tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6709844700034298584.post5885238645892631250..comments2024-03-14T06:26:00.182+00:00Comments on Reflections: Ajahn Sucitto: The Low PointUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6709844700034298584.post-63704267260002969682011-03-11T08:31:19.168+00:002011-03-11T08:31:19.168+00:00A deeply moving piece to read.... and to feel, mov...A deeply moving piece to read.... and to feel, moving is not just a metaphor, it reflects the actual sensory experience of my heart feeling kinda achy.<br /><br />This reflection with it's inclusion of death and 'long grey vistas' both literal and metaphorical spoke to something that was already awake for me this morning.<br /><br />This life and it's inevitable end. This morning, speaking to someone and knowing that our connection was going to end (a working relationship) We have shared intimacy and I felt a deep sadness and grief at the inevitability of this ending. I encouraged myself to 'stay' and feel it. I remembered that the Buddha said something like everyone we love will die. This is a pretty depressing thought. Yet, despite this there is this will to live and the mystery and beauty of it all. Our capacity to live with, and through and despite the sorrows of life.<br /><br />I too have experience viewing life 'through a glass darkly', mildly, on and on throughout my life, my heart fills with a deep sense of compassion for those who suffer with depression on a long term basis. It leaves me dumb.....what to say.... and I agree that were we taught from a young age to connect with, and honour our feelings, perhaps there would be less depression in our world.<br /><br />Heartfulness...... Mary Oliver's words resonate:<br /><br />'When it's over, I want to say; all my life<br />I was a bride married to amazement.<br />I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.<br /><br />When it's over, I don't want to wonder<br />if I have made of my life something particular, and real.<br />I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,<br />or full of argument.<br /><br />I don't want to end up, having simply visited this world.'rosies' thoughtshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02957584736623883421noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6709844700034298584.post-87394231889052778702011-02-08T13:13:13.539+00:002011-02-08T13:13:13.539+00:00Dear Sir,
I really appreciated reading this post....Dear Sir,<br /><br />I really appreciated reading this post. I actually just stumbled across your blog after hearing a talk that you gave on 'letting go', in light of which this post seemed particularly apposite. It is always alarming to hear about suicide, but especially so when the victim was a practitioner of mindfulness. I myself have suffered, on and off, from a version of melancholy and anxiety which is also probably closer to a mild flu than to severe pneumonia. However, it has been debilitating at times, and has had as great a tendency as any strain of negativity to trigger a multitude of projections and worries about the future. Nevertheless, I hold great faith in the power of mindfulness training to help us approach and slowly unravel these states of mind/heart. A particular section from the talk you gave sticks with me:<br /><br /> “…You begin to realize that feeling fed up with it all isn’t going to solve it…and trying to pull yourself together doesn’t quite solve it…so that the skills required are those that bring about release rather than taking a position. Yet our tendency is not to release, but to take a position: either ‘let’s get out of here’, or to get angry with oneself, and none of these things work because they don’t actually handle the hindrance. It is only letting go that handles the hindrance. The first aspect of letting go is letting go of the belief in it, and the second aspect is letting go of the reactions to it (the fondness of fantasies, or the sense of resignation).”<br /><br />I have personally found this pronouncement to be entirely true. Although, of course, letting go of beliefs and unpleasant emotional reactions to them is easier said than done, I do believe that it is possible. In my own experience I have found that when one has backed oneself into a tight mental corner and there is nowhere left to run, so to speak, there is a sense that challenging the rampant doubts and one’s belief in them (e.g. ‘I can’t be with this’, or ‘this will never end’) is eventually the only option available. And once a small negative belief - which once seemed entirely solid and unquestionably true - has been challenged in awareness, with an outcome of a felt sense of relief and respite from its emotional/mental effects, then at least the potential is created for any belief to be challenged. And, as you note in your article, it is mindfulness that facilitates this, by “aligning…attention to a specific object (breathing, body, mental image) and out of the store of moods, phobias and desires that the mind holds in its archives”, so that, in the end, “You don’t exactly do letting go: what occurs through carefully holding and moderating attention around a specific theme is that the stuff that the mind projects is deprived of a foothold. So it lets go of its pre-occupations.” Practicing mindfulness makes possible the ‘un-believing’ of held negative beliefs (or the ‘letting go of the belief in it’, as you put it), and does so by allowing us to see these beliefs as only beliefs – all the more so once we have personally experienced tangible benefits from taking such a stance. Such insights, revealed by mindfulness, in turn really help us to be (in the body) with negative states when they arise (i.e. to ‘let go of the reactions to it’). For if we know deeply, through experience, that negative beliefs and doubts are in fact ephemeral and have no truth to them, then intense emotional states are easier to bear. And then letting go can occur, which allows such states to pass, and which in turn inspires confidence in our capacity to face similar states in the future.bearwolfhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00124362035198737173noreply@blogger.com