Tag: contemplation

On this, World Meditation Day, a few random thoughts on practice:

  • You can’t do meditation wrong. There’s no success or failure.
  • In practicing meditation, we’re not trying to live up to some kind of ideal— quite the opposite. We’re just being with our experience, whatever it is…
  • Ordinary everyday life is meditation enough if we attend to it in the moment with simplicity, an open curious mind and without taking ownership of any of it.
  • The only way one really gets any of the most important benefits of meditation practice is by giving up on the notion that there are any benefits to meditation practice.
  • The heart of meditation is simply being interested in what is here now – being more interested in what is… rather than in what was, what will be, or what should be.

And finally…

What we’re really in the business of doing is helping people stay with the thoughts and feelings they are coming to meditation to escape.

— Ordinary Mind Zen teacher Barry Magid

Apparently it’s World Meditation Day today. Who knew? Not me for one!

If I had any advice for anyone embarking on any meditative/ contemplative self inquiry I recommend letting go of any notions of improvement, solving problems, betterment, attaining or gaining anything. Open ended curiosity is all you need. Doing it simply for the sake of doing it, just to see what happens instead of hoping for something. There is no path towards a goal, only the present moment eternally unfolding.

A day off today between a twelve hour shift yesterday and another one tomorrow. In my old job this would have depressed me greatly but these days I couldn’t feel better about it. Such is the profound magnitude and good fortune to have work that you love. Work that is somehow an extension or expression of who and what you are. And often we don’t know who and what we are until the work allows us to express ourselves. A chicken and egg situation but such is life.

Today will be spent contemplatively, outside in nature, inside with coffee and perhaps an invigorating run down by the river later. But mostly in gratitude for, well, everything really. 

After years of practice and contemplation, trials and tribulations, an eventful life with its fair share of contentment and trauma – I still can’t better these three simple words to sum it all up…

This is it.

To become one with just what is, one is at one with both presence and loss, with being and not being. It doesn’t feel like anything; but sitting still, something moves. I don’t know what it is, but somehow it draws from the emptiness that is the way itself, the ground of what is and is not. Not known, it is most precious; not to be held, it is maybe the gift the world needs.

— A gift? An Open Ground

The whole social structure—which is to be competitive, aggressive, comparing oneself with another, accepting an ideology, a belief, and so on—is based on conflict, not only within oneself but also outwardly…

Poetic Outlaws

The bold emphasis above is mine. Reading the original article this phrase leapt out at me.

I find it difficult to articulate just how profound and transformative the shift from inner and outer conflict to inner and outer wholeness can be.

I’m no expert in these matters but, as a lay reader, I have long sensed a commonality between spiritual non-duality and Jung’s individuation.

I have a meditative/ contemplative practice and also had periods of psychotherapy. In spite of coming from different directions, for me at least, they converge on the same point – the recognition of and freedom from one’s own mind.

As my therapist once said as I was trying in vain for something to say to him: ‘If there’s no problem, there’s no problem.’

When the duality of subject and object dissolves conflict of any kind is impossible. As has been articulated for thousands of years in myriad different ways – whatever this is, is impossible to say, but it isn’t two.

The sea used to be my contemplative companion on the morning walk to work but now it’s rivers and mountains – the same ebb and flow of nature, just differing rhythms and vibrations of the whole happening.

Beautiful autumnal morning. A purposefully slow, meandering drive to work. Golden leaves everywhere. The river has retreated from the fields setting the sheep free again.

A bacon and egg roll here, a cup of coffee there.

There’s a real punch of heat from the sun today even as it sits low in the sky.

A contemplative pause at one of my favourite river spots which is still running higher and quicker than usual over a week after flooding.

You’ve noticed by now that more suffering is inflicted on the world by people who take offence than by people who give it. And that what we stop doing is vastly more significant than what we start doing.

What he meant