Endings and Beginnings

I sat on a bench just at the edge of the pond, surrounded by utter quiet.  What a relief to drop all the effort and straining.  As I settled into my perch, I realized I was not alone.  Just at my feet was a row of twenty or twenty-five frogs sunning themselves on rocks and logs.  I watched the frogs for a while.  These frogs knew how to meditate, I thought--talk about "just sitting, just breathing."  I exhaled a huge, pent-up sigh. Somehow, their mud-covered primeval presence spoke to my cells.  They certainly had "nowhere to go and nothing to do"--except to catch the occasional fly. 

I sat with the frogs for hours that day.  I let them teach me nondoing.  Because I was calmed down enough, and quiet enough just to sit with them, to breathe with them, I had epiphanies of insight.  Just sitting there in the sunlight.  This is what I had been trying for in the meditation hall, but here it was, right here with the frogs.

The great Theravadan monk, Ajahn Chah used to teach that the whole world is teaching the truth to us all the time.  In the entire path of yoga, there is really only one lesson.  It is the one lesson we have to learn over and over again.  And each time, it arrives as an epiphany, as it did, again, to me that day with the frogs: Whenever we relinquish our craving, clinging, and grasping, whenever we stop the war with reality, whenever we are totally present and undivided, we are immediately in union with our true nature.  "Try to do everything with a mind that lets go," says Ajahn Chah.  "Do not expect any praise or reward.  If you let go a little, you will have a little peace.  If you let go a lot, you will have a lot of peace.  If you let go completely, you will know complete peace and freedom.  Your struggles with the world will have come to an end."

Such a simple lesson.  Such a difficult lesson.  It doesn't matter what we call it: Yoga. Buddhism. Christianity. Relaxation. Consciousness.  When we stop choosing for and against experience, we are established in the witness, and in the state of yoga.  But that state is here right now.  There is no distance to travel, nothing to do.  In the practice of yoga, the end is IN the beginning, and the beginning is IN the end.

                                       From the book "Yoga and the Quest for the True Self"  by Stephen Cope