What follows is a helpful bit from Jon Kabat-Zinn in his book, Wherever You Go There You Are.
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Certain attitudes or mental qualities support meditation practice and provide a rich soil in which the seeds of mindfulness can flourish. By purposefully cultivating these qualities, we are actually tilling the soil of our own mind and ensuring that it can serve as a source of clarity, compassion, and right action in our lives. These inner qualities which support meditation practice cannot be imposed, legislated, or decreed. They can only be cultivated, and this only when you have reached the point where your inner motivation is strong enough to want to cease contributing to your own suffering and confusion and perhaps to that of others.
If you
cultivate patience, you almost can’t help cultivating mindfulness, and your
meditation practice will gradually become richer and more mature. After all, if
you really aren’t trying to get anywhere else in this moment, patience takes
care of itself. It is a remembering that things unfold in their own time. The
seasons cannot be hurried. Spring comes, the grass grows by itself. Being in a
hurry usually doesn’t help, and it can create a great deal of
suffering—sometimes in us, sometimes in those who have to be around us.
Patience is
an ever present alternative to the mind’s endemic restlessness and impatience.
Scratch the surface of impatience and what you will find lying beneath it,
subtly or not so subtly, is anger. It’s the strong energy of not wanting things
to be the way they are and blaming someone (often yourself) or something for
it. This doesn’t mean you can’t hurry when you have to. It is possible even to
hurry patiently, mindfully, moving fast because you have chosen to.
Do you have
the patience to wait
till your
mud settles and the water is clear?
Can you
remain unmoving
till the right action arises by itself?
--Lao Tzu
The flavor and the sheer joy of non-doing are difficult for
Americans to grasp because our culture places so much value on doing and on
progress. Even our leisure tends to be busy and mindless. The joy of non-doing
is that nothing else needs to happen for this moment to be complete. The wisdom
in it, and the equanimity that comes out of it, lie in knowing that something
else surely will.
It reeks of paradox. The only way you can do anything of
value is to have the effort come out of non-doing and to let go of caring
whether it will be of use or not. Otherwise, self-involvement and greediness
can sneak in and distort your relationship to the work, or the work itself, so
that it is off in some way, biased, impure, and ultimately not completely satisfying,
even if it is good. Good scientists know this mind state and guard against it
because it inhibits the creative process and distorts one’s ability to see
connections clearly.
Non-doing has nothing to do with being indolent or passive.
Quite the contrary. It takes great courage and energy to cultivate non-doing,
both in stillness and in activity. Nor is it easy to make a special time for
non-doing and to keep at it in the face of everything in our lives which needs
to be done.
But non-doing doesn’t have to be threatening to people who
feel they always have to get things done. They might find they get even more
“done,” and done better, by practicing non-doing. Non-doing simply means
letting things be and allowing them to unfold in their own way. Enormous effort
can be involved, but it is a graceful, knowledgeable, effortless effort, a
“doerless doing,” cultivated over a lifetime.
Meditation is synonymous with the practice of non-doing. We
aren’t practicing to make things perfect or to do things perfectly. Rather, we
practice to grasp and realize (make real for ourselves) the fact that things
already are perfect--perfectly what they are. This has everything to do with
holding the present moment in its fullness without imposing anything extra on
it, perceiving its purity and the freshness of its potential to give rise to
the next moment.
Then, knowing what is what, seeing as clearly as possible, and
conscious of not knowing more than we actually do, we act, make a move, take a
stand, take a chance.
Some people speak of this as flow, one moment flowing
seamlessly, effortlessly into the next, cradled in the streambed of
mindfulness.
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TRY: During the day, see if you can detect the bloom of the
present moment in every moment, the ordinary ones, the “in-between” ones, even
the hard ones. Work at allowing more things to unfold in your life without
forcing them to happen and without rejecting the ones that don’t fit your idea
of what “should” be happening. See if you can sense the “spaces” through which
you might move with no effort.
Notice how if
you can make some time early in the day for being, with no agenda, it can
change the quality of the rest of your day. By affirming first what is primary
in your own being, see if you don’t get a mindful jump on the whole day and
wind up more capable
