Aloha Sangha

ancient wisdom for crazy times

Tag: Rumi

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.
Eastern Common Crane by Numata Kashu (1838-1901).
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
to live wisely, and able to love
This is our work: to live my life wisely, not in contention with anything, and able to love.
What does it mean to practice Dharma in the home stretch of 2023, with all the wars, hate crimes, refugee crises, and environmental catastrophes all over the world?
I would offer a short and simple response, quoting Sylvia Boorstein, great grandmother, psychologist and Dharma teacher since 1985:
I want to live my life wisely, not in contention with anything, able to love. This sounds ordinary as I write this, but I think it’s the fundamental goal of spiritual practice.
On-Being with Krista Tippett
This week, rather than bore you with my thoughts, I would like to present passages which speak to me directly about just how to live as Sylvia suggests, wisely, not in contention with anything, and able to love.
As we witness second hand the terrible events in the world, I feel guilty thinking it is also important to celebrate the beauty in my life, and express my gratitude for it.
The poet Rumi counsels us to “let the beauty we love be what we do.” Even if we are stuck doing what we don’t really love, our mindfulness practice has a magical way of melting the resistance and opening the door to the alchemy Rumi alludes to here:
Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study and begin reading. Take down the dulcimer.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
Still Water Center
In many places people wake up empty and frightened every day because of the non-stop violence in their lives. What might it mean for me to “kneel and kiss the ground”?
The poet and essayist Mark Nepo shows the work of our mindfulness practice is a kind of kneeling down into the moment, and kissing the ground of our being, is a kind of self-cleansing.
Moving through my fears doesn’t mean I have to absorb or placate the demands of others. Facing my pain doesn’t mean I have to withdraw from what comes my way. On the contrary, I need to open the ancient door of my own making and let life kiss me on the forehead.
James Baldwin, the gay African American novelist, writes of how his struggles for legitimacy and authenticity in the 50s and ‘60s led him to hard fought inner grace, where:
Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word love here not merely in a personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace—not in the infantile American sense of being made happy, but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.
This, then, is our work. To kneel down into the moment, to kiss the ground of our common experience, take off our masks in the process, and discover peace and joy in the shared nature of being as the mind settles down and the heart relaxes.
To live wisely, and able to love.
12/02/2023
the most important thing
This meditation is a 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.
Someone once asked Suzuki Roshi, the pioneering Zen teacher from Japan who founded the Zen Center of San Francisco in 1969:
“Roshi, what’s the most important thing?” and he answered:
To find out what’s the most important thing.
Byron Katie, who teaches a practice called self-inquiry, said that the world’s number one problem is confusion. As we hang in there with meditation practice, week after week, a little clarity starts to emerge.
The most important thing that brought us to the meditation cushion may not seem so important as we progress. We may have signed up to get an edge in academia or our social life, maybe to find a group to hang out with.
After a while, it sinks in: meditation is not self improvement, it’s self-discovery. It’s more about undoing and unlearning conditioned habits rather than getting some special meditation goodies.
We all just want to be happy and feel at home in our own lives
And to feel a connection with the world and other beings.
But, as the song goes, we are looking in all the wrong places. By habitually looking outside of our skin for fulfillment and happiness, we struggle.
So many of the voices we listen to- both in our own head and outside, through the media, 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 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.
As one of my teachers Sharon Salzberg says:
We learn not to get caught in trying to reach out and grasp after things we never really needed to begin with.
The Healing Is In The Return
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 airborne.
Meditation helps us put down the baggage we carry around so we can be airborne and travel lightly in this world.
This letting go can be subtle, nuanced. We usually associate letting go as letting go of something. But as the teacher Gil Fronsdal points out, there is a complimentary movement here.
With enough practice we appreciate the story doesn’t end with letting go: we discover we are letting go of something but we also are letting go into something else.
Gil Fronsdal offers this metaphor: a diver lets go of the diving board the seconds later dives into the cool water of the pool, much as we let go of impatience then seconds later relaxing into a feeling of ease.
If we find ourselves gripped in panic or fear, we learn to let go into the felt safety of relaxation.
We eventually get how much nicer it is to relax into our natural, free and easy being-ness than it is to struggle with something.
But if we haven’t tasted this free-and-easy being-ness, it’s 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 meditate every day and hang in there.
Then, each moment is fine. Each moment is enough. Nothing missing or lacking, as the Zen teachers of old would say.
Every moment is appreciated as profound and meaningful.
read another?
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07/24/2023
not a caravan of despair
Do you have a fear of missing out on a more spiritual experience doing a mountain of laundry, washing a sinkful of dishes, or raking leaves till kingdom come?
The meditation teacher Karen Maezen Miller, in a piece published in Lion’s Roar, rightfully calls us on this thought, while describing how the domestic lives of the communal Zen masters of old offered many a critical course correction:
Rather than think of daily life chores as something to get through; it’s fully experiencing the “getting through” part that frees the mind more profoundly than running off to a cave in the misty mountains.
In Do Dishes, Rake Leaves, she asks:
Tell me, while I’m sweeping leaves till kingdom come, is it getting in the way of my life? Is it interfering with my life? Keeping me from my life?
Do Dishes, Rake Leaves
There is a break in this piece while she makes simple observations about folding clothes and washing dishes. Then she answers her own question:
Only my imaginary life, that life of what-ifs and how-comes: the life I’m dreaming of.
Then another short narrative digression, ending with:
At the moment that I’m raking leaves, at the moment I’m doing anything, it is my life; it is all of time, and it is all of me.
Pause and ask yourself:
do you really and truly feel you are missing out on some more spiritual experience by being saddled with a mountain of laundry, a sink overflowing with dishes, or a yard full of leaves to rake?
I like Josh Korda’s line, that our mindfulness practice is
not really about being above it all; it’s about being with it all.
Whether in sitting meditation or raking leaves or doing the laundry, our core practice is to notice what is happening.
When you feel irritated, bothered, or bored, just be aware of mind states and their underlying feeling tones. Or the feeling tones and their undelying mind states.
As soon as you notice these feelings, and the awareness in which they arise, you are no longer lost in them.
As the Korean monk Haemin Sunim writes:
Awareness is inherently pure, like the open sky. Stress, irritation, and anger can temporarily cloud the sky, but they can never pollute it.
The wave of irritation, anger, boredom, or whatever it is, naturally recedes on its own as long as you don’t feed it by dwelling or spinning an interesting narrative around it.
A camel train crosses a desert in convoy; from Wikimedia Commons.
This is not just detachment; we also learn to turn towards and gently open to the sadness or grief that seeks our attention, triggering perhaps sadness, shame or fear.
I love how Pema Chodron describes this essential skill:
We join our loss of heart with honesty and kindness. Instead of pulling back from the pain of irritation we move closer. We lean into the wave. We swim into the wave.
Mindful poetry
Mindfulness is this simple: we pay attention to what’s happening in the moment, let go of any stories we may tell ourselves about our experiences, and “swim into the wave.”
As Jiddu Krishnamurti put it:
Pure attention without judgment is not only the highest form of human intelligence but also the highest expression of love.
As you get better at it, you realize that challenging mental states are just the resistance to what is. And they rise and recede within the silent space of your awareness.
When you sit down to meditate today, feel any resistance which may come up — to aches, pains, or mental states such as boredom, restlessness, or doubt.
Savor the resistance, like a fine wine or a smooth boba tea.
As it dissipates, feel the joy of the quieting mind, which is always there.
Ours is a practice of uncovering joy and fulfillment in our lives just as they are, regardless of our circumstances.
Rumi has the last word this week; on his tomb is purportedly written:
Come, come, whoever you are. Wanderer, worshiper, lover of life. Though you have broken your vow a hundred times, ours is not a caravan of despair.
Poems of Rumi
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07/13/2023
meditate every day? yes, you can!
We have been practicing the opposite of what meditation asks of us for so many years, no wonder it is so hard to meditate every day.
I am often asked why is hard to meditate every day? Despite the utter simplicity of the practice itself, why is it so difficult to consistently sit down and meditate?
One of the best answers I know comes from Diana Winston, who is the Director of Mindfulness Education at the UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center. She is also a mom to her three year old daughter, as well as the author of the wonderful book- The Little Book of Being, among others.
Here is her answer:
It’s hard because meditation is the opposite of how we’ve been culturally conditioned.
It’s hard because it’s not necessarily yet a habit. New habits take work.
It’s hard because our brains are wired to be stimulated and it takes a tremendous effort to overcome our addiction to stimulation.
It’s hard because there are seemingly far more interesting and necessary things to do. We could watch TV, work out, write poetry, scrub the grout from our showers…
It’s hard because sometimes, we are going through intense emotions that we don’t want to feel, and nothing short of restraints are going to make us sit there and feel that grief. Sometimes the thought of meditating makes us gag. Especially when we’re having a difficult time in life.
Yet paradoxically, that’s the best time to meditate. It’s when we need it the most.
How to Meditate Every Day, by Diana Winston
why do we give up on meditation?
We have been practicing the opposite of what meditation asks of us for so many years, it’s no wonder we get frustrated and give up.
Meditation asks us to take a step back from how we usually experience our everyday life, and observe how this life unfolds in real time, moment to moment.
While drinking our morning coffee, rather than experiencing the taste of the coffee and the warmth of the mug in our hands, we are often troubleshooting imagined problems at work, or re-living past events– often with revisionist touches.
Or am I the only one who “slightly” re-writes the plot lines of personal failures and other insults?
Meditation invites us into a new relationship with experience: shifting from planning, self-congratulation or regret to touching, tasting, hearing, seeing, or feeling. From a world partially made up in our head, to the real world of raw sensory impressions, unfolding moment by moment.
We are no longer “doing” anything. Rather, we are eavesdropping on ourselves as experiences unfold. This shift from doing, comparing, judging, and thinking, into simply observing is like applying the brakes as we approach a stop sign.
Only many of us just roll right through.
The shift from doing to listening in
This shift from doing to listening in allows us to see how we are contributing to our own malaise. I love Rumi’s line here:
Stop weaving and see how the pattern improves.
Sure, we get restless and anxious. We are not used to “just breathing” because, as Diana writes, it’s the opposite of how we’ve been conditioned.
This thing just takes patience. There is no way around it. Ralph Waldo Emerson reminds us:
Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.
And just look at what She has done with near infinite patience. We just need a sliver of that!
Don’t think about this too much. The task of noticing what is happening in real time, and allowing that knowledge to get successively deeper and wider, carries the mind toward less and less discomfort and regret.
Just like that.
We all feel annoyed, frustrated and tired at times. But we discover, as Rumi points out, that as we stop weaving the threads of our own despair and boredom, the pattern improves.
Life unfolds, and we meet it simply and clearly. A mind like this lives peacefully amidst the changing circumstances of these challenging times.
simple practice, profound results
I am continually amazed at the wonderful our simple practice produces. Just sitting on a cushion and tuning into our real-time lived experiences, and tuning out the radio noise of the ego = such wonder and awe.
The mind re-shapes itself, harmonizing with the flow of life. And contentment follows. It’s that simple.
we harmonize with the universe
I love this observation by the Catholic Benedictine monk and author Brother David Steindl-Rast, OSB:
A lifetime may not be long enough to attune ourselves fully to the harmony of the universe. But just to become aware that we can resonate with it – that alone can be like waking up from a dream.
Just sitting, breathing and tuning in.
Radio noise? Static? Boredom? No problem, just sit, breathe and tune in. Happiness follows, in the Buddha’s words, “as surely as one’s shadow.”
07/06/2022