As a child we are naturally curious and trusting, the world around us exploding into life through our all our senses. We freely met resistance, flow and space in a willing exploration, a sour taste rejected, a tumble from loss of balance, the simple delight in a muddy puddle or a line of ants. Our ineptitude is no barrier to learning. We feed our memory with new and novel experiences, sometimes painful sometimes joyful.
We learn from other reactions, patterns of approval and encouragement, chastisement and control. As we grow, the novel becomes the familiar, both helping us navigate our world but also dulling our initial excitement ingraining habits and patterns of behaviour, some helpful and some destructive. Gradually we lose our natural trust in the validity of our inner experience learning instead to look outwardly seeking approval for the correct experience and response.
The Buddha’s teaching shows us how we can rewind and look afresh at the world around us, recovering the childlike lens we have lost, together with a growing discernment about what is really governing our experience.
Just like the toddler making sense of a new physical world and the excitement of a flight of stairs and the distress of an unexpected barrier, we come to face ourselves and our utter ineptitude in handling both the thrill seeking and the conflicts within us. These are our first steps into a hidden landscape of interior resistance, inner drive, flow and space.
Awakening to this inner world is the humbling experience we need. To see how we are routinely driven by our emotions and desires, how we’re deluded about these impulses and how we need to see the fuller picture showing us where we have identified with the sweeter versions as well as victim versions of ourselves.
Like the small child we have all been, and all still are in one way or another, happily we each have the potential in this lifetime to grow up and reframe our relationship with ourselves with support, connection and above all love. It’s a great journey of hope and healing, whether we are coping with feeling isolated and let down or have simply lost our connection to a sense of ease and the simple joys of life.
One of the pragmatic instructions in the Buddha’s teaching is that we do not need to go over and unpick everything that has been causing us distress. Instead all that is needed is a turning of our gaze inwards to tune into the inner movements that govern our experience right now and, with the fresh gaze of a child recover our capacity to trust.
It is a deeply freeing insight that short circuits our ruminating strategies and tendencies to keep seeking answers outside of ourselves. Instead, investigating in this way means we can learn to see and feel how our habits come to life and how they repeat. As we tune into how exhausting this ineptitude is, we can re-orientate inwardly, learning how to trust in the face of inner conflict, discovering in the process what is needed to sustain our energy and keep ourselves level. As our experience grows, the troublesome stories of our past lose their tenacious grip on shaping the direction of our future and we can ready ourselves for the new chapters of our life, more steady and free.
We learn from other reactions, patterns of approval and encouragement, chastisement and control. As we grow, the novel becomes the familiar, both helping us navigate our world but also dulling our initial excitement ingraining habits and patterns of behaviour, some helpful and some destructive. Gradually we lose our natural trust in the validity of our inner experience learning instead to look outwardly seeking approval for the correct experience and response.
The Buddha’s teaching shows us how we can rewind and look afresh at the world around us, recovering the childlike lens we have lost, together with a growing discernment about what is really governing our experience.
Just like the toddler making sense of a new physical world and the excitement of a flight of stairs and the distress of an unexpected barrier, we come to face ourselves and our utter ineptitude in handling both the thrill seeking and the conflicts within us. These are our first steps into a hidden landscape of interior resistance, inner drive, flow and space.
Awakening to this inner world is the humbling experience we need. To see how we are routinely driven by our emotions and desires, how we’re deluded about these impulses and how we need to see the fuller picture showing us where we have identified with the sweeter versions as well as victim versions of ourselves.
Like the small child we have all been, and all still are in one way or another, happily we each have the potential in this lifetime to grow up and reframe our relationship with ourselves with support, connection and above all love. It’s a great journey of hope and healing, whether we are coping with feeling isolated and let down or have simply lost our connection to a sense of ease and the simple joys of life.
One of the pragmatic instructions in the Buddha’s teaching is that we do not need to go over and unpick everything that has been causing us distress. Instead all that is needed is a turning of our gaze inwards to tune into the inner movements that govern our experience right now and, with the fresh gaze of a child recover our capacity to trust.
It is a deeply freeing insight that short circuits our ruminating strategies and tendencies to keep seeking answers outside of ourselves. Instead, investigating in this way means we can learn to see and feel how our habits come to life and how they repeat. As we tune into how exhausting this ineptitude is, we can re-orientate inwardly, learning how to trust in the face of inner conflict, discovering in the process what is needed to sustain our energy and keep ourselves level. As our experience grows, the troublesome stories of our past lose their tenacious grip on shaping the direction of our future and we can ready ourselves for the new chapters of our life, more steady and free.
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