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“In the mind of the beginner there are many possibilities, in the mind of the expert, there are few.”Suzuki, Shunryu.  (1970). Zen mind, beginner’s mind.  New York:  Weatherhill.

Beginner’s mind is a posture or state of mind in which the communicator approaches a moment of communication with as little conditioning as possible.

Exercise

Open you mind and bring the awareness to breathing. As you sit and listen to the other, anchor your awareness in the sensation of your own breath. The words and affect of the person you are listening to begin to gently shift into the background of your awareness while the sensation of your breath emerges in the foreground. You are listening deeply to this person while you are maintaining the presence of your own breath, your own thoughts and feelings. This listening is now less about “my self” and more listening to “the other.” It is now a contextual awareness of all the complexity of sight, sound, feeling and awareness emerging into your consciousness. Like a child that first walks into a carnival, you are open to all that is present for your consciousness without discernment that “this” is better than “that.”

This is one thing to do today that will make a difference in your day: http://techcritique.com/this-week/2008/12/2/one-day-for-human-rights.html

“What we have no words for, we cannot understand; it does not fit into our view of what is real. And if we stumble upon it, as the study shows, we may be taken by surprise, and frightened. On the unknown places on their maps, the ancient cartographers wrote, ‘Here thee be dragons.” (Kornfield, 2000, p. 62)

image:www.webweaver.nu/…/dragons/colorful-dragon.gif

For those of us who are upset about our age, I have a question; “are we surprised?” Did we not see it approaching? Perhaps our problem is not with age but with our resistance to accepting it. Perhaps we have trouble accepting age because of a fundamental misinterpretation of what it means.
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