Tangerine Meditation

If I offer you a freshly picked tangerine to enjoy, the degree to which you enjoy it will depend on your degree of mindfulness. If you are free of worries and anxiety, you will enjoy it more. If you are possessed by anger or fear, the tangerine may not be very real to you.
One day, I offered a number of children a basket filled with tangerines. The basket was passed around, and each child took one tangerine and put it in his or her palm. We each looked at our tangerine, and the children were invited to meditate on its origins. They saw not only their tangerine, but also its mother, the tangerine tree. With some guidance, they began to visualize the blossoms in the sunshine and in the rain. Then they saw petals falling down and the tiny green fruit appear. The sunshine and the rain continued, and the tiny tangerine grew. Now someone has picket it, and the tangerine is here. After seeing this, each child was invited to peel the tangerine slowly, noticing the mist and fragrance of the tangerine, and then bring it up to his or mouth and have a mindful bite, in full awareness of the texture and taste of the fruit and the juice coming out. We ate slowly like that.
Each time you look at a tangerine, you can see deeply into it. You can see everything in the universe in one tangerine. When you peel it and smell it, it’s wonderful. You can take your time eating a tangerine and be very happy. (Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace is Every Step)

This is the essence of mindfulness. Being Present with whatever you are doing. Mindful walking is being deeply attuned to every step. Mindful eating is being acutely aware of the subtlety of every bite. Even if you’re day dreaming, being aware that you are day dreaming. Everything can be done mindfully, and with mindfulness comes a great sense of peace and relaxation. This months meetup will focus on this quality of mindfulness.

www.adamsewardcounseling.net

My Parents Shouldn't Judge Me...

Is that True? This is the process of inquiry, or what Byron Katie calls “The Work.” We take a belief that seems to cause some discomfort, and we question it.
We ask, “Is it true that my parents shouldn’t judge me”, for example.

The answer to this question is simply yes or no. If the answer is, “Yes, it’s true, they shouldn’t judge me.” Then we ask, “Can you absolutely know that it’s true, your belief that your parents shouldn’t judge you?”

And this is the real “moment of truth” so to speak. This is where you must decide if you truly want peace. If you stay firm to your story that your thought is true, then it really isn’t necessary to go any further. Keep your story and all that comes with it.

If however, you are willing, even slightly, to entertain the possibility that you’re not right about what your parents should or shouldn’t do... If you are willing to let go of your own judgment about them, and how they should live their lives... If you are open enough to “Sell your cleverness, and purchase bewilderment” as the poet Rumi would say, then you are ready to go on to the next question.

How do you react when you believe the thought, “My parents shouldn’t judge me” and they are judging you? Do you get uncomfortable, restless, or upset? Do you become defensive and irritable? Do you at all forfeit your peace? Consider it.

If so, consider how your experience might be different without the thought?. Who would you be without the thought, “My parent’s shouldn’t judge me” when they are? How would it be for you to stop judging them, and the reality of what is happening, instead of just expecting them to? Would you feel more peaceful, accepting, and at ease? More in harmony with the way things are?
This is the way of it. Instead of imposing our should’s and shouldn'ts on others in our lives, we try it ourselves. We stop judging them, including their judgmental attitudes, and we experience more peace ourselves, because we are more accepting of the way things are.

Meditation on Compassion

Love is a mind that brings peace, joy, and happiness to another person. Compassion is a mind that removes the suffering that is present in the other. We all have the seeds of love and compassion in our minds, and we can develop these fine and wonderful sources of energy. We can nurture the unconditional love that does not expect anything in return and therefore does no lead to anxiety and sorrow.

The essence of love and compassion is understanding, the ability to recognize the physical, material, and psychological suffering of others, to put ourselves "inside the skin" of the other. We "go inside" their body, feelings, and mental formations, and witness for ourselves their suffering. Shallow observation as an outsider is not enough to see their suffering. We must become one with the object of our observation. When we are in contact with another's suffering, a feeling of compassion is born in us.

We find ways to nourish and express our compassion. When we come into contact with the another, our thoughts and actions should express our mind of compassion, even if that person says and does things that are not easy to accept. We practice in this way until we see clearly that our love is not contingent on the other person being lovable. Then we can know that our mind of compassion is firm and authentic. We ourselves will be more at ease, and the person who has been the object of our meditation will also benefit eventually. His suffering will slowly diminish, and his life will gradually be brighter and more joyful as a result of our compassion. (Peace is Every Step, Page 82,83)

Walking Meditation

Walking meditation can be very enjoyable. We walk slowly, alone or with friends, if possible in some beautiful place. Walking meditation is really to enjoy the walking—walking not in order to arrive, but just to walk. The purpose is to be in the present moment and, aware of our breathing and our walking to enjoy each step. Therefore we have to shake off all worries and anxieties, not thinking of the future, not thinking of the past, just enjoying the present moment. We can take the hand of a child as we do it. We walk, we make steps as if we are the happiest person on Earth.
Although we walk all the time, our walking is usually more like running. When we walk like that, we print anxiety and sorrow on the Earth. Instead, let us walk in a way that we only print peace and serenity on the Earth. We can all do this, provided that we want it very much. Any child can do it. If we can take one step like this, we can take two, three, four, and five. When we are able to take one step peacefully and happily, we are working for the cause of peace and happiness for the whole of humankind. Walking meditation is a wonderful practice.
When we do walking meditation outside, we walk a little slower than our normal pace, and we coordinate our breathing with our steps. For example, we may take three steps with each in-breath and three steps with each out breath. So we can say, “In-in-in. Out, out, out.” “In” is to help us to identify the in breath.
If your lungs want four steps instead of three, please give them four steps. If they want only two steps, give them two. The lengths of your in-breath and out-breath do not have to be the same. For example, you can take three steps with each inhalation and four with each exhalation. If you feel happy, peaceful, and joyful while you are walking, you are practicing correctly.
Be aware of the contact between your feet and the Earth. Walk as if you are kissing the Earth with your feet. We have caused a lot of damage to Earth. Now it is time for us to take good care of her. We bring our peace and calm to the surface of the Earth and share the lesson of love. We walk in that spirit. From time to time when we see something beautiful, we may want to stop and look at it-a tree, a flower, some children playing. As we look, we continue to follow our breathing, lest we lose the beautiful flower and get caught up in our thoughts. When we want to resume walking, we just start again. Each step we take will create a cool breeze, refreshing our body and mind. Every step makes a flower bloom under our feet. We can do it only if we do not think of the future or the past, if we know that life can only be found in the present moment. (Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace is Every Step, pg 28.)

Adam R. Seward
Individual, Couple, and Family Counselor
www.adamsewardcounseling.net

Twenty Four Brand New Hours

Twenty- Four Brand New Hours

Every morning, when we wake up, we have twenty-four brand-new hours to live. What a precious gift! We have the capacity to live in a way that these twenty-four hours will bring peace, joy, and happiness to ourselves and others.
Peace is present right here and now, in ourselves and in everything we do and see. The question is whether or not we are in touch with it. We don’t have to travel far away to enjoy the blue sky. We don’t have to leave our city or even our neighborhood to enjoy the eyes of a beautiful child. Even the air we breathe can be a source of joy.
We can smile, breathe, walk, and eat our meals in a way that allows us to be in touch with the abundance of happiness that is available. We are very good at preparing to live, but not very good at living. We know how to sacrifice ten years for a diploma, and we are willing to work very hard to get a job, a car, a house, and so on. But we have difficulty remembering that we are alive in the present moment, the only moment there is for us to be alive. Every breath we take, every step we make, can be filled with peace, joy, and serenity. We need only to be awake, alive in the present moment.

(Thich Nhat Hahn, Peace is Every Step pg 5.)

Adam R. Seward
www.adamsewardcounseling.net

More on Silence

Great Meeting Last Night!

Over 50 Eckhart Tolle fans joined together to Practice the Art of Presence last night. There was great levity and laughter throughout the evening. The reading for the night was the story called, "Can You Hear the Mountain Stream." People shared there own Zen moments, we also discussed how ego interferes with our direct experience of the present moment. Surely this was a beautiful evening. Thank you to everyone who attended for the light you brought! Looking forward to seeing you all again next month!

Warmly,

Adam

For more info about next months meeting click here

Complaining and Resentment

Complaining is one of the ego's favorite strategies for strengthening itself. Every complaint is a little story the mind makes up that you completely believe in. Whether you complain aloud or only in thought makes no difference. Some egos that perhaps don't have much else to identify with easily survive on complaining alone. When you are in the grip of such an ego, complaining, especially about other people, is habitual and, of course, unconscious, which means you don't know what you are doing. Applying negative mental lables to people, either to their face or more commonly when you speak about them to others or even just think about them, is often part of this pattern. Name-calling is the crudest form of such labeling and of the ego's need to be right and triuph over others: "jerk, bastard, bitch'--all definitive pronouncements that you can't argue with. On the next level down on the scale of unconsciousness, you have shouting and screaming, and not much below that, physical violence.

Resentment is the emotion that goes with complaining and the mental labeling of people and adds even more energy to the ego. Resentment means to feel bitter, indignant, aggrieved, or offended. You resent other people's greed, their dishonesty, their lack of integrity, what they are doing, what they did in the past, what they said, what they failed to do, what they should or shouldn't have done. The ego loves it. Instead of overlooking unconsciousness in others, you make it into their identity. Who is doing that? The unconsciousness in you, the ego. Sometimes the "fault" that you perceive in another isn't even there. It is a total misinterpretation, a projection by a mind conditioned to see enemies and to make iself right or superior. At other times the fault may be there by by focusing on it, sometimes to the exclusion of everything else, you amplify it. And what you react to in another, you strengthen in yourself.

The Core of the Ego

The content of the ego varies from person to person, but in every ego the same structure operates. In other words: Egos only differ on the surface. Deep down they are all the same. In what way are they the same? They live on identification with separation. When you live through the mind-made self comprised of thought and emotion that is the ego, the basis for your identity is precarious because thought and emotion by their very nature ephemeral, fleeting. So every ego is continuously struggling for survival, trying to protect and enlarge itself. To uphold the I-thought, it needs the opposite thought, it needs the opposite thought of “the other.” The conceptual “I” cannot survive without the conceptual “other.” The others are most other when I see them as my enemies. At the end of the scale of this unconscious egoic pattern lies the egoic compulsive habit of faultfinding and complaining about others. Jesus referred to it when he said, “Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?” At the other end of the scale, there is physical violence between individuals and warfare between nations. In the Bible, Jesus’ question remains unanswered, but the answer is, of course: Because when I criticize or condemn another, it makes me feel bigger, superior.

Join us this month for our meetups on April 16th and 30th where we will be discussing this further. For more information go to www.meetup.com/bellevuetollegroup or www.meetup.com/seattletollegroup

Silence is Golden

Silence is Golden; it has divine power and immense energy. Try to pay more attention to the silence than to the sounds. Paying attention to outer silence creates inner silence: the mind becomes still. Every sound is born out of silence, dies back into silence, and during its life span is surrounded by silence. Silence enables the sound to
be. It is an intrinsic but unmanifested part of every sound, every musical note, every song, and every word. The unmanifested is present in this world as silence. All you have to do is pay attention to it.

Join us this month as we share in this silence www.meetup.com/bellevuetollegroup
www.meetup.com/seattletollegroup

Is that So?

The Zen master Hakuin lived in a town in Japan. He was held in high regard and many people came to him for spiritual teaching. Then it happened that the teenage daughter of his next-door neighbor became pregnant. When being questioned by her angry and scolding parents as to the identity of the father, she finally told them that he was Hakuin, the Zen Master. In great anger the parents rushed over to Hakuin and told him with much shouting and accusing that their daughter had confessed that he was the father. All her replied was, "Is that so?"

News of the scandal spread throughout the town and beyond. The Master lost his reputation. This did not trouble him. Nobody came to see him anymore. He remained unmoved. When the child was born, the parents brought the baby to Hakuin. "You are the father, so you look after him." The Master took loving care of the child. A year later, the mother remorsefully confessed to her parents that the real father of the child was the young man who worked at the butcher shop. In great distress they went to see Hakuin to apologize and ask forgiveness. "We are really sorry. We have come to take the baby back. Our daughter confessed that you are not the father." "Is that so?" is all he would say as he handed the baby over to them.

The Master responds to falsehood and truth, bad news and good news, in exactly the same way: "Is that so?" He allows the form of the moment, good or bad, to be as it is and so does not become a participant in human drama. To him there is only this moment, and this moment is as it is. Events are not personalized. He is nobody's victim. He is so completely at one with what happens that what happens has no power over him anymore. Only if you resist what happens are you at the mercy of what happens, and the world will determine your happiness and unhappiness.

The baby is looked after with loving care. Bad turns into good through the power of nonresistance. Always responding to what the present moment requires, he lets go of the baby when it is time to do so.

Imagine briefly how the ego would have reacted during the various stages of the unfolding of these events.

More on Inner Space

Whenever there is beauty, kindness, the recognition of the goodness of simple things in your life, look for the background to that experience within yourself. But don't look for it as if you were looking for something. You can not pin it down and say, "Now I have it," or grasp it mentally and define it in some way. It is like the cloudless sky. It has no form. It is space; it is stillness, the sweetness of Being and infinitely more than these words, which are only pointers. When you are able to sense it directly within yourself, it deepens. So when you appreciate something simple-a sound, a sight, a touch--when you see beauty , when you feel loving kindness toward another, sense the inner spaciousness that is the source and background to that experience.

Many poets and sages throughout the ages have observed that true happiness--I call it the joy of Being--is found in simple, seemingly unremarkable things. Most people, in their restless search for something significant to happen to them, continuously miss the insignificant, which may not be insignificant at all. The philosopher Nietzche, in a rare moment of deep stillness, wrote, "for happiness, how little suffices for happiness!...the least thing precisely, the gentlest thing, the lightest thing, a lizard's rustling, a breath, a wisk, an eye glance--little maketh up the best happiness. Be still." (A New Earth Pg. 235.)

For more info on our next meetup visit www.meetup.com/bellevuetollegroup or www.meetup.com/seattletollegroup

Recognizing Inner Space

Space between thoughts is probably already arising sporadically in your life, and you may not even know it. A consciousness mesmerized by experiences and conditioned to identify exclusively with form, that is to say, object consciousness, finds it at first almost impossible to become aware of space. This ultimately means that you cannot become aware of yourself, because you are always aware of something else. You are continuously distracted by form. Even when you seem to be aware of yourself, you have made yourself into an object, a thought form,and so what you are aware of is a thought, not yourself.

When you hear of inner space, you may start seeking it,and, because you are seeking it as if you were looking for an object or for an experience, you cannot find it. This is the dilemma of all those who are seeking spiritual realization or enlightenment. Hence, Jesus said, "The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed; nor will they say, 'Lo, here it is!' or 'There! for behold, the kingdom if God is in the midst of you."

If you are not spending all of your waking life in discontent, worry, anxiety, depression, despair, or consumed by other negative states; if you are able to enjoy simple things like listening to the sound of the rain or the wind; if you can see the beauty of clouds moving across the sky or be alone at times without feeling lonely or needing the mental stimulus of entertainment; if you find yourself treating a complete stranger with heartfelt kindness without wanting anything form him or her...it means that a space has opened up, no matter how briefly, in the otherwise incessant stream of thinking that is the human mind. When this happens, there is a sense of well being, of alive peace, even though it may be subtle. The intensity will vary from a perhaps barely noticeable background sense of contentment to what the ancient sages of India called ananda--the bliss of Being. (A New Earth,Pg. 234)

Spaciousness and Saying Yes to the Now

Join us on February 19th, at Bellevue Unity Church, as we continue the discussion of Inner Spaciousness. For more info about this Meetup CLICK HERE

This, Too, Shall Pass

According to an ancient Sufi story, there lived a king in some Middle Eastern land who was continuously torn between happiness and despondency. The slightest thing would cause him great upset or provoke an intense reaction, and his happiness would quickly turn into disappointment and despair.

A time came when the king finally got tired of himself and of life, and he began to seek a way out. He sent for a wise man who lived in his kingdom and who was reputed to be enlightened. When the wise man came, the king said to him, "I want to be like you. Can you give me something that will bring balance, serenity,and wisdom into my life? I will pay any price you ask."

The wise man said, "I may be able to help you. But the price is so great that your entire kingdom would not be sufficient payment for it. Therefore it will be a gift to you if you will honor it." The king gave his assurances and the wise man left.

A few weeks later, he returned and handed the king an ornate box carved in jade. The king opened the box and found a simple gold ring inside. Some letters were inscribed on the ring. The inscription read: This, too, shall pass. "What is the meaning of this?" asked the king. The wise man said, "Wear this ring always. Whatever happens, before you call it good or bad, touch this ring and read the inscription. That way , you will always be at peace."

This, too shall pass. What is it about these simple words that makes them so powerful? Looking at it superficially, it would seem while those words provide some comfort in a bad situation, they would also diminish the enjoyment of the good things in life. "Don't be too happy, because it won't last." This seems to be what they are saying when applied in a situation that is perceived as good.

The story of the ring points to the fact of impermanence which, when recognized, leads to non attachment. Nonresistance, non judgment, and non attachment are the three aspects of true freedom and enlightened living.

The words help to make you aware of the fleetingness of every situation, which is due to the transience of all forms --good or bad. Once you see and accept the transience of all things and the inevitability of change, you can enjoy the pleasures of the world while they last without fear of loss or anxiety about the future.

This, too, Will Pass brings detachment and with detachment another dimension comes into your life--Inner Space. (Tolle,A New Earth, Page 225.)

Join us this month as we discuss this and other topics related to Inner Space, Thursday, February 19th,Bellevue Unity Church, 7:00 pm.

For more info visit www.meetup.com/bellevuetollegroup