Me
ditation, whatever method you are using, is simply getting to know your mind. It is not about meditating ‘on’ something or getting into a zone where you are blissfully removed from your mind’s contents.
Instead, the actual meaning of meditation is more like getting used to being with your own mind.
Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche
Happiness, anxiety, joy, resentment — we have many words for the many emotions we experience in our lifetimes. But deep down, there are only two emotions: love and fear. All positive emotions come from love, all negative emotions from fear. From love flows happiness, contentment, peace, and joy. From fear comes anger, hate, anxiety and guilt.
We have to make a decision to be in one place or the other. If you don’t actively choose love, you will find yourself in a place of either fear or one of its component feelings.
Every moment offers the choice to choose one or the other. And we must continually make these choices, especially in difficult circumstances when our commitment to love, instead of fear, is challenged.
Elizabeth Kubler Ross
Today is the feastday of Teresa of Avila, another formidable nun, this time from the 16th Century. She lived in an age of great social change, somewhat like today, and was a strong leader, founding monasteries at a time when most preferred women to be relegated to the kitchen and the home. She was intensely practical and deeply human. However she combined her achievements with a very profound interior life. She reminds us not to neglect the dimension of the soul in this age with our focus on progress and speed.
Despite suffering ill health she had a great trust that a Higher Power was guiding her life and her work. Even if she could not see where things were leading she trusted. These handwritten words were found after her death. May they support all who struggle this evening. The musical version comes from the monastery at Taize, not too far away from here in Bourgogne.
Let nothing disturb you,
Let nothing frighten you,
Everything passes.
God does not go away.
Patience
can attain anything.
He who has God within,
does not lack anything.
Nada te turbe, nada te espante; quien a Dios tiene nada le falta.
Buddhist nun Pema Chodron’s instruction on how to develop our hearts, how to work with the fears that arise when we touch our natural warmth and love.
Each of us has a “soft spot”: the place in our experience where we feel vulnerable and tender. This soft spot is inherent in appreciation and love, and it is equally inherent in pain.
Often, when we feel that soft spot, it’s quickly followed by a feeling of fear and an involuntary, habitual tendency to close down. This is the tendency of all living things: to avoid pain and cling to pleasure. In practice, however, covering up the soft spot means shutting down against out life experience. Then we tend to narrow down into a solid feeling of self against other.
The trick is to stay with the soft spot and not harden over it. That’s the basic instruction: stay with the soft spot.
How does this work? You’re going along, and your mind and heart are open. Then someone says something and you find yourself either frightened or starting to get angry. You feel the hair rising on the back of your neck, and something in you closes down. You’re on your way to becoming all worked up. At this point, you become unreasonable, and all your wisdom goes out the window. You’re hooked. This is what we work with as practitioners, we have to be able to see where we get hooked like this. It’s easy to see. To interrupt the flow of it, though, is another matter.
Pema Chödrön, Stay with the Soft Spot of Bodhichitta.
All of us have a secret desire to be seen as heroes, saints, martyrs.
We are afraid to be children, to be ourselves.
Jean Vanier, Community and Growth
I watched the first of the Chilean miners being brought out alive from the depths of the earth where they had been trapped for nearly 70 days. It brought to mind the biblical tale of Jonah who was trapped in the whale for three days and all those stories and myths about people descending to the underworld to remerge later. These rich themes seem to speak deeply to aspects of our experience. Today I am just interested in the aspect of waiting, which some call of being in a state of limbo.
We can sometimes be in a phase of our life when we feel like we are waiting or we are stuck, and that can make us uneasy. It seems like we are going nowhere. There may be an acompanying sense of unease or low mood. However, what we may not know is that these periods can be ones of important growth. We may go through a dark period, but that doesn’t mean that we are depressed. We sometimes have to have the courage to wait until a new direction becomes clear. Our culture today prizes achievement and fast forward movement. To stand still is seen as the same as going backwards. Staying quiet and waiting is not valued as a process.
In this understanding, we can see that these periods, when we may feel stuck, even buried or in darkness. can be periods of rebirth. We are leaving behind some elements of the past only to emerge into a new light. As in the story of Jonah, we can be moving in a direction even if we seem to be trapped. The darkness is taking us where we need to go. Sometimes this becomes apparent only afterwards. Not all growth takes place in bright sunshine; as Thomas Moore reminds us, darkness is also part of life’s processes.
You may be so influenced by the modern demand to make progress at all costs that you may not appreciate the value in backsliding. Yet, to regress in a certain way is to return to origins, to step back from the battle line of existence, to remember the gods and spirits and elements of nature, including your own pristine nature, the person you were at the beginning. You return to the womb of imagination so that your pregnancy can recycle. You are always being born, always dying to the day to find the restorative waters of night.
The whale’s belly is, of course, a kind of womb. In your withdrawal from life and your uncertainty you are like an infant not yet born. The darkness is natural, one of the life processes. There may be some promise, the mere suggestion that life is going forward, even though you have no sense of where you are headed. It’s a time of waiting and trusting. My attitude as a therapist in these situations is not to be anxious for a conclusion or even understanding. You have to sit with these things and in due time let them be revealed for what they are.
In your dark night you may have a sensation you could call “oceanic” – being in the sea, at sea, or immersed in the waters of the womb. The sea is the vast potential of life, but it is also your dark night, which may force you to surrender some knowledge you have achieved. It helps to regularly undo the hard-won ego development, to unravel the self and culture you have woven over the years. The night sea journey takes you back to your primordial self, not the heroic self that burns out and falls to judgment, but to your original self, yourself as a sea of possibility, your greater and deeper being.
Thomas Moore, Dark Night of the Soul
