How do we keep our practice alive and applicable to life just as it is? Sometimes, practice can feel effortless. But at other times, being mindful or sending metta can be the last thing we want to do in a situation. When this happens, and practice takes the back seat, what are some ways we can re-center it in our lives? This can be especially difficult for lay practitioners, as we live in the midst of circumstances that seemingly pull us away from practice and towards destructive habits.
This Sunday Max guided our exploration of ways to recognize that our practice is always right here, right underneath us, even when it feels far away.
Amongst the wisdom of his talk, Max read a quote from a Q&A with Thich Nhat Hanh,
Q: Why do people have to suffer?
To grow lotus flowers, you need mud. Suffering is the mud and the lotus is happiness. The mud does not smell good, but the lotus flower smells very good. If you know how to make good use of the mud, you can grow a beautiful lotus. If you know how to make good use of suffering, you can create happiness. We need some suffering in order to create happiness, but we already have enough suffering. We don’t need to create more.
If we know the art of suffering, we will suffer much less; we will suffer only a little, and we will use our mud to grow our lotus flowers
You can read the rest here: which you can read here: https://www.parallax.org/mindfulnessbell/article/dharma-talk-the-art-of-suffering/
He also referred to part of a story told by Joseph Goldstein,
Once when I was on retreat in Nepal with my Burmese teacher, Sayadaw U Pandita, I had an experience of the difference between more-or-less mindful and fully mindful. The conditions on this retreat were really bad: poor food and just a cement floor and whatever kind of pad we had brought with us to sleep on. My room was right next to the latrine. A lot of smells. I found myself grumbling a lot inwardly—the inner grumble, the inner complaining.
One day I went for a meditation interview with my teacher, and I told him what I was experiencing, expecting a little sympathy, or at least empathy, about what I was going through. But all he said was, “Be more mindful.”
My first thought was, “Thanks a lot! I’m suffering with all these bad conditions, and you’re just telling me, ‘Be more mindful’?” But I left the exchange, went outside, and started walking meditation. I thought, “Well, he’s a great meditation master. He said to be more mindful. Let me try it.”
In that period of walking meditation, I intentionally brought my attention in closer. My habit of attention had been halfway there, halfway not. But when he said to be more mindful, I realized: “Oh, I can change this habit of attention.”
You can read the whole thing here: https://www.lionsroar.com/the-doorway-to-wisdom/
