I was very much a tough New York street kid. I went to a school where you had to learn how to get along with everybody or fight with everybody, and I did my fair share of both.
In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.
The more you practice, the more skill you can develop in reducing pain or at least becoming more transparent to it, so that it is less eroding of your quality of life.
You have to actually make the time to practice every day, because otherwise you will not find it.
Non-doing simply means letting things be and allowing them to unfold in their own way.
Awareness requires only that we pay attention and see things as they are. It doesn’t require that we change anything.
You can’t sail straight into the wind, and if you only know how to sail with the wind at your back, you will only go where the wind blows you. But if you know how to use the wind’s energy and are patient, you can sometimes get where you want to go. You can still be in control.
Don’t go outside your house to see the flowers. My friend, don’t bother with that excursion. Inside your body there are flowers. One flower has a thousand petals. That will do for a place to sit.
There are no drugs that will make you immune to stress or to pain or that will by themselves magically solve your life’s problems or promote healing. It will take conscious effort on your part to move in a direction of healing and inner peace. This means learning to work with the very stress and pain that is causing you to suffer.
If you can’t entirely trust what you think, what about trusting awareness? What about trusting your heart? What about trusting your motivation to at least do no harm? What about trusting your experience until it’s proven to be inaccurate – and then trusting that discovery?
You certainly have to be ready for meditation. You have to come to it at the right time in your life, at a point where you are ready to listen carefully to your own voice, to your own heart, to your own breathing.
Seven attitudinal factors constitute the major pillars of mindfulness practice as we teach it in MBSR. They are non-judging, patience, a beginner’s mind, trust, non-striving, acceptance, and letting go.
To break out of this trap of always being driven by our own desires, it is not a bad exercise to ask yourself from time to time, “What is my own way?” “What do I really want?” “Would I know it if I got it?” “Does everything have to be perfect right now, or under my total control right now, for me to be happy?
Right in that or any moment of non-doing, you are already OK, already perfect, in the sense of perfectly who and what you are. And therefore, right in that moment you are already at home in a profound way, far beyond who you think you are and the ideas and opinions that may so shape and sometimes severely limit your view of the larger whole.
We tend to see more through our thoughts and opinions than through our eyes.
If I wanted to predict your happiness, and I could know only one thing about you, I wouldn’t want to know your gender, religion, health, or income. I’d want to know about your social network – about your friends and family, and the strength of your bonds with them.
Sometimes shutting off the sound on the television can allow you to actually watch the game and take it in in an entirely different and more direct way – a first-order, first-person experience – rather than filtered through the mind of another. In the case of meditation it is the same, except your own thoughts are doing the broadcast commentary, turning a first-order direct experience of the moment into a second-order story about it: how hard it is, how great it is, and on and on and on.
Feel your body lying in bed. Straighten it out. Ask yourself, “Am I awake now? Do I know that the gift of a new day is being given to me? Will I be awake for it? What will happen today? Right now I don’t really know. Even as I think about what I have to do, can I be open to this not-knowing? Can I see today as an adventure? Can I see right now as filled with possibilities?
We can feel victimized by our thoughts, or blinded by them. We can easily mis-take them for the truth or for reality when in actuality they are just waves on its surface, however tumultuous they may be at times.
The entirety of our mind, on the other hand, is by its very nature deep, vast, intrinsically still and quiet, like the depths of the ocean.
Embody what you most want to impart, and keep your mouth shut.