介绍:
24 Staying in the Middle
OPENNESS doesn’t come from resisting our fears but from getting to know them well. We can’t cultivate fearlessness without compassionate inquiry into the workings of ego. So we ask ourselves, “What happens when I feel I can’t handle what’s going on? What are the stories I tell myself? What repels me and what attracts me? Where do I look for strength and in what do I place my trust?”
The first thing that takes place in meditation is that we start to see what’s happening. Even though we still run away and we still indulge, we see what we’re doing clearly. We acknowledge our aversions and our cravings. We become familiar with the strategies and beliefs we use to fortify our cocoon. With mindfulness as our method we start to get curious about what’s going on. For quite a long time, we just see it clearly. To the degree that we’re willing to see our indulging and our repressing clearly, they begin to wear themselves out. Wearing out is not exactly the same as going away. Instead, a wider, more generous, more enlightened perspective arises.
How we stay in the middle between indulging and repressing is by acknowledging whatever arises without judgment, letting the thoughts simply dissolve, and then going back to the openness of this very moment. That’s what we’re actually doing in meditation. Up come all these thoughts, but rather than squelch them or obsess with them, we acknowledge them and let them go. Then we come back to just being here.
After a while, that’s how we relate with hope and fear in our daily lives. Out of nowhere, we stop struggling and relax. We see our story line, drop it, and come back to the freshness of the present moment.
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