Flip It If You Gotta

The Law of TaiJi tells us that there is always something to be uncovered if we believe we have arrived at a conclusion.

When we dream up our ideal life, we rarely consider what suffering is included.

We talk about the qualities we want in a partner, but rarely acknowledge what kind of quirks we can reasonably tolerate.

We play the (unduly simplistic) Opposites-Game.

I want this quality which I like.

I don’t want this quality that I do not like.

Which qualities that you don’t like do you want? Which qualities that you want are you happy to do without?

See how this works?

I’ve been thinking about the Practice of keeping a Grattitude Journal after listening to a Sharon Salzberg lecture, but I know from experience that I don’t fare well with the conventional approach to this Practice.

List three things, each day, that you are grateful for. Easy enough, but it quickly becomes a merely cerebral exercise and feels like a chore. It feels like the kind of forced and potentially-fake positivity that is so pervasive in the SocialMedia landscape.

So I poked around my mind for awhile, and it became clear that I could also ask myself, what are three things I’ve taken for granted today?

What we take for granted is where our grattitude truly lies, and it seems to me that the beauty of it all actually depends upon our taking it for granted.

That’s how Grace works.

It’s not that we must never mention or recognize it. In fact, when we do it will be all the more genuine. It’s like getting lost in Presence and then realizing what’s happening. Rather than searching for it, it simply arises.

You can be grateful for all the little, and the big, joys and surprises during the course of a given day, but for my Mind it is much more powerful to pause and recognize all the things I am able to not even notice and to appreciate that this not-noticing is even possible.

Afterall, the Good and Bad aren’t so obvious in the long run and with enough Looking you can see how to flip them into each other anyhow!