Building Integral Resilience and Big Heart IQ in 5-minutes a day!

Integral Resilience is the Rosetta Stone for Behavioral Change underlying Robust Health, Life Force, Imagination, Creativity, and Longevity. What if it can be cultivated in 5 minutes of practice per day?

Noticing

Seizei said to Sozan, “Seizei is alone and destitute. Please help him.”

Sozan called out, “Venerable Zei!” … and Seizei answered, “Yes.”

Sozan observed, “You have finished three cups of the finest Hakka wine and still you say you have not yet moistened your lips.”

Mumonkan # 10 (Gateless Gate)

Audio: On Noticing

Actions: 

• Welcome the world.
• Notice anything that is wondrous, especially little things.
• Pause to count each of these moments, 1,2,3…
• Watch what starts to happen in your life.

Resilience Advantage: The world teems with wonders.

Reference: When to the Moment, then, I say– “Stay a while, you are so beautiful” (Faust, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

PDF

On Noticing.

I begin by just noticing. For me it is a treasure hunt. I’m on the look-out for anything that strikes my senses, in this moment, that is wondrous. Little things, improbable things are the most fun:

A kid doing somersaults with his skateboard; two birds soaring by for their private purpose; a large bumble bee buzzing on a flower that might have struck terror in my childish eyes, but now, somehow I feel a sense of kinship; an ant about to go over the precipice of the sink in the bathroom! Does she even sense the danger she is in? or perhaps, there is no danger at all, for in her ant-ness she is almost weightless! Wow! I find the more I forget myself, the more this world of wonders comes to me.

Sometimes I pause and I remind myself to take a mind/heart snapshot so I don’t forget what I am witnessing.

I count these little miracles, as each emerges from the void, 1=skate board, 2=birds, 3=large bumblebee, 4=ant, like that.

For each visitor, each encounter I ask myself what is distinctive, essential, and fresh? For example, the way the light strikes this leaf this morning; or its saturated greenness. I have never seen the morning light, this ultimate greenness, exactly in this way. Often, I just enjoy listening to the sound of silence. I have a small library of such images in my mind.

At times I pause and I let my intuition take me deeper. I call this “entering the passage way.” I go deeper into bee-ness, ant-ness, green- leaf-ness, and silence. Everything else disappears. I fancy I am entering a wormhole connecting me to another reality. And sometimes I catch what the German poet/scientist Goethe refers to as the “Golden Thread.” This Thread takes me deeper, and if I am lucky, the object of my attention and I merge, and I experience the glory.

In the Zen canon there is story of a famous master before he reaches enlightenment, who attends a funeral, and knocks on the coffin. “Alive or Dead?” he inquires. (Zen stories dispense with commentaries on whether such behavior is odd or not.)

After the funeral on the way home the young man inquires of his teacher, “Alive or Dead?” And the teacher replies, “I won’t say, I won’t say!” The young man has a desperate need to know. “You must tell me, you must. “I won’t say, I won’t say,” his teacher persists.

Years later after his old teacher has passed away the young man meets another teacher and asks the same question, “Alive or Dead”, and receives the same answer, “I won’t say, I won’t say.” This time the young man has ripened in his practice, and he gets the point. It’s not about knowing, it’s about experiencing.

And that’s the real fun of noticing. It’s not about figuring any of it out. Each moment is fresh and alive, and the rolling world around us teems with wonders. Its taste is like the finest Hakka wine.