Normally we do everything we can to avoid just being. When left alone with ourselves, without a project to occupy us, we become nervous. We start judging ourselves or thinking about what we should be doing or feeling. We start putting conditions on ourselves, trying to arrange our experience so that it measures up to our inner standards. Since this inner struggle is so painful, we are always looking for something to distract us from being with ourselves.
In meditation practice, you work directly with your confused mind-states, without waging crusades against any aspect of your experience. You let all your tendencies arise, without trying to screen anything out, manipulate experience in any way, or measure up to any ideal standard. Allowing yourself the space to be as you are — letting whatever arises arise, without fixation on it, and coming back to simple presence — this is perhaps the most loving and compassionate way you can treat yourself. It helps you make friends with the whole range of your experience.
John Welwood
What makes thoughts problematic for most of us is that we are compulsively prone to believing in their contents – their stories and value-judgements – so maintaining any kind of real objectivity with thought, as we might be able to do with other sense objects like sight or sound or smell or taste or touch, seems like an impossibility. Thought seems to be in a totally different category, although in truth it’s not. With time and the skilful development of meditation, we might well be able to learn to focus and calm the mind to the point where conceptual thought stops altogether. I would see this as a pleasant bonus rather than a final goal. More useful is to aspire and practise to see thought as transparent, insubstantial. In this way, when thought is there – whether deliberate or not – there is no sense of cluttering or entangling within the heart and mind. Its presence is just like a fragrance or a physical feeling, a visual image or a sound – it embellishes the silence and stillness of the mind, rather than occluding or corrupting it.
If we are feeling unhappy, what is called for is a willingness to simply be with that unhappiness. If we’re not careful, we say something’s wrong, though it doesn’t really help to say that. We say it either inwardly or outwardly. This projecting of blame is a consequence of having made an inner mistake of misperceiving our unhappiness, sadness or suffering as being something wrong. We don’t receive it just as it is. We don’t acknowledge it and feel it, allowing it to happen; we don’t have the ‘knowingness’ to see it as activity taking place in awareness. Because we don’t have that perspective, we struggle to do something about our suffering, to deal with it in some way. To say that something has gone wrong and that it’s somebody’s fault is a heedless way of dealing with our unpleasant experiences. The habit of consistently doing this is a symptom of what I call the compulsive judging mind.
We really have to determine to recognize and open to that which is emotionally challenging, that which is very powerful, overwhelming, frightening or threatening. Yet through the confidence of awareness, we begin to observe how these difficult situations affect the mind, the heart. What is the feeling? It’s not right or wrong. A feeling is what it is, and only we can know it. If we trust our awareness, we know it’s like this. We don’t need to have a word for it or define it in any way, because it is what it is. This is not cultural conditioning or the ego. It is direct knowing.
Mindfulbalance 