mind weeds
To a week ahead tending to your ‘Mind Weeds’.
Shunryu Suzuki Roshi on ‘MIND WEEDS’ ‘You should rather be grateful for the weeds you have in your mind, because eventually they will enrich your practice.’
While Suzuki speaks of these ‘mind weeds’ as being difficulties that arise in meditation or zazen practice but this concept is just as relevant to our lives outside of meditation or yoga.
You can think of your ‘mind weeds’ as negative self-talk, self-limiting beliefs, unhelpful habits, compulsions….whatever it is for you. There might be many!
So this week viewing these ‘mind weeds’ as opportunities to nourish us when we take the time to tend to them, understand them and so we can remove them. Like weeds in the garden, we need to get to the root of the weed. You can cover it on the surface with bark, but it continues to find its way around. You can pull it off without digging deeper to get to all the roots and it feels like you’ve made an improvement, for a while, but soon enough it’s back. So it’s worth the effort to dig a little deeper, find out where the roots lead and being careful to remove the whole of the weed, so it doesn’t grow back. Not always easy! Some weeds are easy, like thistles, and others like oxalis are really tricky, to ensure you get to the bulbous root, without the root system breaking off.
So too with our ‘mind weeds’, for us to be nourished and not be tangled by these ‘weeds’ we need to dig a little deeper, rather than covering up and just keeping them at bay, we can get to the ‘root of the problem’* and allow it to be acknowledged and resolved. *It’s always so interesting to see how much of our everyday language reflects these analogies.
Self Enquiry this week – is there a ‘mind weed’ that needs some tending to this week? A habit or something I’m clinging to, or avoiding, that I need to give some attention to? To reflect on how I’m relating to it. Can I change my mindset from seeing this as a blocker, or hiding behind it to be more curious about when it shows up and where it stems from. .. to grow and evolve, to be truly nourished and free.