Happiness hidden in plain sight.

For most of us, leaving things alone turns out to be hard work! Without the hard work we don’t seem to be able to leave our life alone and just live. Faced with the dilemma of suffering we turn our life inside out, contorting our “ordinary mind” into an “isolated mind” that seeks to distance, control and dissociate an inner “me” from outer pain. ..Whether our project is the flight from pain or the pursuit of happiness, the outcome is the same: a life in flight from itself and from this moment. And this moment turns out to bethe only answer there is, the only self there is, the only teacher, and the only reality. All hidden in plain sight.

Barry Magid, Ordinary Mind

Where the real journey starts

river

 

It may be that when we no longer know what to do,
we have come to our real work
and when we no longer know which way to go,
we have begun our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.

Wendall Berry, The Real Work

Uncovering strength, here, within

I have discovered, just as my teachers always told me, that we already have what we need. The wisdom, the strength, the confidence, the awakened heart and mind are always accessible, here, now, always. We are just uncovering them. We are rediscovering them. We’re not inventing them or importing them from somewhere else. They’re here. That’s why when we feel caught in darkness, suddenly the clouds can part. Out of nowhere we cheer up or relax or experience the vastness of our minds. No one else gives this to you. People will support you and help you with teachings and practices, as they have supported and helped me, but you yourself experience your unlimited potential.

Pema Chodron, Taking the Leap.

Meeting and disengaging

mazeMost of the work of the practice then is just about noticing what stimulates, alarms or otherwise pushes our buttons, and working with that. It’s about restraining the free-wheeling mind, turning away from sources of powerful attraction, checking the impulse and reactions, softening the ill-will and tension and widening into the body to release the energy of the activation. And more subtly, it’s about meeting and disengaging the ‘should be’s’. So: I walk up and down my meditation path feeling nothing special and practise staying with that; facing a group of school children and wanting to bring something into their lives that will withstand the floods of commercialism, I hold and relax with that; or, at a management meeting, I listen to the gloomy analysis of the monastery’s finances, without dismissing or panicking over that. Meet it, disengage from the script of it even as you widen to receive its wave – and let that move through you. Then trust what arises within when the self-impression passes.

Ajahn Sucitto, Reflections.

Making our experiences solid

snow_melting2More on naming our experiences, which we saw in the Sutta yesterday. It is good to pay attention to this spontaneous tendency, as it lies at the root of a lot of our everyday suffering:

When we look outward, we solidify the world by projecting onto it attributes that are in no way inherent to it. Looking inward we freeze the flow of consciousness when we conceive of an “I” enthroned between a past that no longer exists and a future that does not yet exist. We take it for granted that we see things as they are and rarely question that opinion. We spontaneously assign intrinsic qualities to things and people “thinking this is beautiful, that is ugly” without realizing that our mind superimposes these attributes upon what we perceive. We divide the world between “desirable” and “undesirable” and see independent entities in what is actually a network of ceaselessly changing relations.

Matthieu Ricard, Happiness

How we name our experiences

A lot of our difficulties comes from the “name” we put on our experiences, how we label what is happening to us. This applies particularly to how we talk to ourselves in the moments that something is occurring, as this Sutta from the Buddhist tradition tells us:
Name has weighed down everything
Nothing is more extensive than name.
Name is the one thing that has
All under its control

S. 1.61