If you pay attention for
just five minutes, you know some very fundamental dharma: things change,
nothing stays comfortable, sensations come and go quite impersonally,
according to conditions, but not because of anything that you do or
think you do. Changes come and go quite by themselves. In the first five
minutes of paying attention, you learn that pleasant sensations lead to
the desire that these sensations will stay and that unpleasant
sensations lead to the hope that they will go away. And both the
attraction and the aversion amount to tension in the mind. Both
are uncomfortable. So in the first minutes, you get a big lesson about
suffering: wanting things to be other than they are. Such a tremendous
amount of truth to be learned just closing your eyes and paying
attention to bodily sensations.
--Sylvia Boorstein
