Frank Ostaseski's "The Five Invitations" is a true gem. I am moved to share these excerpts from Frank's beautiful and wise book out of the awareness of how many of us are struggling to find that calm in the storm that is befalling so many in these times. It is my belief that it is important to support ourselves and one another in doing exactly that ― in cultivating and strengthening our capacity to be a true refuge and to act increasingly from a place of mindfulness, compassion, wisdom, kindness, and love. We are all family. Bless us all...
❤ Molly
Finding a Place of Rest In the Middle of Things
The philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote, "I have often said that the sole cause of man's unhappiness if that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room." The deeper we go within ourselves, the more expansive we become. We allow everything to show itself, even what is buried in the unconscious. There is no need to repress the unwanted parts of our situations, ourselves, or others. We realize that everything is a product of our dynamics, our histories, and our reactivity ― and that's it's all part of the human condition. We can allow thoughts, feelings, ideas to come and go without being swept away by any of them.
When I am with family and friends or at the bedside I try to create a warm, open, and nonjudgmental space in which whatever needs to happen, can happen. This is best done if I can first become a refuge to myself. I can pause and call on the better part of my nature as a shelter from my habitual defensiveness, reactivity, or neurotic tendencies that cause me to be overwhelmed by the chaos surrounding me. We cannot always eliminate difficult conditions, but we can use our acquired skills to transform obstacles into opportunities. We can be that one calm person in the room.
In doing so, we can be a true refuge to others...
Becoming liberated in this human experience means including the personal, psychological, and emotional aspects of life, and also going beyond the personality toward a fuller awakening. We have to be willing to meet our suffering, to uncover the hidden shadows, to acknowledge our neurotic patterns, to heal childhood wounds, and to embrace what we have rejected. I
have needed to balance spiritual practice with good psychotherapy, somatic work, grief counseling, and other methods of inquiry. Those wise therapeutic relationships have been invaluable to helping me integrate what I first discovered in silence.
These days, I speak of my mindfulness practice as "a practice of intimacy." We can't know ourselves, each other, or death from a distance. This work is up close and personal. Meditation is all about learning to be intimate with ourselves, with others, and with all aspects of this worldy life, bringing the healing power of loving awareness forward so that we can meet what is scary, sad, and raw.
When we see through the mind's conditioning and our habitual behaviors, we come to understand the ways in which we cause ourselves unnecessary suffering. This is where the real freedom of the practices lies. It doesn't help us to escape from life or transcend our pain. Instead, we become intimate with everthing, and know ourseles as not separate from any of it...
Everything we do can be used in the cultivation of mindfulness: driving to work, eating, raising our children, being with our beloveds. We can roll it all into what we call "our spiritual practice" and seamlessly integrate it into every aspect of our daily lives. Waking to a new day is a holy moment ― doorways offer themselves as thresholds to new possibilities, trees are utterly themselves. All things are a potential source of support and awakening. When we attempt to separate the sacred from the ordinary, we create a false dichotomy.
For many years, I have appreciated the teaching of the Indian guru of non-dualism Sri Nisargadatta, who famously siad, "The mind creates the abyss, the heart crosses it." This statement is often understood as highlighting the division between the thinking mind and the emotional heart, and how love is the bridge between the two.
Over the years, I have come to a deeper understanding of what Nisargadatta might have meant. In hte Buddhist tradition, mind-heart is one thing. The abyss is formed when we split mind and heart into two. As when we split off the ordinary from the sacred, they appear as two sides separated by a gap. Nisargadatta is reminding us about the vast, limitless space of awareness that is beyond thought and emotion. This space doesn't separate. When the mind and heart are awake, you see everything in its unique detail, even your problems, and it all comes to rest in love and wisdom.
It's what Rumi is referring to in his famous lines:
Out of our ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing
There is a field. I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase "each other" doesn't make any sense.
Yes, there is space between each breath, each thought, but it actually connects them. It's a bit like experiments in perception that use the picture of the old woman who, if we look carefully, we can also see as a young woman. Heart and mind, ordinary and sacred ― all are in fact a unified whole.
When the mind is attentive, focused, we notice the space. Here is where we discover a place of rest. Claude Debussy is credited with saying, "Music is the space between notes." The white space on this page allows your eyes to rest on the words. In art, negative space is just as important as the image itself, helping to bring balance to a composition. No matter how much activity, no matter how many forms exist in our lives, there are pause and spaces everywhere, inviting us to rest.
These days, I allow myself to slip into the gaps. The gaps are not the enemy. The transitions, the in-between places in life, are where I find peace and tranquility, the refreshment of pure awareness, the still point, the perspective that recognizes the holiness in all things.
Mind the gap. The sacred can be found in the ordinary. Rest can be found in the middle of things.
― Frank Ostaseski
Excerpted from The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death
Can Teach Us About Living Fully
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