“Well,” said Pooh, “what I like best,” and then he had to stop and think.
Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn’t know what it was called.
A. A. Milne, The House on Pooh Corner
The practice is quite simple really. It is to pay attention to each moment as it actually is, and be open to whatever is happening in that moment. It is not about creating a sense of calm or fixing our personalities. It is not about changing things at all, in one sense, but rather being with them in the light of awareness.
Seems simple. However, I continually find that it is not so easy to keep the mind focused on just this moment or this act. It often prefers to race ahead, thinking about what needs to be said or scanning the horizon for the next task to be done. I got a simple example of that this week. I was standing in line to get breakfast and was putting some food on the plate. I came to the last of the hot items, scrambled eggs, and put them on my plate, looking ahead to see where to get coffee and where to sit. Jenn’s voice from behind came, saying, “Thanks Karl for taking all the eggs“, which indeed I had. Leaning into the next moment – where to sit – or being busy composing an answer in a conversation, meant that I had filled my plate without noticing and consequently without considering others. Luckily, Jenn was kind enough to allow me make amends and to accept some of the portion I had put on my plate ……even though she could not help reminding me of it for the next few days.
When we don’t pay attention to this moment we can notice our minds speeding up to already be in the next. We also fail to pay attention to the deeper possibilities of caring for or listening to others. Mindfulness is sterile if it does not lead us to being more compassionate, more sensitive. A simple lesson, which we have to learn over and over again, hundreds of times each day.
The habit of ignoring our present moments in favor of others yet to come leads directly to a pervasive lack of awareness of the web of life in which we are embedded. This includes a lack of awareness and understanding of our own mind and how it influences our perceptions and our actions. It severely limits our perspective on what it means to be a person and how we are connected to each other and the world around us.
Jon Kabat Zinn
You will soon find that thoughts are like the wind; they come and go.
The secret is to not ‘think’ about thoughts, but allow them to flow through the open mind.
Soygal Rinpoche
Meditators face a very real danger of coming to prefer the view from the top of the pole to their real life on the ground. But such peak moments, no matter how profound, always end, leaving us with the problem of how to live in accord with the perspective they provide. Unless we learn to step off the pole, our practice will devolve into mere addiction to the highs of peak experience.
Barry Magid, Ordinary Mind
Practice is based on a complete acceptance of ourselves, as we are, balanced with a gentle, non-judging movement to change aspects of our behaviour which lead to unhappiness. Any desire for change comes within the framework of that non-judgmental acceptance, and an ease with the status quo.
We know when we are far from that. We can feel an urgency in our desire to change, a leaning forward that is tinged with fear. There can be all sorts of reasons for this, such as an fundamental lack of acceptance of ourselves. Or we have an “indirect acceptance“, when we can only see good in ourselves if someone outside approves us. Or we get mixed up between been needed and being loved. Whatever the reason, we can look to mediation to fix us, and it becomes attached to an outcome, ultimately adding to our unhappiness with ourselves. The reality of our lives is that we are three-steps-forward-two-steps-back-kinda-people, and need to accept ourselves as that.
Ajahn Sumedho encourages an awareness of what we call “the becoming tendency”, meaning the use of meditation to become something. You do this to get that. It’s a kind of busy-ness and doing-ness and leaning — taking hold of a method, or others’ ideas, or quick solutions in order to get somewhere. This habit is the cause of many of our troubles, and can so easily take over our meditation. It can permeate the whole effort of spiritual practice. Indeed, he states that the becoming tendency can take over and gets legitimized by being called “meditation.”
Meanwhile, we miss the fact that we are losing the main point and that what we are doing has turned into a self-based program. We get caught in the illusion, trying to make the self become something other. We can relax without switching off, and consequently we can enjoy the fruits of our work. This is what we mean by letting go of becoming and learning to be. If we’re too tense and eager to get to the other end, we’re bound to fall off the tight rope.
Ajahn Amaro
Do not expect full realization;
Simply practice every day of your life.
Milarepa
Mindfulbalance 