Tag: experience

This is what Zen means by being detached – not being without emotion or feeling, but being one in whom feeling is not sticky or blocked, and through whom the experiences of the world pass like the reflections of birds flying over water.

— Alan Watts

Don’t expect too much from therapy.

— James Low

When I first heard James say this on his podcast it stopped me in my tracks. James is not only a Tibetan Buddhism Dzogchen teacher but he also spent many years as a psychotherapist, so he knows a thing or two about therapy.

I underwent a few years of psychotherapy myself and look back on that time as one of the most profound and transformative periods of my life. So much so that I even considered training to become a therapist myself.

For me the benefits of therapy were demonstratively positive. So to hear a therapist warn not to expect too much was startling. As I listened on keenly what James went on to explain made enormous sense to me.

In therapy, broadly speaking, we bring with us stories about our life. How it was, how it is and how we think it’s going to go. These stories are heard and honoured. In most cases the process of therapy affords us the space to rewrite those narratives with new stories.

What James meant by not expecting too much from therapy was to recognise that what we are essentially doing is swapping one set of negative stories for a bunch of new positive ones.

In the end they are all just stories about our life, but not actually our life, not the actuality of our lived experience.

Of course stories have utility but only up to a point. We don’t live the stories of our lives, we live our lives, and the stories come after.

As Alan Watts so eloquently said about Zen:

Zen is feeling life not feeling something about life.

The only possible place to get to, the only attainable perspective, the only condition one simply cannot help experiencing is the present moment whatever it is, however it is.

If I am constantly on the move, tripping, going from here to there and back again, then I am in a restless state, hanging on to the outer rim of the wheel. I will seek relief from this mental foment in experiences of pleasure. But, of course, no pleasure lasts for long; it invariably yields to the restlessness that creates the desire for pleasure in the first place. Where, then, is my release from pain? Nowhere else but at the centre of the wheel. Where there are no distinctions. Where indifference to one is indifference to the other.

Rest-less

What if you did not separate yourself from the experience that is here now – whether that moment is a dark sky, a dark mood, or the joyful giggles of excited children? What if you allowed your heart to open to ALL of life, all experience – not just the things your mind imagines “should” be here? Why not awaken to the truth that what is here is an expression of a perfectly whole Reality, and invite it all back Home?

— Dorothy Hunt

It takes great resolve to enter into the darkness of our own chaos, to give up the familiar path and begin to trust our own experience.

— Marion Woodman

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.

If you can’t integrate/ assimilate traditional ancient wisdom into the ordinary reality of your own lived experience then you’re completely missing the point.

There’s a kind of wisdom that only arises automatically as time passes that no amount of learning or practice can induce. No shortcuts. There’s no substitute for the experience of life lived.

Everything is always it and it is always different.

Whenever I hear the phrases like ‘original mind’, ‘ground of being’ and other such terms, they seem to imply a final foundational condition that simply doesn’t ring true for me.

Even in complete, pristine, calm silence and stillness we remain the nexus of the ever-changing flow of phenomena of what we are.

I prefer something like ‘flux of being’ because, for me, there is nowhere to land, no ground, no resting place, no fundamental basis, no beginning or end – only ever shifting sands, the perpetual free fall through ever changing experience.