Insight- Non-Striving
by meditative - March 22nd, 2010.Filed under: Insights For Mindfulness Training.
The doing comes out of being. This is an art form…
Non-striving seems paradoxical for a culture, a people who are habitually, go getters and doers. In our meditation practice, there is nothing to do- no place to go- nothing to attain. You are simply present in the moment, but not to trivialize non-striving as it’s realizing that you are already here. We always start from where we are. There is no place to go as the agenda is to be awake. What happens now is what matters- it sets the stage for our future. As T.S. Eliot so poetically phrased in his Four Quartets…“Ridiculous the waste sad time- Stretching before and after.” … non-striving.
It’s not easy for many of us to accept the realization that we are already here. For many of us, we are bound to the conceptual streams of our thought patterns- often day dreaming of the past and of the future- prisoners of a running commentary called our Storylines. The future we want- “this is it”- and understanding “this is it” rotates our consciousness. This is the future. It’s already right here, right now. We are already residing in it.
What is the purpose of all this living if it’s only to get some place else, and then when we are there,we are not happy anyway. Culturally,we continually strive to keep moving and our sense of “self” is often displaced into some future moment- some place else other than here and now- fueled by incessant inadequacy and discontentment. We often hear people say… “when I retire”- “when I graduate from college”- “when I make enough money”- “when I get married”- “when I get divorced”- “when the kids move out,” etc. It is all this self-talk- this internal dialogue that talks us out of living fully in the present moment- in the here and now.
Wait a moment,“this is it”- “this is your life.” We only have moments. This moment is as good as any other. It’s perfect- it’s non-striving.