Stillness

Lama Yeshe in an excerpt about his time being in the hospital and going through all the great difficulty with his heart attack, said:

"Can you learn the basic precept of transforming your unwanted sufferings into the path of practice?"

If you can learn that precept, it will serve you in any circumstances. Can you learn to do that? Can any of us do that? What does it take? A key thing that it requires is faith. It is so important -- faith in the human heart, faith in the power of awareness. The Dalai Lama was asked what was the most important thing one can do as a teacher of dharma, what's the most important thing you can communicate, and he said "Faith." Not faith in the Buddha or faith in something from India or some ancient system, but really faith in our own true nature. Rock bottom understanding of that, not just with words but because you know that it's true that human beings have this capacity to deal with the sorrows of the world and with adversity, and that the heart is greater than all of that, and that the power of awareness is such that we can grow from any of it. That's what we have to discover -- in ourselves, in our sitting, in our families, in our lives. Faith, not so much in doing but in stopping, in listening, in not doing so much, and letting ourselves stop avoiding things that are difficult, not getting so caught by the stories of what we want or what we don't want. That's all the mind. Minds do that, it's sort of their job -- you pay them a little bit and they just think all the time.

Rilke talks about it quite beautifully in a poem which he calls, "I Have Faith in Nights."

You darkness that I come from,
out of which all things come,
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world,
for the fire makes a circle of light for everyone,
and then no one outside learns of you.
But the darkness pulls in everything,
shapes and fires, animals and myself.
How easily it gathers them,
powers and people.
It is possible a great energy is moving near us.
I have faith in night.

Amazing poem, darkness out of which everything comes.

Can we stop -- in our practice, in our lives with our families -- and start to listen, and let ourselves be a little emptier, a little more silent, more in touch with the spaces between words or between desires or between frustrations? There is something really mysterious that reveals itself as soon as we stop. It doesn't take very long, and maybe there's a certain pain that one has to go through in putting on the brakes, if you know what I mean -- each time, again and again, too -- but when you do it, then things become mysterious again like it is for any child.

Walt Whitman said:

As to me I know of nothing else but miracles
when you're still enough.

The source of our happiness is not through our doing, it's really much more through stopping.

From "Urban Dharma"