Thoughts from the Shambhala Tibetan Winter Retreat I have been attending here in London...
The way of the warrior; fierce grace. There are few things challenging as sitting for 8 hours every day, no distractions, only a simple cushion, a bell, and your mind. Our society has conditioned us our entire lives for distraction, for multi-tasking, for clouding over our minds with the busyness of the world; what a challenge, then, to simply sit, to uncover, to unwrap, to spend all day looking directly at your own mind. To uncover what we hide from; to sit with pain, to sit with difficult emotions, with nowhere to run, nowhere to distract; simply to sit with what is. Having the dignity, the courage, to stop running. Waking up. Crazy Wisdom. This is the journey.
I thought of a night, recently, caught out in the cold of a trendy part of London, walking to meet friends, marveling at the huge lines of people, waiting to get into clubs, bars;
the effort, the energy; driving, planning, waiting, working,
and I wondered for what;
for what where all these people looking for?
They were chasing something, looking for something in those lines, standing out in the cold December air; looking for happiness, contentment, perhaps? Do we really know what we are seeking?
"We expend a lot of effort to improve the external conditions of our lives, but in the end, it's always the mind that creates our experience of the world, and translates that experience into either well-being or suffering. If we transform our way of perceiving things, we transform the quality of our lives. It is this kind of transformation that is brought about by mind training."
-Matthieu Ricard
The way of the warrior; fierce grace. There are few things challenging as sitting for 8 hours every day, no distractions, only a simple cushion, a bell, and your mind. Our society has conditioned us our entire lives for distraction, for multi-tasking, for clouding over our minds with the busyness of the world; what a challenge, then, to simply sit, to uncover, to unwrap, to spend all day looking directly at your own mind. To uncover what we hide from; to sit with pain, to sit with difficult emotions, with nowhere to run, nowhere to distract; simply to sit with what is. Having the dignity, the courage, to stop running. Waking up. Crazy Wisdom. This is the journey.
I thought of a night, recently, caught out in the cold of a trendy part of London, walking to meet friends, marveling at the huge lines of people, waiting to get into clubs, bars;
the effort, the energy; driving, planning, waiting, working,
and I wondered for what;
for what where all these people looking for?
They were chasing something, looking for something in those lines, standing out in the cold December air; looking for happiness, contentment, perhaps? Do we really know what we are seeking?
"We expend a lot of effort to improve the external conditions of our lives, but in the end, it's always the mind that creates our experience of the world, and translates that experience into either well-being or suffering. If we transform our way of perceiving things, we transform the quality of our lives. It is this kind of transformation that is brought about by mind training."
-Matthieu Ricard
