Keep It Simple

We get together each week as a group to practice together and to notice what is new and changing in the practice for each of us. By expressing and sharing our experience and asking questions, we can clarify our practice. Understanding the practice allows us to practice with ease and see the relationship between awareness and the objects of awareness; like thoughts, feelings, and sensations. As we become better able to notice the arising of habitual patterns in our thinking and reactions, we find the space in our interactions with others to respond in ways that reduce rather than continue our suffering and the suffering of others. Finding ways to do that in our daily life can be simpler than you think.

Here is a quote attributed to 17th Karmapa, Ogyen Trinley Dorje, a prominent Tibetan Buddhist leader, shared on the “Just Dharma Quotes” Facebook page, and what follows that is how one of the members of our group took this idea into his daily life practice.

Once you have committed to a particular path, I suggest that you look for the simplest way forward. You should make things accessible and approachable in your religious community and in your personal practice, rather than more complicated.

Keep it simple. The life of the spirit is actually very basic and easy. We often don’t appreciate that. In the beginning, our spiritual path may strike us as very simple and perfectly clear. But then, after we have been practicing it for a few years, we sometimes find ourselves going backward, and moving away from that initial simplicity. The spiritual breakthrough we experience may simply consist in rediscovering what we had seen in the beginning.

Spiritual discovery is not a matter of finding wisdom out there somewhere. It is a matter of discovering what already exists within us. Like cleaning the surface of a stone inscription, the more you clean it, the more the original carving becomes apparent. We are like that stone. With spiritual practice, instead of gaining something we did not have before, we gradually make ourselves clearer to ourselves.

Now, from Ron Skinner, a very aware, wonderful, and kind man who took all the teachings he received to heart and gave them to others with generosity and love.

This is a perfect quote.  It’s something I’ve been trying to express at AA meetings.  After 40+ years of THAT practice, I find myself trying to articulate things like…

…it used to be so complicated and everything was to be argued or, at least, understood.  And, now, it’s become so simple. I don’t mean that I’ve invented a new way, or put “all that” aside or anything like that but, simply put… what I used to analyze [and resist] and learn to do etc, it all comes down now to things like having the intention and making the effort to live in the present moment, to be here now, to keep my mind and my body in the same place at the same time; to treat others (ALL others, in my life or simply those who cross my path or come into my line of sight) as I would like to be treated (whether it’s a matter of personal relationships, casual business encounters, while driving, standing in line at a check-out at the store, a phone call that’s the “wrong number;” seeing someone standing on a street corner looking at a map…

…AA says that we do this work so that we may have “the best possible relationship” with every person that we know… and I take that to mean every person that I’m even aware of… a photograph of a distressed child, someone working on a construction project as I drive by and so on… not only do I have a relationship with that child or that worker but they symbolize or represent so many distressed children and their families everywhere; the worker represents all those who labor for their livelihood and, by extension, they represent also all those who are unable to earn a livelihood… and so on, ad infinitum…

…and I won’t go on ad infinitum!!!

So, I wish you all the simplicity of practice that Ron found and shared with so many.