The Certainty of Enoughness

There is a lot to feel happy and hopeful despite the pandemic. If anything, the pandemic is a time of great learning to know this moment is just enough.

In the scheme of things, this is a happy moment. We all look for happiness.

The meditation practice points to a deeper place where we can learn to feel happy in a different manner.

What is the movement we make when are receiving happiness – it tends to be going outwards.

When it is unpleasant we recede or push it away.

In both situations, openness is not part of the landscape.

So the fulfillment of needs is an outward motion. The coming out to get something.

There are times that the mind gets clouded by this outward movement despite the presence in the body.

What to do?

1. First is to recognize that needs need to be differentiated from wants.

2. Then we need to understand that needs are part of the rubric of what defines the process of becoming. Needs turn into cravings and can have a somatic counterpart. Cravings become the cause of suffering. This is the truth of the second noble truth.

Our work here is to be free of suffering. This is where intention comes. Our life’s intention including the moment to moment intention is focused around freedom from suffering and then what follows are steps towards this:

1. We can then make an intention to keep resting and returning to this stillpoint at the inception of the impulse for the outward movement. Seeing the want from the need and making a decision at that point. At that point, we can undercut craving and just be.

2. We can learn to endure the somatic sensations that accompany us slowly but surely. This builds the capacity to endure and tolerate. The more we can do this, the more it leads to self-containment. Recognizing the stillpoint in every aspect of our being helps restore the inherent completeness in each of us in each moment. Satisfaction as a goal is thereby undercut. The process of being satisfied in itself is the building of self. This self needs to be satisfied. Letting go repeatedly of the various needs to just rest in this. Just this.

Through time and repeated practice, we learn to see how many needs were just simply wants and the need for the self to feel complete. Wants also point to different patterns that have been ingrained from lack often of understanding, through habit and in following society. This path can also undercut addictions as one sifts needs from wants and learn to let go of the craving.

And as we learn to recognize this, the needs from the wants, there is greater differentiation between what are actually needs. Through time, this differentiation sheds the unnecessary. There is a simplification that occurs. This builds a sense of enoughness. We can sense this somatically. We learn to see and know this moment to be enough and this turns into a state of being. Once we recognize this, this then becomes our turning toward the moment as being enough.

And more time is available to be present and feel the vibrancy of life. Then this Life, in this moment, is just enough.

When one then reaches outward, it is from a place of being and stillness and containment. Layers have been shed.

So each time, the mind looks outward, just be. All that one needs is right here in this moment as just this. This is just enough for this moment. And this moment is all we ever have.

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