Tag: Present moment

Walking by

Karl Duffy1 Comment

I think it pisses God off
if you walk by the color purple in a field
and don’t notice it.

Alice Walker, The Color Purple

Sometimes we can get caught up in the rush of every day or the familiarity of our routines. We can fail to notice the beauty in ordinary experience. When we travel or are starting something new, we are struck by the experiences, noticing, for example,  the energy and the qualities of  people or the way they do things differently. Everything registers in a heightened way. In these moments things seems more real, more alive. The brain cannot always function like that,  so it creates schemas to allow it quickly locate everyday experiences into familiar categories – cars, buses, flowers,  trees and so on. So in order to really see we have to go against an established habit. We have to slow down in order to really notice; focus in order to really attend.  Today let us try to  look at one or two  things we encounter as if for the first time: Open our eyes, pause, wonder, notice the details, celebrate life.

Living your life in tune with all of life

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To me this would be the best way to live — to situate yourself within your life in such a way as to feel that your own life was unfolding with the pattern of all of life. I suppose this might seem megalomaniacal, but I see it as quite humble. My life isn’t mine, it is just life living itself through me. I think, if you lived your life like that, then a lot of what bothers you wouldn’t bother you any more, and a lot of things that don’t bother you now would seem very important, very personal.

Norman Fischer

Moving close to fear

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Whenever fear arises – either in a sudden wind of panic or a low-grade brooding anxiety – the approach of mindfulness is to fully feel the fear, to move towards it rather than running away. The fire of fear is usually mixed up with the smoke of explanations, abstract considerations that attempt to tame the fear through various storylines about the fear. These storylines move us away from feeling directly.

The healthiest way to be with fear is simply that – to be the fear rather than trying to solve it or successfully manipulate it from a distant vantage point. Approaching fear from a distance is like having a giant pair of chopsticks – fear is at the end of them, twenty-five feet away from us, and we keep trying to move the fear from kitchen counter to dining table and back again. No wonder it keeps spilling onto the floor! Instead we could approach fear as a finger food – using the bare hand to pick it up directly, place it in the mouth, chew and swallow.

Gaylon Ferguson, Natural Wakefulness

Where we are stuck

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The process of practice is to see through, not to eliminate, anything to which we are attached. We could have great financial wealth and be unattached to it, or we might have nothing and be very attached to having nothing. Most practice gets caught in this area of fiddling with our environment or our minds. “My mind should be quiet.” Our mind doesn’t matter; what matters is nonattachment to the activities of the mind. And our emotions are harmless unless they dominate us (that is, if we are attached to them) — then they create disharmony for everyone. The first problem in practice is to see that we are attached. As we do consistent, patient practice we begin to know that we are nothing but attachments: they rule our lives.

But we never lose an attachment by saying it has to go. Only as we gain awareness of its true nature does it quietly and imperceptibly wither away; like a sandcastle with waves rolling over, it just smoothes out and finally — where is it? What was it?

Charlotte Joko Beck, Everyday Zen

Becoming one who sees

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Despite the incredibly warm weather, the berries have appeared on the bushes in the garden. They reminded me of this quote,  and its encouragement to see into the heart of things, happening in each moment of the day. Sometimes we are just to preoccupied and hurried to notice.  We let life – and heaven – pass by,  unnoticed.

Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God:
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes…

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh


Noting, rather than reacting

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Buddhadasa Bhikkhu said, “If there was to be a useful inscription to put on a medallion around your neck it would be ‘This is the way it is’.” This reflection helps us to contemplate: wherever we happen to be, whatever time and place, good or bad, ‘This is the way it is.’ It is a way of bringing an acceptance into our minds, a noting rather than a reaction.

The practice of meditation is reflecting on ‘the way it is’ in order to see the fears and desires which we create. This is quite a simple practice. Many methods of meditation are very very complicated with many stages and techniques – so one becomes addicted to complicated things.  However, the more simple we get, the more clear, profound and meaningful everything is to us.

So with the breath of the body, the weight of it, the posture of it, we are just witnessing and nothing, observing how it is, now, in this moment. The mood of the mind, whether we feel bright or dull, happy or unhappy, is something we can know – we can witness. And the empty mind, empty of the proliferations about oneself and others, is clarity. It’s intelligent, and compassionate. The more we really look into the habits we have developed, the more clear things become for us.

Ajahn Sumedho, The Way it is