Three Truths and One Wish

1. Truth: If you relax, everything is workable. No need to push or force or panic or flee. Aggression isn’t necessary. Relax, soften, settle, let go. This doesn’t mean collapse or become too loose, but rather open your fist, rest your palm, open your hand, your heart as if you are giving something away or waiting to receive, to accept–open and aware and mindful and still.

In this relaxed state, you’ll know what to do, if anything needs done. You’ll know when to act and when to wait. Watching will be true seeing, hearing will be real understanding, what arises won’t hook you, you won’t resist or reject what is, but rather peacefully abide with it. You will taste meaning, bitter and sweet. Your words will find the river and dissolve. You might expect good, but you’ll open your door to whatever comes, and let them go when they go.

Image: federico stevanin / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

2. Truth: Your power is in being wholly, fully, and truly yourself. For you and for the world, this is necessary. You are who you are, you can’t change that, no matter how you try. Certainly, you can change habits or opinions or affiliations or memberships or addresses or hairstyles, but that fundamentally true part of you, that collection of love and wisdom and dirt and breath and blood is you as only you can do it. It is the best, most brilliant you can give, and the most brave you can be. “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”

fortune taped to my computer monitor

3. Truth: You are good. During meditation instruction, Susan Piver of the Open Heart Project often shares this mantra, a contemplation she begins her sessions with: “You are good. You are aware that all other beings share this same goodness. Recognizing this, your heart opens. With an open heart, you can change the world.”

Image: graur razvan ionut / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

One wish: That you relax completely into who you are, aware in each moment of your basic goodness, your natural wisdom and kindness, and in this way, you will be of benefit both to yourself and the world.

Relax. Be yourself. You are good.

It’s okay. Cheer up. You’re perfect.

Small Stone: Untitled

A splash of paint on the floor, half way between my meditation cushion and shrine. Paint spilled and smeared by some previous tenant, it looks like a spirit, a floor fairy, a gray alien bird.

As I meditate, my eyes lightly touch it, allowing it to be seen, to enter into my awareness, but not attaching to or focusing on it. Shamata meditation is done eyes open, with a soft gaze, giving the environment its place in experience, rather than denying it.

The instruction is that just like you can’t ask your eyes not to see, as it is what they do, their natural state of being, you can’t ask your mind not to think. However, you also don’t have to get carried away, hooked by thoughts, and just because they come and invite you to follow doesn’t mean you must. You notice, gently acknowledge them as they arise, peacefully abide, and let them go as they dissolve. They fly away like birds, float off like clouds in the sky, are no more real than this paint creature on my floor.