Tag: Present moment

Things fall apart

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Not everything goes smoothly everyday or in our life history. However, it seems to be a fact that painful situations have the capacity to help us reflect better than pleasant occasions when everything is going smoothly and positively. Indeed, our quest for an easy life without change is a mistaken one, as change is inevitable, even on a daily level. Wisdom comes when we begin to see that our full growth can include holding the painful aspects of our lives in awareness and not pushing them away, as our natural instinct sometimes demands. It is not only pleasant insights that lead to growth. To grow whole we have to go beneath the surface of neat appearance and enter deeply into our hearts and our history.

Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.

Pema Chodron

We will always have some contradictions within

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Sometimes we labour under the mistaken belief that happiness can only come if there are absolutely no difficulties or when everything is resolved in our life or our life history. However, we sometimes need to recognize and simply accept the different parts of our lives and the different directions we want to take, and allow that perfect integration is unlikely to be ever achieved fully in this life. We can hold these different parts and accept the different feelings that exist within us,  as we are, without demanding that they all harmonize. As the writer Mark Epstein put it so well in his excellent book,  we can be “in pieces, without falling apart”

Contradictions have always existed in the soul of man. But it is only when we prefer analysing to silence that they become a constant and insoluble problem. We are not meant to resolve all contradictions but to live with them and rise above them  and see them in the light of exterior and objective values which makes them trivial by comparison.

Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude

Where you are, and not judging it

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The path is something we cultivate. We have to know where we are and not try to become something that we think we would like to be; we have to practise with the way it is now, without making a judgement about it. If you’re feeling tense, nervous, disillusioned, disappointed about yourself or whatever, then try to recognise that what is in the moment is enough. Be willing to just admit, to acknowledge the way it is,  rather than to indulge in believing that what you’re feeling is somehow an accurate description of reality, or to feel that what you are feeling is wrong and you shouldn’t be feeling like that. Those are two extremes. But the cultivation of the way is to recognise that whatever is subject to arising is subject to ceasing. And this isn’t a put-down or cold-hearted way of cultivating the path, even though it might sound like it.

Ajahn Sumedho

Letting go of the things that change

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Things change so quickly. On Friday the news was dominated by weddings and dresses, by pomp and circumstance. Yesterday we awoke to news of  death and differences,  and to the insecurity it provokes.  Such changes can make the ground we stand on feel quite uncertain. However,  it is not just change on a world level but how we deal with the smaller changes in our lives that determines our ongoing  sense of inner peace and calm. We expend quite a lot of energy each day in trying to hold on to what is familiar and in attempting to make the world conform to how we would like it to be. The problem with this – other than the futile waste of energy – is that  we limit our ability to experience joy in the present moment as it actually is. If we approach moments with fear,  rather than opening to how they are, we cannot see the richness in them.

A contrary strategy works best: Stop trying to grasp, to control the world around you or the day ahead of you. In doing so you loosen the grip of fear and  give each experience the possibility to bring its richness.   Letting go of control lets go of suffering.

It is not because of impermanence that we suffer

But because of our ideas about permanence.

Thich Nhat Hahn

Keeping our work in perspective

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One of the symptoms of approaching nervous breakdown

is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.

Bertrand Russell, British Philosopher.

Sunday Quote: ….. Creating our future

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Both our present and our future depend on us.

From moment to moment, we are creating our future.

Tenzin Palmo