Dedicated to Sri Sarada Devi

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"Holy Mother" painted by Swami Tadatmananda

Used courtesy of the Vedanta Society of Southern California

http://www.vedanta.org




Dedicated to Sri Sarada Devi
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Restlessness and Worry

Everybody has them to some degree...Restlessness in the mind shows itself in the restlessness in the body. The body is the servant. It has no authority of its own. Whatever the body does is being dictated by the mind, whether we are aware of that or not. Most of the time we react so spontaneously and impetuously that we don't even know that the mind has said, 'Do that,' and we think, 'Oh, it's my body,' but it can't be 'my body' without 'my mind'.

Restlessness in the mind is mostly due to past experiences, those one has committed and those one has omitted, all the things in one's life that one would have liked to do and didn't, or those one did and would have liked not to do. Restlessness in the mind makes it very difficult to concentrate because it arises again and again.

The Buddha compared it to a pond where there was a lot of wind, making the waves rise high. When there are waves in one's emotions, one is drowned by them. One can't see clearly.

Worry is usually about the future and most people are extremely good at worrying and often fail to stop and think how useless and absurd it is. Worrying about the future is meaningless. The person who's worrying is not the person who's going to experience the future. There will be change, not just having grown older and hopefully a bit wiser, but a totally different set of circumstances with different thoughts and different feelings.

...That doesn't mean one can't plan. Planning and worrying are not the same thing. Planning turns into worrying when one starts thinking whether the plan is going to materialize. Planning is fine, and then dropping the plan until one can actually put it into action, without being concerned with the future results.

Worry...takes one away from the moment, which is the only one in which we can live. Moments spent in worrying are all lost moments. Unless we live in each moment we are missing life. When we think about the past and worry about the future, we aren't living. We are remembering and projecting. That's not living. Life can't be thought about, it has to be experienced. That's the only way life can ever mean anything, and experiencing can only happen in each moment. This is one of the skills that meditation teaches us, to live in the moment, which means to live at all.

Source: 'Being Nobody and Going Nowhere' by Ayya Khema

Location: Wilmslow, U.K.

Re: Restlessness and Worry

Thanks Vriju,
This is quite on time. A lot of things are vain,
regret is vain, worry is vain. But you are right, the mind has become our master. Fight or flight.
But things happen very slowly for some people, (Me)
and I do not know the reference at the moment but I seem to remember that Mother said that meditation must be spontaneous, it must not be forced. Any body else got any ideas about this?
Very good synthesis of the problem.

Location: New Bern, NC