I check the news before I have finished my first cup of tea, and by the time the cup is empty, my chest is already tight. Some mornings it takes real effort to sit down on the cushion after that, calm enough to notice anything at all.

A line from a poem by Neruda comes to mind:

You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep spring from coming.

You cannot keep spring from coming

Neruda was probably writing about the political crisis in his native Chile. He was reminding us that oppression, however total it looks from inside it, does not last.

I think that line also describes what a settled mind can do. With practice, we come to live in a slightly bigger, fresher space, one that can hold difficulty without being run by it.

The power of non-contention

Diana Winston has a name for this: non-contention. She describes it as releasing the need to struggle against, or oppose, the present moment. In her words:

If I do not practice non-contention, I suffer, fret, struggle, complain, and basically ruin my day. If I do, I grieve briefly, but my mind settles.

Non-contention is not giving in to injustice. Nor is it looking away from it.

The work starts small and private. First we end the war we carry on inside our own heads, the one where we react to every headline as if it were a personal insult. 

Then comes the slower, outward work: healing, showing up, nurturing relationships.

Meeting each moment as it actually is takes practice, and a certain nerve, a willingness to be vulnerable.

Under stress, most of us take cover in a more guarded version of ourselves, one that believes it is safer this way, more in control.

Mindfulness keeps returning us to the plain fact of being human: a body, in a room, trying to stay close to other people.

Tenderness

Meeting that all the way, not halfway, is tenderness. We open into it slowly, in pieces. This is where courage, love, empathy, and patience actually come from — not from somewhere else, but from right here.

The second cup of tea is finished. The news has not gotten any better. I sit down on the cushion anyway.

Further reading

• to love the world just as it is
• a gentle rain in the garden of the heart
• when is the best time to meditate?