Meditation is really just learning to enjoy your experience, so you don’t have to tense up. Don’t make meditation a project like everything else. The word “natural” is very important. Yesterday I was walking around and it was so beautiful here….We appreciate nature because it’s so uncontrived and unselfconscious. Bring that to mind and know that the body itself has its own intelligence.
Elizabeth Matthis-Namgyel, in Pema Chodron on 4 Keys to Waking Up
I am starting a number of mindfulness courses these days and so the first posts this week will be on the basics of practice. However, in a sense, we all start over each day, each new week, each moment, discovering how little we actually like to be in the present moment….
Cultivating mindfulness is not unlike the process of eating. It would be absurd to propose that someone else eat for you. And when you go to a restaurant, you don’t eat the menu, mistaking it for the meal, nor are you nourished by listening to the waiter describe the food. You have to actually eat the food for it to nourish you. In the same way, you have to actually practice mindfulness in order to reap its benefits and come to understand why it is so valuable.
Jon Kabat Zinn
For the Week that is in it, an extract from TS Elliot, Ash Wednesday:
Blessed sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separatedAnd let my cry come unto Thee.
We do not remember days,
We remember moments
Cesare Pavese 1908 – 1950 Italian poet and novelist
photo Catherine Scott
There is a quick-fix mentality in Ireland and elsewhere today, which even apply to ways of working on ourselves – like the latest surefire diet, or radio interviews which imply that an instant mindfulness session will cure all ills. At the heart of these is a vision of quick change which encourages us to strive and push to achieve. We think that we need to control everything and impose ourselves upon it. While useful at times, this sometimes can mean that we are never happy with anything, including ourselves. Meditation practice encourages a different way, of letting things come to us instead. We sit in meditation and create space, allowing things unfold in their own time.
To push your self forward to experience and illuminate the millions of things, that is delusion.
When the millions of things come forward and illuminate themselves, that is freedom
Dogen, GenjoKoan
When we get anxious, our breathing tends to get shallow and our energy tends to move upwards, making us feel less solid, less grounded. Our thinking process too can speed up or get hooked by conditioned patterns of fear or unworthiness. We are, however, much more than we think we are. Pausing, getting in touch with this depth inside us many times during the day helps us not swept away by the winds that blow.
Our true life
lives at a great depth within us
Rabindranath Tagore
photo till krech
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