Our minds are such that we are often more asleep than awake
to the unique beauty and possibilities
of each present moment as it unfolds.
Jon Kabat Zinn
Tag: Present moment
Holding a space and not forcing meaning
We get a lot of opportunities in our lives to practice with difficult events we do not understand or experiences that we do not know how they will turn out in the end. So there is a constant dialogue between emptiness and form, with the mind preferring to have definite form most times. We like to be able to give things a definite name, even, paradoxically, preferring to put words like “I’m falling apart” on an experience of confusion or doubt, rather than leave it as an unpleasant feeling. We quickly like to compare experiences with words like “not as good as”, or “went really well” becoming fixed early or immediately after some event. The problem with this is that the mind tends to solidify around the naming and fix the experience there, even though its full meaning has not yet come to light. So there is a wisdom in not naming, in being able to hold a space around an experience which in ongoing. The main ongoing skill in mindfulness practice , which we return to over and over again, is being present in the present moment. We are between what has happened ( which is now a memory, but may be quite active in our emotions and fears, influencing our naming) and what could happen (which is at this moment just a thought). We are in the present, which is really the only time there is. We try to ground our whole sense of balance there, instead of creating fears and what-if’s in our rush to have meaning. Everything else is uncertain.
In-between is where humans always are,
that’s what we have to welcome,
a story with an uncertain ending.
And this condition is interesting if you inhabit it;
it’s alive.
If I’m facing something that I don’t know what to do,
the “not knowing” is what is true,
and the resources that I have,
deeply ignorant that I am,
will have to be enough.
John Tarrant
A morning meditation
I place on the altar of dawn:
The quiet loyalty of breath,
The tent of thought where I shelter,
Wave of desire I am shore to
And all beauty drawn to the eye.
May my mind come alive today
To the invisible geography
That invites me to new frontiers,
To break the dead shell of yesterdays,
To risk being disturbed and changed.
May I have the courage today
To live the life that I would love,
To postpone my dream no longer
But do at last what I came here for
And waste my heart on fear no more.
John O’Donohue, A Morning Offering
Sometimes out of reach
What I most want is to spring out of this personality, then to sit apart from that leaping. I’ve lived too long where I can be reached. Rumi
Our lives are often like over-packed suitcases. It seems like we are always busy, always over-pressured, always one phone call, one text message, one email, one visit, and one task behind. We are forever anxious about what we have still left undone, about whom we have disappointed, about unmet expectations. Moreover, inside of all of that, we can forever be reached. We have no quiet island to escape to, no haven of solitude. We can always be reached. Half the world has our contact numbers and we feel pressure to be available all the time. So we often feel as if we are on a treadmill from which we would want to step off. And within all that busyness, pressure, noise, and tiredness we long for solitude, long for some quiet, peaceful island where all the pressure and noise will stop and we can sit in simple rest. That’s a healthy yearning. It’s our soul speaking. Like our bodies, our souls too keep trying to tell us what they need.
[But]…Solitude is not something we turn on like a water faucet. It needs a body and mind slowed down enough to be attentive to the present moment. We are in solitude when….we fully taste the water we are drinking, feel the warmth of our blankets, and are restful enough to be content inside our own skin. We don’t often accomplish this, despite sincere effort, but we need to keep making new beginnings.
Ron Rolheiser, Longing For Solitude
How to work with negative thoughts today
One of the biggest problems with thoughts is that we tend to believe everything they say: “If I am thinking it, it must be true.”I have learned that the best way to deal with excessive thinking is to just listen to it, to listen to the mind. Listening is much more effective than trying to stop thought or cut it off. When we listen there is a different mode employed in the heart. Instead of trying to cut it off, we receive thought without making anything out of it. When we look at thought in this way we aren’t being pulled into it. We can just look at it. We don’t reject it or suppress it, but we don’t buy into it either. We don’t make more out of it than is there. That attitude of listening, of opening to and receiving thought, has a liberating quality in-and-of itself.
Ajahn Amaro, Thinking
Facing into our avoidance
We first learnt to reject our experience when we were growing up. As children our feelings were often too overwhelming for our fledgling nervous system to handle, much less understand. So when an experience was too much, and the adults in our environment could not help us relate to it, we learnt to contract our mind and body, shutting ourselves down, like a circuit breaker. This was our way of preserving and protecting oursleves…….In time, these contractions form the nucleus of an overall style of avoidance and denial.
Thus our psychological distress is composed of at least three elements: the basic pain of feelings that seem overwhelming, the contracting of mind and body to avoid feeling this pain; and the stress of continually having to prop up and defend an identity based on this avoidance and denial.
John Welwood, Toward a Psychology of Awakening
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