All kinds of things can happen when we meditate too – thoughts, shortness of breath, visual images, physical discomfort etc. Yet the same thing is happening to our minds all the time: sometimes our mind is busy, sometimes calm, sometimes agitated. But when the session end, I’ve realized that throughout the entire time, I was lost in thought. When your mind wanders, gently come back and stay present with your breath. It sounds so simple: just sit down, get comfortable, and bring light awareness to your being. However the truth is, anyone who’s ever tried meditation learns really quickly that we are almost never fully present. In Buddhist teaching of mindfulness, one of the primary focus is meditation as a way to access your thoughts and emotions, to learn how to stay at the present, or to put it accurately learning to come back, to return to being present over and over again. In these cases, this very thing we are most comfortable with: our habits, are our shenpa. Challenges can come from various external sources and they are variedly unpredictable, yet we tend to hold firmly to what we know, and attempt to tackle these challenges in the most predictable ways we know. In this metaphor, we can see that sometimes the very thing that we think can give us comfort can actually be the very thing that is holding us back. Yet most of us would not notice that scratching on the poison is the cause of the escalation, because scratching is the only thing we know how to do to give us comfort. And pretty soon, we will be scratching all over our bodies instead of finding relief, we find that our discomfort is escalating. By straying away from our habits, we will often feel uneasy and restless, that feeling that something bad is about to happen.īut what we don’t know yet, of the poison ivy, is that the more we scratch, the more the poison spreads. The same can be said to our daily routines, a habitual way of dealing with events in our lives by doing what we are comfortable with, and that we know for certain through countless experiences and trials that it would work for us. To relieve the discomfort, the most instinctive course of action is to scratch at it and for that moment in time, it would almost seem like the perfectly rational thing to do. The poison ivy is a plant that produce a poisonous sap that causes itching and painful rashes to anyone who touches it. The poison ivy can be used as a metaphor to look at shenpa from a different perspective. Yet, more fundamentally, we often fail to notice what the shenpa is. Getting stuck is such a bane to us, as we feel that we cannot move on, we feel uninspired, bored, and unmotivated by the lack of ideas. Everyone, especially creative minds like a designer, like to hear teachings about getting unstuck because it is constantly our biggest source of pain. Another way of explaining it is to liken it to “getting stuck”. The concept of shenpa can be simply translated to “attachment”, yet this barely touched the surface of what it really is. To a greater or lesser degree, we might all face similar discomforts with our personal sirens in life: this are our attachments or in Buddhist teachings, the concept of shenpa. This moral of this story talks about the courage it takes to consciously choose and staying receptive and mindful of the moment when the temptation to get swept away is intense. This conclusion, as expected, has a happy ending: the men followed his instructions and Ulysses made it through. This was a challenge that drew him.Īs his ship neared the sirens’ homeland, Ulysses told his men to put wax plugs in their ears and to tie him tightly to the mast, instructing them that no matter how hard he struggled and gestured, no matter how wrathfully he appeared to be ordering them to cut his ropes, they were not to change course under any circumstances. He knew of that if anyone could hear their voices and not go towards them, the sirens would lose their power forever and wither away. Nevertheless, Ulysses wanted to hear the song of the sirens. The sirens are told to be able to lure sailors with their beautiful song to shipwreck on the rocky coast of their islands. When he was making the sea voyage back to Greece after the Trojan war, Ulysses knew that his ship would have to pass through a dangerous area that was inhabited by beautiful creatures known as sirens. “Ulysses is a hero in ancient Greek mythology.
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