Don’t pick it Up

I hope you all had a nice weekend. In my last newsletter I shared the message about being a river, not a container.  That concept continued for me this past week as I shared a story that one of my teachers, Jack Kornfield, tells from his time as a buddhist monk. One day he was on his walking meditation and his teacher pointed out a big boulder in the distance. He turned to Jack and asked “Is that boulder heavy?”. Jack looked at the boulder and then back to his teacher and he answered “Yes, of course.” His teacher then responded “Not if you don’t pick it up.”

The message is we often have a choice about what burdens we “pick up”. Of course there are some “boulders” that are unavoidable but many (more than we realize) are not. The burdens we carry often do not serve us, yet until we realize what we carry we cannot make the choice to “lighten our load”. 

The awareness is necessary to understand the burdens we are shouldering both in our bodies and our psyches. The stress and heaviness can get trapped in our muscles and organs along with our hearts and minds.  

Our mindfulness practice teaches us to hold our experiences, our fears and our joys a little more lightly. We tend to grasp so tightly to joy in fear it is fleeting while at the same time resisting change so intensely that it crushes us. If we can soften into impermanence and the understanding that it is all temporary, we  can free ourselves from some of that fear and  “lighten our loads”.  

Of course this takes practice and part of that practice is softening around the expectation and judgement we have towards ourselves. In noticing our inner critic and the expectations and criticism we endure from ourselves we can again choose to “put down” what is not serving us. The burdens we put on ourselves can sometimes be the heaviest ones of all. 

I hope your practice can lead you towards a choice to “not pick up a boulder” this week. I will be practicing right along with you.