In jealousy and foolish pride

greed hatred and delusion

we immolate our peace of mind

and suffer in confusion

 

Old fears and anguish quake the heart,

in place of ease a tightness comes –

releasing this …A…ཨ…o p e n n e s s

reveals the sameness of our “bones”

 

Each moment of our life will pass

as fresh or turbid waters

we have a choice…

in letting go

we are the the buddha’s daughters

 

 

 

‘Sisters under the skin’  could be this pictures title

of course ‘brothers/sons’ fit too – it just doesn’t rhyme as well!

I wrote this poem many years ago after some turbulent interactions helped me see how quickly I could still become enmeshed in reactivity.

People we find difficult to relate to are priceless for showing  us our ‘pinch points’ or unresolved bruises, and then we can notice the depth of our limited, habitual, egoic response to freeze, withdraw or try to control the situation.

With this, the limited effectiveness of the scabs which act as a protective covering for old wounds is exposed. Picking at their edges is still painful…so there is incomplete healing.

Defensiveness, when there is some’thing’ to protect is a natural response… When there is directly seen to be no ‘thing’ as such,  then resting in the spaciousness of openness works to resolve the tension. The primary locus of perspective is inclusive rather than individuated.

With this, the edges of the wound are brought together and the pain of separation, of being a truly separate other with the fear of annihilation by definition, is healed.

This may sound like a ‘happy ever after’ story… but it’s certainly not the case that all interactions then flow easily. But maybe more easily than they otherwise might because…
as the defensiveness of the ego decreases there is more of a sense of innate inclusion and with that sense, warmth increases and the defrosted softness allows other possibilities of engagement to come to mind.

There is space for the situation to evoke, rather than a habit which provokes, the response.

A screwdriver for a screw… a hammer for a nail…but ‘me’ as something rigidly defined is not useful for very much…!

We are all scions, reflections of the buddha-mind.
It’s in not seeing, recognising, realising that sameness…with that an absence of fixed internal/external definition….that self-other definition increases and the divisions of the world arise.

 

 

Photo creative commons Write Well Daily

The  ‘Beer of Awareness and the Bubbles of Manifestation’ was the title of a talk i gave recently in a small tent. It was an enjoyable hour and a half for me – and also it seems for the happy handful who found themselves there – involving ginger beer, paintings, bubble blowing and a small plastic man in a tin box!

I nicked the beer image from one of James’ talks as its a refreshing a visual metaphor for non-duality. The bubbles are arising from the ground of the beer as its efflorescence…a part of it, within it, and the moving aspect of it – not separate from it nor homogenous with it. In the same way the froth of manifestation, occurring within the openness of the mind, is an enjoyable  but ever-changing display… identification with, and fusion with, individual bubbles is exhausting and unsatisfying…as they pop pop pop!

It’s not a perfect metaphor as the contents of the bubble in a glass of beer is different from the beer itself whereas a bubble in space is space surrounded by space. The encapsulation is a very thin wall and when the bubble pops all is as it was before the encapsulation. The bubble is not a ‘thing’, stable, enduring – an entity which can be known and controlled or something to rest on… and neither is that which we co-create with the energy of the mind….

….’The old man of the village called us back to drink three cups beneath the crooked mulberry…

Mankind is small but this drunkenness is large …where now is your Japan, where your Korea?’

…to a Korean friend – from Sayings and tales of Zen Buddhism by William Wray