Meditation practice is a powerful way of getting deeply in touch with your life at its most essential level. As you become more in touch with your life, you naturally become more attentive, awake, and attuned to your thoughts, emotions, and inner currents. Meditation practice is a spiritual process that unfolds with your life. It requires no doctrine or belief system, and it can be adapted to many purposes and systems of thought. In its broadest sense, meditation practice is an approach to life that promotes self-awareness, self-kindness, and self-forgiveness and brings us the clarity to see what we need to do in our lives and the forbearance to stay the course. Meditation practice fosters the calmness and balance that enable us to be honest with our emotions and needs without being limited and trapped by them. Meditation practice makes it more possible for us to act out of our deepest, calmest, most accurate selves.

In short, meditation practice helps us to firmly set the cornerstone of the most important relationship of our lives: our relationship with our self. As this relationship develops, our meditation opens up to include others; and as our relationships soften and deepen, loving kindness and openness become more natural to us. Meditation practice nourishes our maturity.

Norman Fischer, Taking Our Places: The Buddhist Path to Truly Growing Up

(Hope you aren’t getting sick of seeing quotes from this book!)

A person who chooses to walk the path of maturity is a trusting and trustworthy person. He or she has learned, through clear observation over time, that there is no alternative to trusting what is, for to mistrust what is, is to reject our life experience which is all we’ve got to build on, no matter how hard it may be. To take our places in this world we need to trust this world, ourselves, and each other this much.
Norman Fischer, Taking Our Places: The Buddhist Path to Truly Growing Up

Giving back, the final stage

The final quarter of life is the time of the sannyasin, the one who emerges from the forest dweller phase of life with a much deeper understanding of life and the self than people have found in earlier phases. Just as the householder phase represents the fruits of what was learned during the apprentice phase, so the final chapter of the sannyasin manifests and offers back to others what was learned during the forest dweller phase. What they have learned turns out to have a lot to do with transition because it involves the discovery that whatever you are now is the product of transition. Once your identity was nonexistent, and then it was new and untried. It was only through transition that you let go of whatever you then thought was critical to hold on to, and then you waited a while so that whatever was to come next could emerge and become the new way and the new identity that replaced the old.

You can learn that in the abstract earlier in life, but the only people who know it through living it over and over again are old people. Out there in the forest, through taking stock of what life has taught them, the people who found a way to do the developmental business of mid-life discovered the deeper, the more spiritual meaning of transition. It is their own developmental task in the closing chapters of their lives to bring back that lesson to the world. It is their business during the final quarter of their life-long careers—what rubbish that careers end at any point before death!—to help people to understand the great alternating current of life, the rhythm whereby being is followed by letting go, which is followed by emptiness, which is followed by renewed energy and purpose, which is followed again by being.

—William Bridges, Transition: Making Sense of Life’s Changes

A Master once described the journey to enlightenment as ‘like filling a sieve with water’. When a woman questioned this Master on his meaning, he gave her a sieve and a cup, and they went to the sea, where he asked her to fill the sieve with water. She poured a cupful of water into the sieve . It was instantly gone . ‘Spiritual practice is the same,’ the Master explained, ‘if we stand on the rock of I, and try to ladle the divine realization in. That’s not the way to fill the sieve with water, nor the self with divine life.’ He took the sieve and threw it into the sea, where it sank. ‘Now it’s full of water, and will remain so. That’s spiritual practice. It is not ladling cupfuls into the individuality, but becoming totally immersed in the sea of divine life.’

Total Immersion

(Unknown, from the book 1001 Pearls of Buddhist Wisdom)

Spiritual awakening doesn’t happen because you master some spiritual technique. There are lots of skillful meditators who are not awake. Awakening happens when you stop bullshitting yourself into continual nonawakening. It’s very easy to use disciplines to avoid reality rather than to encounter it. A true spirituality will have you continually facing your illusions and all the ways you avoid reality. Spiritual practice may be an important means of confronting yourself, or it may be a means of avoiding yourself; it all depends on your attitude and intention.

Adyashanti

The Sun Magazine | Who Hears This Sound?

Source: thesunmagazine.org