Aloha Sangha

ancient wisdom for crazy times

Category: simplicity

sit quietly and observe your thoughts
This simple practice helps release unhelpful preoccupations that creep into your mind space as you sit quietly and observe your thoughts.
As we release these unhelpful preoccupations, we find less need for distraction hits like the news. What would it be like to spend more time absorbed in mystery and awe rather than in your to-do list or newsfeed?
Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.
Lin Yutang
With our mindfulness practice we breathe, eat and wash in mystery and awe in every moment. Thomas Merton observed in his 1968 collection of his journals The Other Side of the Mountain how eliminating non-essentials, as Lin Yutang mentions above, is the heart of his monastic vocation:
I just need to have long periods of no talking and no special thinking, and immediate contact with the sun, the grass, the dirt, the leaves. Undistracted by statements, jokes, opinions, news.
Thomas Merton
Sure, obstacles will arise. It really wouldn’t work otherwise. Frank Clark observes:
If you find a path with no obstacles, it probably doesn’t lead anywhere.
With maturing practice, we can appreciate all obstacles as “grist for the mill” for this organic process of deepening insight and freedom.
The Buddha was on point here in the Dhammapada:
Let go of that which is in front,
let go of that which has already gone,
and let go of in-between.
With a heart that takes hold nowhere
you arrive at the place beyond all suffering.
We all experience difficulties, confusion and unhappiness. And even when things are hunky-dory, we sometimes worry if something ominous is just around the bend.
Yet our practice shows us glimpses of a fundamental OK-ness, a limitless essential freedom that is our birthright. So we go up and down between appreciating life as both a great mystery and a great misery, until the mind eventually settles down.
observe your thoughts
Mindfulness teaches us to pay attention and observe your thoughts in a way that doesn’t get sucked into whatever storms may arise in the mind, and let them pass, and rest in the settled mind of knowing you are aware.
As we familiarize ourselves with this heart of awareness, we see that whatever blocks the heart is mostly self-constructed- and insubstantial.
The twelfth-century Sufi philosopher El-Ghazali observed:
If you can lose it in a shipwreck, it isn’t yours.
As we rest for a moment, simply present, awake and aware, with no agenda at all, we step out of our habitual comfort zones of control, manipulation, into a space of natural open awareness.
We can’t lose this in any shipwreck.
I love the line by the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke:
Ultimately, it is upon your vulnerability that you depend.
As you sit quietly and observe your thoughts, you open little by little into the warmth and tenderness of our own essential vulnerability, our own heart of awareness, that we all need so much these days.
07/18/2024
a keener love of simplicity
Meditation helps us put down the baggage we carry around. Traveling lightly, we feel airborne. We move into a keener love of simplicity.
There is a story by Mark Twain about someone who dies and goes to “heaven” and gets a pair of wings and a harp. At first, they used the wings as a way of moving around the new place, and plucked on the strings of the harp trying to get some divine tunes out of it.
They soon realize, though, that in this place you don’t need wings to go anywhere and simply by desiring to hear divine tunes, celestial musicians (their house band, I suppose) show up and play.
After dropping the wings and the harp, they found a profound fulfillment in simply being.
We all just want to be happy and feel at home in our own lives, but, as the song goes, we are looking in all the wrong places.
We burden ourselves with unnecessary wings or harps thinking that happiness is all about having certain things or acting in a special way. Many of the voices we listen to lead us on a long walk on the hedonic treadmill Buddhists call samsara.
But one day we have this marvelous insight: we already have what we need.
This meditation is a radical act of self-discovery. We uncover the treasure of our very own being. We lose interest in listening to the voices shouting at us about our deficiencies.
One of my teachers Sharon Salzberg says:
We learn not to get caught in trying to reach after things we never really needed to begin with.
Along these lines, the poet Rumi asks:
How long will we fill our pockets
Like children with dirt and stones?
Let the world go. Holding it
We never know ourselves, never are air-born.
Rumi, translated by Andrew Harvey
Meditation helps us put down the baggage we carry around so we can be airborne and travel lightly. We move into a keener love of simplicity — of lifestyle, speech, and even how to do the dishes and arrange our sitting space.
We get less caught up in what others say about us, or imagine they say.
The grip on our likes and dislikes softens.
We eventually get how much nicer it is to relax into our natural, free and easy being-ness that is already right here, right now, than it is to struggle with having things be other than they are how they are.
But if we haven’t tasted this free-and-easy being-ness, it can be a hard sell to the psyche.
You’ll know the sweet taste of being-ness by accidentally stumbling upon it in your practice.
You can’t make this happen on purpose.
You just need to develop a daily meditation habit and put the time in. As the late Indian author and speaker Jiddu Krishnamurti remarked:
Enlightenment is an accident. Meditation makes you accident prone.
Then, each moment is fine. Each moment is enough.
Each moment, no matter how mundane or annoying, is profound and meaningful.
We practice, as the poet Wendell Berry tells us in this his poem The Wild Geese:
… not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart, and in eye, clear. What we need is here.
Be well, dear reader.
02/02/2024
a slow, simple life
Perhaps we need to chill a little, and settle into the slow simple life that’s already here. And embrace this moment, without trying to improve or tweak anything.
I read a story the other day, attributed to Nikolai Gogol, about a horse that was stuck in the mud. It struggled and struggled to get its hooves out.
When it eventually did, a fly flew up from the tail of the horse to its head and said:
We did it!
I smiled. Yes, sounds like something I would say!
planting the flag of me
I made it a theme a few weeks ago to note how many times in a day I attempt to plant the flag of me, to claim psychological and physical territory. I gave up after a few hours- I lost my count and my self-esteem.
The meditation teacher Larry Rosenberg, in one of his talks, recalls seeing a cartoon once of a Zen monk walking along a beach carrying an enormous bag over his shoulders that was so heavy his footsteps were like craters.
On the bag was written one word – ME.
This is the burden meditation helps me set aside, so my path through this life feels a little lighter. Even after I put it down temporarily in meditation, I pick it up again after a little while. But I’m good with some temporary relief from me.
A slow, simple life–the Flemish painter Jacob van Hulsdonck captures this in Still Life with Lemons, Oranges, and a Pomegranate, 1640.
Sometimes I ask myself–what keeps my practice alive and vital?
Where is my edge of learning?
One answer that comes up is seeing how my body feels when I am being inauthentic. Is there a contraction, tightness, numbness somewhere? I drop the story I am enmeshed in just do a free-form scan.
I try to remember the cartoon of the monk on the beach carrying that heavy “me” bag and feel my feet–am I making little craters when I walk?
Each time I do this I feel a little shiver of pleasure and relief.
It’s so tempting to keep trying to be someone I am not. Some fantasy I want to grow into through meditation, a Tom 2.0. There is a way to live my ordinary life in pristine peace and joy just as it is right now.
But I need to put that bag down and catch my breath. Mary Oliver’s poem “Yellow” reminds us:
There is a heaven we enter
through institutional grace
and there are the yellow finches bathing and singing
in the lowly puddle.
Mary Oliver Rocks the House
Can you reflect on what it means to just be here, now, without pretense, free, open, relaxed and at peace–“bathing and singing in the lowly puddle” of your life just as it is right now?
just sitting and breathing
There are moments in our breath meditation practice when we are just sitting and breathing. There is a feeling of being breathed, instead of breathing to get some special mind state.
A maturing practice, a deepening practice, I say, is a more chill practice. Just the innocence of a body sitting quietly and breathing.
Meditation can turn into a kind of extreme sport, with elaborate training programs for those aspiring to the elite ranks. But what if we set aside those fantasies for a while and just chilled?
a slow, simple life
The blogger Krista O’Reilly Davi-Digui, who writes about minimalism and the anti-consumption movement, posted a while ago:
What if I embrace my limitations and stop railing against them? Make peace with who I am and what I need and honor your right to do the same. Accept that all I want is a small, slow, simple life.
What if all I want is a mediocre life?
That’s all I want–a small, slow, simple life.
Carl Jung envisioned a major shift in understanding the spiritual path –rather than ascending a steep mountain path seeking perfection, instead we “unfold into wholeness.” The wholeness that is who we are right here and now.
We are not so much attempting to vaporize our bad karma or destroy our demons, as it is really hard to do a decent job of this; our well-meaning attempts can easily leave us with more problems.
Rather, perhaps we need to chill a little, and settle into the “small, slow simple life” that’s already here?
And embrace this moment — messy, incomplete, yet alive, fresh, and unfolding — without trying to improve or tweak anything.
Trying to tweak things just brings more frustration. And really, the present moment, as I have written elsewhere, is un-tweak-able.
There is a quiet and deep joy that has always been there, covered over by strata of reactivity and compulsiveness which subtly rule our lives, in one form or another.
The path is simple. Here are some heavy instructions from the late Thich Nhat Hanh… ready?
Smile, breathe, and go slowly.
Can we practice like this?
10/17/2022
an ordinary new year wish
While everyone is wishing their co-workers, friends and family a fantastic new year full of creativity and self-improvement, I would settle for an ordinary new year.
Wishing others an entire year of monumental experiences or events, is curious to me. I am not sure I can handle anything too out of the ordinary.
In fact, I am quite happy with ordinary.
what’s so special about being special?
I’ve been around the “special” block quite a few times, enough to question the entire project of assessing and attributing special-ness stature to things which – on deep analysis – are quite ordinary.
I mean, what makes certain pizza toppings more special than others?
The special-ness project can have a field day with our meditation practice. In the original teachings, the Buddha tried to encourage folks with rather extra-ordinary narratives; to raise their hopes of what is possible in a single lifetime.
But in our ridiculously competitive culture the original teachings, which were intended to motivate ordinary folks back in the sixth century BC, often back-fire in our present day—reinforcing patterns of ego-identification and inflation the original teachings are meant to take apart.
our meditation practice is nothing special
As the Buddhist meditation teacher Ken McLeod recently wrote on his blog:
“When we practice, we think we are doing something special, that we are making something happen. While I fell into this way of thinking myself, I eventually came to understand that it is a completely wrong-headed. Any idea that you are special in some way is an indication of delusion. These are all stories we tell ourselves to explain what is through and through, a mystery.”
The special-ness project secretly encourages us to achieve some feeling or some imagined mental state in our meditation practice. This goal we half-consciously buy into may lead you to judge yourself as failing or succeeding, reinforcing what classical Buddhism calls “grasping and aversion.”
The result? Often a scattered and anxious mind.
then one day …
… with time and patience, you discover an open awareness which is inherently free, peaceful and joyous. And which was not achieved by any effort as it has always been here.
Hiding in the ordinariness of your life.
Ajahn Sumedho, the 84-year-old American-born Buddhist monk, in his clear-eyed book Now is the Knowing, writes:
We tend to overlook the ordinary. We are usually only aware of our breath when it’s abnormal, like if we have asthma. We don’t try to make the breath long or short, or control it in any way, but to simply stay with the normal inhalation and exhalation. We do not even need to be particularly intelligent — all we have to do is to be content with, and aware of, one inhalation and exhalation. Wisdom can arise from observing the ordinary.
Wash your bowls
There is old Zen story that I like very much. A monk comes to the monastery of the master Zhao Zhou and asks for teaching.
The master asks him, “Have you had your breakfast?” The monk says that he has. “Then wash your bowls,” is the teacher’s reply, and the only instruction he offers.
just this moment …
Zhao Zhou wants to bring the monk down to the immediate present moment, as if saying “Don’t look for some profound metaphysical or yogic instructions here. Be present to this moment.”
But we seem to be looking for something other than what’s right here in this moment.
… is the only moment there is
This moment is often seen as a barrier to overcome so that we can at some later moment get whatever it is we thought we were looking for when we got into this meditation stuff.
But at some point it begins to dawn on us that there is no other moment.
Then everything becomes very simple.
We sit with awareness of the body, or the breath. We let thought and feeling come up but we don’t make a big deal out of anything.
We let whatever comes up to come up naturally, without resistance. We appreciate it, and we let it go. We don’t get tangled up in a web of complication.
profound ordinary happiness
As we sit this way, judgments begin to fall away. We allow ourselves to fully be who we are. And we realize we are profoundly happy yet in a most ordinary way.
Wishing you a very ordinary new year!

01/07/2019
everyday mysticism
There is a way to live your ordinary life in pristine peace and joy just as it is right now. This is the way of everyday mysticism, yet it’s not about any “ism” at all.
This year, I don’t think I’ll make any resolutions. Well, except for maybe one. I resolve to live a little more happily.
And that comes by clearly seeing how I make myself unhappy. How I keep carrying this heavy bag of “me” around. Even after I put it down temporarily in meditation, I manage to pick it right up again after a little while.
self-improvement an oxymoron?
Making a set of resolutions implies needing to improve myself, be better at something, or change my body somehow. But Pema Chodron asks us to consider whether self-improvement is an oxymoron- does what we already have really need improving?
We might get into this hoping meditation will improve us, but it’s really about accepting ourselves as we are right now. Let’s avoid any fantasies of some ideal future self, which are subtle aggressions against who we really are.
no regrets
The blogger Krista O’Reilly-Davi-Digui, a working, single mom who writes about minimalism and the anti-consumption movement, recently wrote:
What if I just accept this mediocre body of mine that is neither big nor small? Just in between. And I embrace that I have no desire to work for rock hard abs or 18% body fat. And I make peace with it and decide that when I lie on my deathbed I will never regret having just been me.
seeing through the masks
This year, I resolve to see how I am when I am being inauthentic. I resolve use mindfulness to see through the heavy masks I make to hide behind.
I resolve not to keep trying to be someone I am not. Some fantasy I want to grow into, a Tom 2.0.
Woman in a Hat with Pompoms and a Printed Blouse- Pablo Picasso (1962)
the way of everyday mysticism
There is a way to live your ordinary life in pristine peace and joy just as it is right now. This is the way of everyday mysticism, yet it’s not about any “ism” at all.
Mary Oliver’s poem “Yellow” reminds us:
There is a heaven we enter
through institutional grace
and there are the yellow finches bathing and singing
in the lowly puddle.
Can you reflect on what it means to just be here, now, without pretense, free and open, relaxed and at peace – “bathing and singing in the lowly puddle” of our life as it is?
sitting quietly and breathing
There are moments in our breath meditation practice when we are just sitting and breathing. There is a feeling of being breathed, instead of breathing to get something.
A maturing practice, a deepening practice, is a more chill practice. Just the innocence of a body sitting quietly and breathing.
Meditation can turn into a kind of extreme sport, with elaborate training programs for those aspiring to the elite ranks.
But what if we set aside those fantasies for a while and just chilled?
small, simple and slow
Krista O’Reilly-Davi-Digui continues:
What if I embrace my limitations and stop railing against them? Make peace with who I am and what I need and honor your right to do the same. Accept that all I want is a small, slow, simple life.
That’s’ all I want – a small, slow, simple life.
unfolding into wholeness
Carl Jung envisioned a major shift in understanding the spiritual path –rather than ascending a steep mountain path seeking perfection, instead we “unfold into wholeness.”
The wholeness that is who we are right here and now.
We are not so much attempting to vaporize our bad karma or destroy our demons, as it is really hard to do a decent job of this; our well-meaning attempts can easily leave us with more problems.
the life we have been given
Rather, perhaps we need to chill a little, and settle into the “small, slow simple life” we have already been given?
And embrace it is in this moment — messy, incomplete, yet alive, fresh, and unfolding — without trying to improve or tweak anything.
un-tweak-able
Trying to tweak things just brings more frustration. And really, the present moment is un-tweak-able.
This is a quiet and deep joy that, in a way, has always been there, covered over by strata of reactivity and compulsiveness which subtly rule our lives, in one form or another.
a simple path
The path is simple. Here are the instructions (from Thich Nhat Hahn) … ready?
Smile, breathe, and go slowly.
Can we practice like this?
read another?
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12/28/2018
coming home
No matter how nice our home is, it is still “of the of world,” as my Buddhist teachers in Asia would say.
We are settling in to a new house. As I get older, moving feels more emotional, more gut-wrenching. Witnessing our old home slowly coming apart, with carefully chosen bits going into carefully chosen boxes, I felt a little vulnerable.
Little bits of me separated, re-arranged with other bits, and put away. Only to re-emerge and be put into new places, with less dust and more air.
Carrying one of the last boxes out of the old house, I heard my footsteps echo through the fresh, open spaces of our old home.
Yes, it’s all temporary, everything eventually falls apart, and as the Buddhist masters of old would say
The end of collection is dispersion.
The end of rising is falling.
The end of meeting is parting.
and yet, and yet …
Yes, of course, but as the 17th century poet and Jodo Shinshu priest Issa wrote after his first-born child died shortly after birth —
The world of dew —
A world of dew it is indeed,
And yet, and yet . . .
And yet there is a longing for stability, for protection, for refuge.
For Issa at that moment, impermanence is no longer just a philosophical concept, but a real feeling of sadness and longing.
The poignant “and yet, and yet…” also points to something else, something waiting for him to discover, something he feels is missing.
I fall for it again
What is missing? Is ask myself as the tears dodge bits of dust and dried sweat on my unshaven cheeks as they trickle down.
Then I catch myself. I fell for it again! It’s just life being life. No mistake anywhere, and nothing is missing.
During times of stress, transition, heartache, and struggle it is easy to get stuck in “and yet, and yet…” We can feel uprooted at times, abandoned, homeless.
So, what is this place like where nothing is missing? Where we don’t feel uprooted even when we are?
Where is home?
Essayist and novelist Pico Iyer, in his Ted Talk ‘Where Is Home? “says what we call our real home has more to do with a piece of your soul, not your soil.
While our outer home is a protected space in which to thrive; a place of refuge from the storms of the world—it’s still “of the of world,” as my Buddhist teachers in Asia would say.
The old house, as we call it now, is someone else’s house. It was home, but now it’s not. And this house will be someone’s else’s when we are asked to move again. It’s just a temporary shelter, and not just because we are renters.
No place to settle among conditioned patterning
“You can’t make a permanent home in a sankhara” Ajahn Chah would say.
There is no place to settle down in conditioned patterns. But you don’t really need to worry about it, he retorts, because it’s not your real home anyway. Ajahn Chah continues:
Anyone can build a house of wood and bricks, but that that sort of home is not our real home. It’s a home in the world and it follows the ways of the world. Our real home is inner peace. An external material home may well be pretty, but sooner or later we’ll have to give it up. It’s not a place we can live in permanently because it doesn’t truly belong to us, it’s part of the world.
The refuge we never leave
When we come home to who we are in our entirety, not to some borrowed or imposed image, but to who we are, as we are, moment by moment, we discover we never left the “place” of true refuge and inner peace Ajahn Chah describes.
We have been pining for something that has been there all along – a silent wakefulness through which all our experiences to pass effortlessly.
The poet Mark Nepo writes that this wakefulness is not a destination but a song the human heart keeps singing, the way birds keep singing at the first sign of light; and the journey of becoming who we truly are never ends.
We don’t really arrive anywhere new; we just keep growing out of that radical peace of being. We blossom out from the timeless loving awareness; we shift smoothly into what Ajahn Chah called “the One Who Knows,” the impersonal witness to all things.
Our simple, dedicated mindfulness practice reveals a remarkable peace within, just waiting for you. A place inside beyond the clutch of the thinking mind, untouched by any memory or personal history.
And, funny thing, the body is always giving us subtle hints to go there, but we seldom listen.
It’s really so simple
It’s so simple, really. Just be kind to yourself and others. And meditate.
Open your being to embrace whatever happens with less judgment and more loving-kindness, especially to your imperfections and vulnerabilities.
And come home for the holidays, without leaving your seat.
12/21/2018
refuge
We suffer because we forget what we truly are. We take refuge to remember.
We forget we are love and compassion; that we are hard-wired to feel and connect. We forget we are truly and profoundly good through and through.
Yet we settle for less, much less.
Tara Brach said in one of her talks one of her favorite Asian teaching stories is about a huge statute of the Buddha somewhere in Thailand. Since it looked like all the others in the temple, made of plaster and clay, people didn’t particularly revere it over the others.
Then came a long period of drought, and small cracks started to appear. One of the monks had the idea to shine a flashlight to look inside the crack to see if it there was some infrastructure problem.
In every tiny crack he looked into, a bright shining light reflected back. He called the other monks, and together they carefully removed small pieces of the cracked plaster and clay to reveal flashes of gold.
When they removed the plaster and clay covering, they found one of the largest pure gold Buddha statues in Southeast Asia.
tiny cracks as insights
I like to think of the tiny cracks in the story as those little insights we get from time to time throughout our day: the light is turning red, OK, an opportunity to be aware of my body just sitting here in the car, waiting patiently.
My favorite work shirt is wrinkled – a reminder to fold it nicely the next time it comes out of the dryer.
Little cracks like these appear in the plaster covering of our life all day long, we just forget to look for the gold shining through each moment.
The monks think the statue had been covered in plaster and clay to protect it from (from thieves, I imagine). But through the passage of time, people forgot what they had.
Just like we forget what we have. We put on a covering of defenses to protect ourselves so long ago; we have forgotten what it was we are protecting: our true nature, our Buddha-nature.
we take refuge in the depths of our true self
We forget the gold and we start believing we’re the covering – the defensive, small, insecure self.
The essence of the spiritual path is simply reconnecting with the inner gold, mindful moment after moment. This connection is an unassailable refuge.
refuge in traditional Buddhism
In traditional Buddhism the first step on the spiritual path is taking refuge in the three treasures of Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. We take refuge in the pure gold inner Buddha, the spacious freedom of our true nature.
Sure, it begins with some desire on our part for perceived spiritual goodies, but if we hang in there it progresses into small daily revelations through those tiny cracks in the defensive self.
Mindfulness encourages the pure gold to shine though those tiny cracks.
With deepening experience, refuge as a religious ideal fades into the liberating immanence of our true nature. We are “at play in the fields” of aliveness and mystery.
to find treasures of joy in the fields of the daily
A sangha member emailed me this poem the other day; I write this week’s this email as a sort of prologue to this poem, which is a kind of prayer:
(with many thanks to Noah for finding it)
Empower me
to be a bold participant,
rather than a timid saint in waiting,
in the difficult ordinariness of now;
to exercise the authority of honesty;
rather than defer to power,
or deceive to get it;
to influence someone for justice,
rather than impress anyone for gain;
and, by grace, to find treasures
of joy, of friendship, of peace
hidden in the fields of the daily
you give me to plow.
~Ted Loder, from Wrestling the Light: Ache and Awe in the Human-Divine Struggle.
As Noah wrote in his email to me, “treasures hidden…in the fields of the daily” speaks to the heart of this practice.
07/20/2017
occupy home
I read online somewhere that before they enter kindergarten kids are exposed to thousands of commercials. I remember when our son was just four he told me most emphatically “Daddy we need to buy that toothpaste — next time, tell Mommy.”
Popular and social media mesmerize many with 24/7 slogans, sound bites and odd notions of normalcy. The problem is that those who craft these messages are pretty good at what they do, and before we know it, we have let the messages occupy some precious real estate in our mind.
Back in the 12^th Century, in Germany, lived an extraordinary woman, the Benedictine abbess Hildegarde Von Bingen – “a poet, author, philosopher, theologian, singer, musician, composer, playwright, artist, architect, doctor, botanist, herbalist, visionary, preacher, seer, and canonized Catholic saint” according to one biographer.
Responding to the popular, restrictive and corrosive messages of her day, she wrote:
We cannot live in a world that is not our own, in a world that is interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not a home. Part of the terror is to take back our own listening, to use our own voice, to see our own light.
Lots of these messages, like the one about the new, improved toothpaste that got my son’s attention back then, play on our sense of needing more, better, faster. It’s a major feature of our times. It organizes the way a lot of us live. It conditions much of our thinking and interactions more than what we may be open to realize.
Another remarkable nun, from our time, commented:
One of the advantages of being born in an affluent society is that if one has any intelligence at all, one will realize that having more and more won’t solve the problem, and happiness does not lie in possessions, or even relationships: The answer lies within ourselves. If we can’t find peace and happiness there, it’s not going to come from the outside.
~ Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo, American Buddhist nun.
Look at our constant low level anxiety around keeping all our various apps, drivers and devices all running the latest and greatest new versions.
But those moments of silent gratefulness – of welcoming each breath, each sound, each smell, and each rubber slipper step — calm this frenzy.
Hut at Nassau (1885) by Winslow Homer, from The National Gallery of Art.
In each mindful moment we occupy home.
Step by step, the path of mindfulness reveals the splendor present here in just this moment.
I did not read books the first summer; I hoed beans. Nay, I often did better than this. There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands.
~ Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Tara Brach reflects on when Munindra, a Buddhist meditation teacher from Bengal (now deceased) was asked why he practiced meditation, his response was,
“So I will see the tiny purple flowers by the side of the road as I walk to town each day.”
Mindfulness allows us to simplify our life, moment by moment we are simply present with what is presented to us by our senses. When we experience the tug and push of compelling thoughts or emotions we gently acknowledge them and come back to the utter simplicity of this breath, or this sound, or the touch of our feet in “rubbah slippahs” as we walk.
We come back again and again, gently, kindly, by simply letting go of everything that is not this breath, this sound, this touch, this smell.
And in this letting go sometimes we get a glimpse, an intuition, that this moment is enough, just as it is.
I’ll let Saint Hildegarde Von Bingen have the last word this week:
“Dare to declare who you are. It is not far from the shores of silence to the boundaries of speech. The path is not long, but the way is deep. You must not only walk there, you must be prepared to leap.”

05/19/2016