Talks

Someone asked me, ‘aren't you afraid about the state of the world?‘

I allowed myself to breathe and then I said, ‘what is most important is not to allow your anxiety about what happens in the world fill your heart. If your heart is filled with anxiety, you will get sick, and you will not be able to help.’

There are wars - big and small - in many places, and that can cause us to lose our peace.

Anxiety is the illness of our age.

We worry about ourselves, our family, our friends, our work, and the state of the world.

If we allow worry to fill our hearts, sooner or later we will get sick.

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Yes, there is tremendous suffering all over the world, but knowing this need not paralyze us.

If we practice mindful breathing, mindful walking, mindful sitting, and working in mindfulness, we try our best to help, and we can have peace in our heart.

Worrying does not accomplish anything.

Even if you worry twenty times more, it will not change the situation of the world.

In fact, your anxiety will only make things worse.

Even though things are not as we would like, we can still be content, knowing we are trying our best and will continue to do so.

If we don't know how to breathe, smile, and live every moment of our life deeply, we will never be able to help anyone.

I am happy in the present moment.

I do not ask for anything else.

I do not expect any additional happiness or conditions that will bring about more happiness.

The most important practice is aimlessness, not running after things, not grasping.

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Thich Nhat Hanh

Example of a sliver coming to the surface naturally. The tide of deep, repressed, suppressed, unconscious conditioning is flushed up and out during meditation and self inquiry. This is why the practice must be accompanied by willingness, humbleness, sincerity, basic warmth or gentleness, consideration, kindness, candor, compassion, steadfastness, teachings and community.

Remain as basic awareness, awareness. Willingness to just experience in a raw, unadorned, unnarrated way. Let go of what we are thinking and believing and relax into and AS the underlying energy. Find the immediacy in the breath, the body, Rather than look for a false refuge through armoring strategies like defensiveness, comparison, pridefulness we relax into the basic awake present. And the body naturally moves into balance. This is what is named as aimlessness. It is an aimlessness of the ego structure. Rather than gaining, winning, owning, disowning, burying our heads in the sand etc. we just simply come home. Come home to our basic, fundamental simple selves. Which is totality. The refuge is within AS loving awareness, and also within the teachings and the community.

The process of emotional turmoil:

It begins with an initial perception. and a belief about the perception gives rise to a feeling. This is where the hooking begins. The hormonal juice of the affective nervous system literally begins an IV infusion. And we begin to be under the influence. Begin to enter the undertow, the subtle current.

The push/pull, for/against, want/don’t want and more beliefs are generated around the emotional feeling. The flames are being fanned with our thoughts and beliefs.

During this process we can remain “steady as a log” as the Tibetans say. We can surrender the thoughts and stay vitally present with the immediate, raw, sharpness of the experience. Rather than attending to or getting stirred up we are abiding in fundamental awakeness, the underlying present. No separation , ie) narrative thought. Just pure experience. Fundamental awareness, present Presence is experienced as uncaused Love. As essence that is never far or distant.

To sink into this vulnerability can feel deeply uncomfortable at first and takes practice.

Aimlessness points to the fundamental changing ness ,free- fluidity of Reality. Aimlessness is not a checked out, “yeah whatever man” sort of experience. That is the ego’s idea of aimlessness. From Reality’s point of view, without the overlay of self identification, every current moment is the expression of Love’s originality. The redemption.

If one is able to abide, remain, STOP, take a seat in the midst of tidal wave emotion. It quickly unfolds into a poignant, profound and vulnerable tenderness.