Most think that living a “full life” means living into old age.
But if you are not alive this moment, what makes you think you’ll be alive then?
Stephen and Ondrea Levine, Embracing the Beloved
Tag: Mindfulness
Patience and a different view of time
This evening marks the start of a New Year in the Christian Liturgical Calendar. Different wisdom traditions mark the passing of time in different ways. Most of the ones which originated in the Northern Hemisphere see a change from one year to the next around now. Although a significant number of people in the Western world come from a Christian background, very few seem to mark this day in a significant way, preferring to look forward to the more commercially-sanctioned December 31st.
We can see that an understanding of time is relative, having been framed in different ways over the centuries and in different traditions. This makes it interesting to observe how we can attach stories and get upset by certain dates, when their meaning is quite arbitrary and driven frequently by more modern advertising concerns. For example, traditionally, different days were used to give gifts. The feast of Saint Nicolas on December 6th in Germany and Northern Europe saw children putting their shoes in front of the fire in the hope of receiving something nice. December 13th, the Feast of Saint Lucy, was celebrated in the Nordic countries and in some parts of Italy, again with gift-giving and visitors coming down the chimney. These and other traditions have been replaced or combined in the much more recent figure of Santa Claus.
I like the fact that there are different calendars used in different traditions. It gives us a choice as to what meaning we wish to attach to the passing of time and how we can hold certain stories lightly. In other words, there is no objective meaning to December 25th, December 31st or any other day. It is us who place meaning on those dates. Because society attaches importance to these dates we can allow an association of stories to form in our heads and make them into a story about our lives. This can often lead us to compare our life or our history to other lives, who are celebrating these days in a “better” way. As a result, the comparing mind is quick to kick into action. So for many people, this holiday period can increase anxiety, and they can feel inadequate on the 25th or the 31st when they were feeling reasonably content on the 24th or the 30th. Human life and family history is much more complex than the snapshots seen on a certain day and cannot be rewritten just for one day.
The more we can see the expectation created by these messages, the more we see that we are frequently tempted to try to manipulate our life into something portrayed outside of us, rather than working with it as it actually is. In sitting practice we are working on our underlying contentment, deep within ourselves; we learn to patiently refuse the messages given from others and return, over and over again, to our life as it is and not the stories we receive about it from outside. We do not need others’ ideas to complete our life for us.
Let go of an idea of perfection
When we seek happiness through accumulation, either outside of ourselves–from other people, relationships, or material goods – or from our own self-development – we are missing the essential point. In either case we are trying to find completion. But ……completion comes not from adding another piece to ourselves but from surrendering our ideas of perfection.
Mark Epstein
Working with our life
Accepting the conditions of existence means first of all admitting our vulnerability to them. When we realize that the givens of life – no matter how ferocious – are not penalties, but ingredients of depth, lovability and character, we can let go of the belief that we are immune (or need to be). “That can’t happen to me” or “How dare they do that to me” changes to “Anything human can happen to me and I will do my best to handle it”. The strength to handle challenges, in fact, is directly proportional to how much we let go of entitlement.
David Richo, How to be an Adult in Relationships
Being grounded today
The mind can still slip away at the speed of a thought and without giving a moment’s notice. This means that we have to choose something useful to bear in mind – and to put some effort into staying with it – in order to keep to the fore an object or theme that supports clear, empathic, or stabilising states of mind. One of the fundamental ways of bringing the mind into the present moment is to focus on how we sense our own body. This bodily sense – that is awareness of the sensations and energies that manifest in the body – is something immediate that we can contemplate. It gives us ground and balance. It gives us the sense of being where we are. Although this may seem basic and obvious, much of the time we are not grounded in where we really are. Instead we are ‘out there’ in a world of changing circumstance and reactions to that, without having a central reference.
Ajahn Sucitto, Meditation, A Path to Awakening
Who we truly are
I had a nice conversation yesterday on the challenge of finding purpose within, in a world which has lost many of the traditional places or containers which used to supply meaning in the past. It is a challenge all through life, and it comes down to having some degree of comfort in our sense of who we are and where we are at this moment. In other words, as Winnicott says, “we gather the personality together from within” by developing a capacity to be at ease with an interior “formlessness and comfortable solitude”, without being afraid, or needing to fill the space with objects and distractions. In this way we unlearn a lot of the messages which come from our restless society or from the wounds of our own history:
To know this spot of inwardness is to know who we are, not by surface markers of identity, not by where we work or what we wear or how we like to be addressed, but by feeling our place in relation to the Infinite and by inhabiting it. This is a hard lifelong task, for the nature of becoming is a constant filming over of where we begin, while the nature of being is a constant erosion of what is not essential. Each of us lives in the midst of this ongoing tension, growing tarnished or covered over, only to be worn back to that incorruptible spot of grace at our core. Regardless of subject matter, this is the only thing worth teaching: how to uncover that original center and how to live there once it is restored. We call the filming over a deadening of heart, and the process of return, whether brought about through suffering or love, is how we unlearn our way back to God.
Mark Nepo,
