Month: May 2011

Bring your heart to each moment today

Karl Duffy1 Comment

The Chinese character for “mindfulness” is nian. It is a combination of two separate characters,  each with its own meaning. The top part of the character means “now” and the bottom part of the character means “heart” or “mind”. Literally, the combined character means the act of experiencing the present moment with your heart. So mindfulness is the moment-to-moment awareness of what is occurring in and around us. By being present and mindful of the present moment, we can accept what is at that moment as it is, allowing change to happen naturally, without struggle, without the usual resistance and judgment that cause us to suffer more.

Thich Nhat Hahn and Dr Lilian Cheung, Savor

First Steps in Mindfulness Day 9: Noticing thoughts as thoughts

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“This is boring” or “This is not working”, or “I can’t do this”.

These are judgments. Actually they are just thoughts.

It is important to recognize them as judgmental thinking and remind yourself that the practice involves suspending judgment and just watching whatever comes up, without pursuing them or acting in any way

Jon Kabat Zinn

Finding the gap

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In our ordinary mind we perceive the stream of thoughts as continuous, but in reality this is not the case. You will discover for yourself that there is a gap between each thought. When the past thought is past, and the future thought has not yet arisen, you will find a gap in which the nature of the mind is revealed: so the work of meditation is to slow down, to make that gap become more and more apparent.

Sogyal Rinpoche,  Glimpse after Glimpse

How love makes us vulnerable

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The big challenge through life is not letting our hearts get hardened. We are born into a world where we feel a danger of getting hurt if we allow ourselves be open at our deepest level. So there is a tendency to shy away from this, to armour our hearts, to hide behind our words or our achievements. Or we numb out the pain that comes from our wanting to be seen but are afraid to risk it.  It takes courage to stay open, to tell our story with our whole heart, to step out when there are no guarantees, to stay open to a relationship that may or may not work out, to keep the heart soft and vulnerable.

When I was a child, my grandmother died and was buried in the churchyard in Castlecomer,  Ireland.  The following year I went there on holiday.  One day we drove to visit relatives, I in the back seat with my grandfather.  As we pass the gravelled driveway leading up to the churchyard, my grandfather, thinking he was unobserved, pressed his face against the window of the car and with a small, hidden motion of his hand, waved. It was then I came to my first understanding of the majesty and vulnerability of love.

Herbert O Driscoll, A Doorway on Time

Its not in the future, but here today

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Mindfulness encourages us to pay attention and rest in what is happening in the present moment.  However, we often prefer to be elsewhere, or that the present moment be other than what it actually is. What we learn through our practice is the key to finding contentment is to be fully present with whatever we are doing, no matter how ordinary. This realization that the fulness of our lives is right in front of us, and not to be found in the future, is an insight found in all wisdom traditions and leads to true contentment .

The everyday tedium of our lives is the desert we wander, looking for the Promised Land. Our relationships, our work, and all the little necessary tasks we don’t want to do are all the gift. We have to brush our teeth, we have to buy groceries. we have to do the laundry, we have to balance our checkbook. This tedium — this wandering in the desert — is in fact the face of God. Our struggles, the partner who drives us crazy, the report we don’t want to write — these are the Promised Land.

Charlotte Joko Beck

The Secret of health

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The secret of health for both mind and body is

not to mourn for the past, worry about the future, or anticipate troubles,

but to live in the present moment wisely and earnestly.

Buddha