Two Sides of Practice
Dos Lados de la Práctica
This meditation invites you to move between two sides of practice—approaching discomfort with honest attention and resting in effortless, open acceptance.
Two Sides of Practice
Every practice has two sides.
We can approach the source of our suffering,
and that will increase the suffering
as we look to discover its root causes.
We get closer to the human condition:
a sense of smallness, powerlessness,
the sense of struggle.
We can dive deeper into the experience of suffering, suffering itself,
and that is a necessary process,
to know it so fully
that we no longer need to try to run away or control it.
Growing intimate with discomfort
In that sense we grow in intimacy with experience.
You can explore that right now.
It can be mild or acute,
some sense of discomfort,
unrest,
anxiety.
Contraction, sadness,
pain, anything, anything
that elicits the sense of:
I wish this was different.
This is the practice of attention,
focus,
grounding.
What can feel tighter, smaller?
When the mind comes to the rescue
The mind will come in to the rescue,
hypnotizing, distracting.
It will fight it.
Just notice it's answering your call for help.
Your need to avoid feeling and sensing the unwanted.
Just notice it
and say a thank you to it for its momentary moment of hypnosis,
and go back to that sense of unease, unrest.
Facing the shadow
This is the practice of the underground, facing of shadow.
The doorway is the sense that something in your experience is not okay,
something in what you experience,
or a sense about yourself.
You can come over and over again to this,
exploring it,
sensing,
touching,
relating,
engaging.
The practice requiring effort
changes the body and the mind.
Turning to the other side
Now we turn to the other side,
the complementary aspect of this practice.
It's not about effort.
It's not about focus.
It's not about doing.
The recognition,
the deeper and deeper recognition.
It's just to be open.
There's nothing to do, nowhere to go.
Nothing needs to be achieved.
We are free from becoming, because we already are.
Sensations, pains, worries,
thoughts, dramas
are all part of the moving beingness, aliveness.
Even the resistance to that is also just something happening.
Unimportant.
Everything comes and goes
Seeking comes and goes.
Resisting comes and goes.
Struggling comes and goes.
Unimportant.
Untouched.
This being is unmoved
and untouched.
Eternal grace and acceptance,
celebrating the ups, celebrating the downs.
Rejoicing in the variation of experiencing the infinite possibilities,
the delicious experience of contraction, suffering, and therefore expansion, elation.
Loving contrast and change.
Imagining separation.
Imagining death.
Imagining relationship.
Where the circle closes
And these two extremes: concentration, focus, effort in doing,
and the other extreme of the impossibility of not being exactly what it is right now.
Effortless acceptance.
In these two extremes,
the circle is closed,
the ends meet,
the universe in creative destruction.
Balance arises.