A simple practice for working with fears

Just the wind blowing: allowing life to move through this moment:

Take a comfortable position,

Now imagine you are in a beautiful place in nature. Surrounded by beauty you can feel the wind blowing around you

Let all of your conscious experience — sounds, sensations, thoughts, emotions, everything — become the wind.

Feel all of it moving and changing, arriving, moving around and over you, and then going.

Notice how the wind takes on different qualities — soft, strong, harsh, gusty, gentle.

Relax as the wind blows around you.

Let it come and go in all its forms. You remain here, in calmness, abiding.

Jeffrey Brantley  and Wendy Millstine, Daily Mediations for Calming Your Anxious Mind,

Non-doing in stillness and activity

A new MBSR group started last evening. However, new or experienced, young or old, the practice is the same: intentionally seeing what is present each moment before our eyes, tuning in to the richness of what is already there, switching off the leaning in our being and in our doing.

Non-doing has nothing to do with being indolent or passive. Quite the contrary. It takes great courage and energy to cultivate non-doing, both in stillness and in activity. Nor is it easy to make a special time for non-doing and to keep at it in the face of everything in our lives which needs to be done.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

The depth beneath our thoughts.

In 1929 the British Broad­casting Corporation decided to start broadcasting “live silence” in memory of the dead instead of just halting transmission for two minutes every day; it was important, it was felt, to hear the rustle of papers, the singing of the birds outside, an occasional cough. As a BBC spokesman put it, with rare wisdom, silence is “a solvent which destroys personality and gives us leave to be great and universal.” It permits us, in short, to be who we are and could be if only we had the openness and trust. A chapel is where we hear something and nothing, ourselves and everyone else, a silence that is not the absence of noise, but the presence of something much deeper: the depth beneath our thoughts.

A chapel is where you can hear something beating below your heart.

Pico Iyer, Where Silence Is Sacred

Sometimes out of reach

What I most want is to spring out of this personality, then to sit apart from that leaping.  I’ve lived too long where I can be reached. Rumi

Our lives are often like over-packed suitcases. It seems like we are always busy, always over-pressured, always one phone call, one text message, one email, one visit, and one task behind. We are forever anxious about what we have still left undone, about whom we have disappointed, about unmet expectations. Moreover, inside of all of that, we can forever be reached. We have no quiet island to escape to, no haven of solitude. We can always be reached. Half the world has our contact numbers and we feel pressure to be available all the time. So we often feel as if we are on a treadmill from which we would want to step off. And within all that busyness, pressure, noise, and tiredness we long for solitude, long for some quiet, peaceful island where all the pressure and noise will stop and we can sit in simple rest. That’s a healthy yearning. It’s our soul speaking. Like our bodies, our souls too keep trying to tell us what they need.

[But]…Solitude is not something we turn on like a water faucet. It needs a body and mind slowed down enough to be attentive to the present moment. We are in solitude when….we fully taste the water we are drinking, feel the warmth of our blankets, and are restful enough to be content inside our own skin. We don’t often accomplish this, despite sincere effort, but we need to keep making new beginnings.

Ron Rolheiser, Longing For Solitude

How we give up fixed positions and get peace

Through examining and contemplating perceptions, we begin to see the relative truths of the angles or biases that we have, the blaming, self-blaming or justifying, or ignoring. Perceptions don’t give you an ultimate reality; they give you a subjective readout of where you’re coming from. Widening the perceptual field means the mind becomes more peaceful, less defensive and less obsessive….You realize everything and anything that is held onto can’t be an ultimate truth, it’s just a naming, based upon a position. Through insight into perception, the mind has given up on “naming” and has realized peace.

Ajahn Sucitto, Working with Perception

Moving fluidly through our experiences

Awareness is able to hold everything that passes through the mind – thoughts, emotions, sensations – in its kind,  non-judging space. It holds things lightly, without becoming identified with them. This “flowing” quality of awareness allows us move with the arising and falling away of conditions, without becoming fixed in any of their forms.

A person  fundamentally does not dwell anywhere. The white clouds are fascinated with the green mountain’s foundation. The bright moon cherishes being carried along with the flowing water. The clouds part and the mountains appear. The moon sets and the water is cool. Each bit of autumn contains vast interpenetration without bounds.

Hongzhi, 12th Century Zen writer