Renew your commitment when you get up and before you go to sleep.
It's been very enjoyable to work with this slogan. I start by asking myself, What is my commitment? The answer can be quite different on different days -- a commitment to practice for all, or to avoid harming others and the great way through judgmental thoughts or actions, or to allow/acknowledge emptiness in my daily activities, or simply to practice. All variants of a basic commitment towards the original nature, but I am enjoying the specificity that can arise. The morning commitment and the night time commitment can also have a different quality -- morning commitment after a good night's rest and a little touching in at the heart center to see what seems most available, and a little later notice where I've been slipping up and reaffirming a commitment to not keep beating myself up over it; the evening a good time to just remember/reaffirm what's most at issue before conking out (letting go into sleep). Oddly, something about this slogan is getting me into bed at a more reasonable hour :). Maybe I'm looking forward to seeing what my commitment is going to be?
Practicing even when distracted is good training
aka STORY OF MY LIFE
I'm not trying to exaggerate the situation, but really, even when practicing and stillness is all around, is there any time when I'm not distracted in some sense?
OK, taking the slogan in a more literal way, in specific situations where I'm distracted, I've lapsed into a very narrow frame of mind (distracted by my own thinking and stories), yes, it's very helpful to practice at these moments. Sometimes it's possible to see the emptiness even of this distracted frame of mind, see it directly -- sometimes it's not, and then it can help me notice the specific character of the mind that I've taken on.
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One of the precepts we worked with before, "abandon all hope for results" came up again this week, maybe as a result of working with the two above. Became easier to see that it doesn't mean just releasing hope for good results and allowing the possibility of bad results, it also means abandoning the notion of results all together. Maybe this is clear conceptually, but it was easier to notice the ways this had not been thoroughly enacted in my "distracted" states.
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