05/07/2017
I love this passage about releasing habit energies from the book, "One Buddha is Not Enough:"
"The way to break free from our habits and our conditioning is the two-fold training of shamatha, stopping, and vipashyana, looking deeply..
It is essential in terms of our meditation practice to touch that stillness, that spaciousness, that relaxing of our body and our mind before we're able to practice our second aspect of the training, vipasyana, looking deeply. If we practice vipasyana without stretching our heart, then we can easily stand to get injured. If we don't stretch our heart, we tend to use our head a bit too much and over-analyze, which doesn't really get us very far....
With just a small degree of stillness, things become apparent, you don't have to strain yourself to see. We learn how to dwell with what is there outside of us and within us. There's so much that is right in front of us, but when we're distracted by so much mental noise, we can't hear it, we can't see it; we don't see the full picture...
To look deeply, we need to let go of all that. Letting go is the beginning of expanding our heart. Once our heart is open and relaxed, we can see more deeply, using more than our eyes. If we only use our eyes, we tend to strain or focus on the details..."
