Touching Wonder
At Nyingma Institute

By Robin Caton

Each morning, the first thing we see when we open our eyes is light. The gray and white winter sky, a bright blue car, a splash of red berries on a deep green bush – a world of color and form is revealed. What an incredibly wondrous realm we live in! From the moment we open our eyes in the morning until we go to bed at night, we could be celebrating each moment of experience: golden yellow, warmth, the sound of birds, brilliant thoughts, trivial thoughts, the feeling of water washing over our hands.

Students participate in the Healing Mind program at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute. Find this longtime OPEN EXCHANGE lister under Retreats & Getaways.

For most of us, though, such moments of celebration are rare. Instead of opening our senses to the wonder of the world, our minds lead us toward the negative. We don't see yellow because we're thinking anxious thoughts. We don't feel warmth because we're thinking angry thoughts. The extraordinary quality of awareness that is a natural feature of mind can encompass beautiful and awe-inspiring experiences, or anxious and irritating ones. Mind is a dynamic process. Its capacity is amazing, but it does not start out operating in positive ways. The positive has to be cultivated.

One way to think about cultivating mind is to use the image of refining gold. The process of making gold begins with big chunks of rock, hard and inflexible. When these chunks are repeatedly refined, an incredibly precious substance is revealed – one that is not only beautiful and luminous, but soft and pliable.

We can think of our minds at the start as being like rocks. Our thoughts, emotions and perceptions are hard and inflexible. The refining process is one of loosening, softening, and cultivating. The "gold" we find as we work with this process has a precious, soft quality—unlimited and flowing. At the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, we call this process of refining and softening, Healing Mind.

When we cultivate Healing Mind we step outside the box. This box frames the story of "Who I Am." We write and tell this story every day. It begins with phrases like "I want this" or "I should do that" or "I've always been this way." The story of "who I am" always has the same ending: "I can't be happy now, because," followed by some further story that blames someone or something else. When we tell and believe this story, we are truly boxed in.

Rather than tell a story of who we are, Healing Mind allows us to touch and open our senses and our minds. We begin to experience a spacious and compassionate quality that allows what is positive and good to come into being. We use this capacity to touch the wonder and beauty of the world – truly to celebrate each moment of experience.

In the Healing Mind program at the Nyingma Institute, we apply an array of meditation and awareness practices that help us to unlock the potential within our mind and senses. These practices can transform negative emotions and crack the hard shell of limiting patterns of thought, refining our natural capacities for joy and wonder.

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