Neither hold onto ‘what is’ nor try to get rid of ‘what is’ — Nature, Life, The Cosmos or whatever name you give the divine process will move it, change it, or dissolve it for you.
Yes, alright. You read about The Secret and The Law of Attraction. Fine. Apply the techniques but in the meanwhile…. while you wait for the desired result, then what’s the approach? That’s what I’m writing about here.
The snow photo above reminds me of states in life that we simply cannot do anything about. That’s the first snow of the season that came last week in the mountains… which by now (a week later) is melted by a warming trend. Trend is a good word I think. Stock markets are associated with this word and so is the weather and in our own life there are energy trends as well which may (or may not) be personal karma or group karma or simply life itself. Things come and go like thoughts during meditation and like snow that comes and then melts away.
It’s tough not to hold on to thoughts and not to dispel them which is what we are told to do in meditation and thus in life. Thoughts are trendy–they come and go like the fashion trends do, and like stock market trends and like trends in the weather.
I’m thinking a lot about how when it would snow in the mountains and me living all alone up there and in the midst of a large snow that was coming down fast. I’d start to feel that bit of panic– What if this keeps up? Will I be snowed in? When will it stop? If it keeps snowing at this rate….
I can get caught in that kind of thinking when I’m on the treadmill at the gym. My goal is to hold a particular pace without stopping for a total of 30 minutes. If I have one nano-second wherein a thought comes wherein I hold one like, What if I can’t hold this pace for 7 more minutes? This is getting tough! Inevitably, I cave-in and have to slow down to recover my breath.
If we could do more of just neither holding onto what arises nor trying to dispel it…. right? I mean this is our whole practice in life, isn’t it? We hear it called ‘accepting what-is’.
It isn’t easy. But like the snow melting, everything is impermanent and eventually dissolves, goes away, or changes form. The nature of life itself is that nothing last forever–not the good, the bad or the ugly.
It isn’t easy in the meanwhile to meet whatever arises in our self and in our life spectrum and simply be open to it. To have the courage and detachment to be open to it to discover what is beyond it or behind it without manipulation or opinion or any thought of anything whatsoever.
And then what happens? We do it again in the next moment and the one right after that one. We can have faith that the snow will stop and eventually melt, the 7 minutes will pass on the treadmill without heart failure and whatever trend, whatever contemptuous situation of disdain you are facing right now will eventually change and so will the bubbly blissful business as well. One thing we can know is that everything changes and nothing stays the same for very long.
And that’s why we should neither try to hold or try to dispel anything that arises. Just observe and be and above all else, maintain the sense of humor!
Joy's Blog 