Just this day, with its work, and travel, its meetings and discussions, and its weather, roads, stones and plants. We do not need to add more.
Mind as fences, walls, tiles, and pebbles
is nothing other than fences, walls, tiles, and pebbles.
There is no additional mud or water.
Dogen.
photo ardfern.
“When you are walking, walk. When you are sitting, sit,” is ancient wisdom. Hopping rapidly from one thing to the next, answering the phone while we’re shuffling papers while we’re sipping a latte, we fritter away our attention and forget more easily. ….. That is why learning to be a unitasker in a multitasking world is so vital. Rather than divide our attention, it is far more effective to take frequent breaks between intervals of sustained, one-pointed attention. Debunking the myth of multitasking, we become much better at what we do and increase the chance of being able to remember the details of work we have done in the past.
Sharon Salzberg, Real Happiness at Work
That is the wonderful thing about the breathing, and the reason it is such a helpful object of attention. It is both perfectly ordinary (we are all doing it, all the time) and extremely special (if we weren’t doing it, we’d be dead)… Everybody breathes. It is also extremely portable. We take it everywhere we go. So if you choose to practice with the breathing, it has the advantage of always being there. No matter how many times you forget it throughout the day, you can always take it up again. There’s another in-breath. There’s an out-breath.
Larry Rosenberg, Breath by Breath
Settle down in your room at a moment when you have nothing else to do. Say “I am now with myself,” and just sit with yourself. After an amazingly short time you will most likely feel bored. This teaches us one very useful thing. It gives us insight into the fact that if after ten minutes of being alone with ourselves we feel like that, it is no wonder that others should feel equally bored! Why is this so? It is so because we have so little to offer to our own selves as food for thought, for emotion and for life. If you watch your life carefully you will discover quite soon that we hardly ever live from within outwards; instead we respond to incitement, to excitement. In other words, we live by reaction… We are completely empty, we do not act from within ourselves but accept as our life a life which is actually fed in from the outside; we are used to things happening which compel us to do other things. How seldom can we live simply by means of the depth and the richness we assume that there is within ourselves.
Archbishop Anthony Bloom, Learning to Pray
Just sitting means just that. That ‘just’ endlessly goes against the grain of our need to fix, transform, and improve ourselves. The paradox of our practice is that the most effective way of transformation is to leave ourselves alone. The more we let everything be just what it is, the more we relax into an open, attentive awareness of one moment after another.
Barry Magid, Leave yourself alone
photo nevit dilmen
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