Breath is the bridge that connects life to consciousness, which unites your body to your thoughts. Whenever your mind becomes scattered, use your breath as the means to take hold again.
In our community, where people are practicing the mindfulness of doing laundry, washing dishes, eating, walking and so forth, everybody learns to use breath as a tool for restoring mindfulness.
Thich Nhat Hahn
As a new MBSR group started last night in Geneva, I will post for the next week some texts to support anyone just starting to practice strengthening their awareness and focusing the mind, a kind of basic foundation for mindfulness. For regular readers of the blog, they will be familiar quotes by now. However, as I have said before, practice is essentially the same for everyone – starting over and over again, re-minding ourselves to be present to our lives, as the mind wanders. We are all learning and starting over each day, as we again and again find ourselves far away from the “now”:
There is no other time than now. We are not, contrary to what we think, “going” anywhere. It will never be more rich in some other moment than in this one. Although we may imagine that some future moment will be more pleasant, or less, than this one, we can’t really know. But whatever the future brings, it will not be what you expect, or what you think, and when it comes, it will be now too. It too will be a moment that can be very easily missed, just as easily missed as this one.
Jon Kabat Zinn
To practice we must start exactly where we are. Of course, we can imagine perfect conditions, how it should be ideally, how everybody else should behave. But it’s not our task to create an ideal. It is our task to see how it is and to learn from the world how it is. For the awakening of the heart, conditions are always good enough.
Ajahn Sumedho, The way it is
Wherever we are, from one day to the next, the Earth is moving at the same speed. Yet in the modern world, we’ve convinced ourselves that the world is moving faster, and that speed is the way to make our life work. Under the pressure of schedules and commitments, we think we can accomplish more if we speed through our day. Speed gives life a frantic quality. It is an anxious state of mind that keeps us from settling into whatever we are doing. There is always something more important than what we’re doing now. We’re double-parked outside a store, trying to find what we need, while talking to our mother on the cell-phone. Rather than accomplishing our activity well, we are nullifying it, because we aren’t really there for it. Speed comes from being overly ambitious. We aren’t content with our own mind, so we become aggressive in how we conduct our life. In an effort to match a concept of what success might be, we fill our calendars and spend the whole day holding on to our “to do” list. We chase after appointments, phone calls and meetings with jealousy, competition, fixation and irritation — whatever it takes to get us where we think we need to go. When life still won’t match our concept, we get mad — mad that others are late, or mad that we are early.
The practice of meditation offers us the opportunity to slow down for a short time every day. This is how we can begin to step out of the cycle of speed. In sitting still and focusing our mind, we are declaring daily that this human life is precious. Taking time to appreciate it comes from our own determination and wisdom. Through this discipline, we simplify our life. We regain the space to appreciate it, having lost nothing but speediness. We learn how to float aloft, carried by the winds, appreciating what we see in every direction. We learn to relax.
Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, Slow Down, You Move Too Fast
The combination of stillness and movement is a spiritually effective style for how we live our lives. We refuse to be caught up in activity but are committed to frequent pausing, taking time to let things unfold. [This] combination of opposites characterizes us when we find psychological health and enter the spiritual realm, the twin goals of our evolution towards wholeness. We combine our psychological work, which takes effort, with our spiritual work, which takes allowing. The ego-Higher Self axis that happens in such individuation is visible in the combination of action and acceptance. A statue is motionless, but movement bursts forth, not only in the how the sculptor’s imagination brings it to life, but in the mysterious sense of motion he has achieved. This may be what he poet Rilke meant by “outer standstill and inner movement”
David Richo, Being True to Life
We could say that meditation doesn’t have a reason or doesn’t have a purpose. In this respect it’s unlike almost all other things we do except perhaps making music and dancing. When we make music we don’t do it in order to reach a certain point, such as the end of the composition. If that were the purpose of music then obviously the fastest players would be the best. Also, when we are dancing we are not aiming to arrive at a particular place on the floor as in a journey. When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point. And exactly the same thing is true in meditation. Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.
Alan Watts
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