The Missing Piece Recently, I completed a 500-piece jigsaw puzzle borrowed from my local library. The final image was a painting of a dozen dogs of all shapes, colors, and sizes in an outdoor setting. I began with the edge pieces — easy-to-find flat-edged bits of blue sky and green grass that quickly formed a tidy border. But the jumble of pieces left to fill the frame looked like chaos. Over the course of a few days, I slowly chipped away at completing the picture. A dog would almost come together — but then a nose, a tail, or an eye would be missing. I lost count of how many times I swore a piece didn’t exist. But then I’d step away for a while, and when I came back the piece I’d been looking for would suddenly appear in the pile, almost like magic. Slowly, it all came together — save for one glaringly absent piece in the center. For a moment I felt vindicated. I knew something had been off all along. But looking around me, there it was. The missing piece had fallen to the floor at some point in the process. It clicked into place effortlessly. It struck me how much this mirrored life and practice. So often, we feel unfinished, broken, or convinced something essential is missing in ourselves and our lives. We strive and puzzle and grasp, doubting that things will ever come together. Yet somehow, when we let go of our need to control the outcome, they often do. In “ A Thousand Thoughts, A Thousand Pieces,” Roberval Oliveira compares doing a puzzle to meditation practice: “At one moment, the puzzle seems easy. Another moment, we want to quit. Similarly, we may be hitting a plateau in our meditation practice or encountering a seemingly insurmountable challenge.” “At first it is all a blur,” he writes, “but with time it starts to make sense. Finishing a puzzle can bring a sense of accomplishment. We have cultivated attention and can now notice what we didn’t before.” Often, the missing piece we’re searching for was never actually missing. When we feel discouraged by our life or our practice, we can learn to trust that all the pieces are there — even when we can’t yet see how they’ll ever fit together. Below, you’ll find three teachings that explore this trust in different ways — in the meditative process of puzzling, in life itself, and in the golden basic goodness that’s already within us. —Lilly Greenblatt, digital editor, Lion’s Roar |
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Roberval Oliveira on why doing puzzles can deepen your meditation practice.
Doing puzzles is a humbling experience, since we see how dispersed our minds can be. Our field of vision is bombarded with puzzle pieces, but when we try to focus on one piece, another attracts our attention. We then let go of that distraction and return to finding our initial piece. As we return, another thought pops up and takes our attention away. We believe we saw the piece before; we just don’t remember where. We can even swear that a piece is lost, simply because we cannot find it. That’s how unfocused our minds can be. The good news is that as long as we keep returning to the task of finding the puzzle piece, eventually we will “see” it. This is what makes attention grow: a gentle but consistent persistence. It is like dripping water filling a bucket drop by drop. In my community in Brazil, we have a similar saying: It is grain by grain that the hen fills her gullet.Thanissaro Bhikkhu says that mindfulness “is the ability to keep something in mind and remember to keep it in mind.” He also reminds us that the Buddha taught right mindfulness and not simply mindfulness. With right mindfulness, together with other aspects of the path, we keep in mind and remember to keep in mind what is beneficial and abandon what is not.  |
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In this teaching, the late American Zen pioneer Charlotte Joko Beck reminds us that having a sane and satisfying life comes from having a sane and balanced practice.
To some degree we all find life difficult, perplexing, and oppressive. Even when it goes well, as it may for a time, we worry that it probably won’t keep on that way. Depending on our personal history, we arrive at adulthood with very mixed feelings about this life. If I were to tell you that your life is already perfect, whole, and complete just as it is, you would think I was crazy. Nobody believes his or her life is perfect. And yet there is something within each of us that basically knows we are boundless, limitless. We are caught in the contradiction of finding life a rather perplexing puzzle, which causes us a lot of misery, and at the same time being dimly aware of the boundless, limitless nature of life. So we begin looking for an answer to the puzzle. The first way of looking is to seek a solution outside ourselves. At first this may be on a very ordinary level. There are many people in the world who feel that if only they had a bigger car, a nicer house, better vacations a more understanding boss, or a more interesting partner, then their life would work. We all go through that one. Slowly we wear out most of our “if onlies.” |
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The gold of your true nature can get buried beneath fear and confusion, but it can never be tarnished. Tara Brach on how to trust your basic goodness.
How can we learn to trust the pure awareness and love, the basic goodness that is our very essence? How can our lives be an active expression of our natural wisdom and kindness? And how can we respond with a wise heart to the human ignorance, greed, and hatred that perpetuates violence toward each other, racial and other caste systems, cruelty toward nonhuman animals, and destruction of our living earth? These questions have shaped my spiritual path. The basic teachings of the Buddha awaken us to who we are. They begin with learning to recognize the Truth of our experience by opening to life, just as it is. Then we discover how to awaken our inherent capacity to meet this ever-changing life with Love. This unfolding of presence and love reveals the Freedom of our true nature. Even though the gold of your true nature can get buried beneath fear, uncertainty, and confusion, the more you trust this loving presence as the truth of who you are, the more fully you will call it forth in yourself, and in all those you touch. And in our communities, as we humans increasingly remember that gold, we’ll treat each other and all beings with a growing reverence and love. |
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