Day 59 Morning Meditation - The More You Try, The Harder...

Please note: These are unedited recordings from live sessions held each weekday morning online. Please keep in mind the context when listening.

During this session, there is a spacious short meditation followed a teaching. The meditations are spacious intentionally so that you can feel into your own experience rather than me talking through the whole 20 minutes.

Transcript

Okay, Good morning, Good afternoon, Good evening. Thank you, Linda, For yesterday. Thank you. Looked like it went very well. Nice poem. What we're waiting for. This is it. This is it. So we just set it. Tune into this sense of presence, This sense of aliveness being here. Kind of subtle but so obvious. We just let life reveal itself to us. We just joined, We just. . . Tuning into this sense of presence. Nothing special. Letting go of all ideas of getting somewhere. Just resting, You could call it the heart, Being presence. What's happening now? There's absolutely nowhere to go. Or it happens if you just relax. Where are you now? Keeping it all so simple. Like a virus. Do the heavy lifting. The more we try, The harder this is. Notice that this sense of presence is here, Without thought, We don't have to think it into existence. Okay if anybody does have a question or an observation. Do share it. I just want to say why we, I want to go over some essentials, Why we do this as the main practice. One of Charlotte Joe Quebec's students went to her and said, I want to learn the loving-kindness practice. She said, Fine. He said, But whatever you do, Don't try to attain anything. And that was what struck me. That's the heart of it. Because we're always trying to attain. The mind makes us believe that there's something missing, Something needs to change, Something needs adding, Need to get something else, Be different. So that's what we call the path. We think there's an end to it. There isn't. There's no end to that. So the practice that we do is sort of secondary to how we do it. The only practice that Djoko back in Zen teaches is the one we've just done. It's called Shikantaza, Just sitting, Literally just sitting. The truth, Whatever we want to call it. Rises all by itself, It reveals itself. Because what needs to happen is that we need to lose interest in thought. Self-centered thought, Not functional and practical, That's different. We never lose interest in that. Or the self-referential ego-centred thinking. The obsessing about the past, The obsessing about the future, The obsession of next. What else? Because the mind is presenting a reality to us. And that reality isn't true. That's why we suffer. Sitting here right now, Thoughts arise, The mind's presenting this reality, And the shoulders tense, There's a butterfly in the stomach, All because we've bullied the thought. So St Francis of Assisi, What are you looking for? He's doing the looking. You're looking for yourself, Your true self. We are looking in the wrong place. We are looking in the wrong place. We're looking to an experience. Special experience. We have an idea, The mind has an idea of what this is, What we're looking for. As this picture of it. But again, It's a lie. It's not true. So we give up the chairs, We rest here, We watch the thoughts, We see again and again. Just how my mind is constantly. . . Hijacking our attention. And we come back to what's actually happening. Hearing, Seeing, Feeling. That's how we become intimate with our true self. It happened when we stopped trying, Stopped chasing ideas and shadows. OK. Thank you very much guys.

Reviews

My morning routine... thanks for adding to it & also always bringing it back to simple 🙌🏼

Thanks again Suryacitta.

Thank you 🙏

how can there be a true self when causes and conditions are constantly changing? Or is our true self The ability to be aware of what’s present in this moment as causes and conditions are continuously changing?