Tag: Meditation

Keeping our life whole

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Anything you do to escape the fundamental duality of ego consciousness just kicks more energy into it. Your only choice is to stop. That unsplit, unifying place is found at the fulcrum. This is the holy place, the whole place. The demand for human consciousness to have the “right” thing –  at the exclusion of something else –  just sets the wheel in motion again. There is a kind of consciousness that assists slowing down. If you can honestly assess what is true in your life, looking at it with objectivity and intelligence, this is getting closer.

Practically speaking, if we would spend as much time being alert and aware as we do worrying, we would be out of any mess fairly soon. When you stop fighting your situation, you just have the situation but no longer the struggle to cope with. Generally one can endure that. This is to cease wounding yourself on the jailhouse bars of reality —  to stop complaining about what is.

Robert Johnson

A pilgrimage to our own life

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Since everything is sacred, staying close to what is sacred is a matter of presence and attention more than travel to some secret place. In essence, staying close is a pilgrimage to the heart of where we are. Since it is we who lose our directness of living, our task is often to restore that freshness of being alive….How do we stray on and off the path of what matters? How do we befriend the life of obstacles? How do we find a home between suffering and loving the world? How do help each other respond to the invitation to grow?

Mark Nepo

Sunday Quote: When we do not appreciate what we have

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You cannot avoid paradise.

You can only avoid seeing it.

Charlotte Joko Beck

Seeing and holding the problem in awareness

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Meditation is about finding a centre, and carefully sweeping awareness out into the wilds of the mind, until there is a sense of space, relief, and subtle uplift. We can’t clear the whole wilderness in one go. But a little release is a precious thing; and every time we come out of being the problem to seeing and being with the problem, every time we come out of being entranced by a memory or fighting with it to know – ‘oh, it feels like this, and it’s there’ there’s a shift to a free centre. Every time we widen with kindness and awareness to see that the self-position I’m coming from, or the self I’m trying to get rid of or defend are objects over there and not a subject, something stops and there’s a touch of release. That’s the process. And it’s marked by happiness.

Ajahn Sucitto

Not a way to escape from ourselves

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When we come into therapy, instead of pursuing some ideal, we may be trying to escape some part of ourselves. Our anger. Our depression. Our sexuality. Then we think that therapy may be some kind fo mental surgery, cutting out all those disagreeable aspects of the mind and leaving behind only what is calm or compassionate. But neither therapy or… [meditation] practice works that way. The mind cannot escape itself – that would be like riding a donkey fleeing a donkey.

The only way out of that struggle is to leave our mind alone,   to fully accept the mind that we have, anger, delusions, and all. And when we no longer judge ourselves or try to emotionally neuter ourselves, the internal tensions and conflicts gradually begin to quiet down. We might say that this is the most basic psychological insight: I can’t escape myself, so I must come to terms with the mind that I have. I call this a “psychological” insight,  because the basic task of all …practice is re-owning the split-off and denied or dissociated aspects of the mind

Barry Magid, Ending the Pursuit of happiness

Weekend, winding down…when work is finished

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What in your life is calling you,
When all the noise is silenced,
The meetings adjourned…
The lists laid aside,
And the Wild Iris blooms
By itself
In the dark forest…
What still pulls on your soul?

Rumi