ever learned in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side is salvation,
whose meaning none of us will ever know.
To live in this world you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
Mary Oliver, In Blackwater Woods
How do we arrive at non-agitation through non-clinging? When the instructed person does not regard form with these words: “This is mine, this I am, this is my self.”
The form of his changes and alters, but with the change and alteration of form, sorrow, lamentation, pain, displeasure and despair do not arise.
The Buddha, S 22.8
photo keven law
The different sides of wonder
Everything has its wonders,
even darkness and silence,
and I learn, whatever state I may be in,
therein to be content.
Hellen Keller
With thanks again to Ellen for the photo
