Aloha Sangha

ancient wisdom for crazy times

Category: courage

  • enoughness

    enoughness

    Our meditation practice shows us radical enoughness. We have all we need to lead a fulfilling life now. If you can breathe, you can be mindful.

    Your of well-being is actually independent of conditions. As your practice matures over time, the feeling of well-being arises more frequently and in all kinds of situations.

    We may feel a little chagrined finding ourselves in those old emotional haunts, and can laugh at ourselves more readily.

    This marvelous discovery prompted former Google engineer Chade-Meng Tan to pen his bestselling book “Joy on Demand.”

    trust, courage and gratefulness

    Let’s explore some implications of this discovery, specifically regarding trust, courage, compassion and the attitude of gratefulness. These qualities add richness and depth, transforming this well-being into a truly spiritual endowment.

    During a talk he was giving on “grateful living”, David Steindl-Rast, a Catholic Benedictine monk, was asked by an audience member how she could possibly feel grateful after just being laid off from her job, and feeling overwhelmed at how she can continue to care for her sick father, and help one of her kids who is in trouble with the law?

    His answer is remarkable for its depth and clarity.

    When I ask myself, would I feel grateful if I had just been laid off from my job–not to mention the other challenges you are facing–the answer is no. How could anyone in your position feel grateful?

    But gratefulness is not a feeling; gratefulness is an attitude. Even though we have a grateful attitude toward life, we may or may not feel grateful. No should applies here. Our feelings are not under our control; only our attitude is.

    He went on to explain:

    You feel a trust in life that overcomes fear. This trust makes your heart feel wide open and free, the very opposite of those anxious feelings that squeeze your chest until you can hardly breathe.

    Now, that deep trust in life is not a feeling but a stance that you deliberately take. It is the attitude we call courage; and courage is quite compatible with feeling afraid. Courage presupposes fear; it is the attitude of one who goes ahead in spite of fear, anxiety, and fatigue.

    A grateful person trusts enough to give life another chance, to stay open for surprises. As you stay open in grateful trust, grateful feelings will start to bud. By living the gratefulness we don’t feel, we begin to feel the gratefulness we live. This is not a quick and easy recipe, but you will find that it works.

    Take a moment right now. Sit down. Make yourself comfortable. Close your eyes. Become aware of your breath breathing itself. Notice the enoughness of your life in this moment.

    Our practice is about coming back to the present and finding the well of being that comforts us and dis-inclines us from being pulled and pushed around so much by everything that we like and everything we don’t like.

    The Buddha said we suffer because we don’t have what we want. Or we have what we want, but we’re afraid to lose it. If we judge everything by likes and dislikes, we’re always unhappy.

    There is something deeper. There is something more fundamental.

    Our life just as it is!

    Or as Brother Steindl-Rast puts it – contentment comes from  knowing the gift that is unceasingly being given to you.

    It’s simple: meditate, discover the happiness independent of circumstances, trust your life as it is, lean into the suffering of yourself and others with courage, and open to the flowering of gratefulness, compassion and loving-kindness for all beings everywhere.

    This is our path. It’s what we signed up for.

  • non-contention

    non-contention

    We open little by little into the warmth and tenderness of our own essential vulnerability. It’s the birthplace of the renewable energy sources of courage, love, empathy, and compassion we all need so much these days.

    Despite all that’s wrong in the world, at times I surrender and trust that I can be of some benefit by staying awake for it all, but non entangled, yet connected by a caring heart.

    The line from a poem by Neruda comes to mind:

    You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep spring from coming.

    What We Can Learn from Neruda’s Poetry of Resistance

    You can’t keep spring from coming

    Neruda was probably addressing the humanitarian and political crisis of his native Chile when he wrote that line, reminding us that at times of oppression, dehumanization cannot last.

    But I think that line also describes the fruit of our mindfulness practice. With a calm mind, we live in a bigger, fresher space that accommodates everything with ease. As Jack Kornfield reminds us:

    What would it feel like to love the whole kit and caboodle—to make our love bigger than our sorrows?

    When I read the Japanese poet Issa’s haiku below, I see cherry blossoms blooming in the dead of winter (despite it’s unlikeliness), and I feel the acute poignancy of life, with all its joys and sorrows:

    What a strange thing!
    To be alive
    beneath cherry blossoms.

    the power of non-contention

    Mindfulness softens the contracted heart many of us experience these days, and hastens the coming of the Spring Neruda mentions.

    Diana Winston calls this special power of our mindfulness practice non-contention.  “You release the need to struggle and oppose the present moment,” she explains.

    Diana elaborates:

    If I don’t practice non-contention, I suffer, fret, struggle, complain, and basically ruin my day. If I do do it, I grieve briefly but my mind is at peace. I let go of what are merely ideas about the way things should be and open to the truth of things as they are.

    But let’s not miss one key point. This non-contention Diana talks about is not giving in to oppressive conditions nor to escaping them in distraction.

    ending the war in our heads

    This inner work is suble and layered. First we end the war we carry on in ours minds as we constantly react to this and that, e.g., the news.

    But then there is the work of healing, integration and nurting our communuties. Let’s let Cesar Chavez describe this part of our path:

    Non-violence is not inaction. It is not discussion. It is not for the timid or weak. It is hard work. It is the willingness to sacrifice. It is the patience to win.

    In fact, opposition to injustice will be much more effective by the training in non-violence baked into our basic mindfulness practice.  

    before after1
    Before and Afer, by Consuelo Mancheta of Valencia, Spain

    whatever blocks your heart is unreal

    Jack Kornfield observes that whatever blocks your love is, in the end, unreal. The twelfth-century Sufi philosopher El-Ghazali observed:

    If you can lose it in a shipwreck, it isn’t yours.

    I don’t think we can easily lose this love in a shipwreck.

    We just rest for a moment, being purely and simply present, awake and aware, with no agenda at all, we radically step out of our habitual comfort zones of control, manipulation, and could have-would have-should have.

    this takes courage

    Living with mindfulness and meeting each moment as it is takes practice, and a kind of courage. I’ve been told this courage is depicted symbolically as those fierce figures in Vajrayana Buddhist iconography.

    In times of stress and uncertainty, we may cling to a protected place. This is a small space, where we aren’t fully ourselves, and want to control life. We like to think in this space that we aren’t vulnerable, but that’s not so.

    Mindfulness mirrors our humanity. It’s just plain vulnerable to be human, to be in a body, and be intimate with others in this way.

    tenderness

    To meet that vulnerability fully, not half-assed, that’s tenderness. We open little by little into the warmth and tenderness of our own essential vulnerability. It’s the birthplace of the renewable energy sources of courage, love, empathy, and compassion we all need so much these days.

    And the good news is that they are already here for us, at the center of our being, just waiting for us to put down our burdens.

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