the struggle is over

.

.

.

VI.                    Riding the Bull

Mounting the bull, slowly I return homeward.

The voice of my flute intones through the evening.

Measuring with hand-beats the pulsation harmony, I direct the endless rhythm.

Whoever hears this melody will join me.

.

 

Comment: 

 

 This struggle is over; gain and loss are assimilated. 

 I sing the song of the village woodsman, and play the tunes of the children. 

 Astride the bull, I observe the clouds above.  

Onward I go, no matter who may wish to call me back.

.

 

 

 

 

 ~ Kakuan

from 10 BULLS

Transcribed by. Nyogen Senzaki and Paul Reps 

 Illustrated by Tomikichiro Tokuriki

 

 

 

clear of the sticky web of the personal

.

May morning be astir with the harvest of night;

Your mind quickening to the eros of a new question,

Your eyes seduced by some unintended glimpse

That cut right through the surface to a source.

May this be a morning of innocent beginning,

When the gift within you slips clear

Of the sticky web of the personal

With its hurt and its hauntings,

And fixed fortress corners,

A morning when you become a pure vessel

For what wants to ascend from silence,

May your imagination know

The grace of perfect danger,

To reach beyond imitation,

And the wheel of repetition,

Deep into the call of all

The unfinished and unsolved

Until the veil of the unknown yields

And something original begins

To stir toward your senses

And grow stronger in your heart

In order to come to birth

In a clean line of form,

That claims from time

A rhythm not yet heard,

That calls space to

A different shape.

May it be its own force field

And dwell uniquely

Between the heart and the light

To surprise the hungry eye

By how deftly it fits

About its secret loss.

~ John O'Donohue

from To Bless the Space Between Us

better thoughts?

Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life --

What can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

~ William Stafford
from The Way It Is: New & Selected Poems

fantasies fade only in stillness

.

25

.

I chose high cliffs far from town

the sound of tall grass a half-open gate

where's an old pauper who isn't deferential

or a rich man who isn't vain

emergency loans don't come without strings

fantasies fade only in stillness

clouds too say mountains are better

returning at night they ease the solitude

.

27

.

Who enters this gate and studies this teaching

has to be thorough and push to the end

empty the body and reason remains

forget the mind and the world disappears

cloud-covered trees form a landscape of white

swallowing the sun the mountain turns red

the flag moves or is it the wind

it isn't the wind or the flag

.

28

.

A friend of seclusion arrives at my gate 

we greet and pardon our lack of decorum

a white mane gathered in back

a monk's robe worn untied

embers of leaves at the end of the night

howl of a gibbon announcing the dawn

sitting on cushion wrapped in quilts

words forgotten finally we meet

.

 

 

 .

~ Stonehouse

from The Zen Works of Stonehouse

Poems and Talks of a 14th Century Chinese Hermit

translated by Red Pine

.

while the music lasts

Men's curiosity searches past and future 

And clings to that dimension. 

But to apprehend 

The point of intersection of the timeless 

With time, is an occupation for the saint - No occupation either, 

but something given And taken,

 in a lifetime's death in love, 

Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender. 

For most of us, there is only the unattended

 Moment, the moment in and out of time, 

The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight, 

The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning 

 Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply 

That it is not heard at all, but you are the music 

While the music lasts.

~ T.S. Eliot

excerpt from The Dry Salvages

 

the secret signature

 

 

 

 

 

All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it -

 tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away 

just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest -

 if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself -

 you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say

 'Here at last is the thing I was made for.'

We cannot tell each other about it.

 It is the secret signature of each soul,

 the incommunicable and unappeasable want,

 the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work,

 and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds,

 when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. 

While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.

 

~ C. S. Lewis
from The Problem of Pain

 

 

 

we must be still and still moving into another intensity

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older

The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated

Of dead and living. Not the intense moment

Isolated, with no before and after,

But a lifetime burning in every moment

And not the lifetime of one man only

But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.

There is a time for the evening under starlight,

A time for the evening under lamplight

(The evening with the photograph album).

Love is most nearly itself

When here and now cease to matter.

Old men ought to be explorers

Here or there does not matter

We must be still and still moving

Into another intensity

For a further union, a deeper communion

Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,

The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters

Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

~ T. S. Eliot

excerpt from East Coker

Eliot regarded Four Quartets as his masterpiece, and it is the work that led to his being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. It consists of four long poems, each first published separately: Burnt Norton , East Coker , The Dry Salvages and Little Gidding . Each has five sections.

awareness which allows experience to unfold itself

The desire to be secure in things and in relationship only brings about conflict and sorrow,

 dependence and fear; the search for happiness in relationship without understanding

 the cause of conflict leads to misery. When thought lays emphasis on sensate value

 and is dominated by it there can be only strife and pain. Without self-knowledge

 relationship becomes a source of struggle and antagonism, a device for covering up

 inward insufficiency, inward poverty.

Does not craving for security in any form indicate inward insufficiency?

 Does not this inner poverty make us seek, accept and cling to formulations, hopes,

 dogmas, beliefs, possessions; is not our action then merely imitative and compulsive?

 So anchored to ideology, belief, our thinking becomes merely a process of enchainment.

Our thought is conditioned by the past; the I, the me and the mine,

 is the result of stored up experience, ever incomplete. The memory of the past

 is always absorbing the present; the self which is memory of pleasure and pain

 is ever gathering and discarding, ever forging anew the chains of its own conditioning.

 It is building and destroying but always within its own self-created prison.

 To the pleasant memory it clings and the unpleasant it discards. 

Thought must transcend this conditioning for the being of the Real.

Is evaluating right thinking? Choice is conditioned thinking; right thinking 

comes through understanding the chooser, the censor. As long as thought

 is anchored in belief, in ideology, it can only function within its own limitation;

 it can only feel-act within the boundaries of its own prejudices;

 it can only experience according to its own memories which give continuity

 to the self and its bondage. Conditioned thought prevents right thinking

 which is non-evaluation, non-identification.

There must be alert self-observation without choice; choice is evaluation

 and evaluation strengthens the self-identifying memory. If we wish to understand 

deeply there must be passive and choiceless awareness which allows experience

 to unfold itself and reveal its own significance. The mind that seeks security

 through the Real creates only illusion. The Real is not a refuge; 

it is not the reward for righteous action;

 it is not an end to be gained.

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

 from The Observer Is The Observed

 with thanks to No Mind's Land

desire to become

We all want to become something: 

a pacifist, a war hero, a millionaire, 

a virtuous man, or what you will. 

The very desire to become involves conflict, and that conflict produces war. 

There is peace only when there is no desire to become something, 

and that is the only true state because in that state alone

there is creation, there is reality. 

But that is completely foreign to the whole structure of society, 

which is the projection of yourself. You worship success. 

Your god is success, 

the giver of titles, degrees, 

position, and authority. 

There is a constant battle within yourself, 

the struggle to achieve what you want. 

You never have a peaceful moment, 

there is never peace in your heart because 

you are always striving to become something, to progress. 

Do not be misled by the word progress. 

Mechanical things progress, but thought can never progress 

except in terms of its own becoming.

J. Krishnamurti

from The Collected Works

healing our wounds

 

 

 

 

 

When an animal in the jungle is wounded, it knows how to find a quiet place,

 lie down and do nothing. The animal knows that is the only way to get healed—

to lay down and just rest, not thinking of anything, including hunting and eating. 

Not eating is a very wonderful way of allowing your body to rest. 

We are so concerned about how to get nutrition that we are afraid of resting, 

of allowing our body to rest and to fast. The animal knows that it does not need to eat. 

What it needs is to rest, to do nothing, and that is why its health is restored.

In our consciousness there are wounds also, lots of pains. 

Our consciousness also needs to rest in order to restore itself.

 Our consciousness is just like our body. Our body knows how to heal itself

 if we allow it the chance to do so. When we get a cut on our finger 

we don’t have to do anything except to clean it and to allow it the time to heal, 

because our body knows how to heal itself. The same thing is true 

with our consciousness; our consciousness knows how to heal itself 

if we know how to allow it to do so. But we don’t allow it. 

We always try to do something. 

We worry so much about healing, 

which is why we do not get the healing we need. 

Only if we know how to allow them to rest 

can our body and our soul heal themselves.

But there is in us what we call the energy of restlessness. 

We cannot be at peace with ourselves. 

We cannot be peaceful. 

We cannot sit; we cannot lie down. 

There is some energy in us to do this, to do that, to think of this, to think of that,

 and that kind of restlessness makes us unhappy. That is why it is so important

 for us to learn first of all to allow our body to rest. We have to learn how to deal

 with all our energy of restlessness. That is why we have to learn these techniques

 of allowing our body and our consciousness to rest.

I have arrived. I am home.
In the here. In the now.
I am solid. I am free.
In the ultimate I dwell.

If you are able to arrive, then you will stop running—running within and running without. 

There is a belief in us that happiness cannot be possible in the here and the now.

 We have to go somewhere. We have to go to the future in order to be able to really be happy. 

That kind of thinking has been there for a long time. 

 

Maybe that feeling has been transmitted to us from our ancestors and our parents. 

That is why we have to wake up to the presence of that habit energy in us

 and to do the reverse.  It is possible for us to be peaceful and happy

 in the present moment.  When you are there, body and mind united, 

you have an opportunity to touch the conditions of your happiness.

 If you are able to touch these conditions of happiness that are already

 available in the here and the now, you can be happy right away. 

You don’t have to run anywhere, especially into the future.

 

 

 

~Thich Nhat Hanh

excerpts from At Home in the World

with thanks to Lion's Roar 

our real condition

 

 

 

 

 

 What we really want to do is serve happiness.
We want everyone to be happy, never unhappy even for a moment.
We want the animals to be happy. 

The happiness of every living thing is what we want.
We want it very much but we cannot bring it about.
We cannot make even one individual happy.
It seems that this thing that we want most of all is out of our reach.
But we were born to serve happiness and we do serve it.
The confusion is due to our lack of awareness of real happiness.
Happiness is pervasive.
It is everywhere. And everywhere the same.
And it is forever.
When people are really happy they say: 

'This will last forever even after death', and that is true.
When we are unhappy it is because something is covering our minds and we

 are not able to be aware of happiness. When the difficulty is past we find happiness again.
It is not that happiness is all around us. That is not it at all.
It is not this or that or in this or that.
It is an abstract thing.
Happiness is unattached. Always the same. It does not appear and disappear.

 It is not sometimes more and sometimes less.

It is our awareness of happiness that goes up and down.
Happiness is our real condition.
It is reality.
It is life.
…
When we see life we call it beauty. It is magnificent - wonderful.
We may be looking at the ocean when we are aware of beauty but it is not the ocean.

We may be in the desert and we say that we are aware of the 'living desert' but it is not the desert.
Life is ever present in the desert and everywhere, forever.
By awareness of life we are inspired to live.

Life is consciousness of life itself.

~ Agnes Martin

from Paintings, Writings, Remembrances, by Arne Glimcher

with thanks to being silently drawn

the honeyed tip of anger and its poisoned roots

 

 

 

 

 

The energy of anger can feel empowering. 

When we feel extraordinarily vulnerable or diminished, the energy of anger

 sharpens our senses and brings our power back, serving as a wake-up call

 that shakes us out of our doldrums. Initially, this surge of anger-ridden energy feels good. 

The rush of adrenaline is seductive — we want to hold on to it and increase its energy.

 This feeling of anger can be beneficial at times, but unless we meet it with conscious awareness,

 it can make us lose perspective and can destroy relationships the longer we hold on to it.

Anger allows us to stand in our righteousness, in our sense of justice.

 We may even feel inspired because we regain our sense of self. Our ego, our sense of me,

 is so full, thinking of what we will be doing to right this wrong.

However, unconscious, mindless anger becomes personal, invariably leading to

 inappropriate and unreasonable behavior. It can become divisive, exclusionary, 

and even hateful at times, and it can also separate us from others because it can be

 condescending and arrogant. At its root, this type of anger says

 I am right, and you are wrong.

In this state of mind, our ability to listen carefully to what the other person has to say

 suddenly stops. This righteous anger blinds us and stops serving us as an empowering force.

 It is then that anger can become our worst enemy and an impediment to a peaceful outcome.

Rather than confronting the feeling, we tend to focus on a person or situation

 that serves as a false refuge, something to blame for what we’re unhappy about. 

Forming a false refuge externally robs us of the opportunity to reflect on our fears, 

our loneliness, and our wounds, and eliminates the path to heal the cause of our suffering.

Meeting anger without conscious awareness puts us at great risk.

 It may simmer within as silent suspicion and resentment,

 or it may explode into violent rage and devastation.

 It may come with justifications like I need to be angry, because if I am not, 

I’m going to be hurt, which creates stories in our minds of what we truly believe

 and disconnects us from what we are really harboring in our hearts. 

Unaware of the trap we have fallen into, the only way out

 — the only way to save face — is anger.

Paradoxically, anger can also come with self-judgment: I should not be angry;

 a person with my values cannot be angry. Therefore, I’m a bad person if I show anger.

 We suppress anger by self-condemnation, and it never goes away.

 Without working on avoiding self-judgment, anger is not metabolized,

 and it may return to haunt us later in unexpected ways.

It’s part of being human. Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet, describes what to do

 when we are visited by uncomfortable emotions in his beautiful poem,

 “The Guest House.”

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.


Skillful ways to start working with anger involve cultivating an openness

 towards curiosity and self-awareness. We must examine anger with the desire to learn 

from it, not in a cold and superficial analysis, but in a warm and intimate way

 that comes from caring about the nature of being human. We must feel the anger

 at a somatic level and explore what is underneath. 

We need to feel it to heal it.

Stay with it. The wound is the place where the Light enters you.

 Feel the anger without judgment, but with self-compassion instead.

 Holding your suffering with tenderness, allowing any thoughts connected to your

 emotions to surface, and then let them go. In this way, your emotions will be able

 to move through you rather than becoming blocked in your body and 

potentially turning into illness or disease.

When I ask myself What is going on with me? I turn my gaze inward and look at my triggers.

 This eliminates the influence of external things that I cannot control. When I do this, 

I often realize it’s not about who did something to me or what was done to me.

 Instead, it’s about what’s going on inside. The anger is in me, and as soon as I shift

 the focus to the right area, the anger starts to dissolve. 

 

Take a pause before reacting, which gives us the space to breathe

 in and out and start dissolving the tension. Through this action, our thoughts

 may calm down, and we may be able to see things more clearly.

This takes practice, and as such we must engage in it consistently.

 We can start with little triggers, like losing our keys, misplacing our wallets, 

experiencing laptop issues, or running late to a meeting. This way, we train

 our brains to respond mindfully and wisely when provoked by greater threats.

Taking responsibility for what we are experiencing rather than avoiding or repressing

 anger is empowering. Feeling the feeling is where the healing begins.

 Only then, we will be able to have clarity of mind to take a wise step forward.

 

 

 

 

 

 

~  Monica Jordan

 https://embracemindfulness.org/

excerpt from: How to work with Anger

Lion's Roar

 

 

our kneejerk reactivity

 

 

 

 

 

The next time you are offended, consider it a “teachable moment.”

Ask yourself what part of you is actually upset. It’s normally the false or smaller self.

 If we can move back to the big picture of who we are in God, our True Self,

 we’ll find that what upset us usually doesn’t amount to a hill of beans in objective reality!

 But we can waste a whole day (or longer) feeding that hurt until it seems to have a life

 of its own and, in fact, “possesses” us. At that point, it becomes what Eckhart Tolle

 rightly calls our “pain-body.”

Tolle defines this “accumulated pain” as “a negative energy field that occupies

 your body and mind.”  In this space, we seem to have a kneejerk, self-protective

 reaction to everything—and everyone—around us. I emphasize the word reaction

 here because there’s no clear, conscious decision to think or act in this way.

 It just happens and we are seemingly powerless to stop it. By doing healing work

 and by practicing meditation, we learn to stop identifying with the pain

 and instead calmly relate to it in a compassionate way.

For example, in centering prayer, we observe the hurt as it arises 

in our stream of consciousness, but we don’t jump on the boat and give it energy. 

Instead, we name it (“resentment toward my spouse”), then we let go of it,

 and let the boat float down the river. We have the power to say, “That’s not me.

 I don’t need that today. I have no need to feed this resentment. 

I know who I am without it.” This is the beginning of emotional sobriety.

 

If we’ve been eating a regular meal of resentment toward our spouse, our boss,

 our parents, or “the world,” the boat’s going to come back around

 in the next minute because it’s accustomed to us filling our plate.

 But we must be able to ask and to discover, “Who was I before I resented my spouse?

 And even before that?” This is the primary way we learn to live in our True Self,

 where we are led by a foundational “yes,” not by the petty push backs of “no.”

 

 

 

 

~ Richard Rohr 

from Emotional Sobriety:

 Rewiring Our Programs for ‘Happiness’

 

~ Eckhart Tolle 

from The Power of Now:

 A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

 

 

 

our confusing, obscuring emotions

 

 

 

 

 

In the psychological climate of our own times, our emotions are almost always
considered to be virtually identical with our personal authenticity,
and the more freely they flow, the more we are seen to be honest and
“in touch.” A person who gravitates to a mental mode of operation
is criticized for being “in his head”; when feeling dominates,
we proclaim with approval that such a person is “in his heart.”

In the Wisdom tradition, this would be a serious misuse of the term heart.
Far from revealing the heart, Wisdom teaches that the emotions 

are in fact the primary culprits that obscure and confuse it. 

The real mark of personal authenticity is not how intensely we can express

 our feelings but how honestly we can look at where they’re coming from

 and spot the elements of clinging, manipulation, and personal agendas

 that make up so much of what we experience as our emotional life today. . . .

In the teachings of the Christian Desert Fathers and Mothers, 

these intense feelings arising out of personal issues were known as the “passions,” 

and most of the Desert spiritual training had to do with learning to spot

 these land mines and get free of them before they did serious psychic damage. 

In contrast to our contemporary usage, which tends to see passion as a good thing, 

indicating that one is fully alive and engaged, the Desert tradition saw passion

 as a diminishment of being. It meant falling into passivity, into a state of being

 acted upon (which is what the Latin passio actually means), rather than clear

 and conscious engagement. Instead of enlivening the heart, 

according to one Desert Father, the real damage inflicted by the passions

 is that “they divide our heart into two.”. . .

The heart, in the ancient sacred traditions, has a very specific and

 perhaps surprising meaning. It is not the seat of our personal affective life—

or even, ultimately, of our personal identity—but an organ for the perception

 of divine purpose and beauty. . . .

 

Finding the way to where our true heart lies is the great journey of spiritual life. . . .

 

 

 

 

~ Cynthia Bourgeault

 from The Wisdom Way of Knowing: 

Reclaiming an Ancient Tradition to Awaken the Heart

 art by Picasso

 

 

lost in emotion

 

 

 

 

People say we can’t help how we feel. It’s true we can’t help unpleasant, pleasant, or neutral feelings arising when one or more of the six senses have made contact with an object. We multiply the intensity of feeling every time we move away from something pleasant or unpleasant; we create a vicious cycle of craving and aversion.

Often when people say we can’t help how we feel, they are talking about their emotions. We can help how we experience our emotions. They are created by our unconscious and conscious thinking and conditioning. When we emote our thoughts we are habitually responding and reacting out of our emotions. We are forcibly changing our emotions all the time, by reaching out for external stimuli, or by blaming others when we feel vulnerable or upset. Before we know it, we are angry, resentful, self-righteous, and begin to inhabit a storehouse of toxic thoughts, which suppress our uncomfortable feelings of vulnerability.

By observing our thoughts and emotions, we can witness how they build on each other through our attachment to repetitive inner stories. Such witnessing begins the process of healthy nonattachment:

If we are patient, our feelings will change of their own accord—some quicker than others. Our emotions will begin to deplete; they won’t dominate us, or dictate our behavior. Eventually toxic emotions will disappear and nontoxic thinking will start to arise in our hearts, and one day there will be just thoughts without a thinker. There will be sounds without a hearer, tastes without a taster, smells without a smeller, sights without a seer, and touch without a toucher. What I mean by all of this is that things will arise and we will not identify with them as me, mine, or I. There will be no judgments, interpretations, or stories about what we have just perceived. We will see the bigger picture, and not be caught by the clash of the senses, not react to whatever we have made contact with. We will feel the unpleasantness, pleasantness, neutralness, or even the mixture of all three feelings, and will turn toward it without an agitated mind. The heart and mind will accept all of it without protesting. When we protest, toxic emotions begin to emerge. . . .

Our hearts well up with toxins because we push away our painful feelings. Many of us will do our utmost to push them down. We won’t allow ourselves to stop. Our busy lives don’t seem to give us time to feel our feelings. When we turn toward our experience, we will often find feeling tones or sensations in the body. We turn away from the experience in the body with thoughts and thinking. If we have the courage to face the feeling tone, we will discover there is nothing there, no I or me, just a flow of sensations that may be painful, pleasurable, or neutral.



~ Valerie Mason-John

from Detox Your Heart: Meditations for Healing Emotional Trauma