Notes from The Way app by Henry Shukman

• Deep and transformative changes can happen when we sit and find stillness, even just for a little while, each day.
• Over time, as we meditate, a deeper knowledge comes of our own experience, our own life.
• Four zones of practice essential for a deep and fulfilling meditative journey:
  • Mindfulness: to be truly aware of present moment experience, and succumb less frequently to entrapment by thoughts and reactivity
  • Support: to recognise that we are not lone agents, but in fact are part of a rich network of causes and effects that support us
  • Flow: to rest in deep states of absorption and ease, where the sense of self goes quiet
  • Awakening: to pierce the illusions we carry around with us and see into the true nature of ourselves and our non-dual relationship to the world.
• Seven common hindrances
  • Restlessness
  • Reluctance
  • Worry
  • Dullness
  • Desire-craving
  • Aversion-resistance
  • Doubt
• A single awareness from which flows an unlimited and deep wellbeing.
• Come home to a place of ease, quiet and rest, right in the centre of everyday experience.
• Gently wear down the idea that we’re separate, independent, entities in the world by seeing how all of what we are depends thoroughly on things outside of us.
  • The self is just a story we tell ourselves. Once we see that, our attachment to the story can soften.
• No effort.
  • No need to change anything.
  • No need to make anything happen.
  • No looking forward.
  • Notice that we don’t actually need to do anything to receive sounds, sensations, thoughts, feelings. They arise in our awareness by themselves
  • The whole world is arising just as it does, without effort – everything unfolding by itself, just as it does.
• It’s possible to reduce, or even to give up – if just for a little while – the endless quest to arrange our lives. And to find a very different kind of fulfillment, one that is intrinsic to the bare fact of being alive, and is always already here.
• In awakening, we can recognise that we are not actually the contents of awareness. Rather, we are in fact the broader context that awareness is. We are simply awareness itself. An open, boundless, center-less space in which all things arise.
• In Buddhism they talk about two forms of knowing: ‘understanding’ and ‘recognizing’. We can cognitively understand something, but it’s a different thing to recognize it as true, through our own personal experience.
• The more we allow ourselves to release our need to do and to strive, the more we may come to feel like there really is a deeper part of us that is simply an ever-present state of restfulness.
• We can start to discover a deep contentment in letting go of the need to move.
• Learning not just to have a still body, but to be comfortable in it, is a tried and tested way for helping the mind slow down and become more still.
• There is a place we can find in our own first-person field of experience that is always still.
• Awareness itself is also somehow ‘still’. It can’t move. It doesn’t change. Movement can only occur in relation to something else.
• Yaoshan: ‘take the backward step that shines the lamp inward.’
  • Something like: ‘relax, don’t strive, release back into a light of awareness that is already present.’
  • The advice of taking a ‘backward step’ seems to suggest that it won’t help to be ‘striving forward’.
• (from email) It’s not an answer on the same level that any question about it is asked. It’s not on the same level as all other questions and answers we have known.

The Way app

Added 2024-11-22, last updated 2025-01-07.