Each separate being
in the universe
returns to (a) common source.
Returning to the source
is serenity.
Lao Tzu
Tag: Present moment
What really stresses us
Work can never tire you!
What tires you are your worries about the past and anxieties about the future.
Swami Parthasaraty, TIME Magazine, October 2007
What way it is ‘supposed’ to be?
The more things go “our way” for a while, the more we can believe that that is the way it is supposed to be. And when things don’t go “our way,” which sooner or later they will not, we can get angry, disappointed, depressed, devastated forgetting that it was never “supposed to be” any one way at all.
Jon Kabat-Zinn, Arriving at your own Door
Time past and time future
Go, go, go, said the bird: Human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton
Another post on remaining in the present moment, this time as a practical way of working with fear. It is prompted by a nice comment I got from Eric regarding a previous post, where he quoted Einstein. That set me thinking of another quote from the same famous scientist, which echoes some of the ideas we find in our meditation practice: People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
When we meditate we come to see that – in one sense – the past and the future exist only in the mind. And often with regard to the future we create scenarios which will never happen, leading to worry. Last night in the MBSR Course, we had a discussion about how we can work when strong emotions, such as fear, arise. One thing we can do is to recognize that some of the thoughts connected to the fear concern future scenarios which may never happen. If we can let go of those thoughts – and that is not always easy – what have we got to work with when we just stay in the present? The main thing is the sensation in our body at this moment. We notice there is a tightness in the chest, a clenching or a knot in the stomach, or rushed breathing. So this is our practice: We recognize this, and stay with the present, experiencing fear or anxiety as it is actually happening, as an embodied feeling. We then try not to add any judgment about the feeling or about ourselves to the moment. We let go of trying to fix it. We practice just being with the sensation for as long as we can, seeing what is going on. Thich Nhat Hahn writes about this practice as a way of taking care of ourselves, almost like we would take care of a frightened child:
Mindfulness is there in order to recognize. To be mindful of something is to recognize that something is there in the present moment. Mindfulness is the capacity of being aware of what is going on in the present moment. “Breathing in, I know that fear has manifested in me; breathing out, I smile towards my fear.” This is not an act of suppression or of fighting. It is an act of recognizing. Once we recognize our fear, we embrace it with a lot of awareness, a lot of tenderness.
Make the most of life:Stay in the present
A similar idea to yesterday’s one posted about Saint David. We make our future happiness by taking care of the present moment.
The past is gone, and I don’t know what’s coming in the future. It’s obvious that if I want my life to be whole, to resonate with feeling and integrity and value and health, there’s only one way I can influence the future: by owning the present. If I can relate to this moment with integrity, and then this moment with integrity, and then this moment with integrity, wakefully, then the sum of that is going to be very different over time, over many moments that stretch out into what we call a life, than a life that is lived mostly on automatic pilot, where we are reacting and being mechanical and are therefore somewhat numb.
Jon Kabat Zinn
Getting places, one step at a time
Today is the first of March, the feast of Saint David of Menevia, – ‘Dewi Sant’ – the patron saint of Wales. He is celebrated also in the Irish calendar as he was a friend of many of the main figures in the early Irish Church. One of the teachings which he passed on is beautiful in its lucidity and its wisdom. He said simply, Do the little things in life. We are sometimes concerned with the “direction” of our lives, in working out how we can make an impact, how we can get to the top of the mountain. This can mean that we spend part of the time in the future, in imagining various scenarios, waiting for our life to begin sometime later. By doing this, we can miss all the possibilities that are right in front of us now, or allow moments go which will never return. David reminds us to concern ourselves with what is in front of us just now, to be mindful of this moment. We do not have to live tomorrow, or next week just yet. He reminds us to make the journey one step at a time. In keeping with a Welsh theme, we try to keep our focus on the path down in the valley, not on the heights we like to conceive for ourselves.
Mindfulbalance 