The Ways of Wind {part 2}

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This is a series about wind, about good and bad, about our struggles with the state of the world; but mostly, this is a series about wind. 

I love wind. 

Sometimes, I resonate with the sensation of being blown around. Chaotic, uncontrolled.

Other times, I resonate with the sensation of my feet on the ground. My body, a steady anchor as the wind whips around me. 

It is a both/and situation, and it asks us to acknowledge paradox. It teaches us equanimity. 

In Buddhist teachings, there is a teaching known as the 8 Worldly Winds. These winds are:

-Praise/Blame

-Gain/Loss

-Success/Failure

-Joy/Sorrow

The gist of the teaching is that we never know when the wind will change directions.

We are also reminded that one doesn’t exist without the other. We can’t only have praise. Or success. Or Joy. And in fact, we know through psychological research that if you refuse to experience sorrow, you inadvertently are unable to experience joy. The teaching isn’t telling us to fix it, or to get better. 

Rather the teaching is offering us a way to learn how to exist in the middle. 

We learn to embrace tension, paradox, change.  Instead of seeking resolution, waiting for the chord at the end of a song, we let ourselves open and relax in the middle.

Ajahn Sumedo teaches us to be open to the way things are.  “Of course we can always imagine more perfect conditions, how it should be ideally, how everyone else should behave. But it’s not our task to create an ideal. It’s our task to see how it is, and to learn from the world as it is. For the awakening of the heart, conditions are always good enough.”

Join me for today’s episode of The Mindful Minute as we explore the ever-changing wind both in concept and within a 20-minute guided meditation.