The principle of nowness is very important to any effort to establish an enlightened society. You may wonder what the best approach is to helping society and how you can know that what you are doing is authentic and good. The only answer is nowness. The way to relax, or rest the mind in nowness, is through the practice of meditation. In meditation you take an unbiased approach. You let things be as they are, without judgment, and in that way you yourself learn to be.
Chogyam Trungpa
And I am thinking:
maybe just looking and listening is the real work.
Maybe the world, without us, is the real poem.
Mary Oliver
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These are the things we can contemplate. We can’t control what arises in the mind, but we can reflect on what we are feeling and learn from it rather than simply being caught helplessly in our impulses and habits. Even though there is a lot in life that we can’t change, we can change our attitude towards it. That’s what so much of meditation is really about — changing our attitude from a self-centered, “get rid of this or get more of that” to one of welcoming life as it is. Welcoming the opportunity to eat food that we don’t like. Welcoming wearing three robes on a hot morning. Welcoming discomfort, feeling fed up, wanting to run away. This way of welcoming life reflects a deeper understanding. Life is like this. Sometimes it’s very nice, sometimes it’s horrible, and much of the time it’s neither one way nor the other. Life is like this.
Ajahn Sumedho
photo of welcoming ritual in India by mckay savage
Do not wish to be anything but what you are
and try to be that perfectly.
St Francis de Sales
Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.
To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable.
Helen Keller
In a general sense we seem to prefer things to remain the same and dislike too much uncertainty (except maybe when the normal dull Irish Summer has been replaced by warm sunny days). Change unsettles and can prompt an almost instant movement towards turning away or tightening up. So it is a challenge to “keep our faces towards change” – as Helen Keller says- by going against our instinct for once and staying with something that our fears tell us to avoid. When we consistently buy into our fears and strengthen fearful thoughts, we can forget some of the larger truths of life, or lose sight of our essential confidence and strength. An avoidance mentality leads us to expect trouble and weakens our ability to live with how the present moment is unfolding.
One of the fundamental truths of existence is that life changes, and changes in ways that we cannot expect. So developing this capacity to turn towards change is a necessary skill for working with life. It is probably best to practice it in smaller matters, so that it is somewhat developed when the bigger changes happen. So it is good to sometimes look at some small things we avoid and see what we can learn from them. We could practice with something like some paperwork we have been putting off, a contact we have been delaying, or staying in the presence of someone who disturbs us instead of running away. In this way we can be curious about what happens when we move towards something rather than moving away.
photo of dawn at Dunmore East Co. Waterford, Ireland
The river is everywhere at once, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the rapids, in the sea, in the mountains, everywhere at once, and that there is only the present time for it, not the shadow of the past, not the shadow of the future.
Herman Hesse, Siddhartha
photo: vincent, la rivière Rouvre.
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