The Practice of Compassionate Awareness

QUOTE FOR TODAY, from Charlotte Joko Beck, Nothing Special: Living Zen

"Ours is an awareness practice that takes in everything. The ‘absolute’ is simply everything in our world, emptied of personal emotional content… awareness practice is open to any present experience—all this upsetting universe—and it helps us slowly to extricate ourselves from our emotional reactions and attachments… Most emotions do not arise out of the immediate moment, such as when we witness a child hit by a car, but are generated by our self-centered demands that life be the way we want it to be. Though it’s not bad to have such emotions, we learn through practice that they have no importance in themselves. Straightening the pencils on our desk is just as important as feeling bereft or lonely, for example. If we can experience being lonely and see our thoughts about being lonely, then we can move out of the gap. Practice is that movement, over and over and over again. If we remember something that happened six months ago and with the memory come upsetting feelings, our feelings should be looked at with interest, nothing more. Though that sounds cold, it’s necessary in order to be a genuinely warm and compassionate person. If we find ourselves thinking that our feelings are more important than what is happening at the moment, we need to notice this thought. Sweeping the walk is reality; our feelings are something we’ve made up, like a web we have spun in which we catch ourselves."

So, another day arises, and it will be full of occasions to notice my thoughts and feelings, and the stories I tell myself about them, and the way that my stories, given a little attention, can grow into entire dramas, Broadway productions, even! that have nothing to do with what is really going on, right now. Especially since the task at hand for me, today, is cleaning out my email inbox on campus, full of many inquiries from students about their schedules, their courses, recommendations they need... in other words, sweeping the walk! Many times, if I pay attention, I find something very beautiful out there, sweeping the walk.