Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful,
we must carry it with us or we find it not.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Tag: Meditation
…and expanding our range
The crucial factor influencing how we can respond in a given situation seems to be the level of mindfulness we can bring to bear upon the moment. If we don’t care to be present, unconscious decision-making systems will function by default to get us through to the next moment, albeit in the grip of (often flawed and suffering causing) learned behaviors and conditioned responses. If, on the other hand, we can increase the amount of conscious awareness present by manifesting mindfulness, we expand the range of our possible responses. Even if disposed to anger, we can choose to act with kindness. This is the essence of our freedom in an otherwise heavily conditioned system.
Andrew Olendzki, Unlimiting Mind
Out from behind our curtain…
When we examine this experience of opening, we find that we are expressing a part of ourselves that we may tend to overlook: we are expressing our ability to trust ourselves completely. In order to open — in meditation and in life in general — we must let go of our familiar thoughts and emotions, we must step out from behind the safe curtain of our inner rehearsals and onto the stage of reality, even if it’s for just a brief moment. When we open on the cushion, we renounce our attachment to our emotional security blanket, over and over again. We drop our pretense and our story lines and stand naked in the midst of uncertainty — the very essence of confidence itself.
Michael Carroll
The blank sheet
The aim of Buddhist meditation then, is to let go of the conditions of the mind. This doesn’t mean denying, getting rid of, or judging them. It means not believing them or following them. Instead we listen to them as conditions of the mind that arise and cease. We learn to trust in just being the listener, the watcher, with an attitude of awakened, attentive awareness, rather than be somebody trying to meditate to get some kind of result. Then through mindfulness we are able to get beyond the conditioning of the mind to the pure consciousness that isn’t conditioned, but which is like the background, the emptiness, the blank sheet on which words are written. Our perceptions arise and cease on that blank sheet, that emptiness.
Ajahn Sumedho
Living with all our strength
Just yesterday I watched an ant crossing a path, through the
tumbled pine needles she toiled.
And I thought: she will never live another life but this one.
And I thought: if she lives her life with all her strength
is she not wonderful and wise?
And I continued this up the miraculous pyramid of everything until I came to myself.
Mary Oliver, Reckless Poem
Inherently well
What would it be like to approach our lives, and to engage in the lives of others, knowing we are all inherently whole, intrinsically well, in need of being drawn forth into the discovery of unabashed completeness? How would this change the entire dance of practitioner and patient? What kind of relationship would be wrought and shaped when seen from, and uncompromisingly held within, this point of view?
Saki Santorelli, Heal Thyself: Lesson on Mindfulness in Medicine
