Coming out of the movie, I realized that I want what the crones have: time for all those long deep breaths, time to watch more closely, time to learn to enjoy what I’ve always been afraid of – the sad and the invisibility; the ease of understanding that life is not about doing. The crones understand this, and it gives them all kinds of time – time to get much less done, time for all the holy moments.
When we examine our thought stream with mindfulness, we encounter an inner sound track. As it plays, we can become the hero, the victim, the princess or the leper. There is a whole drama department in outr head, and the casting director is indiscriminately handing out the roles of inner dictators and judges, adventurers and prodigal sons, inner entitlement and inner impoverishment. Sitting in meditation we are forced to acknowledge them all. As Anne Lamott writes “My mind is like a bad neighbourhood: I try not to go there alone” . When we see how compulsively these thoughts repeat themselves, we begin to understand the psychological truth of “samsara”, the Sanskrit word for circular, repetitive existence. Samsara describes the unhealthy repetitions in our daily life.
Jack Kornfield, The Wise Heart
“Work is a mess” encourages us to first recognize that we can never have a completely neat relationship with our livelihood. Treating work’s messiness as if it were a mistake or liability only creates further unnecessary distress and resentment. By developing the attitude that work is a mess, we can learn to relax and be curious about the surprises and interruptions. By engaging the messiness of work directly — appreciating both the advantages and disadvantages — we become fully equipped to engage such events in all their variations. We have the ingenuity, good humor, and curiosity to adapt and innovate — to be victorious, no matter what the circumstances.
Michael Carroll.
Because they challenge us to the limits of our open-mindedness, difficult relationships are in many ways the most valuable for practice. The people who irritate us are the ones who inevitably blow our cover. Through them we might come to see our defenses very clearly. Shantideva explained it like this: If we wish to practice generosity and a beggar arrives, that’s good news. The beggar gives us an opportunity to learn how to give. Likewise, if we want to practice patience and unconditional loving-kindness and an enemy arrives, we are in luck. Without the ones who irritate us, we never have a chance to practice.
Pema Chodron, The Places that Scare You
When you are practicing….. do not try to stop your thinking. Let it stop by itself. If something comes into your mind, let it come in, and let it go out. It will not stay long. When you try to stop your thinking, it means you are bothered by it. Do not be bothered by anything. It appears as if something comes from outside your mind, but actually it is only the waves of your mind, and if you are not bothered by the waves, gradually they will become calmer and calmer.
Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind.
Two observations, from different perspectives. One from Linda Stone, who used to work at Apple and who now writes on the effect of the internet and other technologies on our overall wellbeing. The other from Thomas Merton, the Catholic monk, reflecting on the effect of noise. Written over 40 years apart, with different epistemologies, they come to similar conclusions.
We pay continuous partial attention in an effort NOT TO MISS ANYTHING. It is an always-on, anywhere, anytime, any place behavior that involves an artificial sense of constant crisis. We are always in high alert when we pay continuous partial attention. This artificial sense of constant crisis is more typical of continuous partial attention than it is of multi-tasking.
Linda Stone, Writer and Consultant, 2009
Now let us frankly face the fact that our culture is one which is geared in many ways to help us evade any need to face this inner, silent self. We live in a state of constant semiattention to the sound of voices, music, traffic, or the generalized noise of what goes on around us all the time. This keeps us immersed in a flood of racket and words, a diffuse medium in which our consciousness is half diluted: we are not quite ‘thinking,’ not entirely responding, but we are more or less there. We are not fully present and not entirely absent; not fully withdrawn, yet not completely available. It cannot be said that we are really participating in anything and we may, in fact, be half conscious of our alienation and resentment. Yet we derive a certain comfort from the vague sense that we are ‘part of’ something – although we are not quite able to define what that something is – and probably wouldn’t want to define it even if we could. We just float along in the general noise. Resigned and indifferent, we share semiconsciously in the mindless mind of Muzak and radio commercials which passes for ‘reality.’
Thomas Merton, Cistercian Monk, 1915 – 1968
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