'If you are focused on the end goal of changing yourself, it’s implying that you aren’t good enough as you are today. This is unhelpful and inaccurate because you are enough.'
Trying less and being more.
Nothing to do, nowhere to be. A simply little kind of free.
When we are strongly attached to a particular outcome, such as relaxing or clearing the mind or becoming a better person, striving toward these goals actually interferes with the ability to accept what is here.
Open your heart to who you are, right now,
Not who you would like to be,
You are already more and less
Breathe out, Touch in, Let go.
Cultivating the attitudinal foundation of non-striving is challenging for many of us, yet essential to the development of mindfulness practice. In our culture, the possibility of non-striving is radical, given much of our lives are spent trying to achieve something. The word (v.) strive comes from the old French word estrife and means to “quarrel, dispute, resist, struggle, put up a fight, compete.” Contrary to this, in mindfulness practice the invitation is to sit and do nothing. The very thought of this notion of non-doing turns people’s noses up in disgust, conjuring up feelings of anxiety, and making even the most open-minded folks wonder how anything will get accomplished.
When is the last time you did something just to be there doing it, fully immersed in the moment to moment experience? Close your eyes and see if you can recall the frame of mind that was present while engaged in a recent activity. Gardening, watching a movie, cooking a meal, making love. You may likely find that you were heavily invested in the outcome of the event and paid little or no attention to the process as it was unfolding.
In mindfulness meditation we cultivate our capacity to pay attention to process, witnessing the unfolding of our lives and ourselves, moment to moment.
Let go of any outcome and just enjoy what we are doing, in the
moment.
Flow - action, immersion, energy, focus, involvement, enjoyment
Non-striving is a radical practice that takes patience and non-judging to cultivate. Begin by becoming familiar with the way striving feels in the body and seeing how what you feel changes when you practice non-doing. This clear seeing will begin to loosen the grip of attachment to outcome and allow you to have more moments of flow. You may consider choosing one activity a day where you focus on process, with no concern for outcome. Stay curious and be creative! Reflect on your universal intentions as well as any intentions for specific goals and begin to integrate them in to your daily life. Finally, remember what Laozi said, “Do non-doing, strive for non-stiving, savor the flavourless, make much of little, repay enmity with virture; plan for difficulty when it is still easy, do the great while it is still small.”
Non-striving isn’t about giving up aspirations and goals, it’s about letting-go of control, of needing things to be a certain way. Recognising this is a process of disillusionment. Disillusionment in a positive sense, the illusion – the bubble of believing that we are in control and can have things our way, is burst. Now we can ‘wake-up’ to reality, to see things as they actually are. We can take response-ability for attending to the ways in which much of our stress and suffering arises from our refusal to accept life as it is in any moment.
The only safety lies in letting it all in –
the wild and the weak; fear,
fantasies, failures and success.
When loss rips off the doors
of the heart, or sadness veils your
vision with despair, practice
becomes simply bearing the truth.
In the choice to let go of your
known way of being, the whole
world is revealed to your new eyes.
Sources:
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