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Impermanence
Xrayman
Veteran
One of the most important concepts that Buddhism has helped me to realise is the concept of Impermanence.
last week I had to explain to my daughter that her "fair-weather friends" were not really her friends, they were only along for the ride that her good nature and kindness provide. It is so hard to get a child to feel better when treated this way. :-/
In the course of the discussion I mentioned the fact that I have a concept for her to try to understand-impermanence.
Things come and go, things do not remain, happiness comes and goes but so to does sadness and "fair-weather friends" etc.
What buddhist concept do you hold dear, in your day to day activities? To which idea can you relate to more often than not?
regards,
Xrayman
last week I had to explain to my daughter that her "fair-weather friends" were not really her friends, they were only along for the ride that her good nature and kindness provide. It is so hard to get a child to feel better when treated this way. :-/
In the course of the discussion I mentioned the fact that I have a concept for her to try to understand-impermanence.
Things come and go, things do not remain, happiness comes and goes but so to does sadness and "fair-weather friends" etc.
What buddhist concept do you hold dear, in your day to day activities? To which idea can you relate to more often than not?
regards,
Xrayman
0
Comments
I love your quote by Michael Franti btw!
I, like you, think a lot about impermanence in my day to day life. It's a great comfort to me and helps me stay mindful.
Kindness and compassion toward all beings, especially the ones I find it difficult to like, is constantly on my mind. I have a lot of work to do in this area and I give myself a lot of practice.
Confidence in myself as a process and Buddhism as a process is also on my mind every day because I have to work on patience and having compassion for myself as well as others.
Oh, there are so many. I'm steeped in thinking about it all because I have nothing else to do with my time, like work or children or husband. My parents are usually a joy and I appreciate these years with them more than I can express. When we have conflict, which is rare, there's always some Buddhist wisdom to be practiced. And living with the physical pain everyday has me practicing regularly and as much as I could wish for.
I like to study a bit everyday, but my whole life is about practicing now. I don't have any distractions and live a very quiet, pretty solitary life. The life I've always wanted.
This is a good topic, Xray. Thanks!
Brigid
“The important thing to remember about karma is not to make it into a blame game. It's really just cause and effect. Don't attach judgment to it. If you wish to create happiness for yourself and others, you do not do it by planting seeds of unhappiness. You must plant seeds of happiness. You do this by practicing virtue and compassion. It's really that simple.”
(Palzang, Buddhism 101, Karma Question (Mrs Karmadillo’s thread) 240206 post #37)
Another thing I constantly remember is that everything we perceive is transitory and illusory....
Just let it go.....
I guess for me personaly I try to practise "loving-kindness"/compassion. I know this is going to sound "dicky", but when I garden I make sure that I remove all the creatures that I see from harms way. I put them in one of the paddocks where they won't be hurt. In this way I constantly remind myself that compassion is not only for humans, dogs, cats and cows but for ALL creatures.
I'm also trying to remind myself that the Buddhist teachings are guidelines and are not strict rules where i'll be damned if i stumble at times, alot!!!!:rockon:
P.S. Sorry for the long post!!!
That's not "dicky" at all. (I don't know what "dicky" means, but oh, well.)
I think that's pure Buddhism. It's a beautiful practice of mindfulness and I've started doing it with everything from ladybugs (or ladybirds) to spiders to mosquitoes, you name it. It's a wonderful practice on so many different levels and I think you're lovely to do it. Staying alert and living our lives with compassion is so helpful.
Brigid
P.S. Xray, have I said how much I like this thread?
Good one, Simon.
Hair bands of the 80's should know this lesson well.
-bf
Even with things as small as my participation out here.
Trying to identify what this self is? What ego is? My ego's desires, wants, clingings, expectations, etc.
To me, right now, Self is a nasty little buggar that needs a "time out".
-bf
I do much the same thing! I have three cats, and they will inevitably bring 'gifts' to me, in the form of mice or birds- most often alive and unharmed, apart from in shock. I know that cats can't help their behaviour- that's what they evolved to do, but what I do is praise them and thank them for giving me their gift, and carefully remove the prey from their jaws. When they're not looking, I then quietly nip across the road to the park, and let the poor animals go! Both hunter and hunted are happy: the cats get praise for their gift, and the mice or birds get to live after a nasty scare!
That's your idea of self. The ego isn't the enemy. This sort of self dislike is another game of the ego's perversely enough. The same is true of the thought of 'improving' the self, or of making it more compassionate or more aware, or of the self being more disciplined and so forth. That's all part of ego in the Buddhist sense.
My idea of self is what I'm talking about.
My idea of who or what I am. My expectations. My clingings. My desires. Or "self" as in, "this is me - this is what I do." "I am this."
Ego that I was referring to is like this: Someone says something rude or obnoxious towards me which "wounds this ego". This ego, doesn't like what has been said and wishes to drop some sort of verbal bomb on the jerk that is trying to tear me a new one.
What is the point? What is the point of allowing this ego to lash out at someone else? What is to be gained? The self-satisfaction of being verbally abusive back to another person? What is gained? By nurturing the anger used to in retaliation like this, I'm nurturing something that is really of no import - nor will anger like this do anything positive for me.
Am I all wrong?
-bf
I guess I look at this ego, self, anger, desire, etc. in the same fashion as looking at the mind when meditating.
Just as in meditating - the monkey mind will wander. In the same way, things/emotions are going to happen - but do my passions rule me ... or vice versa?
-bf
"First, we need to know we're upset... If we're upset we have to experience being upset... And such experiencing is physical; it has nothing to do with the thoughts going on about the upset... If I feel that I've been hurt by you, I want to stay with my thoughts about the hurt. I want to increase my separation; it feels good to be consumed by those fiery, self-righteous thoughts. By thinking, I try to avoid feeling the pain."
- Everyday Zen
And as Ezra Bayda says,
"So this first aspect of sitting-being-in-the-body-simple as it sounds, is actually very difficult. Why? Because we don't want to be here. A strong part of us prefers the self-centered dream of plans and fantasies. That's what makes this practice so difficult: the constant, unromantic, non-exotic struggle just to be here. As we sit in wide-open awareness, however, as the body/mind gradually settles down, we can begin to enter the silence, where passing thoughts no longer hook us. We enter the silence not by trying to enter, but through the constant soft effort to be present, allowing life to just be.
The second mode of sitting is labeling and experiencing. As we sit, emotions arise. Sometimes they pass when we become aware of them. But sometimes they demand more of our attention. When that happens, we become more focused in our practice. With precision we begin to label our thoughts. As well, we focus on experiencing the bodily state that is an inextricable part of an emotional reaction.
As emotions arise, we can ask, "What is this?" The answer to this question is never analytical. It cannot be reached with thought, because it is not what the emotion is about. It's what it is. So we look to our experience itself, noticing where we feel the emotion in the body. We notice its quality or texture. We notice its changing faces. And we come to know, as if for the first time, what the emotion actually feels like.
Invariably we will slip back into thinking. As long as we are caught in thinking, we can't continue to experience the bodily component of our emotions. In fact, the more intense the emotion, the more we will want to believe our thoughts. So the practice is to label the thoughts over and over-to see them clearly and to break our identification with them. That will almost always involve moving back and forth between labeling and experiencing.
Learning to stay with-to reside in-our emotions in this way allows us to see how most of our emotional distress is based on our conditioning, and particularly on the decisions and beliefs that arose out of that conditioning. We come to see that these emotional reactions-which we often fear and prefer to avoid-amount to little more that believed thoughts and strong or unpleasant physical sensations. We can see that when we are willing to experience them with precision and curiosity, we no longer have to fear them, or push them away. Thus our belief systems become clarified.
The third aspect of our sitting practice is opening into the heart of experiencing. On those occasions when we experience dense, intense or even overwhelming emotions, when we seem so confused that we don't even know how to practice-what can we do?
When the precision of labeling thoughts is not an option, the practice is to breathe the painful reaction into the center of the chest. Although eventually we will still need to clarify the believed thoughts that are an inextricable part of our emotional reaction, for now we simply open to our deepest fears and humiliations. We're pulling our swirling physical sensations, via the in-breath, into the center of the chest, allowing the center of the chest to be a container of awareness for our strong emotions. We're not trying to change anything. We're just learning to fully experience our emotions. Why? Because experiencing our emotions fully will allow them to break through the layers of self-protective armor and awaken our heart. Fully felt, our emotions will clear the path to the deep well of love and compassion that is the essence of our being.
It is in these darker moments, when we feel overwhelmed, that we are apt to judge ourselves most harshly. We're likely to solidify the most negative core beliefs about ourselves, seeing ourselves as weak, as losers, as hopeless. It's at this point that we most need a sense of heart, of kindness, of lightness, in the practice. We do this by learning to breathe into the heartspace, thereby undercutting the relentless self-judgment of our deeply held beliefs. As we breathe into this space, piercing our armoring and awakening the heart, we can open into a more benign awareness toward ourselves and the human predicament. We can begin to relate to ourselves as we might relate to a defenseless child in distress-nonjudgmentally, with friendliness, tolerance and kindness. Our willingness to breathe into the heart, to stay in that space for just one more breath, shows us our strength, our courage to go on.
By opening into the heart of experiencing, we can come to understand that everything is workable. This is one of the key points of practice. Our efforts to be-in-the-body, and to label and experience, will inevitably "fail" at times. We will have periods of aspiration and effort, followed by dry spots and apathy. Ups and downs in practice are predictable and inevitable. That we seize these ups and downs as opportunities to judge ourselves-as failures or as superstars-is the problem. The countermeasure is always to simply persevere-to attend to one more breath, to label one more thought, to experience one more sensation, to enter just one more time into the heartspace. We can then experience for ourselves that it is ultimately possible to work with everything. It may not be possible today, but it is possible. In fact, it may take years of work in all three aspects of sitting practice for this understanding to become real to us.
Until now I've spoken of these three modes of sitting as if they were distinct from each other. In truth, although each mode does entail a different aspect of practice, they do have one essential thing in common: they all require that we experience this present moment. That's what our practice always comes down to: just being here. By continually allowing the light of awareness to shine on the confusion and anxiety of the present moment, we break the circuitry of our conditioning. This is the slow transformative path to freedom."
From - Three Aspects of Sitting Meditation By Ezra Bayda
It's an awesomely powerful meditation tool to reflect comprehensively "This is not me, this is not my Self, this is not what I am".
When I was experiencing a severe panic attack in which I felt, (literally I mean) a part of my brain (or awareness, or something,) receding to the back of my head and things around me, like a table, chairs, objects on the the table began to look like they were further away and not as identifiable as they had been when I was calm, I instinctively knew that the part of me that had receded had done so in order to avoid the discomfort of the panic. My surroundings turned grayish and lost their weight in my perception. I felt like the floor I was standing on was no longer as solid and I wanted to bang myself up against a wall to feel solidity.
I was lost in thinking, and I was thinking "panic". I couldn't feel the physical attributes of the panic at first, only the mental agony. At first, I didn't feel like I had a body at all. I was made of pure panic. I think now that may have been why I had wanted to throw my body against a wall. But soon I started to feel cold and sweaty and physical sensations started to make themselves felt. Things in the room slowly started to come back into...not focus, because they had never been blurry, but where they had receded before, they started to come back, like they were moving in a tunnel back towards me. I understand this. I came to the conclusion after that panic attack that the next time it happened I would look at what was happening to me clinically, as if I were my own doctor. I would take note of what my thoughts were, what my physical reactions were, and I'd keep track of what was going on during the whole process of the panic attack like the analytical part of me was detached from what was happening to the emotional me, the me that was attaching values (extremely negative values) to the thoughts.
And this is exactly what I was hoping to achieve by "becoming my own doctor" as I described above.
So, I wasn't crazy. lol. My instincts were good. I was primitively trying to do what Ezra Bayda is describing here.
Thanks for posting this. I have a new clarity in what has been, by far, the greatest challenge I've ever faced. Just this week I started to see this panic thing that I've had almost all my life not as the great dreaded thing anymore but my own little journey into hell. I've been trying to avoid it by any means all my life. But now I'm starting to see it as an incredibly precious opportunity to face hell and overcome my fear of it and fear in general. It's now entirely possible, even inevitable to overcome these conditioned fears with skills like the ones Ezra Bayda is describing here.
My self confidence has been raised a hundred fold as a result of being forced to deal with this issue and having found the right tools to do so. Until recently I never dreamed I'd be able to overcome this panic disorder. I always thought it was going to be something I was going to have to avoid for the rest of my life. What a terrible waste that would have been! What an opportunity I would have missed.
I'm not there yet, but I know how I'm going to overcome fear, or at least the fears that I know. And if I can conquer fear, I can face anything. I can be a strong, productive aspect of the Dharma and finally be of some help to others. It's going to be great! LOL!
Thanks again for the clarity.
Brigid
in the body..
good stuff!
i read it 3 times.. thanx
again.. the more i learn, i learn i need to learn more..
Harry S. Truman.
Surprisingly to me, my GPA has gone from a 3.2 to a 4.0 now since starting this non-attachment in school.
How fortunate I am to have discovered Buddhism...
and I take it 3.2 to 4.0 is going up, not down.....?
In any case, well done. it looks like you're really doing well.
Have you stopped chewing your pen yet....?
Great post, K of B! Yes, how fortunate indeed. I wish I'd had it. But I do now, so I'm content.
I'm so happy for you! You've found the secret to calm success!! And at such a great age. I'm just thrilled to read your post!
Really well done!
Brigid