Going with the flow

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All of us rock back and forth between the tendency to hold on to ideas, experiences and emotions, and the ability to glide through the changes of our life. One reminder that can be helpful for being more fluid is to recognize our own watery-ness. We are also made up of earth (no wonder we get stuck sometimes), air (can’t make a commitment?), fire (sometimes passion helps), and space (ahhh…). But an overwhelming percentage of our physical make-up is water….Relating to waves of movement is what allows us to stay steady and sustain balance. The word “balance” comes from the Latin balare, meaning “to dance.” [And] you know what happens to water if it stays still —  it either turns into ice or becomes brackish and unhealthy. The same thing happens when we try to latch on to a prescribed feeling or experience. If we can only relax a bit we will see that our feelings, both emotional and physical, are flowing all the time.  It’s fun to think of your own body as a tiny part of the whole world of tides, rains, rivers and other people’s ninety-percent-water bodies. Can you let your body be the water bed that your heart and mind rest on?

Cyndi Lee, Go with the Flow

Making friends with ourselves

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The ninth Karama, a sixteenth-century meditation master, wrote of a “reverse meditation”, in which we recognize thoughts as they occur and regard them as friends. This “reverses” the tendency to regard thoughts as distractions from the main focus; now the thoughts themselves are the main focus. Mindfulness-of-mind practice is a further step on the path of making friends with ourselves. This is the heart of awareness practice: making friends with our entire being as a stepping stone to embracing our world.

Gaylon Ferguson, Natural Wakefulness

Running and missing

runningFrequently for us time is money. We must save as much time as possible, so that we have free time for more important things. The question is – what is more important to us? Often we cannot do much at all with all the time “saved”. We are habitually in a rush. But where to? We’ve become victims of our own frenzy – we rush at all times including our free time. He too we want to do more ever faster. But this constant rushing takes away our ability to feel and to experience the things we do. Increasingly we only feel alive in the midst of the hustles and bustles. We no longer feel ourselves, our breathing, our body, or the stirring of our heart. As the poet Ingeborg Bachman once said: “Idleness is the beginning of all love”

Anselm Gruen, Angels Calling

Today is where we live

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What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?
Philip Larkin

A prayer for the journey

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I no longer ask you for either happiness or paradise; all I ask of You is to listen and let me be aware of Your listening.

I no longer ask You to resolve my questions, only to receive them and make them part of You.

I no longer ask You for either rest or wisdom, I only ask You not to close me to gratitude, be it of the most trivial kind, or to surprise and friendship.

Holocaust Survivor Elie Wiesel, One Generation After

Learning from nature: the seasons cannot be hurried

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If you cultivate patience, you almost can’t help cultivating mindfulness, and your meditation practice will gradually become richer and more mature. If you really aren’t trying to get anywhere else in this moment,  patience  takes care of itself. It is a remembering that things unfold in their own time. The seasons cannot be hurried. Spring comes, the grass grows by itself. Being in a hurry usually doesn’t help and it can create a great deal of suffering. Patience is an ever-present alternative to the mind’s endemic restlessness and impatience. Scratch the surface of impatience and you will find lying beneath it, subtly or not so subtly is anger. It’s the strong energy of not wanting things to be the way they are and blaming someone (often yourself)  or something for it. From the perspective of patience, things happen because other things happen. Nothing is separate and isolated

Jon Kabat Zinn, Wherever you go, There you are

Photo by Donald Macauley