Tag: Mindfulness

Seeing the beautiful in the difficult

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Sometimes we do not fully understand why things have turned out as they have. At times like this we understand that we cannot make life problem-free, but our focus is to try and give to our everyday life a depth and value. To do this we may have to sit with the difficult moments without understanding why they are there. Rilke suggests that we love the difficult. It is not easy, but his words encourage us to believe that there is meaning underneath what is happening.

What is required of us is that we love the difficult and learn to deal with it. In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us.  Right in the difficult we must have our joys, our happiness, our dreams: there against the depth of this background, they stand out, there for the  first time we see how beautiful they are.

Rilke

Learning from whatever happens

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We also try to listen to whatever is going on in our lives, and whoever we encounter in a day. Opportunities for growth come in many shapes and sizes, sometimes unexpected or not quite what we would like.

The present moment is the perfect teacher. And lucky for us, it’s with us wherever we go.

Pema Chodron

Being able to see into the heart of things is great wisdom

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Everyone who lived at that time,
not being as wise as you young ones are today, found it rewarding enough in their simplicity to listen to an oak or even a stone, so long as it was telling the truth.

Plato, Phaedros

He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe,  is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.

Albert Einstein

Oak trees

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We try to be fully present in everything we do. We focus on just walking when we walk, and when listening to others we try to fully listen, not thinking ahead to the answer.  The vietnamese Zen Master Thich Nhat Hahn writes beautifully on giving whatever we are doing our full attention, taking care of one moment after another. Each event is important even if it is just washing a cup. In that way we are fully open to the happiness that is possible right now,  in each moment, if we just have eyes to see.

We learn this looking at nature around us and seeing how in silence each tree is perfectly complete in this moment. Nothing needs to be added. We are reminded of the old philopsophy maxim – actio sequitur esse- or action is based on being. Everything we do, all our happiness, is rooted in the heart. We touch into the heart every time we remember to be fully in each moment, not leaning onto the next, not always trying to be elsewhere or someone other than ourselves. Sitting practice strengthens this too: we do not try to feel anything particular, we drop all of our planning and additions and being in relationship  to just this moment, to just being.

An oak tree is an oak tree.  That is all it has to do.

If an oak tree is less than an oak tree, then we are all in trouble.

Thich Nhat Hahn

How to transform your work

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Even if you have a lot of work to do,
if you think of it as wonderful,
and if you feel it as wonderful,

it will transform into the energy of joy
and fire, instead of becoming a burden.

Tulku Thondup Rinpoche

Step by step, we make our lasting happiness

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Among all living creatures studied thus far by modern scientists, only human beings can be said with absolute certainty to have been endowed with the ability to make deliberate choices about the direction of their lives, and to discern whether those choices will lead them through the valley of transitory happiness or into a realm of a lasting peace and well-being. Though we may be genetically wired for temporary happiness, we’ve also been gifted with the ability to recognize within ourselves a more profound and lasting sense of confidence, peace, and well-being. Among sentient beings, human beings appear to stand alone in their ability to recognize the necessity to forge a bond between reason, emotion, and their instinct to survive, and in doing so create a universe—not only for themselves and the human generations that follow, but also for all creatures who feel pain, fear and suffering—in which we are all able to coexist contentedly and peaceably.

Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche