From Tias Little: the term emptiness is mostly misconstrued, second only to the word enlightenment. People think emptiness is vacuity, blankness, nothingness, nil. In fact, emptiness is closer to receptivity. When we are empty, we are receptive, available, impartial, broad-minded, and tolerant [accepting?]. When we empty out, we feel full, spacious, open and unconfined. [Thus] awakened in heart and mind, we feel fulfilled by each small thing.
We've been lately about emptying, and the paradoxical fullness that can emerge when we do. As with so much of the yogic teaching, we come to experience life as intertwined and inseparable, full of apparent "opposites" that are not actually opposite at all.
From Tias Little: the term emptiness is mostly misconstrued, second only to the word enlightenment. People think emptiness is vacuity, blankness, nothingness, nil. In fact, emptiness is closer to receptivity. When we are empty, we are receptive, available, impartial, broad-minded, and tolerant [accepting?]. When we empty out, we feel full, spacious, open and unconfined. [Thus] awakened in heart and mind, we feel fulfilled by each small thing. Sometimes, we get focused on being somewhere other than where we are in our practice - as Tias Little calls it, stuck on not being stuck...
From The Practice is the Path (2020): The experience of the mirror-like nature of the mind requires, at some point, a kind of surrender. The word surrender implies "giving over" as in the French word "render" - "to give back"... surrender implies giving back that which does not belong to us. When we empty before we begin, we are ready, willing, and able to give of ourselves, to reflect back in kind. One of the most difficult "letting go's" is holding our sense of solitary self or ego more gently and with more willingness to be curious and humble, instead of defaulting to "I, me, mine". Patanjali refers to this habit of clinging to self as asmita (one of the five kleshas or veils). This habit obscures the knowledge that everything - including ourselves - is part of a unified, timeless whole composed of interconnected layers of incredibly complex diversity).
From Tias Little: When we empty before we begin, we give back to the world. One of the oldest analogies for the mind in meditation is that of a mirror. When we discard our assumptions about things, we can reflect things as they are. If we only see the world through the narrow lens of "me, my, mine" then we fail to live a full and boundless life. |
AuthorMisha Butot RCSW, ERYT 500 is a longtime clinical social worker and senior yoga teacher living in Victoria, BC Archives
April 2024
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