Awareness is Your Refuge

I started to feel better last night and I feel even softer and lighter today. This is interesting given the InnerNet Weekly and Dharma Quotes I read this morning that reiterated a consistent theme I began to recognize yesterday: My times of feeling down (or up) are a choice on my part whether I consciously recognize or acknowledge that fact. Osho writes in "You Carry Your Wound":

With the ego, your whole being is a wound. And you carry it around. Nobody is interested in hurting you, nobody is positively waiting to hurt you; everybody is engaged in safeguarding his own wound.... you are so ready to be wounded, so ready, just waiting on the brink for anything. You cannot touch a man of Tao. Why? - because there is no one to be touched. There is no wound. He is healthy, healed, whole.

A meditation practice offers us awareness. It's possible that my desire to soften the tightness and tension in my hands and wrists during yesterday's practice had a palpable effect on my mental/emotional holding. It's also regretable that when we feel caught up in our dramas and traumas, it is difficult to discipline ourselves to stay with or return to our practice.

In a Dharma quote from Snow Lion Publications Lama Dudjom Dorjee writes (From: Heartfelt Advice):

As practitioners we will face many obstacles and sidetracks on our path to liberation.... We shouldn't allow our practice to become interrupted due to these obstacles and sidetracks, such as the appearance and disappearance of the many friends we will have over the course of our lives....

And we shouldn't allow our practice to become interrupted by the obstacles and sidetracks presented by the many distractions of mind that are readily available in the mundane world of our external environment. We shouldn't allow our practice to be interrupted by obstacles and sidetracks that arise due to the desire and attachment we feel for loved ones, or our aversion to enemies, or our indifference towards others....

I feel grateful that, despite my sagging heart I continued to practice T'ai Chi Chih daily during this past week. Though I didn't always feel fabulous while I practiced nevertheless I continued. And now something is shifting, changing, moving....

Awareness is your refuge:
Awareness of the changingness of feelings,
of attitudes, of moods, of material change
and emotional change:
Stay with that, because it's a refuge that is
indestructible.
It's not something that changes.
It's a refuge you can trust in.
This refuge is not something that you create.
It's not a creation. It's not an ideal.
It's very practical and very simple, but
easily overlooked or not noticed.
When you're mindful,
you're beginning to notice,
it's like this.

From: Intuitive Awareness by Ajahn Sumedho, reprinted by "InnerNet Weekly: Trust in the Awareness," Nov. 9, 2010.