Tag: Present moment

Noticing what is here, not what we would like to be here

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Similar thoughts to yesterday morning’s post – this time from the Zen tradition – on staying close to what is actually happening, moment by moment, rather than worrying about what may happen. Sometimes it may not be what we would want, so our practice is to see if we can open to it and acknowledge it’s happening, even if we do not like it.  It also encourages us to meet every person today with fresh eyes, rather than immediately reducing them to  history which we have had with them, or to what we have come to “expect” from them.

The aim of Zen is to focus our attention on reality itself, instead of our intellectual and emotional reactions to reality – reality being the ever-changing, ever-growing, indefinable something known as “life,” which will never stop for a moment for us to fit it satisfactorily into any rigid system of pigeonholes and ideas.

Alan Watts

To love the reality of what happens today

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Over and over again I see – in myself and in others – the capacity to turn things that do not actually exist – possible events in the future – into real,  vivid,  scenarios and tangible fears in the present. A huge amount of our anxiety comes from what is not, what “may happen”.  The big challenge is to stay with what actually is, not what the mind convinces us could possibly be. Here,  two quotations,  from completely different traditions,  encourage us in this regard today.

Every particle of creation sings its own song of what is and what is not. Hearing what is can make you wise.  Hearing what is not can drive you mad.

Ghalib, Sufi Poet and mystic, 1797 – 1869

The big thing for me is to love reality and not live in the imagination, not live in what could have been or what should have been or what can be, and somewhere, to love reality and then discover that God is present.

Jean Vanier, Founder of the L’Arche Communities

Bring compassion to what happens

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Meditation is an experiment we are making, bringing us out of our normal habits of intense self-judgment, comparing, and impatience. Mindfulness isn’t about what is happening; it is about how we are relating to what is happening — how much awareness, balance and compassion are bringing to this moment’s experience, whatever it is. For example, it is very likely you will find your attention wandering, not 45 minutes after you first begin, but probably within a few seconds. You get lost in a fantasy, or fall asleep. That is normal and not a sign of failure. What I emphasize is that the critical moment in your meditation is the moment you see you’ve been distracted; instead of falling into our usual habits of self-condemnation, that’s a time we can practice letting go while being kind to ourselves, and work with the renewing power of beginning again.

Sharon Salzberg, Meditation and Mindfulness for All of Us.

A value in being lost

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There is immense value in “finding ourselves lost” because we can find something when we are lost, we can find our selves. Indeed, the deepest form of wandering requires that we be lost.  Imagine yourself lost in your career or marriage, or in the middle of your life. You have goals, a place you want to be, but you don’t know how to reach that place. Maybe you don’t know exactly what you want, you just have a vague desire for a better place. Although it may not seem like it, you are on the threshold of a great opportunity. Begin to trust that place of not knowing. Surrender to it. You’re lost. There will be grief. A cherished outcome appears to be unobtainable or undefinable. In order to make the shift from being lost to being present, admit to yourself that your goal may never be reached. Though perhaps difficult, doing so will create entirely new possibilities for fulfillment.

Surrendering fully to being lost –  and this is where the art comes in  – you will discover that, in addition to not knowing how to get where you had wanted to go, you are no longer so sure of the ultimate rightness of that goal. By trusting your unknowing, your old standards of progress dissolve and you become eligible to be chosen by new, larger standards, those that come not from your mind or old story or other people, but from the depths of your soul. You become attentive to an utterly new guidance system.

Bill Plotkin, Being Lost but not lost in Life

The freedom of not comparing to an ideal self

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We can always see ourselves in terms of what’s wrong with us as persons. There are always so many flaws and inadequacies. There is no perfect personality that I have ever noticed. Personality is all over the place. Some of it is all right and some of it is really wacky. There is no personality that you can take refuge in. You are never going to make yourself into a perfect personality. So when you judge yourself you find so many problems, inadequacies, flaws and weaknesses. Maybe you are comparing yourself to some ideal person, some unselfish and superlative personality. However, that which is aware of personality is not personal. These personality conditions arise and cease…. Your refuge is in this awareness rather than in trying to make yourself into an ideal man or woman – mature, responsible, capable, successful,  “normal”  and all the rest – these are ideals.

Ajahn Sumedho, The Sound of Silence

Practice is about our fears

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Good practice is about fear. Fear takes the form of constantly thinking, speculating, analyzing, fantasizing. With all that activity we create a cloud cover to keep ourselves safe in make-believe practice. True practice is not safe; it’s anything but safe. But we don’t like that, so we obsess with our feverish efforts to achieve our version of the personal dream. Such obsessive practice is itself just another cloud between ourselves and reality. The only thing that matters is seeing with an impersonal searchlight: seeing things as they are. When the personal barrier drops away, why do we have to call it anything? We just live our lives. And when we die, we just die. No problem anywhere.

Charlotte Joko Beck, Everyday Zen