Most of the work of the practice then is just about noticing what stimulates, alarms or otherwise pushes our buttons, and working with that. It’s about restraining the free-wheeling mind, turning away from sources of powerful attraction, checking the impulse and reactions, softening the ill-will and tension and widening into the body to release the energy of the activation. And more subtly, it’s about meeting and disengaging the ‘should be’s’. So: I walk up and down my meditation path feeling nothing special and practise staying with that; facing a group of school children and wanting to bring something into their lives that will withstand the floods of commercialism, I hold and relax with that; or, at a management meeting, I listen to the gloomy analysis of the monastery’s finances, without dismissing or panicking over that. Meet it, disengage from the script of it even as you widen to receive its wave – and let that move through you. Then trust what arises within when the self-impression passes.
Ajahn Sucitto, Reflections.
It is natural to look for things you want outside of where you are now. That is the whole point of a journey. Yet this moment is all anyone has. So if freedom, love, beauty, grace, and whatever else is desirable are to appear, they must appear in the now. It would be nice if they appeared in the now you have now. And if they are to appear and endure they will have to be found in ordinary circumstances, since ordinary circumstances fill most of life.
