September 2011 – Page 9 – Mindfulbalance

New to Mindfulness Practice 3: Patient learning….

September 9, 2011September 9, 2011 Karl Duffy1 Comment

[Learning to meditate…..] is like a child who is learning to write. At first she doesn’t write nicely – big, long loops and squiggles – she writes like a child. After a while the writing improves through practice. Practicing meditation is like this. At first you are awkward… sometimes calm, sometimes not, you don’t really know what’s what. Some people get discouraged. Don’t slacken off! You must persevere with the practice. Live with effort, just like the child: as she gets older she writes better and better. From writing badly she grows to write beautifully, all because of the practice from childhood.

Ajahn Chah

Stopping for breath

September 7, 2011September 7, 2011 Karl Duffy1 Comment

The difficulty most of us face is that we’re afraid of our humanity. We don’t know how to give our humanity space. We don’t know how to give it love. We don’t know how to offer our appreciation. We seize upon whenever difficult emotions or painful thoughts arise – in large part because we have been taught from a very early age that life is a serious business. We’re taught that we have to accomplish so many things and excel at so many things because we have to compete for a limited amount of resources. We develop such high expectations for ourselves and others, and we develop high expectations of life. Such a competitive, goal-orientated approach to life makes us very speedy inside. We become so tight physically, mentally and emotionally as we rush through each day, each moment, that many of us forget – often quite literally – to breathe.

Tsoknyi Rinpoche, Upgrading our Practice

Starting over and over again

September 7, 2011September 7, 2011 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

As I said in this morning’s post, mindfulness practice renews itself every day, as we start over again and again, returning to the present moment which is always different, always new. This is because life is continually changing, and what we are presented with today is not the same as yesterday, no matter what our thoughts tell us. So the underlying attitude is key: a gentle, non-judging, attitude towards ourselves and our efforts.

I first heard the phrase “just start over” some 20 years ago from the meditation teacher Sharon Salzburg….who told us about her own struggle with learning to meditate – how she would become lost, distracted, and discouraged and would constantly second-guess herself and her teachers. Gradually she learned to pay no attention to the mental and emotional chatter and to just start over by meditating on her breath as she had been instructed. “Just start over” became her mantra, which she now teaches to her students.

Each time Salzburg repeated this phrase, I was deeply inspired. I realized that she was pointing to a radical attitudinal shift in which you cease to be reactive when you are knocked off your intended path. Instead, when you discover that you have lost your focus, you just begin again without getting caught up in emotional stories about why you can’t achieve your aim or judgments about how unworthy you are or why the change you seek is impossible.

As you know if you’ve ever tried to meditate, the mind is constantly being pulled away from its object of concentration by bodily sensations and mental activity, causing you to lose awareness of the present moment. In this same way, when strong feelings arise during your daily life, you get swept up in the story they create. You lose the awareness that enables you respond skillfully to events and that gives you peace of mind in the face of difficulty….. You have the mistaken notion that you must know why you have a problem and must get rid of it before you can act in a more self-empowering manner. Starting-over practice takes a different approach. It switches your focus away from dwelling on those characteristics that limit you and redirects it toward recognizing your strengths from which you can realize your potential…. In so doing, you free yourself from your judging mind that thinks it can control results and creates the grandiose expectation that you can do more than you can do in the present moment. You become a more effective person by simply learning to use your time and energy to do what you can do right now.

Phillip Moffitt, Starting Over

Just the seen

September 6, 2011September 7, 2011 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

You should train yourself like this:

Whenever you see a form, simply see; whenever you hear a sound, simply hear;

Whenever you smell an aroma, simply smell; whenever you taste a flavour, simply taste;

Whenever you feel a sensation, simply feel; whenever a thought arises, let it just be a thought.

The Buddha, Sutta on Bahiya

Not chasing after happiness

September 6, 2011September 5, 2011 Karl Duffy2 Comments

Some more reflections on not going anywhere, from a lovely recent book by Thomas Bien, entitled The Buddha’s Way of Happiness. Letting go of our instinctive need to “fix” ourselves – of the drive to do more and more – is the key to change. Staying put is a secret to getting places.

We get stuck in the drama of our lives. If we are to find happiness we instinctively feel that we have to go through something, endure some difficulty, go on a quest, slay dragons or monsters and ultimately find the gold or the princess in order to find the resolution and the peace which we seek. When we are told that happiness is available right now, we can hardly escape thinking what we have to do, endure and struggle to find it. We almost can’t help it.

Seeing life as “story” gets us caught in the notion that we don’t have happiness. We have to go after happiness somehow.…When we learn that we can be happy right now, just breathing in and out, and seeing a leaf for the miracle it actually is, instead of the idea of “leaf”, we’re almost disappointed. We want it to be a great achievement. If we can’t find a way to see it as an achievement, then we can’t feel special and feed the ego. Instead, in seeing things as they actually are, we step outside the ego.

….. staying with what is here

September 5, 2011September 5, 2011 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

When we encounter things during the day, they can frequently spark off a rush of thoughts and emotions. Or sometimes even deeper reflections upon the direction we are going or how we have gotten to this point. Occasionally these are useful but at other times they can easily lead into self-judgment and doubt. Most of our daily practice is just staying with the awareness of how things are now, in this moment, and not the thoughts about this moment. And it is still the same practice if strong emotions have been triggered automatically – often before we can even notice – by some of the things we meet. So, instead of going too far into the thoughts provoked, we try to stay with the sensations in the body, holding a space around them. Staying with what is here, not thinking ourselves into what is not here.