“The Buddha picked in particular five very common entanglements or difficulties that would come
as one simply sat down to begin to pay attention to one’s life”. —Jack Kornfield

Five very common entanglements = five hindrances, like we said, but … it was the second part here that grabbed me.

When I hear the word ‘meditation’ it feels very freighted to me, with tradition and ceremony and ritual and piety, with the smell of incense and a mad seriousness.

I think I’d like to let go of all that, and just siddown and pay attention instead.

The man also talks about the ‘powerful forces that run the world’, only he doesn’t use the phrase to mean the Bezos and the Gates and the rest of the rich assholes at the top. He means instead: Judgement. Fear. Wanting. Doubt. Anything that keeps us from the reality of the moment, keeps us from an open heart and a clear mind.

I’m five minutes in, and here he begins to talk about what I really want to hear, which is how to address these forces. (Not to overcome them, as I almost said, but instead ‘the way that one might work with them’.

***

1: Wanting Mind, Desiring Mind, the ‘if only I had’ Mind (kamacchanda)

He puts greed here too, which interests me.
If only I had a little more money. If only I had that one perfect lover. Wanting is normal. Wanting is … exhausting.

Accept wanting as part of the landscape of a life. Notice and study this force and then sensations it brings when it arises. Give it space in the mindful heart and see what it does. Understand it as weather; can you be present with it without reacting until you know what is the right thing to do with it? What is the backstory of the force of wanting and wanting … where in your early life experience does it come from?

(I need to know more about this Mindful Heart. I feel what it means but I don’t rationally know what it means. … )

He quotes a Wendell Berry poem called The Peace of Wild Things.

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.