May – August 2012
Dear Friends:
One of the most challenging aspects of mindfulness practice is learning how to trust that awareness is always ready to know experience as it is. Meditators often swing back and forth between unwise effort and giving up. Unwise effort is disappointing because it doesn’t lead to insight. Wrong effort often equates the practice of mindfulness with focusing attention on an object. Notice how the intention to focus often has to do with the mind wanting to control. The need to control is at the root of our stress and suffering.
In order for awareness to reflect things as they are, mindfulness must arise with wisdom. As long as we are involved in self-centered doing, one’s attention is affected by greed, aversion, or delusion. Wise effort remembers how to understand the moment directly and simply. Instead of the mind reacting and spinning with projections of self-centered dramas, there can be the wise effort to recognize that these patterns are thoughts and feelings being known. Wisdom recognizes that even the most intense moments are simply moments of experience being known.
Wise effort invests in remembering that the mind is already knowing. Wise effort asks, “What is the mind knowing now?” Instead of the effort to focus or to attain, mindfulness remembers, “This is how it is now.” This simplicity is a relief; it is what makes the practice trustworthy.
Peace,
Mark Nunberg
Guiding Teacher
Download the Spring Summer 2012 Newsletter
