Thursday, July 14, 2022

abandon ourselves








When we are hyper-vigilant, 
we fear everything and everything offends us.  
We don't dare to move forward,
 as if we could reach the ultimate dwelling 
by leaving it to others to make the journey for us. 
 
Since that is impossible, 
why don't we exert ourselves, 
my friends, for love of our Beloved?
 Let's abandon our reason and fear into his hands. 
Forget about the weakness in our nature
 that we worry about so much. 
 
Let our families look after the safekeeping 
of our physical form; that's their concern.
 All we should focus on is getting to see
 this Beloved of ours as soon as possible.

Even if there is not much comfort on this path,
 we would be making a big mistake to fret about our health.
 Anxiety over our health does not improve it one bit; 
this I know.... The journey I'm talking about requires great humility... 
 
Unless we abandon ourselves, 
this state is arduous and burdensome. 
 We would be trudging under the load of our egos,
like mud clinging to our boots and dragging us down. 
 Those who reach the ultimate dwelling
 bear no such baggage.




~ St. Teresa of Avila
from The Interior Castle
translation by Mirabai Starr
art by Julio Anaya Cabanding

Wednesday, July 13, 2022

tender presence


.







May you know that absence is full of tender presence and
that nothing is forgotten.

May the absences in your life be full of eternal echo.
May you sense around you the secret Elsewhere which
holds the presences that have left your life.
May you be generous in your embrace of loss.
May the sore well of grief turn into a well of seamless
presence.

May your compassion reach out to the ones we never hear
from and may you have the courage to speak out for
the excluded ones.
May you become the gracious and passionate subject of
your own life.
May you not disrespect your mystery through brittle
words or false belonging.

May you be embraced by God in whom dawn and twilight
are one, and may your belonging inhabit its deepest
dreams within the shelter of the Great Belonging.



.
John O'Donohue
 from eternal echoes



.

be still and know








Imagine you are walking alone at night on a country road.  
No people or cars or houses around, just enough starlight to see your way, 
the only sound the sound of your shoes on the road and the swish
 of your clothes as you walk.  You feel the stillness inside of things come close. 
You stop. Now there are no sounds, except the almost-never-heard hush of things being.

You sense the stillness on all sides and an identical stillness within you.
 It makes you uneasy, as if you are about to be extinguished. 
 You try to think, to establish yourself against the stillness,
 but the voice of your thoughts sounds thin, metallic.  
You feel an irrepressible need to be distracted, to change the stillness
 and its overwhelming of you. 
You walk home thinking about plans for tomorrow.

But in the quiet of your room you realize what happened: you got scared. 
 You got scared of opening into the stillness, of allowing it to be.
  It was a close call.  You see how throughout your life you have invited 
one distraction after another to prevent just this from happening.  
Now you feel disappointed in yourself. So instead of turning on your computer
 or reading a book or getting something to eat, 
you sit down and invite the stillness back.

A phrase you once heard comes to you, 
from Psalm 46: "Be still, and know." Be still. Be still.

You arrange your body as you have learned to do.  You sit in a comfortable, 
alert position, with your back vertical so you don't slump or drift off. 
 You let your body be motionless, quiet.  The motionlessness of your body
 is a helpful friend; you know it is temporary, and in fact it is
 not really motionless - little shifts and sensations keep happening - 
but the relative stillness of your body reduces your identification with it,
 with the sense you are your body's ambitions and memories and likes and dislikes.

Learning to sit still, to settle like this, is called by Tibetan lamas "the first motionlessness."
 A quiet body at ease relaxes the persistence of thoughts.  Once the first motionlessness
 has been learned, they say, then it doesn't matter if the body is motionless or moving,
 for the the ground of stillness is always available.  But for now you need this helpful friend, 
and you sit still.

Now you invite what the lamas call "the second motionlessness."
 This is the still, empty openness "behind" each of your senses, 
the openness in which your senses arise.  You relax into that openness.
 To say it is not moving points to its nature, but that's not entirely accurate. 
 It is not the opposite of motion, or of the visible, or of sound. 
 This motionlessness is not definable - it is not a sensation.
 Nevertheless it has an almost kinesthetic effect on you, 
as if it is vanishing you, as if the existing one you thought you were, 
the receiver, the photographic plate that records your experience, this"one,"
 becomes transparent. You begin to feel the same threat of vanishing 
you felt on the road, but now you relax and let it be.

  "The third motionlessness" comes now, unbidden. 
 It is the stillness of presence itself - the stillness of a clearness that is always here,
 behind and within everything. It is what allows everything to show up.
  It is empty too not made out of anything, yet it is awesome and radiant in its presence.
  It is without being an it.

You remember now how the phrase from Psalm 46 continues:
 "Be still, and know I am God."

"God"  - this old, strange word that sounds like a judge and yet still resonates beyond that -
 could it mean - could it have first meant - this empty Presence without form,
 appearing as all form?  You realize you are trying to figure it out and you stop.
 Be still, and know I am God.  The knowing is not thinking.
 It is presence being present to presence.
You find yourself wavering here - one moment at ease in the clarity, 
and in the next thinking about it.  You hear the words again:
 Be still. Do nothing. Let be. Don't fill anything in. 
 No need to figure anything out. Relax.

A sense of peacefulness opens in you, vast and without dimension.  
This what Sufis call sakina - vast, peaceful tranquility without dimension -
 and suddenly you are smiling, your eyes are filling with tears - a joy -
 could it be called that? - a joyousness like praise and thankfulness together,
 love pouring forth from nowhere, the whole show showing up - 
mountain, sky, stars, bodies - from nothing, from stillness.

In remembering the Real, all hearts find joyous peace.
- Qur'an 13:28




~ Pir Elias Amidon
from Free Medicine
 
 

 

Tuesday, July 12, 2022

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



Wednesday, July 6, 2022

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



Monday, July 4, 2022

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.



Sunday, July 3, 2022

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


Saturday, July 2, 2022

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 



Friday, July 1, 2022

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



Wednesday, June 29, 2022

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