sit quietly and observe your thoughts
This simple practice helps release unhelpful preoccupations. You notice these creeping 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.
