What I’m describing isn’t magic; it is a practice, something between an art and a science. But it can definitely be learned, and it is learned in the doing. I know of no other way.

At first maybe you try and you can’t do it, though there is some relief from just being there with the conscious breathing. It puts the fear in a larger context. Perhaps you keep escaping, the way you have in the past, but you see your escapes. That can be a valuable practice too because you see that they don’t work. The mind gets tired of seeing them again and again.

Finally you get to the point where you can just be with the fear. And however monstrous it has seemed up to that point (a part of that perception stems from the fact that you have been shrinking from it), you see that it is observable, and therefore workable. You can deal with it.

You realize the futility of your escapes. They don’t work. They never worked. There is a greater fulfillment in staying with the fear. Really being with it through the whole process is different from our usual intellectual understanding that it will go away. It’s a different kind of knowing. And it changes our whole relationship to fear.

The truth is that we don’t own anything, not our bodies, not even the content of our minds. That’s actually good news (though not for the ego; it immediately compensates by resolving to be a great  practitioner, really to see through itself and become a famous meditator). Wisdom has helped us let go of the burden of attaching to things as me or mine. We are able to lay that burden down.

I remember an image I saw about this truth in Japan. It was a cartoon of a Zen monk walking along the beach carrying a huge sack. It was so heavy that his footsteps  were like craters. On the sack it said ME. That’s the burden we need to lay down. It will make our life incomparably lighter.

~Larry Rosenberg

there never was an easier way…..

inquiry for today~    reflect on the many riddles designed to hide us from ourselves……

how to rise up

Everything

just as it is,

as it is,

as is.

Flowers in bloom.

Nothing to add.

~Robert Aitken