If you need something to do in meditation , then watch the breathing. This is a very simple process. When you are breathing out, know that you are breathing out. When you breath in, know that you are breathing in, without supplying any kind of extra commentary or internalized mental gossip, but just identifying with the breath.
Sogyal Rinpoche
Sometimes, admittedly, the world can still of a sudden assume a resonance beyond
the one-dimensional, as the sun sometimes breaks through the Irish summer’s ample blanket of cloud cover.
And sometimes even in the rain there comes a moment when
the bird on the neighbouring roof is an ancient symbol or a hieroglyph
in the book of the riddle’s meaning.
And this is poetry, when the bird preaches to you, and you respond
By preaching strictly for the birds.
Ciaran O’Donnell, A Former Franciscan visits Assisi
Normally, fantasies are spinning out , one after another, usually about being someplace else or being different from what we are right now. What about a moment of stopping and checking whether this is going on right now? Simply waking up this moment to what is taking place right now, opening up to……nothing special. Just wind blowing, windows rattling, birds calling, breath flowing in and out, bright sunlight flowing through the shades making patterns on the floor. When that happens it is clear that no wishing has brought it about! Being here and now in unadorned simplicity is our true state – whole and inseparable from anything else.
Toni Parker, The Silent Question
As other posts this week have already discussed, true human development comes from relaxing with, accepting and integrating aspects of our personality that make us fearful and insecure. As Jung said, our journey in life is not towards some kind of perfection, but towards wholeness.
If it comes to a neurosis, we invariably have to deal with a considerably intensified shadow.
And if such a person wants to be cured it is necessary to find a way
in which his conscious personality and his shadow can live together.
Jung
Understanding how our emotions have the power to run us around in circles helps us discover how we increase our pain, how we cause harm to ourselves. Because of mindfulness we see things when they arise…we can stop harming ourselves and harming others. We don’t buy into the chain reaction that makes things grow from minute to expansive – we leave things minute.
Pema Chodron
Allie shared this lovely poem from Rumi at our MBSR Course last evening. It harmonizes well with the intention of the Course – using our body’s natural wisdom to help us deal with the challenges of life. Mindfulness is a practice of simple presence, before we attach any labels, stories or descriptions to what is happening in our life. Each day we practice shifting our attention, making ourselves available to the moment as it presents itself. In this way, our natural wisdom can reveal itself.
There are two kinds of intelligence: one acquired, as a child in school memorizes facts and concepts from books and from what the teacher says, collecting information from the traditional sciences as well as from the new sciences.
With such intelligence you rise in the world.
You get ranked ahead or behind others in regard to your competence in retaining
information. You stroll with this intelligence in and out of fields of knowledge, getting always more marks on your preserving tablets.
There is another kind of tablet, one already completed and preserved inside you.
A spring overflowing its springbox. A freshness in the center of the chest. This other intelligence does not turn yellow or stagnate. It’s fluid, and it doesn’t move from outside to inside through conduits of plumbing-learning.
This second knowing is a fountainhead, from within you, moving out.
Rumi, Two Kinds of Intelligence.
