Today is Ash Wednesday, the start of the Christian season of Lent, a period of simplification and fasting. Just as this morning’s saying simplified practice down to its very basic, this whole season encourages us to reflect on all the different inputs which come into the Body-Mind, not just those in the form of food:
The past decade has seen an unparalleled assault on our capacity to fix our minds steadily on anything. To sit still and think, without succumbing to an anxious reach for a machine, has become almost impossible… Our minds, no less than our bodies, require periods of fasting.
Alian de Botton
Most people today seems to think that sacrifice means giving something up. This is how shallow our religious sense has become. Sacrifice really involves the art of drawing energy from one level and reinvesting it at another level to produce a higher form of consciousness.
Robert Johnson, Jungian Analyst
You should all bear in mind that this practice is difficult. To train other things is not so difficult, it’s easy, but the human mind is hard to train. The mind is the important thing. Everything within this body-mind system comes together at the mind. The eyes, ears, nose, tongue and body all receive sensations and send them into the mind, which is the supervisor of all the other sense organs. Therefore it is important to train the mind. If the mind is well-trained all problems come to an end. If there are still problems it’s because the mind still doubts, it doesn’t know in accordance with the truth. That is why there are problems.
The key element of practicing with this tendency is gentleness, and the method is mindfulness. Many of us practice in a speedy environment. In a sense, speed is the disease of our times. It’s always there and it’s very hard to extract ourselves from it. But we must realize that speed is in fact just a hallucination, a self-imposed reality. Being mindful cuts speed. Being present cuts speed. If we trust in basic goodness when we look at what’s going on in our life right now, kindness and patience naturally come about.
When we’re feeling aggressive — and in some sense this would apply to any strong feeling — there’s an enormous pregnant quality that pulls us in the direction of wanting to get some resolution. It hurts so much to feel the aggression that we want it to be resolved. So what do we usually do? We do exactly what is going to escalate the aggression and the suffering. We strike out; we hit back. [However] Developing patience and fearlessness means learning to sit still with the edginess of the energy. We discover that joy and happiness, peace, harmony and being at home with yourself and your world come from sitting still with the moodiness of energy until it rises, dwells and passes away. The energy never resolves itself into something solid. So all the while, we stay in the middle of the energy. The path of touching in on the inherent softness of the genuine heart is to sit still and be patient with that kind of energy.
Mindfulbalance 