Click here to join our daily meditations to support establishing a regular sitting practice.

Sometimes Bodhisattvas Need a Rest!

The world right now is full of conflict, confusion, and crisis. If you’re walking the path of a bodhisattva you may be working overtime to care for the pain and suffering of those around you, the planet, and yourself! It’s arduous work. You may find at times your heart is tired, broken, and depleted. Just like any activist, the bodhisattva needs care in order to stay in fighting shape!

How can the practice be supportive in these times of great challenge? What can connect you to strength, nourishment, and resilience?

Take a moment right now to connect your attention with the body. In the midst of physical sensations related to breathing, touching, sensing, in between emotions fluttering here and there, can you sense stillness? Can you sense a place of rest?

See if you can find or create a place where there is relaxation, even if tension elsewhere is pulling more strongly at your attention. Can you feel into some sense of peacefulness or restfulness? Perhaps this place is very small, like the tip of a finger. Or maybe it’s located somewhere in the release of muscles on the out-breath. What about tuning in to the natural repose of sitting down?

This place doesn’t need to be large or over the whole body. Let this micro-space of peace be a refuge. It can be a place to focus a ragged attention that has been yanked so violently from one difficulty to the next.

Allow thoughts about the past and future to come and go. Allow emotions to arise and pass. Let everything other than this patch of peace stay in the background of awareness.

Connect with this place of stillness. In it can be nourishment, sustenance, and solace. Come back to it when attention gets pulled away. Let it grow and spread through the body, absorbing your focus.

This directing of attention can provide spaciousness. It can allow a change in perspective. It can provide a recharge of energy. It is here if you know where to find it. The more you visit it the easier it is to find in times of need. And in this way it can help you continue to walk the bodhisattva’s path and bring peace to a world that needs you.