Walking the Wall

 The truth you believe and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new. ~Pema Chodron

After a lovely walk through a State park near me, where my friend and I saw a deer standing in the path in the woods (I’ve gone to this park since I was a child and have never seen a deer there, it was a beautiful moment), we decided to stop off at the bookstore as we were both looking for a book. We both ended up walking out of the bookstore with a book by Pema Chodron, she bought When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times and I bought Comfortable with Uncertainty: 108 Teachings on Cultivating Fearlessness and Compassion.

I’ll definitely be getting more of her books, I think she has a very easy, common sense, practical, compassionate voice. Her chapter on the Four Noble Truths was the clearest I have read thus far,  and she reminds the reader that "everything in our lives has the potential to wake us up or to put us to sleep" and obviously she recommends we wake up, not zone out. Her approach to meditation is very straightforward as well. I have been interested in beginning to do meditation, but I over complicated it in my brain and thought, "I’ll never be able to clear my mind completely." She explains that we don’t have to fight against having thoughts, that when your mind wanders, label it "thinking" and then focus back on the breathing, happens again? Label it and move back to the breathing. No stress, no work, acknowledge what comes and let it go. That sounds doable to me.

My goal this week is to work on what she calls "The Practice of Mindfulness and Refraining":

   

Refraining is…the quality of not grabbing for entertainment the minute we feel a slight edge of boredom coming on. It’s the practice of not immediately filling up space just because there’s a gap.

I know I am very guilty of this, even more so as I multi task so much so I’m not just filling, but overfilling. A space of quiet comes my way and I grab for my laptop, or my knitting, or my iPod, or the remote, or a book. The knitting is relaxing if I choose a simple project and leave the quiet intact–but the point is that I shouldn’t have to have every moment full of something. I really need to learn to slip in some true quiet.

   

In the attitude of silence the soul finds the path in a clearer light, and what is elusive and deceptive resolves itself into crystal clearness. Our life is a long and arduous quest after Truth.
   ~Mahatma Gandhi