Other Restful Things

Other Restful Things

1- Meditation

from Sharon Salzberg's book "A Heart as Wide as the World"

Trough meditation practice we learn to enter into silence, and there the fruits of the practice reveal themselves: wisdom, which is seeing deeply into the true nature of life, and compassion, the trembling of the heart in response to suffering. Wisdom reveals that we are all part of a whole, and compassion tells us that we can never really stand apart. Through this prism we see life with openness, knowing our oneness. We find wisdom and compassion coming to life, transforming how we understand ourselves and how we understand our world.

Like the presence of the Sky

One day I asked an acquaintance of mine, "How has your life changed since you started meditation practice?" Without a moment's hesitation, he said that before starting to practice, whatever happened in his mind felt as if it were taking place in a small, dark, enclosed theater and that everything taking place on the stage seemed to be over whelming and solid. He went on to say that now, since he started meditation practice, his awareness of what happened in his mind was like watching an opera in an open-air theater.

It was funny that he would use this metaphor of an outdoor theater. Not long before that conversation, some friends had taken me to my first opera - in an open-air theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Our seats were situated so that I could see both the stage and the sky all around it. In New Mexico the sky is so vast. Watching the characters struggling with the immense complexity of their lives against the backdrop of that open and spacious sky was a fantastic juxtaposition: however histrionic the event, however dramatic, however much despair or ecstasy was happening on-stage, it ws all in the context of that hugely spacious sky.

Trough meditation practice we begin to enlarge our own perspective. We discover a quality of space that knows no bounds, a quality of mind that can accept anything., The practice is about nurturing this immensity of vision. Sometimes we think that what is in front of us is so solid and so real, and yet it is actually just an operatic interpretation. If we step back and see things in a greater perspective, our experience changes completely. But when we aren't able to see this larger perspective, our energy and awareness tend to collapse around certain events. We habitually create, as William Blake put it, "mind-forged manacles," binding ourselves to limited perceptions.

However, we can retrain the mind to be aware, to be mindful, to take rest in what is actually happening, to relinquish grasping, aversion, and delusion, and to be filled with love. The mind has already been trained: to grasp, push away, separate, collapse, to be confused, to not see options. We have been trained to be jealous, anxious, doubtful, afraid, and to judge ourselves. Our minds have basically been conditioned to be stuck in the opera and to miss the sky above and around.

Training our mind through meditation does not mean forcibly subjugating it or beating it into shape; it means very patiently inclining the mind toward awareness, loving-kindness, compassion, letting go, and toward a generosity of spirit. Again and again, no matter what is happening, we incline the mind trough meditation practice to relax ans experience the spaciousness that is inherent to awareness and to loving kindness. Ten thousand joys and ten thousand sorrows may arise - but that spaciousness, like the presence of the sky is able to transform our lives.

2- Rest