Category Archives: quotes

Go quietly, quietly

Fiona writes: Last week I was in a beautiful quiet place with thirteen other writers and two tutors. The tutors were wise, and the other students were helpful, but somehow I found myself getting frustrated in the group sessions. I felt choked with other people’s words.

On the Wednesday morning I skived the morning class. I walked out through the vegetable garden and lay on my stomach on a bench. I walked through the woods, noticing the scents of sage, honeysuckle and pine, hearing wood pigeons and the wind shuffling the leaves, finding a dalmation-mottled leaf, seeing a red admiral, the sun filtering through hazel leaves.

I sat under a tree and read this quote in my book, by Thoreau: ‘What is a course in history or philosophy or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared to the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen?’.

I made a cup of tea. I brought it to my mouth too suddenly, and the loose tea was a whirlwind. If I waited, the black bits settled and the golden liquid became clear.

I started to settle. Slowly. Quietly. Ideas bloomed. I started making notes for this post. I covered a page – the first words I’d written all week.

The title of this post is the last line of a poem I have up on my office wall – ‘After Reading Tu Fu, I Go Outside to the Dwarf Orchard’. When you are ready to hear something, everything speaks to you.

A post from the archive, as I need to remember this today.

Photo by nutmeg66 via Creative Commons with thanks.

Our business in living (according to John Cage) and bendiness

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As a part of my Amida Buddhist psychotherapy training, I’m getting to read a lot of interesting books.

‘Psychotherapy without the Self’ by Mark Epstein is a psychodymanic (Freud and all that) as opposed to a person-centred take on using buddhist psychology in psychotherapy practice.

I do like the epigram (that’s the word for the quote at the beginning of books, isn’t it?), by John Cage.

“The great Buddhist scholar D. T. Suzuki came to Columbia to teach [in 1951] and I went for two years to his classes. From Suzuki’s teaching I began to understand that a sober and quiet mind is one in which the ego dose not obstruct the fluency of the things that come in through our senses and up through our dreams. Our business in living is to become fluent with the life we are living, and art can help this.”

Good, eh? To become fluent with the things that come in through our senses and up through our dreams. To allow them in as they are, rather than as what we need them to be. To allow our ego’s tight structures to loosen a little, like a stiff old piece of rubber that can be warmed and massaged and made bendy again.

Here’s to getting a bit more bendy, and welcoming the world in as it is. Happy bendy weekends. And thank you for all the love after my last post. x

PS here’s a live version of a song I’m much enjoying on the radio at the moment – Four Dreams by Jesca Hoop. It’s lovely and chirpy and makes me happy.

Stealing tissues and finding a piece of my shadow

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I work as a therapist, and so there is often a need for tissues. I share my rented room with other therapists, and we all bring our own tissue box which we keep in the cupboard between our sessions.

When I wanted to blow my nose the other day, I found my hand reaching automatically into SOMEONE ELSE’S box of tissues.

This immediately reminded me of a story Robert Bly tells about himself in his wonderful ‘A Little Book on the Human Shadow’. He’s being interviewed by William Booth.

Let me give you one more answer to the question, ‘How do I know I have a shadow?’ The other day I was making coffee for Ruth (his wife) and myself. I put a spoon and a half of ground coffee in her filter and the same in mine. Then something inside me reached back and took another half spoonful for mine. It wasn’t me – I didn’t do it. I just noticed it happen.

I love that he admitted to this. I might talk more about the rest of this book another day – and how we should all aspire to eating our shadows – but for today I’m just going to acknowledge that part of me that feels I can’t afford to use my own tissues.

On keeping your mouth shut

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Jon Kabat-Zinn says the following about meditation:

If you do decide to start meditating, there’s no need to tell other people about it, or talk about why you are doing it or what it’s doing for you. In fact, there is no better way to waste your nascent energy and enthusiasm for practice and thwart your efforts so they will be unable to gather momentum. Best to meditate without advertising it.

Every time you get a strong impulse to talk about meditation and how wonderful it is, or how hard it is, or what it’s doing for you these days, or what it’s not, or you want to convince someone else how wonderful it would be for them, just look at it as more thinking and go meditate some more. The impulse will pass and everybody will be better off–especially you.

This gives me one of those wry-recognition smiles, and also reminds me very much of how much I talk about my writing.

When I first started submitting my work, I would share every tiny failure or success with all my friends. Look, a poem was accepted! Look, another agent rejected me! They were very lovely and nobody told me to shut up and just get on with the writing. I’m not sure I could have contained myself anyway – I was very wobbly.

Maybe this is why we talk so much about a new meditation practice – underneath the fervent evangelising is a small voice that is still unconvinced.

As my writing career has progressed, I’ve started to find less need to shout everything that happens to my books from the rooftops. I think I’m learning to get on with it more quietly, and to quietly accept the good stuff (and feeling good) and the bad stuff (and giving myself time to heal) as it comes along.

In what area of your life do you get ‘a strong impulse to talk about it’?

Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life

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Thank you to Jo for recommending this book, which I finished off over Christmas and which was very tasty.

Amy Krouse Rosenthal tells us the story of her life in encyclopedia form – an alphabetical collection of little random quirks and snippets.

I like the humour, the ordinary-ness (ordinary-ness is always good) and the entries that gave me a little frisson of ‘yes, it’s like that for me too!’ like the best comedians.

Here are a couple from the ‘E’ section to give you a taster…

EITHER

It’s either I don’t like you. You are just like me. Your presence confirms much of what I don’t like about myself or I like you. You are just like me. Your presence confirms much of what I like about myself.

ESCALATOR

One would think that by this point in my life, I would have outgrown the fear of getting my shoe caught in the escalator.

And the puppy runs away over and over again

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Once again courtesy of the Tricycle Daily Dharma emails (sign up here) -

For some, [the] task of coming back a thousand or ten thousand times in meditation may seem boring or even of questionable importance. But how many times have we gone away from the reality of our life?–perhaps a million or ten million times! If we wish to awaken, we have to find our way back here with our full being, our full attention. . . In this way, meditation is very much like training a puppy. You put the puppy down and say, “Stay.” Does the puppy listen? It gets up and runs away. You sit the puppy back down again. “Stay.” And the puppy runs away over and over again. Sometimes the puppy jumps up, runs over and pees in the corner, or makes some other mess. Our minds are much the same as the puppy, only they create even bigger messes. In training the mind, or the puppy, we have to start over and over again.–Jack Kornfield, A Path with Heart

I don’t know about you, but my puppy also appears when I sit down to write my novel. And when I try to respond to anything in a non-habitual way. And when I exercise (or it would if I ever got round to doing any).

Just look at that face. They can’t help it. Be patient with your puppy.

The only pain that can be avoided

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There is a great deal of pain in life and perhaps the only pain that can be avoided is the pain that comes from trying to avoid pain. R. D. Laing

I found this Laing quote last night in a book I’d tried and failed to read ten years ago but that is now speaking to me as if it was written for me and me only (funny how that happens).

I first read Laing when I was about thirteen (I must have been an odd child) – Sanity, Madness and The Family. My memory of it is that it took case studies of schizophrenics and looked at their symptoms and their families. When their ‘mad’ symptoms were seen in the context of the madness of their families, they were suddenly seen as perfectly understandable and ‘sane’.

This made a great deal of intuitive sense to me at the time, and I still hold to it in my work-as-a-therapist now. Some of our thoughts or behaviour patterns might seem crazy, but they have their own intrinsic logic – even if it might take a while to find it. It was once necessary for us to be this way, in order to survive in the world (i.e. to survive our families).

Laing’s quote reminds me of the Zen teaching that we must try not to add anything ‘extra’ to our experience. If we are hungry, we are hungry – it’s only when we try to avoid this suffering that it becomes a problem. This doesn’t mean that we don’t get food as soon as we can, but until we can, we are just hungry. No problem.

A song I love has just come onto the radio. I’m going to finish there so I can listen to it properly. Have wonderful Thursdays.

Stop clenching

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Here’s yesterday’s Daily Dharma from Tricycle (subscribe here) – copied here because it’s good advice, but mainly because the word ‘clench’ makes me giggle a little bit.

The moment we want happiness, we start to cling to it in our mind. First, we cling to our own idea of happiness. We relate to the outside world as a source of satisfaction and look outward for the things we normally associate with happiness–accumulating wealth, success, fame or power. As soon as we become attached to any idea–happiness, success or whatever–there is already some stress. Clinging is itself a stressful state, and everything that derives from it is also stressful. For example, try to clench your hand to make a fist. As soon as you start to clench your hand, you have to use energy to keep your fingers clenched tightly. When you let go of the clenching, your hand is free again.

So it is with the mind. When it is in such a state of clenching, it can never be free. It can never experience peace or happiness, even if one has all the wealth, fame and power in the world.

-Thynn Thynn, Living Meditation, Living Insight
from Everyday Mind, edited by Jean Smith, a Tricycle book

An antidote to disembodiment and dematerialisation

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More from the book I’m currently enjoying – Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places:

In so many ways, there has been a prising away of life from place, an abstraction of experience into different kinds of touchlessness. We experience, as no historical period has before, disembodiment and dematerialisation. The almost infinite connectivity of the technological world, for all the benefits that it has brought, has exacted a toll in the coin of contact. We have in many ways forgotten what the world feels like. And so new maladies of the soul have emerged, unhappinesses which are complicated products of the distance we have set between ourselves and the world.

He goes on. And so how can we save ourselves? Walk outside for ten minutes for every two hours you spend in the office, even if all you can see of nature is the sky and weeds between the cracks in the pavements. Pick up a stone from the beach and keep it on your desk. For every ten emails you write, shake someone’s hand, or touch their shoulder, or look into their eyes. Take off your socks and feel the carpet against the soles of your feet. When you’ve finished reading this, find a window. Look outside. Stay awhile.