Tag: Buddhism

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Relax into impermanence

“When the appearances of this life dissolve, may I with ease and great happiness, let go of all attachments to this life, like a child returning home.” ~ Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche

When we pay attention to the world around us, we begin to notice that everything is always changing – the temperature of the air, the clouds in the sky, scents wafting by on the breeze, the sounds of people and traffic and birdsong.  We walk outside our same front door each morning and yet what awaits us is different every time.  We take our same route to work and yet we see different cars, different people.  We pour coffee into our same mug and yet, if we are really paying attention, we notice that the coffee tastes and smells differently today. Why? Because we are different.  Because this moment is different. Because all of life is impermanent and although we may encounter people and places and things that seem to be the same as those we have met or seen or experienced before, those experiences have ended and what we have before us is beginning anew.

Impermanence can be challenging to truly understand and accept.  Realising that nothing remains the same and that all things must come to an end can give rise to fear and anxiety and a sense of groundlessness.  As human beings we form attachments to the people and places and things in our life; they become part of how we identify ourselves and our place in this world.  When an experience is over, when we lose a treasured object, when a beloved friendship ends, we often try to cling, to grasp, to bring it back into existence, even though deep down we know that it has reached its natural end and we must continue on.

Life is a continuous cycle of beginnings and endings, of births and deaths. Each breath has a natural beginning and ending, each moment begins and ends, and the end of one moment marks the beginning of the next.  Through our mindfulness practice, we learn to observe this natural evolution of time and experience with a sense of equanimity; we learn to release our attachment to what has passed, without fear or anxiety.  As we cultivate an attitude of acceptance and our resilience grows in the face of change, we are building the inner resources necessary to face our deepest fears, to face the ultimate example of impermanence: our own death.

On the eastern edge of the Himalayas lies the Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan.  When we hear about Bhutan in the West, it is often referred to as the happiest place on earth, a country whose King declared ‘Gross National Happiness’ to be its true measure of success.  In such a place where happiness abounds, it might be a surprise to learn that they contemplate their own death five times a day.  Five times every day the Bhutanese acknowledge that this life will end; they acknowledge the impermanent nature of everything around them, and then they return to living in that moment.  I find this practice fascinating and have decided to try it myself – believe it or not, there is an app for that!  At five random times a day this app sends me a reminder that I am going to die, and it shares a quote with me about some aspect of impermanence.  At first blush this may sound morbid; however, I believe it is by confronting our fears that we relieve them of their power over us.

Fear can have profound effects upon us.  We can feel paralysed by our fears, and they can rob us of our ability to live each day in a healthy and conscious way.  When we acknowledge fear, when we observe it and name it and sit with it, we grow our awareness of its nature and its roots.  We can look upon it with compassion and lovingkindness and then feel its power diminish.  Change and the impermanent nature of all things gives rise to fear for many of us, but if we can find a way to acknowledge and accept impermanence, perhaps instead we can welcome change, relax and make peace with it.  Perhaps by accepting impermanence, by realising that all we really have is this moment, we can live our lives more fully and allow the births and deaths along the way to teach us powerful lessons.

I leave you with the wonderful wisdom of Pema Chödrön, a Tibetan Buddhist nun who has the extraordinary ability to make challenging concepts like impermanence feel much more accessible.

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The two arrows

When we welcome mindful practices like yoga and meditation into our lives, we learn about the myriad benefits they can bring.  We might feel them physically: less pain, more energy, softness, strength.  We might feel them on a mental or emotional level: less stress and anxiety, greater ease and calm.  Pay attention to the present moment, and all of these benefits can unfold for us.  It sounds so simple, and yet I am often reminded that ‘simple’ does not make it ‘easy’.

When we practice mindfulness, we seek to pay attention to the present moment in an open and receptive way, without judgment or attachment.  However, as human beings we unconsciously form judgments about all that we experience – good, bad, pleasant, unpleasant, happy, sad, the list goes on.  Mindfulness does not stop the judgments altogether, but it makes us aware of them when they arise, and more importantly, it teaches us to release our attachment to those judgments; we learn to accept what arises just as it is without attaching a story to it, without getting carried away from the present moment in that story.  Again, this sounds simple enough on the surface, but learning to release our attachment to the narratives we create can be very challenging, especially when those narratives come from deep-seated places and experiences within us.

When our attention rests fully in the present, we are witness to all that arises in that moment. For example, when we attend to sensation in the body, we begin to notice that sensations ebb and flow moment by moment – an itchiness here, a tingling there, warmth on my back, coldness in my feet.  When we attend to the breath we might notice that inhales and exhales differ in length and breadth and depth, and the breath moves differently in different areas of the body.  When we attend to our thoughts we might notice more busyness some days than others, or that certain thoughts come back again and again, and others seem to appear out of nowhere.  As we deepen our practice of mindfulness, we notice more and more about each moment’s experience, and we cultivate the ability to do so with less and less attachment.

In the Buddhist tradition, it is said that the root of all suffering is attachment.  We are attached to the desire to have (craving what is good, pleasant, happy) and the desire to not have (aversion to what is bad, unpleasant, sad).  We get attached to our judgments and perceptions of people and places and things.  When something arises in our experience, two things can happen: we can react automatically based on these preconceived notions that we have developed over our lifetime, or we can respond from a different place, a place that is open and receptive, a place of compassion and equanimity.  If we respond from this place, we can view the experience through a different lens and observe its nuances without those old judgments colouring our perception and causing us suffering.

When we sit down to meditate and we open our awareness to the changing experience of each moment, at some point we will inevitably be confronted by the suffering of our judgments and attachments.  We attend to the sensations in our body and a sharp pain arises.  Most of us would naturally feel an aversion to the pain; we might also attach a unique story to this particular pain – a story about an injury or illness, a story about something stressful, a story that makes us feel fearful of this pain.  There is a Buddhist parable about two arrows, and the first arrow is this initial sharp pain.  After we have been struck by this first arrow, would we intentionally shoot ourselves with a second arrow?  Of course not – and yet we do this through our unconscious reaction to the pain and our attachment to the story we create around it.  It is this reaction that is the second arrow of suffering, and while we cannot always control the first arrow, we can definitely work on stopping the second one – or at least reduce its impact.

The first arrow could appear in our practice as a physical sensation, as a mental or emotional sensation, or perhaps as something we perceive as energetic or spiritual.  We practice mindfulness so that we can cultivate resources like compassion, lovingkindness, acceptance, and equanimity.  We often think of directing these resources to our loved ones and those in the world around us, but it is vitally important that we also direct them towards ourselves.  When the first arrow strikes, we call upon these resources to help us respond consciously in a balanced way.  We feel that sharp pain – or deep loss, betrayal, anxiety, humiliation – and we reach into our heart and tap into our compassion and lovingkindness.  We sit with the pain and we accept it as part of this moment’s experience.  We resist the stories that want to attach themselves to the pain and carry us away from the experience of it.

Mindfulness is not an easy practice when we start to peel back the layers of our experience, but it is one that is full of rewards and enduring benefits.  Mindfulness helps us come home to ourselves, to create a place within us that is warm and welcoming and compassionate and accepting of all the many facets of who we are.  Indian spiritual leader Osho reminded us: “Drop the idea of becoming someone because you are already a masterpiece. You cannot be improved. You have only to come to it, to know it, to realise it.” Mindfulness helps us find our way to this realisation, recognising our innate wisdom and beauty and letting it guide us in the way we treat ourselves, others, and the world around us.