Читать книгу 20 MINUTES TO MASTER … MEDITATION - Christina Feldman, Christina Feldman - Страница 17

Simplicity is a fundamental principle of meditation found in all spiritual traditions. Cultivating simplicity is in the service of establishing an environment of calmness and wholeheartedness in our lives and within ourselves. There are many dimensions to simplicity. Simplicity does not imply abandoning our lives, work and relationships. Simplicity is concerned with our approach to all of these areas of our life. Conscious simplicity is a path of disentangling ourselves from complexity, excess and the confusion generated by a mind that is fragmented and scattered. Excess may be in terms of possessions, commitments or thought. The mind that is burdened by excess in any area, is a mind that is starved of calmness and balance. Alienated from inner calm we are prone to habitual reactions and feelings of being overwhelmed by the events of our inner and outer world. Cultivating a path of simplicity begins with the honest reflection upon our lives to see where there is excessive complexity and entanglement. Do we do too much? Are we over-committed? Do we want too much? These areas signal their presence through tension, obsessive or repetitive thinking, habitual reactions and stress. We can interpret these signals of complexity and excess as messengers that invite us to give clear and conscious attention to the ways we may be able to cultivate disentanglement, simplicity and calm.

Simplicity is a path that is consciously developed through calm attention and wholeheartedness. Learning to be simply present, attending wholeheartedly to the moment we are in, is the path of meditation that can be applied to the whole of our lives. The cultivation of simplicity invariably has with it the companion of renunciation – not in the pursuit of asceticism but in the service of calmness and balance. Layers of judgement, evaluation and comparison are unnecessary burdens that distort our capacity to see each moment and each person in our lives as it actually is. We can learn to let go, to bring a fullness of attention to one moment at a time. In any moment of our lives it is not possible to attend to or solve every detail of our past or future. It is only possible to fully attend to and care for the moment we are in. Thoughts of past and future will continue to arise in the present – held in the light of clear and simple attentiveness they are divested of their urgency and will also pass. Held in the light of clear attentiveness there is the possibility of a more intuitive response emerging.

Just as simplicity is a quality that brings calmness to our outer lives, it is equally a quality to cultivate in our inner world. Meditation is not a path of accumulating theories and information but a path of fostering intuition and clarity. Our meditation is not aided by preoccupations with goals, evaluation or comparison. Learning to be simply present, attending wholeheartedly to the moment we are in is the path of meditation. Through habit our minds will demand answers, solutions, reassurance and familiar labels for our experience but this will simply get in the way of clear attentiveness. A major factor in cultivating simplicity is the willingness to let go of all of these demands, to not cling to the variety of thoughts and comparisons that will inevitably arise, but also to let them pass.