“In my psychotherapy practice, I saw this play out daily. Clients spoke of loneliness, but what they really meant was a failure of reflection.”
— Robert Saltzman
Where do you want to be?
I work with someone who spends all of their time on holiday despite actually being on holiday for only two weeks of every year.
The other fifty weeks of the year she spends imagining, anticipating, desiring, wanting, dreaming and fantasising about those two weeks.
You might say she is in the wrong job. Maybe. But I suspect not.
One year when she came back from holiday I asked her if she’d had a nice time. She said ‘yes’. But then went on to list how her holiday could have been different, where she would rather have been, where she wanted to go next year.
Where are you right now? Where is the majority of your attention? In the past? In the future?
What about right here, right now? This is where everything is happening. This is where the action is. This is where your life is actually unfolding. Live and unedited, uncensored.
And you don’t have to do a damn thing about it.
How to be unhappy
- Compare yourself to others
- Compare the present with the past and the future
- Believe your thoughts
- Repeat until miserable
“I speak not of transcendence, but of what shimmers before the mind moves to name it. Not the ultimate, but the immediate. The unsponsored. The unclaimed. Neither sacred nor profane. Not sanctified. Not high-minded. Not venerated. Just this.”
— Robert Saltzman, Beyond Spirituality
“The way out of our cage begins with accepting absolutely everything about ourselves and our lives.”
— Tara Brach
There is no thought, idea, concept or story that can survive the raw actuality of experience.
Not even this one 😉
“Silence is not freedom from sounds. Silence is not freedom from thoughts. Silence is freedom from some other moment – past or future.”
— Dorothy Hunt
“…it becomes vividly clear that in concrete fact I have no other self than the totality of things of which I am aware.”
— Alan Watts
Looking back over old journal entries from years ago I see a completely different person. Recognisable but gone. How transient and ephemeral our selves are.
Ouch
This morning I stubbed my toe. Badly. You know, the kind that hurts beyond all reason. The stubbing that convinces you the toe must be broken (it never is). We’re all too familiar with that briefest of delays between the actual physical contact before the searing pain inevitably hits.
And it occurred to me, as I was reeling and grimacing, that the exquisitely awful pain was an intensely pure encounter with consciousness/ awareness/ life/ whatever. The crystal clarity of the agony was as perfectly ‘it’ as the glorious relief that slowly came as the pain eventually subsided.
As intimate an encounter with being as anything else.
The varying flavours of phenomena are all of a piece. Whole, complete and indivisible. None of it can be pulled apart, edited out or separated off from the rest.
At a certain point what we want and what we don’t want dissolves into simply what happens.
The specific qualities of experience pale in comparison to the simple presence of everything, the fact that anything is happening at all.
