It’s a beautiful day here in the UK. The first sunny weekend of the year has fallen exactly in the official last days of spring. There’s such a sense of space at this time, even in the shedding of warm jumpers and the digging out of lighter clothes. My tomatoes had their first experience outside yesterday and they seem to have quite enjoyed it! I’m really a novice gardener so I ask them how it’s going, much to the amusement of the other humans around me.
There’s quite a lot of transition happening at the moment; kind of between one place and an unknown other. Can’t go back; forward is…..well what? My teacher described this with an analogy recently. She said it’s like throwing a ball up into the air. Where it takes a pause before it journeys down again, that’s where it feels like we are; at the top, like a ball stopped in mid air. It resonated a lot. Is anyone else feeling a bit like this? So here, in this moment in time, we can practise gently being in the pause. Overwhelm may come sometimes or uncertainty or doubt, and we can consciously try to lean back, breath slowly and change channel. It’s ok to be in the pause.
In Buddha Dharma there are 8 wordly conditions. What I love about these is that they are totally universal no matter what you know or where you come from, no matter if you practise meditation or not. The 8 worldly conditions will ALL be experienced by us ALL. They are pleasure and pain, praise and blame, gain and loss, and fame and obscurity/ordinariness (you can use your own language for some of these it if sits better with you). The idea is to practise being less kind of ruled by these. It’s so good to be praised and have enough money and have fun, in fact lets have as much of all that as we need. But, if possible, we can recognise that these factors don’t make us any more special than the next person…ouch! In turn however, the pauses, the uncertainties, the difficulties and transition times, don’t make us any less special either….cool!
When life is in transition, it’s because transition is part of life. This is a time to be generous to ourselves with kindness, informal connection and simple joys.