For those who are hard on themselves, always pushing and pulling and striving, this may be the most important aspect of the teaching. Which is, for perhaps the first time in your life,
just stop.
Just be.
Every impulse to go off and do something else, or distract oneself, just stop. Witness the impulses arising, but don't take the bait. Let those things be. Let go. There will be plenty of time for striving later if you want. But for now, just relax and hang out right here, right now. Stay sensate - continuously feel the body, aware of awareness. Just an ordinary blob of flesh with nothing in particular to do, nowhere to go, no one to be. If boredom arises, then experience that. Don't push anything away with some need to distract, or to move to something "better". Feel that need for distraction, that need for things to be some other way than they are, and return to letting everything just be as it is. Stop fighting, stop pushing and pulling. And then continually feel and experience the next sensation, and the next.
Strictly speaking, any effort we make is not good for our practice because it creates waves in the mind. It is impossible, however, to attain absolute calmness of mind without effort. We must make some effort, but we must forget ourselves in the effort we make.
- Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind
The essence of Zen is non-seeking ...
"Only practice" is the best, but without any object, without trying to achieve anything.
- Taisen Deshimaru, The Ring of the Way
Both of these Zen master quotes illustrate the paradoxical nature of practice. A kind of effort must be made to lean (or perhaps fall) in the direction of mindfulness, yet ultimately through practice this leaning becomes the natural default of the mind, at which point we can completely forget ourselves and the mind can relax to an unbelievable degree. This is like the way a trained musician or athlete works hard over the years to ultimately forget themselves, to lose themselves in the moment when they play at the highest level.
A taste of this forgetting is available in any moment, and for some people this simple understanding may end up being their method. To let go deeply, maybe for the first time, and simply do nothing but relax and be.
The various structured methods I recommend are paradoxically useful for keeping oneself aware enough to do this vital practice of letting go. Some kind of effort in this way is often necessary to change, to retrain the mind, to unlearn what we have unconsciously learned. Maintaining awareness is important. But it is also important to understand the essence of the inward journey that needs to be happening amidst the awareness, that of relaxing and letting go, and letting everything be.
Those structured methods can become a kind of trap for people that are used to striving, if they are pushing themselves too hard and beating themselves up for lapses. But the structure is often necessary, and it's a kind of balancing act to engage with enough effort to maintain a near-continuous awareness, while simultaneously letting go enough to be deeply relaxed.
Some guidelines on this kind of relaxation from Tibetan Buddhism, Six Words of Advice by Tilopa (McLeod translation).
A taste of this forgetting is available in any moment, and for some people this simple understanding may end up being their method. To let go deeply, maybe for the first time, and simply do nothing but relax and be.
Stop leaving and you will arrive.
Stop searching and you will see.
Stop running away and you will be found.
- Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
The various structured methods I recommend are paradoxically useful for keeping oneself aware enough to do this vital practice of letting go. Some kind of effort in this way is often necessary to change, to retrain the mind, to unlearn what we have unconsciously learned. Maintaining awareness is important. But it is also important to understand the essence of the inward journey that needs to be happening amidst the awareness, that of relaxing and letting go, and letting everything be.
Those structured methods can become a kind of trap for people that are used to striving, if they are pushing themselves too hard and beating themselves up for lapses. But the structure is often necessary, and it's a kind of balancing act to engage with enough effort to maintain a near-continuous awareness, while simultaneously letting go enough to be deeply relaxed.
Some guidelines on this kind of relaxation from Tibetan Buddhism, Six Words of Advice by Tilopa (McLeod translation).
- Don’t recall - Let go of what has passed
- Don’t imagine - Let go of what may come
- Don’t think - Let go of what is happening now
- Don’t examine - Don’t try to figure anything out
- Don’t control - Don’t try to make anything happen
- Rest - Relax, right now, and rest
Alternate translation by Watts & Wayman:
No thought, no reflection, no analysis,
No cultivation, no intention;
Let it settle itself
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