Tag: Meditation

To love the reality of what happens today

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Over and over again I see – in myself and in others – the capacity to turn things that do not actually exist – possible events in the future – into real,  vivid,  scenarios and tangible fears in the present. A huge amount of our anxiety comes from what is not, what “may happen”.  The big challenge is to stay with what actually is, not what the mind convinces us could possibly be. Here,  two quotations,  from completely different traditions,  encourage us in this regard today.

Every particle of creation sings its own song of what is and what is not. Hearing what is can make you wise.  Hearing what is not can drive you mad.

Ghalib, Sufi Poet and mystic, 1797 – 1869

The big thing for me is to love reality and not live in the imagination, not live in what could have been or what should have been or what can be, and somewhere, to love reality and then discover that God is present.

Jean Vanier, Founder of the L’Arche Communities

Making space for new words

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Fare forward, travellers! Not escaping from the past Into indifferent lives, or into any future; You are not the same people who left that station Or who will arrive at any terminus.  T.S. Eliot, The Dry Savages

The Latin word “limen” means “threshold” . Liminality is an inner state ands sometimes an outer situation where people can begin to think and act in genuinely new ways. It is when we are betwixt and between, have left one room but not yet entered the next room, any hiatus between stages of life, stages of faith, jobs, loves or relationships. It is that graced time when we are not certain or in control, when something genuinely new can happen. We are empty, receptive, an erased tablet waiting for new words. Nothing fresh or creative will normally happen when we are inside our  self-constructed comfort zones,  only more of the same. Nothing original emerges from business as usual. It seems we need some anti-structure to give direction, depth and purpose to our regular structure. Otherwise, structure, which is needed in the first half of life, tends to become a prison as we grow older. Much of the work of …human destiny itself is to get people into liminal space and to keep them there long enough to learn something essential and genuinely new. It is the ultimate teaching space. In some sense it is the only teaching space.

Richard Rohr, Adam’s Return

Sunday Quote: Identity

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Your identity is not equivalent to your biography

John O Donohue, The Inner Landscape of Beauty

Being patient and starting over

Karl Duffy2 Comments

I was thinking about the GPS in my car. It never gets annoyed at me. If I make a mistake, it says, “Recalculating.” And then it tells me to make the soonest left turn and go back. I thought to myself, you know, I should write a book and call it “Recalculating” because I think that that’s what we’re doing all the time. If something happens, it challenges us and the challenge is, OK, so do you want to get mad now? You could get mad, you could go home, you could make some phone calls, you could tell a few people you can’t believe what this person said or that person said. Indignation is tremendously seductive, you know, and to share with other people on the telephone and all that. So to not do it and to say, wait a minute, apropos of you said before, wise effort to say to yourself, wait a minute, this is not the right road. Literally, this is not the right road. There’s a fork in the road here. I could become indignant, I could flame up this flame of negativity or I could say, “Recalculating.” I’ll just go back here. And no matter how many times I don’t make that turn, it will continue to say, “Recalculating.” The tone of voice will stay the same.

Sylvia Boorstein.

Bring compassion to what happens

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Meditation is an experiment we are making, bringing us out of our normal habits of intense self-judgment, comparing, and impatience. Mindfulness isn’t about what is happening; it is about how we are relating to what is happening — how much awareness, balance and compassion are bringing to this moment’s experience, whatever it is. For example, it is very likely you will find your attention wandering, not 45 minutes after you first begin, but probably within a few seconds. You get lost in a fantasy, or fall asleep. That is normal and not a sign of failure. What I emphasize is that the critical moment in your meditation is the moment you see you’ve been distracted; instead of falling into our usual habits of self-condemnation, that’s a time we can practice letting go while being kind to ourselves, and work with the renewing power of beginning again.

Sharon Salzberg, Meditation and Mindfulness for All of Us.

A value in being lost

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There is immense value in “finding ourselves lost” because we can find something when we are lost, we can find our selves. Indeed, the deepest form of wandering requires that we be lost.  Imagine yourself lost in your career or marriage, or in the middle of your life. You have goals, a place you want to be, but you don’t know how to reach that place. Maybe you don’t know exactly what you want, you just have a vague desire for a better place. Although it may not seem like it, you are on the threshold of a great opportunity. Begin to trust that place of not knowing. Surrender to it. You’re lost. There will be grief. A cherished outcome appears to be unobtainable or undefinable. In order to make the shift from being lost to being present, admit to yourself that your goal may never be reached. Though perhaps difficult, doing so will create entirely new possibilities for fulfillment.

Surrendering fully to being lost –  and this is where the art comes in  – you will discover that, in addition to not knowing how to get where you had wanted to go, you are no longer so sure of the ultimate rightness of that goal. By trusting your unknowing, your old standards of progress dissolve and you become eligible to be chosen by new, larger standards, those that come not from your mind or old story or other people, but from the depths of your soul. You become attentive to an utterly new guidance system.

Bill Plotkin, Being Lost but not lost in Life