The Carefree Heart

A metaphor that is often used by meditation teachers is of thoughts being like clouds in the sky.  It can be easy to hear this and forget to feel what it is suggesting. When I was a teen I heard the lyrics “into each life some rain must fall but too much has fallen in mine” I started singing it to myself as it resonated with my melancholy mood as a teen. And at times in my life it does feel as if I’ve been standing under a huge rain cloud and that life just seemed wet and miserable!

I was lucky to meet teachers who had had their own experience of this and who had recognised how to liberate their hearts. Knowing such people and feeling the sense of carefree joy that they exuded was always an inspiration. They could feel difficult emotions.  I know that from talking to them.  But they did not become a person lost in those emotions.

There’s a teaching that one can feel sad without being sad. If sadness (or any other difficult emotion) is here then it’s what is knocking at the door of awareness, asking to be let in to the heart. It can be welcomed. Held. Seen. Allowed. Whilst not merging with it as an identity. Not getting lost in that script. Taking one’s role in the familiar drama of oneself. Instead a feeling comes. It makes itself at home for a while. And it passes. It brings its own learning and healing if it is honoured and not made wrong.

Whilst there may be a state of being where one might be dispassionate through not clinging to the idea of self, for the rest of us to try to artificially create that state by denying what one is feeling most likely will only lead to it finding some other way to make itself know: for as Yung says, “What we resit persists, what we fight we get more of”.

A more workable model of dispassion may be finding that middle place where we neither get lost in the emotion nor are we pushing it away. Allowing this moment to be perfect. Whether it be an experience of joy. Sadness. Fear. Or whatever.

This brings us back to the clouds in the sky.  My teacher Ajahn Sumedho would always remind us that that which is Aware of something is not the thing of which it is aware. The sky holds the clouds as Awareness holds whatever thoughts and feelings are arising and taking birth in this moment. But the sky is never the cloud. The sky can only be the space in which the clouds take birth and dissolve.   Even when the clouds are thick and no hint of blue is there, they can only exist because of the space of the sky. And that space of open, free and non-attached clarity is still there even when filled with the clouds of worry, regret, fear, etc.. The clouds are temporary appearances in the vastness of the sky. But we can so easily get absorbed in the clouds and forget there ever was a sky.

In Buddhism it is taught that our true nature is like the sky. It is unborn and uncreated and never touched by all of the travails of the ego mind. Like the screen of a cinema it allows whatever drama there is to be projected onto it, seeming to be the drama but in fact never touched by it. And when the drama stops, there is simply the clear screen still as immaculate as it was before the drama spread across it.

As I reflect more on this it gives me a sense of softening.  The struggle to be free is part of the drama of the mind caught in the belief in linear time: “one day I will be free, but I’m not free right now”. This is like a cloud thinking one day I will find the sky!

The thought “I have all these problems that have to be solved” is just one of the many clouds scurrying across the sky. But when I truly stop. Breathe. Rest into the moment and into my heart. Then there is a peace. A peace that was so close that it was overlooked in all the looking for peace somewhere else than right here. In this moment. The funny thing is we spend so long trying to find peace. To get the answer to being happy. But the search in the end only leads back to this moment. To seeing that we were never not the sky, but just identified with being the clouds. And when this is felt, there is a moment of the heart being carefree and at peace.  Then the drama of the cloud like mind takes over again. Or takes hold of the experience and tries to own it as an ego experience “the time I had an insight”

I was on a retreat this week end where there was an opening to this sense of peace.  And since the weekend there has continued to be a feeling of a peace that is vibrant yet still. So lovely. Things have started to occur to cloud over this open sky and I can see how my thinking mind wants to get back in the driving seat again – worrying about a concern, desiring that body in the gym changing room, feeling angry with my neighbour…..but it’s a choice: I can let it go, dissolving back into that infinite blue sky of loving awareness that held me….that was me….during the retreat……or I can go into it and experience the mind’s creation – which feels narrower, more ego focused and driven by desire to get or push away rather than rest in the moment.

A daily mindfulness practice is an invitation to drop into this peace that just is, which does not need to be created or found. This moment of allowing and “being the knowing” as a Thai forest monk described it. The ‘knowing’ is calm: the knowing of sadness is not sad, the knowing of anger is not angry – it feels it, senses it, is intricately connected to it, but is also dispassionate, knowing that this movement of the mind is not what it is. It’s like waves rushing across the surface of the ocean, however much they get wiped up into a storm, they never touch the still depth of the ocean. Meditation is like this: knowing the waves for what they are, being fully present to them when choppy or calm, but also resting into the deeper depths of being, the stillness at the heart of the ocean.

Please follow and like us:
error