Drop the narrative of the past and the future and just stay with the present moment, find a purpose in the present moment. That will give a buoyancy to your rebuilding efforts.

"When everything else seems to be crazy in life, just say, “Okay, I’m going to stay right here. If I don’t know anything else for sure, what I do know for sure is that the breath is now coming in, the breath is now going out. Let’s just hang out here for the time being.” In that way you can weather whatever crisis comes up, and it gives you the strength to deal with things, to recover.

I was reading recently about studies they’ve done of major disasters and catastrophes — huge hurricanes, earthquakes, fires. They’ve noticed how people immediately after a catastrophe feel a bizarre sense of euphoria. They develop a sense of common purpose as they drop their normal concerns and band together to rebuild, to recover. Then, after a while, once things get back to normal again, everybody goes back to their old ways. As one researcher pointed out, right after a catastrophe there’s a suspension of time; people’s normal narratives stop functioning and there’s a sense of liberation from those narratives as you’ve now got an obvious, immediate, common purpose. In fact, one of the researchers said it sounded a lot like Buddhist meditation to him: the idea of dropping the narrative of the past and the future and just staying with the present moment, finding a purpose in the present moment. That gave a buoyancy to the rebuilding efforts.

Well, try to use that same attitude when your meditation comes crashing down. You’ve got some rebuilding work to do. It gives you a purpose and it’s something you can focus on totally in the present moment. The best way of doing that is to drop the whole narrative that’s driving you crazy: the fact that things seemed to be going well and now all of a sudden they’ve crashed. Whether it’s a sudden crash or a gradual one doesn’t really matter. What matters is that you realize, “Okay, just forget about the narrative and focus on the needs of the present moment.” That’s all you’re responsible for. That’s all you have to worry about. You’ll find that that will give you the buoyancy, the energy you need in order to start the rebuilding work."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Intelligent Design" (Meditations3)

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