Remembering and Forgetting

Mindfulness is the energy that helps us recognize the conditions of happiness that are already present in our lives. You don’t have to wait ten years to experience this happiness. It is present in every moment of your daily life. There are those of us who are alive but don’t know it. But when you breathe in, and you are aware of your in-breath, you touch the miracle of being alive. That is why mindfulness is a source of happiness and joy. Most people are forgetful; they are not really there a lot of the time. Their mind is caught in their worries, their fears, their anger, and their regrets, and they are not mindful of being there. That state of being is called forgetfulness — you are there but you are not there. You are caught in the past or in the future. You are not there in the present moment, living your life deeply. That is forgetfulness. The opposite of forgetfulness is mindfulness. Mindfulness is when you are truly there, mind and body together.

Thich Nhat Hahn

Sunday Quote: Opening towards

 

You learn about a thing … by opening yourself wholeheartedly to it.

You learn about a thing by loving it.                                       

Barbara McClintock,  Nobel prize-winning geneticist

To name is to tame

Tiger-forest v3Whatever is newly born needs a name and when we are more and more  welcomed by the silence, naming becomes our job . We have to notice, to bless with attention the beasts before us, both the rough and the smooth. To name is to bring an attitude of wonder to the work of sorting, and even to the work of dealing with difficult states of mind. When we can name what is happening to us, we are no longer fully identified with it and have begun to separate from the grasping dark. If what we feel is known and named to be a tiger, then the whole world is not tiger. We can divide the compulsion and the image, the action and the emotion. There is a landscape through which we move, trees casting their own stripes on the forest floor, places where tiger is not.

John Tarrant, The Light inside the Dark

Dis-identifying with thoughts

Meditation practice is not about blanking the mind. Trying to stop thinking would be like trying to stop digesting or stop pumping blood. The stomach is made to digest food, the heart is made to pump blood and the mind is made to think. That’s what it does. It generates thoughts, pretty much non-stop, But right now. as you are reading this page, are you involved with your stomach digesting or your heart pumping blood?  Arc you attending to them? Of course not. They go on automatically in the background while your attention is directed toward reading.

During meditation practice, the idea is to direct your attention to your breath  and allow the mind to do its thing automatically in the background, just like all your other organs are always doing. It’s not a battle unless you make it a battle. It’s merely a habit you are trying to form, the habit of dis-identifying with the mind as “me.” The mind is not “you” any more than the stomach or heart or ears are “you.” They are parts of you. They are part of how you get along in the world. They are important tools, but they are not you. You are something deeper and more mysterious than any of your parts – including the mind.

Bo Lozoff, The Big Mistake about Meditation

Notice judging and blaming

Our most direct way of promoting healing and peace is to become mindful of our habits of judging and blaming. It is a brave activity, because to do this we must let go of our most familiar, comfortable reference points. In the moment of releasing blame, we step out of the story of self and other, the story of good self and bad self, and discover the spaciousness and tenderness of being alive. Blaming distances while acceptance connects.  When we let go of blame, we open to the compassion that can genuinely transform ourselves and our world.

Tara Brach, Creating Peace by letting go of Blame

Our antidote to restlessness

We can become restless and adverse to the breath because we always have the desire to get something. We want to find something that easily interests us, something we can focus on without much effort. If we find something interesting, such as exciting rhythmic music, we absorb right into it. But the rhythm of normal breath isn’t interesting or compelling. It’s calming, and most beings aren’t used to tranquility; they are caught in a need to be excited or interested. In other words most of us need something outside of ourselves to stimulate us and to engage our attention.

Ajahn Sumedho, The Mind and the Way